The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olakunle Abimbola

  • Appian way

    Making the yearly Ilese Day, the Ilese-Ijebu, Ogun State, community-mobilization-for-development show-piece, has for three years now, become a duty.

    That is thanks to the loving prompting of Otunba Kunle Kalejaiye — KK to about everyone — a distinguished native, and golden cousin.

    But surprise, surprise!  The town’s major road, for eons narrow and snaky, had morphed into a wide four-lane way,  though still under construction.

    Taiwo Adeoluwa, Secretary to the Ogun government who represented Governor Ibikunle Amosun, at August 11 final carnival and rally, called it “Ijebu Ode-Ilese road, which indeed, it is.

    But the historic-minded could well dub it “Appian Way”, after the famous 62-km freeway in antiquity, from Rome to Brindisi, built by the Roman, Appius Claudius Caecus (340-273 BC).

    Quite a fitting prize  — for a community that, every year, rallies its natives and residents; and therefore, nudges the government to its developmental needs!

    Still, making this year’s Ilese Day, through the crippling traffic on the Ibafo-Mowe section of the Lagos-Ibadan expressway, that Friday August 10 night, was almost mission impossible.

    Yeah, the Redeemed folks, that swelled the traffic, were the fall guys for that glitch — and, was it bad!  From the Kara Bridge at the Berger end of the Lagos border, to communities spanning Ibafo to Mowe, it was bumper-to-bumper traffic!

    The Redeemed folks were holding the grand finale of their yearly convention.  But the real culprit was reconstruction works going on, at that corridor.  That forced a traffic squeeze from eight lanes to four.

    But even as the bad traffic sparked foul temper, the Redeemed zealots, in various buses, en route to their camp, were in good cheer: sprightly, merry and boisterous in praise and worship; spiced with free-style prayers, and thunderous halleluyah!

    You never saw a more beatified band, bristling with bliss, when about everyone else was in pains — excruciating pains!   Why were they so blest!

    But as the Redeemers had their fun, the two-man traveling party cowed under own cross.

    At the wheel was Foluso Adelaja, another Ilese son and publisher of SOS (State of Ogun State), an Ogun-wide community newspaper. He had both communal and commercial interest in the spectacle.

    Ripples, on the other hand, was a study in stormy calm.  With this pace, when a snail’s speed is a like sprint, when the hell are we getting to Ilese?

    Then, as the crawl snailed near a fuel station near Ibafo, the worst dawned.  The sputtered to a stop.  It was around 9pm, four hours after leaving Lagos.

    The mechanic, hired on the spot, diagnosed an ignition complication.  He suggested a manual kick-start, which, after a few false starts, set the engine roaring again.

    Still, we couldn’t possibly trust this machine, on a late night trip, all on our own, without additional expert hands?

    A brief but intense negotiation saw, for a fee, emergency mechanic morph into emergency driver.

    Due diligence (driver’s licence and discreet inquiry about his person) followed; and we were back, after an agonizing hour, waltzing again in the traffic.

    To cut short a long story: we didn’t hit Ijebu Ode until 11.56 pm — almost 12 midnight.  A one-and-a-half-hour trip, at the most, had lasted almost seven hours!  We checked into a hotel in Ijebu Ode, too tired to make Ilese that night.

    Yet, that was a major loss.  Even at that late hour, Ilese was all-bubble, with the festival’s gala nite, which main attraction is the Miss Ilese Beauty Pageant, with the Queen driving away with her win — a car.

    That alone is a massive youth-pull, from all of Ijebuland and even beyond.  But even more iconic, with the winner also announced during the gala nite, is the Ikokore cooking contest — Ikokore, the Ijebu foremost national delicacy.

    It is the making of perhaps the greatest concentration of youth anywhere in Ijebuland, for a particular event.

    Yes, Ijebu Ode boasts its yearly Ojude Oba festival, tied to the Muslim feast of Eid-el-Kabir, which the Yoruba call Odun Ileya.  Compared to Ilese Day, however, its crowd would is more evened out, since it pulls all age grades, young or old.

