The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olakunle Abimbola

  • How not to grow parties

    How not to grow parties

    By Olakunle Abimbola

     

     

    The February 11 passage of Alhaji Lateef Jakande, 2nd Republic governor of Lagos (1 October 1979 – 31 December 1983), was the end of an era — on the personal plane.  Of all the five Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) governors back then, he was the last to depart.

    But that epochal end, and start of another, may yet transcend Jakande as a person.

    It may symbolize a shift — not necessarily for the better — in the evolution of political parties: from the Jakande era, with its organic flow, on the progressives front, from the 1st Republic Action Group (AG), to 2nd Republic UPN; to the post-Jakande period’s inorganic and much more diffused methods.

    Now, a bit of backgrounding — then and now.

    Then, the UPN, with its four cardinal programmes of free education, free health, full employment and integrated rural development, was the 2nd Republic leading progressive voice.  But it was in opposition to the ruling but conservative National Party of Nigeria (NPN); just as the progressive AG was in opposition to the conservative Northern People’s Congress (NPC: NPN forebears), and its ruling allies, in the 1st Republic (1 October 1960 – 15 January 1966).

    Now, the All Progressives Congress (APC) is the ruling party, officially sworn to social democracy.  But its nativity, after the merger of legacy parties, was a fusion of varied tendencies.

    These were South West traditional progressives of the Awolowo hue, in the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN); northern conservative progressives, in the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC); wilted conservatives, in the All Nigeria People’s Party (ANPP); South East liberals, in a faction of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA); and, of course, latter-day joiners, and rebels against the then ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP), in New PDP (nPDP) elements.

    Just as well Alhaji Jakande died in the midst of APC revalidating its membership, amidst reports of the party exploring the raiding of cross-party lines to grow its ranks!

    That makes the former Lagos governor an exciting historical landmark: at his death, the loading of APC with ideological all-comers, but christening them “progressives”, appears coming of age.

    On the surface, that passes as a post-Jakande development.  But really, Jakande was in the thick of it all (though as a victim), when it all started, in 1989.

    Gen. Ibrahim Babangida had, take-it-or-leave it, charmed the brow-beaten political class, with his divisive “new breed” versus “old breed” theory.

    The regnant fib: to make way for saner politics.  But the real reason: to power Babangida’s own ploy, as Army general, to dominate Nigerian electoral politics, after the style of Argentina’s Gen. Juan Domingo Peron (1895-1974); with feeble opposition from the broken and disinherited politicians.

    That new breed experiment effectively cut the umbilical cord, of political tendencies, progressive or conservative, from their 1st and 2nd Republic ideological ancestors.

    It would also presage the terrible partisan cross-breeding of today, which suggests every party is only a convenient vehicle to grab power; and not ideological vehicles to clinically think out and distil public service solutions.

    Sure, the IBB gambit collapsed under the June 12 rubble — that avoidable nation-wrecking crisis, over a rash military annulment of the presidential election of 1993, that Moshood Abiola won fair and square.  Still, the new breed vs old breed dummy has remained to blunt the ideological clarity of subsequent political parties.

    But back to Jakande, as prime victim of it all.  As at that time, the Awo old guard still boasted three UPN-era governors: Ondo’s Pa Adekunle Ajasin, with unimpeachable moral authority; Oyo’s Chief Bola Ige, with unrivalled street charisma, particularly among the younger South West progressive elements, and Jakande himself.

    At least in his native Lagos, Baba Kerkere appeared well positioned, as Awo-incarnate, to lead the third generation of Nigerian tested and trusted social democrats, after AG and UPN.  But the IBB abracadabra put paid to all that.

    The new breed experiment attracted young, upwardly mobile professionals, gathered behind Dapo Sarumi, determined to battle, for political space, the Jakande-led Lagos old guard.

    That new phalanx crystallized behind the late Shehu Musa Yar’Adua, retired major-general and Obasanjo junta’s chief of staff, Supreme Headquarters; and post-Army days, conservative progressive from Katsina State, with creditable presidential ambitions.

    Either side won some and lost some.  But that sustained clash would knock Jakande off, as the Lagos progressives’ undisputed leader.  But beyond that personal loss, the Lagos Awoists would get diluted with more conservative elements than hitherto. Again, that set the stage for today’s ideologically flexible — indeed, neuter — political parties.

    But again, the June 12 crucible would further purify the Lagos progressive front.  Sarumi backed the Yar’Adua bloc’s trade-off of the MKO mandate, for the earnestly hated Ernest Shonekan Interim National Government (ING).  He got consumed in all of its vortex, and promptly lost his leadership.

    From that ruin, a new order sprouted, boasting a new breed-old breed alliance, that somewhat restored the primacy of Awo-like social democracy in Lagos, thus trumping the putative ascendancy of the Yar’Adua conservative-progressive strain.

    This new Lagos order would morph into the Alliance for Democracy (AD), in 1999.  The new face of this alliance is Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who led successor governors to re-plant Awo’s progressive ideas, as firm cornerstone of Lagos state policy.

    Also Asiwaju Tinubu, more than any, takes credit for the progressives’ 2015 win at the centre, though only after his own faction of the old, fissured AD had morphed into Action Congress (AC), Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and APC, the winning platform, after the 2014 merger.

    But why this brief historical tie-back?

    Well, the regnant wisdom, among the present APC party leadership, appears cross-party sorties to grow the party — no crime! — not withstanding any ideological dissonance that brings in its trail.

    Still, let them remember that it’s such brazen cross-party raids, so long as it translated into immediate power grabs, that eventually unhorsed the PDP, which had bragged to rule for 60 years — in the first instance.

    Let the passage of Jakande, therefore, rekindle the message among true progressives in the party: long-term cohesion is a function of like minds, not a staccato of all-comers, in for ultra-immediate gains.

    But that message is true of progressives as it is true of conservatives, and even of centrists.  It’s the only logical way to grow sustainable political parties.

  • Baba Kekere! When comes another?

    Baba Kekere! When comes another?

    By Olakunle Abimbola

     

     

    Except you grew up on Lagos Island, you probably would not know Iga Jakande, en route to Okepopo, in Epetedo.

    But anywhere you are in sprawling Lagos today, Jakande is ubiquitous — in Ojokoro, Oke Afa-Isolo, Lawanson, Iponri, Mile 2, Adenji Adele (a shouting distance from the original Iga), Ikorodu, Epe, Ilasan (Lekki) — not the palace of some potentate, not ultra-luxurious splashes of a former governor, but the bastion of Lagos denizens’ housing needs!

    That is the Lateef Kayode Jakande (LJK) essence.  A common name, popularly bestowed upon these estates, was a glorious citizen exchange, not initiated by LKJ but by the people themselves: you serve us, we honour you!

    It’s a grateful people’s making of a living legend.  That legend passed into higher glory, at 91, on February 11.  Adieu, Baba Kekere!  But when comes another?

    In the annals of social democracy, locally dubbed progressive politics in Nigeria, LKJ’s feat in Lagos, between 1 October 1979 and 31 December 1983, was in sheer comprehensiveness, second only to Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s sweeping social revolution, in pre-Independence Western Region from 1952.

    From education to sanitation, housing to transportation, rural development to urban renewal, LKJ was a replica of Awo’s acute vision, and the very epitome of the low-cost Citizen Governor.

    As governor, he lived in Bishop Street, Ilupeju, his own home.  He drove his own Toyota Crown, which soon became iconic, in its gubernatorial simplicity.

    His dressing was spartan too: Yoruba male buba and sokoto, the LKJ variant of the Awo fez, and the irukere, which spoke of a beloved, benign democratic royal next door, sans any feudalist conceit.  He was the classic man of the people, minus the cynical hue, of Chinua Achebe’s fictive creation.

