The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olakunle Abimbola

  • To SA with loot

    To SA with loot

    By Olakunle Abimbola

     

    To South Africa with loot, sorry love!

    That is grim but fair; for anytime there is some excitement in that polity, industrial-scale looting and arson appear part of the mix.

    So it is, with the current looting and riots, that greeted the latest station, in Jacob Zuma’s bumpy public career: freedom fighter, to president, to jail bird — to borrow the unflattering projection of a BBC report.

    It could have been a gripping grist for Shakespearean or Greek and Roman classical tragedy, except that Mr. Zuma had, peak or trough, exhibited the character (or none of it) of a low man — to echo the tragedy of Willy Loman, the tragic hero and failed travelling salesman, in Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller’s contemporary tragedy.

    But while Willy Loman’s tragic flaw was being untrue to himself, though a decent bloke, Jacob Zuma’s is being wilfully true to himself, though an indecent fellow.

    That would appear a fair take, from the scandalous controversies that always swirl round him: from jailed liberation stalwart under the Apartheid regime (a heavy cross he admirably lugged from the tender age of 17), his stormy (un)presidential years (2009-2018) and the looming tragedy of a jailed former president — even outside his current jam: a 15-month jail term, for contempt of court — the first in South African history!

    Unlike the fictional Loman that got milled by a cold, cruel and soulless capitalist grind, real-life Zuma seems the much lampooned “African Big Man” (with fulsome apologies to The Economist of London), full of illicit power and glory, and sworn to bending — nay crushing — everyone: state, people and all, to his own will!

    A Farouk Chothia BBC report, of July 8, paints Jacob Zuma’s unsavoury long tiff with the law (2005 to 2021), dating back to his pre-presidential days — a profile hardly presidential!:

    — 2005: Charged with raping a family friend — acquitted in 2006.

    — 2005: Charged with corruption over multi-billion dollar 1999 arms deal — charges dropped before he becomes president in 2009.

    —  2016:  Court orders he should be charged with 18 counts of corruption over the deal — he appealed, but in 2017 lost a bid to overturn them.

    —  2016:  Court rules he breached his oath of office by using government money to upgrade private home — he has repaid the money.

    — 2017:  Public protector said he should appoint judge-led inquiry into allegations he profiteered from relationship with wealthy Gupta family — he denies allegations, as have Guptas.

    — 2018:  Zuma approves inquiry into claims of state looting.

    — 2018:  The National Prosecuting Authority confirms Mr. Zuma will face prosecution for 12 charges of fraud, one of racketeering, two of corruption, and one of money laundering, relating to the arms deal, which he denies.

    — 2021:  Begins a 15-month jail sentence after the Constitutional Court orders his arrest for refusing to testify at the commission into state looting.

    All of us are rogues, goes that cynical Nigerian street quip, but whoever is caught is the barawo!  That might just be the unpleasant reality among the ANC cadre, 27 years after triumph over White Apartheid.

    This BBC portraiture of Zuma is anything but beatific.  But the former president, rocking monumental disgrace because of personal recklessness, may just be a sick metaphor for ranking ANC apparatchiks.

    Those have been accused of cornering South African resources under Black re-empowerment, just as the White racist red necks did under Apartheid.  Brutally, it is dubbed “state capture” — and Zuma is now in hot soup, simply because he shunned the Raymond Zondo Commission of Inquiry into State Capture.

    That appears the point of Brian Pottinger, a former editor/publisher of the  South African Sunday Times, in his July 15 analysis for The Post.

    In that piece, Pottinger blamed the KwaZulu Natal rioting and looting, by the comrade-masses, protesting the Zuma jailing, as direct tutorials from the grab-and-grab of the itchy and golden fingers of ANC comrade-aristocrats in power.

    He slammed Zuma as an irredeemable ruffian — which he may well be — and gored President Cyril Ramaphosa as a pussy-footing incompetent, who hates to rock the boat, when he should be the fiery Daniel come to judgment, over his decadent comrades.

    Why, he even struck a familiar, if excitable note, to local Muhammadu Buhari critics here, dismissing Ramaphosa as taciturn, remote and sepulchral; instead of fierce, dashing and assertive — traits he needed to have, to summarily chop off the Zuma and allied sore, before decay into the current cancer.

    But read more closely: Pottinger was pushing a rollback on post-Apartheid policies of Black empowerment, as ode to the White privilege days of yore, though without being outwardly racist!

    For Ramaphosa in Pottinger’s court — just as PMB in critics’ court here — it’s damn you do, damn you don’t: the politics — or is it, cynicism? — of public criticism!

    In the garb of sacred criticism, you unleash the most profane of closet yearnings, which though may not edify the public space, is sure to titillate not a few.

    Still, whatever is Pottinger’s closet motive, South Africa and ANC, the country and party of Madiba, the great Nelson Mandela, are in a mess and need urgent help.

    Pottinger is bang on the money: what was designed as Black radical economic transformation, in response to decades of cruel apartheid and mass economic strangulation, has petered down to serious socio-economic deformation.  Holding the short end of the stick is the Black majority, just as they did during White racist rule.

    That structural breakdown explains the South African penchant to resort to looting and arson, at the proverbial drop of a hat.  With tact and wisdom, but never by rashness, President Ramaphosa must do whatever it takes to stamp out that rot.

    Failure to do that would amount to an epochal failure, that would question the very basis of ANC intervention: from its early day as Black pressure group against White domination, to its colourful history as a liberationist movement, to its democratic triumph of 1994.  All would be undone!

    But a good start, to get that right, is calling the Zuma bluff.  Zuma, the virulent strongman mightier than his country’s institutions, is a nightmare for any country — and Donald Trump, even after 245 years of American statehood and democracy, is living and ugly proof.

    Let Zuma stay in the can.  Draft whoever were accessories to the mayhem that greeted his jailing to meet him in there.  Let him also face fair trial, for whatever allegations of sleaze hanging on his neck.

    A fitting denouement, to the wilful tragedy of Zuma, is the shock therapy South Africa needs to get its life back.  It’s good that is coming in early days — 27 years after Apartheid.

  • Past poison, future poison

    Past poison, future poison

    By Olakunle Abimbola

    It’s amusing to watch PDP gripe over old poison it brewed for others.  But it’s equally heart-rending to see APC set itself up for that same poison.

    So, it was rather comic, the other day, to hear Kola Ologbondiyan, the goodly PDP national publicity secretary, whine the ruling party was snatching its governors and other elected members.

    “Governor [Bello] Matawale did not defect to APC because the party has any democratic credentials, as erroneously claimed by the APC national leader, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu,” went the apologia, after Ologbondiyan had dismissed the Zamfara governor’s defection as an ‘unpardonable act of betrayal’, “but [he]only surrendered to intimidation and cowardly joined those behind the killings and acts of violence in Nigeria.”

    Then, a furious Ologbondiyan threw everything — the proverbial kitchen sink, vulgar abuse and all — at his party’s oppressors-in-chief: “Of course, the APC, as a party of political bandits, does not have any democratic credentials to attract well-meaning and patriotic Nigerians.”

    Phew!  That grape must be sour!  The griping, so gripping and painful! But pray, what does Ologbondiyan expect, given that PDP itself was a soulless partisan predator, at own high noon of power?

    Just match Dayo Adeyeye’s old cry — against Ologbondiyan’s new screech — back then at the PDP poach-and-swallow glory days!

    “The Vice President is not in a position to teach anyone lessons on principle or ideology,” Adeyeye blazed at VP Atiku Abubakar, who had waxed triumphant in Ibadan, at the defection of an AD senator to PDP, in June 2002; and asked his ruling party to repeat, in 2003, the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) electoral magic that collapsed the 2nd Republic (1978-1983).  ”His party is populated by politicians without principle — the Abacha apologists of yesterday.”

    Adeyeye was spokesman for Afenifere/AD, then at the receiving end of PDP slaughter!

