The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • Baba Lekki solves the change riddle for the nation

    It was a distraught and distressed Okon who went in search of the old contrarian who had moved his headquarters of state subversion to the seamy swamps of Okokomaiko.

    “Okon, why are you looking like a man who has just been beaten by his wife, or am I the yeye man who cannot pay you?”, the old man smiled with a contorted visage.

    “Ha baba no be like dat sam sam.  Sikira no fit. Even him Yoruba papa no fit. But dis days when I go market go buy meat, he get one Hausa meat seller who dey shout as I dey reach him slab. “Ha, ha Yaro Okon, akoi changi, akoi changi, ba changi mana, ba changi”, baba wetin dem mala dey say?”, the poor boy moaned.

    “Ha Okon you are a fool. The man is asking you whether you have correct change”, the old man shot back.

    “Wetin be my own for dem  yeye change? No be dem mala for Abuja say him get am for plenty change?” Okon snarled.

    “ Okon, dat one na dem parable of meat seller. What the mala is saying is that no be Daura mala alone go bring change. For there to be real exchange, everybody must have correct change. Yeye Nigerians”, the old man spat and dismissed an even more confused Okon. “

  • Devils at the crossroads

    Devils at the crossroads

    (The neo-colonial state and the emerging Nigerian society)

    Unlike what obtains in organic nations where the state acts mostly in concert with the will and aspirations of political societies or at the very worst in dialectical modification of each other, the Nigerian state has been mostly at odds with the genuine aspirations of the emerging Nigerian society as it struggles with the imperatives of modernity and modernization.  The result is a war of all against all which leaves the nation bruised, battered and permanently bleeding.

    The origin of this endemic crisis of nationhood can be located in the colonial constitution of the modern Nigerian nation and the type of indigenous political elite authorized by the colonial masters to facilitate the project of permanent domination of the global periphery.  Colonialism destroyed the extant political structures and the viable states of the constituting nationalities and replaced them with an alien structure so hostile and implacable as to be at violent variance with the genuine aspirations of the indigenous people.

    No matter the prefix to delimit its historical actuality, it is obvious that there is not much difference between colonialism in Nigeria and what has come after it. In reality, “post” is often a marker of barely disguised continuity rather than sharply delineated discontinuity. As an English wit has quipped, there is no point in settling the order of precedence between a flea and a louse. They are both bloodsucking vermin.

    In many African nations where enlightened indigenous elites seized the reins of power after independence, they saw the overriding need for the visionary reconstruction and recreation of the colonial state in order to humanize it and make it more amenable to the genuine needs and aspirations of the people. It is this epic narrative of recreation that has found a few African nations on song for economic development and national integration.

    This is the difference between Nkrumah’s Ghana, Nyerere’s Tanzania, Senghor’s Senegal, what could have been Augustino Neto’s  Angola and a laggard Nigeria. Upon independence in Nigeria, what took place was the Africanization of colonial tyranny and a mere change in the personnel of despotism and extractive predation. The managers of the interior simply switched colour in the colonial plantation.

    Yet it will amount to self-slander to insist that the colonial incursion into Nigeria did not throw up some visionary leaders. Beginning from the end of the nineteenth century, a string of intellectual pamphleteers and writers from the Lagos coastal aristocracy subjected colonial rule and its sham pretensions to searing critiques and penetrating putdown. It was a very risky thing to do and it was to draw the ire of the Lugard brothers who responded with vitriol and vehemence.

    The long list of illustrious anti-colonialists and conscientious objectors stretches from the great lawyer, Sapara-Williams, Otunba Payne, Henshaw, Sir Kitoye Ajasa, through Herbert Macaulay, the wizard of Kirsten Hall, and on to Nnamdi Azikiwe, H.O Davies and their contemporaries. Azikiwe’s stirring anti-colonial rhetoric and polemics of Black emancipation set the tone for the final push against colonization. In retrospect, it can be seen that Obafemi Awolowo’s  radically humane project of the rapid emancipation of his people from the jaws of colonial depredations represents a visionary and pragmatic critique of colonization at its most destabilizing.

    Unfortunately in the run up to independence as the Lagos coastal elite appear to have lost steam as a result of historic fatigue while Zik became bogged down and embroiled in bitter local politics, the feudal colonial state reasserted its authority and suzerainty with vigour and ferocity.  Under the less than watchful eye of bitterly feuding regional politicians, this predatory and patrimonial state transformed into the predatory and patrimonial post-colonial Nigerian state with the war cry of always centralize! It is as if a nation is nothing more than a vast military garrison.

    It is the repercussions and fallout of this overcentralization and harshly unitarist system which have led us to where we are today. It is an ideal breeding ground for despotism and the garrison politics, not to talk of military irruption which often lead to a forcible homogenization of the nation with predictably disastrous results. No matter the military might or the feudal wiles, it is impossible to homogenize a heterogeneous nation of contending nationalities in mutually incompatible stages of economic, political and spiritual modes of production.

    It is a measure of this endemic crisis of nationhood that a western observer recently described Nigerian leaders, particularly in their post-military incarnation, as “personalist and patrimonial”. It is a short, pithy and pitiless summation which captures the roiling contradictions of the Nigerian post-colonial state and its hapless political society. In a telling contribution to the debate, President Mohammadu Buhari was reported to have observed that in Nigeria, strong men destroy institutions.

    Institutionalized rule because of its impersonal and rational nature, its clause of substitute actors and abstract procedures is the logical enemy of patrimonial rule and its father-figures. Yet in saner climes, these human institutions are the creations of strong men and women with a selflessly visionary imagining of a better, fairer and more orderly society.

    Building institutions is not a tea party.  It is the product of repeated gestures and habits burnt into the human consciousness where they become routinised and accepted norms of human behavior which in turn are emblematic of society over time. When General George Washington declined to become an American presidential monarch, he set the tone and template for political rectitude and the institutionalization of democratic rule in the new nation.

