The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olakunle Abimbola

  • Wages of propaganda

    Wages of propaganda

    Olakunle Abimbola

     

    THE wages of relentless propaganda?  Political self-destruction.

    If you doubt, watch Seyi Makinde, the Oyo governor dash, with willy-nilly propaganda, to politically self-destruct — his latest fiddle clearly Covid-19.

    Did Nero fiddle while Rome burnt?  Well, you could say Seyi rallied — Coronavirus be damned! — while global health decreed the extreme opposite.

    Why, the governor even essayed partisan wit, which sent his deluded PDP crowd, rolling in partisan mirth!

    “I want you,” the governor quipped, “to take two things home.  And the first is: they are of the opinion that we should not have staged this rally because of the Coronavirus pandemic but it was,” he joked, to cacophonous applause, “one of their leaders who said Coronavirus had already entered their party” — yet another thunder of applause —  ”We all know,” came the sententious clincher, by Seyi the Wise, “that there is no Coronavirus in our own party”!  Ringing, rousing applause!

    But some 24 hours later, the governor was eating crow. Now, was that God confounding the wise?  Or the foolish, passing wiles for being wise, reaping the fair comeuppance of combative folly?

    Hear a subdued Makinde cringe, akin to bolting the stable doors, after the stallion had galloped clear: “That rally should never have held.  It was a lapse of judgment for which I take full responsibility.”

    Just as well — for there is always nobility in apology.  So, give the governor some credit.

    But he isn’t about getting away with gubernatorial garrulity and equal opportunity recklessness in perilous times, just to corral needless political mileage.

    Ibadan’s Covid-19 index case test just returned positive, as announced by the governor himself in a tweet, @seyimakinde Twitter handle: “The Covid-19 confirmation test for the suspected case at Bodija has come back POSITIVE.  The result was released at 17:35 pm of March 21, 2020.  Oyo State public health officials are collaborating with the University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan’s team on the case.”

    Now, Coronavirus appears the beginning of the end for Governor Makinde’s populist charm, which craves good news, good news and more good news!  The wages of relentless propaganda!

    Yet, that bit of APC having Coronavirus and PDP having none, was meant to start —and end — as a campaign ground joke.

    It was a witty, though wily, pun on Asiwaju Bola Tinubu’s quip, that APC elements that wanted to unhorse Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, the APC national chairman, had caught a blind power virus, akin to Coronavirus, en route to 2023.

    Yet, it was needless gubernatorial flippancy, that could peak in costly gubernatorial consequences.

    Indeed, given all we know about Covid-19, the governor’s frivolity was shocking, especially to a large gathering, that could spur its spread, and claim needless lives.

    In a classic case of fiction trumping reality, to hazard clear and present danger, Dean Koontz, in The Eyes of Darkness, had written: “They call the stuff ‘Wuhan-400’ because it was developed at their RDNA labs outside the city of Wuhan, and it was the four-hundredth viable strain of man-made microorganisms created at that research centre.”

    Credible conspiracy theory, in a globe swirling with mutual Sino-Western hostile propaganda?  Relax!  The Eyes of Darkness was published in 1981 — 39 clear years before the current pestilence, though Coronavirus did break out of Wuhan, China!

    Even then another excerpt, from that same fiction, simply leaves you numb and dumb!  ”… the Chinese could use Wuhan-400 to wipe out a city or a country, and then there wouldn’t be any need for them to conduct a tricky and expensive decontamination before they moved in and took over the conquered territory.”  Can that be true?

    Again, a credible conspiracy theory, even if fictive?  Or the West just being haunted by long shadows, of own past imperialist crimes?

    But leave Koontz and flip to Sylvia Browne’s End of Days, a scientific stuff, published in 2010 by Dutton-Penguin Books, USA.

    “In around 2020,” Browne predicted, “a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments.  Almost more baffling than the illness itself,” he continued, “will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack again ten years later, and then disappear completely.”

    Relief?  Or fresh alarm that Coronavirus could come ravaging the globe again by 2030?

    But even more chilling, and closer to Koontz than to Browne, is an account credited to an unnamed Chinese military intelligence officer, making the rounds on cyberspace.

    It claims Coronavirus was a biological warfare experiment gone awry, to hobble Hong Kong, and slow down its democracy hell-raisers.

    It claimed the plague broke out in Wuhan because its remote experimental base was near there; and that the Wuhan dead were simply collateral damage, even if the victims were mostly alleged Chinese dissidents and government critics, carefully handpicked.

    The unnamed Chinese soldier decided to squeal because his co-Chinese operatives allegedly gave his only child, a boy, polluted mouth/nose masks.  The boy caught Coronavirus; and is being nursed on his deathbed.

    His final chilling verdict: Coronavirus, he alleged, may as yet have no cure.  So, all the talk about heat destroying it are fibs from the sweet-lying Chinese government!

    Some conspiracy theory, from inside China itself, suggesting the very Armageddon?  You can’t but break out in cold sweat!

    This then is the very serious issue, rippling with life-threatening uncertainties, that the Oyo governor chose for his propagandist fiddle.  It’s good he duly apologized.  But what good would that do, if people from that gathering got infected, and became agents to spread the virus, in other South West states — and even beyond?

    Still by the apology, the omi tuntun (fresh and refreshing spring) wonder boy is miles ahead of his unthinking party.  The PDP had moved from the Ibadan South West zonal rally, to local government polls campaign in Cross River and Rivers PDP elective congress in Port Harcourt, Covid-19 be damned! Hardly any surprise.

    Makinde is so, so reminiscent of Otunba Gbenga Daniel (OGD) in his Ogun gubernatorial years.  OGD was the classic Afenifere-PDP, a neophyte more authentic than the Afenifere-AD original!  In his glory days, OGD media votaries belted out merry acronyms, in praise of their god: OGROMA, OGADEP, OGRA-GRA, … zealous chirps to spread the good news.

    But if OGD earned a second term before he unravelled, Makinde appears unravelling fast even before his second year!  The perils of eternal good news and the wages of propaganda!

    Tinubu on the other hand, that Makinde tried to ridicule in his unfortunate Coronavirus joke, logged his own due share of bad news.  Indeed, early in his Lagos governorship, he was a devil dutifully nailed to the cross, by impatient Lagosians, to echo Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s novel, Devil on the Cross.

    Still, at the end of it all, he built enduring legacies for Lagos, so much so that during the Ebola crisis, and now Coronavirus, Lagos is never found wanting.  Indeed, it is to Lagos, that other states look for direction!

    Governor Makinde had better use his ill-fated Coronavirus joke to turn a new leaf.  It’s time to shun cheap showboating and face serious business.

  • Muhammadu Sanusi vs the North

    Muhammadu Sanusi vs the North

    By Olakunle Abimbola

    Imagine the taciturn Emir Ado Bayero, as voluble as Omoyele Sowore, bristling, swashbuckling and hell-raising?

    That was the royal peculiar mess that was Emir Muhammadu Sanusi II!  It was doom foretold. Yet, completely shattering, when it came!

    The tragic fate of Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the newly deposed Muhammadu Sanusi II, 14th Emir of Kano, tracks back to two of history’s most famous quips.

    One, by George Santayana, the Harvard philosopher, famous for sundry aphorisms: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” — often with tragic consequences.

    That bunches, in a historical gargoyle, the deposition of Emir Sir Muhammadu Sanusi I, KBE, (December 1953 – April 1963) and grandson, Emir Muhammadu Sanusi II (8 June 2014 – 9 March 2020).

    Sanusi II obviously didn’t remember the slip, or learn from the fall, of Sanusi I.  So, he too cropped Grandpa’s plague: avoidable deposition?

    The second, by Karl Marx, in his famous essay, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, written between December 1851 and March 1852, in which he quipped: history repeats itself, “the first as tragedy; then as farce.”

    Now that the shattering fall of Sanusi II is tragic encore of the royal collapse of Sanusi I, any chance of a future Sanusi III?

    Indeed, grandpa lasted 10 years; grandson, barely six.  Would a Sanusi III somewhat come to redeem the Sanusi Kano lineage, or just confirm its farce, while their Bayero royal cousins thrive?

    Now, the two tragedies of the two Sanusis have rather eerie parallels.