    As the 2nd Republic Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) was generational successor to the 1st Republic Action Group (AG), LKJ was only one of the progressive Titans, charged with implementing the UPN four cardinal programmes, in the then LOOBO states: Lagos (LKJ), Ogun (Olabisi Onabanjo), Oyo (Bola Ige), Bendel (Ambrose Alli) and  Ondo (Michael Adekunle Ajasin).

    Still among these Titans, who implemented these programmes to the best of their abilities, it was LKJ that best replicated the wondrous Awo pre-1st Republic developmental magic.  Hence the moniker, Baba Kekere (practically, Junior Awo) — the famed Action Governor of Lagos.

    Though the political street would sizzle with the Baba Kekere moniker, avidly proclaiming LKJ was an Awo replica, it drove serious peer envy in the progressive camp, in the fierce positioning, for post-Awo leadership.

    But peer politics and envy aside, the LKJ developmental worth, in a rising conurbation as Lagos, with its vanishing land resource, was well and truly awesome.

    In a virtual twinkle of an eye, he collapsed the two-, in some cases, three-shift Lagos schools system, for his new free education policy.  As a child in primary school on Lagos Island in the late 60’s, it was no fun at all, going to afternoon school, in the draining heat!

    But LKJ’s ultimate master stroke was, as trusted governor, persuading communities to cede yet unused communal lands, to build new schools.  Enter, the different schools villages, at different locations, in a sprawling, rapidly growing Lagos.

    It was an Awo-like vision, that trouble-shot a sure future education crisis, and tackled it head on.  Can you imagine Lagos today, without those public school complexes?

    Yet, at the start of it all, the elite, quick to condemn, slow to suggest, dismissed the earliest functional classrooms as “poultry sheds”.  To be sure, those “poultry sheds” were stark and unpretentious.  But today, they have all given way to more befitting structures, extending educational opportunities to the poor and vulnerable.

    Sanitation was another under-reported achievement of the LKJ era.  Much of Lagos had bucket latrines, with night-soil men nightly servicing each household, in a blanket of stench.

    But in a race against time, LKJ mounted an upgrade to healthier flush toilet systems, in four short years.  Now Sura, hitherto Lagos Island’s high shrine of filth and stench, where the Council stationed its night soil sanitary tank, now boasts a modern shopping complex.

    Still, the area where LKJ most replicated the brilliant Awo vision was the Metroline light rail, which the military, in command arrogance, killed.  It was an intra-city rail that foresaw the booming Lagos population today, and figured how to power their daily shuttle, without a fuss.

    But alas!  In 1984, a new military order dawned.  In its wholesale demonization of the fallen civil ancien regime, it cancelled the Metroline, with messianic hubris.

    A grand irony, though: Major-Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, that undid the Lagos Metroline, has morphed into President Muhammadu Buhari, impatient champion of the sweeping modernization of Nigerian rail!

    Even the Sani Abacha post-June 12 stumble — the only chink in LKJ’s formidable progressive armour — was driven by Baba Kekere’s rigorous personal code of unstinted service.

    Abacha was an eel to string along the progressive forces, with a dummy to honour MKO Abiola’s June 12 mandate.  But the public servant in Jakande, having felt the pull to serve, couldn’t turn back.  He threw himself at legitimate grind, for an illegitimate regime.  His progressive comrades frowned.  But ordinary Nigerians were net-gainers.

    To these comrades and the thundering, rabid popular press, LKJ’s was a capital crime, to be slammed with political death!  In the ruthless, dog-eat-dog gallows of the Yoruba progressives, whispering campaigns flared: that LKJ’s Abacha stumble was indeed an alleged Awo “curse”, for some alleged 2nd Republic trade-off, that allegedly imperiled Awo’s presidency!

    Pure fantasy?  Gospel truth?  Peer envy gone ga-ga? Who knows!  But something is clear.  With his 2nd Republic feat, LKJ had secured his place in history, as second only to the Great Awo himself, in implementing progressive ideas in government.

    Even the way LKJ yielded space to younger progressive elements, in his native Lagos, was a study in grace, reminiscent of the Titan-Olympian change of guards in Greek mythology.

    Not for him the grating hauteur of some of his Awoist contemporaries, heating up the polity.  LKJ was the Awoist tiger, that need not proclaim its tigeritude (to borrow that timeless quip, of our own WS).  His works spoke for him.

    Farewell, Baba Kekere, foremost exponent of the Jeremy Bentham greatest happiness of the greatest number!  When comes another?

  • Pathway to Somalia

    Pathway to Somalia

    Olakunle Abimbola

     

     

    It’s testy time in the Yoruba country.  Dire insecurity plagues the people. No less dire reactions, to that threat, hurl them towards a sorry pass.

    Would they, from there, power into the Oodua utopia of their agitated dreams? Or hurtle right back, into the sorry dog-eat-dog, of their pre-colonial past?

    The magic capsule, for good or for ill, could well be Sunday Igboho, who the media, ever ready to crunch the latest cliche in town, now flaunt as “Yoruba rights activist”.

    Yet, the focus here is not Sunday Adeyemo aka Igboho, as a person, but on the you-push-me-I-shove-you tendencies he epitomizes; and the danger the Yoruba elite are letting themselves — and their civilization — ceding space to such seedy tendencies.

    Forward, on the double, into the immediate pre-Kiriji War (1877-1893) past!  Long before Somalia unravelled in clan heads mortally preying on own stock as mighty warlords, Yorubaland had once descended into such Oodua-on-Oodua chaos.

    Yet, it must be said: Igboho’s dawn follows the collapse of Nigeria’s centre-powered security; and the tragic tardiness of the Federal Government to re-jig it, to effectively face current harsh realities.

    For that, the Muhammadu Buhari Presidency bears a harsh censure, for sticking with a collapsing infrastructure, when it ought to have made timely adjustments, to tackle the dynamics of the moment.

    Yet, that censure is less a monopoly of any regime since 1999, but more of an Aso Rock constant.  As it was with Obasanjo, so was it with Yar’Adua and Jonathan.  And now, it is with Buhari: sticking, blindly, with a decayed central policing system.

    So, if you dwell less on Fulani-baiting, on dangerous profiling of every herder as a violent criminal, and on draping an entire ethnic group in the grim colours of its criminal elements, the structural security collapse would be clear: the Nigeria Police, and its civil security sister agencies, are overwhelmed by the criminality of the day.

    What to do, therefore, is to infuse complementary constabularies, at state levels.  To dig deep, you could even sanction sub-state community police, if necessary, to fend off creeping grassroots criminality.

    But while tweaking the law en route these new security imperatives, the central police must rally to enforce the law, and rout criminal elements, in every part of the country.  Had that happened, Igboho, as charming gargoyle, wouldn’t have appealed to long-suffering natives, in Ibarapa (Oyo), the Ketu areas of Ogun; and much of forested Yorubaland, chaffing under the assault of violent and criminal herder elements, and sparking the present justifiable uproar.

    But let it be clear: even a recharged federal police, rooting out criminals nationwide, would still not be enough right now.  Too much confidence is down the drain.  Too much mutual distrust is in the air.  Besides, the police is too spread thin to sustain such a blitz.

    So, let the need meet the time.  Let the federal authorities work with state governments to fast-track the South West Amotekun, and equivalents in other geo-political zones, into formal state police.

    If tasks are shared; and stringent operative protocols are drawn, and each arm is funded and fully equipped for its tasks, this spiralling danger may yet be curtailed.  It may well be the last opportunity for the civil order to put out this roaring blaze.

    That re-birth will save everyone from the do-me-I-do-you (to borrow that colourful pidgin) credo, central to the Igboho essence.

    True, harried local folks may balk at all this: folks that these criminals, moonlighting as herders, routinely slaughter; farmers these violent elements banish from their livelihoods; and husbands whose wives these hardy felons consistently rape.  Still, canonized disorder, which an Igboho intervention entails, should be a no-no.

