The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olakunle Abimbola

  • Easter 2022

    Easter 2022

    William Butler Yeats, Irish nationalist and 1923 Nobel Prize for Literature winner, wrote “Easter, 1916”, a poem with that terrible yet terrific refrain: “A terrible beauty is born”.

    For the Oko-Oke boys, it would be Easter 2022.  It was 50 years after they entered school in 1972.  It was 46 years after they left in 1976.

    Beauty was born all right — in new amity and new dreams, to toast and give back to  their old school, the Odogbolu Grammar School (OGS), Odogbolu, Ogun State.

    It was a reunion to remember, for all 17 present, at the palace of Oba Adebisi Adedotun Okubanjo, the Obiri of Ayepe-Ijebu.

    But unlike Yeats’s “Easter, 1916”, pain-pleasure rendition of the Irish rebellion savagely crushed by the British, which nevertheless birthed sustained Irish ultra-nationalism against British domination, there was nothing terrible about the beauty of Easter 2022.

    Holy Saturday, 16 April 2022, was all sweet glad-handing and uproarious backslapping; with even sweeter reminiscences by the old boys of yore, now turned fathers and grandfathers, most of them meeting one another again, 46 years after.

    As they did, with Ebenezer Obey’s classics purring in the background — His Royal Highness, the Obiri, is a life-long Obey fan — something Biblical merrily played out.

    Joseph, the 11th of Jacob’s 12 boys it was, that had the dream that his ten seniors crowded around him; and all bowed to him.  Only Benjamin, his sole younger sibling, didn’t feel piqued by Joseph’s colorful dreams.

    Indeed, those audacious dreams; and Father Jacob’s unabashed doting upon his 11th child, would fire the conspiracy by Joseph’s seniors to sell him into slavery but lie to heart-broken Jacob that a wild animal had devoured his favourite son!

    Well, there was nothing dreamy or arrogant or cocky about the young Bisi Okubanjo back at Oko-Oke, the OGS rather extensive compound.

    Yet, here we were, all of his old mates including one or two Ayepe-Ijebu natives, merrily bowing before His Royal Highness, the Obiri, and humming Kaaabiiieeessssssiiiii o!

    Indeed, 20 kids as the Yoruba say, can’t frolic for 20 years!  Each and every of them would go their different ways!

    Oba Okubanjo had become a monarch; and pulled out all the royal stops to host a most memorable reunion of his old mates.  That earned him the unanimous honour of Grand Patron, OGS Old Boys Association (OGSOBA) ’72/76 Family.

    But the other 16 too, in the ensemble, had all gone to make names for themselves in different fields.  That much was clear from the monarch’s quiet mien and gracious gait, as he lapped up the rare honour his old classmates were doing him.

    Indeed, the proverbial 20 kids had gone on to excel in varied fields, over the proverbial 20 years, though the assemblage would appear skewed in favour of retired bankers.

    Otunba Rotimi Onafadeji, who emerged the OGSOBA 72/76 President, is a barrister-at-Law, well-known and applauded in Ogun legal circles.

    But Wasiu Balogun, aka Balinga, the powerful-voiced crooner that used to wow his old mates, while rendering Sunny Ade’s hits, is a retired banker but still practicing chartered accountant.

    Besides, beyond his boyhood musical promise and career accomplishments, Balinga appeared comfy with new organizational talents that would put veteran politicians to shame, in how he masterfully nudged his old mates towards consensus, en route to the affirmative elections, for the new OGSOBA executive.

    Omoba Olumuyiwa Akinola, debonair fellow and a social worker in the UK, who emerged the Vice President, represented the diaspora legion.

    His constituency powered instant recollections of other mates in the diaspora realm. Adeyinka Layemo was Head Boy and later orthopaedic surgeon of first crust.  But after retirement, as consultant surgeon, at the National Orthopaedic Hospital Igbobi (NOHI), he is now relocated to Canada.

    Layemo echoed another, Dotun Ogunnaike, aka Esse (for eccentric): a teenage kidder like no other, who brutally teased you and virtually left you for dead!  After earning a first degree from the University of Ife (now OAU), he left for the UK.  The happy company broke into fresh animation, at the recall of the rascally exploits of Ogunnaike.

    Layemo and Ogunnaike might be hundreds of kilometers away across the seas, but thanks to Balinga and his pre-election consensus caucus, Akinola was elected Vice President to spread the OGSOBA gospel overseas and rein in his diaspora colleagues.

    But full credit for the reunion must go to the trio of Alaba Olusoga (General Secretary), Ademuyiwa Obisanya (Financial Secretary/Treasurer) — both ex-bankers — and Bamidele Ogunde aka Tony Anthony (Social Secretary), Fine Arts teacher at the Yaba College of Technology (Yaba Tech).

    The fizzy Tony Anthony is the set’s institutional memory: you want any rare school days reminiscences?  He’s your go-to guy.  Obisanya framed the OGSOBA tag and launched the body’s WhatsApp interaction hub.  Olusoga, gentle and deep, is the quiet but efficient presence that got things done.

    Everyone was thrilled the three made the new executive — joined by Mudasiru Abujade (Welfare/Chief Whip) and practicing architect, who most were meeting for the first time in 46 years.

    Now, Tony Anthony brought old teenage passion into a future career.  He held the most nimble of brushes in the Fine Arts class, under the tutelage of our iconic teacher, Mr. Eggy N. Obaseki, who the boys dubbed “Gbedi-e-wa” — after his faltering Yoruba, meaning “bring your buttock”, for tanning in loving anger, anytime you misbehaved!

    Ripples was a member of that class of budding artists too, though he would build on another boyhood passion.  In William Wordsworth-speak, the child reporter of Oko-Oke sports events is the father of today’s newspaper columnist!

    But back to our iconic and beloved “Gbedi-e-wa”.  Mr. Obaseki became Tony Anthony’s life-long mentor, in the Fine Arts, sculpture and allied cosmos, as Tony Anthony blossomed in his career at Yaba Tech’s School of Art, Design and Printing.

    Beyond Tony Anthony, the mention of Mr. Obaseki jogged the boys’ fond memory of their old teachers: Chief Mamora, the incomparable “Meeeeerrrrrryyyyy Chief!” (of blessed memory), eternal favourite teacher and father of Senator Nimbe Mamora; and Messrs Aderibigbe and Otudeko, still alive and kicking in their Okunowa-Ijebu and Ibefun-Ijebu respective hearths.

    Besides, Gbolagade Oke and Ibukun Okegbenle, relations of old teachers, Messrs Oke and Okegbenle (both now of blessed memory), reminded the boys of old school authorities.  Mr. Oke was House Master while Mr. Okegbenle succeeded Mr. Otudeko as Sports Master.

    As the “boys” buzzed around HRH for the parting photo-op — Deji Cole aka ABC, Pastor Akin Tokoya (who offered the Christian opening prayers), the fasting Wasiu Yusuf (who said the closing Muslim prayers), Badejo Kujimiyo who proudly declared himself an “organic farmer”, property buffs Jamiu Adeyemi and Gab Sonowo — it was crystal clear to all: for OGSOBA 72-76, Easter 2022 is a treasure to remember!

  • Obey: To a legend at 80

    Obey: To a legend at 80

    It was 1969.  The Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970) was grinding to a close; and ‘Ye mi (Ijebu dialect for Matriarch) had just died, very close to her 100th birthday.

    ‘Ye mi was the much beloved Madam Bamiyajo Onadipe, matriarch of the Onadipes of Erigo, the Siamese twin of Ogbogbo, tiny but powerful communities, in Ogun State’s Ijebu North East local government, near Ijebu Ode.

    The twin-communities boast illustrious natives: the Onadipes, Okeowos, Runsewes, Teluwos, Banjokos, and of course, Olufojudes, among many others.

    Ma Onadipe, Ripples’ maternal great-grandmother, was much loved by her great-grandchildren.  Her stock fish-soaked-in-egusi special delicacy was so, so irresistible!

    “Wa je golugo?” [“Won’t you like a treat of egusi stock fish?] she would croon in Ijebu, as super indulgent as ever, to which the thrilled bevy would beam and jump!  ’Ye mi’s cooking was sheer joy to the palate!