    Sanusi I shared combative visibility with Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sokoto blue blood, 1st Republic Premier of the North and foremost political figure of that region, surpassing even Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa.  He burnt his fingers.

    Sanusi II, in preening and combative feuding, nettled Kano Governor, Abdullahi Ganduje.  But Ganduje was only a synecdoche for the northern conservative order, or even the British-rigged pristine Nigerian state.  Both share common DNA with the North’s feudal system, prime jewel of the British indirect rule in colonial Nigeria.

    Now, the ex-Emir ought to be a tested and trusted royal keeper of that heritage, warts and all.  But a fatal delusion turned him its tormentor-in-chief.  He burnt his throne!

    The Sar’dauna despatched Sanusi I under the smoke of alleged financial incontinence, from the findings of the 1963 David Muffet inquiry into the alleged seedy finances of the Kano Emirate Council, even if everyone knew the real cause was the no love lost between the assertive Premier and the colourful Emir.

    Governor Ganduje, without much ado, despatched Sanusi II for alleged serial “insubordination”; and for profaning sacred traditional northern ethos.  In a grand historical deja vu, the Kano government further forages for alleged sleaze, worth N3.4 billion via a parliamentary probe, for the final nail, on Sanusi II’s royal coffin.

    Still, everyone knows there was no love lost between the flamboyant Fulani Emir and the unforgiving Hausa governor.

    The only blip perhaps, in the running tragic parallel, is the differing federal temper, then in Lagos, now in Abuja, towards the Sanusi depositions.

    Prime Minister Balewa cautioned Premier Bello not to move against Sanusi I, for Kano might burn — an advice the premier spurned.

    For taciturn Muhammadu Buhari, it would appear presidential ambivalence: if he didn’t push the Kano governor to depose the gadfly Emir, nothing suggests he cautioned him against it.  That fatal ambivalence further cooked the Sanusi II goose.

    In both depositions, 57 years apart, Kano didn’t burn.  It appears to just have moved on, calmly watching the high-octane emirate drama, of sudden dethronement and instant enthronement.

    Indeed in the current case, if anywhere did “burn”, it was hustling politicians seeking capital, ever excitable southern busybodies, going ga-ga over a northern problem via skewed southern lens, and the southern conventional media, awash with subversive dirges, but only to pummel northern feudalism, as the bane — and pain — of modern Nigeria.

    Still, not a few have knocked the president for alleged culpable complicity, if not in the Sanusi dethronement, then in his arrest and banishment to Loko and Awe in Nasarawa State, which a court has since declared illegal, null and void.

    On this score, however, the sympathy orchestra missed the point.  The president exercised his discretion however he wished.  But the real culprit is the Sanusi hubris, in which frothing brilliance, and colourful crowing to rub it in, hardly equated any wisdom.

    You don’t drench yourself with petrol, knowing some fellas are hell bent on roasting you, do you?  But then, that was the long and short of Sanusi II’s royal wisdom!

    Read Also: Sanusi dethronement: Count me out, says Malami

    Still, on the score of citizen rights, Muhammadu Sanusi II looks set to escape the fate of Muhammadu Sanusi I, in terms of life-long banishment to internal Siberia, for biting the feudal finger that fed him.  That appears good progress in Nigeria’s eternal ding-dong between democracy and feudalism.

    Still, there is a limit to which folks, even SANs mouthing intimidating legal jargons, can push on that lane.  The Nigerian Constitution is democratic and libertarian.  But its sociology is feudal — pristine or cultivated — and constricting.

    Nigeria is a Federal Republic.  But its land space, East, North or West, is strewn with feudal potentates, pushing their democratic rights to reign without question, sell ancestral lands without query, and levy handsome fees for chieftaincy titles for the grovelling elite, in a fit of feudal parasitism.

    So, a republican Nigerian state is constrained to cohabit with this thriving feudalism, pleading the hegemony of culture and the legitimacy of tradition.  It is this delicate cohabitation that Sanusi I and II tried to rupture, with fatal consequences.

    So, our legal heavyweights had better be wary of pushing, too hard, this rights agenda; lest another crazy set of Nigerian citizens charge at these same courts to accuse the government of conspiring with the feudal elite to betray — and criminally too — the republican ethos of the Nigerian Constitution!

    A citizen that savoured the sweet gravy of feudal pleasure should stoically bear its bitter torture if things turn awry, shouldn’t he?  Instead of dead-panning as an injured, common republican citizen?

    That famous legal-speak nails it: he who comes to equity must come with clean hands!

    But away from feudal hubris and royal folly, Muhammadu Sanusi, now twice deposed, and maybe risking putative banishment from the Kano throne as some northern voices are suggesting, remains a potent voice, haunting the North for sweeping reforms.

    Colourful Grandfather, Muhammadu Sanusi I, romped as unfazed local Caliph, of the Sunni reformed Tijaniyya order of Senegalese Ibrahim Niass, with spiritual fount at Kaolack, Senegal, against the religious sensitivity of the Sar’dauna, more in tune with the Sultan of Sokoto-led, and more conservative, Sunni Khadiriyya.

    Flamboyant Grandson, Muhammadu Sanusi II, frothing brilliance, cutting intellect and rousing gift of the gab et al, ripped, without mercy, at the laggardness of the North, calling for urgent and sweeping reforms — or else …

    Both earned humiliating deposition for their royal audacity.  So, twice in 57 years, the messenger is unhorsed.  But is the message unhinged?

    Muhammadu Sanusi versus the North — who finally blinks?  That nestles in the womb of time!

  • Supreme Court: between restraint and rashness

    Supreme Court: between restraint and rashness

    By Olakunle Abimbola

    In 1979, the Supreme Court cropped a blizzard, over the twelve-two-thirds crisis.

    The Federal Electoral Commission (FEDECO), ancestors of present-day Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), had consistently used 13 states, as the twelve-two-thirds of the then 19 states, in every pre-election decision: registration of parties, certifying parties’ compliance with nationwide constitutional spread, and the like.

    But then came a looming electoral college run-off between the two leading candidates, as Section 7 of the Electoral (Amendment) Decree, 1978 stipulated, after the first round of the 1979 presidential election: National Party of Nigeria’s Alhaji Shehu Shagari and Unity Party of Nigeria’s Chief Obafemi Awolowo.

    NPN’s Shagari was nearest to breasting the tape.  Aside from having the highest vote count, he had one-quarter of the vote in 12 states. UPN’s Awolowo had the next highest in popular vote, but with one-quarter spread in six states.

    The Electoral (Amendment) Decree 1978 was clear: an electoral college showdown, between Shagari and Awolowo.  That college would be peopled by National Assembly members, elected from the same 1979 general elections.

    That was taken as given, and media pundits were already painting a scenario of possibilities, probabilities and re-design of partisan alliances, when Chief Richard Akinjide, SAN, NPN’s national legal adviser, outed with his joker: twelve-two-thirds of 19 states was not 13, but 12 states and a fraction of the 13th!

    The polity was up in a tail spin!  When the Michael Ani-chaired FEDECO bought Akinjide’s joker and declared Shagari duly elected;  and the body language of the Olusegun Obasanjo outgoing military order suggested the junta was tilting towards that decision, the tail spin exploded in sheer Armageddon, blazing with molten conspiracy theories!

    Enter the Supreme Court, the supreme battle ground that would cure that supreme headache — or compound it to supreme migraine!

    The apex court eventually went with the Justice Boonyamin Kazeem-chaired Presidential Election Tribunal, with a 5-1-1 split decision: five for, one neither-nor, one against.  Shagari was president!

    Whether that supreme judicial intervention was supreme cure or supreme bust was a function of partisan parallel lines that would never meet.

    Even then, not a few thought that decision gifted the 2nd Republic (1979-1983) a legitimacy kiss of death — from which it never really recovered, until its overthrow on 31 December 1983, after another round of rotten and fiercely disputed elections!

    In 1979 then, the Supreme Court was a solid pillar of conservatism, extremely wary of rocking the boat, even if the polity could have been better off, if it did.

    But in 2020, it appears the violent opposite: a ripple of activism, which exuberance borders on judicial recklessness — perceived recklessness that could well retard polite society; and tear off the mystique holding the civil polity.