    Besides, the elite, whose bounden duty is to be strategic, no matter the acute immediate provocation, should be more receptive to civil processes.

    The dangerous overthrow of norms, in the heated convenience of the moment, is the beginning of strategic tragedy.

    All that was clear from military rule.  When Murtala Muhammed roared into town “with immediate effect”, the polity hooted and cheered!  But it killed job security in the civil service, turning not a few into soulless hustlers.

    This has fuelled the gargantuan corruption plaguing the bureaucracy today. Yet, the Murtala patriotic temper was to root out corrupt civil servants “with immediate effect”.

    Norms!  The dangerous overthrow of norms is the beginning of strategic tragedy!

    But back to Igboho and the herders crisis.  If you norm-alize torching Fulani folks’ assets, simply because some of their kins are accused of violent crimes, how do you prevent such fate befalling the Yoruba in other parts of Nigeria, even if they too are only guilty by association?

    Even if you have credible evidence that the victim is a kidnapping racketeer, as Igboho claimed of the Igangan Seriki Fulani, when did being an accuser and judge and dispenser of penalty, cease to be jungle justice?

    Even if canonized disorder helps to expel hated aliens, is it not only a matter of time the strong, among the now cheering natives, use it to pounce on the weak?  Norms!

    But perhaps to the basest and most virulent campaigners for Oodua Republic, this is pure gas, since that tantalizing, post-Nigeria utopia, is already winking in the dark?

    The grim fact is pre-Nigeria Yorubaland offered pretty little reassurances, if historical accounts from Samuel Johnson’s The History of the Yorubas, are anything to go by.

    The Oyo Empire, of murder and plunder, was bad enough.  The dominant victims, of  that Yoruba-on-Yoruba orgy, were the Yoruba themselves.

    But as civil order collapsed, with Oyo unravelling in the awesome contradiction of own imperial violence, Yorubaland became a marauder’s haven.

    In that canonized disorder, every neighbourhood tough headed to Ibadan, the new imperial power of renewed plunder, which claimed fealty to a highly weakened and much diminished Alaafin.

    Things got to a head in September 1877, when Oyepetun, Ibadan’s local ruler in Okemesi, raped Fabunmi’s wife.  A provoked Fabunmi hewed off his oppressor’s head.  Enter, the Kiriji War!

    The Latoosa-led, all-conquering Ibadan army, which pronto launched a punitive expedition, didn’t care about Fabunmi’s ravaged manly pride.  They were only incensed at a dire imperial crime.  Norms!

    It was this self-loathing patch-patch that the British colonialists stemmed, and Awo moulded into the Yoruba nation of today.

    Mainstreaming Igboho’s push-and-shove would be a dive, right back, into that dark past.  That would be the death of the Yoruba civil elite — and civilization — within or without Nigeria.

    That is the pathway to Yoruba Somalia.

  • Dogara: beyond the theatrics

    Dogara: beyond the theatrics

    By Olakunle Abimbola

    Behind the ongoing Bauchi theatrics, judicial and political, is the sanctity of the political party system, an umpteenth casualty, even as Nigeria shambles in its willy-nilly advance in democracy.

    But the drama ripples with varied ironies, that lead the trail right back to where and when the rain started pelting.

    The first irony is Yakubu Dogara, former Speaker of the House of Representatives.  The disputed seat, Bogoro/Dass/Tafawa Balewa federal constituency of Bauchi State, the embattled Dogara has held since 2007 — the zenith of PDP rule.

    From those halcyon days of PDP federal power (when Dogara was faithful MP), to APC’s first taste of federal power (when Dogara was controversial House Speaker), to the present stormy days of alleged change of political gear, Dogara has been a constant: the proud poster-boy of a dominant Christian constituency, eager to enthrone its own.

    Alleged change of political gear?  Yes, because the matter is before a court of competent jurisdiction.  Until the court rules on the matter, either way, media commentaries are not allowed.  But not so, on the political aspect of the combat.

    That leads to the second irony: both Dogara and Bauchi Governor, Bala Mohammed, the two prime dramatis personae in the Bauchi theatre, have been involved in cross-party manoeuvres.

    Mohammed, Bauchi PDP governor (since 2019), is ex-ANPP-turned PDP veteran, in prosperity and adversity, since 2010.

    He was ANPP senator (2007-2010) but became minister of Federal Capital Territory, FCT (2010-2015), even while still ANPP elected senator — the last FCT minister, under PDP rule — for supporting the “Doctrine of Necessity” that made Goodluck Jonathan acting President, in the last days of mortally ill President, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua.

    Mohammed may have joined PDP after Dogara, a veteran from 1999.  But since joining up in 2010, Mohammed never left — even when the PDP power dam broke; and new PDP (nPDP) elements, like Dogara and Bukola Saraki, teamed up with the then mega opposition party, APC, to sack PDP from federal power.

    That leads to the third irony: the PDP itself, on whose behalf the Bauchi battle rages.  It’s the utmost irony, indeed, that PDP which during its power years made killing opposition parties and poaching their members to grow — or more accurately, bloat — now growls against injury from that very same practice.

    Talk about gulping own bitter herbs!

    Indeed, in the routinized subvert-to-collapse PDP policy against the luckless opposition, it became a badge of honour, in PDP-controlled parliaments, for MPs to sack parties on whose platforms they got elected, and swagger into the ruling parliamentary sanctum, cock-sure of illicit cover by the notorious “federal might”.

    If you still doubt, ask former members of the defunct Alliance for Democracy (AD), for their bitter experience in the South West, and elsewhere, between 1999 and 2003.

    Yes, it could be argued — and validly so — that such lack of fealty to parties was a general product of an era just emerging from long-term military rule.

    Still, there was no question: the PDP amoral politics, and its power-first-and-last credo, helped in no small measure to subvert the political party system.  Pray, how can democracy endure and thrive, without a robust and vibrant party system, culture and tradition?

    But back to the Bauchi drama.  Dogara, more than anyone from the nPDP misadventure into APC, enjoyed the best of two worlds.  Is he then fated for some bitter pills, after the hurly burly is done, and the Bauchi battle is lost and won?

    Unlike ex-Senate President, Dr. Bukola Saraki, who got his Kwara political thraldom smashed, becoming a virtual POW fleeing from own metropole, jeered by former subjects to boot, Dogara somewhat clobbered back in triumph.

    Unlike Saraki who lost everything — his Kwara central senate seat; and putative second term as Senate President the least of his worries — Dogara rumbled back to reckoning.

    He not only dusted Dalhatu Kantana, the APC challenger for his parliamentary seat (by 73, 609 to 50, 078 votes), he also helped to oust then APC Governor and arch-rival in local Bauchi power play, Mohammed Abdullahi Abubakar, whose second term dreams turned ashes, with the triumph of PDP’s Bala Mohammed.

    Ay, former Speaker Dogara returned as ordinary House member and opposition legislator.  But he wore, on his high shoulders, the proud chips of new Bauchi kingmaker, that delivered when it was toughest.  But he forgot, apparently, Machiavelli’s chilly whoop: the sacred, bounden duty of the new king, with eye on the long haul, is the swift despatch the king maker!

    So, it would appear to be, between the embattled Dogara, and Governor Mohammed baying for his blood, for clutching tight to the PDP mandate, after allegedly crossing the partisan aisle to APC.

    To be sure, however, Dogara fired the first salvo.  In a resignation letter from the PDP, on 24 July 2020, to his Bogoro Ward C chairman, Dogara rued the “breakdown of governance in Bauchi”, by Mohammed, the governor he “helped instal” only the previous year.

    The governor and his allies riposted.  ”As a party,” Hamza Kashe Akuyam, the Bauchi PDP chairman swore, “we will do everything possible to get back our seat from him through legal means.”  The voice of Jacob but the hands of Esau, since the governor had dead-panned he had no problems with Dogara?

