By Olakunle Abimbola

On former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s kiss, let Peter Obi and Obidients enjoy their democratic swoon.  Soon, they would know it was all over a dud cheque.

Whatever happened to African Democratic Congress (ADC), Obasanjo’s “third force” of 2019?  

The last time one checked, wasn’t ADC busy sacking its presidential candidate?  Or the courts sacking the national executive that purportedly sacked the candidate, in a live political echo of that hilarious TV comedy, Fuji House of Commotion?

Or, to the fib he sold Atiku Abubakar (after Obasanjo junked ADC, in that same 2019) — Obasanjo, with fellow busy-bodies, temporal and spiritual: Chief Ayo Adebanjo, Catholic Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah, Winners Bishop, David Oyedepo and Muslim cleric, Sheik Abubakar Gumi?  

Were they not all crushing losers, reflective of Jamaican Reggae great, Jimmy Cliff’s great hit: “The bigger they come, the harder they fall?”

Atiku!  Peripatetic as ever: is he not still howling from the wilderness, trying to lead a broken PDP — the same PDP he and Obasanjo wrecked, pushing personal glory over service to country, in their blighted presidency, from 1999 to 2007?

This year, as per his wont these past three electoral cycles starting 2015, the flighty, restless Obasanjo has moved on to Obi, his freshest mischief to scam the gullible. 

Poor Obi!  He is nothing but the latest faggot to keep aglow a flickering Obasanjo public flame, fated to extinction, anyway, even as the good Lord keeps the Ebora very much alive!

If Obi and co doubt, they should “go verify!” — incidentally Obidients’ strident whoop, to spur St. Peter’s fantastic stats, in their halcyon days of social media roar, when, in Achebe-speak, they danced selves lame before the real dance began!  Now, the cold ash of reality is setting in!

Still, in a way, Obasanjo, Obi and Labour Party (LP) deserve one another — Obasanjo: vacuous doctrinaire; Obi: rattler of fake China stats; LP: opportunistic shell, ever whoring with the highest bidder, among the politically displaced and desperate!  

What a breed!  What a brood!

The great Awo — Chief Obafemi Awolowo of glorious memory — once let go a quip: only the deep can call to the deep.

But for Obasanjo and Obi, it’s the flip: only the vacuous could call to the empty.  So, let both serenade and venerate each other in mutual vacuity!  As for LP, it will yet bob up in 2027 for yet another highest bidder!

Still, much as Obasanjo postures and Obi floats and faints over a mirage, the so-called endorsement is not about Obi.  

It’s all about a restive Obasanjo drawing attention to himself — his notorious pastime.  

Still, in President Muhammadu Buhari and Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, the Obasanjo antenna rightly perceives a clear and credible danger, that could trash — once and for all — the Ebora brand of public service that ogles and gobbles private gravy.

In Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, Mark Anthony once mused why the Octavius army always belted his.  Yet, when they went after Brutus and other plotters that killed Julius Caesar, the callow Octavius was but a subaltern; and Anthony, a full General. 

When the Murtala military partisans went after Buka Suka Dimka and co, who brutally mowed down Head of State, Gen. Murtala Muhammed in a botched coup on 13 February 1976, Obasanjo was already a General while Buhari, as a Lieutenant-Colonel, just clambered onto the lower rungs of senior Army ranks.

Yet as President, PMB — no thanks to Obasanjo’s ceaseless vain glory, served in a seething, sparkling foam of empty sanctimony — teaches his old Army boss the ABC of unstinted public service, never blighted by grubby personal gains.

Laderin and surrounding hills and sprawl, in Abeokuta, Ogun State, offer a vivid contrast in the PMB/Obasanjo cosmos of governance.

Laderin hosts the Wole Soyinka Train Station, on the new Lagos-Ibadan standard-gauge rail corridor, itself a glittering metaphor for the most penetrating hard economic infrastructure, by any federal government, since 1999: a virtual explosion of rail, roads, airports, sea ports and bridges, even in the worst of economic seasons.

As with other stations in that corridor — which from Ibadan will terminate in Kano — none is named for PMB.  Yet, future generations won’t ever forget which president emplaced that critical public asset.  Not so, the Obasanjo ethos!

On the flip side of Laderin, bordering Oke Mosan (Mosan Hills), the Olusegun Obasanjo Hilltop Estate virtually hugs you, as you breeze in from Lagos, via the Shiun-Sagamu Expressway.  Virtually co-joined is the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library (OOPL). 

So much private juice from supposed public sweat — and in your face too!   

That the Land Use Decree (now Act), the legal instrument that makes such vast land access possible — for whatever purpose(s) — emanated from Gen. Obasanjo’s first coming as military Head of State, speaks to the man’s suspect public service morality.

Yet, this crass visibility, burnished by eternal self-worship, has made the old man no less jittery over his real place in history. 

The other day, a pathetic Obasanjo, looking really trapped, blurted to BBC’s Hardtalk that his successors abandoned his 25-year rail modernization plan.  

Even if that were true, how many kilometres of tracks did Obasanjo lay during his eight-year presidency?  How many did “subaltern” PMB put together in less than eight years — and in relative adversity too?  

Rail!  In that, PMB has righted an epochal wrong.  General Buhari scuppered the Lagos Metro Line.  But President Buhari liberalized the rail corridor, even ahead of the constitutional amendments, still a work-in-progress.  

As epochal reward, PMB will on January 24 inaugurate the Lagos Blue rail, with the Dangote refineries — critical twin-infrastructure beyond the ken of Obasanjo’s tenure.

Indeed, with his eternal posturing, and talking down others to look good, he grandly robs himself the nobility of self-correction.

Leaving rail, did Obasanjo’s successors also pull down the Second Niger Bridge, a phantom PDP-era vote scam, which take-off he personally launched twice?  Or the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway? It’s true: a bad artisan almost always blames his tools!

