The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • Trump Triumphant

    Trump Triumphant

    The Revenge of the old Right

    This past week will long be remembered in American and global history as the week when the unthinkable became the unavoidable. Donald Trump is the president-elect of the United States of America. All lovers of liberal democracy and its most bullish rampart must be saddened by this development. In a way this may presage the precipitous decline of America’s global hegemony, the unravelling of the nation-state paradigm and the resurgence of the ancient National Question even in the most seemingly secure nation on earth.

    The auguries are hideous but intriguing. In their haste to dismiss the old establishment, the Americans handed over their country and its nuclear arsenal to a man without any record of public service and one that had been adjudged by many to be temperamentally unfit to handle sensitive matters. But the nightmare having become a throbbing reality, the daydreaming must stop henceforth. Realpolitik suggests that Donald Trump must be promptly engaged before he can do any grievous damage to his country and the world at large.

    The blissful but not so innocent narrative of relentless human progress has now been dramatically halted on the plains of Middle America and in the same country where such possibility was first mooted at least in modern history. Once again, we are confronted by the fact that humankind is not a fallen angel but a rising hominid. But more important, America is sending signals to the rest of the world that the modern nation is no longer an expanded community of organic values. Everybody must find their way out of the apocalyptic cave. Picking up the pieces from this Trumpian inferno may take quite some time.

    For twelve long and lonely hours on Tuesday, yours sincerely kept vigil with the American people and the American dream. It is not for a love of hyperbole that American presidential contests have been described as “the American melodrama”. It is full of strange turns and twists. It is breathless and breath-taking in sheer electrifying drama. It is not a political fare for the fainthearted.

    It was a nail-chewing finale. For sheer poetic beauty perhaps nothing could beat the CNN female anchor who casually and offhandedly blurtedout that there was no more nail to bite. At 2 am Nigerian time when the tide began to turn strongly and finally against Hillary Clinton, yours sincerely decided to call several Nigerians living in the US. Not a single one returned the call. It was an ominously pregnant development. The called could no longer hear the caller. Donald Trump was about to be loosed upon the world. America will never be the same again.

    Yet according to virtually all known and unknown pundits, it was supposed to be history of a different and more ennobling type that was in the making. America was all set to complete a historic double. All trends and political statistics pointed to the election of Hillary Clinton as the first female president of the United States. Having elected Barack Obama as its first African-American president, America was on its way to becoming a truly egalitarian society by electing its first female executive. The gender glass ceiling was about to be shattered forever.

    But it was not be. History does not progress in such neat and linear geometrical order. America may now have to wait for years and even decades before such a perfect opportunity presents itself again, and probably in diminished circumstances. In a cruel irony of fate, the Obama presidency itself may now be viewed by posterity as a last-ditch effort by the American establishment to stem the tide of evil political retrogression and social anarchy; a heroic effort to circle the waggon before the whole country goes under in a tsunami of right-wing extremism leavened by ethnic and religious bigotry.

    A decent, solid and dignified fellow brimming with compassion and the milk of human kindness, this is not the kind of history Barack Obama would have wished to make or the kind of legacy he would have wanted to be associated with. But as this column never tires of asserting, history often moves forward by lurching sideways. In the fullness of time and when the historical meandering has run its course, Obama would be rightly regarded as an avatar of modern American history.

    Although history moves in a mysterious manner often beyond the full and immediate comprehension of humankind, there are many codes that can be enlisted in cracking the mystery. Many discerning observers have noted that there is a familiar global ring to what is happening in America. It is duly noted that the global resurgence of right-wing fascism and extreme ethnic nationalism coupled with religious fundamentalism has berthed in America and found fertile and productive soil.

    The Donald Trump phenomenon in its shrill xenophobia and crude loathing of the other is all at one with the Brexit vote that has crippled Great Britain, the persistence of ultra-nationalist parties in France, the resurgence of Neo-Nazi groups in Germany and the xenophobic murmurings despite Angela Merkel’s countervailing personal heroism, Russia’s relapse into an ancient pan-Slavic nationalism and the human fiasco the Middle East has become. This is not to talk of the devastated phantom nations of post-colonial Africa. It is a broken world crying to be fixed.

    But in order to do this we must get certain myths out of the way. As we have seen with the current demographic crisis in Europe and the revolt of the right in America, all human societies no matter the development and the sophistication behave in the same manner when faced with want, hunger, generalized fear and insecurity. They turn their xenophobic fury and paranoid resentment on those who do not belong to their ethnic and religious categories. Even in racially homogeneous societies, they pounce on those who do not share clannish commonalities with them.

    The notion of a lunatic fringe is one of the comforting myths of modern civilization. The lunatic fringe is not so much a fringe of lunacy as it is a glimpse into the darkness of the human heart in which subliminal impulses common to all are given free expression or acted out by a few. When the chips are down, the fringes disappear but not the lunacy. The genocidal Hutu tribesmen of Rwanda, the old German middle class that acted as Hitler’s compliant executioners, the implacable isolationists who voted for Brexit in Britain and the millions who have just voted for Donald Trump cannot be regarded as belonging to a fringe of the society. They are the mainstream acting in errant communality.

    To be sure since its inception as a nation, America has always boasted of such extremist, murderously xenophobic groups: White Aryan Resistance, the Ku Klux Klan, White Order of Thule, the White Knights etcwho might have been responding to the wanton brutality and savagery that accompanied the birth of America as the most modern nation the world had seen.

    Yet the notion of American Exceptionalism inheres in the fact that by coming up with rules, laws, institutions and ideals which should nudge the sweltering commonwealth of disparate souls to a higher telos, the American founding fathers and many of their successors have managed to restrict the savage contrarians to their primeval forests and the antediluvian margins of American society.

    These American titans were far from being perfect. In fact some of them were morally culpable while one or two were psychologically flawed in a profound manner. But their fundamental nobility of spirit and considerable intellectual talents enabled them to rise above their own human failings to envision a better and more humane societyand one to be guided by the finer ideals of civilization. The brotherhood of humanity, irrespective of race, creed and social status is one of these ideals.

