Category: Olakunle Abimbola

Mission to Ibadan was to meet, for the first time, Emeritus Prof. Ikenna Onyido, senior citizen and avid reader of this column.

But Ripples came back wowed, with the concept of Food as human right; from the traditional notion of food as human need.

Though that concept is not so new, that it hasn’t fired much fresh thinking on food policy, food availability and food security, is well and truly depressing.

For a developing country making strategic choices, in a brutally skewed globe, it shows how jejune public discourse has become.

It was all a fallout from the 1st Prof. Francis Sulemanu Idachaba Memorial Lecture, held on August 15, at the University of Ibadan’s Faculty of Agriculture.

That lecture, with specific focus on Agricultural Policy in Nigeria, is the brainchild of the Idachaba Foundation for Research and Scholarship and the University of Ibadan.

At UI’s Department of Agricultural Economics, the late Idachaba looms rather large.  He not only spent most of his celebrated academic life in that faculty — “the building at the blind corner”, as the guest lecturer dubbed it — he mentored a rich brood of protégés, who now proudly swear by his name, even if the renowned scholar has passed.

Prof. Onyido, chair at the lecture, is one.

An ex-UI (though later a professor of Chemistry), he rose to become Vice Chancellor, Michael Okpara University of Agriculture, Umudike.  After, he founded the Centre for Sustainable Development, Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka (Unizik). Now, after formal retirement in May (an event billed for December 2018 but postponed because of the ASUU strike), he is now Emeritus Professor of Chemistry, Unizik.

Onyido’s Unizik valedictory lecture, entitled “The antithesis of a rolling stone that gathers moss”, which he delivered on May 24, speaks of a renaissance scholar: a core scientist at home with the liberal arts; and a Chemist comfy with the history of the academia, right to its pristine roots.

When others fled the Nigerian academia, mouthing fulsome grumbles, Prof. Onyido stayed back.

The Yoruba speak of the shame-faced boy, who points his contemptuous left finger at his ancestral home.  Not Onyido, in his gripping — but never griping — engagement with the Nigerian university, warts and all!

He is the eternal rolling stone in our local universities — five, over some 44 years, at the last count, public and private; a rolling stone gathering moss; a doting troubadour traversing the vast space, in the service of his Lady; while others fled, griping and swearing; and later, smacking and gloating, from their foreign redoubts!

To Onyido, therefore, chairing the Idachaba lecture was both fealty to a cherished mentor; and umpteenth service to a cherished Lady — the Nigerian university.

Another was Prof. G. B. Ayoola, founder of Farm and Infrastructure Foundation (FIF), an Abuja-based agricultural think-tank; shaped in the Idachaba tradition of robust interface between gown and town, especially in agriculture and allied matters.

The lecturer, whose topic was “Rural Infrastructures and the challenge of food security in Nigeria: Are good intentions of policymakers enough?”, interrogated the popular controversy: is agriculture a business (like other ventures) or a core developmental prerogative?

He submitted it was both.  Still, he frowned at the starkness of regarding agriculture, by latter-day investors, as strictly business; as a Mathew Arnold (1822-1888), the English poet, would classify the nouveau riche of his day as ‘Philistines’, in comparison to ‘Greeks’, the well-rounded (wo)men of wealth and culture.

Quoting Wendell Berry, in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays, he posited: “The word agriculture, after all, does not mean ‘agriscience’, much less ‘agribusiness’.  It means ‘cultivation of the land’. And cultivation is at the root of the sense, both of culture and cult.  And these words all come from Indo-European root meaning both ‘to resolve’ and to ‘dwell’.  To live, to survive on the earth, to care for the soil, and to worship — all are bound at the root to the idea of a cycle.  It is only by understanding the cultural complexity and largeness of the concept of agriculture, that we see the diminishment implied by the term ‘agricbusiness.’”

That would appear the conceptual basis for Prof.  Ayoola’s FIF, particularly its national campaign on the right to food.

FIF has declared, following its founder’s 2016 postulation of food as human right: “The right to food,” Ayoola quotes, “is the irreducible minimum degree of freedom from hunger and malnutrition for a person to live a dignified, productive and healthy life.”

That appears the classical social democracy (“progressive” in local Nigerian parlance) — the primacy of humans over capital (the opposite of the Conservative primacy of capital over humans), even if humans, individual or government, can do pretty little without capital.

But it doesn’t translate into some Utopia, a neo-Garden of Eden, where you could pluck whatever you wanted, from a sweet garden of bliss!  Even that would appear unsustainable, from the debacle of Adam and Eve!