But even pushing aside iron, brick and mortar, hasn’t PMB given Obasanjo fine tutorials in democracy etiquettes, as befitting a former officer and gentleman?  Who is talking of “third term” now, except as a putrid puff from the Obasanjo era?

But imagine Tinubu winning the Presidency on February 25 and following that up with upscaling the Buhari-era infrastructure and agriculture thrust, fix power and not abandoning the social safety nets for the poor and vulnerable?

Whoever then would remember Obasanjo, his blatant self-worship and his narcissistic cathedral called OOPL, even if the man lives for a thousand years?

That naked fear drives the Obi endorsement noise.  But for Obi, It’s a kiss of death.

Happy new year, folks

Happy new year, all — particularly Elder Saliu Ojibara from Ilorin who grabbed his copy of The Nation, only to find Ripples still missing; Prof. Clement Kolawole of UI, who sent a text, noting he missed the column last Tuesday, and many others who kept on wondering at the long, long leave!  Thank you all.  Happy new year as we, all over again, probe and interrogate Nigeria’s exciting landscape.

By Olakunle Abimbola

Two days before the theatrical Nyesom Wike released his Niger Delta version of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, the media showed how proudly distracted it really is.

On November 18, Wike spewed at the chop-and-clean-mouth of his co-Niger Delta governors, who allegedly collected mouth-watering derivation cash — never ever paid since 1999, the arch-dramatist claimed! — and went ahead to quietly blow it.

The brutally pugnacious Wike blared and preened — to the irritation and ire of his peers — that he, instead, had invested Rivers’ takings in an endless slew of projects, which he is now gloriously inaugurating, as Mr. Project for all seasons.

To be sure, Wike’s main target would appear Delta’s Ifeanyi Okowa, the dour one that “usurped” feisty Wike as running mate to Atiku Abubakar, though Wike always growled he never wanted the job.  And maybe the “ingrate” Godwin Obaseki, of Edo, with whom Wike has no love lost.

Still, Daily Trust of November 18 quoted a published report by ACIOE Associates. That report claimed that between 2009 and 2019, eight oil-bearing states grossed N6.589 trillion from the Federation Account, by virtue of the 13 per cent derivation principle.

How this claim segues into the Wike counter-claim is not clear.  But that did not stop the other Niger Delta governors from crouching as collateral damage — too bad!

From deserved jeers by his peers, Wike pushed thunderous cheers for President Muhammadu Buhari, for his unmatched even-handedness.

So, if there was indeed such secret trove, how come the mighty Fourth Estate of the Realm didn’t know about it?  Perhaps the tragic crowing of November 16 would give a clue.

November 16, The Punch griped in its banner lead:  ”Tinubu campaign: VIPs hit Plateau with 30 private, chartered jets.”  Pray, in 21st century far-flung Nigeria, how are VIPs supposed to “hit” Jos — with a caravan of camels?

Read Also: Wike’s Logistics Command

The Punch’s “sweet sensation” (apologies to the popular eatery chain) so echoes the disastrous Coriolanus-baiting in Shakespeare’s tragedy, Coriolanus.

The treacherous tribunes had turned the sacred trust the laws of Rome gave them into sacred spite.  But after they baited the short-fused Coriolanus to join arch-enemies, Volscians, against his own city, the tribunes melted into sickening, begging jellies!

That grim metaphor is clear: brusque cynicism has its tragic limitations.  One would have thought The Punch ”millions” of readers craved a dutiful reportage of the rally to make rational electoral choices, not the cynical dramatics of the campaigners’ arrival!

On same November 16, on same Jos campaign, This Day cooed: “100 days to presidential poll, Tinubu says ‘God bless PD … APC’ “, a mere slip of tongue weaponized into mocking headlines that would have put Linda Ikeja, she of the prime gossip blog, to shame.

Quoting a Tunde Rahman-signed Tinubu Media Office (TMO) release, This Day went through the ritual of reporting what actually happened there.  But, from its screeching headline, its own reporters’ preferences were clear.

Still, it’s good to know not everyone in the media has gone ga-ga.

That was clear from how Leadership couched a three-prong campaign across two cities in a simple, beautiful and functional headline, reporting same November 16: “2003 Presidency: Tinubu, Atiku, Obi market selves at Jos rally, Lagos parley” — with some euphonic poetry (rally … parley) to boot!

That is ode to the old school reportage on the straight-and-narrow, away from the wide-and-merry that now threatens to down and drown everything.

Now with the media so gloriously distracted, would it surprise anyone that a democratic president, in a free, open and democratic order, paid democratic governors alleged humongous cash, and yet the democratic press had absolutely no inkling?

Even if the Wike claim was a “hoax” as a This Day report claimed (see “13% derivation: Wike’s hoax to unsettle N’Delta govs?”: November 27), how come no media house could immediately rebut the claim, with solid facts and figures, instead of This Day’s clear damage control more than one clear week after?

But away from newspapers.  As radio and television drift from trained-and-tempered broadcasters to wild-and-flighty “on-air-personalities” (OAPs), the unapologetic distraction in the media hits you smack on the face, as some thunderous slap.

Arise, from its market-entry strategy, seems to have learned little from the pitfalls of AIT, which once drove viewers’ imagination as high-end alternative to NTA’s age-old languidness, with some racy, dynamic, top quality broadcasting.  Some dream!

Two election seasons ago, AIT torched its own essence, morphing into some wild partisan rod, with its infamous Bola Tinubu documentary and its wild cocktail of lies.  The gambit backfired and AIT ate crow.

Arise seems following the same track with its morbid Tinubu fixation, serving its viewers toxic stuff instead of wholesome fare.  For one reckless broadcast, it has already paid a N2 million NBC fine.

No sooner was Arise done with that escapade did This Day — Its print media stablemate — delve into another reckless reportage mixing up the identity of a dead man with a living sibling, over a “drug” case (election-season old wives’ tale since 2003) just to tar a partisan opponent they can’t legitimately match on cold facts.

David Hundeyin, linked with that baleful rumour, was so riled with This Day that, in a tweet, he threw it under the bus for reckless reporting.  The Tinubu presidential camp is also threatening a possible legal suit.