    But where hunger and want prevail, where inequity and inequality of staggering and idiotic proportions persist, the prospects of a better and more humane society evaporate and the brotherhood of humanity disappears. The result is a hopelessly divided and bitterly polarized society which paves the way for the emergence of a reactionary right-wing huckster and hustler like Donald Trump. It is all so eerily reminiscent of the rise of NAZI Germany.

    If there is a silver lining in this cloud that has descended on the greatest liberal democracy the world has seen, it is that no society can afford to take its own goodness and greatness for granted. Donald Trump is a mere symptom of a more fundamental human malady. This is where the death of good old socialism as a countervailing global force against the grosser moral and political absurdities of savage capitalism must be regretted.

    Given the fallibility and frailty of human nature, the communist dream of a paradise on earth may represent a phantom impossibility. But while its writ was in place in vast swathes of human space, it compelled and committed the capitalist world to momentous social re-engineering which birthed a more humane and compassionate society in leading capitalist countries.

    For these nations, the fear of a communist take-over was the beginning of wisdom. With the collapse of the socialist world, the capitalist order has reverted to the sadistic prototype of the Dickensian bleak house. History works in mysterious ways and without realising it, humanizing capitalism may well have been the main historic leitmotif of the socialist challenge.

    After the collapse of socialism, America has not been helped by the intellectual and ideological quietude from other global epicentres of knowledge production. Beyond the early stirring of Negritude, all has been quiet on the African intellectual front, except the jejune mimicry of western ideologies of the right and left by its jaded middlemen of ideas. It is only in South America where an alternative narrative to western modernity has evolved, where the concept of No-Capitalism has been developed and where Liberation Theology flourished among its Jesuit intellectuals that there is a stirring of redemptive hope for humanity.

    Do we then say so long America? It may be too early to count out God’s own country. For one, its major state institutions remain in place as the seamless transition from Obama to Trump attests. The funeral of a lion is not a spectacle for domestic dogs.As the most powerful nation the world has seen, America must now find it within its soul and spirit to recover the essence of American Exceptionalism and the repudiation of its finer ideals which the ascendancy of Donald J Trump represents.In the interim, welcome to trumped America.

  • The passing of a titan

    The passing of a titan

    Column and columnist mourn the passing of the elder statesman, revered Afenifere grandee, distinguished author, lawyer and legendary political operative behind the curtain, Sir Olaniwun Ajayi. A man of muscular Christianity and deep spiritual faith, Sir Olaniwun was also one of the most sophisticated and accomplished political chess players thrown up by the Awo tradition in Nigeria’s modern political history.

    As an avatar of the creed of apostolic followership, he was ready to do anything for an adored leader he regarded as next to God and for a political cause he regarded as sacrosanct and sanctified by the presiding deities of his people. If it led to a certain rigidity and inflexibility of strategy and tactics, so be it.

    If it warrants a prompt foreclosure of other competing options then to the devil with such options. It was adamant discipleship at its most visionary and ennobling. They do not come like this anymore. Yet in a multi-ethnic nation with other competing deities, it was bound to lead to a permanent collision of altars and a seething confrontation with other faiths powered by equal zeal and self-belief.

    But like his surviving fellow disciples, the late political juggernaut was not about to be fazed by such little national difficulties. In fact, they seem to relish the slow-motion adversarial leisureliness of the permanent Yoruba political warfare. “Ijafaajini’ja Yoruba”, as one of them famously put it. Whether in frenzied opposition or wary collaboration with the centre, it is this questing and questioning spirit dating back to the Oduduwa Revolution a millennium earlier that has defined the essence of the Yoruba Question in modern Nigeria.

    As it is said, looking at a king’s mouth, no one would ever believe that he suckled at his mother’s breasts.  It is hard to imagine that Sir Olaniwun was a self-made man who had lifted himself up by the bootstraps slogging his way through primary school and teacher training college before finally making his way to England to study law when he was already the headmaster of a local primary school. It is an inspirational story worthy of emulation by generations to come.

    Compact, well-built, erect till the very end and carrying himself with an understated aristocratic flair which remindedone of ancient Yoruba nobility, the late patriarch was a man of immense personal charms and abiding generosity of spirit. But only the most foolhardy would take this as a license for political rascality. Behind the smooth and alluring exterior, there was a hint of steel infrastructure.

    Till the very end, the old man was concerned and disturbed by the fate of his people in the colonial conundrum that is Nigeria. A few weeks back, he had come for a meeting somewhere in Bourdillon, Ikoyi together with Chief Ayo Adebanjo and Pa Rueben Fasoranti to deliberate on the fractious nature of Yoruba politics and the way forward. He had spoken extempore and without notes for almost an hour. Nobody guessed then that he had come to say goodbye. May his soul rest in perfect peace. Adieu papa and his “piping hot” pounded yam.

  • From a peculiar mess to a peculiar mission

    From a peculiar mess to a peculiar mission

    Excerpts from an address to the 1966 set of Government College, Ibadan on the occasion of its golden jubilee.

    Mr Chairman, the president of the old boys association of Government College Ibadan, distinguished members of the Class of ’66, their spouses and all the notable alumni in the hall, please permit me to stand on existing protocols while I thank the organisers for the honourof asking me to deliver this address.

    I did not attend Government College, Ibadan, so I am not one of Mr J.D Bullock’s boys. I am not even a full product of IONIAN secondary schools or “äyo” as you guys referred to products of provincial secondary schools in the old Western Region. They suffered in your hands. Even after we had all got to the university, some spoilt rascals from elitist schools derived immense pleasure and rib-cracking humour from forcing us to recite what was to them the strange-sounding names of many of these institutions: Iganmode, Atakumosa, Manuwa Memorial, Titcombe, Iju-Ota Ogbolu, Gbongan-Odeomu etc. To their metropolitan eardrumsthey must have sounded straight out of DOFagunwa.