    Washington had the full weight of history behind him. Whatever their personal contradictions, America was founded by visionary intellectuals with radical notions of human emancipation and the inalienable right of each person to choose how he would be ruled and by who. Despite the horrors of slavery and the decimation of the native Indian population, Washington would have felt that his ancestors did not escape from the horrors of absolutist rule in the old world only to inaugurate same in the new world.

    It is this absence of a transcendental idealism and the sheer lack of capacity to envision a free and prosperous new society from the ashes of traditional authoritarian society and colonial predation that has been the bane of the bulk of Nigeria’s post-independence leaders. But you cannot give what you don’t have. If we must complain about the sluggishness of a stream in midcourse, we must first take a look at the origin.

    In the absence of a critical pan-Nigerian mass which can galvanize and serve as the nucleus of a radical political emancipation of the nation and pioneer its rapid economic emancipation, and given the obvious incapacity of the political elite to act in pan-national concert, various segments of the emerging Nigerian society have risen in stirring critique of the patrimonial and neo-feudal state.  Since independence and as a result of radical disaffection with the state of the colonial union, all the major nationalities have threatened at one time or the other to leave the nation.

    Most of the time, this disenchantment with the nation remains at the level of muted murmuring and private cursing. But occasionally, they assume the status of armed critiques which leave the nation roiling in a bloodfest, the most devastating and destructive being the civil war. This is not discounting the Tivi uprising, the Niger Delta insurrection and the ongoing Boko Haram war which has laid waste most of the North East of the nation.

    The federally engineered scuttling of the Awolowo project also occasioned much bloodshed. Although the Yoruba nationality has never risen in armed confrontation with the Nigerian state, its political rebellion and intellectual critique of the architecture of the nation have twice led to bloody confrontation with the federal might and quality casualty for the ethnic formation.

    Yet despite perpetual adversity, Nigeria is slowly changing. The slumberous giant may be rousing. There is an obvious change in the demographic complexion of the nation and a shift of ideological orientation which bode ill for personalist and patrimonial rule. The problem with compulsive thieves is that they never know when they have stolen too much for the owner not to notice. But when devils get to the crossroads, they must also tremble, for it is usually a short ride to perdition.

    Twice in the last twenty two years, the Nigerian multitude have risen as one to demand momentous change in the structure and system of leadership in the nation. On June 12, 1993, the pan-Nigerian mass voted for MKO Abiola and the termination of despotic military rule. Although they did not succeed in installing Abiola, the chain of events triggered by the annulment led to the eventual retirement of the military to the barracks. Failing to correctly decode the signal, the military ended up disgracing and humiliating itself.

    On April 28th 2015, Nigerians rose as one again to vote for change as personified by Mohammadu Buhari and for the termination of inept kleptocratic rule famously exemplified by the last administration. This time, they seem to have succeeded in both objectives, or so it seems. Last week, the regnant rump of the patrimonial cabal struck in the hallowed chambers of the senate in a daylight putsch at implacable variance with the mood of the nation. For them, the nation can go to blazes as long as they have their way even over the corpse of party and noble principles.

    Is another “democratic” annulment of the national will on the way? As it happened with the SDP in 1993 and the federally engineered implosion of the Action Group in 1962, the irony of all this is that the victorious party which is at the vanguard of radical transformation is also the weakest link in the radical evaporation of hope and change. With the APC reeling from one crisis or the other ever since, is history about to repeat itself?

    If the APC implodes, the only possibility in the horizon is radical anarchy. Change should not shortchange a nation. The widespread condemnation of the senate putsch and of the over-pampered privileges of the National Assembly is a pointer to a looming social combustion. Without a dominant party with clear moral and political integrity through which the turbulent social discontents can be channeled and routed, there is bound to be a direct collision between the streets and the state. It is another word for chaos and anarchy.

    The leadership of the APC must put on their thinking cap. Change is possible only if there is a party that drives change. Let those who are fanning the embers of discord and disunity both within and outside the party understand that that they are also in the shortest run organizing their own political funeral. For now and with President Buhari at the helm, this coalition of contraries represents Nigeria’s best hope for orderly change and the principal powerbrokers must find strength, resolve and visionary energy in the countervailing polarities. Otherwise, the party itself will become part of an unfurling narrative.

  • Odolaiye Aremu sings for Azeez Arisekola Alao

    Eniti aiye banfe (When a person is beloved by the world)
    Bo f’ewe dewu yi o ye e (Even if he makes for himself a dress of leaves
    It will be found very befitting)
    Bi ikan ba duro, ile o la (If the all-consuming termite tarries
    It will be consumed by the earth)

    As soon as the warm winds from London brought the shocking news of the death of the great Ibadan business mogul, entrepreneur, philanthropist extraordinary and influential broker behind the political scene, Alhaji Azeez Arisekola Alao, snooper went in search of the classic by Odolaiye Aremu, the great Ilorin musician and exponent of dadakuada music.

    Snooper is not always on the same political page with Arisekola, particularly during the military inquisition and the drama that led to the annulment of the best election ever held in Nigeria and the death in malignant custody of MKO Abiola.  But this column always insists on giving a person his dues. The unprecedented outpouring of grief in Ibadan and environs shows how much beloved this man was and how positively he touched the lives of many people through his various empowerment schemes.

    There are important lessons to be learnt from Arisekola’s life. First is that it is possible to lift one’s self up by the bootstraps no matter how adverse and penurious the circumstances.  The second is that having lifted himself up, one must never remove the grimy ladder from those who may be equally gifted but without the grit and determination.

    A precociously bright student, the young Azeez was the finalist in the entrance examination to Christ School in 1960. In the same year, he also came third in the entrance examination to Lagelu Grammar School. But the straitened circumstances of his parents could not allow him to go to secondary school. It was the end of the road for the young fellow in terms of formal education.

    But not to be cowed by fate or bullied into submission by adversity, the youth ploughed his mental gifts, eye for details and determination into the business of buying and selling. He made a roaring and extraordinary success of it. In a few years, Arisekola became a household word in the western parts of the country, particularly Ibadan and environs. Those who have been hearing his name for a very long time would be surprised that Arisekola was still under seventy when he answered the final call.