    Worse: in the explosive electoral cases, the legal justice the apex court handed down appears to violently jar with social justice, as perceived by the teeming masses on the street, free or cajoled.

    Free or cajoled?  Yes, because much of the protests were organized reactions to express partisan angst.  But the real danger: those protests may have resonated with, using that legal-speak, “right-thinking” members of society.

    That sparked a lot of wild claims, of an apex court allegedly available for the apex bidder!  Again, much of that could be pure trash from sore losers.  But that they were mooted at all brought the Supreme Court no sheen.

    Besides, such wild talks risk gravely de-marketing the democratic order.  Indeed, had the political soldiers, opportunistic pseudo-saviours of yore, not rightly self-destroyed, those decisions could have jolted the civil order, with devastating consequences.

    That perhaps explained the supreme judicial-political hotchpotch of 1979, which though kept the martial power hustlers at bay, only postponed the evil day by just four years.

    But that was a best-forgotten era of heady military hegemony and cowering civilian interregnums — and just as well!  Still, this new-found Supreme Court activism appears insensitive to those dark and turbulent pasts.

    The Imo decision, which stripped Emeka Ihedioha of his eight-month governorship, was nothing short of revolutionary.  That set the Imo — and national — PDP wailing and screeching without end!  Indeed, ex-Governor Ihedioha still impresses everyone he’s yet in cursing mode!

    The thing though was that the PDP was always crying wolf, with no discernible moral compass beyond crowing after winning, and whimpering after losing: no matter how foul the winning was procured; or how fair the loss was earned.

    Nevertheless, might Imo be one of such rare cases when a band of wolves really came prowling? Ihedioha, struck by judicial Amadioha, really thought — and still thinks — so!  But his party is a victim of its own waywardness — crying wolf!

    In Bayelsa, APC’s David Lyon appears to have borne his own supreme judicial thunder with stoic grace, even if he was struck on swearing-in eve, rehearsing his inauguration; and did no wrong beyond his joint ticket being fatally infected by a name-crazy running mate, who popped five different names, on five different certificates!

    Some howl forgery, and insist the defaulting candidate be hauled in for a criminal charge.  But if the certificates were fake, countered others, where are the duly proven originals?

    With no proven fakery, therefore, not a few have declared the Supreme Court decision rather harsh — both on the running mate in the eye of the storm; and on his ill-fated principal, who had to surrender his thumping mandate, for the sin of another.

    The court appeared to have brutally exercised its discretion against both, in a case that could have gone either way.

    More than the tragic gubernatorial duo, however, the Bayelsa electorate were the grand victims: they said an emphatic yes; yet the court said an emphatic no!  By apex judicial diktat, minority vote trumped the majority — not unlike the biblical wonder, where seven lean cows swallowed seven hefty ones!

    That is no way of democracy, with its hegemony of the many.

    Still, on Imo and Bayelsa, the Supreme Court has bared its fangs on its supreme finality — even if it does so, not with supreme reason, but with well, supreme illogic, canonized as supreme legalese: we are supreme and final and there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it! (appeal to force and threat); never thought this day would come — tears! tears! — when our decisions would be challenged! (appeal to pity).

    Why, might it be in this same spirit of supreme — ad baculum, ad misericordiam — fallacy, that the apex court harshly fined the party that took its controversial verdict with better grace, but gave the one with unfazed ill grace a slap on the wrist?

    Might the judiciary then be taking its own pound from an administration that has challenged it to square up to its sacred judicial duty, in its cardinal fight against corruption? Conspiracy theories!

    After the present debacle, the Nigerian Supreme Court should live its essence: a palladium of wisdom, restraint and utmost sensitivity; not a conclave of callow activism. Enough of this new-found exuberance, which threatens civil society balance.

  • Opposition by rascality

    Opposition by rascality

    Olakunle Abimbola

    His kith-and-kin kid selves it’s only a mild ailment. But those who know him not swear he is raven mad — Yoruba saying

     

    There is something, about a fallen big man, that chips away at common humanity.

    If Shakespeare’s and Greek classical tragedies are drenched in pathos, it’s simply because they touch the chord of common humanity, across races, across ages, across sages.

    You could feel the pathos in Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra; in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, and even in Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, even if Barabas, the tragic hero here, was a cur, with no redeeming trait.

    Man, over the ages, always over-reaches himself.  Then after toppling and crashing, he consigns fellow humans to avoidable anguish.

    That is true of the February 25 36-year jailing for money laundering, of Olisa Metuh, the last national publicity secretary of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), during its boisterous power days.

    Frankly, unbearable Metuh, with his pre-trial hauteur, irritable stunts during trial to stonewall justice, and generally unrepentant audacity, is closer to Marlowe’s Barabas, than to either Shakespeare’s Mark Anthony, or Sophocles’s Oedipus.

    As the party he served, he oozes the public image of repugnance, devil-may-care imperiousness and in-your-face arrogance.  Could he be different in private?

    Pre-trial for money laundering, EFCC accused Metuh of shredding evidence and attempting to chew it all up — a charge Justice Okon Abang re-echoed with a bang, on judgment day.

    On the personal lane, a brazen Metuh traumatized the vice-principal of his child’s Abuja school, for the school’s temerity to seize his son’s phone, as routine discipline.

    Metuh, the unfazed African Big Man (apologies to The Economist of London), hit the school with security details in tow, and bawled at the poor man to identify himself.  In front of staff and pupils, he bundled him into his car boot, thundering: no IGP or SSS can save you!  At the high moon of PDP impunity, never mess with mighty Metuh!

    Even after the sun had set on the PDP power years, bristling Metuh in 2015 patented “the international community must see this, international community must hear that” — the grand credo that now powers PDP’s bathetic squeal: “democracy in danger!”, each time they lose out in the political sweepstakes!

    Thus, Metuh the neo-Don Quixote tilting at political windmills, bequeaths to his beloved party an eternal chase of shadows.  If you doubt, check out the PDP leaders’ comic tours, of foreign embassies and United Nations facilities, to report their country to metropolitan overlords and demand prompt sanctions!

    Yet, when Justice Abang banged down the first guilty-as-charged sentence, all that braggadocio vanished;  and the craven human in Metuh craved to obey nature’s call!

    Pray, was that, to parody our own WS in The Man Died — a mere titration, or the full sit-down strike?  Either way, he had only three minutes, under the watch of three court guards!

    Metuh’s all-too-human reaction re-echoes Barabas’s anguish in The Jew of Malta.

    True, Barabas lacked any redeeming trait.  Yet, when to ransom Malta, the Malta aristocracy annexed the entire Barabas trove, claiming the poor Jew should feel honoured, because another Jew — Christ Jesus — had earlier given his life to ransom humanity, you feel the unbridled heresy, cynicism and humbug of the Malta stance!

    At that moment Barabas tapped into the common human pathos.  So did Metuh in his tragic hour of truth.

    But Metuh’s pathos plumbs to clear bathos, in PDP and its regnant rascality: trivializing all, mouthing wild allegations, and vaulting official waywardness as its cornerstone of partisan policy.

    Over the Supreme Court verdicts on Imo and Bayelsa, PDP swings between two extremes, like a tantrum-throwing brat.

    Hear it serenade the apex court, the very same it had shellacked and reported to Metuh’s beloved ‘international community’, over Imo:

    Read Also: Money laundering: Metuh jailed 36yrs

     

    “Nigerians know that the APC has been going through a hemorrhage since the Supreme Court delivered valid judgments on Bayelsa and Zamfara, and as a result, they are no longer interested in the logic of these judgments.”

    In Bayelsa and Zamfara, PDP became judicial winners, after a fearsome drubbing at the polls.  So, “valid logic”, in PDP-speak, is clear, framed in the cynical finality, of that street lingo: either we win or they lose!

    Partisan cant was never more piously crunched!

    But should APC challenge its fate in Zamfara and Bayelsa, as PDP challenged its on Imo, the former ruling party let out a cascade of infantile threats: to seek a review of the Supreme Court verdict on the 2019 presidential elections, aside from decided governorship cases in Katsina, Kaduna, Osun and Kano states!