    But why did the governor and allies pick the gauntlet, rather than let the alleged defection slide, as many before had done, even when it was illicit advantage PDP, the all-mighty federal ruling party, destined to rule for 60 years, at the first instance?

    To push for the sanctity of the party and its sacred electoral rights?  Hardly!  To push Dogara’s nose out of joint, to prove who rules the roost in Bauchi politics?  More likely!

    Besides, when is defection a defection?  Immediately you dump your party for a new one?  Or after your new party enlists you in its rolls?  Within that grey zone, however, what happens to the mandate you lug?

    A contraband to be wrenched off you, with all the contempt your former party can muster?  Or some holy grail to forbear, until the defecting process is complete?  The courts have their jobs well cut out!

    Still, challenging illicit defections is the way to go, if the party system must bloom with Nigeria’s growing democracy.  Strong institutions are, after all, the sine qua non of vibrant democracies.

    So, let the Bauchi PDP press its rights.  Also, let Dogara defend his honour.  But had PDP, in its power years been less wayward in bucking sacred democratic norms, it wouldn’t have been caught in this warp.

    That ought to be a telling lesson to the ruling APC.

  • War on the Oodua front

    War on the Oodua front

    Olakunle Abimbola

     

    WAR on the Oodua front!  But it’s not unlike that easy but macabre tease, by reggae great, Peter Tosh: everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die!

    In the gangling, growling, sabre-rattling mood of the season, everyone bawls war! But about everyone too, is cock-sure to live to tell the tale!

    The stupidity of scalding passion!  The danger of wild delusion! The inevitability of ice-cold reason!

    It dawned with the Ondo gubernatorial diktat, the Presidency’s counter riposte, and the acute danger of faulty messaging.

    Meeting with Hausa, Fulani and Ebira leaders in Ondo State, Governor Rotimi Akeredolu decreed that herders (who kidnappers fake), within seven days, must quit the Ondo forest reserves-turned-kidnappers’ den.

    The governor’s key call here was worsening insecurity.  Spikes in kidnappings and killings were intolerable.  The lawful majority must be protected.  So, the diktat was both reasonable and popular.

    Also, these crimes are often associated with “herders”: following endless tales from the seized, that alien kidnappers have turned Ondo forests into ransom-awaiting refuge; and grim slaughter slabs for victims that couldn’t pay.

    Yet, these forests stream with herdsmen that speak same language as these alleged criminals, thus making a perfect camouflage.  It makes eminent sense, therefore, to clear the area of every noxious element.

    Still, under the law — and politics — of the Federal Republic, can a state governor give non-indigenes a sweeping order to vacate a precinct, without provoking similar backlashes from other governors?  To every “Sabo” (northern conclaves) in the South, aren’t there Sabongeri (southern settlements) in the North?

    Stripped of its ethnic interpretation, that would appear the core of the Garba Shehu Presidency retort, to the Ondo gubernatorial diktat.

    Incidentally, the same Shehu had issued two previous but similar statements.  One: to press the right of northerners in the East, against threats from some eastern elements.  The other: to defend Catholic Bishop Matthew Kukah’s residential right in Sokoto, again after some locals threatened to expel him.

    So, except you apply the most disingenuous of ad hominem fallacies, Shehu cannot be right in defending Father Kukah’s right in Sokoto, yet be wrong in defending northerners’ rights in the East, or herders’ rights in Ondo — particularly law-abiding herders, not convicted of any crime — just because of accusation that the presidential spokesperson is a Fulani ethnic jingoist.

    But even if Shehu has, on citizen rights, been consistent, he dangerously begged the serious security question in the Ondo case.

    The governor didn’t just rise from the wrong side of the bed to bark out quit orders.  He acted from intolerable kidnapping, many of them by Northerners, plaguing his people.  On that he can’t be faulted.

    On the security question, therefore, both the Presidency and the Ondo government should be on the same page; not work at cross purposes.

    But as these skirmishes flared, sub-state extremists jumped into the fray.

    Sunday Adeyemo, aka Sunday Igboho, now styled “Yoruba ethnic activist”, galloped into town at Igangan, Ibarapa North in Oyo State, and ordered the resident Fulani in there to scram — or else …

    The comedy, from this brewing tragedy: the Ivy League-educated FFK goads Igboho on, as his new-found Yoruba champion.  But Gani Adams warns his fellow sub-state player to beware of a suicide mission — both for himself and for “the struggle” they both push!

    For Yorubaland, however, an epochal regression: a people hitherto hoisted on the cutting intellect of the great Obafemi Awolowo, now comfy with the likes of Igboho and Adams — no thanks to some careerist-Awoists, who have morphed into neo-Samsons, ready to crash the edifice on all and everyone!

    In all the excitement, a scornful Igboho told Governor Seyi Makinde to go jump into the Ogunpa River, for daring to call for his arrest; when it was Igboho, and Igboho alone, that made him governor!

    Somewhat, that echoed a 2nd Republic brush, between the great Bola Ige and ace partisan fixer, Busari Adelakun, in same Oyo State!  With that came the serenading of Igboho’s alleged awesome magical powers!  Enter: new atavistic champ come to save the Yoruba from the Fulani!

    Still, only Igboho and Igboho alone would answer to the law, if charged with any felony.

    Of course, intemperate outbursts weighed in from the northern divide, the craziest of which represents a cattle lobby, claiming the Fulani owned every grain of Nigerian soil; and could well do whatever they damn well liked with it!

    That such a lunatic could crow and make sense to anyone, in 21st century Nigeria, should bother everyone.

    Newspapers, of course, take predictable regional stands.  Ironically, Daily Trust, which arguably had the more cautionary editorial, slapped you with a reckless and rabid headline.  The Nation essayed a centrist mode, but its southern sympathies were without question.  The Punch?  A thunderous bombast and tirade, that only preached to the converted.

    No surprise at all: both the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) and the rump of Afenifere, gung-ho, tore at each other, in defence of the right of own people — a Nigerian notorious penchant, to be sure, to talk at (not with) one another.

    Still, all of these are the proverbial din, that begs the market question.  The critical business is a failing security infrastructure, which both the Federal Government and states must partner to renew and reshape; or otherwise face looming but avoidable catastrophe.

    The genteel — among whom most Yoruba regard themselves — would cringe at Igboho’s atavism.  But they are no less riled by some cocky criminals from the North, who triggered the Ondo and Ibarapa, Oyo crises.

    That you have a constitutional right to roam nationwide does not equate a democratic right to free-wheeling crime.  That is true of northerners in the South; as it is of southerners in the North.

    But all these wouldn’t be issues if the security infrastructure were adequate — inserting state police, for instance — and security agencies are perceived firm, fair but tough on crime, no matter the tongue, or the ethnics, of the criminals.

    This is where the Federal Government must show leadership; and launch critical initiatives, on which it must partner with the states to implement.  Had that been the case, most of the current crisis wouldn’t even occur.

    But the media too must play its part.  You can’t because of a few criminals profile the entire Fulani as felons; or demonize honest herders, as kidnappers.

  • Exit, the American big man

    Exit, the American big man

    Olakunle Abimbola

     

    “Trump is the wrong man for the job” — the final sentence in Bob Woodward’s Rage, Simon & Schuster (2020).

     

    The African Big Man” — that’s the coinage (not unfair) of The Economist: that wry, condescending and often racially mischievous up-market London weekly.

    Though that coinage galls — it refers to African (mis)leaders that fancy selves mightier than their countries — it is finically fair.

    Finically fair, at least, of this vile trinity: Uganda’s Gen. (Dr.) Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada, CBE — Conqueror of the British Empire; Central African Empire’s Jean-Bedel Bokassa, self-named emperor and alleged cannibal; and Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, notorious despot once estimated far richer than the Zaire state he subverted!