    So, when ‘Ye mi died at ripe old age, and everyone had howled and cried their eyes out, the Onadipes were determined to give their matriarch a burial to remember.  That began Ripples’ Ebenezer Obey story.

    At the pre-funeral meetings, the clear preference was either I. K. Dairo or Tunde Nightingale: the pair that then bossed Juju music, aside from other genre grandees like Ayinde Bakare and Adeolu Akinsanya, aka Baba Eto.  The hardworking, hard-partying Ijebu love their Owambe — and the bragging rights after — more than any other!

    But an auntie, the immediate younger sister to Ripples’ mother, kept insisting, in Ijebu: “Ebenezer Obey ma nseree; Ebenezer Obey ma nseree” (Ijebu for “Boy, Obey too can play!”).

    Long story cut short: the family decided on Obey.  On the night, the band bus, which boasted an ambulance-like strobe light, was parked on the Erigo main road. It bore: “Ebenezer Obey and his International Brothers Band”.

    The band itself was set, on the Onadipes’ vast forecourt.  The band boys were readying selves for an all-night groove: “Hello, hello … Testing, testing microphone … Hello, hello …”

    Before the post-Civil War advent of armed robbery, Owambe qua Owambe was all-night long.  Folks would eat, drink and wriggle to music all night, in choice Aso ebi!

    Even then, the great-grand kids rippled with own curiosity: who, among the band boys, was Ebenezer Obey?  And who, among them — the kids — would step out to find out?

    That would be bold, though the bragging right after looked great.  Ripples stepped forward, that audacious step strange even to him, an otherwise self-effacing lad.

    “Buoda, Buoda,” he asked, with a slight stammer, the one that appeared the leader, in Yoruba.  ”S’eyin ni Ebenezer Obey?” [Elder, Elder, are you Ebenezer Obey?]

    The face lit up.  It was handsome.  The smile was winsome — angelic really is the word.  The cute diastema, between his two upper front teeth, made the smile all the more arresting.  The man was simply debonair.  He nodded in the affirmative.

    That was Ripples’ first impression of Ebenezer Obey, then 27, as a nine-year old.  That impression has lasted till now: 53 years later — and thus began the deep love for the man and his music.

    Three years after, in boarding school at Oko Oke — that was what the boys at the  Odogbolu Grammar School (OGS), Odogbolu, Ogun State, then an all-boys school — called their serene, extensive school compound.  The boys, on social nights on Saturdays, would break into two antagonistic musical groups.

    One was for “Sunny” (Sunny Ade).  The other, for “Obey” (Ebenezer Obey).  It was the teens’ ode to the longest musical hegemony to come in Nigerian history, but then just starting.  Both straddled Juju popular music, like the true giants that they were.

    At the zenith of their reign, you were assured of four albums in a year, most of them monster hits that got people crowded in Lagos streets, gulping in the latest musical trove on vinyl.

    But back to Oko Oke. On such nights, Suraju Balogun aka Balinga, with booming, penetrating voice as strong as Sunny’s audacious guitar, would sing Sunny Ade’s latest release, complete with strumming its fetching guitar works, with his bare mouth!  His fellow boys would go berserk, dancing away in the Dining/Assembly Hall.

    But Ripples and co, in Obey’s quiet corner, would scoff at the happy bedlam: Sunny’s music was all dance-no-depth — which was quite untrue.

    Only our own hero, the Chief Commander himself, was well and truly evergreen — not untrue too!  Long after the sweet hullabaloo of the present-day dance hall, we’d brag, Obey’s timeless pieces would seize and rule the roost.

    That was at the beginning of the happy 1970s.  After the sobering peril of the Civil War, there was the gush of post-War can-do!  That was replicated in the very fecund Juju music scene.

    Season after season, Obey would unleash one monster hit after another; which framed his Miliki genre — languid, leisurely and thoughtful numbers:

    Board Members, Odun Keresimesi (the Christmas album), What God Has Joined Together (the wedding album for all seasons), Oya ka jo jo, Mukulu Muke Ma Jo, Aya F’Oba Mimo, Mr. Wise, Iwa Ika Ko Pe, Aye wa a toro, Alowo ma jaiye, the highly philosophical pair of  Eni ri nkan he and The Horse, The Man and His Son (aka Ketekete), Around the World; aside from early singles like Oro seniwo and London la wa yi.

    Many of these albums preserved cherished memories, private and public: of the Late Oke Aminu (Obey’s treasured star vocalist — the  Olohun Iyo — that passed away); the Late General Murtala Muhammed (mercurial, six-month military Head of State); and of course Immortality, Obey’s 1987 album that well and truly memorialized the great Chief Obafemi Awolowo.  There were also Obey at 7O and 80 albums — self-celebratory epochs.

    “Eniyan Ti Mo Feran Ju”, the flip side of the Awo album, with its concluding, “O se o, Jesu” was perhaps Obey’s last dancehall hit, before quitting regular Juju for the gospel genre.

    Many of his hits too truly documented Nigeria’s contemporary history: change-over from left to right-hand driving (1973), currency switch from the British Pound Sterling to decimal-friendly Nigerian Naira and Kobo (also 1973) and Operation Feed the Nation (OFN: 1976).

    Others celebrated socialites and businesses: the globe-trotting Olabisi Ajala, who Obey crooned “travel[led] all over the world”; Henry Fajemirokun (1926-1978), celebrated czar of the Henry Stephens Group, Alhaji I. S. Adewale, aka ”the boy is good”, and even Jimoh Isola, alias Ejigbajero, later hanged in 1975, for the murder of Raji Oba, over land matters.

    Fajemirokun might have died rather young, against Obey’s merry prediction in his hit album.  Ejigbajero too might have ended up in grief after his bubble had burst.

    Yet, for generations to come, the Chief Commander — no, chief musical historian of his age; and his rested Inter-Reformers Band — have recorded these great deeds, warts and all, for on-coming generations to savour.

    It’s classic music as true spirit of the age.  That’s the greatest tribute anyone can pay this living legend at 80.

  • Terror next time

    Terror next time

    The March 28 Abuja-Kaduna rail terror attack met the expected: a thunder of recriminations but hardly any empathy or cutting strategy.

    From a tally by The Nation, the AK9 Abuja-Kaduna train casualty figure: eight dead, 41 injured and a-yet-to-be-established number seized by the terrorists.  Terrible!

    Yet, the news broke — “breaking news!” — with the tone of the terrific: like the gleeful herald of some grand wedding or some sweet christening or some epochal bunting!

    Shortly after, a cartoonist strutted his stuff — and quite brilliant too: terrorists had taken full charge of Nigeria’s roads, air and rail!  You couldn’t move nowhere, unless you bought satanic tickets from them!

    That clear hyperbole connects with the angst of the moment.  But doesn’t someone, somewhere know that could be excellent oxygen for the terror attack next time — if not some dampener for security agents that often foil tens of attempts before one terror attack succeeds?

    By the way, did any heart go out to the battling security agents, who might have died so the rail terror victims could live?  Or their lives and families’ pains don’t matter?

    In trying times, the soul hurts.  The heart quakes.  The mouth wails.  Yet, wrong reactions to present peril could ensure future ones.  That’s a lesson in strategic communication our media must learn.

    Then, from the Nigerian Parliament, a huff of shame-and-blame.  A bilious House of Representatives passed a vote of no confidence on Nigeria’s security agencies (The Nation report: April 1).

    Now, what does that mean?  The wholesale junking of the security order?  And after that, what?  It’s all in tune with the anger of the moment, of course!

    Then, furious members bristled with sundry ire: one, that citizens be free to arm themselves and confront terrorists.  And what then?  Free-wheeling gun violence, ala America, even after terror attacks are distant memories?

    Another, that the House go on strike, like ASUU, if that would force President Muhammadu Buhari to take responsibility! Is our wise House imbibing ASUU’s culture of crippling strikes, with doubtful values?

    Another called for the removal of the National Security Adviser — hardly new.  Before the present set of security chiefs, there was wild clamouring to sack the old ones.

    Yet, that sack has proved no open sesame magic to the security challenge — even if the present occupiers try their best under grave conditions.  No NSA sack would do the magic either.