    It’s that specific youth pull that makes the Ilese Day Gala Nite a vibrant market for products and services — fashion lines, cosmetics, food seasoning, beer and general beverages, and even telecoms.

    For the discerning manufacturer, service provider and smart marketer, that gala nite is a captive market.  With a heavy flow of undergraduates and other tertiary students to the show, it could well prove a profitable tryst between today’s market and the future decision maker.

    But having missed out on the gala nite, the final carnival and rally proved no less exciting — both from fun fair and commerce.

    As the five carnival troupes, exquisitely costumed, dazzled the audience with their dance steps and sundry displays, the commercial side of this fun fair peeped at you.

    Otunba Kalejaiye, sponsor of the triumphant Purple House, told the gathering it cost as much as N2.5 million to costume each group.

    The Purple group dethroned the Yellow House, 2017 winners, sponsored by Otunba Sola Mogaji, the chairman, the Ilese Day Organizing Committee.

    But if it costs N2.5 million to costume each group, discounting training and drilling costs, the commerce of it all also sounds good.

    To hire any of the groups costs no less than N500, 000 each.  The Orange House, hired by a neighbouring Ijebu community to perform two shows, reportedly grossed N1 million.

    But that deal would later burn their hands.   As they savoured the after-show fawning of the excited hosts, some crooks carted away their costumes!

    That explained their abject display at this year’s rally.  With most of their costumes gone, and their major sponsor also dead, they cut the picture of pitiable orphans!  Still, next year is another date!

    But the Sappers Barracks ensemble, from the Nigerian Army cantonment in Ilese, continue to earn plaudits.  They retained the third position they achieved last year, but their especial strength, is the pan-Nigeria mix they give the pageant.

    Ilese Day, according to Otunba Kalejaiye, invited and honoured Gen. Azubike  Ihejirika, then chief of Army staff (COAS), with an award.  But seeing the catchy carnival display, he queried the local army commander why the barracks community were not part of the show.

    Enter, the Sappers Barracks’ carnival ensemble, the Pink House, with their distinct military camouflage, a proud part and parcel of the Ilese community!  See how communities, without much ado, can creatively weave own pan-Nigeria clans?

    Ilese Day continues to show how to deepen community bond, build economic assets and showcase developmental potentials.

    It’s an Appian way other communities need to follow.  Unlike the biblical wide and merry way, this isn’t likely to lead to perdition.

     

  • CANned

    CAN — the Christian Association of Nigeria — appears a perfect fit for this pun.  But it is only symptomatic of a general malaise.

    At a crucial juncture, when everyone ought to face down the demons rendering the republic prostrate, critical segments not only snooze but proudly so.

    In the classical making of self-canning, CAN has taken an unfazed lead.  Among others, a distracted section of the media ripples over inanities; but stays placid on vital issues.

    Ethnic lobbies too, a key collage of the Nigerian fabric — and problem — are too busy — and petty — nursing ancestral hurts, from ancestral feuds, to seize the moment, and face down the demon plaguing all.

    In Vice President Yemi Osinbajo-speak, it’s as rare a time as ever, when Nigerians are faced with a sharp good-vs-evil divide.  But hey, where are the onward Christian soldiers, going onto war, rippling for the kill?  Not CAN!

    Sure, it would be grossly unfair to claim every Christian, or even every church leader, is onto this dole of Christian reproach.  That would be criminal over-generalization.

    Still, even the most doting lover of CAN would admit since Ayo Ortisejafor played unfazed Grigori Rasputin in the court of Goodluck Jonathan, that association has all but projected the mammon, symptomatic of the wide-and-merry; than the holy, epitomizing the straight-and-narrow.

    Like a horror movie, the hypocrisy and sanctimony of 15th century Catholic England, as captured by Geoffrey Chaucer’s Prelude to Canterbury Tales, come reeling in the CAN of 21st century Nigeria.

    In that classic tale, a poem written in old English, about only the lowly Parson, a humble, rustic parish priest, cut the muster of his faith.