    But AD wasn’t the only PDP quarry.  There was also the All People’s Party (APP),  rechristened All Nigeria People’s Party (ANPP).

    For the APP, it was clinical, political guillotining — lob off the head, and the body would shudder, stagger, lumber and surrender!

    President Olusegun Obasanjo simply appointed Senator Mahmud Waziri, the APP national chairman, his special adviser, on “inter-party relations”; and watched, with intense pleasure, APP lull into slow death; with his PDP hailing that rare master stroke!

    With its present gale of defections, therefore, PDP only chokes on own noxious fumes. But that would sure be APC’s future fate, the way it too celebrates its current swallow-and-fatten tactics, under interim national chairman, Governor Mai Mala Buni of Yobe State.

    Indeed, the celebrants have been well and truly shocking: President Muhammadu Buhari, as coy of realpolitik as former President Obasanjo gloried by it.  Adams Oshiomhole, former national chairman, whose tenure struck hard blows for progressive policies, ideology and discipline in APC ranks.

    But both have celebrated the Matawale “capture”, to ape that triumphant lingo of the PDP power years!

    You really must ponder that old poser, from the English Godfrey Chaucer, of the famous Canterbury Tales: if gold rusts, what will iron do?

    Now, there is a lot of talk about APC and PDP being virtually the same.  That is not entirely true — at least, not from the policy front.

    Since 1999, there have been some PDP governors, pushing progressive principles and developmental tactics, a temper so rare with PDP central power, from Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo to Goodluck Jonathan (1999-2015).

    Cross River, under Donald Duke (more or less continued under Liyel Imoke) was one.  Rivers, under Rotimi Chibuike Amaechi, was another.  By the way, what happened to those beautiful public primary and secondary schools, Amaechi built?

    But the most spectacular, it would appear, was the Ebonyi case: David Umahi, within a four-year gubernatorial term, transformed Abakaliki — once upon a time, “as dusty as Abakaliki” — into a glittering model capital, gleaming with smooth roads and sturdy flyovers, alluring fountains, and even airport runway-like side lighting, which aids night driving, outside the conventional street lights.

    But even forget the capital’s near-magical transformation: you still see solid concrete roads piercing the state’s hinterland, gifting the rural folks good roads all-season; and less hassled evacuation of crops to urban markets. Sadly, Umahi too quit PDP!

    But flip the coin.  Unfortunately, there can’t be PDP vs specific parties’ contrast, way back to 1999 — no thanks to ruling PDP’s active subversion of opposition parties.  But even from those ruins, a consistent story springs.

    Since 1999, under AD, or Action Congress (AC), or Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) or now under APC, Lagos, from Governors Bola Tinubu to Babatunde Fashola to Akinwunmi Ambode, and now, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, has been a national reference: in fights for states’ rights in a flawed federation, fiscal federalism, judicial reforms, not to talk of upgrading critical infrastructure, to cope with its galloping population.

    In Oyo and Osun, benchmarking progressive tenures against PDP regimes tell definitive policy — and developmental — tales.  The late Abiola Ajimobi epitomized what a brilliant policy mind could do to spruce up a state and gift it a new sparkle.

    Chief Bisi Akande and Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, sandwiching PDP’s Governor Olagunsoye Oyinlola, tell the difference, for Osun, in pro-people policies and developmental thinking.

    Outside the South West, Borno’s Prof. Babagana Zulum, as Kashim Shettima before him, is pushing new developmental frontiers, despite the Boko Haram challenge, while many of his northern and southern peers, with less challenges, mouth excuses.

    Zulum and co are APC governors; or belonged to pre-APC legacy parties.

    Now, leave the states and, one-on-one, compare and contrast PDP and APC governments at the federal level.  Even with much diminished revenue, the present Federal Government is posting more verifiable achievements, in physical and social infrastructure; aside from strong showings in food security — and in much less time, and in a far harsher season too!

    That means it is funneling more funds to the care of the Nigerian majority, than the PDP federal governments of yore, which seeming credo appeared just stuffing its crony elite-parasites, with gravy that belonged to all!

    Still, is APC then the ultimate?  No.  The much diffused insecurity is a blight; a possible election-time albatross — if insecurity doesn’t roll back most of its gains much earlier.

    On the policy front, however, it boasts enough developmental appeal to drive its politics.

    That’s why APC should do less of the Buni gobble-and-expand gambit (that was what bloated and “killed” the PDP); and play more to its pro-poor and developmental strength.

  • Kanu, Igboho and ethnic bile

    Kanu, Igboho and ethnic bile

    By Olakunle Abimbola

     

    Nnamdi Kanu or Sunday Igboho?  Hardly a model, by which any civil people or culture should be proud.

    The one — Kanu — is an epitome of low manners: to be rude and to be crude; to abuse, to traduce and to cast terrible slurs, which could set one ethnic group against another; and relish the sweet anarchy to follow, appear his execrable stock-in-trade.

    The other —  Igboho — is the proud poster boy of crude push-and-pull.  He talks before he thinks; and pushes reflex impunity, as the apex of human finesse.

    Now, match these profiles against brazen, low-life herders, who mug, maim, rape and kill; and whose Igangan, Ibarapa, Oyo State, criminality triggered Igboho’s pull-and-push street fame; and you’d realize this may be, at best, a clash of the underclass; at worst, a clash of contending outlawry.

    Yet you have, across the ethnic divide, not a few of the elite class, not unwilling to swear by each — even among the much traduced Fulani, whose finest crust take grave exceptions to being lumped (and gaily too) among the outlawry in their kind.

    The question is why?  The first to blame is clearly the government, which ought to have reined in the string of brazen crimes, before they became a crisis; and assumed dangerous proportions.

    But far from the sweet bogey of “Fulanization”, which alleged — no, flatly decreed — a Fulani president gung-ho supporting the crimes of Fulani dregs (witness “Fulani herdsmen”, the ubiquitous criminals of choice, in southern media screaming headlines and news bites) — it would appear a clear case of police lack of capacity.

    Either way, the Federal Government would stand fairly accused, not on the basis of any ethnic demonization claptrap, but on being tardy over state police, the moment it became clear the central police had been spread too thin.

    It is, therefore, welcome that the ongoing constitutional amendment is on the cusp of legalizing state police for states that want it; and can afford it.

    Before that, however, the Federal Government must probe alleged, and punish all confirmed, cases of criminal collusion among the security forces.  It is alleged that criminal herders often enjoy rogue protection, among the security agencies, thus fuelling herder impunity.  That must stop, if true.

    But government flaws aside, ethnic bile, as weapon for socio-political relevance, has always been an elite agenda.  But the danger right now is that the underclass — in some cases, even glorified outlaws — are seizing the space to pronounce own agenda of ethnic chauvinism (or worse!), since it’s high season of fashionable bile.

    That returns the discourse to the genesis of it all.

    Chinua Achebe’s swan song, There Was a Country (released 27 September 2012), sparked fresh radicalism over Biafra.  Shortly after, the great man of letters died, on 21 March 2013.

    Prof. Achebe’s take on the Civil War (1967-1970) — not false, not true but just own reflections — triggered renewed hysteria over Igbo victimhood, into which the elite, spurred by the media, ever the great one for the perceived underdog, quickly tapped.

    In 2015, federal power changed hands, with the mainstream Igbo political elite holding the short end of the stick.  So, weaponized victimhood came all too handy.

    The so-called “Hausa-Fulani” with who the Igbo political mainstream had milked the system — from the 1st and 2nd Republics, and all through the 16 years of PDP rule in this one — suddenly became Igbo enemy No. 1!

    That presumed willy-nilly hatred — the nonsense that a Fulani president “hates” the Igbo and is sworn to oppressing them — created the gargoyle that is Nnamdi Kanu, who frankly, from his base and wild conduct, should be an embarrassment to everyone, Igbo or non-Igbo.

    Even if blind Igbo hatred can’t be supported by the spread of federal programmes and projects (in which the South East, under PMB, has its fair share), some Igbo lobbies and sympathizers reason, then it’s clear from the fact that no “single” Igboman is in the present security apparatus!

