The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • After the biggest party

    After the biggest party

    (The rise and fall of the PDP)

    It was a messy and dismal end. There are some deaths that are dignified and ennobling in their calm fortitude and heroic defiance. But not this one. The PDP has died as it lived: beyond its means and probably beyond the means of the country as well. A presidential capitulation quickly snowballed into an anarchic retreat and a rout ending in an electoral massacre on the scale of a Homeric battlefield.

    We will be counting the principal political casualties for many years to come. State orphans abound. The sixty year Reich has become the sixteen year wreck. There are no mourners in this Sambisa forest of the quick and the wounded; only rotund vultures and pot-bellied hyenas having a field day. It is an Eliotsian wasteland, and April is the cruelest month.

    Not even the greatest political soothsayer could have foreseen this distressing disintegration and death of the greatest party in Africa. One of its shrewd and astute founding fathers, in a moment of embattled lucidity, had cautioned that this was not a political party but a rally. A rally is just a collection of different mobs on parade. If there is food, the mob will stay quiet. But if there is no food, the mob will quickly dissolve into its component units, all heading in different directions.

    After the greatest party comes the great hangover and headache. An army founded on the principles and ideology of loot can never survive the removal of its feeding bottle. The same fate also awaits any political party founded on such nefarious axioms. But we cannot afford to gloat too much on the horrid demise of the Nigerian behemoth. Like a festering corpse abandoned by even close relations, the PDP has become a national and public health hazard.

    The methods, means, principalities and instrumentalities by which this maladroit mammoth met its timely end will be studied and analyzed by students of politics in  multi-ethnic societies with self-cancelling pluralities of power fulcrums for years and generations to come. They are beyond the standard fares of conventional post-colonial Political Science. But it is also important for the Nigerian intelligentsia both at home and in the Diaspora to study and analyze what went wrong as a guide to the future in all its gripping immediacy. We are not out of the wood yet.

    In the long run, the PDP was a child and victim of the circumstances of its provenance and progeny. It was an army arrangement. It was never conceived as a genuine and organic political party or mass movement. You cannot give what you don’t have. The army does not do mass movements, except in battle formations. That is a contradiction in terms and offensively pejorative of its constituting ethos. The army thrives on hierarchy and rigid differentiation. All animals are not equal, and some are even more unequal than others. This is the pecking order of nature itself. Democracy is a product of human evolution away from the state of nature, but even then for democracy to thrive there are certain undemocratic institutions that must be permanently in place.

    Like its NPN forebear which met the same fate in a military putsch, the PDP was not conceived as a conventional political party, but as a gargantuan coalition of big people and power brokers whose influence and authority would be so all-encompassing as to guarantee national stability and ward off the centrifugal forces which have hobbled Nigeria since independence. In the event, the PDP was just a variation of an old theme by very much the same military aristocracy.

    On the face of it, it was a patriotic and nationalistic move. You cannot blame the military for being unable to envision a society beyond its own regimental and ideological purview. The Babangida political experimentation with a two-party system threw up a wildcat and a political maverick that could not be relied upon to guarantee military interests which under the long gestation of despotic rule had become national interests. In an attempt to forcibly liquidate the contrary forces, Abacha almost ended up liquidating the whole country.

    Under clever guidance and astute remote control, his successors were not about to make the same mistake. It is easy to forget that General Abubakar Abdulsalaam, in his first broadcast to the nation after General Sani Abacha’s demise, promised solemnly to see the Abacha transition programme to its speedy conclusion. But after being swiftly countermanded by those who put him there, a contrite general announced a new transition programme.

    But just as you cannot step into the same river twice, no two historical conjunctures can be completely alike whatever their outward similarities. 1998 was not 1993. If the military hierarchy had bothered to take a peep into the political horoscope, they would have noticed that population-wise, Nigeria was becoming a much younger country and the demographic condition was about to change forever. The relentless forces of globalization had led to a radical democratization of the means of violence as well as the methods of mass enlightenment.

    In the event, the logic that led the military to an Obasanjo also led to the eventual disintegration of the ruling party. Having exhausted its historical and political possibilities, the military hierarchy had to look for a safe pair of hands and a bluff retired general to cover its retreat to the barracks. The PDP opening convention was a classic case of a textbook military operation as the founding fathers of the party were muscled out by sheer military might. Obasanjo famously took his delegates to the convention in a sealed train and tellingly bivouacked outside the city.

    In the circumstances, the organic growth of party and the deepening of the democratic process were left in the hands of a man who by training and temperament is an authoritarian autocrat who had no truck with democratic niceties. When the retired general famously asked the Turaki of Adamawa whether he could obey simple instructions, many thought it was an eccentric joke. Atiku himself would later find out to his political peril that the Owu warlord meant every word.

    As for the deluded remaining founding fathers of the PDP, they soon found out that military khaki is not civilian brocade. As Obasanjo went for their political jugular, they began deserting the temple, one by one and two by two as the occasion demanded. The fiery autocrat next turned his caressing attention to the main opposition parties, engineering such momentous fissures that none of them survived the thunderous implosion.

    If the PDP ever had a soul it fled at the Jos convention. In other words, the party died in vitro. It was a mere vehicle for demilitarization which quickly transformed into a fascist terror machine for maintaining a hegemonic stranglehold on the nation. As Obasanjo has brilliantly demonstrated, it takes two to play at the fascist game of hegemonic domination. The same logic of the despotic suborning of a nation which made it possible for a military cabal to impose Obasanjo on the polity also made it possible for Obasanjo himself to impose two successors on the nation without heavens falling.

    The game could have gone on for quite some time, but for the dramatic intervention of hubris so overweening that it is beyond the ken of human comprehension. Yet it was a matter of time, with the PDP becoming a stalled behemoth unable to move itself or the country forward and with its monstrous proboscis sucking life out of the nation.

    But only the bold and deeply cunning can call to the bold and deeply cunning. It took an inchoate and incongruous alliance to have the measure of the PDP  in the remarkable political plot that brought the unflappable and wonderfully poker-faced Aminu Tambuwal to the speakership of the House of Representatives

    At  that point in time, political neophytes, particularly the traditional carrion feeders of the South West otherwise known as mainstreamers who did not know where the game was heading ,thought that the ACN had thrown away their pot of amala. But the PDP had been pole-axed and it was only a question of time before the mammoth would crash on the canvas with a resounding thud. As the end approached, even the wily patriarch openly tore his membership card.

    There are great lessons to be learnt from the rise and fall of a party that constituted itself into a nuisance and menace to the Nigerian polity. Despite the national euphoria that greeted the dethronement of the ruling party, the future is full of dark forebodings. Unfortunately if care is not taken, the same fate awaits the now dominant party. This is what should concern all patriotic Nigerians.