    Partisan cards are never more flippantly stacked!

    Even after APC got itself badly scalded, over its ill-fated attempt to get a Supreme Court reprieve over its Bayelsa debacle, the best PDP could blab were wild conspiracy theories, ahead of its own Supreme Court Imo review.

    From Solomon Lar to Uche Secondus, how did PDP arrive this bind?

    From the flamboyant Emancipator from the Plateau, to the Total Chairman of rut and unthinking from Rivers, how did the former ruling party hit this cul-de-sac?

    From cradle, Ripples never really thought much of PDP.  For one, its nativity of Army Arrangement (AA), apologies to Fela.  For another, ideological dissonance: the one, a social democrat; the other, a proud conservative.

    Still, PDP had own share of noble conservatives: the late Sunday Awoniyi of Kogi; Kaduna’s Ahmed Makarfi (Governor from 1999-2007) who ended Kaduna’s native-settlers’ perennial bloodshed. Even, the Donald Duke-Liyel Imoke-Ben Ayade continuum in Cross Rivers, the closest conservative answer to social democratic Bola Tinubu-Babatunde Fashola-Akinwunmi Ambode-Jide Sanwoolu continuum in Lagos.

    But much of the wheat got purged for mere chaff, when former President Olusegun Obasanjo started his brutal chiselling, to remake the then ruling party in his own grim image.  Enter the dragon, of soulless power hustlers that crashed under Goodluck Jonathan!

    Despite its past havoc as ruling party, and present endless bungling as flippant opposition, PDP is absolutely unrepentant.

    PDP is a classic case of that unfortunate Yoruba being that glumly self-serenades, while provoking a torrent of tears in others.  That dovetails rather neatly, if sadly, into the Yoruba saying that opened this piece: His kith-and-kin kid selves it’s only a mild ailment. But those who know him not swear he is raven mad!

    For dragging the country into mass penury in the years of plenty — and Metuh’s jailing is ample proof of that era’s free-wheeling sleaze — PDP takes absolutely no liability.

    Instead, it indulges in mealy-mouthed cant, infantile finger-pointing and crass hell-raising, to goad the simplistic against those trying to clear the gargantuan mess it left behind.

    It’s a classic opposition by rascality.

    The ruling APC had better learn hard lessons from the pitiful PDP.  To waste your essence in power, and gamble away your future in opposition, pays no one — not individual politicians, not the polity as a collective.

  • The North rumbles

    By Olakunle Abimbola

    You, Preener from the South West and Exceptionalist from the South East, can you hear the rumble from the North?

    What can you make of it, beside predictable gloating, that barks: “serves them right!”, with manic excitability and glowing finality?

    To refresh, hear the flowers of the North, moan and groan over the thorns of the North.

    Emir Muhammadu Sanusi II of Kano, the North’s capital of commerce, speaking at Kaduna Governor, Mallam Nasir El-Rufai’s 60th birthday: “Eighty-seven per cent of poverty in Nigeria is in the North … nine states in the North account for 50 per cent of the entire malnutrition burden of the country.  Besides, there is Boko Haram and the Almajiri problem …”

    Senate President Ahmad Lawan, at the same birthday: The North’s 13 to 14 million out-of-school children are “dangerous for the country … Until we are able to reverse this kind of trend, no matter how much infrastructure you put, you will still have that social angle that will actually lead to serious insecurity …  So, we need to look at people.”

    Katsina Governor Aminu Masari: ”What we need is not only infrastructure.  We need capacity building of the people in this part of the country.”

    But unlike the doleful Sanusi and Lawan at El-Rufai’s gaily show, the governor was performing grim duty: receiving a presidential delegation come to condole with him on umpteenth banditry, which wasted 31 lives, in Batsari local government area of his state.

    As Emir Sanusi graphically painted, the North teems with grave developmental crises: 87 per cent of Nigerian poverty — almost nine, out every 10 Nigerian poor, domiciles in the North!  Half of all Nigerians that eat chaff, too poor to afford wholesome wheat, are from nine states in the North! These indeed, are devastating stats!

    Then, the systemic attempt to skew, in the North’s favour, Nigerian common opportunities — couched as “federal character” — appears spectacularly back-firing.

    Again, Emir Sanusi puts it like no other: “The reason that people like Nasir stand up … is that they don’t have any sense of inadequacy.  You don’t need to rise on being from Kaduna State or being a Muslim to get a job.  You come with your credentials.  You go with your competence.  You can compete with any Nigerian from anywhere.”

    It can’t be better framed!  Yet, the grand irony: an Emir Sanusi, unfazed symbol of court and elite education, blowing the lid on the clear catastrophe, from the North’s lack of mass education!

    Sanusi and El-Rufai epitomize the putative competitiveness of the North had, over the years, the bulk of northern kids had access to Western education, combined with its traditional forte of Islamic scholarship.

    Boko Haram’s opening gambit, “Book (Western) education is evil”, could well show the fierce tension, between Islamic and Western education, in what could have been the North’s glorious dual heritage.

    Yet, neither Sanusi nor El-Rufai is an exemplar in compact brood — the one, blissful product of royalty with all its plums; the other, faithful mirror of northern multi-spousal families.

    Though western education has had little dent on this practice, even among the northern aristocracy and general elite, at least this elite class has the cash to cater for own brood.

    That can’t be said of the masses — and the consequent population explosion explains the developmental drag.

    Indeed, the crux of the northern bind is the absence of mass and structured public education.  Yet, the North holds no monopoly, of underinvestment, in that sector.

    Of Nigeria’s original three regions of East, North and West, only the West, under the great Obafemi Awolowo, invested big in structured mass education.

    It not only started its epochal free and compulsory primary education in January 1955, it also invested in tertiary scholarships for its natives, though most were bonded to serve the region in its area of manpower needs.

    The East, under Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, later launched own free primary education policy. But that attempt collapsed after two years.  But such ravenous was the Eastern appetite for western education that when the government faltered, individuals and communities took over.

    The East, willy-nilly, got itself educated, in one of the most amazing tales of laudable self-help in human history.  But lack of moderating public policy birthed individual conceit and collective hubris, which thrust forward the individual but relegates the community.  That social disequilibrium still haunts the East, particularly in consensus building.

    The North largely kept faith with elite education.  But it extended its regnant policy of court education to capture its aspiring merchant and middle class.  With the help of British colonizers, it shut out Christian missionaries from the core Muslim parts.  That considerably narrowed mass access to schools.

    Not a few even swear Awo’s persistent electioneering attempts, to push mass education, against the North’s elite education consensus, led to his political odyssey, shortly after Nigeria’s flag independence in 1960.

    One thing is clear: the North’s developmental odyssey today, which has metastasized into Boko Haram, banditry and sundry violence, has its roots in the strategic blunder of the 1st Republic and before.  It is a case of strategic blunder of the past, boding even more strategic ruin for the future.

    Yet, about everyone serenades that era as some golden age of public policy, across regions.

    The growing brood of South West irredentists, basks in that Awo-era policy acuity, and fancy themselves as some special breed.  By that, they completely miss the point.

    Between the North and the West, there appears an eerie parallel.  As the North had a head start in Islamic scholarship, so did the West in Western education.

    But had the North pushed mass education, and the West embraced the North’s exclusive trajectory, the northern burden today could well have been the South West’s, other things being equal.

    So, the developmental gap between the two regions may well be down to one man and his radically blinding vision — a vision that even cost Awo’s ruling Action Group (AG), the immediately following federal elections.

    That hardly equates pan-ethnic genius, against other pan-ethnic laggards!  Which is why the South East Exceptionalist too, with his penchant for condescension towards the so-called northern laggards, should learn to be humble.

    But whatever the cross-regional temper to the northern mess, that the North is troubled by own sore is remarkable. Even more encouraging: some northern leaders appear tackling the issue, even if it’s early days yet.

    El-Rufai is said to be investing 40 per cent of Kaduna budget in education.  Kano, under Governor Abdullahi Ganduje, just translated science textbooks into Hausa.

    Even Boko Haram-plagued Borno, under its last two governors, Kashim Shettima and Babagana Zulum, are expanding educational frontiers. That is a redemptive retreat from the tragic path of Ali Modu Sheriff, that led the state to Boko Haram catastrophe.