    As soon as fortunes began smiling on him, Arisekola initiated a Scholarship Scheme for the poor and the talented indigent. He named it after the father who was unable to send him to school. It was an act of exceptional nobility and filial devotion.  Numerous examples abound of his kindness, courtesy and generosity. He was a patron of politicians in need of economic rehabilitation as well as a partisan of the desperately poor in search of their daily bread. This feudal munificence was in keeping with the Islamic injunction. Arisekola was a man of muscular devotion to the Islamic faith.

    Despite his Croesus-like wealth and his Midas touch going forward, the late business mogul conducted and carried himself in public with amazing grace and simplicity. He wore no airs. Although not a politician in the formal sense of the word, Arisekola was the quintessential man of the people. He was the sort of person who could haul a former classmate out of a crowd and engage him in public bantering. There was always something about him of the home boy made good and an unrepentant Ibadan nationalist.

    Snooper recalls a chance encounter with the late billionaire at a public event in Ibadan last year. Arisekola’s warmth and lacerating wit was a reporter’s delight any day.  The Aare Musulumi seized the High Table with his impish humour and irreverence sending yours sincerely almost toppling with laughter. May Allah receive the departed.

    This piece is republished because it never made it to the internet edition of the paper.

  • War Lord Democracy

    War Lord Democracy

    As military rule mercifully recedes into remote and distant memory in Nigeria, it is profoundly ironic that the democratic process continues to manifest some of the ungainly features of repressive autocracies. For example, there is the continuing militarization of the polity and the weaponization of politics itself to the point that it has become a game of political warlords. This much was evident in the last days of the last regime.  Only a balance of terror and the watchful eyes of the international community prevented Nigeria from tipping over into the abyss.

    But so soon thereafter, we are at it again as it is customary for a country with a legendary reputation for permanently camping at the edge of the abyss and for flirting with suicide.  Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you, and you sold me, as George Orwell famously noted. Politics in Nigeria is a game of multiple treachery and multivalent betrayal.  Yet it is only those who consider politics however dangerous hair-raising as a mere game that would fail to see the delinquent seizure of the machinery of the senate by some rogue senators in all its dangerous and destabilizing import.

    Once again, something new comes out of Nigeria. This one goes beyond the established norm of political normlessness. As we shall see, it strikes a deadly blow at the change mantra of the current regime. It casts the senate in dissident dissonance and disharmony with the executive and possibly with the judicial arm. It sets the stage for a crippling administrative disorder and possible disintegration. A hybrid senate leadership is a hybridized monster which is unknown in the history of modern democracy and one with a capacity to destroy even its own. It is a peculiar mess, a typically Nigerian peculiar mess at that.

    Having said that, it is important for those who have invested intellectual, strategic, political, economic and even ethnic capital in the project of change and the possibility of national redemption not to despair or throw up their arms in frustration. Democratic change cannot and does not occur overnight. It is always easier for forces of reaction to regroup and reassemble at short notice because they know the economic price of everybody but the political value of nothing.

    It is too early in the day to consign the Buhari administration to the trashcan of history. Nigerians, both mighty and low, must learn the virtue of patience. A people without any demonstrative capacity for collective revolutionary initiative must also not add the vice of impatience to their baggage. This is not the time to further inflame passions. It is not the time for wild speculations and unrestrained tirades. Without sacrificing party supremacy, APC must engage its dissident members. Bukola Saraki is a wasp perched on the most delicate part of the human anatomy.

    It has been a typically Nigerian coup, full of intrigues, double dealing, double crossing and ambush within ambush reminiscent of the exploits of Nigeria’s aging coup maestros. There is also a hint of self-coup, or what the Latin Americans call Autogolpe. An Autogolpe is a conscious coup against one’s self. But this one is probably unconscious.  When Mohammadu Buhari tersely but awkwardly noted that “a constitutional process has somewhat occurred”, we say with the retired general that it is actually a constitutional autogolpe that has somewhat occurred.

    The Nigerian president must now be helped out of the awful mess he has partly created. But he will need to change tack. He must avoid the Ben Bella Syndrome. Ahmed Ben Bella was a great hero of the Algerian war of independence against the French. It was a nasty and cruel contention whose echoes reverberate till date. When Ben Bella finally assumed office, he had become so physically, psychologically and emotionally drained that he could only spend time trifling with extant structures until his colleagues put him out of his miseries.

    There are extenuating circumstances for the presidential faux pas. As a born again democrat who has deliberately and strenuously purged himself of the autocratic mind-set of his military career, Buhari is anxious to be seen as a man who values consensus, a man is willing to marry messianism with the multiplicity of contrary views, and a man not willing to be seen as disrupting the seamless web of governmental harmony among the executive, the judiciary and the legislature.

    This can only work in advanced climes where people have learnt from bitter experience to live for the greater good of the greater society. But in a society teeming with political sharks and vultures, it is a manual for political martyrdom. It is up to the retired general to find a golden mean between the obsessive and obtrusive meddlesomeness of his military predecessor in civilian office and the hardy and alert proactiveness necessary to do the job at hard. The Nigerian presidency is not a habitat for secular saints.

    In Latin America after they had almost killed themselves off due to incessant and tempestuous coups, the generals decided on a simple method of eliminating the perennial bloodfest.  Whenever a coup is in the offing, they would do a simple troops’ audit and since God marches on the side of the greater battalion, the general with the highest number of battalions  on his side carried the day.

    On Tuesday, Bukola Saraki did a troops’ audit. But as a veteran power pragmatist who knows that there is no party as such but alliances of inconvenience, he simply called for help from battle hardened adversarial combatants itching for a pound of flesh. The old warriors of reaction and ethnic revanchists still nursing the wounds of their ouster from the federal Toll Gate simply rallied.