    As it was in the beginning, so it seems at the end of the beginning. Like the PDP, the APC remains an inchoate and incongruous alliance; a mere vehicle to capture power teeming with contrary characters and mutually contradictory elements all in a state of antagonistic but paradoxical complicity. In trying to outsmart and outwit the PDP, it has had to be like the PDP; or at best its veritable doppelganger. In other words, there is no qualitative difference or deep ideological divergence between the two parties.

    This is a veritable source of a coming anarchy. The ranking APC hierarchs must now find within themselves the deep reserves of strength and character to give the party a soul and a capacity for organic growth which will drive change and accelerated development for the country as a whole.

    Luckily, they don’t have to look very far for a driving template. The APC already has their two leading chieftains as shining exemplars of the power of a missionary envisioning of a new society. The APC should fuse the pragmatic Democratic Welfarism of a Bola Tinubu with the instinctive messianic populism of a Mohammadu Buhari to evolve a left of centre party whose developmental strides will resonate with Nigerians and the Black Race for generations to come. This is the only way to avoid the fate of the PDP.

  • Shifting cultivation among the Nigerian political class

    Oh boy, oh boy, Nigerian politicians are something else. Whilst we are still on the subject of the death and disintegration, has anybody noticed the epic migration going on among the Nigerian political class since the PDP gave up the ghost? We do not know whether this is an attempt to evade death duties or the fear of imminent hunger which has induced the disease known in Northern Nigeria as Sokugo or wandering psychosis among Nigeria’s dissolute and irresponsible political class.

    What we know is that since the death of the PDP was announced, there has been a Gadarene rush to jump ship or to flee the sinking hulk of the biggest party in Africa. Hordes of internally displaced political prostitutes, homeless ideological destitute, rank-shifted renegades, politically homeless vagrants and other hobos and yobos of reactionary politics have taken to the road to Bourdillon as if it is a new highway to Babylon. In Yoruba folk parlance, it is known as eni ori ba yo odile. (If you survive, we shall meet at home)

    Among these wastrel wayfarers is a notorious political scoundrel from the old Adamawa province who has betrayed just about anybody in contemporary Nigerian politics including the illustrious MKO even while mouthing meaningless Marxist mumbo-jumbo about pending and impending class conflagration. Another is a fugitive from American justice who seemed to be permanently encamped at the gate of the Lion of Bourdillon. Thrice he had attempted to gain forcible entry and thrice the fat fool has been driven away.

    Snooper has a political theory for these unprincipled gyrations and shameless gallivanting. It is taken from soil science. When native farmers exhaust the nutrients of a particular plot of land due to incessant and relentless cultivation, they simply abandon it and move on to the next plot of land until the entire farming space is crying for mercy. We are looking for a worthy son of the soil to marry soil science with political science in a compelling treatise on the habits and habitats of the Nigerian post-colonial political class.  So long then for shifting cultivation among contemporary Nigerian politicos.

  • Missing persons index: mum is the word from a mumu

    And whilst we are still on the subject of the hordes of displaced political refugees flocking the highway of politics, it is meet to file a missing person report from another department. It would seem that our man, the Kirikiri canal columnist, has committed hara-kiri. Snooper has been waiting in vain for his response to the electoral triumph of General Mohammadu Buhari, the man he claimed to be simply unelectable and Senator Bola Tinubu, the one he excoriated so callously and unremittingly.

    A dark cloud has since enveloped his even darker visage. While the dyspeptic diatribe lasted, it was a classic case of the column as unrelenting calumny and shameless hate sermons. Snooper was happy to watch from the sideline knowing that it will all end in a fiasco. Only in the annals of psychotics can a man who claims to be a pastor be so consumed by hatred and malice towards fellow mortals no matter the opposition to their politics and person.

    Yet a cursory glance at this mishmash of misanthropy reveals nothing but jejune emoting and the sophomoric canards of a mind so superficial, so incapable of analytic rigour, that a robust engagement is out of the question. You cannot argue with unarguable lunacy. For those who know their history, this is not the first time the fellow’s hate platform would collapse under the weight of its own troubled contradictions. The first time around, he disappeared for a long spell. Here is hoping that this time around, the spell will be much longer.

  • In remembrance of things to come

    In remembrance of things to come

    To flee your fate is to rush to find it, so observes a famous Arab proverb. It is just as well. Ethnic termites are crawling out of the woodwork in Nigeria.

    In the hostile psychological jungle of multi-ethnic nations, ethnic chauvinism is a psychic weapon against adversity. But since it stifles the inter-ethnic cooperation and collaboration necessary for envisioning a new order, it is also the surest formula for continuing underdevelopment.

    After the elections comes the demon of ethnic chauvinism and its implications for the national project. The euphoria of a record breaking election and its record breaking aftermath had hardly subsided when a nasty ghost stole in to jolt us out of our reverie, reminding us of unfinished business. These old ghosts can be very remorseless and implacable indeed.

    An apparently off the cuff remark by Oba Rilwan Akiolu, the influential and irrepressible Eleko himself, to a visiting group of Igbo notables has sparked off an ethnic firefight the like of which has not been seen in recent times.

    In a manner reminiscent of Lagos circa 1948 when the deadly duel for political ascendancy between the Yoruba coastal aristocracy and the emergent Igbo elite first reared its ugly head, the current elites of the two remarkable Nigerian ethnic nationalities both at home and in the Diaspora simply lined up behind tribal ensigns presaging the eruption of ancestral animosities.

    It was not a pretty sight. General Buhari has just been shown a sneak preview of the nation he has inherited. He has his work cut out for him.

    Yet by the end of the week, it has apparently turned out to be a storm in a tea cup, or a repression of the returning. Common sense and political sagacity intervened on both sides.

    The problem with ethnic chauvinism is that it is such a deep-seated and entrenched group feel that it cannot be resolved by political fiat but by social engineering and the working out of implacable national contradictions.

    Anybody of Yoruba extraction familiar with royal rhetorical flights of fancy, its metaphorical flourishes should be able to contextualize Oba Akiolu’s fire and brimstone fulminations in all their grim, terroristic hectoring as nothing but instances of royal yabis. How many military divisions does Kabiyesi have? When was the last time an Oba of Lagos herded human beings into the Lagos lagoon?

    All of this, of course, would amount to cold comfort to an Igbo native who is culturally alien to Oba Akiolu’s flamboyant signifiers and who is bound to grasp the import of the message in its hair raising, horror-dripping literalness. You cannot blame such folks. The Igbo community is right to express a legitimate outrage.

    But it would seem that some Igbo sectors in spite of their legitimate outrage crossed the boundary into churlishness and tribal contumely by demanding an apology from the Oba of Lagos.