    It’s a race against time.  But with focus and persistence, the North can correct its age-old strategic blunder.

    That would be boon for a renascent future Nigeria, now threatened with ethnic venom and balkanization.

  • Kukah cooking again!

    By  Olakunle Abimbola

     

    Catholic Bishop of Sokoto, Father Matthew Hassan Kukah, just dished the latest broth, from his spicy kitchen.

    But the starry-eyed had better be wary of rushing to taste: it might just harbour a virulent public discourse strain of coronavirus!

    The Surgeon-General (SG) just warned that could be lethal to the mind!

    If your focus is to think through the challenges of a country in crisis, and not just to titillate the traumatized public, as the good Bishop is wont to do, you will do well to heed the SG’s advisory.

    Hear the holy polemicist go on a savage blast of cutting poetry: “Nigeria’s years of hypocrisy, duplicity, fabricated integrity, false piety, empty morality, fraud and Pharisaism have caught up with us.”  What colourful rush of poetry!  Simply brilliant.

    Make no mistake: that poetic bazooka was levelled at President Muhammadu Buhari — he, whose integrity has been a subject of intense peer envy and disputation, both on the spiritual and temporal fronts.

    But here lies the supreme irony: that damning portraiture is even truer of the sacred Father’s constituency: the ecclesiastical hustlers, though posturing as people’s champions, gunning for increased market share, in power, glory and influence.

    All that became clear, and the scales fell off the eye of not a few, during the hyper-corrupt Goodluck Jonathan Presidency, when the holy hustlers, under the Ayo Oritsejafor-led Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), played merry Rasputin, on account of religious fealty, to the sinking Jonathan order.

    Remember Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, the Russian mystic that had the spiritual number on the last Russian Emperor, Nicholas II?

    Yet this immaculate lobby, that wildly savoured illicit “Christian” influence under Jonathan — holy filth, sacred scandals, et al — are now railing and howling and growling and thundering about “Islamization” under Buhari!

    The Holy Kukah is right: his holy ensemble is riven with “hypocrisy, duplicity, fabricated integrity, false piety, empty morality, fraud and Pharisaism”!

    Didn’t Father Kukah himself urge everyone to leave Jonathan-era rot behind and “move on”?

    And what could have amounted for the ruin of the present, than the free-wheeling heists of the past, which the immaculate Father would rather gloss over — because a “Christian” president was involved?

    Still, it’s only fair to link Father Kukah’s comments to its two settings.

    One: a hurting Kukah’s homily to a pained congregation, at the funeral mass for Seminarian Michael Nnadi, slain by Boko Haram lunatics.

    And two: by own words, “provocative questions on corruption” at the public presentation of former EFCC chair, Farida Waziri’s memoirs, One Step Ahead: Life as a Spy, Detective and Anti-Graft Czar, where incidentally Femi Adesina, President Buhari’s top spokesperson, was also book reviewer.

    Now, no sane person would blame Father Kukah for being grumpy at such a tragic funeral mass.  The pained congregants needed re-assurance; and the Bishop’s offering was probably the psychological lift they needed.

    Besides, you can’t blame anyone for giving the Buhari Presidency a proper dressing down, over the worsening insecurity spikes.  The government is there to secure and protect.  If it is failing in that cardinal duty, the citizens are entitled to howl, for a quick and sustainable fix.

    But legitimate mourning is one thing.  Weaving wilful falsehood that claims terrorism — of which everyone is a victim — is targeted solely at Christians, just because a Muslim is president, is another.

    That is arrant crap — and that’s where Father Kukah wilfully got it wrong.

    Besides, by giving this dangerous narrative traction, are Their Holinesses bent on inspiring own holy band of Crusaders, to duel Saracens, for Nigeria’s theocratic soul?

    That would lead nowhere but perdition.

    CAN President, the Revd. Samson Ayokunle, latched on to this false narrative, after the callous be-heading of the kidnapped Adamawa State CAN chairman, the Revd. Lawan Andimi, again by Boko Haram beasts.  The Baptist priest went on and on, claiming Boko Haram was the latest proof of Christian “persecution” in Nigeria.

    But again, that was pure fib.  Inasmuch as many Christians have been victims of Boko Haram terrorism, particularly its latest flare, these drugged fanatics are free-wheeling anarchists, who have wreaked far more havoc on their fellow Muslims.

    But even this notorious fact — as the Presidency rightly pointed out — Father Kukah adroitly skewed, with a rather mischievous turn of phrase: “If your son steals from me, do you solve the problem by saying he also steals from you?”

    The unwary would cheer this riposte.  But it’s nothing but a classic case of polemical fraud.

    Read Also: FG to Kukah: work for religious harmony

     

    By “your son”, is the good Father suggesting Boko Haram has Islam’s divine stamp?  Or that because the president is Muslim, Boko Haram is regnant state policy to wipe out Nigerian Christians?

    That fib isn’t supported by facts — and cleverly twisting stuff, to score cheap points, is dishonest and certainly un-Christian.

    But again, perhaps one should concede to the Father that the alleged Islamist domination he passionately attacks, goes way back to his troubled southern Kaduna nativity.

    In that cultural quicksand yoked together by mutual hate, there appears no love lost between Christians and Muslims, in their unending feuding to dominate one another.

    That the Muslim side often gets illicit cover, from their religious cousins in power, appears an open secret.

    But that is countered by the no less illicit one-sided media splurge, that the Christian side enjoys, from the dominant southern media — again, often times, on account of blind sympathy and faith fealty.

    Even then, conflating these age-old ethno-religious feuding, with Boko Haram terrorism, is rather rich, if not satanically romantic.

    It does nothing but muddy the waters.  The net-gainers from such emotive goading are the anarchists, against who everyone must unite, face down and defeat. Otherwise, the grand victims would continue to be the ordinary, vulnerable folks, Christian or Muslim.

    One thing is interesting, though: even with the good Father’s bombast and tempest, he still sits pretty as Catholic Bishop of Sokoto, the seat of the Sultanate and the North’s capital city of Islam.

    Even in Borno, the epicentre of the Boko Haram insurrection, a Muslim Governor, Babangana Zulum, just openly openly celebrated a lowly Christian teacher, Obiageri Mazi, for exceptional devotion to duty, even in the face of acute danger.

    Might the Bishop in Sokoto, and Christian teacher in Maiduguri, be part of the Christian-Muslim Armageddon the good Father belched in his homily?

    At the Farida Waziri show, Father Kukah even waxed philosophical over corruption as biological necessity, or political intervention.  Finger-pointing is cherished fetish of the Nigerian critical class, temporal or spiritual!

    But pray, if Kukah and co are so super-efficient at own spiritual duties, how come Nigeria, wild with religiosity, is a stinking moral sewer and a haven of crippling sleaze?

  • To you, Oodua nationalist

    By Olakunle Abimbola

    The flared temper over Amotekun is betraying a direr Yoruba distemper: “self-determination”.

    But as Amotekun is different things to different lobbies (as Ripples argued in Amotekun!, January 21), “self-determination” too could be a code for a rainbow of meanings: re-federalization, confederation or even outright secession, depending on placid, frenzied or even frazzled tempers.

    Why, the giddiest, of the Yoruba “self-determination” lobby, is already dreaming and crowing “Oduaexit”, after Brexit, Britain’s exit from the European Union (EU)!  Trust the excitable Nigerian to crunch and gobble the latest global slogans!

    Still, a caveat: nothing is wrong with self-determination — absolutely nothing.

    Indeed, it is both fundamental and legitimate, particularly in a federation, yet to find its true soul, since its dawn with the Lyttleton Constitution of 1954.

    Besides, the same theory valid for Nigeria’s independence from colonial yoke, could well be valid for Nigeria’s radical re-tinkering: if the omnibus isn’t delivering value and joy, to its restive components.

    Remember Jeremy Bentham and his greatest happiness of the greatest number?

    So, in pursuit of that common happiness, nothing really should be off-limits — even secession — if rigour is the criterion; and whatever goal in view, is achieved by democratic means.  Mass happiness and citizen satisfaction, after all, confer legitimacy on any political territory.