    Again, while all of these were legit and understandable responses to the angst of the moment, they add very little value to solving the problem.

    So, in moments of crisis, what Nigerians need from their leaders are reassurances, fired by penetrative thinking; not chamber echoes of helpless worries in the street.

    Besides, if the parliament would reflect more and point fingers less, why did it not birth a new federalized Nigeria police, in its latest raft of constitutional amendments?  Isn’t centralized police a major plank of the current insecurity challenges?

    From the executive, the mercurial Nasir El-Rufai, governor of Kaduna State, fast becoming the epicentre of North West insecurity, weighed in with own executive hysteria — go into the bush and bomb terrorists/bandits into ash!

    The frustration of Mallam El-Rufai is understandable.  He has shouted himself hoarse, warning the federal authorities that the vortex of Islamist terror and opportunistic banditry is moving from the North East to the North West — and his Kaduna is being swamped by it all!  That perhaps explains his mercenary bug.

    Still, his umpteenth vote for go-in-and-bomb-them-all-to-hell harbours pretty little emotional intelligence.  True, the bandits-terrorists will get their due.  He who lives by the sword must die by the sword.  But what of their captives?

    For context, the terrorists kidnapped an undisclosed number during the March 28 rail attack.  Families and friends of these folks still worry sick about their fate, in the hands of those brutes.

    Would the government, in a bid to wipe out these felon-captors, be right to wipe out their captives too?  Shouldn’t our thinking be more pin-point and precise?

    Governor El-Rufai appeared to have given that a thought.  Yet, his best take was that every crisis harbours its own collateral damage.  That could well be.

    But bombing off captives with their captors doesn’t portray high emotional intelligence — an area where the Kaduna governor seems to lag, despite his acute mind.

    Still, Governor El-Rufai gave useful context to the flare of bandit attacks in some parts of rural Kaduna — much more than the media that seems to glory only in reporting explosive end-tragedies.

    The governor accused the local vigilante of reckless and arbitrary acts, suggestive of wrongful killings; which then attract revenge raids that put the victim communities in utmost peril.

    Again, with federalized policing and better training at handling such matters, such killings and revenge missions would greatly reduce, if not completely eliminated.

    So, Nigeria sorely needs a decentralized police system, with state police working in tandem with the central police.

    Transport Minister, Rotimi Amaechi, also threw his Federal Executive Council (FEC) peers under the bus for allegedly refusing a N3 billion-plus rail censor and security deal, that could have averted the March 28 disaster.

    But a leaked memo has hit right back, suggesting that cabinet rejected the Amaechi request for alleged suspected conflict of interest, since the minister’s vendor-nominee didn’t seem to have the required track record, if not competence.

    This cabinet to and fro seems to expose needless turf wars, when concerted efforts should save lives and avert disasters.  Yet, there seem no enough facts to start ascribing ill motives to either side of the isle, even with the train disaster.

    It’s another chilly and lonely spot for President Buhari and his security chiefs!  Already, the ill-graced Ebora Owu is mouthing his umpteenth cant.  Olusegun  Obasanjo just can’t shine unless he bad-mouths others!  Still, the president must carry his cross!  Buhari must end his seeming fixation with central policing.

    So, what should happen now is for the federal cabinet to grant accelerated approval to secure every metre of Nigeria’s rail track, because rail holds the key to Nigeria’s socio-economic renaissance, despite the present gloom.

    To beat the terror next time, everyone must know the country is at war.

    To beat this war against terror, everyone must be at their best: the media, the government (state and federal) and the people at large.  All must work hand-in-hand.

    To ward off future attacks, there must be clinical forward-thinking; and vital fellow feeling to tide over the present gloom.

  • Grudge ahoy!

    Grudge ahoy!

    At 70, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu is swarmed by grudgers — those who can’t but begrudge those who can.  It’s the perfect political dog in the manger.

    Yet, it won’t be the first in Nigerian history.

    The great Chief Obafemi Awolowo who also, like Tinubu now, marked his 70th birthday ahead of his presidential run in 1979, was so riled at such characters that he let fly this famous rebuke.

    “While many men in power and public office are busy carousing in the midst of women of easy virtue and low morals,” Awo quipped, “I, as a few others like me, am busy at my desk thinking about the problems of Nigeria and proffering solutions to them.  Only the deep,” came the final, crushing put-down, “can call to the deep.”!

    Still, the political Lilliputians of that era flailed at their perceived Gulliver, even if all they had were hate and spite.  Nigeria was the loser.

    If Awo played in “far-away” 20th century Nigeria, the 2015 Muhammadu Buhari story appears fresh enough.  Rapacious “yam eaters”, in President Goodluck Jonathan’s government, had cleaned out the common barn.

    A sunk, desolate nation was looking for the sole man of integrity to salvage the mess.  It wasn’t unlike Abraham driving a hard bargain with Jehovah, for that sole righteous soul that could well save Sodom and Gomorrah.

    Enter Buhari: who kept his head while his peers, with zest, lost theirs in sweet decay.  Yet, the vapid dogs-in-the-manger confected a certificate-less Buhari!  Many self-deluded souls have basked in that for the past seven years.  Well, delusion is free!

    Tinubu is at a similar pass: those who cannot pay his price are bitterly questioning his prize.

    Old man Bode George, as a young naval officer-governor of Ondo State, was a slithering snake on the smooth rock.  He left absolutely no trace or mark.

    Yet, he flies into a fit at the sight of Tinubu, who used his youth to leave indelible marks as Lagos governor (1999-2007), spawning a glorious set of brilliant leaders.

    Long before, the “me too” ensemble of the “Yoruba Nation” — a mishmash of acute modernists and stark atavists — had planted, in the South West political waters, enough anti-Tinubu toxin to literarily re-sink the Titanic.

    Yet, preening over routine bail for battling ram, Sunday Igboho, who had rammed himself into a ditch in Benin Republic, marked the zenith of their gumption.  How scalding hate cripples the brain!

    But hate, envy or mischief aside, Asiwaju Tinubu is the prime revelation since 1999.  If you doubt, compare and contrast him with other leading lights since then.

    Former President Olusegun Obasanjo inherited PDP as a solid military-conservative forces’ special purpose vehicle.  Fela would have called PDP Army Arrangement (AA).

    Yet, it took only eight years of imperial presidency and raw self-worship, ala Obasanjo, to crash that vehicle.  Another eight years after, the battered PDP crashed out of power — a ruin Obasanjo even celebrated with impish glee, because the ill-fated Goodluck Jonathan wouldn’t be his poodle.

    In 2003, Tinubu (no thanks to Obasanjo’s killer manoeuvres), was the last Alliance for Democracy (AD) governor standing, after the electoral perfidy of that year.

    Yet, from that meltdown, in 12 tumultuous years (2003 -2015), Tinubu led a progressive counter-charge:  AD to Action Congress (AC), to Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and finally, to APC: Nigeria’s first-ever successful political merger — and federal power.

    Away from party matters to policy and governance: the polity would have been much poorer but for Tinubu’s policy and constitutional activism as Lagos governor.

    Tinubu was part of the opposition lobby that shot down Obasanjo’s attempt at term extension.  Just imagine how the republic could have turned out, had that succeeded.

    Then, the law records teem with facts on how the Yemi Osinbajo-led Lagos legal team rang rings round Obasanjo’s Leviathan Federal Government, on core basic law matters, which negative resolutions would have chained the commonwealth.

    Tinubu, as governor, pushed radical concepts as independent power projects (IPP), away from the national grid; and liberalized railway corridors.  The dog-in-the-manger Federal Government balked at both, flexing sterile federal might.

    But today, both are near-routine under the Buhari Federal Government.  That explains Governor Jide Sanwo-Olu’s progress on Lagos urban railway projects (ideas, by the way, developed under Tinubu); and why the Kano government is building light rail.

    Still, just imagine what progress Nigeria today would have made on power, had the Obasanjo order been less hostile to fresh thinking in federalized electricity that Lagos, under Governor Tinubu, had pushed.

    Again, the Tinubu tendency in the APC takes credit for federal safety net policies: N-Power (youth empowerment and training), national home-grown school feeding programme and soft credit to the humblest of traders — a classic South West signature anchor on Nigeria’s federal ocean, brilliantly tested and patented by Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola during his eight-year Osun governorship: in OYES, O’Meals, etc.