    This is an illegitimate affront on the Yoruba race. A Yoruba Oba does not apologise to anybody. This is the whole meaning of Kabiyesi. (He who cannot be queried or questioned)

    It is, admittedly, a dialogue of the deaf. To a non-Yoruba person, this might sound like some meaningless cultural gobbledygook; a dogged mystification of a profoundly secular matter. It seems we are back to the very constitution and contradictions of the post-colonial subject in a modern nation-state.

    The secular and rational plank on which an apology is demanded from the Oba of Lagos is that Nigerian is a republican state and not a monarchy.

    Yoruba nationalists might retort that Nigeria may be a republican state but there are monarchical enclaves within the nation-space and there is nothing anybody can do about that.

    In pre-colonial society, the Oba had a fatherly responsibility to all subjects under his domain. Everybody was free to ply his trade, religion and creed but with the signal proviso that there must be substantial compliance with the cultural ethos and ethics of the host community in order to maintain societal harmony and cohesion.

    Whosoever steps out of line is immediately whipped back either by physical force or by metaphysical agencies and enforcers acting as ideological apparatchiks of the native state.

    Some traditional cultures take this to another level by summarily banishing prospective settlers to the outer margins beyond the city walls.

    In their culturally circumscribed imaginary, these are nothing but citadels of sin and permissiveness where they can indulge in what looks to the indigenes as cultural shenanigans as long as they do not disturb the walled sanity of their host community. If they do, the infraction is met with swift and severe reprisal that did not exclude mass expulsion.

    The advent of colonialism and the modern nation-state has whittled down the power, influence and authority of traditional institutions. In truth, no one who has tasted the liberating tonic of modernity would wish to return to the dark days of traditional despotism.

    Yet that notwithstanding, the Yoruba people and most Nigerian nationalities  retain a great respect and reverence for their traditional rulers.

    The unintended consequence of the sacrilegious insult to the Lagos throne is to rouse a dormant Lagosian Yoruba ultra-nationalism in a way it has not been roused since the late forties. It has led to a sense of a great siege among a normally tolerant and accommodating people.

    Apart from the long term possibilities of ethnic tension leading to an unimaginably apocalyptic tribal conflagration, snooper will eat his tongue if this does not increase the size of Akin Ambode’s winning margin this Saturday.

    In a multi-ethnic nation, tribal narcissism often provokes tribal narcissism as a countervailing, self-protecting measure. As it was the case in Georgian Lagos which directly led to the ascendancy of Obafemi Awolowo as an avatar of his people and in 1966 when it led to pogrom and a civil war, so it may well be in the emergent conjuncture. The past is a dark mirror for remembering the future.

    Yet all of this would have been unnecessary had the enlightened Igbo community put on their thinking cap, and if their political leadership can be more politically discerning and be less consumed by irrational hatred of the Other. The history of human migration and shifting demographic complexion of an improbable megalopolis favour them in the long run.

    In about a hundred years to come, the dynamics of a tumultuous mega-city would have altered the current demographic balance of power and the kind of meeting which took place last week at the Lagos palace would be virtually impossible.

    If the dynamic, resourceful, adventurous and relentlessly advancing Igbo people continue along the same pattern and the Yoruba populace, as a result of empire hangover, remain lethargic, incurious, insular and unadventurous, the pattern of ownership and land distribution would have changed forever and it will be a new ball game.

    But that is only if Nigeria remains a single country retaining its current format; that is only if unscrupulous greed and the penchant for political short-termism among the current dominant faction of the Igbo leadership do not topple the country into the abyss of chaos and disintegration. To whom much will be given, much is also expected. Otherwise by that time, we would be talking of stiff immigration control and tighter internal regulation of prospective emigrants.

    From time immemorial and particularly since the advent of the post-Wesphalian modern nation-state, ethno-nationalism and ethnic chauvinism have been the bane of the human society. The British often dismiss the French as frog-eaters while Napoleon famous put down of England as a nation of shopkeepers still rings a bell. The French contempt for what they consider as America’s lack of culture and finesse finds epic summation in the short pithy putdown: “Les Americaines!”

    The good thing about this European tribal fencing is that they take place within the confines of respected borders. The world would have ended a long time ago were the British, the Germans, the French and the Americans to be packed into the asphyxiating cage of the same nation. Even then beginning from 1870 when the Germans memorably drubbed the sophisticated French to 1914 when the First World War erupted with the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, western nations chalked up among themselves about thirty one wars of ethno-national supremacy.

    African , Middle East and Asian nationalities are not so lucky having been boxed into convenient colonial cages of apocalyptic contraries against their will and wish. This is not even a question of strong states and weak states. As we have seen in the tragedy of Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union, strong states which try to liquidate the national question by forcible suppression merely postpone the apocalyptic meltdown.

    It has been said that mankind is principally a political animal. But humankind is primarily a homo economicus with economic warfare often disguised as political hostilities. Nigerians should ask themselves why it is so that the most vicious and virulent strains of ethnic nationalism rear their head whenever there is an ongoing brutal contention about who controls what economy.

    This is precisely what happened around 1948 with the advent of Yoruba nationalism in the nascent nation, in 1962 with the attempted take over of the buoyant economy of the old west and the summary liquidation of Awolowo’s ambition, in 1993 with the dramatic annulment of Abiola’s victory because it was an economic threat to northern plutocratic generals, in 1999 with the rise of Obasanjo and Sharia as mere decoy and now in 2015 and the dramatic dethronement of the ruling party which has led the Igbo political elite holding the wrong end of the stick. It can now be seen in immediate retrospect that Oba Akiolu’s fatwa and the hysterical reaction to it is all part of a complex struggle for economic control of Lagos.

    Yet as we have noted, without inter-ethnic cooperation and collaboration, without the consent and consensus of a fractious political elite, Nigeria cannot be envisioned anew or be made amenable to radical surgery and major re-engineering necessary for the greater wellbeing of the greatest majority of Nigerians.

    As we have said last week, General Buhari has his work cut out for him. The task ahead requires not just a strong political will but exemplary political skills and great dexterity. He can no longer rule by military fiat and therefore a creative and proactive presidency is mandatory. As a first step, the general must take a look at the current structural configuration of the country which has made it impossible to liberate the complementary genius of our various people or for power to be wielded for productive purposes.

  • Okon to accompany Bode George to exile

    Okon to accompany Bode George to exile

    Over since retired Commodore Olabode George publicly declared that he would voluntarily head for exile if General Mohammadu Buhari won the presidential election, tongues have been wagging as to whether the old sailor would make good his threat, now that the no-nonsense general has been elected president.

    But it seems as if the man famously known as Lagos boy has been stalling and stonewalling about “checking out”, like the even more famous Andrew. Why should a sailor be afraid of the open seas?