    Still, Gen. Lucky Irabor, the current Chief of Defence Staff, is ethnic Igbo from Delta State.  Perhaps he is not Igbo enough, because he’s not from the South East?

    “It’s-either-my-way-or-no-other-way” — that penchant, by a faction of the Yoruba progressive mainstream, paved the way for the current giddy excitement over “Yoruba nation”.

    First, Afenifere, which backed Goodluck Jonathan but lost out in the 2015 sweepstakes, dug in on “restructuring” and Fulani demonization.

    Then, a raft of grudge groups weighed in, lobbing the passionate bomb of Yoruba ultra-nationalism and the explosive hand grenade of “Fulanization” — all aimed at de-marketing elected leaders, for some giddy Utopia, of a future “Yoruba nation”.  Enter, with aplomb, the free-wheeling Yoruba “self-determination” lobbies!

    So, resent Bola Tinubu within, hate Muhammadu Buhari without, and frenetically plant anti-Fulani venom in gullible minds — and you have the rogue formula that vaulted Igboho as zealous but stark Oodua Republic champion!

    True, rabid Fulani hate got traction from hurting folks, hit by reprehensible kidnapping and sundry brutal crimes, traced to some criminal herders.  Still, to every herder criminal, there are hordes of law-abiding ones.  But again, tardiness, by security agencies, take that blame: for not separating the proverbial wheat from the chaff.

    Even then, the problems may have been misdiagnosed: trading common crimes by Fulani dregs to regnant policy, to suppress others, by the Fulani cream — not unexpected though, in a Nigerian setting of pulsating ethnic rivalries, that seethes and throbs with dangerous conspiracy theories.

    What’s unclear is whether that misdiagnosis was innocent or intentional.  But what is clear is that such super-charged passions give wings to the likes of Igboho and Kanu, to fly with own brands of anomie and anarchy, the only methods they know, since they appear incapable of rigorously thinking things through.

    Indeed, methods by the likes of Kanu and Igboho — and the criminal herders they thump for public applause — show the dirty underbelly every culture ought to hide, not flaunt.

    Yet, the hyper-educated, great twin-ethnic majorities of the South, seem self-condemned to the exact opposite, no thanks to crowing ethnic chauvinism and near-total surrender to ethnic bile — end times!  It’s such an epic let-down!

    If that trend holds, then the result won’t be pretty — for it would be tantamount to barbarians seizing Rome: they can only ruin, not build.

    So, those with the power of clinical reasoning must reclaim their rightful place, at a most tetchy juncture of Nigerian history.

    Let the central authorities be less hostile towards re-federalization.  But let the “self-determination” crowd too be less sanguine, over a post-Nigeria ethnic utopia, which could well be a costly delusion.

    A bit of give-and-take, will do a lot of good.  Enough of this underclass agenda!

  • Kabir’s take

    Kabir’s take

    By Olakunle Abimbola

     

     

    Fareed’s Take?  That’s familiar stuff: the coinage of Fareed Zakaria, famous Indian-American CNN anchor of Global Public Square (GPS), his brilliant weekly on global affairs.

    But Kabir’s Take?  Just a pun of the original. Still, Kabir’s Take could point the way to rigorous politicking — and “poli-thinking” — by Nigerian youths, beyond lobbing “youth” at you, as if that fleeting phase is any generation’s monopoly.

    Kabir Aregbesola, at the APC National Youth Conference, in Abuja on June 21, made a claim: that the Buhari presidency was birthed to deliver for the poor and silent majority.

    To deliver on this mandate, Kabir claimed, that presidency had, in his words, “stood itself out, unleashing the boldest, socio-economic programmes this country has ever seen.”

    That sounds audacious, particularly in a contentious polity that runs high on emotions, but pretty low on hard facts.  But to back that claim, Kabir reeled out stats — verifiable, if disputed: over one million youths engaged under N-Power, the volunteer youth job scheme.

    Over 5.5 million school children, nation-wide, had been — and are still being — fed under the Homegrown School Feeding Scheme: both programmes targeted at hurting youths, many of them jobless and near-hopeless even after gaining tertiary education; and children from the most vulnerable of homes.

    Also, “homegrown” targets the farmer-parents of these vulnerable children: while their food crops feed their kids in school, by buying those crops, the government empowers those poor farmer-families and homes.

    Still, on the most vulnerable of demographics: the administration’s conditional cash transfer, to the poorest-of-the-poor, has supported no less than one million families.

    Then, credit for the most humble and lowly of businesses, clearly before never addressed on this scale: more than 2.5 million traders and market women had accessed micro-credit via Trader Moni and Market Moni schemes — again, a jab at mass poverty, at its lowest and most crippling hub.

    Then, agriculture — the Anchor Borrower’s Programme.  That scheme, the flagship of the administration’s agriculture/food security exertions, has shovelled credit the way of more than 3.1 million farmers, boosting the Buhari economic war cry of grow-what- you-eat and eat-what-you-grow.

    The “rice revolution”, which has thrust Kebbi as Nigeria’s rice capital, is the most pivotal proof of these strides which, by official stats, has greatly rolled back Nigeria’s food import bill; and saved billions of dollars in forex.

    Integral to that agricultural rebirth is the ramp-up in fertilizer supply, halving the price from its pre-2015 N11, 000 a bag to N5, 500.  That has given farming a healthy jab, though present security challenges threaten to roll back those gains; and also imperil paying back the Anchor Borrower’s loans.

    Kabir also cited the Buhari administration’s infrastructure up-scale, in rail and roads, clearly the most far-reaching since 1999: the delivery of more than 400 kilometres of faster and more modern standard-gauge rail tracks, at the Lagos-Ibadan corridor, en route to Kano, among other rail renewal projects nation-wide.

    The road parallel to the rail renaissance would appear no less impressive, given the lean economic times: over 1, 000 kilometres of road infrastructure nationwide; aside from the 2nd Niger Bridge, now at 60% completion stage; and the no less crucial Lagos-Ibadan expressway — both critical arteries billed for delivery in 2022.

    “Lest we forget,” Kabir jogged blunt memories, the regnant ailment of contemporary Nigeria, “all these were achieved with dwindling crude oil revenue and a devastating global pandemic.”

    The political opposition could counter — and rightly so: the Buhari administration has gone on a borrowing binge (which could well shackle the future generation); and the pandemic has not translated into better lives for Nigerians.

    Indeed, it could screech: life is tough; and mass poverty bites ever so hard — and it would be right on both fronts.

    Still, had yesterday’s governments — today’s opposition — better harnessed yesterday’s boom, today’s bust, and Buhari’s resort to loans to deliver critical infrastructure, in ultra-lean times, would clearly have been averted.

    Indeed, it all appears the Nigerian equivalent of the biblical seven lean cows, that gobbled up seven fat ones!  It isn’t easy or comfy for anyone.  But it is a hard rite of passage, without which redemption, social or economic, could be a mirage.

    Still, Kabir’s Take comes with a caveat: the dire danger of scrambling off those progressive-powered development paths of the last six years, in the post-Buhari years.

    He warned: “When this President finishes, with the best of efforts, the development work still won’t be enough. This is because,” he added, “the rots of decades can’t be reversed completely in eight years.  Therefore, the legacy of progressive, pro-poor and inclusive development we seek for our people is not an eight-year play.  It’s a forty-year one.”

    You could, straight off, juxtapose Kabir’s 40-year quest for “inclusive development”, with a former PDP national chairman’s boast that his party would rule for 60 years — in the first instance!

    The one pitches hard development.  The other brandishes sweet power.  But even more impressive: the one is a callow youth.  The other was an elder that should brim with wisdom and experience!

    Still, if Kabir aggregates fellow youths in the progressive front, then Nigerian politics can only be the better for it.

    Who knows?  Such forward and critical thinking could trigger a response from conservative youths across the aisle; and rigorous progressive versus conservative ideas may well bloom, in a triumphant flowering of ideas, that can be win-win for all!