    Permit me to establish some bragging rights. Having finished primary school in 1962, had I gone straight to secondary school, I should be in the set of 1963, three clear years ahead of the set of 1966. But we thank God for small mercies. Bernard Shaw, the great Anglo-Irish playwright, contrarian and cutting wit once famously noted that his education was continually interrupted by schooling. Some of us finished secondary school in the primary institution of early responsibility.

    However that may be, let me note that fifty years of having entered secondary school is no joke particularly in an unstable polity bristling with chaos and disorder. Your journey through life has been marked by an astral distinction; a stellar congregation which can only produce a galaxy of stars. Your class boasts of illustrious products who have distinguished themselves in all walks of life. Except in rare cases of a cosy lack of awareness, those who are marked by destiny are often aware of the heavy hand of fate.

    This is even more so in the particular case of your class. Why is this so? You are children of destiny.  You entered Government College the very year Nigeria lost its innocence and a dark cloud settled on the nation like a permanent companion. It was the year of booming guns; the year when tanks and armoured cars became regular fixtures of the Road. It is fifty years of solitude.

    We had walked our talk and we found ourselves hurled across the path of thunder as memorably visualized by Christopher Okigbo, one of our greatest poets ever and himself a proud product of Government College, Umuahia.  You are the children of that midnight when hope deserted us and despair settled in. This was the year of the great misadventure when the dancer became estranged from the drummer. And in distress and disorientation, we began to applaud.

    In the event, this class is crucial and critical to the recuperation of our essence as a people and the recovery of elite momentum without which the nation is doomed. The failure of a country is the failure of its elite. To whom much is given, much is expected. Let us use this as a golden opportunity for critical reflection, first on the state of Government College, the state of education in the country and the state of the country. Nigeria is too important to fail.

    Hence the title of this address: How to transform a peculiar mess into a peculiar mission. The phrase “peculiar mess” or “penkelemesi”— its folk translation—is attributed to one of the most iconic products of Government College, Ibadan and the stormy petrel of the old Western Region: AdelabuAdegoke. He was as charismatic as he was intellectually gifted, a rebel against colonial education of which he was an exemplary product and colonial cultural politics which he denounced to no end.

    Almost sixty years after his tragic death, Adelabu’s brilliance continues to dazzle. As a result of multiple promotions, he was reputed to have spent only three years in school. Had his intellectual genius found accommodation and rapport with Awolowo’s more methodical and painstaking socio-political genius, had the two titans realised that they were antagonistic but paradoxically complimentary kindred spirits, perhaps the trajectory of Yoruba politics in post-independence Nigeria would have been different.

    Like Awo, Adelabu was also from a remarkably poor background. But the two men succeeded by sheer grit and determination lifting themselves up to pole positions in their society by their bootstraps. There is a folk saying in Ibadan which illustrated Adelabu’s straitened early circumstances: Adelabu ta panlari, aroyeoteni.  Recalling that Adelabu hawked stock fish as a youth is just a diversionary tale of intrigue and sheer malevolence.

    Yet there is a remarkable sense in which Adelabu exemplifies the triumph and tragedy of Government College, Ibadan.  The late avatar of Ibadan politics bears heroic witness to the notion of an intellectual aristocracy which has nothing to do with inherited money or feudal  transfer of political fiefdom. You make your way or fall in society as a result of your brains. You are somebody not because of who your parents are but because of who you are.

    This is perhaps the most paradoxically revolutionary legacy of colonial missionary education in Nigeria. It was a radical and radicalizing vision of an egalitarian society. Vigorously pursued by the Awolowo administration in the old west, it led to the rapid emergence of a new educated middle class which in its own contradictory way has become the scourge of political retrogression in post-colonial Nigeria.

    But it was the colonial educators who showed the way. JD Bullock, the iconic principal of Government College, was the visionary pathfinder. No promising student was turned away simply because the parents could not afford the fees. It was not beyond and beneath Bullock to ask a poor boy he had encountered hawking bread on the streets of a Western Region town to come for the entrance examination at Government College, Ibadan. Having passed the examination in flying colours, the young man would later become a distinguished professor of Mathematics in an American university.

    Another future distinguished professor would have remained stuck in his father’s farm but for the fact that Bullock was having none of that. He had personally gone to the farm to bring the boy back to school. It was inevitable that the glittering products of Bullock’s would later distinguish themselves in all walks of life and the various fields of human endeavour.

    But there was a fly in the ointment, a major structural defect in this glorious amphitheatre of the best and the brightest. It would appear that you were all trained to be apolitical professionals without political ambition; hockey-playing gentlemen without any burning urge to dominate their environment.

    It was just enough to provide ancillary services supporting the political establishment. Political rugby is a game of thugs writhing in the mud and muck of politics, and it was fun to watch them even as they contribute to the plight and pillage of the country. The new aristos must wear their colonial bowler hats and opinions lightly.

    In the event, you all became famous lawyers, celebrated professors, doctors, engineers, writers, psychiatrists, architects, surveyors, economists, accountants, judgesetc without first securing the political kingdom. One cannot say whether this is a conscious colonial policy; a subtle re-engineering of the colonized consciousness away from intellectual and ideological confrontation towards cooperation and collaboration with external and internal colonization. This is the Raymond Spartacus Kassoumicomplex famously exemplified by the protagonist of YamboOuologuem’sBound to Violence.

    On the other hand, this apolitical neutering may well reflect the origins of the colonial pioneers and missionaries in the lower middle class of their respective societies. You cannot give what you don’t have. In any case, the Colonial Office and its sophisticated surveillance radar would have picked off potential contaminators of “young” African minds and acted accordingly either through subtle disincentives or direct apprehension.

    Whatever it is, it is ultimately a disservice to the nation. A nation deserves what it gets when its best and brightest are discouraged from politics. They will be ruled by their moral, spiritual and intellectual inferiors. This is not the case with the colonizing countries. It was said that the battle of Waterloo was won and lost on the playing grounds of Eton College. In England, the Oxbridge concourse and connection provides the political leadership. In America, it is the Ivy League conclave in close collaboration with the military industrial complex. Same with France and Germany.