    But it appears that the ever proactive Okon is having none of that nonsense. Okon is a traditional believer in the saying that a man’s word should be his bond and can be a very nasty enforcer indeed.

    The euphoria that greeted General Buhari’s victory had hardly died down when the mad boy crashed into snooper’s bedroom dressed like somebody headed for Siberia even as he carried a colourful basket oozing the aroma of akara, ewa aganyin, sawa and other Lagosian delicacies. A hungry snooper was more interested in the contents of the bag.

    “Okon , what is that bag?” a gamey snooper inquired with a cajoling voice.

    “Oga no be for you, na small chops for dem Lagos Boy Bode George”. Okon replied.

    “But why?” snooper asked with a hint of disappointment.

    “Oga abi you don forget say the man say him go vamoose if dem mala general come win? Naim I say make I come take permission follow am  make sure say him reach dem oyinbo obodo. If he no want go again, I go get dem Eyo boys for Isale Eko make dem flog am well well”, the mad boy screeched like a man possessed. At this point, snooper could hardly resist bursting into laughter. But Okon simply pressed on with the offensive.

    “Oga, no be joke at all at all. I dey hope say dem wuruwuru man no go say na Israel he wan go becos I no go take dat from am”, Okon screamed. Snooper was now alarmed.

    “And what is your problem with Israel?” snooper demanded.

    “Ha oga, no be dat place dem say when dem quench dem go wake after three days? We know dey dat kind army arrangement.” The mad boy snarled and then moved closer eyeing snooper with a knowing smile.

    “Oga, I hope say dem Lagos Boy go leave him beautiful wife behind for obodo”, Okon whispered with malignant mirth.

    “And what is your own with his wife?” snooper queried.

    “Ha  Oga, Okon dey Kampe. Like dem juju man for Uyo go say, a trial will conceive you!” At this point, snooper chased away the mad boy.

     

  • Happy birthday to Sir Olaniwun Ajayi

    And whilst we are still on the matter of coming and going, it is meet to celebrate one of the great titans of our time, Sir Olaniwun Ajayi, the urbane, courtly and supremely cultured Afenifere patriarch who recently turned ninety. There will be more on Papa Olaniwun in this column very shortly. Suffice it to say for now that in the course such a long life of productive service to the people, it is the cumulative heft of positive contribution that matters and not the odd strategic error or costly political misjudgement. God bless you sir, and keep the Isara pounded yam “piping hot.”

  • Closure, and a new beginning for Nigeria

    Closure, and a new beginning for Nigeria

    At a critical point during the Second World War, Winston Churchill, arguably the greatest Englishman of all time, told his embattled compatriots: It is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. It is the end of the beginning.”Last Sunday, as the results of the closest, truest and most modern presidential election in the history of Nigeria began to tumble in, a great blast of fresh air coursed through the entire length and breadth of Nigeria. History was being made before our very eyes.

    Throughout the preceding night even before the voting booths officially closed, bush exit polls had been predicting a landslide victory for the opposition candidate, General Mohammadu Buhari, the once and future ruler of Nigeria. To be alive at this very moment and in Nigeria is to witness the bounteous blessings of history. It has never felt better to be a Nigerian. God is probably a Nigerian. No other profligate country had been this promiscuously pampered by the forces of history; or has been this invested with such a legendary run of good luck.

    Lenin famously noted that while there are decades when nothing happens, there are weeks when decades happen. It has been such a week in Nigeria, when contradictions germinating and maturing for decades are suddenly resolved by the people themselves, opening the vista for fresh contradictions and conflicts.  Stuff happen all the time, as they say in America. It is not historical contradictions and political conflicts that we must fear, it is the lack of will to resolve them.

    Yet when all is said, it has been a close run thing. Nigeria loves to live permanently at the edge of the abyss of chaos and anarchy. And just when it is about to tip and topple over, common sense intervenes until common sense becomes uncommon and senseless all over again. The political class, a grand oxymoron by Nigerian standards, begin to work their wonder again and an edgy nation is returned to the edge. The journey of the national and international magi commences all over again.

    It is not entirely surprising then that by last Monday, the great surge of fresh air had been superseded by an eerie and edgy calm. There was a razor-edged tension in the air. People began deserting the streets in droves. Rumours circulated of an imminent truncation of the electoral process reminiscent of the June 12 1993 abridgement of the will of the Nigerian electorate. There was a sense of déjà vu in the air. We have been through this pass before.

    The silence from Aso Rock, Nigeria’s seat of power, was as profoundly eloquent as it was profoundly disturbing and unsettling. Something nasty was definitely going on. Perhaps there was an attempt to circle the wagons in one final last ditch standoff to retain power that has been so flagrantly thrown away. Then the international community rumbled, noting ominously their displeasure about attempts to prevent the will of the Nigerian people from prevailing and hinting darkly about the dire consequences of any attempt to terminate the electoral process.

    Tuesday stole in and by then it was already too late. The democratic genie and the spirit of a new Nigeria powered by the sovereign will of the electorate had already been let out of the bottle. You cannot abort a flight already on cruise speed, or as Abiola, an earlier martyr of electoral shenanigans would put it, you cannot terminate a full pregnancy. In this respect, Godsday Orubebe’s temperamental buffoonery and well-rehearsed ploy to disrupt proceedings amounted to nothing but the last sigh of political swamp dwellers.

    After that, a powerful ray of light began forcing its way through the dark clouds that had enveloped the nation. The gale of fresh air returned. Optimism filled the air again. By that time, the tallying of votes had reached such a state that any rational person must conclude that there could be no come back in this one for even the greatest comeback kid, shoes or no shoes.

    By then sheer electrifying drama and typically Nigerian political magic took over. The streets which had dramatically emptied in anticipation of millennial mayhem began filling once again miraculously. The scent of victory was in the air, and the people could smell and sniff its sweet perfumed fragrance. Yet there was still an underlying tension.

    Then at about twenty minutes after 5pm, the television screen began flashing what is perhaps the greatest news and miracle of the Fourth Republic. At first, it looked like a great hoax. It was too good to be true. In a dramatic intervention of lucidity and enlightened self-interest, Goodluck Jonathan dismounted the high horse of power and shamed the hawks that had held him hostage by conceding victory to General Mohammadu Buhari.

    The entire country minus one or two sections erupted in wild jubilation. Car horns honked with manic rapture. It was a great moment to be a Nigerian. Yours sincerely joined in the wild celebrations and it was a bleary-eyed columnist that crawled into bed on Friday morning. Once again, Nigerian has been granted a dramatic reprieve from the hangman’s noose.