By the way, “want” pushes the discourse to basic Economics, and its demand and supply concepts of want, need and effective demand.

Linked to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, “want” is not unlike the id — raw, unbridled desire.

“Need” is want, moderated by purchasing power.  In other words, you grab your needs, from an unceasing pool of wants.

“Effective demand” is what, despite all you want, your money can buy — except, of course, you steal; which has devastating consequences!

Still, that food should be cheap, because it is abundant, underscores the concept of food as human right — so cheap, even the dirt poor can afford it and have their fill, as the very basis of living.

But then how can the government achieve food, cheap (available) and abundant (secure), if it often treats agriculture, in isolation of rural infrastructure, physical and social: roads, linking farms to markets; electricity, lighting up farm houses and rural homes; schools and hospitals, for the sound education and sound health of the rural folk?

It’s not as if linking agriculture to the local ecology is new.  The problem is that policy-wise, both are often treated as “extracurricular” matters, when they ought to be “co-curricular”, to borrow those educational terms, floating or sinking with one another.

That was the crux of the Idachaba lecture, with Prof. Ayoola tracing agricultural policy way back in time: Nationally Coordinated Food Production Programme (Gowon, 1972); Operation Feed the Nation (Obasanjo, 1976); Green Revolution Programme (Shagari, 1980); Directorate of Food, Roads and Rural Infrastructure (Babangida, 1986); National Agricultural Land Authority (Babangida, 1990), National Programme on Food Security (Obasanjo, 2000), National Food Security Programme (Yar’Adua, 2008) and Agricultural Transformation Agenda (Jonathan, 2011).

Food as human right should have gripped the media, revolutionized policy and anchored the polity on a sharp ideological divide.

But alas!  The media is busy and not to be disturbed — in perfect bliss with banality and allied crap!

The Trials of Brother Jero is a Wole Soyinka play, which protagonist is a roguish but likable C&S prophet living on his wits; like other white-garment hustlers of his era, in his Lagos Bar Beach redoubt.

But the Trial of Brother Ike is no fiction.  Indeed, it’s ultra-real setting is Nuremberg, the pre-World War II (1939-1945) city of intense Nazi hate, in Bavaria, Germany.

With post-World War II trials, however, that same Nuremberg played judicial nemesis to the rump of Adolf Hitler’s hate-spewing thugs, after the global debacle that consumed thousands, if not, millions of lives.

Besides, this scary, non-fiction badgering had the social media, as its global stage — from which it went viral, practically a few seconds after the macabre assault and battery played out.

It was the odyssey of Ike Ekweremadu, former deputy president (DSP) of the 7th and 8th Senates; and current sitting senator of the Federal Republic, in the hands of IPOB fanatics, out there in Germany.

The video of Ekweremadu’s mugging was simply unnerving.  Mugged by a mob, clothes torn; pushed-and-pulled, a virtual ping-pong in the hands of a hateful mob; poor Ekweremadu wouldn’t gain his get-away car until one of the mob let fly a king-size tuber of yam!

Lodavemesi!

Those who wish to gloat have earned their democratic right, to enjoy selves, at Ekweremadu’s expense.

Truth be told, the Nuremberg show of shame is nothing but crass internationalization of the sewers of South East politics, particularly in relations to other ethnics.

In that lunatic, combustible cave, it’s an elite goading to free-wheeling hate.  After all, going by the French Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1944 No Exit play, “Hell is other people”!

But at Nuremberg, the city of Nazi hate, hell suddenly became own people!  That’s Ekweremadu’s personal tragedy.

Still, those who have been gloating would do well to remember that scriptural caution: beware of throwing the first stone.

In this high season of hate, you never know where the children of hate would spring from.  That is with particular reference to South West folks.  But more on that presently.

Back to Ekweremadu; and an IPOB romance gone awry.

When Nnamdi Kanu and his Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) were spewing hate, across the Niger north and west, it was mum from Ekweremadu and co.

For one, it was the first time the mainstream South East elite would play themselves into opposition, in any democratic experiment, pre- or post-Civil War (1967-1970).

For an elite that loves to blame others for own failings, some bile from the misguided mass would do just fine — hell is other people!

Besides, it was the summit of Ekweremadu’s sweetheart deal with Bukola Saraki.

Saraki had sold off his party to gain the Senate presidency.  En route, he had sold Ekweremadu the carcass of DSP, even if the beneficiary was a minority senator.  It was carcass and carrion so sweet!

But the mission was clear: with Saraki, gang up to thwart the new order; turn triumph into defeat; and four years hence, from that base platform, rocket back to power!