    So, Kabir’s Take is all about raising the level — and rigour — of policy debate and public discourse, beyond traducing persons, abusing rival tribes as emotive fall guys, or planting fashionable hate — the present sweet toxin that struts the public space, shuts down individuals’ faculties and dams reasoned discourse.

    Yes, he would go further to pitch, to his party elders, some affirmative actions practically telling the APC to surrender every elected local government position to the party’s young Turks — hardly a crime but hardly democratic too!

    In the long run, however, a party whose members eat and drink their chosen ideology, would render these affirmative actions nugatory.  In such, it’s your ideological drill and the age of your ideas — not your biological age — that rule the roost.

    If that holds across party lines, then Nigeria could boast new tribes in politics —  progressive, centrist or conservative!  That could well stem the present zero-sum game, in which one ethnic’s gain has got to be the loss of the other!

    There then, for the general polity, appears the exciting promise of Kabir’s take.

  • Kaunda shall be free

    Kaunda shall be free

    By Olakunle Abimbola

    Kenneth David Kaunda (28 April 1924-17 June 2021), famous author of even more famous book, Zambia Shall Be Free (Heinemann, 1962), is at last free from it all!

    But such a biting irony: Zambia’s first president (1964 to 1991) was, in 1999, declared “stateless” by a Zambia high court; and risked instant deportation to Malawi, his parents’ birth place.  Later, the Supreme Court restored his Zambian citizenship.

    Yet now, President Edgar Lungu hails KK, at death, as a worthy patriot — which he was — deserving of a 21-day national mourning!  The rough-and-tumble of African politics!

    Like Zambia, like Côte d’Ivoire!  How can a country just jerk awake to declare its former president, of 27 years, an alien?

    The Côte d’Ivoire equivalent is Alassane Quattara (now president but former Prime Minister).  Former President Laurent Gbagbo declared Quattara a Burkinabe, just to shut him from the presidency.

    Only in Africa!  Kaunda shall be free!

    Still Kaunda, despite the raw treatment from his immediate successors, was hardly a saint.  He too intimidated his state, over which he governed.

    For 27 years, his personalization of the Zambian state was afoot: the national football team was dubbed “KK Eleven”.   His United National Independence Party (UNIP) was the sole legal party.   KK himself, from 1978 to 1983 to 1988, was the sole presidential candidate at Zambia general elections.

    That charade crashed in 1990, culminating in his electoral “massacre”, by an electoral alliance, led by Trade Unionist, the late Frederick Chiluba, in 1991 — two clear years before the next election was due.

    Still, KK was no single power Satan of his age.  That notoriety probably  belonged to the trio of Idi Amin Dada (Uganda), Jean Bedel Bokassa (Central African Republic, which Bokassa renamed “Empire”) and Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga — some mouthful! — he who was even claimed richer than his country, at the zenith of his rule!

    Indeed, KK belonged to the more decent bloc.  With Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah (probably the age’s most rigorous) and Tanzania’s Nwalimu Julius Nyerere (among that era’s most revered), KK managed to rustle up Zambia’s homegrown version of “African Socialism”: “Zambian Humanism”; with Ghana’s Consciencism and Tanzania’s Ujamaa.

    Still, bar Tanzania’s Nyerere, the ideological stunts would appear ploys to build personality cults, instead of solid state institutions.  That particularly undid the promise of Ghana (among its peers, the most ideologically robust); and progressively shaped KK into a dictator, even if benign, who didn’t know when to quit.

    For good or for ill, therefore, KK honestly epitomized the first generation of African leaders, who stepped out with the wrong foot, and consigned their people and continent to be global laggards — an unflattering reality that endures till today.

    Yes, Cold War-era ideological intrigue and panic, from the Western sphere, may have shot down and crippled the most promising — and here again, Nkrumah’s Ghana is golden reference.

    Nevertheless, from Nigeria’s Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, to Malawi’s Hastings Kamuzu Banda, to Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, to Uganda’s Milton Obote, this first generation of African leaders would appear unprepared for office.  Worse: they were ingloriously intolerant of better local minds that could make the difference; and thus manipulated the electoral process to willy-nilly stay in power.

    In Nigeria, the manic conspiracy to destroy Obafemi Awolowo (by far, his generation’s most piercing political and developmental mind) climaxed in disastrous military rule; and the carefully wrought 1963 Republican Constitution crashed on the altar of crass politicking.

    Those who still crow about that document, and chirp as if it’s some dormant El Dorado waiting to be conjured, conveniently forget the human foibles that buried it.  That dark mindset is still very much around, if not much worsened!

    But while military rule swallowed West Africa (bar Senegal), fuelling epochal rot all round, pseudo-democracies took hold of much of East and Southern Africa, with Kenyatta’s Kenya and KK’s Zambia standing out in that genre — though crude military rule would also dawn, under Idi Amin, in Uganda.

    Still, African democracies-sans-democracy would lead to no less devastation of public institutions in new African nations, from the 1960s lasting into the 1990s.  That was the critical lead time KK, as most of his peers back then, blew; and therefore helped to under-develop their respective countries.

    Still, KK ruled Zambia for 27 years, lived 30 years more, within which he got bruised and worsted, despite doing excellent anti-HIV/ADS campaign aside from the sterling anti-Apartheid advocacies of his power years, before earning due honours, after dying at 97.

    Moral?  Nation-building is a marathon, not a sprint.  So, the Nigerian media should adopt historic-cum-strategic methods, if it must be the agent of positive change it craves.

    TB Joshua x-rayed

    By Azubike Nass

    Your article on the late TB Joshua displayed good memory and research statistics, in making your point — a product of a fecund and clean mind.

    I am a practicing mystic, well studied in Oriental (Eastern) and Occidental (Western) mysteries.  I have never been to TB Joshua’s church but I had followed his activities for many years.  What I saw in him was a grandmaster of a high order, a great Christian mystic, far above the level of much church leaders.

    He had the powers, and he applied them for the best benefit to humanity, and that has refurbished his powers in multiple.  He had completed his work for this incarnation.  He is now an Ascended Grand Master.

    As to the source of his powers, from the level of understanding of most church leaders, it is neither here nor there.  It is not always a strait-jacket of good and evil,

    Christ and anti-Christ.

    The Wizard of Endor was a great spirit medium with awesome powers, and was consulted by kings and nobles, from far and near.  It was not a case of either good or evil.  There was no record of applying the power for evil.  The Supreme God still holds the ultimate authority over all things.

    Most church leaders actually don’t know enough of the mysteries of Jesus Christ.  The powers He acquired during his 18 years sojourn in the East.  During His mission, Jesus once spit His saliva on the ground, mixed it with sand, robbed it on the eyes of a blind man and instructed the man to go to the river and wash it.

    The blind man did so and his sight was restored.  The deeper meaning of this specific form of power principle is to be found in certain Oriental esoteric teachings which Jesus had passed through.

    If you do that today, any ignorant church leader could give it any derogatory name: Satanism, Shamanism, Occultism, etc.

    There are many such examples in the multiple powers manifested by Jesus the Christ during His earthly life.

    • Col. Nass (retired) writes from Enugu, Enugu State, Nigeria.

     

  • Death, TB Joshua and peer envy

    Death, TB Joshua and peer envy

    By Olakunle Abimbola

    Chris Okotie, head Pastor at the Household of God Church, in classy Oregun, Ikeja, was tackling TB Joshua, of the Synagogue Church of All Nations (SCOAN), in seedy Ikotun, Lagos.

    Trapped, in the crossfire, was the other Chris, and neighbour of Chris: Pastor Chris Oyakhilome — classy peers both, at their classy Oregun base.

    Poor Oyakhilome had dared to join Joshua — Joshua, the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN) pariah! — to pray for a man in a wheelchair.  What heresy!

    Ripples’ interest, back then, wasn’t really the holy men of God, their holy beefs, their holy spite.  It was rather own peers’ uncritical attitude to a potential story, being explored and discussed, at The Anchor on Sunday editorial suite.