    It is a foul and unethical thing to do reeking of betrayal and perfidy, but it reveals the monumental hollowness that lies at the heart of the current democratic process in Nigeria. There is no party as such only amalgams of mutually contradictory and violently incompatible tendencies that have refused or are probably incapable of congealing and coalescing into an organic whole. It is a dialectical mirror image of Nigeria itself.  You cannot plant cassava and expect to harvest yam. It is a symptom in search of a disease and the nearest diagnosis we can come up with is democratic warlordism.

    In the event, the defeated and disorganized PDP showed greater cohesion and dynamic mobility than the ruling party. They have claimed that they were also benefitting from the phenomenon of Tambuwalism, which is akin to an invasion of enemy territory even before the commencement of proper hostilities. It is rumoured that the veteran Tambuwal himself also played a stirring role in this one. It is in the nature of cut-throat politics, and there are no permanent allies but present interests.

    The APC has received its baptism of fire. It should now go back to the drawing board. It should immediately put in place a rigorous mechanism for party conflict resolution through the three Cs: conciliation, compromise and consensus.  It is obvious that the party has suffered grievously due to lack of internal cohesion and as a result of excessive vanity and obsession with the spoils of office.

    When all else fails, it is only the presidency that can wield the big stick. The failure of the president to wade in much earlier and to do so in a decisive manner when he was eventually roused to act has resulted in a political black eye for the party. It is a curious irony that Buhari would seem to be encouraging political warlordism in his own party when the electoral revolt that swept him to power is a stinging disavowal of the same phenomenon in the larger Nigerian polity. The Nigerian senate is the surviving stronghold of our last political Shoguns.

    Having acquired teeth and muscle, this senatorial Shogunate is going to try President Buhari’s will and iron resolve to reform and sanitize the Nigerian polity to the snapping point in the next few months. It is going to be a battle royale the likes of which has never been witnessed in these climes. If the president wilts and withers away, it is all but guaranteed that his presidency will end as a colossal failure, unable to make a dent in the monumental rot that has stifled the nation. As we have previously advised, it is going to be a game of will and wits and the president will need all his political savvy and street wisdom.

    A lot is going to depend on his party and its principal partners. A few columns back, we had commended the tragic fate of the inchoate and incongruous alliance which ended authoritarian misrule in Kenya to the APC. Going forward to a fresh election, the party disintegrated into its political components and ethnic particularities. The result was a brief civil war which shook Kenya to its foundation and from which the country is yet to properly recover.

    It is not a question of whether one likes President Buhari or not. The Change Project which the retired general has courageously spearheaded in collusion with many patriotic Nigerians and which has resonated spectacularly with our compatriots both at home and abroad is the last chance to redeem this country and put it on the path of rectitude and righteousness.  If it fails, it is going to be goodbye to Nigeria as we know it.

  • Christian Oladele Onikepe

    A Tribute

     

    On Tuesday, May 26, 2015 Christian Oladele Onikepe passed on to meet his Holy Father, God Almighty. His indomitable spirit and joy for life are carried on by his family, extended family, friends, colleagues and fellow travelers on the path we call life.

    There is only one Christian Oladele Onikepe and yet to everyone that met him, he was many different things. He was a father, friend, mentor, spiritual guide, kindred spirit, a debate and discussion partner, a leader and much more… If you were to ask him to describe himself, he would simply say, “I was sent to this world to be a servant of God, in humility and simplicity of the heart, and to be a testament to God’s grace and mercy.”

    Born to a large family, Christian Oladele Onikepe possessed a keen intellect and grew up to be one of Nigeria’s brightest minds and brilliant thinkers. He was a star student at GOAGS, Gbongan, Government College, Ibadan, University of Lagos where he bagged a Second Class Upper Division honours in French, and capped it all with a Ph.D in French from the University of Grenoble, France.

    In his professional career, he touched and changed many lives as professor, social activist, and advocate for peace. At the University of Lagos, Lagos, Nigeria, he and his peers were pioneers. He led colleagues and students in reinterpreting African literature through the application of metaphysical concepts. This led to the first ever successful doctorate in his academic unit at the university. Christian expressed and lived his faith through his teaching and mentoring. Always the rigorous academician, he was also the humble teacher who respected his students’ intellect—even when he disagreed with them. He was an unyielding and passionate defender of the weak and helpless; and of what was right.

    In the United States he also worked towards sharing knowledge and shedding light on the African experience, both within the country and abroad. He was highly successful at two institutions, namely Mount Saint Mary’s University, Maryland (America’s second oldest Catholic university) and the University at Buffalo (SUNY), New York. At SUNY-Buffalo, he was part of the team that helped to lay the groundwork for the university’s graduate education in Cuba in January 2002. An accomplished teacher, Christian was also a Fulbright Scholar in Burkina Faso, West Africa, in 2004 and 2005.

    In addition to his work in Francophone cultures, he never forgot his roots. He was a tireless promoter of his beloved Yoruba culture and language. His boundless energy and joyfulness were infectious. Wherever he was, he fought for religious tolerance and freedom. Always humble, passionate and charismatic, he tirelessly advocated for a space in which Christian, Muslim and Traditional practitioners could work beyond ethnic and religious differences, towards the common good. In Nigeria, he was one of the co-founders of NARETO, the National Association for Religious Tolerance and Peaceful Coexistence.

    If he were to speak his wishes today, it would be to say, “celebrate my life as the only happiness in this world is that of always being content with what God has given me. I can “demand nothing with fervor, except the perfect accomplishment of God’s will in my soul.”

    We will always carry you in our hearts, Oladele Christian Onikepe. We will always remember and see you in every smile, every joyous song and everything good in life.

     

    • Tayo, Angel, Ope and Ifedayo
  • Fathers and sons

    Fathers and sons

    Poor boy , even after suffering an electoral catastrophe on the scope of Hiroshima the wicked Yoruba enforcers will not leave him alone. They will not allow him to lick the wounds of rejection in silence and solitude.  Even an attempt to honour his illustrious departed father has met with fierce resistance. The whole thing backfired and boomeranged in his face. Yet is a Yoruba axiom that honoring one’s parents is the ultimate filial compliment. If so, why must his own be different?