With that temper, Nnamdi Kanu’s bail was the umpteenth politics to cement that not-so-hidden rogue agenda.  Besides, don’t they say the enemy of my enemy is my darling friend?

So, Ekweremadu played the folk hero, and Kanu got his bail — applause, applause!  Until Kanu, with his ceaseless stream of hate, turned himself into a fugitive from the law, it was, to echo that pidgin street lingo, notin’ spoil!

Then came Nuremberg — and the hunter becomes the hunted (and haunted); things fall apart; the falcon can no longer hear the falconer; and mere anarchy is loosed upon the Igbo world: right out there in Nuremberg, the old city of Nazi hate!

Why, IPOB, though proscribed, is even threatening more thunder and brimstone, against South East governors and other high-ranking politicos, that venture outside Nigeria’s shores!

How internationalizing senseless bile and crass hooliganism would boost Biafra’s cause is left to anyone to figure out.

In fairness to Ekweremadu, he just fitted pat into an extant elite agenda; the same way Ohanaeze’s combative temper in inter-ethnic matters does, as ferreted from the often bulldog stance of John Nwodo, its president; even if elderly restraint would do.

You could even trace, on a grander cultured level, the current South East distemper to Chinua Achebe’s swan song, There Was A Country, his Civil War memoirs of prose and poetry, which not a few think is a tad one-sided.

Even if you could excuse that criticism with the saying that he who wears the shoe knows where it pinches, bile has never solved any problem.  All it does is block clear thinking, sorely needed to clear the fog and improve the situation.

Still, for South West denizens that love to gloat at the Ekweremadu debacle, they had better watch current happenings in  own home region; with elders at the departure lounge (to echo Obasanjo’s  metaphor) vomiting enough bile, to ensure inter-ethnic ancestral feuds continue, long after they are gone.

True, former President Olusegun Obasanjo continues to blow hot and cold, as befits his rather unstable political temper, with wild swings between joy and angst, as final judgment dawns on his legacy.  But Obasanjo is not the danger here.

The danger, rather, is the progressive mainstream now split, with the losing bloc digging deep into bile, as bitter as gall.

That explains why a faction of Afenifere, which hitherto had served the Yoruba rather well in earlier battles in a federal Nigeria, would now seem to champion a rather noxious strain of Yoruba ultranationalism, complete with ethnic slurs, particularly against the Fulani.

Now, that would appear a potent two-in-one whiplash: to drub the rival victors at the polls, turning into ash their legit win; and to inveigh against the Fulani who, by present hysteria, are folks others love to hate.

Even better: in blind bitterness, cast the victorious bloc as bastards, come to drag the once proud Yoruba into Fulani peonage — applause, applause, from a fast increasing bigoted mass!

But when comes the Yoruba Nuremberg, when a Yoruba Ekweremadu would play out, in shameful technicolor, in full view of the globe?

When would that be?  After the grandees pushing the present hate are dead and buried; and the young Turks in the current bile ensemble become the new Ekweremadu, flailing under own home missiles, to universal derision?

So, let folks nationwide gloat less and think more.

Let the Ekweremadu pill be the turning point, jerking everyone back to reality. Hate or bile exalts no nation.

Nigeria may be at a crossroads.  But so have many countries too, at separate times in their history.

Yet, many of these not only weathered their storms, not a few even morphed from countries into nations, integrated in love, justice and mutual respect.

A consummate professional, Adeniyi Adesina, got recalled to The Nation for higher duties.

Another, Ismail Omipidan, got invited from The Sun to take Adesina’s place, as chief press secretary (CPS) to Gboyega Oyetola, the Osun governor.

Both exited and entered without fuss or ill will.

Nor did the governor exhibit any angst, beyond the reluctance of letting go a calm, measured and polished mind; replaced with great relief at finding an alter ego — in professional brilliance, focus and temper — to do the job.

But see how a fellow, on Facebook, captured the transition: “Gboyega Oyetola sacks Ijeshaman Niyi Adesina as his CPS; replaces him with Ila-Orangun man, Ismail Omipidan. O da baun!” (cynical Oyo Yoruba snap for “It’s alright”).

And then this follow-up: “Sacking a Christian to replace him with a Moslem. So Oyetola could be this intolerant?”  Ah!

And this yakking, after reasoned caution, to his hysterical post: “Is Adesina an Ijesha? Is he a Christian? Is he still Oyetola’s CPS?  Is Ismail the new CPS, a Christian, an Ijesha?”

The reminds you — doesn’t it? — of Irish poet, W. B. Keats, in his famous poem, ‘The Second Coming’ : “…The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity …”?

Talk of combative ignorance, cocky, reckless and unfazed!