    The modal view, in that chirpy, frenzied ensemble, was clear: PFN had decreed Joshua a pariah.  A pariah he must be.  Let the story validate that sacred creed!

    But Ripples cautioned: shouldn’t we first sound out both sides, and let the readers decide?  We will, came the riposte!  But we all know where all this would lead!

    The story did lead to the answer — and no prize for guessing right: TB Joshua got thoroughly roasted!  But Ripples wrote a “rebel” piece: an analytical side bar, insisting on fairness to both parties.  The editor graciously published it, with the story.

    A grateful Joshua would, the following Monday, seek out Ripples, at The Anchor: his followers bearing tonnes of ”Synagogue” literature, evangelizing video cassettes and allied souvenirs.  Still, the newsroom buzzed: beware of Joshua and his hypnotism!

    For a barely educated prophet — he had only one year of formal secondary education — TB Joshua boasted rare organizational savvy!

    So, if the dandy, the trendy, the lyrical, the musical, the handsome, the winsome, and above all, the lexically flamboyant Chris Okotie crowed at Joshua’s death, you know that beef didn’t come overnight.

    “The wizard at Endor who assumed the title Emmanuel,” Okotie gushed, in his now (in?)famous joy at Joshua’s death, “has been consumed by divine indignation. And now his disciples bewail his ignominious exit.”

    To boot, the lexical juggernaut signed off with trademark heavy artillery diction: “Operation Hupopodion (footstool) has commenced. The day of the vengeance of our God has fully come to Nigeria. And they shall not escape.”!

    To the excitable — and converted — that was classic Prophet Elijah, thundering down the miserable prophet of Baal and Ashera, at the biblical crunch!  But really, it was the classic dross of man, seeping through the man of God, playing the god of man!

    Joshua is dead.  Okotie still kicks.  But God, who they both claim to serve, knows who is who.

    Much earlier, Ripples — indirectly — had crossed TB Joshua’s path.  It was 1993, around the June 12 annulment crisis.  Mother-in-law, Madam Felicia Omosipe (beautiful and gentle, God bless her soul!), was down with terminal illness.

    Her distraught daughter, after fruitless hospital rounds, heard of “TB Joshua”, the new seer in town, about whom everyone crowed.  She met him at his Agodo sanctum, then a pond-side, under the Egbe-Ikotun bridge.  The place streamed with scores, craving healing, craving miracles.

    Joshua couldn’t do much for her mom — beyond a blessed bottle of stream water, which worked no miracle on her dying mom.  But she came back awed by “a young, powerful, yet humble prophet.”  Joshua must have been around 30 then.  He started his church in 1987, at 24.

    Ten shy years later, less than 10km away from that Egbe under-bridge, Joshua had built his Ikotun SCOAN global sanctuary.  But beyond the faithful among the Ikotun folks — Ikotun itself streaming with the hoi polloi of all races — he was the biblical prophet, not without honour, except in his own country, among his own people.

    As Joshua’s SCOAN globally bloomed — not as some American Evangelical mimic: an image much of Pentecostal Nigeria crave and court — Joshua’s peers put him down: if not as the supreme antichrist of the age, then certainly the ultimate fakery of the era.

    Ayo Oritsejafor’s Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) — Daddy Oritsejafor, later the Rasputin of Goodluck Jonathan’s presidential court — buffeted him from one side.  Joshua’s immediate PFN rivals lanced the prophet from another.

    It was almost Christian Nigeria’s version of the biblical Stephen stoning: except that this neo-Stephen wasn’t martyred — unless, of course, you buy Okotie’s merry dirge!

    But the Joshua prophetic image — less plastic than local American-wannabes, but more in tune with the first wave of pioneering Nigerian Pentecostals of the late 19th century — grabbed global attention.  The unorthodox Joshua thrived.  So did spiritual tourism, traced to his seedy Ikotun doors!

    Joshua’s healing and miracle bent was a clear throwback to that first age of Nigerian local Pentecostals, who battled the cultural hegemony of white missionaries, at the close of the 19th century.

    Mojola Agbebi (1860-1917) battled American white missionaries to, with others, found the Ebenezer Baptist Church, from the First (then Native) Baptist Church, Lagos.

    Joshua’s immediate models, in healing and miracles, however, would appear the duo of Moses Orimolade Tunolase (patron saint of the Aladura movement: the first breed of local Pentecostals, registered as the Eternal Sacred Order of Cherubim & Seraphim, formalized 1930, though the church started in 1924) and Joseph Ayo Babalola (whose Christ Apostolic Church, in 1941, emerged from the schism in The Apostolic Church).

    Now the eerie parallels, between Joshua and his “models”:  Orimolade Tunolase (1879-1933) died at 54.  Ayo Babalola (1904-1959) died at 55.  Joshua himself (1963-2021) died at 58.  Relatively short life of founders didn’t stop either the Aladura or CAC  from thriving after.  Will that be the story of Joshua’s SCOAN too?

    Still, more parallels, if the Okotie school won’t fall into a swoon: Joshua minded his flock for 33 years (1987-2021) — more than Tunolase (nine years, from 1924, as formal head of his church); and Babalola (18 years, after the founding of CAC in 1941).

    But 33 years — depending on the month in 1987 the church opened — could have equalled the Christ’s total earthly existence!

    Temitope Balogun Joshua (12 June 1963-5 June 2021) had his fair share of controversies.  Not a few claim his “so-called” miracles were either fake or staged — or both.  Others claim the bevy of beautiful ladies, in his commune, were all but priestly sexual fringe benefits.  And the ultimate blot: the crashed hostel that consumed no less than 145 lives, most of them South Africans.

    Still, in simplicity, humility, compassion and philanthropy — all Christ-like traits — TB Joshua trumped most of his noise-some peers in the PFN market.  His scorn for materialism also jarred against the screaming, sacred mammon of many of his peers.

    Whether his powers were of God or of Satan is for his maker — who just called him —to decide.  Which is why Okotie should not have mocked, in Joshua, a debt everyone owes.

  • June 12 and elite manoeuvres

    June 12 and elite manoeuvres

    By Olakunle Abimbola

    June 12 — the brazen cancellation of the 12 June 1993 presidential election — was simple, if serious, electoral crime, which craved a simple, if hefty, resolution.

    MKO Abiola won the election.  Ibrahim Babangida cancelled the result.  The crime was simple.  The time ought to be ample.

    But then came elite manoeuvres, playing dangerous regional and ethnic cards.  The result was avoidable crisis that shook Nigeria to its roots.

    From that simple crime, the elite, all round, fed fat.

    Somehow, IBB broadened self and cronies’ waywardness into a “northern” plot. Still, no one could finger any northern plebiscite, mandating that costly act.

    Among the Yoruba, Olusegun Obasanjo’s cunning first drove him to the nadir of Abacha’s gulag.  Then, to the zenith of the Nigerian state, as elected president — both from elite manipulations of that same June 12.

    Egba Chief, Ernest Shonekan, was quite earnest, glorying as Interim President, while MKO, his Egba kinsman and rightful claimant to that tenured office, would die in limbo.

    Poor Shonekan!  Once the toast of military-era policies, became the scorn of annulment-era politics — at least in his outraged, native South West!

    In the South East, Dim Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, at the onset of the Sani Abacha madness, prattled his Abacha Constitutional Conference “mandate” trumped MKO’s.

    Okwesilieze Nwodo, then Enugu governor, swore he would hit voluntary exile, should MKO’s mandate be restored — aside from pushing the bogey of another civil war!

    Indeed, an age of elite brutal opportunism, if ever there was one!  Yet, all issued from a clear crime, which a right-thinking elite should have promptly — and justly — resolved!

    That’s the Nigerian elite.   On that, no part of Nigeria can claim sainthood!

    Still, remember the “All of You” stunt the selfish tortoise pulled in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart?  Tortoise’s neighbours had kitted him with wings to fly to his in-laws’ bash, in the skies.