    Yet, it’s on this home front that the Asiwaju, at 70, faces some dissonance, vis-a-vis his presidential dreams.  It’s quite a quandary: how could protégés you’d always come through for, be so dog-nosed cold at coming through for you this once?

    The most sensational tiff in the Tinubu camp would appear the Ogbeni-Asiwaju blow-out. That was unfortunate. Aregbesola should not have said all that stuff about Tinubu.

    Still, Aregbesola would appear more riled at Gboyega Oyetola, Osun governor, for his lack of fidelity to the legacies of the Ogbeni government, in which Oyetola served as chief of staff — and virtual prime minister — for eight years, than at the Asiwaju himself.  Still, that rumpus shouldn’t ever have happened.

    Be that as it may, what is required now is due reconciliation and mutual forgiveness.  The Ogbeni tendencies — left-left of social democracy, the Asiwaju himself being a progressive centrist and pragmatist — hold core strategic value for a Tinubu presidency, if the envious, baleful South West hyenas were not to query him, in supreme mischief, what his presidency had done for his native region.

    Femi Ojudu, celebrated guerrilla journalist and former senator, has also run his mouth in shocking antipathy to the Asiwaju cause.  Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, Ojudu’s boss, has sealed his.  But even with malice to no one, clearly the adorable Veepee doesn’t hate the Asiwaju cause.  He only craves the Osinbajo deal — hardly a crime!

    The other day, Muiz Banire, SAN, commissioner in Lagos for 12 years, mounted a media “lecture”: both Tinubu and Osinbajo might be “too old” for president!

    The aging: is it of persons or of ideas?  And when did the learned silk find that out?  Before his long, long Lagos tour of duty or after? Strange times!

    At 70, Asiwaju Tinubu is fated to living his most famous quip: power isn’t served a la carte.  You go there and grab it!  The famed strategist and pragmatist may yet cobble together the needed compromises to blunt these backyard threats!

    But as folks gather for his 70th birthday colloquium this morning, it’s time to toast the celebrator! Happy birthday to the Jagaban: most consequential politician of his era!

  • War, our oxygen

    War, our oxygen

    Not being a historian, I cannot even pretend to know the origin of war – when the first one was fought and between whom; its causes and its outcome. Even in my youthful days when we’d beat hostel rules to go watch films at Rex Cinema or Ocansey Cinema, I was never enamored of war films.

    The Americans were always the victorious over the Japanese. And I kept wondering whether my Japanese underdogs would ever have the upper hand. Maybe, my humble beginnings have aligned me irrevocably with underdogs.

    However, I know — though I am no expert — the humongous budget of the global war industry. I know the research that goes into developing  military arsenal that is driving mankind with unaccountable haste to the edge of the precipice and annihilation.

    A few, just a few, powers are at the commanding heights of this industrial complex that produces armaments, while the rest of us in our multitude look on in awe of their destructive powers.

    The sight of new guns, launchers and other munitions, the steely coldness of their appearance, fascinates and sends chills down the spine of us laymen. We look on hopeless and helpless, as we contemplate those that will be the eventual victims of these murderous technologies – our youth, our women, our children!

    Scientists developing these deadly munitions are smug in their sense of accomplishment, seeing each deadly invention as toy, and gloating over what the human mind is capable of. When they talk about its unimaginable destructive power, they smirk with orgasmic pleasure and delight.

    At that point they rarely contemplate their inventions as instruments of human misery, agents of death, and tools for wiping out years of human civilisation. They only anticipate the billions of dollars that is the outcome of their dark exertions, which will be stashed away in coded accounts with invisible banks. And they itch to have their deadly inventions tested to demonstrate to the world their deadly potency.

    In the meantime, leaders of poorer countries who ought to agonize over how to develop their countries and secure the future of their citizens, are busy negotiating with the big murderous powers how their countries could become proud owners of deadly armaments. Warfare is more important than welfare! So, to the basement of development is cast welfare of their citizens.

    Arms sales and acquisitions are negotiated every waking moment in international corridors of power. Most times, with strings attached. You may do this.  You cannot do that. This is how you must run your country, if you must purchase our weapons.

    Talk of arrogance of power; and talk of ignoble servitude — all to possess the real Weapons of Mass Destruction of the poor! And thus, the rich countries feed off the poor and become richer, while the poor get poorer.

    Meanwhile, poor infrastructure in education, health care, roads and transportation, agriculture, nutrition — indeed, the parlous state of their economies, reverberate in the people’s lament in the poor countries.

    The bulk of the people are ravaged by poverty, disease and squalor; while the preference of their renegade leaders is warfare over welfare. And lick-spittle-subservience, over political astuteness and assertiveness.

    Can peace rule the world? What happens to the gargantuan armament industry if peace should reign in the world? Maybe, our own world will be better, yes? Meanwhile, theirs will be boring, gloomy and horrid.

    They will certainly loathe that kind of existence and will do everything to ensure that provocation drives the world. And appetite for weapons never ever cloys. The excitement of seeing the hapless die is intoxicating.

    They would ensure that world peace remains a mirage. And that brothers are always at war, at pistols drawn; that suspicion, power-mongering and hate characterize relationships among neighbours.

    Just contemplate what makers and importers of generating sets will suffer if Nigeria were to have steady, uninterrupted power supply. Do you think they will fold their arms and allow policies that will instal stable power supply to gain root and succeed?

    Or what would become of producers of pure water from wells and boreholes, if waterworks in state and local governments roar back to life. Not on your life!

    It is ultimately about not what we gain when there’s peace in the world, but what oppressors lose if there’s no war in the world. Are we really not “the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth”? — apologies to the master satirist, Jonathan Swift.

    We may want to throw into the mix the reaction of environmentalists and animal rights group if some of these deadly weapons are modified for game, to destroy our flora and fauna. Head we lose tail we lose. Finito.

    • Ray Yusuf, seasoned broadcaster and retired NTA top buff, writes from Ilorin, Kwara State.

     

    Not the West, not Russia, just humanity

     

    Prof. Alade Fawole, of the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, is one of The Nation’s consistent corps of priceless contributors.

    Yet in “Ukraine: Forced into a war it can never win!” (March 17), Ripples wondered if anyone could start a piece with a fallacy but still execute a logical conclusion.

    The abiding thesis in Prof. Fawole’s piece was appeal to force.  Because Russia has overwhelming force, it can storm Ukraine and impose its will!

    In other words, might is right; and cross-border outlawry is chic!

    But John Donne, in “The Sun Rising”, a piece of solid poetic intellection, dismissed the notion of might-is-right: with a mere wink, a mere mortal could shut out the sun’s powerful beam!  Yet, the all-mighty sun decides whether it is day or night!

    That is the sheer power of human will!

    So, while Russia could brag there is no way it could lose this war (and good luck to President Vladimir Putin and his war generals on that), there is no logic to it.  It’s all a fallacy of force, which has no place in reasoned discourse.

    The professor sure has soft spots for Russia in its Ukraine grudge — no crime. Ripples too has soft spots for Ukraine?

    That Russia sympathy, from his piece, issued from the West’s annoying hypocrisy over Russia’s legitimate security fears.

    On that, the professor is spot on: do unto others as you want others to do unto you is no great virtue of the America-led West, as EU or as NATO.

    Indeed, in the West, there is too much cant to make Immanuel Kant, that rigorous, clear-thinking, straight-talking moral philosopher, to go hopping mad!

    Yet, neither western cant nor Russian grudge can summarily cancel out Ukraine’s sovereign right and will — including, if it comes to that, NATO membership.

    That, to be sure, would rankle.  America would kick were Mexico — or Canada — to enter into some security alliance with Russia.  Yet, that would still not justify a mad raid and severe bombing of Mexico as Russia now does of Ukraine, just because it could.

    It’s all the futility of force, when reasoned engagement would do.  In any case, after two World Wars, Putin ought to know playing Hitler all over would attract terrible consequences, even if Russia achieved a Pyrrhic victory on the battle front.

    But even on that, Putin and co are no longer so smug.  That explains why Russia seems to abandon the hot but stalled fronts, to savagely shell soft civilian targets.