Enter the menace of the media as meddler: base, petty, graceless, crass, cynical, petulant, manipulative and mischievous.

Still, a Facebook comment, by a cyber denizen, as reckless and they come in the cyber jungle, couldn’t possibly qualify as “media”, in the most basic sense of the word?  True.

You could even label — and with justification too — that categorization as a tad too sweeping.

But that is only when you view the media from the formalist stand point.

From the point of effect, that repudiation would appear cosmetic and artificial.  Otherwise, the social media, where you could unleash anything that suited your fancy on an unsuspecting and often gullible audience, could not have become such a menace.

In a contemporary Nigeria, where the line is becoming wafer-thin, between the conventional media (with its robust “gate-keeping”) and new media (with its mad rush at “breaking news”: even if it is often pure fiction, garbled truths or even spiteful lies as free and democratic commentaries, as this Osun case), the havoc of such steamrollers is real.

Why, even AIT, before its crunch with the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission (NBC), gloried in such unfazed mischief, by beaming social media inanities, which nevertheless fuelled some partisan bliss.

Even now, some radio stations are outright pests, pushing a brazen democratic right to misinform — nay, to disinformation; traducing and maligning those whose right of response, in full measure, could be distracting, if not outright impolitic; and unleashing  nothing short of media anarchy, that bucks all sane broadcast rules.

Enter: the birth, nurture and sustenance of the poisoned psyche, on a mass scale.

Yet, partisan reportage is not new.  The NTA, from nativity, sees and hears no evil, concerning the extant powers.

But should the tide change, as it did in 2015, the transition is prompt and dutiful.  Open sesame:  the clobbered of last night, become the new news toast this morning — all in the line of duty!

In the 2nd Republic, nothing the conservative National Party of Nigeria (NPN) President Shehu Shagari (Allah bless his soul!) did passed the muster of the opposition press; which, with a vengeance, cancelled out the NTA government doting, at least within these newspapers’ spheres of influence.

Still, all those were generally done within the confines of strict and robust gate-keeping: check and balances, at many layers of news treatment, to at least conform to journalism best practices.  Not any more!

Now, a new potent virus straddles the conventional and new media.  Those in government will ignore it to their peril.

In this particular Osun case, traducing an innocent Governor Oyetola, over base but empty clannish and faith allegations, would appear a continuation of the sickly Osun-as-media-ping pong of the Rauf Aregbesola years.

Independent sources, including mainstream local and international development agencies, hailed that government as nothing but revolutionary; in driving radical, human-centred development, dealing mass poverty lethal blows, even with puny cash in its till.

But to a section of Nigeria’s mainstream media, all those striving, rich practical equivalent of Jeremy Bentham’s “greatest happiness of the greatest number”, were nothing but crap.

Indeed, going by their own old wives’ tales, dished as hot and explosive media fare,  the former governor, with his then chief of staff and now governor, and other braves that laboured and sweated to lift their people, only qualified to be nailed to the cross, to parody Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s novel, Devil on the Cross.

Media terrorism was never more brazen!

That, for Osun, nearly proved fatal — fatal because, no matter what partisans may claim, had Osun voted otherwise, it would have proved more than a routine election lost and won.

The people would have been the ultimate loser, for a dawn of true people-centred development would have been tossed away, by partisan bile, no thanks to a poisoned psyche, deliberately and spitefully pushed by a section of the media.

It would have been well and truly tragic.

Both Adesina and Omipidan, the one returning to  journalism practice, the other crossing over to media-manage a government, must know it’s poisoned times.

But again, partisan journalism is not new.  What is new is the newfound toxicity that poisons all.

The earliest Nigerian journalism masters, John Payne Jackson and son, Thomas Horatio Jackson (Lagos Weekly Record); George Alfred Williams  (Lagos Standard); James Bright Davies (Nigerian Times/Times of Nigeria), and the great Herbert Macaulay (Lagos Daily News) were great crusaders against the colonial order.

Though they were no partisans for belonging to political parties, they were partisan — and proudly so — for their fiercely pro-native stance, against a harsh colonial order.

If history remembers them rather fondly today, it was just because they went by the highest ideals: in language, thought and temper, so much so that they corralled attention, if not grudging respect, from the uppity colonial order.

Not any more — for a section of today’s media appear blissfully luxuriating in the sewers: in language, thought and temper, fired with base emotions.

How will history remember the media of this era?  That should agitate the mind of Adesina and Omipidan — one processing the news, the order churning out stuff to project his principal — as they lead their new charge.

The media thrives on fairness to all.  So, a media that spews toxins that poison its environment of practice only digs its own grave.