    But on getting there, tortoise declared he was “All of You”: meaning he cornered all of the lollies!  Needless to say: his piqued benefactors stripped him of borrowed wings, and sent him scuttling down the skies and crashing down to earth!

    In four days, the June 12 watershed would clock 28 years.  But the “All of You”, in the Nigerian elite, appears much worsened, particularly in this high winter of dissent.

    So, the starry-eyed, beware!  You might just end up cannon fodders, in others’ selfish battles!  Even the most sincere-sounding of minds is not beyond cant!

    Our own WS, in his latest work, Chronicles of the Happiest People on Earth, calls it the “professionals of emotive trafficking”!

    Take the latest Twitter uproar.  The media, in uncritical ideological crow, decree it “assault on free speech!” So, does the political opposition, to gain sensational mileage.  So does too, the embattled Twitter itself, posturing as battered but unbowed global champion of free speech.

    But really?  If Twitter was so enamoured of “free speech”, why did it clang off Donald Trump — who ironically, till tomorrow is still shrieking “free speech!” — after the US Capitol invasion of January 6?  Perhaps free speech, that threatened to burn America’s democracy, is handshake that shoots beyond the elbow?

    So, if the same “free speech”, via Twitter, wilfully pours fire on Nigeria, and fuels the slaughter of innocent souls in the South East, and threatens Nigeria’s democracy with anarchy, how’s the situation different from America’s January 6 experience?

    Yes: Twitter shut down Donald Trump but an irate Nigerian government shut down Twitter — true.

    But isn’t the core motive the same: preventing lunatics from razing their respective homesteads?  Twitter, its American business bastion, from where it creams off billions of dollars, globally? And Nigeria, which government has a legal and sacred duty to its populace, despite reckless and subversive tweets from Twitter?

    The sententious Seyi Makinde, governor of Oyo State, has declared moving against Twitter is moving against the livelihood of the Nigerian “youth” — not untrue.  But would the wise governor rather have both his beloved youth and Twitter businesses perish, in the very blaze Twitter itself lit?

    Talk of “professionals of emotive trafficking” and their one-sided posturing!

    Those who canonize Twitter the fiery arch-angel of global free speech are entitled to their fancy.  But that gadget is more interested in gobbling up billions of dollars, from its global captive market, bewitched into an eternal buzz of sense and nonsense!

    That was why, even in America, the high shrine of free speech and global cathedral of democracy, Twitter conked Trump before Trump conked its business — free speech be damned!

    Which is why, in Nigeria — or any sane country — Twitter can’t be the Almighty Lord of the Flies (apologies to Nobellist William Golding), which must be appeased with citizens’ blood, on the reckless altar of free speech!

    Think the likes of Libya and Syria, caught in the cross-current of the so-called Arab Spring, lit by these same foreign gadgetry!  The doom after, Libya and Syria are in ashes.  But the archangels of “free speech” have moved on!

    Between Nigeria and Twitter, therefore, it’s a clash of interests.  Beyond the seductive humbug of “free speech”, Twitter has a right to drive its business.  But that right can’t ride roughshod over the Nigerian government’s right, within the laws of the land, to govern in peace and protect its people.

    That willy-nilly arrogance was what Twitter courted, by failing to moderate the anarchic tweets, from its end.  No responsible government would tolerate that.

    But the suspension (and hopefully its early resolution) calls for a new beginning, in which both sides realize — and respect — their limits, in a symbiotic relationship that could be win-win.  It’s not who wins or who loses.  It’s rather a call to common sense.

    The same Nigerian elite that feasted on June 12 and baited catastrophe, now abuse the use of Twitter, putting their compatriots in harm’s way, because of current challenges.

    The pitch, pathos and bathos of English Romantic poetry issued from laments: the Industrial Revolution laying Nature bare!  Yet, demonized Nurture back then, has greatly enhanced human living now.

    Nigeria today goes through current throes because some “All of You” gluttons had gobbled up the people’s future. Efforts to block these parasites have earned the Buhari government a fearsome elite tar, which the naive masses — poor, manipulable souls!  — only amplify.

    Twitter — and allied social media tools — are in the thick of that dark campaign.

    Twitter has its normative good.  But its misuse is outright evil.  Mouthing “free speech” can’t fob off that danger.

  • Avoidable fire

    Avoidable fire

    By Olakunle Abimbola

     

     

    Avoidable fire — that’s what some South West hot heads court. Which is why the May 23 anti-secession caution, by the South West political order, was reassuring, even if belated.

    That order should now follow its caution with full blast counter-mobilization, against lobbies sworn to torching the region’s dry thatch, in the harmattan of high discontent.

    Dangerous developments, in the South East, make that even more imperative.

    On May 30, Ahmed Gulak, ex-aide to ex-President Goodluck Jonathan, was killed, in cold blood, in Imo State; en route to the Sam Mbakwe International Cargo Airport.

    A report by The Punch claimed the Police had killed the Gulak-killing gang; at a spot in Aboh-Mbaise local government area, where they were allegedly playing Robin Hood, gifting locals free onions, from a seized truck, from the North.

    Killing the alleged assassins would make investigations into their motives a tad problematic. Still, everyone looks up to the Police for answers, after a thorough investigation. Until then, no one should jump into any hasty conclusions. But the Police have earned rare praise, for apprehending the felons on the double.

    Still, as historical trends go, it appears deja vu: 1966 all over again!  A January 1966 coup, dubbed “Ibo” coup, cleared top political and military officers from the North and the West.

    That provoked a fearsome pogrom, of “Easterners”: majority Igbo, but not excluding other Eastern and Midwestern minorities — or even Yoruba look-alikes, in the North.

    But those massacres were a precursor, to the “revenge” coup of July 1966 — with hundreds more of “Eastern” officers (including Mid-West Ibos, in the present Delta State) killed, displaced and sent scuttling to their Eastern homeland.

    Welcome, Biafra!  But that secessionist nightmare would well-nigh wipe out the Igbo starting gains in independent Nigeria (thanks to the North/East elite power coalition from 1960, with its winner-takes-all bragging culture), which continues to fuel Igbo victimhood till today.

    Still, compare and contrast the 1966 trend with now, using Imo as grim metaphor. First, the murder of nameless northern “suya” sellers, during a community brawl.  Now, the killing of a northerner with a name.

    To boot: the economic sabotage of rogue Robin Hoods, playing charity with a truckload of others’ onion-sweat!  But that cargo could well be an Igbo merchants’!  Double jeopardy?

    Now add the dark spice of Nnamdi Kanu and his IPOB, baying for blood, en route to own peculiar Biafra, without caring a hoot about millions of Igbo ordinary folks, who would be poor cannon fodder; or even millions of peaceful Igbo doing honest and legitimate business, all over Nigeria.

    So, what if some northern “youths” — the favourite Nigerian romantic coinage for tolerable mischief — decide on their own counter-killings?  1966-1970 all over again?

    Those who refuse to learn from history risk being consumed by history!

    You think this is ethnic finger-pointing across the Niger?  Welcome to the macabre parallels, of today’s South West, to the unfortunate events of 1966!  Yet, the region that Awo built prides itself the palladium of reason in Nigeria!

    Chief Obafemi Awolowo left gaol to be crowned the Asiwaju Yoruba, even as the old power partners, North and East, that plotted Awo’s persecution and gaol — or prosecution and gaol, if you’re legalistic-minded — fell upon themselves.

    Today’s South West, successor to the old West, has another Asiwaju Yoruba, in the illustrious, celebrated and respected historian, Prof. Banji Akintoye.  That sparks the Karl Marx quip of history repeating itself — whether as tragedy or farce, time will tell!

    Suffice it to say: while the original Asiwaju Yoruba steered the Yoruba from the perils of secession, the current Asiwaju Yoruba goads them right into Oodua Republic, though the celebrated author, of the latest authoritative account of Yoruba history, swears it would be “peaceful”, waxing poetic on the doctrine of self-determination.