    We are of course talking about our very dear aburo, Femi Fani-Kayode, Deacon in a remote incarnation, lately presidential bull terrier and illustrious scion of illustrious ancestors. But before this engrossing tale of fathers and their sons, and of the punitive politics of the Yoruba people and its retroactive severity race ahead of the griot, let us dispense with some customary formalities.

    Despite the deep ideological chasm between us and our even deeper abhorrence of his politics, readers of the column would have noticed a cagey reluctance to come down hard on Femi.  Rather than excoriate him for his political impieties, snooper often passes over the matter in stony silence and deeply felt regret.

    The reason for this is a rather odd and awkward sense old charity and obligation. Femi holds snooper in almost reverential admiration. By his own written admission, snooper ranks near the very top in Femi’s pantheon of literary avatars. Even when one stoutly disagrees with or is working at political cross-purpose with him , one always thought that it will be rather graceless and mean to publicly castigate somebody who holds you in such high public esteem, no matter the affront.

    But in commemorating his father and eulogizing him as a former deputy leader of the Yoruba, the younger Fani has raised a matter of public interest which should be addressed in the light of history and Yoruba politics in its military and post-military phases.  The ire and flak from some commentators are predicated on the conduct of the father during the pre-military and military period and of the son during the military and post-military phases. We must now look critically at the fact.

    During his eventful lifetime, Chief Remilekun Fani-Kayode ,SAN, QC,CON, Balogun of Ile-Ife, aka Fani-Power,  cut quite a dash through the country’s legal and political circles. Tall, good looking and extremely charismatic, the supremely self-confident and brilliant lawyer was a man of magnificent presence. Born into wealth and distinction, the son and grandson of Cambridge graduates, there was something of a classical snob about the old patrician.

    This disdain for the rabble and the masses was to lead his politics inexorably in the direction of fascism and his ideology towards Social Darwinism. Who are the odoriferous and hygienically challenged masses to protest when a body of men of superior intellect and superior breeding has volunteered to rule them? Tani baba won gan? It was straight out of the political manual of Benito Mussolini.

    But this fascist mindset was going to be out of sinc with the radical populism and Black nationalism  which was the driving ideology of the dominant Black intellectual and political elite of the decolonizing period. Up to a point, Fani Power was being true to his elitist roots. One’s personal insertion in a social and political milieu often determines their ideological outlook.

    Having been where only few Black people dared, having brilliantly excelled and beaten the White man at his own intellectual game, it was possible that Fani-Kayode no longer regarded himself as a Black person not to talk of being a Yoruba man, an African Aryan so to say. It was even noted that during their students’ days in England, what Fani considered to be Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s ill-fitting trousers and thick Remo accent were the butt of savage jokes and derision from the upper class, impeccably attired aristo with his Buckingham County glass cut vowels.  This elitism and in your face reactionary conservatism may well be driving the younger Fani in the same direction.

    In the event, Fani senior was as colourful as he was controversial. Tales of his political derring-do abound and abide.  For snooper, the most hilarious, possibly apocryphal, was when the great “Fani Power”  was said to have walked into a live WNTV newscast completely soused and sodden to felicitate with his beau, the delectable Ms Toun Adeyemi.   Chomping at his custom made cigar, and unaware that the news was being beamed to the world, the legendary hell-raiser was said to have bawled at the former Mrs Onibokun: “Ah ah, O chop life? Enh, o ni lati chop life niiii”. The entire station went off the air. The rest is history.

    But fair is fair and it is sometimes good to set the record straight however much the facts inconvenience us. The truth will let us see the ways of history and the strange turns of elite conduct in moments of dire emergency . Femi Fani-Kayode’s efforts to romanticize the memory of his father posted on this Facebook account has met with blistering scorn and apoplectic disavowals. Many will have none of that nonsense. In the old West there seems to be no statute of limitation to injury done to the race.

    Enter the inevitable Hardball. Hardball is the witty, irreverent, brilliant and entertaining meta-column on the back page of The Nation newspaper. It is a reader’s delight any day, that is if you are not on the receiving  side of its nettling scorn, and as the name suggests it is hard and packed with cujones. If Hardball was grudgingly willing to concede Fani’s deputy leadership of what is widely considered as an occupation government, the column took fearsome umbrage at what it considered the attempt by the son of Fani Power to leverage this dubious distinction and promote his father as a one- time deputy Yoruba leader.

    Hear, hear Hardball: “ But to romanticize [Fani} as a force for public good, with all due respect to the loving memory of his relations, is pure balderdash. That was what FFK tried to do by dubbing him as “deputy Yoruba leader”. He was absolutely nothing of the sort”.

    Absolutely? Snooper must now enter judgment against Hardball. At the first gathering of the Yoruba people after the second coup of 1966 and under the chairmanship of the then Colonel Robert Adeyinka Adebayo,  the recently released Chief Obafemi Awolowo was unanimously  named as the leader of the Yoruba people. But to mollify the powerful conservative rump of the old reactionary tendency, Chief Remi Fani-Kayode was also named as deputy Yoruba leader.

    It was a tense and fraught arrangement. The hard line, radically progressive Francis Adekunle Fajuyi would have had none of that. But Adebayo was of a more liberal and integrationist outlook. This cosmetic patch up left bitter wounds to fester. Quick-witted and wonderfully survivalist, Fani himself knew that there was unfinished business in the air.  Whether it was Chief Awolowo’s  icy stare of disdain or his legendary scorning glare that did it remains to be seen. But soon thereafter, Fani packed up his  things and relocated to England seemingly for good.

    Future historians will have a lot to chew about this intriguing episode in Yoruba history and post-colonial politics. But as it was in that turbulent period, so it is in this equally tumultuous conjuncture. Yoruba politics continues to be riven by elite division and bitter polarities which often spill unto the national canvas with dreadful consequences. Snooper will not follow many in concluding that Femi has merely taken off where his father left, but it is useful to remind this gifted young man that if a man chooses to be on the wrong side of his people, no matter how high he climbs in the ladder of vindictive preferment, he can never be on the right side of their history. Case dismissed.