    The African big man!  Though this triad didn’t entirely capture that disgraced tribe, it best epitomizes that umpteenth African crisis of strongmen ravaging puny institutions; with resultant political and developmental catastrophes.

    Still with Donald Trump, whose tenure ends in a blaze of odium tomorrow, January 20, perhaps The Economist, wry, laconic but always brutally frank, should ready the biting lexis, to script the American Big Man, from Trump’s crude crust!

    The Trump American tempest!  It started with an arch-misogynist, pushing his democratic macho to grab women in the rudest and crudest parts, to wild acclaim.

    It ended with a Make America Great Again (MAGA) mob — well and truly “maga” (read dumb) in the global eye — storming the US Capitol, the sacred high shrine of America’s 232-year democracy, tragically claiming five scalps, in the mad MAGA equivalent of T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral!

    That dual travesty — profaning the high shrine of American democracy and futile but wilful subversion of the sacred American vote, with a seven-million-plus majority to boot! — may have earned Trump an unprecedented second impeachment, in a four-year single presidential term.

    But it is doubtful if it has purged him of his tragic delusion, of playing America’s wanna-be Hitler, for White folks, scared stiff of radically changing demographics.

    Still, that tragic bravura — inciting his MAGA mob to storm the Capitol — has earned Trump a free cascade from the global summit, as America’s commander-in-chief; to the nadir, as the global pariah-in-chief, aside from a butt of caustic jokes!

    If you doubt, ask Twitter (where his dark shadows once loomed, tweeting reckless lies, as if that noxious genre was dying out), Facebook, Snapchat and allied social media platforms); banking giants, like Deutsche and Signature, where Trump was once royalty; and other brands like Marriott, Blue Cross, Shopify, et al, now scramming from Trump and family, their once-upon-a-time business aristocrats!

    Why, it appears a 21st century rollback of the Pericles experience in ancient Athens!

    In 444-443 BC, Pericles, via potted chards the Greeks called ostrakon, was voted out of the Polis, for subversive popularity.  Ostrakon would go on to cement the English word “ostracize”.

    Yet, Pericles would serve out his brief ostrakon ban; and power back to become the greatest lawgiver in Athens history (460-429BC).  The Golden Age of Athens — in politics and democracy, art, theatre and culture, philosophy and the sciences — was dubbed Periclean Athens.

    For Trump, however, January 2021 is final(?) infamy: three successive Wednesdays (as a CNN analyst brilliantly quipped), and his well-earned sink — January 6: the Trump insurrection; January 13: the Trump second impeachment; January 20: the power Trump never wanted to leave, will leave him in a sorry pile!

    Again, courtesy CNN, a new American parents’ putative cry: may you never be like Trump, undone by his hefty lies!

    Still, might Trump survive his looming Senate trial, which if convicted could earn him a life-time ban from public office?

    If he does, would he power his MAGA mob to Trumpian America — some severe MAGA glory; or palpable decline, that could sack the American civilization, like barbarians at the gate of Rome, with racial tension and endless catastrophes?  Time will tell!

    But before getting too excited either way, we should revisit Bob Woodward’s damning verdict on Trump, that opened this piece, from Rage, his 2020 book on the Trump power years.

    Woodward’s full quote, in that book’s last paragraph: “When his performance as president is taken in its entirety, I can only reach one conclusion: Trump is the wrong man for the job.”

    The Trump Capitol debacle all but confirmed that harsh but fair verdict.  An American president, that levies a murderous mob to sack the American first estate of the realm, to brazenly steal an election that he lost, earns thick odium, fair and square.

    Yet, that wasn’t entirely unexpected.  Indeed, it was debacle waiting to happen.

    Trump’s merry penchant for self-ruin (and institutional iconoclasm, for all the ultra-selfish, ignoble reasons) was clear from the very first day he took power. His post-3 November 2020 electoral defeat tantrums were only a sad climax.

    Yet, any telling parallels, for the noise-some army around here, trump-eting everything “saner climes” (including Trump’s basest follies) as utopian, but decrying everything local (no matter how wholesome) as hellish?  Plenty — and for starters, the religious order in troubled times!  The American Evangelicals, wild and right-wing, sanctified the Trump garbage as neo-piety.  But post-election defeat woes, climaxed by the Capitol insurrection of January 6, they now endure rotten eggs on shamed faces!

    A wild section of Pentecostal Nigeria, hate-filled and baleful, dredged up holy rot to tar an otherwise decent president, at a very testy juncture of Nigerian history.  Their fate, harsh or benign, comes with the judgment of history.

    Then, the willy-nilly Libertarian party: to which freedom (of speech and allied rights) is absolute; and to whom the social media is virtual, sacred and untouchable cathedral, to lunch democratic insurrection, with absolutely no repercussion!

    Well Trump, even as all-mighty POTUS, just got cured of that costly delusion: from commander-in-chief, to pariah-in-chief!

    That his Humpty-Dumpty crash emerged, not from some high-minded legislation but from stark, Big Tech business decision, is hard reality check: Big Tech ruined Trump before Trump could ruin its bottom line!  No sentiments.  Just plain business!

    As for the Nigerian media, that often baits anarchy to prove its “patriotism”, the CNN response to the Capitol invasion is instructive.  The same CNN that here thumbed down clear anarchy and giddily fuelled a fictive “Lekki Massacre”, is now bawling and screeching and yelling and wailing “coup at the Capitol”, run, run run!

    Trump has ruined himself — and about time too!  It is America’s headache if, even after his unprecedented second impeachment, it allows a malevolent, disgraced and unhinged former POTUS to power back to ruin it.

    But if in 208 weeks Trump nearly crashed America’s democracy of 232 years, then democracy must be fragile.

    Moderation is, therefore, the big take-away from the Trump debacle.

     

    Happy new year! 

    After a sound rest, it’s sure great to be back.  Thanks to readers of this page, who almost decreed my leave be annulled, to take Ripples’ take on tumbling news.  It’s good to be loved and missed.  Thanks again, and happy new year!

     

  • Roiling(?) Rawlings

    Roiling(?) Rawlings

    Olakunle Abimbola

     

     

    During his epochal deeds, gushing admirers crowed he was “JJ” — Junior Jesus.  But unfazed haters also growled he was SS — senior Satan: if not in those exact words, but in scalding and scornful, if not outright hateful, sentiments.

    During his older days, not a few, friend or foe, called him Pappy Jay.

    But roiled or pleased, riled or bliss, friend or foe, no one could ignore Jeremiah John (JJ) Rawlings aka Jerry Rawlings, the “Scot” that took over Ghana (a condescending Western media headline framing of his power capture); and gifted it back its soul!

    JJ, 73, died on November 12.  He ruled Ghana as military strongman (1981-1992); and then, as two-term elected president (1993-2001), as candidate of his National Democratic Congress (NDC).

    But that twin military/democratic tour was his second coming.  His first, a short, sharp but intense 112-day roller-coaster (4 June – 24 September 1979), cemented Rawlings’s place in history — a mark neither friend nor foe would forget.

    Yes — and regretfully — it was a testy period of bloodletting.  For that, not a few dismiss JJ as “murderer” and “blood-spiller”, his act beyond pardon, and Rawlings himself, unmitigated villain of history.

    But it was bloodletting as shock therapy, for a post-Nkrumah Ghana that had totally lost its soul; and the cream of its intellect, the flower of its knowledge class, self-reduced to hewers of wood, cobblers of shoes and lowly teachers with tick-tok minds, in neighbouring Lagos, Nigeria, in a furious gallop from the nightmare at home.

    But even that hit a trough: in the Shagari Presidency Ghana deportations of 1983 (a reverse of the 1969 Kofi Busia mass expulsion of Nigerians from Ghana), which the rather picturesque Nigeria-speak dramatically captured: Ghana Must Go (GMG)!