    So, the angst is not about “self-determination” per se, but the gung-ho, rabid Yoruba nationalism fuelling it all.

    Behind this preening, leering, ethnic back-slapping, set in a boisterous orgy of mutual-serenading, is a rather vacuous premise: grab ye first the Republic of Oodua and you have a Utopia of utopias, where everyone lives happily ever after!

    This costly conceit is not supported by history, far or near.

    Ay, Amotekun has brought about rare Yoruba unanimity.  But even the most casual follower of Yoruba history would know the Yoruba always band together in periods of great peril.

    What happens before and after a major crisis, however, is far less predictable.  Which is why the frothing ethnic pride, driving this fervent “self-determination” push, after the Amotekun breakthrough, appears rather curious.

    Let’s start with near-history.  The great Obafemi Awolowo social revolution, that made the old Western Region a clear pace-setter and the envy of all in the Nigerian federation, peaked when the British were still in charge (1951-1959).

    By Awo’s own account in Adventures in Power 2: The Travails of Democracy and the Rule of Law, by November 1960 — a month after independence — a North/East high-wire plot was on, by parliamentary deputies, to clamp down on the West.

    Most of the plotting deputies, that launched an anti-West debate in the House of Representatives, were from the North and the East, goaded on, with frenzy, by their regional leaders.

    But no less active, in that plot, were Awo-loathing Yoruba elements, hiding behind partisan differences to cock a snook at Awo.

    Sure, their main target was the uppity “Mr. know-it-all” Federal Leader of Opposition.  But they seemed not to particularly care that the West, their region, could end up as grand collateral damage — which was what happened.

    At the depth of that debacle, the West had birthed iron-clad camps of Awoists versus anti-Awoists — the anti-Awoists not unlike the scorned anti-Christ in Christian orthodoxy.

    That division has more or less defined the Yoruba political orthodoxy till this day. The regnant Awoists, clearly in the majority, look down on the other camp: at best, as leperous conservatives to be kept at arm’s length; at worst, as a scum of anti-people reactionaries, always at the ready to undo, with alien conspiracy, the Awo political estate.

    But to the Yoruba conservatives, the distaste is mutual: many so-called Awoists are pretentious ideological vacuums, barren without vomiting Awo’s inherited manna.

    Still, both camps, progressive or conservative, boast pan-Yoruba elites.  But their followers are much more skewed, sketching out some rough neo-Kiriji massing of partisan alliance: the Ijebu-Ekiti-Ijesa-Ondo, widely against the ethnic Oyo, with the Egba boasting decent sprinkles in both camps.

    Neo-Kiriji!  That echoes the Kiriji War (1877-1893), that fierce late-19th century intra-Yoruba conflict that raged for 16 years, and ended in a stalemate because the British moved in to impose order.  That pushes the discourse back into the far-history of Yoruba harmony or crisis.

    At its zenith (1608-1800), the bulk of the people that the Oyo Empire subjugated and plundered were fellow Yoruba: from Metropolitan Oyo, to the adjoining Yoruba vassal states in the heart of motherland, to the far-flung coastal Egba/Egbado corridor, which linked Oyo merchants to the sea.

    After its decline (which started circa 1754 and peaked in 1836), the main victims of the rising Ibadan military hegemony, to shore up a falling Oyo, were also fellow Yoruba.

    Indeed, the mass rebellion that triggered the Kiriji War, arose from wanton rape: in Oke-Imesi, the Ibadan Ajele (viceroy) there, Oyepetun, had raped the wife of Fabunmi, an intrepid local, who in rage lobbed off the randy viceroy’s head.

    The Ibadan response was war, not to condemn rape but to teach Fabunmi and audacious folks a stern lesson — Kiriji!: an onomatopoeia of booming guns, wreaking  great slaughter!  Again, the Ekiti-Ijesa Parapo military alliance, arrayed against the imperial Ibadan, were fellow Yoruba!

    Even the coastal Ijebu, that shut out Oyo-Ibadan subjugation, played the neo-Sparta of that troubled era — Sparta, that impenetrable Greek city state with mythical military might and a healthy suspicion of aliens!

    The Ijebu sealed their borders and made hay, golden middlemen, trading in coastal slaves, with foreign vendors; and arms and ammo, with the Yoruba interior.  Again, the bulk of the victims here were fellow Yoruba.  It took the Ijebu defeat in the Anglo-Ijebu War of May 1892 to open up the Ijebu country.

    But why this long foray into history?  For starters, Yoruba solidarity isn’t historically given.  That, however, is much mitigated today, given the general peace that has held from the 20th century till now.

    But much more important, there is a bogey — Nigeria — on which neck every intra-ethnic foible is hanged; and the past is over-romanticized as lost utopia.  That would appear the delusion driving this current Yoruba ultra-nationalism.

    Nigeria is yet to be anyone’s dream — which it can be, when well-structured and well-run.  But it has been the unsung bogey, to which every problem is adduced.  That is delusional.

    The Yoruba should try every constitutional means to secure their region.  But that should not automatically equate Oduaexit, as many are mouthing.

    Renascent Nigeria, a continental power with immense size, and global pride of the Black race, is a much more strategic turf, for the Yoruba to play.

    Even Awo, dubbed a “tribalist” by his malevolent opponents, was anxious to unleash his cutting ideas on Nigeria, rather than limit them to an ethnic cocoon.

    He knew it was a far better deal, than an Oodua Republic, which could just be a blip, even if brilliant, on the global map.

  • Kwara: post-Otoge wars

    Olakunle Abimbola

     

    In Kwara, the opening battle, of post-Otoge wars, has flared on the necromancy front.

    On Ile Arugbo (old people’s home), the Sarakis have pitched the formidable memory of Oloye, the late but well loved Dr. Olusola Saraki, against the executive integrity of Governor AbdulRahman AbdulRasaq.

    It is a classic sight of the dead, not staying dumb, taking pot shots at the living!

    Crave the potency of political necromancy, which Ripples, in an earlier piece (13 March 2018), defined as “the devastating politics of the dead, for the deadly benefits of the living”?

    Look no farther than Peter Obi, he of the (in)famous China stats, former Anambra governor and running mate to Atiku Abubakar, in their failed run for the presidency in 2019.

    Governor Obi, en route to enthroning Obiano as successor would, protégée in tow, do numberless sorties to the Nnewi tomb of Eze Igbo Gburugburu, Emeka Ojukwu, the late Ikemba.

    In the very living business of Peter and Willy, the dead Ikemba was the spark: to power the very serious business of Obiano succeeding Obi.  No less crucial was APGA, of which the mighty Ikemba was revered spiritual leader.

    As it turned out, Ojukwu is dead and gone. Obi and Obiano are done and dusted. APGA, for Obi, is dead as dodo.   The dead, of course, stay dumb.  So long for political necromancy!

    Not so in Kwara. But to be fair, you can’t blame the Sarakis for starting the fray, even if they are guilty as charged, for charging in from the necromancy front.

    In December 2019, the Kwara government had announced the reactivation of a long-truncated plan to build, for the state, a befitting government secretariat. It even outed with its model, pretty, modern and impressive.

    The snag, though, was that the land, on which the new public service edifice would stand, was the same land, housing the spiritual — if symbolic — soul of the Sarakis’ prime private interests, which feeds a doting and sympathetic rabble.

    That was “crossing the red line”, to use the exact words of Bukola Saraki, former Senate president and prime family scion, charging in hopping mad, like an enraged bull, after a red rag; hoisting the Saraki family standard, in high combat, to save family honour.  Enter, the Ile Arugbo debacle!

    Saraki the Son raved and railed, roared and foamed, growled and swore: he would unhorse the governor yet, for hiding behind state duties to settle ancient scores, between the Sarakis and the AbdulRasaqs, simply because he had fleeting gubernatorial powers.

    The rabble, both the Ilorin street battalion and the elite media corps, got the hint and rallied with a flourish — injury to the Oloye is injury to all!

    By carefully framing what the government claimed was sound public policy, as rabid Saraki-AbdulRasaq family squabble, Saraki the Son tapped into the lethal emotional stream of Saraki the Father.  The old Oloye army got stoutly and proudly roused!