    Everything, therefore, boils down to Ukraine’s will to pay the price to safeguard its sovereign rights.  That could well nurture a new international order anchored on basic humanity; from the present disorder driven by brute force.

  • Ghost of Oshiomhole

    Ghost of Oshiomhole

    How does one frame this piece: return of the tortoise or the ghost of Oshiomhole?  Both sweetly capture the shattering fate of Yobe Governor Mai Mala Buni, the APC provisional national chairman, who just hobbled himself.

    But that was after he had run countless rings round the party put in his care, following the conspiratorial overthrow of Adams Oshiomhole and his APC national executive.

    The tortoise, in the Yoruba folktale, swore he wouldn’t return to base until he was disgraced.  Well, Buni would return from Dubai, via London, not exactly soaring high — no thanks to alleged devious ploys by the body he heads.

    In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the evil Lady Macbeth thought the woes of her pliant, regicidal husband would end with Macbeth’s murder of Banquo, whose sole crime was the watery witches’ prophecy that Banquo would not be king but would father kings.

    Yet, Banquo’s ghost unnerved the Macbeths more than a living Banquo ever could; thus turning their rogue royal dreams into cold ash.

    Like Banquo, like Oshiomhole — Buni and co are finding out.  A much more powerful spectre of Oshiomhole laughs, to cold scorn, the stunning manoeuvres of the APC plotter ensemble, more than Chairman Adams ever could!

    An alleged plot in Buni’s macabre drama was to gift former PDP President Goodluck Jonathan the APC ticket, pair up with him and, after one term, gun for president!

    Goodluck Jonathan!  Under whom everything crashed though he had much more cash?  Would that be Buni and co’s ultimate “change”, when the party had more solid stuff to point to, despite the eternal droning of the woe-begotten nay orchestra?

    To be sure, that charge could be wild rumours, as APC’s coven of plotters turn upon themselves; but belch out bizarre stuff to roast Maradona Buni for out-dribbling all.

    Everyone is a thief, that cynical Nigerian quip goes. But only those caught are the confirmed barawo!  So, it might well be for Buni.  No tears from here!

    Still, however the Yobe governor emerges from it all, his nimble stealth and ghostly feigns, which have prolonged the tenure of his Caretaker Extraordinary Convention Planning Committee (CECPC) from six months to nearly two years — and still counting — are nothing but extraordinary!

    Extraordinary caretakers?  Spectacular perfidy?  Tremendous undertakers?  Ha!

    But again, right there, you have a stark Oshiomhole-Buni contrast: the one, the legit chair, for party love, held back pressing his legal rights; the other, the contrived chair, sits tight, as long as it bloody takes, juggling sundry tricks, party love be damned!

    At the peak of Oshiomhole’s trials, his ruthless traducers even contrived to denude him in his native Edo, vital elections and all. Yet, the man stood firm.

    Now who laughs last?  In Abuja, Buni gets his comeuppance!  In Benin City, Godwin Obaseki, emergency PDP governor, brawls to no end with new partisan sweethearts!

    To boot, Philip Shaibu, Obaseki’s deputy and Oshiomhole’s life protege-turned traducer-in-chief, just received a fitting tongue-lashing from a garrulous Nyesom Wike!    Obaseki himself joined the fray to tongue-lash Wike!  The Edo rogue revolution is consuming own children!  Who laughs last?

    But back to sitting tight to skew party stuff for personal gain: while Chairman Buni was at his alleged high-wire national manoeuvers, Secretary John James Akpanudoedehe was also accused of feathering his nest on his alleged Akwa Ibom governorship!

    But all of these skullduggery couldn’t have happened without a rich nest of plotters party-wide, bent on gaming others, in the push towards 2023.

    The APC governors, to start with.  From privileged party picks in the last set of elections, they decreed selves czars who must be obeyed, else their party dies! Their war cry?  Governors, by hook or by crook, gobble up the party!

    Yet, many of these folks are no more than butterflies that kid selves they are all-mighty eagles — eagles that could soar, to any height, to corral whatever they crave.

    By Buni’s hobble, however, it just might dawn on them that they fatally mistake fleeting formal power for eternal control of the partisan street.  Some costly delusion there!

    The bit about Buni cobbling a sweetheart deal with Goodluck Jonathan may well be wild.  But not so Buni’s fixation with PDP and its elected cadres — and well, even some certified noisemakers that add little or no value.

    Indeed, among the most perplexing, of Buni’s frenzied partisan “sign-ons”, was the “unveiling” at Aso Rock, of the loquacious Femi Fani-Kayode, as APC’s latest capture — and before a petrified president, razed countless times by FFK’s reckless tongue!

    To be sure that was, for President Muhammadu Buhari himself, a fitting purgatory.  If he hadn’t succumbed to pressure from anti-Oshiomhole forces, perhaps he would have escaped the FFK ordeal which, frankly, added no value — not to the president; not to his party.

    Before and after FFK had come other Buni “sign-ons”, in the fevered season of cross-party raid-and-capture: Ebonyi’s Dave Umahi (arguably by miles, South East’s best developmental governor); and Cross River’s Ben Ayade — two decent blokes.

    Still, whatever their gubernatorial strides, they had no right to take PDP mandate into APC.  The law on that may be muddied up but its immorality is crystal clear.

    True, it’s sweet karma seeing PDP being paid back in own bad coins.  Under President Olusegun Obasanjo, the ruling PDP was a menace to the opposition, subverting them at will; and preening and bragging about its toxic conduct.

    Still, how did that all end for PDP?  And why should Buni not have learnt from the former ruling party’s mistake?  In any case, the current tenure ruckus involving Umahi might soon engulf Ayade, and Zamfara’s Bello Matawalle — and poof!: Buni’s party-growth-by-partisan-raid rogue doctrine goes up in smoke!

    Yet, there was an alternative — admittedly a harder road to follow, among deluded fellows: party discipline, party supremacy and shared values in the party’s social democratic charter, which Oshiomhole tried so hard to push.

    Yes, not a few accused Oshiomhole of high-handedness and stuff — fair calls, perhaps. But with hindsight, could the ruling party under Oshiomhole, warts and all, have fared worse than this shifty mess Buni has foisted on everyone?

    Buni’s flighty CECPC seems as far from delivering the APC convention to elect a new national executive, as it was in June 2020 when it assumed office in a stunning railroad.

    Though APC continues to bandy a March 26 date, its path is littered with a slew of booby traps, allegedly planted there by Buni’s sit-tight CECPC.  Yet, the 2023 elections are around the bend!

    Pastor Tunde Bakare, nobody’s poodle, shuttled once on the Lagos-Ibadan rail and crowed: whoever comes after Buhari must continue on his twin-strides of infrastructure (rail, roads and air) and agriculture — two relatable sound bytes Buni should have grabbed to grow the APC as interim chair.

    Instead, Buni’s CECPC blundered into a jungle of intrigues, got fixated with sterile PDP capture, and risks hobbling off in disgrace, leaving their party in peril.

    Buni’s is the classic tragedy of a sane path insanely not taken!

     

  • Putin peril

    Putin peril

    Adolf Hitler is long dead.  But his blasted memory continues to haunt nervy humanity, still stunned by his all-round evil.

    Which is why Russia’s Vladimir Putin, playing Hitler again, should worry everyone — even if you’re assailed too, by the mealy-mouthed hypocrisy of the Western powers.

    Around February 21 — three days before the Russian invasion — “Why Ukraine?”, by one Thomas Gentry, started making the rounds on WhatsApp and sundry social media, chalking the proverbial 1, 001 reasons Russia covets Ukraine: greed!

    But on greed, can the West throw the first stone?  Might the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU), both now playing crusading angels against Satan Putin, be ogling Ukraine’s stupendous wealth too?

    On naked greed, neither the West nor Russia are angels!

    Still, that shouldn’t blunt the present Putin peril — clearly not lost on the 168-strong Body of Nobelists, including Nigeria’s Prof. Wole Soyinka, who just threw Vladimir Putin under the bus, for his aggression against Ukraine, citing a chilling Hitler parallel.

    In 1939, Nazi Germany blasted through Poland with an overwhelming blitzkrieg — Warsaw saw war!