  • The Socrates of Oworonsoki

    As the rogue fuel shortage began to bite harder during the week, and as bodies of able men spilled into the streets hunting for the rare stuff the way frenzied pigmies hunt for rodents, our mind went back to the old man,  Bros Akins Woroworo, a.k.a  Atatalo Alamu. It has been a long time since he communicated with the outside world. He has been in permanent mourning since the last fuel uprising failed, performing, as he claimed, the last rites for a nation in a terminal seizure of political epilepsy.

    For good measure, he had buried his head in white sand at Maroko, ignoring the police and passers-by alike and often sending forth stupendous fumes of prohibited weeds from his massive ancient pipe. Occasionally he would barge into a nearby five star hotel to steal their food and to harangue the guests at the lobby. Then he would return to his ostrich-like existence at the famed beach.

    When snooper asked about the choice of Maroko and his punitive regimen, he observed that it was symbolic. “This was where the real tragedy of post-colonial Nigeria began when native men in uniform violently dispossessed native men without uniform of their land and property only to proceed to share the loot among themselves.”

    As the fuel crisis entered its second week, snooper learnt of a major scam that bore all the imprimatur of the old devil. A man in Oworonsoki was claiming that he had turned water into petrol and was offering the stuff for sale at a heavily subsidized rate. We immediately smelled a rat, and our old friend. And to Oworonsoki we headed, on a bleary day when the sky blew its top.

    A human snake of a queue had formed from the Ogudu end joining the one coming from Alapere to form a serpentine confluence of distraught humanity. With much pluck and daring, snooper wangled his way through the queue. In a situation of near total anarchy where everybody is afraid of everybody, the gutsy fellow is usually a winner. When there is general disorder and insecurity, the person who has the mantra of order and security can get away with murder.

    And lo, it was the old man indeed. He had set up shop at the weedy intersection of the multiple fly-over. In the marshy background, the brackish and murky water of the Lagos lagoon foamed like fresh palm wine. The old man eyed everybody with amusement and weary contempt. Then he saw me.

    “Ah Agbadagbudu boy, long, long time. You come for the show, too?”, he crowed.

    “Bros, what is this?” I whispered.

    “Ask the fools. Sebi na dem want cheap fuel?”, he screamed with much hilarity as he gestured wildly at the crowd. My fear at this point was that he could be lynched by the irate crowd if it was discovered that it has all been a cruel hoax. To my utter surprise, the old man seemed to be enjoying the discomfort of the crowd. In a show of sublime disdain, he even changed the topic as desperate men and women swarmed all over.

    At this point, the crowd became rather unruly. A man who looked like a spare parts baron began to complain aloud.

    “When are we going to get this thing now, abi na dis kind yeye talk-talk we come for?” he growled.

    “ Shief, ankali fa, he who must drink hot pap must exercise patience”, an Ogbomosho man with deep tribal marks cautioned the increasingly agitated fellow.

    “Shut up, Zebra crossing. Am I talking to you?” the increasingly agitated mogul scowled at the man. At this point, the old man decided to intervene.

    “Listen, you fools”, he said and suddenly jumped up. “Have you idiots ever asked yourself why everything horrible and hideous in the world has a black adjective to qualify it? Black sheep, blackguard, blackmail, black spot etc. And now you want cheap black market petrol?  Se mi ni baba yin ni? (Am I your father?) Yeye people. Just go and hide your head in shame.”

    “Chineke!!! This crazy man has fooled me again”, the spare parts magnate groaned as the crowd began to disperse in sullen despair and displeasure. As the last of them slunk away in defeat, the old man fixed snooper with an unnerving gaze.

    “See how meek and docile your people have become and you are expecting great changes. You have a revolutionary situation at hand but no revolutionists on hand. People are just making stupid noise all over.  You cannot access the gains of a revolution without revolutionary efforts and strivings. It is only then that you can create your own courts and legal procedures that bypass the normal status quo. Human fuel shortage, that is the real problem, and it leads to paralysis and impotence in the face of evil, but..”

    “But we must start from somewhere. At least we have voted out an evil government” I ventured.

    “Shut up!” the old man screamed as he charged at me with his massive pipe.

  • Love in the time of Vuvuzela

    It has been a colourful presidential inauguration pageant in Abuja. Nigerians are over the moon. It is a honeymoon that seems designed to last for a long time. For now, President Mohammadu Buhari can do no wrong. Journeys seem to end in lovers’ meeting, as their own WS has put it. Even old foes like the aging Creek contrarian, Edwin Clark, have chipped a word or two of endorsement in remorse and contrition. This is as it should be. The whistles of approval are blowing all over the place like a million primitive horns. It is love in the time of vuvuzela.

    Snooper finds the presidential address plucky and inspirational but choppy and unduly chirpy in parts. It doesn’t matter. Nigerians love the bit about Buhari not belonging to anybody. For too long, Nigeria has been held hostage by a heartless power consortium and their designated dingoes. Whether they will let him be without Buhari dropping some iron bricks on their back remains to be seen.

    Like a veteran war correspondent, Okon has been embedded in Abuja all week. But of all the issues that should catch the mad boy’s fancy, it was the appearance of King Mswati the third, the hypergamous, energetic and punitively heterosexual ruler of Swaziland and Africa’s last absolute monarch, swankily attired and looking sharp and snazzy in bespoke suit. As soon as Okon sighted the preeminent playboy of the southern hemisphere, he let forth a hoot of panic and admiration in parts.

    “Bia, I been dey hope say no be you capture dem Cecelia girl I ben dey look for?” Okon hollered as he accosted the suave monarch who smiled back in regal bemusement. A security official quickly moved in with a stern frown.

    “What’s the matter” the rookie growled as he collared the crazy boy.

    “I wan ask weda na him steal dem Cecelia girl, Dem say he get him own Sambisa forest for him Obodo”, Okon whimpered.

    “Get lost”, the security man screamed as he pushed the mad boy away.