    In these countries, would be kings are first taught how to be philosophers and the intellectual aristocracyis easily transformed into the political aristocracy. A young William Hague was first spotted addressing the Conservative Party annual conference as a teenage secondary school pupil while a youthful Bill Clinton charmed his way up to the White House to whoosh and whoop over President Kennedy’s Camelot. Only the best and finest are allowed to make it to positions of leadership.

    By contrast, a developing country like Nigeria is saddled with its fourth eleven when only the first eleven would do. The result is multiple jeopardy of mutually reinforcing failures in every sector all pointing at avoidable national collapse. Consider for example, the aplomb and sterling heroism with which Lee Kuan Yew and his Singaporean avatars assembled and dismantled concepts and ideas from the west only retaining whatever is of use and value to their people.  The education of the post-colonial citizen begins with the de-education of the colonial subject.

    Although there was the fundamental problem of colonial mis-education, the roots of the modern decline of Government College even as a provider of ancillary services can be traced to 1979 when the government in a misguided zeal to democratize education simply parcelled out the old college and divided its premises to accommodate new tertiary institutions. This was the radical ideology of social levelling in reverse gear, a political absurdity which recalls the Taliban desecration of Holy sites and destruction of national heritage worthy of the attention of UNESCO.

    There is a lot to be said for constructive elitism and the adherence of a society to the higher templates of civilization. The finer aspects of culture and civilized existence are often spread by osmosis or direct transmission of superior consciousness to the less privileged. A society is redeemed not by the number of the privileged sent under in the dark paranoid furies of misdirected vengeance but by the number of the underprivileged rescued from cultural, political and economic serfdom.

    Had Government College been able to boast of a powerful political lobby which could serve as a nuclear deterrent to the antics of transient governments perhaps it would have been spared its appalling fate.No one who lived in the old Western region beginning from the early fifties till the late seventies would fail to appreciate the civilizing and refining impact of this iconic secondary school.

    On the musical scene we remember with gratitude the college band, the iconic Sound Incorporation with its ever magical signature tune. Its literary and debating society threw up the likes of Wole Soyinka, TM Aluko and later stars such as Femi Osofisan, Bode Sowande, Chucks Momah, Femi Olugbile etc. Across different generations, it produced a posse of legendary academic stars such as OmololuOlunloyo, Lekan Aare, Femi Okuronmu, Akin Aboderin, TokunboOsinowo, AjibolaOgunshola, Akin Omigbodun and later day whizz kids such as Femi Olugbile, TayoAkinwande and co. Their spectacular teenage feats and later distinction in various fields of human endeavour served as a source of hope and cultic emulation for many in the old region.

    So my friends, brothers and compatriots, there is a lot of work to be done. You must rediscover the old spirit of Apataganga. You already have the critical mass of distinguished old students. You must now galvanize this critical mass into a force for good governance and the academic redemption of the nation. As a link to the past and a bridge to the glorious future, your class of 1966 is strategically placed to achieve this objective. Let it now be your avowed peculiar mission to transform this peculiar mess of a nation. Once again, I thank you all.

  • Dollar don cost and the mother of all stagflations

    Dollar don cost and the mother of all stagflations

    As the current recession bites harder turning former princes into paupers and the old Nigerian middle class into a beggarly rump, snooper,out of sheer panic and fear of economic annihilation, has developed a strange habit. It is called phantom shopping. Without any particular thing to buy, yours sincerely makes it a duty to do a round of several leading supermarkets just to see how things are holding up.

    Needless to add that it has been depressing spectacle in the past few weeks. Prices of everything fluctuate wildly and without any apparent reason or rhyme. Often, the same item goes through several upward revisions within the course of one week. Such is the haste that new prices are often clumsily glued on old ones. It all reminds one of Weimar Republic before the Hitler Revolution. The universal refrain is that “dollar don cost ooo”.

    Snooper put this question to an economist of note who should know.

    “Why is it that even the price of vegetables has skyrocketed in the market?”snooper demanded.

    “They need dollar to buy fertilisers”, the man retorted.

    “And what about wild fruits growing freely in the forests?” snooper railed.

    “They need dollar to fuel and repair the vehicles to transport them.” the man snapped.

    “So why are they not paying us in dollar? “ snooper insisted.

    “Ha, that is for labour to demand. Are you in America?” the man demanded.

    Last weekend, snooper experienced the mother of all stagflations in an Ikeja supermarket when a packet of cigarillos hitherto marked at one thousand five hundred naira suddenly jumped to eight thousand. Even as a modestly and moderately paid lecturer three decades earlier, snooper could occasionally afford this. There must be a mistake somewhere, snooper thought as he pointed the attention of the Lebanese owner to the anomaly.

    “Na him price, no mistake”, the affable rogue retorted.

    “ I see”, snooper grunted.

    “You see. One big man just buy ten now now”, the man crowed.

    “I am not in that premier league yet”, snooper noted with heavy sarcasm.

    “Ha baba, but many Nigerians dey premier league, we dey watch them everyday”, the scion of Maronite merchants drawled without any hint of irony. On that note, yours sincerely quickly excused himself. Dollar come finis dullard. It is called economic hara-kiri.

  • An evening in Ibadan

    An evening in Ibadan

    There is always something fascinating about Ibadan. It is the city built around a hundred hilltops. The distant din of what you thought was civil commotion and fistic exchange tells its own story. Ibadan is a city of warriors. It is not for the weak or fainthearted. Here, the meek will kiss the canvas very early. They will not inherit the earth. Neither will they partake of its sweet bounties.

    Lest we forget, snooper was in Ibadan to address the 1966 class of Government College as part of its golden jubilee. In the nation, golden jubilees are as rare as gold itself.But even here in the intellectual boxing ring nothing was given or assured. You arrived in the lush and tropically verdant Iyaganku sector of the city post-haste, having been expelled by British Airways two days earlier without your luggage.