But away from adversarial media that profane their sacred trust, you many times see confounding happy-go-merry lack of capacity.

On one of its broadcasts in October, CNN cameras, in a fleeting second, caught a branded mug.  It was taken off so fast an inattentive viewer would have missed it.

Around the same time, on Your View (YV), a popular morning belt news show on TVC, the ladies majestically posed with branded tea mugs — an advertiser’s totem.

The other day, one of the presenters beamed on set with a nose ring, drawing instant and stormy viewers’ protest!  Did they ever hear of the concept of “noise” in news?

Still on capacity.  Ajuri Ngelale, an exciting renderer of informed statistics if ever there was one, was guest on YV, perhaps to boil down policy for YV’s ardent viewers.

Ajuri, all-froth, was in the clouds.  The ladies, shackled to the ground, were agitated, but seldom asked the right questions to get the best from their guest. It was the dreariest one hour or so.

Yet, same station everyday, immediately after YV, “old school” Yori Folarin’s TM (This Morning) does everything by the finest canon of broadcasting!  But it’s doubtful if TM is half as popular as YV among TVC viewers — and that’s the snag.

Many popular TV news shows serve virtual junk — wilfully or innocently.  The noisy southern newspapers, fiery guardian angels of “press freedom”, curt lowest-common-denominator reader taste, in their devil-may-care base profiling and ethnic baiting.

It’s indeed a humbling time.  A difficult epoch demanding dutiful reporting and news therapy for stressed readers, instead ripples with baiters, bashers and hell raisers!

It’s distraction so comic were it not so tragic.  It’s cry, our beloved media!

Since the “Omo a ni, e je o se” campaign of 1982/83, Ibadan has come a long way in pressing its base politics of democratic domination.

Back then, during the 2nd Republic (1979-1983), it launched a desperate bid for its own to occupy the Agodi Government House, at the expense of Chief Bola Ige, the great Cicero of Esa-Oke and honourary Ibadan son himself, though of Ijesa ancestry.

Now, Ibadan makes even a more desperate stand, which likely might blow up in its face : that because it boasts the numbers, no other sub-ethnics in Oyo State: Ibarapa, Oke Ogun, Oyo Alaafin, Ogbomoso etc, is good enough for governor, no matter his or her brilliance or proven talent.

Ibadan — “running splash of rust/and gold-flung and scattered/among seven hills like broken/china in the sun”!

That’s classic and rustic Ibadan from the poetic lens of J.P. Clark-Bekederemo, famous Nigerian poet and playwright.

Being proud host to Nigeria’s first-ever university, the University of Ibadan, Ibadan is toast of poetic muses.  It is also the undisputed capital of Yoruba culture and politics.

Grab Wole Soyinka’s Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years, and you’d savour how our own Nobel Laureate and this charmed city, of happy-go-merry yokels, intimately interacted: his boyhood and teen years at the Government College, Ibadan (GCI); and his precocious years at UI as one of the UCI (University College Ibadan) pioneering students.

You’d also see, post-Leeds University, UK, how our own WS, as research fellow at UI’s Institute of Drama, embarked on his first local series of experimental theatrical engagements and travel drama — the golden age of the Mbari Literati.

There, he cut his difficult tooth in life-long socio-political activism, in his intimate cut-and-thrust with the Nigerian state, across its many power generations.

Why in Ibadan, Maren — WS’s alter ego — as a Police detainee at Iyaganku, tasted a heart-rending spousal snub: dumped at his feet were his three tots by an irate wife, the cascade of dust, trailing madam’s vanishing car, spewed the ultimate disgust — others tended their young families like delicate flowers; you, Maren, blew precious time on arid activism!

It was during the rough-and-tumble of the “wild, wild West”, with Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s Action Groupers and Chief Ladoke Akintola’s Demo army trying one another for size.  From Ibadan accounts, Maren was an integral part of that campaign.

Aside from WS, UI was also nursery to Nigeria’s foundational intellectuals: Chinua Achebe, doyen of the African novel, Christopher Okigbo, the euphonic poet, historians J. F. Ade-Ajayi and Tekena Tamuno, lexical Solon, Prof. Ayo Banjo, who would later become pivotal vice chancellor in UI’s trying years of the 1980s, not to talk of later-generation poets and writers, like world-renowned poet, Prof. Niyi Osundare and ace playwright and essayist, Prof. Femi Osofisan.

So, in culture, taste and intellect, Ibadan is always up there, in the Olympian clouds.

Not so its politics — always the rut of antediluvian politicking.  No wonder, WS grafted “Penkelemes” into his Ibadan autobiography.  Ibadan politics is always a peculiar mess!

That obviously was ode to Adegoke Adelabu, aka Penkelemesi — perhaps Ibadan’s brightest and best politician of all ages, but patron saint of its atavistic politics.

Like the great Adelabu, the more Ibadan dazzling minds embrace modernity, the more their core craves their rambunctious past, like some powerful muse and compass.   That has more or less defined Ibadan politics.

But back to “Omo a ni, e je o se”!  Ige, the Kaduna Boy (title of his early life autobiography) had made quite a life for himself in Ibadan.

The boy whose Esa Oke folks once teased as gambari (northerner) when he first came down South (for his faultless Hausa: he could speak no word of Yoruba!), had become a formidable political Iroko in Ibadan, and beloved of Awo.

But then, came the split in Awo’s Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN). Ige’s razor-sharp tongue slashed and sliced former UPN friends-turned-foes; and ruling National Party of Nigeria (NPN) defectors, including ace bouncer, Busari Adelakun aka Eruobodo.

Ibadan threw, into the fray, one of their own, the maverick Dr. Omololu Olunloyo, for an epic Ibadan vs Ijesa/Ijebu political rumble, in the old West’s swashbuckling capital!

Olunloyo was — still is — a numbers and engineering genius.  But his run was driven less by his acute mind; more by his crowing, gangling Ibadan nativity: Omo a ni, e je o se!  (He’s our son, let him rule!)