    But the secessionist foot soldiers?  Now, that’s quite a Babel, between Oodua Republic and re-federalized Nigeria.  But the base motive is clear: scalding Fulani hate faking hot Yoruba love.

    The stark Sunday Igboho bravely grapples with what he little understands. “Field Marshal” and celebrated hero of the Igangan Fulani campaign appears the Yoruba equivalent of Nnamdi Kanu, with his happy-go-merry anarchy!

    Gani Adams, who crows over his Aare Oona Kakanfo title, even with its bag of  chequered tragedies, merrily conflates “restructuring” with some romantic “Yoruba nation”, in which he and his atavistic crowd would have some say — and sway.

    Why, good old Afenifere is also there, standing “gidigba”, as old fox, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, would crow.  On restructuring it stands.  But it won’t mind playing the bogey of “Yoruba nation” as bargaining chip — a glorious double-speak, that sits pat with both agenda.  Talk of having your cake and eating it!

    What a Babel, in the Yoruba country!

    Hardly a surprise then: that May 23 caution, by the South West APC governors, elders and leaders of thought in the formal polity, came under a bombast of vulgar abuse and base name-calling, by a little-known group called Apapo Oodua Koya (AOKOYA), in a statement by one Col. Abimbola Sowumi (rtd).  Contrast with Agbekoya of the 1970s!

    AOKOYA might be a beautiful Yoruba pun, which could mean “We’ll prevail”.  But while the Col. Sowumi screeched insults for barely any attention, Gen. Alani Akinrinade, in the cautioning camp, didn’t have to say a word to grab attention.

    The General had fought a war.  Even from the winning side, he knows the horrors of war to openly glory in, and thirst for it — unlike some of these Yoruba data-tigers, belching hate in the social media!

    This cacophony, driven by hate fuelled by ethnic hubris, echoes W. B. Yeats’s poetic quip: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity”!

    That is why the South West political order must boldly counter these reckless voices — who screech shrillest, about a grim business, they least comprehend.

    But they are only excitable puppets dancing to the hidden juggling of puppeteers — cold elite faking personal grudges as ethnic slurs.  This band too must be checked.

    As a boy growing up in Lagos, it was often perplexing to see and hear adults brand anything and everything bad as “Ijebu” — particularly fake money: “owo Ijebu”.

    Then, the jarring saying: “Ijebu o da; Ijesa o sunwon; iyen wa l’oun Ijebu-Ijesa!” [The Ijebu are no good; the Ijesa equally worthless.  Yet the daft calls himself Ijebu-Ijesa!].

    As at that time, the venom had left those intra-Yoruba bigotry, leaving behind a playful tease.  But later reading up history, it was clear these were explosive intra-Yoruba biases, cresting in the Kiriji War (1877-1893), well ahead of the Awolowo make-over.

    A nation, founded on hatred of others, will consume its own, when there are no more “aliens” to hate.  That might just be the fate of “Oodua Republic,” if this hate-filled secession-by-emotion continues unchecked.

  • Tragic crashes, conspiracy theories

    Tragic crashes, conspiracy theories

    By Olakunle Abimbola

     

     

    Again on May 21, tragedy struck: a thunderclap that swept away Lt-Gen. Ibrahim Attahiru, Nigeria’s Chief of Army Staff (COAS) and 10 others, among the finest in the Nigerian military.

    Other Army victims, in that air catastrophe, were Brig-Gen. Abdulkadir Kuliya (acting Chief of Army Intelligence), Brig-Gen. M. I. Abdulkadir (chief of staff to the late COAS), Brig-Gen. O. L. Olayinka (Provost Marshal of the Nigerian Army), Major L. A. Hayat (aide-de-camp to the late COAS) and Major N. Hamza.

    The Air Force casualties were Flight-Lt. T. O. Asaniyi (pilot of the doomed aircraft, whose wedding was reportedly due in November), Flight-Lt. A. A. Olufade (co–pilot, who wedded only two months ago), Sergeant O. Adesina, Sergeant Umar and ACM O. M. Oyedepo (air crew members).

    It was one tragedy too many.  One can only pray to God to forgive the dead, comfort the distraught they left behind (particularly the newly wed, whose husband just went with the winds; and the prospective bride, who would be bride no more), console us, their grieving compatriots (who are shell-shocked at the sheer magnitude of the tragedy), heal our hurting country, and spare us all further disasters.

    Still, that disaster has spewed conspiracy theories.  First, by many, who genuinely need explanations to grapple with the catastrophe, to retain their sanity.  Then, by others, who just betray a Freudian slip: solid evil, buried inside the deepest recesses of their dark souls, cascading like dank and dark fountains.

    Still, sadness and joy are a duality.  One dawns for us to appreciate the other.

    That reality stresses the imperative to always be grateful to God.  Over the severe beauty of life, humans have absolutely no control.  So, we take it or leave it.

    Still, the present bears an eerie parallel to 1968/1969, with its high profile military air crashes, sparking the very Armageddon in wicked rumours, driving up the adrenalin of doom.

    On 8 May 1968, Lt.-Col. Joseph “Joe” Akahan (12 April 1937 – 8 May 1966), the late Ibrahim Attahiru’s predecessor as chief of staff, Army (May 1967 – May 1968), had died in a helicopter crash, during the Nigerian Civil War (1967 – 1970).

    Akahan’s crash and death fuelled serious propaganda, as could be understood in times of high tension, on both sides of the Nigeria-Biafra divide.

    From the Biafra side, it was good riddance.  Aside from peerless war propaganda of the enemy’s army chief crashing, Akahan it was, they reasoned — if not outright gloated — that allegedly supervised the slaying of Igbo officers, in the Ibadan-based 4th Battalion, under his command.

    Indeed, Akahan was Head of State, Major-Gen. Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi’s substitute for Major M. O. Nzefili, a Midwest Igbo acting Battalion Commander, who the mainly northern troops in that division refused to obey.

    After the counter-coup of July 1966, Akahan was reported to have said the killing of Eastern officers would stop, “since events had now balanced out” — referring to the counter-killings, to “avenge” the January 1966 coup, and its non-Igbo casualties.  He then replaced new Head of State, Lt-Col. Yakubu Gowon, as chief of Army, before his death, after barely a year in office.  He was succeeded by Col. Hassan Katsina.

    But if the Akahan-Biafra antipathy was understandable, an intra-Nigeria whispering campaign soon greeted Akahan’s tragic death.  It suggested that though a Gboko-born Tiv, Akahan allegedly fell to some so-called “Hausa-Fulani” ploy to replace him with one of their own!  Conspiracy theories — and it swirled around for quite a while!

    The Akahan fate shows the Attahiru crash isn’t novel.  Yes, the pain is unbearable.  It would also breed wicked rumours.  But nation-building continues, to ensure the gallant COAS — and Akahan, his predecessor — did not die in vain.

    Nor were high-profile deaths, of military top brass, limited to the Army alone.

    On 15 October 1969, when the Civil War was nearing its end, Lt.-Col. Shittu Alao (1937-1969), fourth commander of the Nigerian Air Force (NAF), crashed and died at Uzebba, some 50 miles northwest of Benin City.  He was NAF chief from August 1967 to October 1969.

    Alao (six-foot-five) was as massive as his Ogbomoso cheek scarifications were deep.  But he was only partly Yoruba, his mother being from Shendam, in the present Plateau State, where he was born in Dorowa Babuje.  He also went to school in Jos and Kuru, before joining the Army as a cadet officer, after graduating from the 13th Course, Regular Officers Special Training School, Accra, Ghana.

    He was one of four Army infantry officers seconded to the NAF, to take over from the pioneer German officer corps; and one of only two that qualified to fly, the other being Brigadier Emmanuel Ikwue, who succeeded Alao as Air chief.