    But even at that, nothing is given. The narrative keeps changing. Just as you are about to send your account of events to the press something more fascinating crops up. It is an account of events by a member of the set; a tour de force of political and cultural psych-op. It is better to hear from the horse’s mouth, as they say. In Yoruba culture, you cannot be invited to a wedding only to turn out more fancifully attired than the bridegroom.

    So, dear readers, this morning snooper yields pride of space to a member of the Government College Ibadan class of 1966, Femi Olugbile, a distinguished psychiatrist, prize-winning writer and notable administrator. But because the issues raised are so critical and crucial to the health of the country and its wellbeing, we will pick the baton next week from where Olugbile drops off. Happy reading.

  • My school, my friend, and a celebration

    —the story of a Government College Ibadan Class, 50 years after by Femi Olugbile

    It is the turn of your class this year, this weekend, to play host to the annual celebration and old boys’ reunion of Government College, Ibadan. It is fifty years since you entered the school, and eighty seven years since the school came into being.

    You had approached the date with mixed emotions. You are not exactly given to the ritual and chumminess of old boys celebrations, which, for some people, was a whole way of life. As a rule you find the backslapping camaraderie of people you remember not at all, or only vaguely, a mite irksome.

    But this is a special event, even for you.

    Fifty years!

    It comes home to you, with a fleeting wash of emotion, as you watch your friend standing with the microphone in the middle of the hall, meandering his way with the sure hand of a seasoned driver taking a landrover across the crags and crevices of rough terrain, through the history of Government College, Ibadan. His story is waxing stronger as he progresses. The audience, a dinner crowd made up of the 1966 set, their wives – they call them ‘young girls’, their guests, and leaders and other members of the main Old Boys’ body here to celebrate with them, are sensing that something important is afoot – a unique experience everyone would remember for some time. There is a pin-drop silence.

    The 1966 set, who are celebration today, may be called the set that enrolled the year Nigeria lost its innocence. You came into this College on 20th January, 1966. Five days after the first coup. Before the end of the year there would be another coup. Very soon a Civil War would start, dislocating the lives of many of your classmates…

    Your school has produced many illustrious sons, the speaker is saying. Do you remember AdegokeAdelabu?

    Everybody remembers AdelabuPenkelemess the colourful Ibadan politician who became something of a romantic hero among the populace, but sadly came to an early death in a road traffic accident.

    He was in GCI, says the speaker.  Spent only three years.Was always getting double promotion.

    This is new information for you. You never knew Adelabu, scourge of the Action Group, gadfly to the adulatory supporters of the great ObafemiAwolowo, was your senior in school.

    He was so brilliant nobody knew what to do with him.

    Yes, you think. A candle that burned at both ends.

    Your friend’s assignment at this event is to say a few words about Government College, Ibadan as a friend of the house, and to assay a cursory review of the 200 page book written by the class of 1966 to mark its golden anniversary.

    The speaker confesses that preparation for his assignment has been done on the fly, literally. His review and comments are written on the back of a British Airways cabin menu, picked up and scribbled on midair as he returned hotfoot from an important trip to Chicago to join the celebration.

    He tells other human angle rags to riches GCI stories that he witnessed. He had himself grown up in the old West, and many of the people he speaks about were his friends, or known to him personally. He had not himself attended Secondary School – his Scholarship had been rescinded as part of the persecution of his family for supporting the opponents of the Awoists. Unfazed, he had gone on to ‘Modern school’, become a cub reporter, cut his milk teeth on the job, including a spell of prison detention – like every reporter worth his salt, and gone on to become an internationally acclaimed Professor and scholar lecturing in ivy league institutions in Europe and America. Today he is a front-line thinker for the Awo tradition – a veritable 360 degree turn that once brought his poor father – the redoubtable JB Ekun of Gbongan fame, to tears. But that is another story – his own story, and today is not about his story but the GCI story.

    AdegokeAdelabu was his father’s close friend and political associate.

    There are other stories, such as the young man who finished Primary Six in Gbongan and passed his examinations with flying colours. Feeling at the end of his educational life, as his parents had no means to take him further, he started to hawk bread on the streets. One day, an oyinbo man, driving by, saw him in conversation with others and stopped.

    What are you doing selling bread when you can speak such English?

    The boy explained his situation.

    The white man – he was DJ Bullock, the iconic Principal of Government College Ibadan, gave him some money and invited him to come to Apataganga for the entrance examination of the college the following Saturday. He would pass with ease, and go on to become a prominent Professor, lecturing at Howard University.

    And what about the brilliant GCI student who did not come back from holiday because his father could no longer afford the money? It came to the attention of DJ, who kept a studious eye on his brood. He would have none of that. He personally went to his father’s farm to drag him back to school. Fast forward a few years. Another internationally acclaimed scholar.

    The school, avers the reviewer, speaking off his British Airways menu, was like a beacon to all the youths who grew up in the South, and even farther afield.

    The British – the colonial masters, clearly had in mind, in setting up such a school, to create a factory that would churn out proper, well rounded ‘squires’ of the English model, who would populate the middle class and provide leadership in the new nation. It was a system totally built on merit, and in the dormitory, as in the classroom, you could see the son of a carpenter from Ago Taylor – down the road, sitting – or sleeping next to the son of a millionaire businessman from Port Harcourt. It was the Nigerian Dream, put in a crucible, and set afire.

    But there is a caveat. The school culture has helped to bring out the best among children who were already selected for being the best and the brightest. They have gone on to excel in The Arts, in Medicine, in Engineering, and other fields besides. Not to put too fine a point on it, no other secondary school in Nigeria has produced a Nobel laureate.