    In 1941, the Nazis pummelled the defunct Soviet Union, of which Russia was the prime state, the Nobelists just reminded everyone.

    Yet in 2022, Russia is applying similar strong-arm tactics, and birthing rogue territories, because it feels it could corral Ukraine with raw might?

    So Russia, bullied by Nazi Germany, could itself bully Ukraine — which, by the way, co-bore the brunt of that Nazi lunacy?

    But the Nazi invasion of the defunct Soviet Union — how did it end, after its “initial gra-gra”, to borrow that picturesque pidgin?

    Is that the catastrophe Putin is setting up to snare his beloved Russia, as Hitler did his Nazi Germany, by this Ukraine campaign?

    Herr Hitler (sorry, Putin) has gone mad again!

    Still, the Putin peril didn’t start with the unfolding Ukraine debacle, with all its avoidable human suffering and misery.

    Rather, it started with Putin’s likely diseased thinking, as gauged from a rambling, classless broadcast, teeming with weird history, base insults and vulgar abuse.  That broadcast ordered the February 24 invasion.

    Putin not only echoed Hitler with mind unhinged, he also beamed, like a blinding flash, the Karl Marx bit of history repeating itself as tragedy and farce.

    In his farce, Putin railed at the “neo-Nazis” of Ukraine, dismissed the Zelenskyy order as drug-crazed, ultra-right monsters bent on cleaning out Ukraine’s ethnic Russians.

    But to that Nazi sabre-rattling, history chuckles.  Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, is Jewish!  A neo-Nazi Jew?  But that irony appears totally lost on Putin!

    Putin also swore to get Zelenskyy and co first, before they got his beloved Russian minority folks, thus projecting a fearsome Russian ultra-nationalism — not unlike Hitler’s reckless touting of the Aryan superior race theory.

    To walk his talk, Hitler — sorry, Putin — carved out two new states, bastion of ethnic Russian separatists, out of Ukraine’s troubled Donbas!

    Hitler, even at the apex of his power fancy, never deluded himself that his victims would roll over; and hail him as a liberationist hero.

    Yet, here we were: Putin telling his would-be vanquished in Ukraine to not only roll over but also take up arms and overthrow their President, Zelenskyy, who only in 2019 harvested 73 per cent of the vote.  What farce!  What outlawry!

    But while Russia’s bombs pound Ukraine’s prime cities and bloody its ill-fated people, a no less explosive Vladimir-Volodymyr tangle blazes.  It’s a classic David versus Goliath stuff!

    For starters, Top dog Vladimir versus Underdog Volodymyr.   You could feel that in how the West-dominated global media frame the Ukraine cause — and rightly so.

    Then, Vladimir the killer, locked with Volodymyr the suicidal.

    Vladimir, dour but formidable power brawler faces off Volodymyr, ace actor and nimble mobilizer, rallying his people, out-gunned and out-bombed, to resist to the last man!

    But with mere words, Volodymyr seems to have fared better than Vladimir, with fierce bombs.  Despite Russia’s tanks, Ukraine’s will remains strong.

    CNN has shown stunning live pictures that should truly worry Putin.  Russia just captured a city. Yet, its band of unarmed denizens told the Russian troops to go to hell.

    Halyna Yanchenko, young woman and Ukraine member of parliament, swore to CNN Russia would prevail only if it killed every Ukrainian.

    Another CNN live picture spotted panicky Russian troops shooting at unarmed locals to break up an anti-Russia protest, hitting a protester in the leg.

    Though bloodied, these folks aren’t exactly rolling over — not the exact picture in Putin’s head, as he ordered his short-and-sweet campaign! This mess could linger for much longer!

    Yet, Putin couldn’t even tell his people he is waging a brutal war.  The official lingo is “special military operation”; and independent media, like Radio Echo and TV Rain, that balked at that euphemism have shut down, threatened with a new law prescribing 15 years’ jail for “fake news” (read grim truth) on the Ukraine War.

    How long will the Ukraine resistance, much romanticized in the western media, last? As  long as it takes to spread Russia thin and make Putin blink?

    Or would Volodymyr Zelenskyy and co become the 2022 AD version of the 480 BC King Leonidas of Sparta and his out-matched 300 warriors, who fought and bravely perished at Thermopylae but glowed in the heart of antiquity, as much as their slayers perished from human memory?  Gripping stuff!

    But how long too, will Russia survive the economic siege the America-led western powers are laying to it: first, to cut off its cash; and then, cripple its fearsome arsenal — a strategic ploy that holds no comfort for Russia?

    Putin’s latest growl at these sanctions (which have degraded the Ruble and made global pariahs of innocent Russians) is to warn the West that Russia might deem sanctions as acts of war.  That followed his earlier threat to put his nuclear arsenal on high alert — to unleash Russia’s nukes on whoever dared to fight on Ukraine’s side?

    Hitler all over again, insane threats and all?

    Yet, America and co should also be very careful to not overplay the sanctions.  Just apply enough for harried Putin to abandon his gambit. The League of Nations collapsed — and World War 2 came — because the price of peace for defeated Germany, with harsh reparations from the Treaty of Versailles, was just too stiff.

    That fuelled the rise of Hitler, following the collapse of the Weimar Republic.  A trapped Putin, with Russia’s nukes, could well go that path!

    Still, might can never be right.  So, the globe has a moral duty to save Ukraine from Russia’s aggression — fired more by Putin’s dark grudges than by Russia’s interests.

  • Of TNM and messiahs

    Of TNM and messiahs

    Third Force” is fast becoming the prime soap of Nigeria’s election circuit — and The National Movement (TNM) would appear the latest proof.

    On vital election eves, sundry dreamers grab the garb of emergency messiahs come to down the major partisan order — like some hi-tech supersonic bomber.

    It’s empty bombast that nevertheless fires up the naive.  Enter, the perennial “Third Force”!

    On 1 February 2018, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, glitz and dash, announced he had enrolled in his Coalition for Nigeria Movement (CNM).  That self-massaging spin reeked with sweet platitudes, all too familiar with Obasanjo’s public persona.

    After public letters to de-market the Muhammadu Buhari order, the Owu chief came zeroing on his last-ditch pre-election racket.  Many a starry-eyed bawled “third force”!

    But the Owu chief would later hand the African Democratic Congress (ADC) the CNM franchise.  Still, neither CNM nor ADC — both Obasanjo’s Hobson’s choices — drew much traction in popular response.

    So, Hobson (and choice) vanished — until the next election season: to preach fresh preachments, yet little difference.

    The racket is alive and well — and Rabi’u Musa Kwankwaso’s TMN appears its latest reincarnation!

    However, not only Obasanjo’s CNM postured as 2019 “third force”.  The Nigerian Intervention Movement (NIM), which Olisa Agbakoba, SAN, led, also jostled for it.  So did Chief Olu Falae’s Social Democratic Party (SDP).

    Somewhat, “third force” comes with evocative names: CNM; NIM. From SDP came the added ring of grand resurrection: the platform that delivered Abiola’s stunning June 12 mandate seeking radical vote insurrection to save Nigeria!

    How sweet!  How quaint!  How brave!

    So, if Alhaji Kwankwaso’s TNM comes charging with chest-thumping bravura of national redemption, it has some pseudo-history driving it!

    Still, TNM comes with sundry side drama.  Enter again, the political Titan for all seasons, our irrepressible Ebora Owu!

    CNM dawned in 2018.  Its softening fire, like a brutal battling army’s, was the artillery of thunderous letters, calling the extant order horrible names, to wild media roar.

    With the current TNM soap, Baba has become the patron saint of youths and their political dreams.  In 1999, Gen. Obasanjo became elected president at 62.  In 2007, he completed his second term at 70.  Yet, Jagunlabi — as the Yoruba would joke — craved a third, though illegal term!

    Had he got that third term, how would the youths’ political dreams, which he now champions, stand today?  But perhaps post-power, Baba’s Saul turned to Paul, after a blinding flash, between Ota and the Abeokuta Hill top!

    Of course, there’s nothing to any age campaign.  Yahaya Bello, Kogi governor, is the youngest of the current brood.  What value has his youth added to his rule?