It was Ibadan’s 1983 do-or-die dash for the Agodi Government House, long before President Olusegun Obasanjo made do-or-die the unfazed PDP battle roar of 2007.  Little wonder: both polls, though 24 years apart, teemed with slashed throats, crushed skulls and hewn limbs!

Ige lost the battle — and kissed bye-bye his governorship.  But everyone lost the war.  Three months later, both Ige and Olunloyo, fierce rivals for Agodi Government House, were horrid guests at Agodi Government Jail — captives of the new military overlords!

Still, since that sweet-sour, jinx-breaking triumph, Ibadan has corralled the Oyo governorship as the virtual political arm of the Olubadan stool: Kolapo Isola (1992-1993), Lam Adesina (1999-2003), Rashidi Ladoja (2003-2007: with an interregnum of illegal impeachment), Abiola Ajimobi (2011-2019), Seyi Makinde (2019-date).

The only interregnum, in the Ibadan full-sweep, was 2007-2011, when Adebayo Alao-Akala, Ogbomoso native, held sway — but just because Ladoja and Lamidi Adedibu, self-named Alaafin Molete, and PDP’s Ibadan “garrison commander”, were feuding.

Ibadan’s saving grace?   That Alao-Akala lacked class and dash; and his government dour and dull, as Ajimobi’s was sparkling and brilliant, perhaps?

Might a brighter, more charismatic or even more Machiavellian Alao-Akala have played the end of a hopelessly fissured Ibadan against its middle, unite the irate minorities and lock the Oluyole out of Agodi for a long, long while?

Right now, without Ibadan nativity, hardly anyone, across party lines, is considered fit for the Oyo governorship.  It’s quite an epidemic!

Why, even supporters of Bayo Adelabu, then APC 2019 candidate but now Accord Party defector, were ecstatic the wild rumour that PDP’s Makinde was ethnic Ijesa, not Ibadan, was enough to prise off the Ibadan hoi polloi and knock off Makinde’s momentum.  What neo-Penkelemesi, distinct from the original!

Thus far, Ajimobi, all class and dash, policy depth and glitz, has shone brightest in Ibadan’s galaxy of “omo a ni” governors: bested all his predecessors.  It’s doubtful too if Makinde, his lone successor thus far, can hold a candle to him.

But the crunch might come when Ibadan plumbs its relay of own Alao-Akala, and a future Alaafin Molete feuds to the death with him, claiming a heady democratic right to feudalistic pork — as Adedibu did with Ladoja.

With its democratic plebs pissed beyond measure, and the minorities coalesced behind a brilliant pan-Oyo rising star, it’s then the Ibadan would realize — too late? —Nelson Mandela’s wise quip: better cement democratic rule, with solid minority rights and aspirations, than push crass majority rule that parasites on grubby numbers.

For the media, the Afenifere excitement has been the perfect storm: high drama, eye-popping combat, breath-taking sensation.

Afenifere Leader, Baba Reuben Fasoranti, with the bulk of his group, endorsed Asiwaju Bola Tinubu as the Yoruba choice, with colour and drama that suggested the “end of discussion” — as that catchy Honda auto advert of yore.

But Baba Ayo Adebanjo, Afenifere Acting Leader tried, as he is wont, to impose his lone view, to force his support for Labour Party’s Peter Obi.

Still, some cold perspectives.  The all-powerful Afenifere of 1999 is hardly its fading shadow of 2022.  No less than three factions have scrambled out from that amalgam.

First, was the Afenifere Renewal Group (ARG) chaired by Hon. Wale Oshun.  The ARG baled out: turned off by the grandees’ eternal bickering.

Then, the Afenifere Ilosiwaju Yoruba, first led by Senator Ayo Fasanmi, then by Senator Olabiyi Durojaye (both of blessed memory) but now led by Prince Tajudeen Olusi.

Of course, there is this rump in the storm, which Baba Adebanjo has, with wild zest, weaponized for his whims, masquerading as “Afenifere” or “Yoruba” stand.  The Tinubu/Obi endorsement row is latest of such.

So, as a political force, Afenifere is much diminished.  But that’s not to say its words are as dead as dodo.  Many in its ranks still command respect — if not the awe of old.

But even in this particular faction, there is little doubt who is cruising, and who is bleating blue murder, despite the media thunder from the Adebanjo camp.

Baba Fasoranti is always the elder’s elder: shrewd, tactful, restrained and taciturn.  Baba Adebanjo is the diametric opposite: combative and feisty.  That jars against the Afenifere leadership creed of wise quiet.

Indeed, previous leaders: Baba Adekunle Ajasin (Leader during the decisive NADECO era) and Senator Abraham Adesanya (reasoned czar during the democracy formative years from 1999) passed that temper to Baba Fasoranti.

Which is why whenever Baba Fasoranti speaks, his voice resonates all over.

Read Also: Lonely Old man

It’s that quiet awe, on the Tinubu case, that Baba Adebanjo tries to upend with his predictable media racket.  But then again, who is losing is clear.

By the way, the avatar himself, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, was never media-loose.  During the 2nd Republic (1979-1983), Awo would address only one press conference in a year — at the airport en route his British Caledonia flight to his yearly London medical check-up.

The media would feast on his bombshell.  But that would be all for the year — the great Awo had spoken! — except, of course, he felt obliged to further clarify, on his way back from the medical check.  That gave Awo his near-oracle mystique.

Afenifere’s stoic leadership, from 1999, tried to contain its chirpy hawks, with little dice.  The result?   A perennial crisis and progressive whittling of its influence.   The bold, wise, taciturn Baba Adesanya, aka Apamaku, battled that challenge to his grave.

Indeed, the Bola Ige crisis birthed the Yoruba Council of Elders (YCE), basically an intra-Yoruba revolt against the Afenifere bear hug, by the so-called “Ijebu Mafia”.