    The others, higher up in the Catholic hierarchy — the Summoner, bully papal police; the Pardoner, corrupt hawker of indulgences, “hot, fresh and smoking from Rome”; and the Miller, gold-fingered from massive heist of clients’ grains — were hustlers per excellent, spiritual and temporal!

    Compare and contrast those Brit old rogues, with the free-wheeling prosperity preachers, merry doomsday prophets and political pundits in priestly garb of today’s Nigeria, and the difference might not be so clear.

    Take the prayer sortie to Ike Ekweremadu, deputy senate president (DSP), under scrutiny for alleged sleaze.

    Now, the issue is not to demonize praying.  Even the Christ Jesus himself quipped the healthy had no need of physicians.  So, from Christian tenets, every sinner — and that means everyone — needs prayers, every time.

    What rather rankles is the ugly symbolism of it all, in all its combative and un-Christian filth, of a slew of clerics rushing — to the prayerful defence? — of a DSP accused of questionable assets, in a polity laid prostrate by sleaze.

    The Ekweremadu case is a fundamental moral stinker, which crippling stench ought to warn any self-respecting priest, Christian, Muslim or traditional worship, off that persona.

    Ekweremadu, as DSP, was a product of soulless perfidy and unfazed opportunism.  Under the PDP ancien regime, Ekweremadu was DSP.  That was legitimate, for his party commanded the majority in the Senate.  So, he emerged DSP as of right.

    Now, under APC rule, he emerged DSP by sleight, powered by the most condemnable strain of blind opportunism.

    And his accuser, trier and gaoler is no more than the immaculate logic of his first coming under PDP, now rendered moral and logical gargoyle, under APC.

    In legal metaphor, if Bukola Saraki stole APC’s DSP “pearl”, Ekweremadu was its unflinching receiver and adorner.  That act is an abomination, under logic; and a rebuke, under morality.

    Yet, Ekweremadu has pranced, swaggered and capered with that sickly pearl, bolstered by the nauseating humbug that rules the political roost; which, however, every true Christian, as society’s moral conscience, ought to scorn.

    Again, for clarity: this column has no problem with Citizen Ekweremadu, as a person.  But the rotten stench, from the Ekweremadu DSP persona, is a terrible assault on the nose.

    Now, pile this same moral aberration with allegations of suspect assets, and the best the leading lights of Nigerian Christendom could do was rush in with combative prayers?

    “If gold rusts,” the immaculate Parson’s voice drifts in from 15th century England, in all its gentle but chilling rebuke; as censorious as it was, uttered against the Catholic England of his day, “what would iron do?”

    In holy empathy, these same leading lights bawl and thunder over the hunger ravaging the land.

    But if corruption unfairly skews the bulk of the common patrimony, leaving the majority beggared, and priests rush to offer solidarity with those accused of sleaze, are their holinesses too not complicit in the hunger tearing apart the land, despite their holy cant?  And isn’t that the very acme of hypocrisy?

    CAN is mealy-mouthed at best, starkly indifferent at worst, on the corruption question.

    Fiery Catholic Bishop Matthew Kukah, at the very genesis of it all, sensationally declared the country should forget the nation-burying corruption of the Jonathan era, simply because the former president did fantastic by losing an election and quitting.

    That, more or less, has been the attitude of CAN, and its leading lights.  Yet, by the tenets of their faith, they ought to be among the most radical, to stamp out the menace.

    But again, CAN stands in good company, in a raped country, at its most trying hour, sapped by condemnable indifference, by its critical pillars.

    Since Lord Frederick Lugard forged, in the imperial furnace, the colonial territory he christened Nigeria, the media, marshalled by the newspaper press, had always been on the right side of history.

    Name it — the colonial times, the turbulent immediate independence era and the dark epoch of military rule — the media had always championed the best for the polity.  Not any more?

    In any case, on corruption — sleaze and political humbug — the media is in a raucous free fall, like the collapsing Tower of Babel.  It’s a moral equivalent of a swagger on Mount Olympus, down to a whimper deep inside the Hades.