    Nevertheless, his crash and death came with thick conspiracy theories.  But the official cause of death was that, flying solo, his L-29 aircraft ran into bad weather, ran short of fuel and crashed into the woods of Uzebba, near Benin, while manoeuvering the fuel-starved machine to crash-land.

    Despite the thick, dark rumours that buzzed around Alao’s death, it is glory to the Nigerian phoenix that his son, now Air Vice Marshal (AVM) Lawal Shittu Alao, only three when the senior Alao died, still made a career in the NAF.

    That’s fitting tribute to the memory of Col. Alao.  Those jabbering Armageddon and prattling fashionable doom, particularly in times of national woes, must know some folks have invested simply too much in Nigeria to contemplate its failure.

    But why this brief foray into Nigerian contemporary history?  That every country has its share of triumph, power and glory.  So does it, its share of doom and gloom.

    That doom and gloom just consumed the late COAS and co — brave and gallant officers all, who died that their country might live; who perished that their nation could thrive.  It’s a huge debt of gratitude we all can never pay back.

    Martial supreme sacrifice would always make the military that elite corps, sworn to its  nation’s survival; and deserving deep love, awe and honour, so long as they stay true to their noble creed, and shun ignoble coups.

    Conspiracy theorists?  No time to gloat; or spread wilful bile that helps no one.

    If Nigeria survived the Akahan and Alao tragedies — one year apart, during a very turbulent period of Nigerian history — it will surely survive the present gloom of Attahiru and co; despite the current challenges of banditry, kidnapping and Boko Haram terrorism, not to talk of separatists’ emotive derring-do.

    Indeed, the blood of the fallen should whet the common appetite for a country founded on fairness, justice and equity; and equal-opportunity access to every citizen.

    Still, the government must move swiftly to probe military aircraft crashes — the Attahiru crash was the third in quick succession — and stem the tide of losing the cream of Nigeria’s military pilots; and the very flower of the Nigerian armed forces.

  • South ahoy!

    South ahoy!

    By Olakunle Abimbola

     

    South ahoy?  Legitimate message.  But not-so-sound messaging, if it only preaches to the converted.  The goal should be doughty national consensus, in a season of peril.

    That about captures the crux — and puff — of the May 11 Southern Governors parley.

    Indeed, since 2005, when Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, then governor of Lagos, pushed a southern equivalent of the Northern Governors Forum (NGF), that parley has, at best, been some staccato.

    After a sixth summit, which held at Port Harcourt, Rivers State, in 2007, counting from the 2005 Lagos first meeting, the Southern Governors Forum (SGF) went into a limbo; before a spasmodic burst into life again — 10 years later in 2017 — thanks to the effort of Akinwunmi Ambode, incidentally again, then governor of Lagos.

    Three years later, on May 11, the Asaba parley would dawn.  So, when comes the next SGF parley?  And what’s the assurance it won’t again succumb to its accustomed fits and starts — unlike the routine NGF?

    Meanwhile, since 2005, the SGF agenda has changed little: fiscal federalism, more robust states’ rights, more state tasks, backed with requisite cash, resource control, state police (which could all be grouped under the omnibus: “restructuring”).

    Perhaps the only not-so-new, but which has assumed a fresh alarm (no thanks to the security challenge), is the call to ban open grazing.

    O, there’s another: the call to re-jig security appointments to reflect Nigeria’s ethno-cultural diversity — a purely elite push, though it masquerades as core people charter!

    But more on open grazing and security appointments presently.

    If the SGF cause has remained virtually the same, over 16 years (2005-2021), why has its course been so slipshod?  No prize for guessing right: cant, politics and the careful framing of selfish elite wish list, as the people’s demands.

    SGF should, all season, push its people’s core interests, beyond combative newspaper headlines, after its usual sudden burst into life.

    Still, no thanks to geography, culture and mutual suspicion, SGF has its task well cut out.  Yes, there is a geographical South.  But hardly a political South: in the sense of a political North, even with radical “Middle Belt” elements attempting a disavowal!

    Pray: what’s the difference between “North Central” and “Middle Belt”?  Maybe the colour of your faith and the tinge of your politics!  Yet, somewhat, NGF has always found its groove.  Not so, SGF.  By geography, the South is riven by the Lower Niger, as it drains into the Atlantic, via a tributary of rivers.  No such physical barrier nettles the North.

    Then, comes the majority question: the great Igbo-Yoruba rivalry, from their South East-South West redoubts.

    Then, the great southern minorities, all humming and chirping, from their South-South geo-political refuge.  Of course, they are suspicious of the Yoruba and the Igbo — but perhaps, even more suspicious of one another!

    Now, how do you build sustainable consensus, in this Babel of ringing distractions?  But it may not be as complex as it looks, if you can hone in on a genuine South people’s charter which, for that matter, should be little different from a genuine North people’s charter, since human needs are basically the same.

    The Niger could well be a natural, if artistic, West-East demarcation: the actual geography is much less precise.  But a less selfish elite can locate, in the life and links that a body of water brings, mutual goals to lift the entire South.

    Unfortunately, politics is often elite-driven.  So, the political elite simply wraps its cravings as the people’s ravings, waving the magic of trickle-down benefits, which most times fails; and ends in mass frustration, hopelessness and bitterness.

    But back to the “Asaba Declaration”, as not a few have crowed, of the SGF parley.

    While a fresh “national dialogue” is neither here nor there, restructuring — or what this column prefers to call re-federalization — makes eminent sense to all.

    That there is still any controversy over it issues from poor messaging (from the South: which postures and lectures as though it would be the sole beneficiary); and phobia, from some lobbies in the North (which act as if restructuring would snare their region).

    Restructuring is a win-win.  It’s high time both sides saw it that way.  But It’s good a national consensus appears afoot over it.  Nevertheless, that can be fastened by better messaging, devoid of phobia-driven stalling and triumphal crowing and show-boating.

    But while the buzz is on, the Federal Government can pluck low-hanging fruits from the re-federalization tree.  It can push an immediate constitutional amendment to formalize state police, in view of the current security challenges.

    That would be a brilliant move, indeed: making the states to own their local security challenges, rather than pointing fingers — many times, helplessly — at the centre.

    But even on “restructuring”, the southern elite hypocrisy shines through and through.  It’s rich the South-South lobby now screams “restructuring” when less than six years ago, under Goodluck Jonathan, they were loudly silent over it!

    Perhaps “restructuring” is useless to whoever is in power, is busy “eating”, and table manners decree silence, for it not to choke on its munificence?

    Now, grazing.  Without a solid consensus on modern ranching and allied alternatives, claiming to “ban” open grazing is pure gas.  For one, herding is some citizens’ legitimate livelihood.  You can’t take it away by fiat, without risking avoidable crisis.

    For another, you can’t make sound public policy by criminalizing all herders, just because some of them are alleged criminals.  But it is good the governors’ communique is generating further discourse on grazing routes and ranching.

    The push to re-jig personnel manning Nigeria’s security infrastructure looks convincing on the surface.  But probed further, it’s another elite prerogative moonlighting as people’s imperative.  Though framed by the governors as a pan-southern challenge, it is basically a South East elite charge.

    Now, the Igbo have a right to cry out if they feel short-changed.  But the irony here is that, in terms of crowding out other ethnics from public offices, right from 1960, the Eastern (and later, South East) elite and the elite of the political North, are guiltier than most.

    1966 would perhaps not have flared out of control, if not for that spectre of putative Eastern domination of the federal space. Under President Jonathan, it was government by the political North, the minority Niger Delta and the South East elite.

    Does this seedy past then negate the present demand?  No.  But it behoves everyone to, every time, strive for fairness.  Complaining only when you’re out in the cold is cant.  It would only breed future opportunism, rather than birth overall decent conduct.

    South ahoy!  Not a bad move in a federal Nigeria.  But the SGF must push for regional economic cooperation and integration, among its three geo-political zones.

    That way, it would have homed in on a genuine South people’s charter while, across the Niger and the Benue, pushing for a more equitable federal Nigeria; and focus less on elite greed, which can’t equate its people’s need.