Ige had charisma and immense street value, among the younger elements.  The “Ijebu Mafia” were steeped in the Afenifere ”deep state”, and its complex court intrigues.

Adesanya, a most scrupulous and conscientious leader, tried to juggle the two.  When both died — Ige, by own hubris of cohabiting with f(r)iend Olusegun Obasanjo and his PDP Presidency; Adesanya, hit by caucus feuding that took a toll on his health — Afenifere entered the uncharted territory of splintered leadership.

Till date, it has not recovered from this shock.  But the Adebanjo bloc went on with the tragic delusion the house was still one, slandering and traducing its rivals with gusto.

Meanwhile, Tinubu and Afenifere have been a clash of conflicting visions, dating back to Tinubu’s Lagos governorship.

Afenifere (read Adebanjo’s bloc) crowed “Afenifere is AD-AD is Afenifere” to the horror of non-Yoruba AD members.  But Tinubu emplaced alliances beyond Yorubaland, attracting some non-Yoruba talents into his Lagos cabinet.

Afenifere thundered “restructuring”, to crafted media grandstanding and raucous applause from the converted.  But Tinubu made do with “fiscal federalism” — a less scary balm to lobbies scared by  ”restructuring”.  Yet, same principles drive both.

For pragmatic effect (contrast with dogma noise), Tinubu poured Lagos executive talents and resources into the courts, to nibble at Obasanjo’s near-imperial central Leviathan, gradually cutting it to federal size — with the stunning Lagos legal wins.

The Adebanjo bloc’s response — in contrast to Tinubu courting new friends — was digging in (still is), hugging the Yoruba bear, bawling: we’re purer Yoruba than you!

Even after a rare South West-North West entente had propelled Muhammadu Buhari to the Presidency, this Afenifere faction belched base Yoruba insults and wild Fulani-baiting.  In triumphant delusion, they claimed that was what Awo would have done.

To Baba Adebanjo and Baba Femi Okurounmu, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo was “an enemy of the Yoruba” (See Vanguard, 11 February 2019) because he was loyal Veepee to PMB.  The late Baba Ayo Fasanmi, an Afenifere great, was a fraud for backing PMB.

Yet, these “ogidi” (genuine) Yoruba backed PDP’s Atiku Abubakar in 2019 (who lost) — much after their 2015 Lagos rally for Goodluck Jonathan had miserably crashed!

In-between 2015 and 2022, Tinubu was the Yoruba “arch-traitor” — who must be destroyed — for building a South West-North West alliance.

Yet, the Alliance for Democracy (AD), which they infused and imbued with Yoruba arrogance, insularity and near-exclusivity, is today buried and history.

Bilious Fulani-baiting and free-wheeling anti-Tinubu toxins soon brewed “Yoruba Nation”, which wilfully misdiagnosed the crime of a few Fulani (and essentially a grave national security crisis) as a Fulani invasion of Yorubaland, backed by the Fulani powers-that-be, simply because a Fulani was sitting president!

But for sheer luck, despite the un-Yoruba rashness of that terrible time, the South West today could now have been living the present horrors of the South East!

It’s similar rashness that would make Baba Adebanjo “donate” the “Yoruba” to Peter Obi’s cause, hardly consulting anyone but his whim, but expecting everyone to fall in line.

And that’s when Tinubu seems set to call in his decades of nation-wide bridges, and his APC bloc forcing into the federal front core South West — basically progressive — agenda: pro-poor policies (free school feeding, conditional cash transfer, credit for micro-trades, etc).

But if you can’t build structures, how do you “decree” endorsements?  That’s the gangling illogic behind the Baba Adebanjo comical diktat.  But this time, the Fasoranti quiet awe is not there to stay a suspect cause.  Tough luck!

Beyond its symbolic value, this Afenifere storm is over-blown.  The Yoruba seldom vote like zombies.  Yet, at crucial epochs, their voice is loud.  It won’t be different this time.

So, every Yoruba that supports Tinubu should speak up.  But they should commit him to specific Yoruba agenda, just as other ethnics are doing now.

Still, the Yoruba agenda need not be much different from other ethnics’. Everyone faces common issues: a transiting economy with all its pains; and bulwark against its socio-economic spin-offs like banditry, kidnapping and sundry insecurity.

The news was all over rediffusion —  the radio communication of choice in 1969 Western Nigeria — and everyone seemed aware, except the star boy himself.

“Yaya! Yaya!” a neighbour barged in, breathless. “Have you heard?”

“Heard what?” shot back the surprised Yaya Aregbesola, now 80 and retired Professor of Computational Mathematics of the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, Olori Ebi (family head) of the Aregbesola family of Ilesa, but then a 27-year-old.

“They have been calling your results since yesterday,” the neighbour outed.

It was at Owo.  Yaya was immersing himself in work, as young teacher at the Owo High School, owned by the legendary teacher-politician, Chief Michael Adekunle Ajasin, later elected governor of old Ondo — now Ondo and Ekiti states (1979-1983).

He made a first class — the very first in Mathematics, at the old University of Ife, in 1969. Yaya Aremu Sesan Aregbesola was among only three such high fliers that year.

The other two first class graduands, both in Chemistry, were Jide Ige and the late Olusegun Olubuyide.  Both, as Aregbesola, later become professors and carrier academics at Ife.

Incidentally, Aregbesola and Ige were at Owo, under the tutelage of Ajasin, brand new graduates, but future stars of his new school, after Ajasin had left his job as founding principal of Imade College, which the Owo community owned, when a Unife telegram arrived: “Assistant Lecturer Appointed. 959 Pounds per annum.  Letter follows.”

It was augury of a new, glorious era in the academics, a halcyon augury that nevertheless delivered far less than promised.  But back then, it felt really good!

First class in Mathematics from Ife.  M.Sc and PhD (in Applied and Computational Mathematics), in less than four years (1970-1974) — a record — from Sheffield University, UK.