    But, yes, there is a caveat. The school culture and training has been rigorously a-political. There are sports ranging from Cricket to Hockey and to Soccer and Athletics. There are clubs for Literature and Debate, as there are for Music. There is Drama – the GCI of old was reputed throughout the nation as having the finest tradition in Drama. But there is no club for Politics, no discussion of it before or among the young charges of the teachers. No lessons. No Association.

    The upshot, concludes the speaker, confronting the crowd with an accusatory jutting forward of his chin, is that you have become famous doctors, lawyers, and engineers –  technocrats, ruled over and dictated to by children who did not, or could not, pass your school’s entrance examination. Yes.

    But the situation is even more dire than that, he goes on. The Government College Ibadan that is being celebrated is not the current physical reality, but a memory that resides only in the imagination of its Old Boys. From 1979, a sea-change swept away the old GCI, as the Bola Ige government of Oyo State embarked on a mission to ‘take down’ the ‘elite’ school. Additional ‘schools’ were built in its compound. Part of its land was parcelled out for other use.  The boarding house system was effectively abolished, and the buildings went into disuse and decrepitude. From being the school for the best and the brightest from far and wide, it became a local, essentially day school for children in the Apata Ganga suburb of Ibadan. The admixture and cross-fertilisation of yore is gone. There is now no possibility of tear-jerking stories such as the story of the bread-seller from Gbongan who went on to become a Professor because DJB heard him speaking English with great proficiency.

    This deliberate policy of ‘levelling down’ the elite schools was also implemented in Lagos State under the Jakande administration. New schools were built on the playing fields of old schools, and for a time, the best schools – the Igbobi Colleges and Maryland Comprehensives, became noisy factories without culture, and without  soul. True – the progressive agenda in operation in the South West required that enrollment be cranked up so that every child got a shot at education and no one was left behind. But what about quality? What about culture? Why take out the playgrounds? Why kill old schools, instead of simply building new ones on fallow land? In sum, why ‘level down’, instead of ‘levelling up’? For people who got so much right, they got this one wrong!

    Would Awo have approved? A training ground to turn out thinkers and technocrats to innovate and lead the drive for his bold vision for social development should be as much a part of his legacy as Free Primary Education, surely!

    Every thinking society has a duty to determine what is best about itself, and groom its children towards these ideals. In that drive, a leadership based on innate merit has to be facilitated, irrespective of the ideology of the nation. Most of the political leadership of UK and USA come ultimately from a few institutions. It is said, for instance, that William Haig – who became head of the Conservative Party and almost made it to 10 Downing Street, was first identified as a talent while addressing a school Conservatives meeting at the age of eighteen. The best guarantee of egalitarianism is when children have places to aspire to, based on merit and hard work.

    The speaker is winding up. You scrutinize his face closely through the powerful zoom lens of your Sony camera, which sees better than the naked eye. The dimples and contours give his face a look that is at once soft and hard. With him you always get the sense that under the placid exterior, there is a roiling volcano. Beneath the soft speech and cultured mannerism, there is a derring-do capable of putting everything in the world on the spin of a coin and damning the consequence.

    But there is still hope, he says. Or perhaps he doesn’t say, and you are filling in for him. There is the emerging prospect of a public-private partnership between the old students of GCI and the government, with the ‘private’ component, supplied by the old students, providing the management and finance required to take the institution back to the old days of glory and give the future children a hope. Similar discussions are ongoing concerning other schools, including King’s College, Lagos.

    He gets a standing ovation, does your friend, as he returns to his seat, clutching his British Airways menu. He is still jet-lagged from his travels, and has had precious little sleep in several days. On top of that his mission in Chicago had not been met with great success – his quarry, a big politician with whom he wanted a discussion for the advancement of The Cause, had eluded him. But all of that is in a day’s work, and there would be another day, another meeting. Earlier, over lunch, you had commiserated with him and given him a mild beer, ‘not enough to harm a fly’, for the stated purpose of ensuring his perspective is not skewed as he delivers his address. You had also, off-handedly, promised another beer for later.

    The evening winds down on a high note. The food is good, the conversation is loud. The music is full of golden oldies.

    It is close to midnight as you make to depart the venue, after endless rounds of photographs.

    Your friend is waiting  in ambush for you by the steps. His chin is jutting forward in a gesture that is at once benign and determined.

    ‘Where is the beer you promised me?’

    It is not a question but a statement. You look helplessly beside you at the wife. She smiles in that way that she has, which says at once ‘It’s alright’ and ‘You’re on your own’.

    You see her down the corridor and return to face your assignment, heading to the bar.

    This time you order strong brew for him, hoping a combination of the unresolved jet lag and the ethanol will abbreviate the engagement.

    With a clarity of sight that you can only get at a bar, you examine the reasons for the fact that colonial ‘missionary’ educationists such as DJ Bullock and Miss Groves of St Annes came in to teach generations of Nigerians for leadership with a script that included everything except a grooming in Political Thinking. Your friend’s theory is that they themselves, being of lower middle class origins, had not gone to Eton or Oxbridge, and could not give what they did not have. Your own theory is of a more sinister conspiratorial hue. Perhaps the colonial founders of Nigerian who midwifed the ‘marriage’ of the ‘poor husband’ North to the ‘rich wife’ South took pains to read the riot act to all colonial educators coming to these parts that while it was okay to breed professors of Medicine and Engineering, they should not stir the hornet’s nest by giving the children in these parts the idea that they could one day rule the land.

    The conversation shifts to Aisha Buhari and her ‘cry for help’ – and the desperation that could lead a woman to share her ‘pillow talk’ with hundreds of millions of others. You agree it is a last-ditch move to save the ‘handshake across the Niger’. The public comment that ensued back and forth has missed the point by failing to see that the ploy worked, and the principal, within a few hours, was organizing a strategic meeting to try to get a grip back on the handshake.

    Too little too late?

    Your friend is worried.

    So much hope had been kindled for the Nigeria project on this handshake.

    Way past midnight, you see your friend begin to nod. The strong brew has worked.

    You say your good nights.

    It has really been a great celebration.