  • The Nigerian state and the economy of disaffection

    The Nigerian state and the economy of disaffection

    Now that the protocols of power have disappeared and the inauguration of a new president over, we can resume in earnest the business of thinking aloud about the problems and prospects of Nigeria. The last few days to the inauguration of the Buhari administration have been particularly hair-raising. It has been the equivalent of an apocalyptic meltdown in Nigeria. What we dreamed of in improbable nightmares suddenly became a fearful reality. For a moment, it seemed as if something was about to give.

    For the first time in living memory, Nigerians experienced the equivalent of a virtual state lock down. As striking petroleum sector workers held the nation by the jugular, the national electricity grid collapsed.  No light. No food. No fuel. No salary. No government. For the first time in living memory, Nigerians experienced what it is like to be at the mercy of individuals and enemy nationals waging an economic warfare against their own nation.  Welcome to hell on earth.

    The phantom petroleum subsidy which is a function of phantom accounting, phantom ships, phantom bill of laden and phantom landing finally turned Nigeria into a phantom land. On Tuesday, snooper was at the Capital Oil filing station on Ojodu Berger around ten in the night to witness the pilgrim’s progress towards perdition. It was a scene out of the apocalypse.

    Fists of fury and empty jerry cans flew at short notice. Men yelled at each other like famished hyenas. The surly night was no respecter of past achievements and future distinctions. Even this late into the night, the express road leading out of Lagos was an automobile bedlam. Vehicles snarled and yelled at each other.

    As a nation and as a people, part of the problem with Nigeria is our inability to accurately describe and pinpoint what torments and ails the country.  It has been suggested by many that Nigeria runs a kleptocracy. A kleptocracy is a government of thieves by thieves and for thieves. While this concept captures the superficial features of our affliction, it does not exhaust its deeper essence.

    When and where disaffected nationals bring a country to its heels by waging an unrelenting economic warfare against the nation, an economy of disaffection prevails. To be sure, this is often a question of weapons of choice and necessity, for there are other forces that bring a country to political heels through sheer number and superior political skills or bring it to religious perdition through organized spiritual siege.

    In the event, the economy of disaffection stems from many sources. In many cases, it could be part of some unresolved national question.  It could be part of a fundamental dispute between old and new power blocs; between the resilient but lethargic residual and the untamed but dynamic emergent. It could be the fallout of a fundamental collision of economic altars within the mutually contradictory constituting units of a nascent nation. It could also be a reflection of class warfare by a pan-national underclass against a dysfunctional state with all the features of state banditry itself.

    On its current scale, the economy of disaffection can no longer be regarded as part of the shadowy networks of illegal and semi-criminal activities that make up the informal economy. It is the formalization of informality or the normalization of economic abnormality. It ranges from smuggling, kidnapping, armed robbery, bunkering, the operation of illegal refineries, the hijacking of petroleum products by pirates, the direct sabotage of petroleum passage, mounting book piracy, the wholesale importation of expired drugs, pension scams which is akin to robbing the dying and many more.

    Economically, the state has lost its raison d’etre and is totally at the mercy of more powerful and more resourceful non-state actors who have taken over the commanding heights of the economy. Like the democratization of the forces of coercion which has completely demystified the Nigerian state and robbed it of its aura of invincibility and impregnability, the economy of disaffection has finally undone the Lugardian state architecture. As it was said in the old Zaire of Joseph Mobutu, everybody gets by but on the corpse of the post-colonial state.

    Whatever may be the cause of the economy of disaffection, it should be clear that its un-Nigerian and anti-Nigeria activities cannot be sustained in the long run without provoking state collapse. The run on the Naira in the last few years occasioned by unregulated business activities and state burglary of the Exchequer, and the collapse of the national grid for a few days this past week should serve as pointers to a looming apocalypse.

    Unfortunately, the first and major victims of an economy of disaffection are the multi-national underclass themselves. While those at the apex smile to the bank with their loot, the members of the underclass are sentenced to further immiseration and poverty by the economic meltdown.  Their small scale ancillary industry dies out as a result of lack of power and fuel and their patronage shrinks dramatically. When the smoke clears, more people would have been sentenced to the Nigerian underground. More nationals would have been downloaded into the peonage of perpetual poverty.

    This is the ticking time bomb that all the post-military administrations in Nigeria have been priming, and the consequences have now arrived with us in all its implacable fury.  Yet it is obvious that it cannot be confronted by mere palliatives. The roots of the disaffection have to be uncovered and tackled. This is why all the dodgy schemes accompanying the removal of petroleum subsidy in this country from so called Mass transit transportation, poverty alleviation schemes, Petroleum Tax Funds and SURE-P have come to naught.

    The time has now run out for these state-subsidized scams. We have been arguing for the past twenty five years that as long as there is a run on the naira through a burglarized treasury by corrupt and dissolute administrations coupled by the wild purloining of the national currency by economic brigands, a gap will always open up which gives the illusion of subsidizing.

    As long as a national product of Nigeria is being purchased by foreign currency earned from the same product, the illusion of subsidy will never go away. This economic psychosis is a function of the historic psychosis of the Nigerian ruling elite. It is not subsidy that should be removed, it is those who have brought Nigeria to a sorry pass that should be restrained or reined in by the iron laws of the state.

    It is not in the interest of those waging economic warfare against the fatherland through the economy of disaffection for a drastic solution to be found for the subsidy conundrum. They will fight tooth and nail. These are enemy nationals for whom the idea of the nation has not come. For them, Nigeria is and remains a no man’s land; a jungle of primitive and predatory extraction; a new Congo of combustible combos in which God marches with the quick and quick-witted.

    Mohammadu Buhari has his work cut out for him. This is where his authoritarian messianic populism will help. In his first coming as an economic nationalist, the former military ruler, proudly and stoutly rejected all blandishments from the western powers to devalue the naira. Some of the measures he introduced, particularly counter trade and stiff fiscal regulation, were dismissed by western interlocutors as signs of economic illiteracy. Yet they would have worked very well if Buhari had been allowed to stay the course.