    Even, if you didn’t witness that Ghana odyssey in Lagos and all-over Nigeria, just pick up and read Ayi kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones are not Yet Born (published 1968): to see, and hear, and smell the depth of the tragic dialectics, that triggered the Rawlings-era bloody purges.

    Eight Ghana senior army officers were executed for official graft: Major-Gen. Robert Kotei, Cmdr. Joy Amedume, Col. Roger Felli, Air Vice Marshal George Boakye and Major-Gen. Edward Kwaku Utuka.

    But three generals, among the doomed eight, caught global attention, all ex-heads of state: Akwasi Amankwaa Afrifa, Ignatius Kutu Acheampong and Fred Akuffo.

    Akuffo had earlier overthrown Acheampong, in a corrupt junta palace coup.  But the sight of two immediate past Ghana heads of state, facing the firing squad, was roiling and shocking!  It sent a chill through the emergent but corrupt Ghana elite!

    But deep global sympathy welled up for Afrifa.  Afrifa, a retired lieutenant-general, had overthrown Kwame Nkrumah in 1966; and become head of state.  Later, he was first chair of the three-member, collegiate presidential commission that “reigned” with elected Prime Minister, Kofi Abrefa Busia (1969 to 1972), in a diarchy.  Besides, Afrifa had just won a seat in the soon-to-be-inaugurated Ghana 3rd Republic Parliament, and pop! — his execution, at 43, on 26 June 1979!

    There, Ghana regained its soul the hard way!

    But all happened in 112 days, after which the Rawlings Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) handed over to elected President Hilla Liman, on 24 September 1979.  But two years later, Rawlings would overthrow Liman, on 31 December 1981, for his second coming, stretching 20 long years.

    Between Nkrumah and Rawlings, therefore, lay Ghana’s paradise lost and paradise regained (to borrow John Milton’s glorious literary coinages), in a rich belt of — even if  — bloody 20th century history!

    Both have earned Ghana’s eternal gratitude, for their mutual salvation of motherland.  But beyond that common glory, they were radically different ideological birds.

    Nkrumah was a radical intellectual ideologue and pan-Africanist, fired by dreams of Ghana’s greatness; and its leadership of an Africa — indeed, a Black universe — totally free of any foreign domination, political or cultural.

    His classic, Neo-colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism (published 1965), which saw — and punched — through Africa’s post-flag independence western domination, sent sheer panic through western metropolitan capitals.  Indeed, the US State Department sent the author-president a growling note of protest; and promptly cancelled a US$ 25 million “aid” to Ghana!

    That appeared the beginning of the end.  Next was his 1966 overthrow, by international capital and renegade local soldiers.

    Rawlings, on the other hand, was the impassioned, development-minded pragmatist, propelled by a strong sense of right and wrong; and the urgent push to force the ruinous Ghana elite through the straight and narrow path.  But he never claimed any ideological kin with Nkrumah, though Rawlings harboured own pan-Africanist streak.

    Still, that strong “right and wrong” cast palls on his interventions.  In his second coming, three Ghana Supreme Court (GSC) justices: Cecilia Koranteng-Addow, Frederick Sarkodie and Kwadjo Agyei Agyepong; and two military officers, Majors Sam Acquah and Danasa Nantogmah, were all abducted and later found killed.

    It’s true: Joachim Amartey Quaye, a top civilian hierarch of the Rawlings second intervention, and four others: Lance Corporal Amedeka, Michael Senyah, Tekpor Hekli and Jonny Dzandu, were tried, convicted and executed for killing the GSC jurists.

    Yet, it all happened under Rawlings, with even some tongues wagging over his alleged involvement.  Others also pointed fingers at Kojo Tsikata, retired Captain in the Ghana Army and head of National Security and Foreign Affairs in the Rawlings Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC), the ruling council of his second military regime.  But these accusations were not proved.

    Still, whatever his drawbacks, Rawlings was never about Rawlings.  Rawlings was all about Ghana.

    In 1967, Gnassingbe Eyadema took power in Togo.  Now, 53 years later, Togo is near-Eyadema fiefdom, with “Baby Doc”, Faure Gnassingbe, presiding over “family fortunes”!  Why, siblings Faure and Kpatcha, one the president, the other Defence minister, once even brawled, in the Eyadema “royal” rumble!

    In Liberia, the pathetic Master-Sergeant Samuel Doe made a bathetic push at power; and copped a civil war that consumed him at 39.

    Even in Nigeria, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida essayed a failed Peronist transition, from self to self.  But all he achieved was a Khalifa, Sani Abacha, who left sleaze as stinking memory!

    But Rawlings entered Ghana’s Osu Castle as Flight-Lieutenant.  Twenty-two years later, even with the Liman “interregnum”, he left that castle as Flight-Lieutenant.

    More importantly, he left Ghana far saner than he met it.  That can’t be said of most African rulers of his generation.

    Rawlings was all about Ghana — and history would never forget!

     

     

  • Liberal dictatorship

    Liberal dictatorship

    Olakunle Abimbola

     

    LIBERAL dictatorship — a violent contradiction in terms, right?

    Yet, that appears what some lobbies are trying to impose, post-#EndSARS protests that tragically miscarried, kissing bare anarchy.

    Dateline October 12, and The Nation outed with this headline: “Banire, Utomi, Falana, others slam Fed Govt for ‘dictatorship’”.  That news report captured the take of Concerned Professionals (CP) on the #EndSARS aftermaths.

    To be sure, different lobbies in a democracy, can push their legal and legitimate rights to dub the sitting order whatever they like.  It’s all about participatory democracy; the right to free speech and the clash between citizen and state rights.

    Do citizens have rights?  Absolutely, though no right is absolute.  Still, let’s be clear: these rights subsist from the harshest of dictatorships to the freest of democracies.  Citizen right is simply the spice of the modern state; and the vanguard for those rights are critical to any democracy.

    But do states too have rights?  Definitely.  Indeed, a 1949 UN document, named Draft Declaration on Rights and Duties of States, which the International Law Commission adopted and submitted to the General Assembly, itemized the rights and duties of states.

    Article 2 of that document spoke of the basic right to govern: “Every state has the right to exercise jurisdiction over its territory and over all persons and things therein, subject to the immunities recognized by international law”.

    That right is rooted in the pristine social contract: by which the people conceptually agreed to forego part of their rights, in exchange for common security and safety, guaranteed by the state and its ruling agency, the government.

    But Article 6 also insisted the state must, as duty, respect and uphold its citizens’ rights: “Every state has the duty to treat all persons under its jurisdiction with respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion”.

    So, every polity (indeed, every democracy), boasts that taut and delicate tension, which balance must not snap: between the right of the state to exercise its legal powers; and the right of the citizens to uphold their legitimate freedoms.

    It’s dictatorship, if it snaps to the government’s side.  It’s anarchy, if it snaps the people’s way.  Neither is desirable — and #EndSARS was living proof!

    To be fair, you must credit the liberal movement — lawyers, jurists, the progressive media, rights advocacy groups and even international rights organizations — as the historic vanguard for the survival of democracy.  They are the palladium that holds these rights as the democratic holy grail; and would go to any length to defend it — admirable!

    Which shows why this movement would ideologically, even if near-uncritically, gravitate towards protests like #EndSARS.  Indeed, Police brutality is such a brazen and unapologetic assault on citizen rights that it must be condemned.

    But support for the right cause is one thing.  Using that agenda to block putative wrongs, even from good intentions, is another.

    Therein then lies Ripples’ departure from CP, in its bid to stonewall legitimate probes into the dirty underbelly of the #EndSARS protests.  By that it, rather arrogantly, beatifies crass sentiments as the manifest good.  It is nothing but holy fraud.