  • The week Ogun struck twice

    The week Ogun struck twice

    There were you on the bleary afternoon of October 19, 1986 as the dreadful news began to seep through the airwaves? Somewhere in Opebi, Ikeja life drained out of a gifted and most inspiring Nigerian journalist. No one could have survived the horrific wounds. Dele Giwa, the charismatic and dynamic editor of the ground breaking weekly, Newswatch had just been assassinated. It was the weekOgun, the god of iron, struck twice.

    Earlier in the same week, Nigerians had risen as one to celebrate the first Nobel Prize for Literature ever awarded to a Black African.  As it had been widely predicted, it went to a Nigerian. Ogun, the god of iron and Wole Soyinka’s acknowledged creative muse, had gifted the great Nigerian dramatist with literary immortality. But before the week ran out, Ogun had struck again.

    The deity of steely violence and blood –suffused cleansing berthed at Talabi Street, Ikeja. As the acrid fumes cleared, Dele Giwa’smangled body nestled amidst a tangled mass of twisted metals and charred wood.   The hour of platinum is also the hour of pellets. For a nation accustomed to extravagant paradox, this was irony at its most supreme.

    Thirty years later, the mind continues to marvel at the revolutionary wickedness of this novel method of human wastage. This was to open a gale of murder and mayhem as if Nigeria was waiting for the astral signal of sophisticated violence.  Three decades later, Nigeria is foaming with blood and is like an open ended morgue filled with the dead and the devastated.  Historians of the future gazing at the vast necropolis will wonder how killing and human culling could occur on such an industrial scale in a largely primitive society. A society which cannot sustain its citizens has procured the most scientific means of dispatching them.

    Let us say this once again, particularly to those who pretend to be hard of hearing. No one who has blocked or conspired to thwart Nigeria’s path to greatness will escape harsh and exacting retribution. If not now, then much later, as Dele Giwa himself famously noted in the poetic prose of a joyously clairvoyant child.

    In many respects, Dele Giwa himself reminds one of a child, particularly in the sweet innocence with which he romanced unaccountable power and its hard principalities. As the Yoruba in their gnomic wisdom will put it, nobody must ask a child not climb the hill of Langbodo. That is if he ever survived to ask questions.

    Yet,there is a mystical and metaphysical dimension to Nigeria’s fortunes and misfortunes, a hidden order to disorder, that one can only shudder at the brainless effrontery of those who have been toying with the destiny of the greatest conglomeration of black souls on earth. Described by an early colonial administrator as an arbitrary block hewn out of the heart of Africa, Nigeria is a great tribute to the self-subverting genius of the colonial imaginary. If it had not existed, it would have had to be willed into existence by post-colonial imagination.

    As part of the national remembrance of this great Nigerian journalist, we republish this morning an expanded tribute to Dele Giwa which was first published on this page nine years ago.. As it was on October 19, 1986, so it has been on October 19, 2016. But this time around, it is the judiciary that was being firebombed by public opprobrium.

  • Snippets of Giwa’s humour

    His jokes could be as expensive as his hand-woven suits. But they came without any hint of malice or ill-will. He could take as much as he would give. Only the psychologically maladjusted could come away nursing any animosity or ill feeling. As a connoisseur of good living, he was as brash and confident as they came.

    Snooper remembers once walking into the sitting room after coming up all the way to see the doyen himself. Giwa’s face glowered with the possibilities and pleasures of literary jousting and exquisite conversations washed down with even more exquisite cognac. Giwa smoked with aristocratic relish, as if he was lapping at a fragrant bar of rare honey.

    “Ah welcome. This is the only socialist I know who wears suits”, Giwa snorted with child-like relish. Very soon, he was all over snooper, sniffing and carping at the jacket like an Alsatian of higher fashion.

    “The lapel of this jacket is too wide. Reminds one of those Ojoyin tailors”, Dele Giwa snorted like a mischievous but good-natured kid.

    “OjoyinkoIremoni. Look I didn’t come to Lagos for a fashion show”,  yours sincerely rallied.

    “When next I travel I must get you a couple of decent suits and stuff. All these Ilarecoats will not wash”, Giwa noted with a mock frown.

    “Listen, my coat is not from Ilare. I bought it from Sheffield”, snooper snapped.

    “Ah, ah ah”, Giwa crowed exultantly, “Why would anybody buy a jacket from Sheffield? The only thing they know how to do there is steel cutlery”.

     

  • Dele Giwa was here

    Beautiful mornings do not last forever. The radiant, luscious and autumnal morning of October nineteen, 1986 did not endure at Talabi Street, Ikeja. As the cool brilliant morning wore on to midday, a novel and spectacular method of human wastage made its devastating entrée into Nigeria’s political space.

    Oladele Baines SunmonuGiwa, groundbreaking editor with film star good looks, was bleary-eyed after a night of carousal celebrating black Africa’s first Nobel prize in Literature. But he was already in his study. As he was handed the bulky parcel with the presidential coat of arms, Giwa had exclaimed rather redundantly: “This must be from the president!”

    If Dele Giwa had any intention of reading the message on earth, the presidential parcel had an altogether different proposition. It was: Open and read in heaven. As the celebrated editor casually tore through the swanky seal, the parcel hissed and let forth a historic explosion.

    Within seconds, the entire study had become a burning, hollowed out shell. Shrapnel, shards of glass and shreds of human flesh littered everywhere. Crouching under the smouldering hulk of the reading table was Dele Giwa, his magnificent torso mangled, his mid-section sensationally shattered. As he gained awareness of what had happened, Giwa gave a weak yell. “Won tipami!” , he moaned in Yoruba.(They have killed me!).

    Acrid fumes of burning human flesh, roasting books and other refined refuse filled the air. Life had begun to ebb away from one of Nigeria’s greatest sons, a mesmerising maestro of the written word, a formidable journalistic sleuth, an extraordinary social animal and a warm, humane visionary.