Much earlier in 1964, at the Oranmiyan Grammar School, Ife, a private school owned by the late Johnson Omisore, the young Aregbesola had earned credits in his GCE O’ Level papers in class four — which he wasn’t supposed to write till two years later.

Then, still officially in secondary school (not in the old Upper Sixth aka HSC), he essayed GCE A’Levels and cleared three papers: Pure Mathematics, Applied Mathematics and Geography, which fetched him his Unife admission in 1966.

Was that the hallmark of genius?  Hardly!  His response, at a lengthy interview with The Nation, published on October 9, revalidated that popular quip: genius is one per cent inspiration; 99 per cent perspiration.

“How do you define ‘gifted’? “ he fired back at his interviewers, who tended to adduce sheer genius to his Ife Mathematics feat. “I liked doing it; I prepared for it and I’ve always said Mathematics is the simplest subject that one can pass”! — a rather audacious statement that sent the gathering howling with incredible laughter.

Since five-year-old Yaya Aregbesola (then known as Yaya Yusuf) virtually gate-crashed into primary school at Kutuwenji, now in Niger State, he had embraced the scholarly hard way.

The gate-crash was another story.  He had followed his mother (of whom he was exceedingly fond) to fetch water at the communal stream down town. He stumbled on a band of kids playing; and asked permission to join them, which doting mum readily granted.

After the play, he followed the kids into a partitioned building where a teacher was teaching, by rote in Yoruba, the first 10 numbers:

“One — ookan; Two — eeji; Three — eeta; Four — eerin; Five — aarun …”  When asked to recite the rote, he was the first to rattle it out, though he was the last to join the class — so much so that the teacher noticed him: the “stranger” kid that outshone everyone!

On account of that, the teacher persuaded Yaya’s mother to enrol him, though at five, he might have been too young, since his right hand, arched over his head, could hardly touch his left ear, as was the practice in those days!

Welcome to Baptist Day School, Kutuwenji, a cottage school put together by the ethnic Yoruba in Kutuwenji — a Christian initiative. But there was no discrimination against any kid over his parents’ faith.

Despite his numeric and literary brilliance (at secondary school he took science and art subjects; and acted as Brutus in an Oranmiyan Grammar School production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in a Western State-wide drama contest, in which his school beat all comers), his credo was hard work, his acute mind notwithstanding.

At Ife, he met a teacher show boy, who always bragged Real Analysis, a foundational part of undergraduate Mathematics, might be too complex for his awed students.

But then, Aregbesola went up North, discovered Elementary Real Analysis by Harold Gordon Eggleston, and copied out the entire book!  The book was available only in the Ahmadu Bello University library. There were no copies to buy in the book stores — and no photocopying machines, either.

By that rare industry, he  figured out the preening lecturer’s methods and beat him to his own game!

At Sheffield University, on a Commonwealth post-graduate scholarship, his British tutors (who called him ‘Areg-besola’, because they couldn’t pronounce the gb sound in that name) lost no breath telling him no Black African or Indian had ever passed M.Sc by examination and dissertation in Applied and Computational Mathematics — the course he was opting for.

But after asking for and securing past lecture notes and past questions for 10 years and working hard through them, the same Brits hailed him for rifling through that “impossibility”, and grossing both M.Sc and PhD in record time, of less than four years!

Even then, his brilliance could have crashed in the turbulence of life but for good mentors — and counsellors — that tracked his paths.

After exhausting his savings after the first year at Ife, he would have dropped out but for Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s insistence that no brilliant student should drop out of school because (s)he was indigent.

That was Awo’s part-condition for joining the war-time federal cabinet of Gen. Yakubu Gowon.  That policy kept him at Ife, even if Awo never knew him.

So, as the awe-stricken cheered and cheered on that convocation day in 1969, and as the great Awo, then the Unife Chancellor, pumped Aregbesola’s hand for his rare feat, the young man mused in quiet joy: “If only this man knew what he did to make me make this first class …!”

Later, Chief Ajasin would headhunt him and even offered to pay him in advance as an undergraduate; just as Johnson Omisore gave him scholarship after his first year, aside from having him under his roof at the Oranmiyan Grammar School, Ife.

Why, to parody the title of Ayi Kwei Armah’s famous novel, was he so blest!

At 80, Prof. Aregbesola, now “retired-retired” (in own words), after post-retirement visiting professor stunts at both Ladoke Akintola University of Science and Technology and the Osun State University, is happy and fulfilled, after moulding so many minds, many of them now greater than him in global academia.

Still, it is doubtful if the country he served with painstaking diligence has given him his due. Like the many quiet heroes of his generation, he stays largely unsung.

 

That about everyone thinks Atiku Abubakar’s ethnic baiting, of October 15, was entirely a Freudian slip, is a spectacular failure of media tracking and dutiful reportage.

Yes, the former vice president’s buried, ultra-rotten thoughts did ooze to the surface. That was clear from the brazen recklessness of that dark northern pitch.

But since Atiku started his run for the PDP presidential ticket, the core of his run had never been clearer.

First, he declared only a northerner could help PDP win back federal power.  If that did not jolt anyone in that party, it was only fair testimony to the PDP’s uncritical — even desperate — hankering after power, by whatever means necessary.

After, he positioned himself as that northerner — the sole Arewa redeemer with whom PDP must swim or sink.

Then, he engineered the Aminu Tambuwal nomination collaboration (no crime, to be sure) to clinch the PDP ticket, leaving the likes of Nyesom Wike and Anyim Pius Anyim in the lurch. 

It was the same sickening crow he carried to the Arewa stakeholders forum — wrong platform! — and Atiku, self-garnished pan-Nigeria unifier, self-degraded (and manically so!), as no more than a crass and hollow northern baiter and divider.  What verbal suicide!

Still, don’t get it mixed up.  In a country of multiple nations, striving to out-fox one another for central power, a solid home base is key.  On that, you can’t fault Atiku.

Indeed, in all Nigeria history, only former President Olusegun Obasanjo has won a federal election without a home base.  