    Rise o Kwara!  Post-Otoge wars are here, with an opening proxy campaign, blistering and savage, in memory of the late Oloye!

    It couldn’t get more explosive: Saraki the Son, acclaimed master of subterfuge, in the high capital of political mesu jamba (local lingo for high-wire intrigue), angling to get back on the Kwara high hustle, after the Otoge routing of 2019!

    Why, Gbemisola, Saraki the Daughter, no political friend of big brother, and current minister of the Federal Republic, weighed in, in fond memory of doting father — and with good reasons!

    It was on account of Saraki the Daughter, that Saraki the Son, defanged Saraki the Father; in the most ruthless political parricide in Nigerian history — or even regicide, if you regard the Saraki political court as a palladium of democratic feudalism.

    The closest, if far less messy perhaps, was the case of Samuel Goomsu Ikoku, who defeated his own father, Alvan, in the 1957 regional poll, for a seat in the Eastern Region House of Assembly.

    Indeed, the political trinity of Saraki the Father, Saraki the Son, and Saraki the Daughter, is rather gripping.

    Read Also: Abdulrahman apologises to Kwara govt

     

    At the zenith of their Kwara hegemony, the patriarch happened on the hubris — no: not a few swear it was solemn promise from a doting dad to an adorable daughter — that Saraki the Daughter would succeed Saraki the Son, in a conservative state none was sure was ready for a female governor; but which only the beloved Oloye could swing.

    The Son picked the most accurate signal, and stonewalled the Father, in painful democratic regicide, lest the dynasty come crashing down, on account of paterfamilias hubris.

    But that high moral didn’t stop the Son and outgoing governor, from succeeding the Daughter and outgoing senator — chauvinist-powered hypocrisy, if there was one!

    Still, as new master of Kwara politics, Saraki the Son, in no time morphed into a feudal Rehoboam, from the feudal Solomon his father was.  He scorched his “subjects” with scorpion, from the loving whips of the revered Oloye.

    That outside resent, coupled with intra-family feuding, oozing from a humiliated father and grudging daughter, laid the foundation for the Otoge electoral rout of 2019, after eight long years of incubation.

    Before that crash, however, the subversive love of feudal giving might have birthed a sense of (im)moral entitlement, that made little demarcation between public wealth and private trove.

    That must have birthed the Ile Arugbo, pat in the middle of a parcel of land, long earmarked for the Kwara Secretariat.

    The Sarakis, flaunting a document, claimed that public land was private property fair and square.  But the government countered the document was incomplete and the transaction inchoate; since there was, from government records, no evidence of payment and legal transfer.

    The court was to settle the debacle, until one of the parties sued for out-of-court settlement.  But even at that last meeting, the Saraki side didn’t show up.  They only sent in a letter, requesting a fresh date.

    Meanwhile, in the pre-court season of high-octane bluff and bluster, Brother and Sister Sarakis  insisted no one — repeat, no one: not even a “power-drunk” governor — could undo their father, the Oloye’s “legacy”.

    But what legacy?  The democratic feudal feeding of the rabble, which the stark and irreverent Ayo Fayose had unmasked as “stomach infrastructure”, in his best forgotten second romp at power, in neighbouring Ekiti State?

    On Ile Arugbo, the court would decide who blinks.  But whoever wins, that battle is only the opener of the blistering wars to come, for the soul of Kwara, in the post-Otoge years.

    The Sarakis’ odyssey is well cut out.  But it appears not many would lose any sleep, should they get further cooked.  Their rabid appeal to base emotion, over Ile Arugbo, is hardly a winning formula, against a Kwara government that appears anchored on solid public policy.

    But the bell hardly tolls for them.  Rather, it does for the AbdulRasaq government, that by the Ile Arugbo campaign, appears opening a new and exciting vista for equal-opportunity access, from the subversive feudal generosity of the Saraki hegemonic years.

    It is condemned to delivering on its enchanting mandate.

  • History soured by prejudice

    By Olakunle Abimbola

     

    Book: S. Ladoke Akintola: His Life and Times

    Author: Prof. Akinjide Osuntokun

    Publishers: Mosuro Publishers, Ibadan (2010)

     

    History has, more or less, consigned the late Samuel Ladoke Akintola (SLA), the second Premier of 1st Republic Western Region (December 1959 to 15 January 1966), as the ultimate villain of his political era — a perfidious fellow that met a tragic end.

    But the historian demurs, insisting that grim verdict is brutally unfair — for SLA, to use the words of Thomas Hardy, in Tess of the d’Ubervilles, echoing William Shakespeare’s King Lear before him, would appear more sinned against than sinning.

    In any case, that is Prof. Akinjide Osuntokun’s take in this posthumous biography, clearly aimed at rehabilitating SLA’s place in history.  Osuntokun is one of Nigeria’s finest historians.

    That grim take — yes, grim: by the way the author went about his task — is both the strength and weakness of the work.

    Strength, because a renowned historian, by providing “facts”, did a doughty swim against the roaring wave — and verdict — of history, already ingrained, and held near-immutable, by not a few.  Call it a profile in scholarly courage!

    In a Yoruba political cosmos, ripped in a stark saint-sinner divide — Awo and immaculate clan, the eternal saints; Akintola and fallen brood, the execrable sinners — it could well have been a stunning and refreshing triumph of reason over base passion.

    And weakness: that paradise of lithe scholarship, come to soar over flabby emotion, was all too soon lost, with the distinguished historian himself spraying a relay of base — well, unscholarly — commentaries, on the Awolowo persona.

    Awolowo sited a rubber plantation in his village (Ikenne) “against expert advice”; Awo was arrogant and insular, while SLA was affable and debonair; folks, the author prattled, shunned Awo’s imperious summons to his Ibadan home, en route to forming the Action Group (AG), though SLA managed to send a representative.

    The AG journey would start with a more successful — and clearly momentous — meeting at Owo (in present Ondo State) later.

    Even the furious spousal front, of the ferocious war of titanic husbands, from where Hannah Awolowo was uncritically loyal to her husband’s political cause, and Faderera Akintola, the restive one goading her premier-husband to throw off the Awo yoke (both portraiture, the author’s) wasn’t enough to sway the author’s own saint-and-sinner cosmos: Saint SLA; Sinner Awo.

    Nor could this authorial dichotomy flag on the politics-governance-policy front: after the AG crushing defeat at the 1959 federal elections, SLA brought unprecedented regional popularity for the party, to herald his reign as premier (politics); SLA retained most of the Awo era ministers, even if most of them were imposed by the ancien regime (governance); SLA was hobbled in his policy choices because the outgone Awo pre-programmed the cash, in the regional till, to specific projects, aside from having drained most of the regional reserves before quitting as premier (policy).

    Read Also: Buhari to Pa Ayo Fasanmi: You’ve truly upheld Awolowo’s legacies

     

    Now, some of these assertions may have been extracted from clinical historical facts.  For that, the author cannot be blamed.  On the contrary, he should earn praise for unearthing facts, to paint a more balanced picture, of that tempestuous and momentous era.

    But the problem, with all due respect to the distinguished historian, was the array of those facts, arraigned as a rich spray of snide remarks, which ran from the beginning to the end of the work.  It was as if the historian had a personal axe to grind with one of his two grand historical subjects.

    That, again with all due respect, would appear the major flaw of the work, despite its in-depth research; and rich vein of immaculate prose, crystal clear and uncluttered, like sparkling spring water.

    Still, on the SLA question, and his fair place in history, this is a welcome work.  It is the story of an ara oke (up-country bumpkin) — with heavy scarification to boot! — unfazed by the cocky Lagos coastal elite: fashionable conceit, wry condescension, empty superiority complex, and all.

    At Baptist Academy, then on Lagos Island, he not only proved a brilliant and dutiful Science teacher, he was the true Renaissance man: master of the English language, spoken and written; but also arch-purist of his native Oyo-Yoruba tongue, lest any invasion from its Lagos conceited and cosmetic variant.

    That would lay the foundation for SLA, the nonpareil political orator, with savage puns and caustic tongue!  Before then, he had taken his mastery of English into the Daily Service editorial suite.  As editor, he jousted with Nnamdi Azikiwe’s West African Pilot and its alleged Ibo hegemonic plot, for the political soul of colonial Lagos — and Nigeria.