    But don’t get it twisted: the liberal phalanx is right to insist on transparency and openness of whatever probe the government is launching.  They are right to disagree with — and even challenge, at superior courts — the legal propriety of a court handing the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) the power to freeze citizens’ accounts, pending investigations.

    They are also within their constitutional rights to raise hell over passport seizures, of citizens that contributed to the success of free, legal and legitimate protests.  Again, aside from raising hell in the press, they can approach the courts to challenge — and overturn — those actions.

    However, they can’t — and mustn’t — wholesale canonize their own preferences as rights groups, but demonize, wholesale, the other side; not on the basis of facts and rigour but on frothing and fraudulent sentiments.  The government also has rights!

    That, however, appears the rally of CP and media allies, carefully passed as progressive thinking.  It is not.

    On the contrary, it’s a looming liberal dictatorship, as bad as government dictatorship.  Both are undemocratic tendencies that must be decried, despite the liberal lobby’s puritanical play to the gallery.

    For starters, if lobbies and individuals earn due praise for driving free, legal and legitimate protests, what stops them from earning due blame, for that critical juncture, where it all went awry?  Didn’t the good saying say the road to hell was paved with good intentions?

    That is the long-and-short of the present CP rally, cloaked as manifest public good, sure to snare the unwary.  First, is the ubiquitous apologia, that #EndSARS’ end- criminality was the work of so-called hoodlums.  That could well be true.

    But if there were no #EndSARS protests, would there have been any follow-up criminality?  If the protesters had not balked at the curfew, at the Lekki toll gate, would there have been the military shootings, and the so-called “massacre”, real or phoney, for which there are desperate, but fruitless, efforts to gather non-existent body bags?

    Indeed, if the protesters had called off their action in sensible time, would latter-day anarchists have forced the curfew in the first instance?  Why this dishonourable efforts to de-link #EndSARS from its chaotic aftermath?

    Why, the CP even used DJ Switch to illustrate its gaseous grandstand, claiming her reported case of Canada “asylum” was forcing “youths” to flee their country — rich!

    To be sure DJ (S)witch is the guilty soul that bales when no one pursues her — no one, except the witchery of her wild social media posts, that later fuelled tens of real deaths!  She can scam external lobbies, ever ready to believe the worst about her country.  But can she scam her troubled conscience?

    It’s even getting more interesting that a Twitter user, Bayo Adedosu, has reportedly offered our puritanical and revolutionary “youth” N1 million to provide evidence of a “Lekki massacre”!  Over to DJ Switch in her Canada “asylum”!

    It’s an abject failure of character that fiery youths, who would drag their country to the straight-and-narrow, pathetically buckled with brazen lies, on a massacre that was not. It speaks to the deep darkness of their soul that every celebrity they pronounced killed, at that e-massacre, has resurrected!

    Let all involved in the #EndSARS debacle be fairly probed.  Let the innocent walk free.  Let the guilty carry the can.  By that, justice is served. Fending off fair probes does no one any good.

    Older CP members should counsel their younger charges to walk their talk.  That would be better than erecting yet other barriers of lies, simply because you could manipulate the media.  It’s the tragic making of liberal dictatorship, which ruins all!

  • Trump taku

    Trump taku

    Olakunle Abimbola

     

    AKINTOLA taku — remember that infamous phrase?

    Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola’s decision to buck a sacred democratic norm (of a prime minister quitting the moment he loses parliamentary support), captured as iconic Daily Times headline, forced a chain of events that crashed Nigeria’s 1st Republic (1960-1966).

    US President Donald Trump’s refusal to concede, days after his Democratic Party rival, Joe Biden, had been projected winner, is unlikely to collapse America’s democracy, more than two centuries strong, from its 1788 debut.

    But by it, Trump risks the garbage of American history.  He has bucked America’s most cherished political ethos: a graceful concession; threatened the peaceful and orderly transfer of power; and profaned American democracy, by a comic plea of “stolen votes”.

    Even now, like the Biblical King Saul, power is leaving Trump.  But Donald Trump kids self he is not leaving power.

    Still, his crashed presidency has always been powered by blatant unreason: whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad!

    Sophocles’s Greek tragedy, Antigone, first sounded that warning.  But then, its African — nay universal — truism came oozing from Ola Rotimi’s The Gods are Not to Blame, an adaptation of another Sophocles classic, perhaps the most famous of his plays, Oedipus Rex.

    In that Trumpian universe of passionate and grand delusion, the embattled president is neo-Samson; and his Delilah is a terrible combo: big ego, badly bruised; and delusion, as deep as the Atlantic, goading him to his doom.

    The Samson, in Trump, would crash America’s entire system on own head!  He would bury the world to save his presidential candy!  Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad!

    That tragic refrain, indeed, aptly captures the relay of unforced errors, that has left the Trump presidency reeling; and Trump the fair object of global derision, if not outright contempt.

    His reckless COVID-19 behaviour makes him the king of unreason in a foxtrot: a failed president in the pan-American anti-COVID-19 charge; an embattled candidate, with COVID-19 as the ultimate referendum.  Not even sympathy, from copping the virus, offers Trump any redemption.

    He dismissed as “idiots”, his COVID-19 task force experts, that acidic tongue-lash tanning the iconic Dr. Anthony Fauci, famed physician and immunologist; and revered boss, since 1984, at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, with excellent track records in epidemiology.

    Fauci might boast global reverence.  But all he earns from Trump is scorn.  This is because Fauci is the Biblical Elijah, that wouldn’t tell King Ahab the sweet stuff he wanted to hear, like Ahab’s posse of false prophets.  Little wonder: Trump threatens Fauci with a post-poll sack!

    “Perfect human specimen” Trump (as he dubbed himself, after his COVID scare, at one of his boisterous mega-rallies) won’t wear a face mask, and would be damned if he told his doting supporters to wear one — nor would he tell them to social-distance!

    If he did, his rallies would not happen.  If they didn’t, poof! — would go — Trump’s perfect platform: to abuse, to traduce and to trash-talk, the Trumpian vile trinity, and searing verbal weapon of mass destruction!

    But while Trump accessed quality care at his COVID-19 crossroads, his expendable republican rabble have none.  That portrays Trump as passionate, if unconscionable, narcissist; and enchanting demagogue, steeped in the most ruthless streak of Machiavelli.  But his doting crowds grumbled not!

    The ever-paranoid Trump, believing America’s critical segments, including the liberal media were gunning for him, dismissed overworked medics as COVID-19 profiteers, claiming they blew up COVID-19 death numbers to boost their earnings — a frothy lie that galled and incensed the medical community.

    In a taped audio interview with Bob Woodward, ace American investigative journalist while working on his book, Rage, Trump mocked American service (wo)men that fell, or got maimed for motherland, as “suckers” and “losers”, though Trump himself dodged the draft.

    Now, Woodward is troubling blast from the past.  With Carl Bernstein, he saw to the drowning of Richard Nixon, another disgraced Republican president, on account of the Watergate scandal.  Rage, a damning work on the Trump presidency, vis-a-vis COVID-19 mishandling, could well be nemesis against Trump, as Woodward was nemesis against Nixon.

    The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement epitomizes Trump’s serious race challenges.  Little wonder, the BLM Washington DC Plaza provided the hub for anti-Trump victory rallies, at the precinct of the White House.  Meanwhile, in Wilmington, Delaware, a victorious Biden singled out Black American voters for special praise.

    So, with alienation from the critical mass of America’s polite society, where did Trump get his 71 million votes from, the second highest in American presidential election history? The answer would appear in America’s fast changing demographics.

    The frontiers men, WASP — White Anglo-Saxon Protestant — from Europe homed in on America and chiselled it in own, and to be sure, glorious and winning image.  En route, they all but wiped out the American aborigines: native red Indians and allied Latinos; and brought in tethered Africans, as plantation slaves.

    But 200 years down the line, its rapid demographic  changes — enough to alarm the core white American base.