    But the world has since moved on. The modern economy is no longer powered by natural resources but by ceaseless knowledge production.  Yet if the erosion and dilution of national boundaries premised on the rampaging forces of globalization has occurred at all, it is only in the peripheries of the global order.

    As a state, America remains bullish and bearish remorselessly powered by the messianic notion of American Exceptionalism. The Brits are chafing at the grinding homogenization of an abysmally incompetent EU while the Scots are bent on dismantling the entire union or its more egregious oversight function. Canada is moving in the direction of a multi-state nation. The reports about the death of the post-Westphalian state appear to be widely exaggerated. Let the premature obituarists take note.

    In the circumstances, it is said that you cannot step into the same river twice. But if Buhari was an economic nationalist in his first coming, he must become an economic hyper-nationalist in his second sojourn if he is to retain a minimal notion of Nigeria as a viable proposition. Buhari must look for a new set of indigenous economists to fashion out a new economic order for a dying nation. There are many quiet Nigerians doing a lot of good work in that intellectual domain.  The reliance on World Bank quacks mouthing shopworn shibboleths from the Chicago School has cost Nigeria very dearly in the past three decades.

    Buhari must be wary of the kind of “policy experts” he takes seriously. He must reflect deeply on the tragic career of President Olusegun Obasanjo who by early nature and instinct was an economic nationalist until he got swamped and stuck in the eddy of premature western adulation and metropolitan mendacity. Beyond the hidebound hallucinations of the intellectually challenged, some of these local “experts” have not done a day’s thorough reflection on the agonistic nature of modern economics and the plight of the Black people in the global order.

    But even at that, a new economic blueprint without a thoroughgoing reevaluation of the architecture of the post-colonial state cannot completely address the adversarial possibilities of the economy of disaffection in all its nation-threatening potential. It goes straight into the heart of the National Question itself.  If President Mohammadu Buhari is in any doubt, he needs to look no further than the parting shots of former President Goodluck Jonathan.

    In a widely quoted Parthian, Jonathan urged Buhari to extend any intended probe to past administrations and to adjudicate judiciously on the pattern and procedures of the allocation of oil wells since independence. This is as close to opening a Pandora Box as it can get. It is a very telling and revealing moment for the Robber-baron politics and economics of the Nigerian post-colonial state. While not denying culpability for mismanaging the Nigerian economy, Jonathan is saying that he is not the only culprit and should not be so treated.

    In that fleeting moment of radical epiphany, Jonathan disemboweled the post-colonial state in Nigeria and reveals a deep political animus powered by the economy of disaffection which is predicated on what a great contemporary sociologist has called a deliberate strategy of excluding the excluders. Plucked from a provincial backwater, the foaming Niger Delta creek claimed its own in the end.

    All those who recruited a man weighed down by such political neurosis and deep ancestral resentment as a blue-eyed boy and pawn of an unjust order might have supplied the burning pyres of their own political funeral. Indeed, if the linguistically challenged former president is not merely slandering himself and his government, it shows that he had merely played along in order to wreak further havoc on the social and national question.

    The Nigerian post-colonial state has become the political and economic pallbearer of the nation and only a drastic surgery can suffice at this point. While there is no doubt that President Mohammadu Buhari has the iron will and the adamantine integrity to handle economic saboteurs, going forward he will need exemplary political skills and superior savvy to handle the pathologies arising from the economy of disaffection and the poverty of our politics.

  • The light artist of Lalakukulala

    Darkness can be very enthralling and enticing. Despite the permanent darkness, despite the soot and grime and the noxious fumes from Third rate generators from Taiwan, Baba Lekki, the great sage, was in a gloriously upbeat mood. He had taken on a new role as a lightless artist which amounted to helping people manage the transition back to the tenth century and teaching them how to do without electricity. He had even formed a band that he called the Dark City Brothers. The huge queue suggested that he was not doing badly.

    As soon as I sat down, he burst into a famous Christian song of praise. Of course, it was a savage parody rendered with satanic glee.

    E se ibi tati bere, baba

    E se ibi te bawa de

    Adupe O Jesu ibi t’enko wa lo.

    Then it was time for business. An elegant woman speaking Queen’s English came forward. “Sir, there has been no light in my area for a month. The generator packed up five days ago. The food in the freezer is beginning to go bad”, she lamented.

    “Spread the food in front of the house in the night”, the guru urged.

    “What? What if rats and snakes eat the soup?” the woman asked in alarm.

    “Then you kill the rats and snakes and add them to the soup”, the sage replied poker-faced.

    “In the night?  What if I’m bitten by snakes?” the woman screamed.

    “Then you are added to the soup, period. O d’obe ni yen. Cobra no dey chop corn, na di thing we dey chop corn naim cobra dey chop” , the guru said and dismissed the woman.

    Then another woman stepped forward, rather gingerly having witnessed the previous encounter. “Oga no light no business oo”, she began on a plaintive note.

    “Which kind business you dey do?”, the great man asked.

    “I be ashewo for Agege”, she replied with a bashful smile.

    “Take your customers outside and get on with it”, the guru replied without looking up.

    “What?  Make dem comot dem blokos and fire me just like dat?” the woman shouted as she stormed off, “Oga, abi you no well?”

    But the most hilarious encounter was between the guru and a self-important man who arrived with a retinue of aides, red cap, feather fan and all what not.

    “Chief, kontri don pafuka, generator no dey work again, the meat dey smell, even the alligator my wife come bring from Abakaliki come dey rot well well for freezer”, he lamented with a hint of self-pity and self-indulgence.

    “Which technology came first, electricity or generator?” the guru asked calmly.

    “Which kind foolish question be dat one? Wetin concern dat kind grammar with dead meat?” the chief raved.

    “Answer my question”, the guru snapped.

    “ Biko, this one be real onyeosi ooo, real were man, anoya proper. I just come waste my time with this yeye ngbati crook”, the man fumed as he fled with his hangers-on cursing.