    Whatever his legendary foibles and defects of character, Goodluck Jonathan has redeemed himself by showing character and a great sense of an ending when it mattered most. Many commentators have called this his finest hour, and we are not about to take this away from him. It surely takes an uncommon nobility of spirit to withstand the temptations to plunge your country into anarchy and chaos for the sake of personal ambition. Alas, had Jonathan demonstrated this steeliness of character and patriotism much earlier, the course of Nigeria’s history and his own public record might have been the better for it.  The rest is for historians.

    By this victory, General Mohammadu Buhari has made history, with echoes of old Abe Lincoln, a fabled serial loser who became a sure winner by sheer force of personality. But history is also a remorseless and implacable continuum. The Lincolnian mystique is made of legendary sternness, backbreaking personal discipline, forthrightness and steeliness of character leavened by compassion, kindness and a sense of justice and fair play. Historical greatness and this Lincolnian ideal of immaculate statesmanship are waiting for the Nigerian general.

    When Buhari survived a mysterious assassination attempt sometime ago, this column noted that he was on the cusp of history. That prediction has now been fulfilled, despite the aspersions cast on the column by some primitive tribesmen who have refused to be fully socialized; who confuse bovine rudeness and incivility with sociological emancipation.  The Buhari ascendancy represents a divine closure and a miraculous new beginning for Nigeria.

    General Mohammadu Buhari is the last born of his mother after a long string of children from a successful womb and was adoringly referred to as “Auta” or last born by his beloved mother. In Hausa culture, the last child of a mother in advanced years is known as “Auta”. It is a profound metaphor for gynecological closure. Abidakun, the Yoruba call it. In the astral political circuits in which Nigeria is currently orbiting, Buhari represents closure as well as the possibility of a new beginning.

    It seems strange and confounding that history can appear so seamless in its impossible symmetry. Thirty two years after forcibly terminating a manifestly corrupt and dissolute civilian dispensation, General Buhari has returned as the democratically elected president of Nigeria. As it was thirty one years ago, so it is if not worse for Nigeria.  In the interim, military messianism has collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions.

    And you cannot step into the same river twice. Thirty one years ago, Buhari rode into town in a military tank. This time around he is coming on foot. The proverbial soldier on horseback has now been replaced by a civilian waving a broom. It is a poor talisman for a nation in acute distress. General Buhari inherits a country polarized and badly divided along ethnic, religious and regional fault lines. A vicious insurgency has completely devastated the north eastern fringes of the nation. To compound matters, the economy has virtually collapsed and the treasury badly burglarized.

    Thirty one years ago, General Buhari and his military colleagues thought they were on a rescue operation. This time around with a motley crowd of ill-assorted politicians, the retired general is on a salvage mission. No Nigerian leader has been saddled with a heavier burden and responsibility amidst great expectations. If the euphoria that greeted his victory is anything to go by, the nation may soon find itself engulfed in a crisis of expectations.

    The pains are real and throbbing. Virtually all the federating sections of the country are hurting and complaining about their lot in the forced union of disparate nationalities. Every significant segment of the nation has had its comeuppance. There are those who are still suffering from the trauma of the civil war.

    There are those who believe that Nigeria owes them a decent rehabilitation and succour having devastated their homestead while prospecting for oil. There are those teeming northern masses who are victims of a pernicious social system of exclusion and enslavement. In anger and disillusionment, many of them have taken up arms against the fatherland. The Yoruba people tend to rue the loss of their destiny.

    This is a situation of dire emergency. President Buhari must learn how to think out of the box of normal amelioration and conventional development. He should come up with a Bureau of Higher Culture and National Integration. Officials of this agency acting in concert with economic experts must come up with an organogram for the vertical and horizontal integration of our people, taking into consideration the cultural uniqueness of the constituting units.

    A vertical integration will involve nothing less than the equivalent of a Marshall Plan for the north of the country and a National Recovery Economic Blueprint for the whole of the country which will accelerate economic growth without encouraging corruption and criminality. In the circumstances that we have found ourselves, it is impossible to achieve a horizontal integration without taking a look at the structural configuration which has turned Nigeria into a warring camp of enemy nationalities.

    One thing General Buhari had going for him in his first coming was a burning nationalism and a sense of duty and responsibility, Thirty years after being ousted, there is nothing to suggest that Buhari’s passion for his country has in any way diminished. As his opening speech clearly and touchingly demonstrates, these are redemptive resources for a new beginning for the nation.

    As we have noted, General Buhari’s renewed ascendancy represents a powerfully symbolic closure for the Nigerian nation and the possibility of a new beginning. In human history, it is rare to have a person come back to power twice and after a thirty year interval. But given the provenance of the party, the circumstances of its formation and the specificity of its insertion into the political process, it may amount to asking for too much to expect a radical rupture with the past.

    No government can solve all the problems or meet all the aspirations of the people. If only General Buhari can set the nation on the path of righteousness and rectitude despite the entrenched forces and vested principalities of reaction even in his own party who will try to take him hostage, he would have met his historic obligations. This is the meaning of closure and a new beginning.

    As MD Yusuf departs…..

    Snooper mourns the death this past week of a senior friend of columnist, avid reader of column, occasional intellectual sparring partner, Katsina nobleman, former Inspector General of the Nigerian police, iconic spook and constant northern star, Mohammadu Dikko Yusuf aka “MD”. Oh papa, why now? Why not tarry awhile to witness Nigeria on the cusp of momentous changes?

    The last time snooper met the great man at the precincts of the Eko Suites in Lagos, he was battling age related infirmities: limping and horribly hobbled. It was a painful sight. But MD remained as cheerful and witty as ever, casting sublime jokes about the state of the nation. There was always something about this illustrious scion of the Katsina Fulani aristocracy which reminded one of the saying that nobility must have its obligation.

    A refined and supremely cultured man of great kindness and courtesy, MD was one of the most remarkable and accomplished Nigerians of the post-independence epoch, rising from the relative obscurity of the Northern Nigerian bureaucracy to national superstardom as the Inspector General of the police. Northern Nigeria has never produced a more cerebral cop.

    Despite his princely antecedents, MD in his youth was a flaming radical and supporter of the Socialist principle of human development, just like his cousin, the late Usman Bala Yusuf and his distant kinsman Umaru Yar’Adua.  Kai, there was always something about these katakata Katsinawa. What if Ekaterinburg had come to Katsina? It was a contradiction which once prompted snooper to dismiss the old man as a purveyor of polo socialism.

    A man with the memory of classic undercover agent, MD quietly and with avuncular bonhomie reminded snooper of this impudent infraction after yours sincerely had delivered the eighty fifth anniversary lecture of the Yoruba Tennis Club on September 11, 2001. Needless to add that MD was the only civilian with the balls to squarely confront General Abacha in the darkest hour of military despotism. It was so surreally foolhardy that many thought it was a hoax. But it seems that even a mad dog must recognize a raging furnace.