    But tweak that: so a smart, young Bola Tinubu, who ran rings round President Obasanjo, despite his imperial pretensions, becomes dumb just because he has added a few years — during which he even engineered the fall of Obasanjo’s PDP from central power?  Or a young, indifferent Bello would turn sudden genius at old age?

    Please!  The age campaign is empty beyond ultra-cheap mischief!

    Still, TNM boasts own exclusive, if bathetic, side soap: which high drama could have trumped Solomon Dalung’s Oscar, at TNM’s formal presentation in Abuja?

    Dalung, lawyer and President Buhari’s first-term Sports and Youth Development minister, craved a heart-felt apology!

    “We must sincerely apologize,” Dalung, Biblical ash, sack cloth and all, rued on behalf of his ruling APC, “because we never promised Nigerians that they would be buying rice at N35, 000 at this time instead of the N7, 000 we met.”  Eeyah!

    But flip that verbal theatrics and you’ll see searing emotions slam at hurting pockets.

    Assuming the base claims are earnest — and not soapbox hyperbole — what was the real cost of that N7, 000 bag of rice, beyond its alluring pocket-friendliness?

    For starters, it was imported rice: the cash Nigerian farmers should gross for honest sweat, parcelled to foreign farmers.  If reckless imports feed foreign labour, how does Nigeria attain a thriving local economy and achieve food security?

    If a boom in local rice leads to higher rice milling, would the price not eventually crash, aside from tackling head-on the twin-plague of youth joblessness and mass penury?

    Of course, Dalung’s take is all belly economics.   Somehow,  the glorious tribunes of belly economics wail loudest over hunger in the land!  That irony is lost on them!

    Dalung also talked the talk on insecurity: “I will appear before God on the day of judgment and one question would be, Solomon Dalung, and you went and mobilized Nigerians and when they are killing people, bandits raping women and children, what did you say?”

    Legitimate, if dire, query!  Still, what is leadership?  Just sweet lamentation?  Or thinking hard to push rigorous alternatives?  If sweet lament is all Dalung and his TNM crowd can crow, what difference would they make?

    But that is the point: opportunistic droning, the hallmark of cheap politics, soars because of media failure.

    Notorious fact: Muhammadu Buhari’s Nigeria is no el-dorado.  Things are hard!  But even at that, in seven slugging years, Nigeria rose from nowhere to become Africa’s No. 1 cultivator of rice.

    Within the same period — with two crippling recessions: one, by past reckless looting; the other, by COVID-19 — Nigeria also became the world’s No. 1 producer of yam tubers.  Grow what you eat, eat what you grow!

    Meanwhile, from Goodluck Jonathan’s all-round near-paralysis (though swimming in more cash), critical infrastructure are sprouting — rail, airports and game-changing roads and bridges, many of them permanent vote-scammers of the PDP era.

    Yet, Nigeria grosses much less in oil earnings; thus needing loans to do these critical investments — loans that the poverty wailing orchestra nevertheless demonize, resorting to cheap scarecrows.

    Yes, there are areas the administration has not done well.  Power is one, with DisCos that supply bulk darkness fleecing their customers with premium bills.

    Security is another.  Boko Haram has been curtailed.  But insecurity has snowballed into banditry and kidnapping.  That offers fresh challenges.

    A more diligent media should clinically have tracked it all; and using 2015 as base, presented definitive thresholds: of progress, retrogress, or stagnation.

    But how can it do that after making easy peace with free-wheeling gloom and doom?

    At every critical electoral juncture, what the lazy media projects is total hopelessness.  Hopelessness begets hustler-saviours mouthing cheap bluff, never superior thinking.  That breeds election-season platitudes.

    That is the harsh reality of TNM.  Enough of this pantomime of fake saviours!

  • News or fib?

    News or fib?

    News or fib?  You better pop that question, as you tear through the latest menu on the on-going West-Russia face-off over Ukraine.

    The United States claims a Russia Ukraine invasion is only days away.  Russia counters it’s withdrawing its troops, after some war games around Ukraine borders.

    The only things you can track — but hardly vouch for — are the specific claims and counter-claims.  All else perhaps is spin.

    The West, over the years, is notorious for raining its values (no crime?) and its biases (no virtues either) on other races, in its perennial go at cultural domination.

    A core value is “democracy”, in which Russia and former satellite communist states are trapped, after the 1991 collapse of communism, as global opposite to capitalism.

    A core bias — call it vice, if you will — is the West’s activism in gay rights, which it tears from harsh censure of faith and morals, to the sweet, airy plain of “human rights”.

    Why? Age-old sodomy the West and its mass media now garnish and push as regnant rights; for which the Metropole must harshly sanction erring peripheral races!

    The USA/Europe versus Russia showdown on Ukraine, however, is more of an intra-tribal war among basically the same people, nevertheless torn apart by ideology and sundry preferences.

    Ukraine is the big prize — a former state in the defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR: 1922-1991), pushing to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO, formed in 1949): the post-World War 2 North America/Western Europe capitalist defence alliance, arrayed against the Soviet communist Warsaw Pact (dissolved 1991), to which Ukraine belonged.

    Indeed Ukraine, in historical terms, echoes the 1955 birth of the Warsaw Pact.  West Germany just got admitted into NATO.  So the USSR, which principal state was Russia, rallied communist East Germany and other satellites to enter the Warsaw Pact.

    So, if Russia now balks at Ukraine pushing to join NATO, you could see the history behind it.  Besides, for context: it is like Texas (which sometimes threatens to pull out of the United States) actually doing so; and leaving NATO for another defence alliance which its former satellite states, in the USA and Europe, consider hostile.

    But what Ukraine is to the West is what Belarus is to the old Soviet bloc.  Belarus is comfy with Russia, as much as Ukraine seeks fresh friends in Western Europe.

    By the way, Russia and Belarus labour under skewed post-communist era “democracy”, for which they get throatily mocked by the West.  Both, however, face their traducers with cold contempt and chilly defiance.

    So, Russia makes no fuss over Belarus’s fealty to it.  But over its dead body would Ukraine look West.

    But the West too has demonized Belarus to no end  as Russia’s puppy, flashing Belarus’s often fiddled votes; and Alexander Lukashenko, its gangling President, as notorious proof of bad company with Russia.

    On Ukraine and Belarus, therefore, the West and Russia only manifest visceral preferences, not any logical differences.  All are of the same Euro tribe.  But the visceral differences stem from differing ideologies.

    Still, Russia has been more gung-ho to prevent Ukraine from exercising its sovereign rights of association; than the West has frowned at Belarus’s relations with Russia.

    Indeed in 2014, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, a peninsula part of Ukraine, though peopled mostly by ethnic Russians.  For that, Russia stands condemned.

    That invasion and annexation could well justify the West chaffing at another encore by Russia the Bully, salivating to pounce on Ukraine yet again — not unlike the Achebe coward that becomes hungry for a fight, each time he meets an unfortunate fellow he can maul.

    So, no tears for Russia — for whatever Western response to its current manoeuvre in Ukraine.  But that hardly banishes a fair x-ray of the West’s tactics — and for that matter, the Russian counter.

    That returns the discourse to the original poser: news or fib?  On this score, neither side is an angel.  To push its case, fair is foul and foul is fair to both sides.

    In reporting Russia’s latest Ukraine stratagem, Western channels present no news.  All they rain down is rogue Russia guilty as charged.  On the double, it should be marched to the guillotine! That could well have happened — had the West had the means!

    But Russia too is no saint.  It may have been hopelessly out-gunned in the global media war, as it had hoped to crush and squelch Ukraine.  It has practically encircled its neighbour by formidable troops and fearsome arms.  It also projects raw, if rogue power, by its provocative nuclear war game with Belarus.

    Yet, in its local media — ironically as reported by these same western media — Russia is alleged to have thoroughly slanted the report, presenting itself as an innocent victim of media bullying and international conspiracy.

    Media bullying?  Yes. International conspiracy?  Maybe.  But innocent victim? Never!  A power player that chokes another with mass troops and brutal arms is never innocent.

    Still, the United States and allies have done a good job of putting Russia on the leash. President Biden warns that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is days away, even after an earlier definite date of invasion — Wednesday, February 16 — came and passed, with Russia selling an alleged counter-dummy that it was withdrawing.