But the 1999 “Army Arrangement” (apologies to Fela) that made that possible only led to wicked taunts and spicy jokes that drove Obasanjo berserk to “capture” (in Chief Bode George’s words) his native South West.

So, from an egregiously rigged 2003 election, to a failed “3rd term” bid, to the unconscionable militarization of PDP ranks, and finally to a travesty that was the “do-or-die” 2007 elections, Obasanjo laid the solid foundation for PDP’s power blues today.  

Yes, it all collapsed on former President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (GEJ).  Still, he was a mere fall guy — though, to be fair, GEJ also contributed his fair share to the PDP rot.

So, you’d pardon Atiku for trying not to go the Obasanjo route — and none of Atiku’s opponents for 2023: Bola Tinubu, Rabiu Kwankaso, Peter Obi and others can afford to joke with their home bases.

On that score, Peter Obi would appear in a serious quandary.  True, his social media army, wild, tetchy and rude, continue to screech from their e-bastion.  

But with the South East flux, not even Peter Obi could boast his tally.  No wonder, not a few are already baiting him to go hold a rally, in his native Anambra, to “test his mic”!

So, locking up the home front is no crime.  But making it sound as if home is all that matters is virtual political suicide.  The simple configuration of the Nigerian Constitution and the rigour of electoral spread make that very clear.

But that could well bring us to the more worrying question on Atiku, the presidential candidate and his party: what exactly would both campaign on?  

If their solid flank of credible campaign appears melting by the hour, wouldn’t Atiku launch into a sterile and barren ethnic pitch, as he did on October 15?

Indeed, what would Atiku and PDP campaign on?

Public morality?  At this time in 2007 when PDP, Obasanjo and Atiku were exiting power, there was also a jumbo strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU).  Back then, both Nos. 1 and 2 hustled for private university licences, while the public ones in their care decayed.

Sure, the current ASUU strike is still unresolved but no one is reporting either PMB or Vice President Yemi Osinbajo hankering after private university licences!

Legacy?  Obasanjo and Atiku loved the Igbo so much!  But all they did with the mainstream Igbo political elite was buy into their “All of you” syndrome, as told by Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart — remember tortoise that soared to the skies with the feathers of others but scammed them all claiming he was “All of you”?

Well, PMB shunned that “All of you” syndrome — translated, in real terms, to South East party barons allegedly securing critical infrastructure contracts but pocketing the money.  He gave contracts to those who could execute them.  That change of temper has secured the 2nd Niger Bridge!

But the loss of All of you ”appointments”, contracts and allied pork has led that lobby to orchestrating scalding PMB hate.  Yet, the most rabid Igbo “hater” in Nigerian history just completed 2nd Niger Bridge, in the harshest economic season imaginable!

Yes Atiku, so, so graceless when cornered, told an Igbo lobby that bridge was no special deal for the Igbo, since all Nigerians would use it — true.  Still, for avid Igbo lovers as Atiku, Obasanjo and PDP, that bridge never got beyond a rich campaign tool!

But the special spice is that “2nd Niger Bridge” is replicated everywhere — East, West, North and South!  That’s not bad for PMB, notorious Fulani hegemonist and arch-hater of other tribes!  Pray, what did ardent lovers, of the PDP era, do with project spread?

Besides, public-spirited legacies, spread everywhere, trump a million of self-serving presidential libraries!

Critical infrastructure and agriculture?  True, President Jonathan completed the Abuja-Kaduna rail, though PMB opened it; and PMB ought to have given GEJ much more credit at the project’s inauguration, very early in the APC era.

Still, contrast a rail project at the tail end of 16 years of relative boom to the APC rail record in less than eight years of painful leanness.  

Besides, while Obasanjo played presidential dog in the manger on rail corridors, PMB played the rail liberal, which explains why the Lagos urban rail is about roaring into life.

On agriculture, did anyone hear of Nigerian rice all through those 16 PDP years?  Now, less than eight years since 2015, it is clawing hard for market share!

Social safety nets?  True, the Obasanjo Presidency did a zonal pilot of the school feeding scheme.  But that pales into absolute insignificance compared to the nearly 10 million kids being daily fed in public primary schools nationwide.  

Besides, whoever heard of conditional cash transfers to Nigerian poorest of the poor, in those years of relative plenty, but hardly any coherent attack on poverty?

True, Atiku and PDP would still, with gusto, push the ogre of “insecurity”; and act the avid hell-raiser on “Muslim-Muslim” ticket, to tap into explosive passion for raw electoral gain. How scare-mongering resonates with the electorate, however, remains to be seen.

The PMB-era policy, big on agriculture, massive on infrastructure, and re-jigging the deformed power sector reforms (and Tinubu’s newly released manifesto, which pushes the same set of goals) is to rebuild the real sector and spring Nigeria from the import trap of SAP, where it had languished, since 1986.

The pain of re-building the real sector, to be sure, is massive.  But it’s pain of rebirth, not the pang of death.

It’s on that future that the presidential contestants should engage the electorate: not on Atiku’s base northern pitch; not on Obi’s gaseous promises and phantom stats.”

All luck is not transferable, is it? — a friend often jokes, a glint of mischief in his eyes.

But what if ill luck is a constant plague in your public life — tough?

That seems the fate of Iyorchia Ayu, embattled PDP national chair, caught in a North-South cross-salvo, onward the presidential sweepstakes of 2023.

Dr. Ayu dawned on Nigerian politics as a dashing and rather intellectual young man: the first president of the Senate, in the diarchy that preceded the still-birth 3rd Republic (1 January 1992 – 27 November 1993), under Gen. Ibrahim Babangida.

But soon enough, ill luck rammed on his public door — with his impeachment and replacement by Ameh Ebute, though for standing up for Abiola’s June 12 mandate.

That portrait of the Senate president as a young man, pummelled by ill luck, has followed Ayu the old man (he locks 70 on November 15) and controversial PDP boss — a chair he fights the political battle of his life to keep.

Between 1993 and now, Ayu’s has been some depressing study in presidential hire-and-fire.