    MD was so humble and unassuming that as Inspector general, he was once arrested for wandering while taking a leisurely evening stroll around Ikoyi by an impudent cop and was taken to a station in Obalende. For a moment, the presiding officer was too consumed by self-importance to look up. When he finally did, he jumped up in frozen and derelict attention.

    “HAIGEEEE”, he moaned. The rogue cop sensing that his evening meal was a coiled cobra threw his gun away and crashed through the window. Almost forty years after, they are still waiting for him to come and collect his police pension. May the noble spirit of MD rest in peace.

  • A deadline and a dateline

    A deadline and a dateline

    (Why the cock will still crow at dawn)

    As a people, Nigerians are confronted with an impossible deadline and a deadly dateline. For many local observers and foreign pundits, 2015 is the crunch year for Nigeria. There is a cruel convergence of certitude about it all. The Americans are even rumoured to have produced the equivalent of a manual of political euthanasia for a terminally ailing country. 2015 is seen as the year when Nigeria will finally unravel and go into deserved oblivion, or miraculously survive and be on its way to genuine nationhood.

    After four years of what many consider as the most callous, unresponsive and irresponsible government that has ever been witnessed in the history of this country, Nigerians are waiting this morning to see whether their punishment has been further extended or whether the nation has been granted a dramatic reprieve from perdition. This is the moment of truth when all self-protecting illusions are torn to shreds.

    An eerie calm has descended on the land as Nigerians await the outcome of the most keenly contested and by far the most “modern” elections in the history of the nation. No matter what happens in the next few hours or days, whether it is an engineered stalemate, an outright victory for the contradictory forces of rational modernity or the final proof that it is impossible for Nigeria to transit to modernity in its current structural iron jacket, it is clear that the nation can never be the same again.

    No matter how much longer it takes to terminate and how many more of our dead compatriots we are forced to bury, the Jonathan presidency is a historic terminus for Nigeria. A terminus is the end of a journey. But it is also the beginning of another journey. As a nation, we have been taught a memorable lesson. Goodluck Jonathan has shown what happens when a nation allows the quest for political justice to override the question of social equity.

    Four years earlier in an attempt to right the historical and political injustice visited on minorities, particularly Southern minorities in the nation, Nigerians voted overwhelmingly for Goodluck Jonathan, an ethnic Ijaw from the provincial backwater of Bayelsa state without any sterling antecedents of public service. By so doing, the nation and its power barons deliberately ignored the competing claim for social justice represented by the lean spare frame of the pious and astringently ascetic retired general, Mohammadu Buhari.

    Unfortunately after four years of incredible misrule which can only be described as organised banditry elevated to statecraft, Jonathan has left the country in a substantially worse shape. Nigerians have never been more bitterly polarised and divided along ethnic, religious and regional fault lines. The quest for social justice has been compounded and exacerbated by Jonathan’s ethical obtuseness and penchant for daring impunity. Nigeria has been dragged into the cesspool of state delinquency. In short, the national and social questions have worsened.

    But not even the most horrendous social experience is without its political value. If General Abacha exhausted the political and historical possibilities of military rule based on regional, religious and ethnic arrogance, the Jonathan ascendancy has sealed the possibility of democratic rule in Nigeria based solely and exclusively on minority rights and sympathy for the excluded. Henceforth, and that is if Nigeria survives this modernization of its political ethics and ethos, every one will have to swim or sink based on their individual record and not on the plight of tribe.

    After all allowances have been made, there is a sense then in which it can be claimed,  the ugly campaigns and hate sermons notwithstanding, that this election represents a victory for the Nigerian people and the Nigerian electorate. In the past years and decades, apart from periods of outright military despotism, the Nigerian electorate have struggled to reassert their sovereignty and the supremacy of the voters despite unrelenting attempts to obliterate and even abolish them by the Nigerian ruling cartel.

    In the past eight years, beginning with President Umaru Yar’Adua’s admission that the election that brought him to power was gravely flawed, the Nigerian electorate has been involved in a deadly duel with the ruling elite. The Uwais Panel Report represents a major watershed in the struggle for participatory democracy in Nigeria. Realising that it had procured for itself a throne of bayonets, the government quickly dumped its cardinal recommendations.

    The niggardly concessions have been wrested at considerable cost to the nation and the people. It is not because the Nigerian ruling class wants and wills electoral reforms. It has been wrought against their will and wits. In the history of the modern world, no authoritarian cabal has ever been willing to free a nation from electoral slavery. But then no maxim or gun or canon has been made by mankind that can silence the voice of the people when they are ready and when it booms collectively.

    It should be noted by those who are sold on ugly ethnic typologies and religious slurs that the current battle for electoral modernity is led by a scion of the old northern feudal oligarchy. Attahiru Jega, up till this moment, has withstood all the attempts to smear his reputation and drag his name in the mud by the agents of a government proclaiming transformation as its national mantra. Some transformation indeed. The situation speaks to the paradoxes of history and the contradictory nature of actual class formations.

    It has been noted that with the seeming inevitability of globalizing capitalism, every sane human society must negotiate its terms of entry and the conditions best suited to its people. The irony of it all may well be that this is what the socialist phase of development has done for China, Cuba, Vietnam and to a lesser extent Russia. From an opposing and contradictory paradigm of human development, this is what the recently departed Lee Kuan Yew has negotiated for the Singaporean nation.

    By deliberately bequeathing power to a reactionary clique, the colonial conquerors of Nigeria made sure that we entered the struggle with modernity holding the short end of the stick of progress. It was not their fault. There was nothing in Lord Lugard’s vitae to suggest that he was trained or had been made to acquire the skills of nation-building. Lugard was a master of the colonial suppression of agitated natives. Nigeria was not conceived as a nation but as a colonial plantation for the expropriation of indigenous natural resources. It is easy for a colonial plantation to become a Banana Republic.

    In the event, it has proved virtually impossible for Nigeria to produce a world-historical leader to lead its people out of the dungeon of colonial retardation to genuine modern nationhood. Anytime a leader emerges who shows the promise and the possibilities, he is immediately hammered into position by hostile forces already primed for reaction. Yet there is enough architecture in the ruins to show what Nigeria can be once it gets its act together.

    The miracle of it all is not that Nigeria has survived but that it continues to survive despite the disabling circumstances of its provenance and the damndest efforts of its own leading citizens. There must be something about this huge block arbitrarily hewn out of the heart of a benighted continent that has refused to accept its sorry destiny.

    Some observers have pointed out the ironic self-subversion of the colonial imaginary which believes it can create such a rich and impossibly gifted country, the greatest conglomeration of black souls ever, only for it to disappear without any trace, once the original charter of colonial exploitation has expired. It is as if the spirit of Nigeria is insisting that it will not disappear until it has fulfilled its destiny and obligation to Africa in particular and the Black race in general.