    That base and Trump enjoy fierce, symbiotic passion; and even fiercer mutual fears: rural seniors, suburban men and non-college educated Whites who couldn’t see, for the life of them, why “aliens” (read immigrants) could come take away their opportunities, in their own native land.

    Hence the war cry: Make America Great Again (MAGA)!  It is hooked to the past and driven by raw fear.

    But the Biden coalition is much more hopeful and futuristic: college educated and global-minded Whites, Blacks, Latinos, suburban women alarmed by Trump’s divisive rhetoric — and even elders, male and female, endangered species, by Trump’s bad management of COVID-19.

    The first alarm, of this looming coalition, of irreversible demographics, was Barack Obama, America’s first Black president.  Though Trump was the nativists’ electoral response, now Kamala Harris, America’s first female Vice President — horror of horrors! — of African and Indian heritage too, raps loudly on the door!

    Donald Trump might feature among the most flawed of personalities in history.  But it is vital to understand the raw dynamics that drive him to further, if avoidable, disgrace.

    Trump is the strong breed of nativist white America, not in a hurry to face its racist past but nevertheless fated to do so.

  • Cry, my beloved Lagos

    Cry, my beloved Lagos

    Olakunle Abimbola

     

    I love dis Lagos, I no go lie

    Na inside am I go live and die,

    I know my city, I no go lie

    E fit in nation like coat and tie

    When Lagos belch, the nation swell

    When the nation shit, na Lagos dey smell.

    The river wey flow for Makurdi market

    You go find in deposit for Lagos bucket.

    – Wole Soyinka, The Beatification of Area Boy (1995)

     

    The above lyrics preceded 1995, when the Wole Soyinka play, The Beatification of Area Boy, was first published.

    Indeed, change “l love dis Lagos” to “I love my kontri”, and you have the revolutionary musical album, Unlimited Liability Company (ULC), that WS released, in concert with Tunji Oyelana’s The Benders, at the height of 1983’s fiddled general polls.

    When the dust cleared, and the hurly-burly was done, and the political battle was lost and lost (to parody Shakespeare’s Macbeth), the 2nd Republic (1 October 1979 – 31 December 1983) lay in ruins.

    Even then, “Lagos” for “my kontri”, made this 1995 version a classic of art predicting — nay, prophesying — life.

    As it were, it most eerily predicted the Lagos 2020 #EndSARS protests, which tragically miscarried, leaving Lagos, and other parts of the country, a scorched car-case still in shock — though the play was published 25 years before!

    Indeed bathetic lines like “When Lagos belch, the nations swell/When the nation shit, na Lagos dey smell”, presaged, in sheer gory and poetic technicolor, how in the #EndSARS violence, Lagos rocked Nigeria, as Nigeria rocked Lagos.

    You want a common human denominator, in all of this poetic madness-turned-living tragedy?  Look no farther than Muhammadu Buhari, president of the Federal Republic!

    ULC (1983) cleared the way for Buhari’s first coming.  Its 1995 cousin presaged the Lagos 2020 fiasco, that rammed rather darkly — at least the regnant order cried, at the alleged hijack of the #EndSARS protests by nefarious lobbies — at rogue regime change, which would have echoed 1983!

    Talk of how things change, yet remain the same!  Still, that unprecedented, post-Lagos curfew anomie from October 21, would haunt Lagos for a long, long time.

    Arsonists, like the Vandals at the gates of Rome, at the 455 AD sack of Rome, freely roamed!   Would Lagos ever be the same again?  Cry, my beloved Lagos!

    This Rome-Vandal parallel is apt.  Evil characters torched Lagos, wilfully blind to strides it had made since 1999 — strides that made it an easy national reference, in democratic-era growth and development.

    That evil lobby was also blind, deaf and dumb, to monuments that epitomize the glorious evolution of Lagos; and savaged its alluring landmarks, rooted in history, that make Lagos tick, sparkle and dazzle.

    Nowhere did the Lagos transportation past, signpost an alluring future, than the rows of sparkling Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) buses that malicious souls, goaded by evil masterminds torched, at Oyingbo; and at Berger, on the Lagos end of the Lagos-Ibadan expressway.

    Oyingbo and Yaba (old Lagos mainland) and Race Course (Lagos island) were old public transportation hubs, which BRT tries to recreate and replicate.

    So, the vandal generation that set ablaze those crucial facilities never knew of the Lagos of Zarpas: golden-colour buses bearing the penny-coin emblem; the flaming red buses of the Lagos Municipal Transport Service (LMTS); later, the Lagos City Transport Service (LCTS); much later, the Lagos State Transport Corporation (LSTC); or even of their latter-day private sector competition, of Benson and Osinowo, et al, transport services, of sundry colours!

    Those were saner days of organized, comfortable shuttles, complete with ticketing conductors; and checkers that conked cheats, ogling comfy rides without pay, before the chaos and bedlam and torture of the rash of Danfo and sundry yellow buses.

    That is the proud culture BRT is trying to bring back, to hustling and bustling Lagos, since its 1999 dawn under the Bola Tinubu governorship, though BRT buses never hit the streets, till Babatunde Fashola’s first term.

    But see the manic invasion of BRT tracks (witness: the okada-yellow buses jumble-and-tumble on the new Oshodi-Abule Egba track), these few days past!  Only the Danfo generation can torch BRT buses, and feel hip about it all.  Vandals!

    Still, back to the “cradle”, the old Lagos and federal capital!  From Campos Square to Stratchan Street, that long stretch on the long, long Igbosere Road, lies a sacred belt of government power and authority — that sweep housing rich monuments of Lagos and Federal Government history.

    To your right, as you approach Campos Square from CMS/Odunlami, was the former Ajele Cemetery (Bishop Ajayi Crowther’s resting place until his remains were relocated circa 1969), now converted to a community mini-stadium and other public facilities.

    Further up road is an impressive stretch, that defined the Lagos landscape, at the apex of its glory and prestige, as federal capital:

    The Holy Cross Catholic Primary School, aka ”Holy Werepe” to indulgent kids in the hood, on account of the school’s crowing and daring tough boys.

    The famous (Lagos) City Hall, Nigeria’s oldest local council secretariat, established in 1900.  Locals gawked at its marbled majesty, when its present form was delivered, circa 1969.  After a blaze, Governor Fashola restored it to its old glory — and more.

    King’s (Founded 1909) College, is Nigeria’s first elite public school for boys, after England’s Eton College. But not even KC’s revolutionary history could save it from vandals — KC, whose “boys” turned against their colonial minders, to form the Lagos Youth Movement (LYM), to give Nigeria’s independence struggle a radical push!

    The federal courts complex, comprising the old Supreme Court (now Court of Appeal, Lagos Division) and the premier High Court.  In one of these iconic courtrooms, Chief Obafemi Awolowo was, in 1962/1963, tried for treasonable felony.

    The famous Ministry of Works, perhaps the most popular in the Lagos Race Course old federal secretariat sprawl, headquartered at the 25-storey Independence Building — but now regrettably a shell, since after a tragic military-era fire.

    Of course, the no less famous “federal Surveys”, after “Works”.  Then, the Lagos Magistrate’s Court complex, which concludes the extensive landmark.  Since 1999, that facility has beamed with modern court houses, and fitting jurists’ work gadgets.

    Now, which Lagos true-born, or true-bred, would dare think arson, talk less of setting fire to these monuments?  Yet, no less than three of them — City Hall, King’s College and the premier High Court — were set ablaze!  Vandals at the gates of Rome!

    The Lagos government must probe the arson, nab the masterminds, and get them their stiff comeuppance.  But it should also chart a new radical path, in tackling urban poverty.

    Anything short, of this twin-strategy, would in WS-speak, beatify the area boys of chaos and crisis.  That won’t augur well for the safety and security of the emerging Lagos assets, to become future monuments.