First, under Gen. Sani Abacha: Ayu was replaced with the loud and controversial, though grimly loyal, Wada Nas aka ”Wada Noise”: on account of his implacable defence of Abacha in life and in death.

Then, under President Olusegun Obasanjo: after a battery of shuffles and re-shuffles, Obasanjo finally dismissed Ayu in December 2005, giving no reasons.

But it needed no genius to figure the presidential guillotine slashed through Ayu’s ministerial neck for being an Atiku Abubakar partisan — then a Vice President declared persona-non-grata in the presidency he re-won with Obasanjo, in the controversial 2003 elections.

So, if Atiku sticks with Ayu now, you must understand both have come a long way.

Both left PDP for Action Congress (AC), Atiku’s platform for his 2007 presidential run, though then a political refugee.

Both, still refugees, were founding members of APC.  Both later gobbled their vomit to return to PDP.

Now, both have grossed the PDP chair and PDP presidential ticket in a North-North lock-up — a one-track blast that Nyesom Wike and co insist fuels the current PDP conflagration, on the virtual eve of a crucial election.

Will Ayu come up short as he did under Abacha and Obasanjo?  Or would he this time ride the tide and deliver some triumph with Atiku?  Time will tell.

Still, for such an endangered species, Dr. Ayu has a rather ruinous proclivity.

In the heat of the moment, Ayu pronounced Aminu Tambuwal the “hero” of the PDP presidential convention, for withdrawing for Atiku to clinch the ticket.

But this particular “heroism” has led to a northern PDP triumvirate: PDP chair (Ayu), PDP presidential candidate (Atiku), director-general of the Atiku campaign (Tambuwal)! That not-so-heroic mis-jive may well haunt Ayu till the end of his political life

Besides, this northern “hat trick” (to borrow that football lingo) has given the Nyesom Wike anti-Atiku blitz much of its vim, for it robes PDP in a distinctly northern tribal hue.

Even then, as the battle drew, Ayu dismissed his Wike-led nemesis as a band of kids not there when the grandees — like Ayu, who these callow kids now had the temerity to challenge — were forming and nurturing PDP!

Then, at the Uyo, Akwa Ibom, launch of the Atiku Abubakar presidential campaign, Ayu claimed the PDP train had rolled off — a rather amusing euphemism to call the bluff of Wike and co — but that it could still be halted to accommodate everyone (another even more comical bluff, with the stark balance of extant PDP powers).

Read Also: Wike, Ayu exchange fire over N1b bribery claims, others

So, might a footloose tongue be Dr. Ayu’s real challenge, which powers the ill luck that clearly has blighted his public persona: impeached president of Senate, dismissed  former minister of the Federal Republic, and now, endangered party chair?

Is he perhaps fated to be yanked off the neck of his troubled party in high storm — just as the albatross in ST Coleridge’s long, long poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”?

These are complex questions that, frankly, hardly anyone can provide accurate answers.  What is certain, though, is that the omens are grim.

Suffice it to say too that a party which simple yet grand electoral joker was to point fingers at present challenges to cynically milk voter pains and sympathy, is ironically getting doubtful — and maybe scornful — fingers pointed at its war-without-end.

Sure, it’s no crime for the opposition to nail the sitting order with its flaws, just to unhorse it.  APC did the same en route to defeating PDP in 2015.

The cynicism here, however, is that much of the challenges in this season of leanness could have been averted in the epoch of plenty, which approximated the PDP 16 years in power (1999-2015).

More like a sick ode to self-glory than salute to clinical thinking, President Obasanjo handed good cash, in hard currency, to Nigeria’s creditors, for debt “cancellation”.

No matter the short-term euphoria over that deal, that cash if invested in massive and renewed infrastructure, could have galvanized the economy to routinely pay back those debts.

If that had been done, much of the post-PDP borrowing, on which scarecrow the party was poised to hang its campaign pitches, would have been averted.

Then, the abiding morass in the power sector has its root in the crony privatization of the PDP era, during which the old Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) was balkanized and sold to DisCo “investors” — a travesty for sweetheart cronies that neither had the capital nor technical nous to run those critical shops.

Mix collapsed infrastructure: decayed roads plus comatose rail, with a power sector dead as dodo, even after gulping humongous cash during the Obasanjo-era power sector reforms, and you have a perfect reason for today’s gritty poverty.

Add the gangling, preening, equal-opportunity sleaze under President Goodluck Jonathan and you’ll clearly see the incalculable harm the former ruling party had done this country.  Yet, it was priming itself to cynically point fingers!

The Wike “rebellion” seems to have put paid to all that though it’s early days yet.  But the chaos appears set for a higher gear, with another G-4 set to call Wike and co’s bluff and stick with Ayu — no matter what.

That G-4? Edo’s Godwin Obaseki, Bayelsa’s  Duoye Diri, Adamawa’s Ahmadu Fintiri and Taraba’s Darius Ishaku — a gubernatorial quad sworn to calling Wike’s bluff.  But where does that leave their splintered party?

Jesus the Christ said his crucifixion was divinely settled.  But woe betide the vessel that aided its fulfilment — and that was Judas.

Is nature paying PDP back, for its past ills, with this chaos in rich technicolor?  Still, might history still blame Albatross Ayu — like Judas — for aiding the chaos foretold?

Time will tell!

Sir ‘Eyo — one year after

14 October 2021, it was all gloom — the passage, at 73,  of Dr. Adewale Adesoji Adeeyo, OON — the triple Alpha in everything: good breeding, compassion, generosity, sartorial excellence, emotional intelligence and overall a sweet and good man.

14 October 2022, exactly one year after, it was time to relive and savour AAA’s abiding sweetness, at a simple but classy first year remembrance in his Ikeja GRA home, as Sir ‘Eyo himself would have wished.

Keep on resting in bliss.  As the Lord lives, your widow and the two boys in her care would never walk alone.  Indeed, sweet is the memory of the just!  Sleep on!