    SLA’s niche for language and logic would fetch him a glorious berth in Law, after harrowing training in England; and gift him a platform to land big in politics, as other Titans of that era.

    In politics, he would become two-time federal minister (unlike now, there were regional ministers too) before climaxing everything with Awo’s succession as Western Region Premier and AG Deputy Leader.

    But as the ripest fruits are saddest (to raid Wole Soyinka’s rebel poem, “Abiku”), history clearly judged SLA, not by his fine personal qualities of early years but by his execrable conduct at his political peak — which also turned his historical nadir — as Western Premier, and (in)famous Awo adversary.

    On that, however, the author argues — and not a few also hold this view, even if fewer still are bold enough to write a treatise to back their claim: SLA was too harshly judged, simply because he eventually lost out, in the titanic political sweepstakes.

    Which puts the question: was Awo over-eulogized, just as SLA was over-demonized?

    Awo, over-eulogized?  Maybe on the human front, in the latter years, when he became a living saint that could do no wrong.  No living being, after all, is perfect!

    But on cutting ideas?  Certainly not!  Awo is the near-sole reason his political generation still hit daily news: thanks to his cutting mind on federalism (which still holds the structural key to Nigeria’s unity-in-diversity); and his developmental torch in social democracy, epitomized by his 1955 free primary education success, a well and truly Nigerian social developmental classic.

    SLA over-demonized?  Ay, but also only on the human front.  Surely no one could be so bad, sans any redeeming features?  Yet, that would appear SLA’s lot — the bogey this work admirably attempted to banish.

    Still, on the legacy front, SLA and Awo couldn’t be more starkly different: the one, the consummate politician that looks no farther than the next election; the other, the astute statesman that looks no nearer than the next generation — and his ready to ride the short-term pain to his long-term gain.

    Not even SLA Akintola: His Life and Times could not fault that assessment.

  • Amotekun!

    By Olakunle Abimbola

    At the felling of Ajanaku (elephant), the Yoruba say, contending knives, of all shapes and sizes, strut and crow.

    But what of at the birth of Amotekun (leopard), the code name for the Western Nigeria Security Network (WNSN), which Abubakar Malami, SAN, the federal attorney-general and Justice minister, just tried to raze, with a haughty fusillade of legalese?

    Well, it appears, even more earth-shaking cacophony — far more raucous than the mere clatter of contending knives, at the elephant’s fall!

    Take the atavistic tribe of Gani Adams, the zesty Aare Ona Kakanfo and co, whose future lay firmly buried in the past.  Mention Amotekun, and all the Kakanfo thrusts is a pre-historic OPC “army”, of which he fancies himself some post-modern commander-in-chief!

    Co-atavists, across regional lines, like the Miyetti Allah cattle lobby, catch the vibes and flee in arrogant panic, screaming: Amotekun is South West ethnic militia — which it is not — run, run, run!

    The irony, though: as Adams quivers to snap free from his Kakanfo ancient leash, polite society, in and out of the South West, gives him a wide berth.

    Then, the Afenifere faction of Baba Adebanjo, which outside its legitimate Awoist federalist agenda, epitomizes the narrowest strain of Yoruba nativism.  The more it loses touch with reality, the sharper its screeches; and bigger its appetite for equal opportunity mischief, especially if it helps to de-market elected South West leaders, whose mandate it covets.

    On Amotekun, however, all the Afenifere factions — both the Baba Fasanmi Abuja-friendly faction and the Hon. Wale Oshun-chaired Afenifere Renewal Group, ARG, whose members mostly double as APC partisans — are solidly united behind the crusade.

    That could mean fresh panic for fretful outsiders:  Amotekun is the Yoruba regional laager, arrayed against the rest of the Federal Republic — which again, it is not!

    But the Southern and Middle Belt Leaders Forum (SMBLF), a body a critic once dismissed as a confederate of paper tigers, arrayed as self-imposed geo-political leaders, waging guerrilla media war against the status quo, has offered support.

    Intriguing though: Yinka Odumakin, the South West associate that, among other associates, signed the SMBLF Amotekun endorsement, was only a few days ago pillorying the South West governors for not going far enough on the security network!

    What changed, in a few days?  Well, for starters: the enemy of my enemy is my friend!  Besides, Amotekun simply offers new fronts for ancient wars, in these lobbies’ media war without end.

    Talking of emergency and transactional friendship over Amotekun, even Nnamdi Kanu, the looney from IPOB, has weighed in, pledging no less than one million Amotekun cadres, hot, fresh and smoking from Biafra!  From within, his no less excitable soul mate, Femi Fani-Kayode, is even threatening war and Armageddon — trust FFK to froth!

    Well, is this earnest and honest friendship from the Biafra front, or just cynical goading for the advocates to unhorse themselves, and become butts of cross-ethnic jokes?  The jury is still out.  Still, caution and tact, not blind passion, are the key words.

    Meanwhile, on the sidelines, Afenifere wars against Miyetti Allah, for linking Amotekun with 2023 presidential sweepstakes, in the raging bluff-and-bluster war.

    Besides, the South West governors pushed Amotekun to pry their legitimacy from ethnic jingoists and partisan blackmailers, cocking a snook at the ethnic Fulani, for the unprecedented kidnapping and banditry that seized their region in 2019, making out the poor governors as feckless accomplices!

    When the Amotekun is born, cacophonous voices seize the air — measured and wild; lunatic and sane; reasoned and daft; wise and foolish!

    Read Also: Operation Amotekun

     

    Still, all these are no more than the market din — ariwo oja, as the Yoruba would put it.  They seldom vitiate the core issues that triggered Amotekun.

    That is why the federal authorities must be extra careful, not to be taken in by the wrong din, friendly or hostile.  If they did, they might just be provoking a major whiplash, which end no one could predict.

    Indeed, since the epochal June 12 presidential election revalidation campaign, Amotekun has the potentials of fiercely uniting the Yoruba, triggering their no-war-no-peace, no-retreat-no-surrender, war of attrition mode.  That could completely raze the post-June 12 entente, with devastating consequences for national unity and cohesion.  But Malami’s swashbuckling advisory doesn’t seem to appreciate this grim risk.

    Whoever scrutinizes every appointment with a scrupulous ethnic comb could well be a closet ethnic bigot himself, who only growls and barks, after losing out in the pork-sharing — which many politicians are, any way.  Pork-sharing — and growling —  are strictly elite pastimes.  The people are only cynical cannon fodders.

    But Amotekun is different.  The WNSN hits at the very core of survival — survival of the mass of Yoruba people, from gangling violent crimes, all blamed on non-natives.

    The police and allied security agencies are over-stretched.  Even while on ground, they lack the local intelligence network to nip the crimes before they happen.  At a period in mid-2019, Western Nigeria lay prostrate, raped at will by these alien criminals.  When the masses feel the heat, Yorubaland is never the same!  Hence, Amotekun!

    Which was why the federal attorney-general, holding brief for the Federal Government, ought to have been much more measured and sensitive in his advisory.  That crass insensitivity has gifted Amotekun extra potency.  Again, that could be devastating for everyone.

    That is why both sides should seek mutual accommodation.  The Yoruba are scared of losing their comparatively safe and peaceful interior to violent arms.  That drives the Amotekun ideal — and no legal diktat can shoot down that legitimate yearning.

    The federal authorities are even more scared to loose their unitary leash, on a supposedly federal territory.  Still, that violent contradiction can’t be resolved by legal grandstanding and threats.  But it can be by seeking sensible, mutual accommodation.

    That is the Amotekun challenge.

    Still, in every campaign there is a limit to bluff and bluster, even if both pump up adrenalin.  What is more essential is critical thinking.  With all the legalese in the air, for and against, the Constitution cannot be against self-preservation.

    So, let every South West state parliament back up Amotekun with individual enabling legislation.  Then, let the jaw-jaw, honest and frank, begin.

    Amotekun was conceived to preserve life.  It pays no one if it spirals out of control, and starts consuming lives.  Again, the key is jaw-jaw, not war-war.  But there can’t be dialogue with the deaf; so both sides must be open to mutual accommodation.