    That obligation has been long in coming. In the meantime, Nigeria has tested the patience and endurance of just about everybody. The colonial masters hurriedly abandoned Nigeria to its fate after it became clear that the colonial plantation cannot be sustained without its own interior managers.

    But as the title suggests, interior managers are not visionary administrators but feisty and ferocious bookkeepers interested only in the balance sheet of expropriation. In the absence of a modernising elite and of a visionary master template to frogmarch the nation to compulsory and competitive modernity, Nigeria will continue to flap and flounder about like a beached whale. Like an elephant and the proverbial battery of blind men, everybody will continue to point at different parts of the mammoth as the real thing.

    In retrospect, it can now be seen that what has been going on in the geo-political space named as Nigeria is a struggle for modernity stretching back over two hundred years to the 1804 Jihad of Usman Dan Fodio, the itinerant preacher and gifted Islamic scholar. Affronted by the hedonism and heathenism of the brand of Islam practised in the north of the country, the radical preacher forcibly imposed a process of purification from within. But in a sublime piece of historical irony, the Dan Fodio revolution merely deepened the mode and relations of feudal production in the north, leading to classical feudalism in its area of authority.

    And there have been many other modernizing wannabes too, with many perishing in the process. From the Five majors who were sworn on ridding the system of ten-per-centers, Major Orkar and colleagues who were bent on a forcible and arbitrary restructuring of the nation, Chief Awolowo who arguably held the most visionary roadmap, and a line stretching all the way back to Sheikh Alimi, the much maligned Afonja and of course the “Victorian” Lagosians who tried to impose classical western values on the new nation, it will be discovered that Nigeria has never been short of transformers.

    In the next few hours or days, we are about to find out whether that critical mass and a truly modernizing elite has really arrived or whether we have to tarry awhile. No matter what, the cock will still crow at dawn, but something tells snooper that after this election, Nigeria will never be the same again.

  • A day in Ibadan

    A day in Ibadan

    This last Thursday, a historic gathering of Yoruba leaders took place in the iconic parliamentary hall of the old Western Region.  Summoned by the much respected and admired General Ipoola Alani Akinrinade, it brought out the very best and the brightest of the race. It has been said that the Yoruba people are always at their best when under grave political pressure. This meeting did not disappoint.

    The cream of Yoruba intelligentsia, traditional leaders of thought, business barons, traditional rulers, technocrats, religious leaders, our consanguineous relations from the South South and battle tested representatives of the dominant political tendency gathered to chart a way forward for the region in the turbulent and tumultuous waters of contemporary Nigerian politics. Snooper was there.

    In an important sense, the Ibadan summit was something of a watershed in the post-independence politics of the Yoruba people. It marked the formal end of hegemony of a certain kind of Yoruba leadership and the ascent to full dominance of another. There was a certain political élan and briskness of purpose in the air. Although regicide was in the air, there was not a word about the old political royals. The Yoruba, like all people of empire, can be very clever, classy and circuitous when dethroning their own kings.

    The choice of venue could not have been more apt. It was an act of political wizardry, worthy of the greatest Yoruba political cognoscenti. Abiola Ajimobi, the urbane and witty host governor, was at his best as a discerning aficionado of the history of theYoruba race and his Ibadan people. Rauf Aregbesola, the politically focused governor of Osun state, electrified the audience with his grim agitprop. When Yemi Osinbajo made his late entry as if on cue, the entire hall erupted in wild jubilation. It was clear by then where the dominant spirit of the Yoruba resides.

    It was in this storied building that the Yoruba people were first forcibly dispersed in post-independence Nigeria in a federally engineered disruption whose echoes reverberate up till this moment. Agents of the federal government acting in concert with political renegades and internally disaffected members of the ruling party conspired to unleash a memorable mayhem on the most sacred sanctuary of democratic governance.

    Before that historic rupture, the Action Group led government had taken a clear lead in the political, economic, educational and social fields of the nation. Such were the radically humane policies, the revolutionarily innovative programmes, that in five years of the Great Leap Forward, the Action Group had completely transformed the Yoruba society in a way that could not have been imagined.

    In one generation, the Yoruba people moved from the farm to the factory. Even our traditional western traducers were impressed. Television came to Western Nigeria before some backward and backwater European communities. It was too good to be true. But while our former colonial patrons nodded in admiration, other sectional Nigerian leaders also noted in affronted envy and cynical malice. For them, it became a question of the west and the rest of us.

    Fifty three years after that historical dispersal, the nuclear fallout is still very much with us. It fed directly into the disputed and violence-suffused federal elections of 1964, the first coup, pogrom, the civil war and decades of untrammelled military despotism. It has also led to the political and economic retardation of the country on an industrial scale. As it was in the beginning, so it is at this end of the beginning; a conjuncture brimming with ruinous possibilities and fearsome portents.

    Once again, the Yoruba society has been turned into a theatre of war and political hostilities with the barely literate trying to lord it over the vastly literate. Only in Yorubaland is this kind of “America wonder” possible. Those who are incapable of learning have taken to teaching, as Oscar Wilde would famously put it. In times of strife and stress and of a bitterly polarized political elite, the Yoruba political mob have always tried to seize control, as this column once warned. Have guns and cutlasses and the elite will travel out.

    The consequences of this unending political gridlock are too horrendous to contemplate. In the course of time, the Yoruba nation and people have lost many of their illustrious scions and icons. From MKO Abiola who won a federal election only to be brutally murdered in incarceration, Architect Layi Balogun, another presidential aspirant, who died in cloudy circumstances, to James Ajibola Idowu Ige who was murdered in his bedroom.

    Neither our women nor illustrious military scions have been spared. Kudirat Abiola was brutally gunned down in broad daylight. Mama Bisoye Tejuoso, a self-made billionaire and Iyalode Egba, and Suliat Adedeji were subject to unimaginable ritual torture before being callously dispatched.

    Francis Adekunle Fajuyi who was despised and constantly dismissed as an Action Grouper by his Commander in Chief was killed while protesting the abduction of the same boss while Victor Anuoluwapo Banjo, a literary genius going by the power and potency of his letters, was finally silenced after several Biafran volleys had been emptied into him. “I am not dead yet”, Banjo continued to moan in heroic defiance of inevitable fate.

    The question to ask and which was not addressed by the Ibadan summit is why the Yoruba elite have been such agreeable grist to the federal crushing mill. Morbid fear, hatred and envy we can understand as the inevitable pathologies of boxing people in different stages of spiritual, intellectual, political and economic development into a colonial cage of contraries. But the question we need to ask is why succeeding federal government, irrespective of its core ethnic affiliation, have always found it convenient to turn the Yoruba nation into a theatre of war.