    As far as dying goes, it was quite a way to go, a volcanic exit if ever there was one, a one-way ticket in a chariot of fire and on a turnpike of no return. It was an extraordinary act of political intimidation, the equivalent of the ultimate nuclear intervention in post-colonial elite warfare. It was a maximum message of intent to dominate and prevail at whatever costs. Nigeria would never be the same again.

    Those who killed Dele Giwa could have organised for him to be quietly dispatched by a lone gunman. They could have set him up in a scene of domestic violence. They had the means to make things look like an armed robbery attempt. They could have a car run him over as he took his early morning jog around Ikeja. No, these modes of elimination are too mundane and cheaply predictable.

    By choosing to bomb Dele Giwa out of existence, his executors wanted Nigerians  of his ilk to note the range and repertoire of the murderous cocktails at their disposal. After all, it is said that men are killed not because horses have been stolen, but so that horses may not be stolen.

    But in addition to its preposterous violence, we must also note the sneaky cowardice of the act. It began a pattern of sly surprise and political ambush that was to become their trademark as earthly powers that be sought to bring the entire Nigerian social landscape under their dominion. Being a plucky warrior himself, Giwa would have loved to go under in a personal, no-holds-barred duel. For a man of such stirring valour, the anonymous bestiality of a parcel bomb would have been the unkindest cut of all.

    May be Giwa would not have died after all, but this was not due to any concession from his vicious killers. History has it that had there not been a minor marital tiff, Giwa’s spouse would almost definitely have opened the parcel thinking that it contained early copies of Newswatch, the magazine Giwa edited with such distinction and panache.

    Like all good women, Funmi shared in the triumph and success of her husband. By October 1986, Newswatch had become a publishing sensation. The magazine had not only the aura of an excellent publication but also the trappings of a great work of art in progress. Week after week it served its rapidly expanding readership scoop after scoop putting egg permanently on the face of the dominant military faction of a corrupt political class that operated by stealth and secrecy.

    It was the complete Americanization of Nigerian journalism, with its power of full disclosure, its fierce and obdurate independence and its raucous razzmatazz. Giwa himself with his matinee idol looks and film star carriage seemed to have been torn out of The Great Gatsby, the classic film of the American dream with its Hopalong Kid and his perpetual romance with an orgiastic future and its immense possibilities. That dire future is now firmly with us, and it is not an American dream but a Nigerian nightmare.

    Giwa was the Nigerian Gatsby, a remarkable wannabe from the gutter of deprivation who became a man of means and a major player in the power sweepstakes. He took his giddy transformation in his elegant strides, and with style and aplomb. Not for him the vulgar obscenities and crude hoopla of the wantonly self-obsessed ragamuffin. He was as cool as cucumber. He became a source of inspiration to millions of Nigerian youths trying to escape the grinding poverty of the bleak house.

    In the event, it was all too good to be true. Dele Giwa patronized the power-elite and spoke truth to power like a mystical superpower addressing earthly powers. By so doing, the great journalist threatened the power structure and the pecking order of an unlettered power-Mafiosi. By his very example, he was pointing to an alternative life-style, an alternative vision away from the larcenous crudities of those who depended on crude oil for survival.

    In the circumstance, both the message and the messenger were handed death sentences without any suspension. The inimitable K.O Mbadiwe once chillingly cautioned his journalistic tormentors to note the fate that befell their predecessors. When a newspaper and the editor were abusing him, K.O said, he did not do anything about it but a few weeks later, according to him, both the paper and the editor folded up. It remains a miracle that Newswatch did not fold up after Dele Giwa’s murder.

    When Dele Giwa was sensationally dispatched, snooper noted at the time that the image of a virile gifted young man with his mid-section shattered might well become the enduring image of the nation itself. Once a country loses its way, it continues to wade deeper and deeper in the jungle of crippled nationhood.

    Thirty years after Dele Giwa’s murder, this has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. On the very eve of Giwa’s anniversary nine years ago, a Nigerian law maker, a trained medical doctor at that, fell to the din of fistic contention as his colleagues slugged it out for the third time on the floor of the house. He was later pronounced dead. Four years after the bomb , made its way to the independence celebration at Eagle’s Square in Abuja. The Nigerian terminator machine has been working in overdrive gear.

    Now try this. If we were to resurrect all the great men and women we have wasted, all the brilliant Nigerians that we have sacrificed at the altar of a vicious and incompetent state, what an endless funeral procession that would be, what a crying cortege of shame it must be!

    Since we have nothing but dark memories of contemporary Nigeria, this is what we must hold on to, since our heart aches with sorrow and tragedy, this is what we must hang on to. The enemies are those who want to us to forget, who want us to bury history and their complicity by asking us to bury our sad memories. No, we shall not. National memory is made of sterner stuff. And Dele Giwa lives forever.

  • And dem judges… dem a changing….

    When the Nobel Prize for Literature for was awarded to a non-literary poet who had nothing but contempt for formal poetry like Bob Dylan, the first thought that came to snooper’s mind was that Dele Giwa, had he lived, could also have won it with his musical prose and brilliant poetic cadences. Confirmation came later when a member of the jury in response to a query from the purists of the profession simply retorted. “The times… they are a changing!!”Meanwhile for the first time in its history, the Nobel jury is still looking for its latest Literature laureate. Times are changing indeed.

    The times are changing in Nigeria too, but for the worse or the better depending on how you view it. Who would have thought that we would live to see the day when revered judges would be trading allegations of enticement and corrupt inducements?

    But one man’s meat is truly another man’s poison. After searching in vain for a judge to grant him a perpetual black market injunction to restrain the police from searching the kitchen for contraband rice, Okon collapsed in tears.

    “Oga he be like if say demBuhari man don strike the fear of dem lord into dem lordship”, the mad boy jeered.

    “Ha Okon, dem judges dem a changing”, Baba Lekki intoned with Nobel sagacity.

    “Baba make dem keep dem change and give man him change”, the crazy boy hollered as Baba Lekki chanted: “ As it pleases their lordships!!!!!”