    Then, Vice President Kamala Harris went to the Munich Security Conference (MSC) to thunder hail and brimstone should Russia invade Ukraine which again, she insisted, could be days away.

    Too bad for Russia — the optics were not good at all!  With its Western foes in Munich, Germany, rallying the tribe and playing peaceniks, Russian Vladimir Putin and Belarus President Lukashenko were beamed enjoying a live war game, cutting the very contrast as war hawks!

    The near-official rumour?  That Putin stayed way from Munich because he never wanted peace!  You can trust the West to go on an over-drive, in patented media bullying, when they want to impose their preferences as global holy writ.

    All these torrents of warning have sort of frozen Russia, whatever its Ukraine intentions are — can’t go forward; can’t step backward; just frozen in its tracks!

    Still, from these patented rituals come probing queries from the most unexpected of quarters: a critical reporter told a high US Department of State official that US “intelligence” didn’t quite cut it, as proof of Russia’s settled invasion of Ukraine.

    Remember how former US Secretary of State, the late Gen. Colin Powell, quoted “US intelligence”, and told the UN Security Council that Iraq indeed had “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD), to justify the second US Iraqi invasion?  That was 5 February  2003.

    It all turned out a fib that Powell would regard as his illustrious life’s darkest single blot!

    So, when you read, listen to, or watch the next report on Ukraine, just pinch yourself: is it news?  Is it spin?  Or even outright fib?

    That may well gauge how the crusading angels of free speech have under-developed basic news.

     

  • IPOB: home to roost?

    IPOB: home to roost?

    Blundering into anarchy is sweet and giddy.  Clambering back into sanity is more sober and chastening.

    That is the long and short of the IPOB sit-at-home in the South East.

    But even now, no one is taking responsibility, beyond the funny apologia that Nnamdi Kanu — or even his IPOB inner shrine — was or was no party to the original order.

    Some spin!

    But if, as the Bible says, you don’t seek the truth (no matter how ugly or how stupid it makes you look), how do you set yourself free?

    Enyinnaya Abaribe, senator of the Federal Republic, moaned aloud, what the IPOB leader told him, in his DSS suite: that he, Nnamdi Kanu, didn’t know anything about, or ordered anyone to sit at home on Mondays.

    IPOB would later amplify Abaribe: “Comments from Abaribe are true, because we stated it before now that Kanu, through his lawyers, had asked IPOB members and its leadership to stop the Monday sit-at-home order,” it claimed.  ”Those purportedly enforcing the directive have been killing and burning property of Igbo people and they will incur the wrath of IPOB in due course.”

    Sweet alibi, isn’t that?  Wait!  Is that IPOB’s idea of ramming shut the stable doors, after the tragic stallion had galloped free, wreaking free havoc all over the place?

    Compare and contrast this lame apologia to the ringing, 30 July 2021 diktat, from Emma Powerful, the IPOB spokesperson:

    “We the global family of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), ably led by our great leader Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, wish to announce to all Biafra citizens, friends of Biafra and lovers of Biafra freedom and independence,” blared Emma the Triumphant and Powerful, “that IPOB leadership has declared every Monday ‘a ghost Monday’.  This declaration takes effect from Monday, 9 August 2021.  Nobody should attempt to flout this directive, as doing so may come with huge consequences. Anybody flouting this order is taking a grave risk.”

    Still on the original diktat and the Abaribe recant: the language of threat and force rips through both.

    That exposes the IPOB lack of any grand strategy, beyond cheap bluff and bluster in the media.

    That lack of strategy handed rogue elements the (a)moral licence to sack the vulnerable Igbo, eking out daily bread; under the pretext of enforcing the sit-at-home.  That’s the genesis of today’s brewing lament.  No tears from here!

    By the way, of what good, tactical or strategic, is a Monday sit-at-home for a people that glory in their beloved commerce?  Monday, the capital day of trade, wilfully wasted, week in, week out?

    For how long did IPOB hope to enforce its language of force?  Or hope to hold out against the Nigerian state, not at all willing to suffer gladly its costly tantrums?

    If milking mass sympathy from the Igbo that subscribe to the Biafra philosophy was its strength, how long did IPOB hope that loyalty would last, with daily bread vanishing; and same loyalists plunged into economic ruin, if not outright poverty?

    The way IPOB postures in the media, even with its diminishing ace(s), reminds you of the tortoise in the folktales.

    “I’m travelling”, he declared.

    “When are you returning,” he was asked.

    “When I’m thoroughly disgraced,” he deadpanned.

    A struggle, no matter how justified, is almost doomed to failure — and disgrace — if it lacks a sound strategy.  That is the story of IPOB and triumphant sit-at-home, fast turning ash.

    But that could also ring true of Senator Abaribe.  Abaribe was he, the zesty Biafra ideologue, that stood bail for Kanu.  But his protege jumped bail without thinking twice.

    The same Abaribe made sweet propaganda of his “one-dot-nation”, a vicious pun of President Muhammadu Buhari’s dire warning to IPOB, over possible isolation, in its secessionist gambit.

    Ironically, that isolation — of failed tactics, if not of ideology — is what is now putting IPOB on the defensive.  Yet, it would blindly bluff than reappraise its methods.

    Read Also: Nnamdi Kanu, IPOB under fire over Southeast sit-at-home protests

    But back to Abaribe: what are his motives by his exertions?  True belief in Igbo secession?  Glory, on the Igbo political street, to later power him to Abia gubernatorial glory?  Or just the preening Biafran in the Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria?

    No one can bet which is which.  Yet, the Abaribe multivalence echoes the Igbo political crossroads, in the context of a federal Nigeria.

    IPOB wants Biafra.  Ohanaeze Ndigbo wants a federal Nigeria, consecrated by an Igbo Presidency in 2023.

    Which of the two represents the genuine Igbo yearning?  And how are other Nigerians, with whom Ndigbo must negotiate, supposed to understand and interpret these many voices from the Igbo Babel — and bedlam?

    However the Igbo navigate out of this logjam, playing the card of victim hood wouldn’t cut it.  Here is time for fresh thinking — if that is not an impossibility.

    In truth, the Nigerian debacle is no sole monopoly of any ethnic group.  So, it’s time to face the stark facts and stop playing the ostrich.

    When power changed hands in 2015 and leading Igbo politicians found themselves in novel opposition jungle, they embraced Kanu and his reckless, insane screeches.

    They told themselves the lie that they had suddenly become the sworn enemy of the Fulani — the same Fulani they had shared and savoured central power since 1960.  But that was because the Fulani that became president wasn’t from their preferred party.

    That lie gave Kanu’s cross-ethnic abuse-and-traduce campaign its initial bounce.  Now that Kanu’s methods appear coming a sad cropper, the solution is another lie: Kanu the Immaculate has done nothing wrong.  Spring him, and open sesame, things would be sorted!  Really?

    If it’s any comfort, this time last year, the so-called “owners of the Yoruba” were busy goading Sunday Igboho to his “Yoruba Nation” doom.  Those vicious data tigers stopped only after Igboho had rammed himself into the Cotonou ditch.

    Not IPOB!  Even with Kanu in the can to answer for his alleged crimes, IPOB continues to bluster as if it had another ace, beyond the footloose, tongue-loose Kanu.

    The other day, IPOB jerked awake to oust Nigeria’s national anthem from “Biafra”.  Its New Year’s package also banned “Fulani cow” from Biafraland.  Hip?  Okay.

    But how about Lagos waking up to ban “Igbo spare parts” from Lagos?  Or Kaduna or Borno or Sokoto decreeing “no Igbo spare parts” in their area?  Hip too?  Or welcome yet another din, wail and squeal of “Igbo marginalization”?

    “Fulani cow”.  ”Igbo spare parts”.  What do they even mean — beyond the folly of ethnicizing mutual economic value?  It leads nowhere but avoidable perdition.

    It’s a grand irony — isn’t it? — that those who gripe over eternal “injustice” seem numb to the routine hurts they hurl at others!

    Fixing Nigeria is a function of give-and-take.  After IPOB’s sit-at-home, and the self-ruin it has unleashed on its locale, let the South East agitators turn a new leaf.