    It is not a question of pride or ethnic chauvinism, but as a result of their history and developmental trajectory, the Yoruba have come to accept certain minimum standards and bar of governance which they are not prepared to lower not even for any of their own wayward children. As this column noted a few weeks ago, it is a question of post-colonial political habitus. In the post-colonial colonium, all the nationalities retain their pre-colonial vibrancy and sense of identity. Here, the group-think and group-feeling are so strong that you do not need to meet at midnight to come to a consensus about what is best for your ethnic group.

    The consensus emerges from the blues so to say and there is no political magic about it. It inheres in the subliminal subconscious of the people or what is known as the political unconscious. For example, nobody has begrudged Professor Ben Nwabueze when he noted that it was in the best political and economic interest of the Igbo people to vote for Goodluck Jonathan.

    That was before the great constitutional lawyer began flying the famous Government of Unity kite. Intuitively, the Ijaw people also know who to vote for without being railroaded. Wise leaders know how to tap into the dominant mood and the political unconscious of their people. When they try to alter the dynamics without any corresponding historic shift in the mood of the people, they become political fools who are out of touch with the political habitus of their own people.

    To repeat, the bane of modern post-colonial Nigeria is the fundamental incompatibility of habitus of its diverse people which has made it impossible for it to evolve into an organic nation. An organic nation is a cohesive community of shared values, ideals and aspirations. In the absence of an overriding national veto and ethos which can homogenize the diverse values of the diverse constituents, a restructuring of the huge amalgam of a nation into properly federating units is imperative. This is why after independence, the Yoruba people and their allies have been at the forefront of the struggle for genuine federalism.

    Going forward, it will take an exceptional historical figure to override the veto of habitus by appealing to the best national instincts of the diverse people of Nigeria. This cannot be done by a leader who out of spite and contempt marginalizes a whole hegemonic bloc or who out of fear puts a vital region under military siege just to secure electoral advantage.

    The Ibadan summit has gone a long way in distilling the contemporary political essence of the Yoruba people. As speaker after speaker, particularly those who were delegates to Jonathan’s confab, mounted the rostrum to denounce the confab in its entirety, it became very obvious that the main plank on which Jonathan seeks electoral reprieve in the old west has collapsed under the weight of its own inner contradictions. So also has the last shred of credibility of those who have been clinging to the sham confab as their political talisman.

    In the flux and fluidity of post-colonial politics, it is not the betrayal of known enemies that hurts but the perfidy of known colleagues and former comrades in arms. In the past fifty three years in Yoruba land beginning with the decimation of the Action Group, going on to the struggle for the de-annulment of the June 12 presidential election and now the malignant presidency of Goodluck Jonathan, the fiercest battles in Yoruba land have always been between progressives and former progressives.

    It may well be that these external battles are a reflection of the internal battles within the Yoruba soul itself, torn in traumatic ambivalence between a radically heady engagement with an unknown and scary future and a rearguard conservative action to preserve the gains of the immediate past. Without the colonial incursion, it is arguable that the Yoruba nation might have figured out its own engagement with modernity on its own terms and in its own right and with the flair for the dramatic peculiar to the race.

    But there is no need crying over split milk. In the post-colonial hell that we have found ourselves, no Nigerian nationality or constituting units is exempt from the millennial horrors. The first step out of the debilitating debris and chaotic ruins is to see off the Jonathan calamity which is the regnant manifestation of a neo-military fascist machine gone haywire. It is only after this that we must all sit down to figure out what to do with a nation in permanent deferral and denial.

    The beauty of the historic summit in Ibadan is that it is neither a vote against particular individuals nor a vote for particular individuals. It is a guarded endorsement of the future with all its scary shortcomings and shenanigans and of all the people who valiantly struggle for a seismic shift in Nigerian politics, personal foibles notwithstanding. A nation is a permanent work in progress and process and we cannot be slaves to the past. The problem is not in failing and falling but in falling and failing to get up. This is what we must keep in mind as the Nigerian ship of state once again trawls uncharted waters. It has been a historic day in Ibadan.

     

  • How to remove jigger

    (Baba Lekki solves a political riddle for the nation)

    A few days after Okon made irreverent and saucy remarks about some Yoruba obas collecting dollars, particularly about a dullard and his dollars being easily parted, Yoruba nemesis caught up with the mad boy. In horrible and excruciating pains, the crazy boy had limped into Baba Lekki’s presence in his new found hideout under the bridge that separates the two Omole housing estates in full view of a police patrol unit. As usual, the old curmudgeon was enveloped in a thick pall of smoke from prohibited weeds and was having a hell of a time so to say eyeing the police people with sublime contempt.

    “Baba, you still dey smoke dis yeye tin when Okon wan die? Dem ogbologbo Yoruba oba don curse Okon. I no fit sleep for night again. I get dis yeye tin for my left toe which dem Yoruba dey call jega. De thin wan call kill me. For night him dey crawl gbigigbigi and him dey cry for food. He be like if say he wan chop Okon finis sef. I go see one yeye Yoruba herbalist for Gbagada and him say make I dey rub dem thin dey call aboniki. Naim I come beat dat one silly. Him come dey cry say him be tailor for Majidun” the mad boy moaned in considerable distress.

    “Okon, you are a fool. You have what is known as jigger,”  Baba Lekki crowed with considerable relish at the boy’s discomfiture as he eyed the boy’s distended toe.

    “Baba, weda na jiga or jega, I no sabi dat one, na dem foolish Yoruba witches sabi. Baba so how I go remove dis yeye tin?” Okon groaned.

    “You send it on terminal leave prior to full retirement. That way the pains will subside and so will the polls”, Baba Lekki interjected with icy and magisterial malice as his lips parted into a sadistic grin.

    “Baba let we tell you. I no dey care about dem gbarogudu grammar. I dey pains. He be like if say dem dey put sewing machine inside my head”, the crazy boy yelled at the old man, a tad threateningly.

    “Okay, okay Okon, to remove jigger please remove your dirty trousers and cut off your leg from the hip with a cutlass”, Baba Lekki intoned with a mischievous twinkle.

    “Baba, no be say Oko kaput be dat?” Okon queried with a rueful look.

    “Ha, if you no sabi how to remove Jega you must sabi how to cut your leg”, Baba Lekki rumbled with malignant mirth. At this point, there was a loud explosion and some shouting in the distance.

    “Baba, he be like if say dem OPC people don dey come. I been dey hear say dem Jonathan come give dem plenty cutlass and obonge gun and boku coffins. As dem kill dem Yoruba people make dem dey put dem for inside coffins”.

    “Kai, kai I no wan enter dem coffin. Dem carpenter boy dem dey call Gani no sabi make better coffin again. Him don chop dodo and obokun fish and him head no correct again”, Baba Lekki shouted and scampered away, leaving Okon stranded with his jigger.