    The ethnic champions?  Corruption, no matter its clear danger, is nothing but welcome tool to point finger, whip up rogue tongue solidarity and wield, as umpteenth rod, of clan and ethnic victimization.

    It never occurs to these folks that sleaze has no ethnic coloration, in its total and complete destruction.

    Still, decay in other critical pillars, no matter how grand, can’t compare to decay in the church, with its deep link to the spiritual and the celestial.

    Yet, that’s the terrible image CAN and leading lights lug; running dubious campaigns, championing suspect causes, at variance with own tenets.

    It’s time CAN and allies did away with such canned thinking.

  • Osun: Looking back, looking forward

    Guess how the Osun governorship electioneering would go?

    Davido belts out sexy and seductive music.  Uncle, and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate, Ademola Nurudeen Adeleke aka Jackson (though, no Michael) turns instant amoeba, with neither shape nor form, in a fit of free-wheeling caper.

    The dancing senator, in his true elements, earns boisterous and thunderous roar, as the merry campaign partisans catch the fire!

    Reminds you — doesn’t it? — of the Biblical King David, doing his vigorous twist-and-turn, before the Ark of Covenant; a wild gyration that drew an instant rebuke from Queen Michal, Saul’s daughter, who felt it was scandalously un-kingly?

    But that itself drew David’s counter-rebuke: Michal’s womb would never bulge with babies; or her legs ever leap with joy, while cuddling infants — a dire decree with Jehovah’s final seal!

    Still, this Jackson caper can’t be to high Jehovah?  No.  But to the low voter, baited to use his heart, not his head.

    From the Iyiola Omisore end, if the impasse over the Social Democratic Party (SDP) ticket gets resolved in his favour?  Perhaps bewitching claims bordering on flagrant untruths; and threats, rude and crude, bordering on the sinister.

    And from the Osun traditional politicians, progressive, conservative or reactionary?  Hot bile over “Tekobo” (returned Lagos emigre) versus the home-bred — sterile controversies that add nothing to wise voting.

    Then, blatant lies; vicious and virulent personality attacks, laced with wicked rumours, that turn the voter into an unthinking, self-destruct mob.

    It’s the old Osun bile-driven electioneering, to whip up base instincts.

    But it has always proved the Biblical wide and merry way, that leads nowhere but perdition and eventual gnashing of teeth, by that same mob, when the emotions ebb.

    Flashback 2003.  Governor Bisi Akande — not the best of glib politicians, being blunt to a fault — was heckled out of office.

    Baba Akande got pummelled, as the hated apostle of enduring present pains for future comfort.  It was a classic mob verdict, all passion, no reason.

    But his replacement?  Almost eight years of near-total paralysis, under Governor Olagunsoye Oyinlola.  Of course, you can’t claim Oyinlola did “nothing”, as excitable partisans are wont to argue and ripple.

    But whatever he did, almost everything about Osun headed south, until the Rauf Aregbesola restoration years, starting 2010, after a three-year judicial battle to reclaim the stolen mandate of 2007.

    Even then, the Osun Government Secretariat at Abere, complete with the Bola Ige House, the Governor’s Office Complex, was the grand vision Akande left behind to mock the Oyinlola-era ruins — and the voters’ grand folly.

    So, what should the Osun voter do, in the midst of the unimaginable din of electioneering?  Look back, before looking forward.

    That way, (s)he can make an informed decision on the ballot.  How was Osun seven years ago?  How would (s)he want it to be four years from now?

    Security?  Kwara was created, first as West-Central State; shortly later, Kwara State, in 1967.  It was one of the original 12 states, created from the four 1st Republic regions, of North, East, West and Midwest, by Gen. Yakubu Gowon.  Osun was created in 1991.

    Yet, the Offa robbery of 2018, probably the worst in that state’s history, caught Kwara napping.  For Osun, however, it was a glorious “so near, yet so far away”, for Offa is virtually Osun’s next door.

    Crime could happen anywhere.  But it was no accident such a hideous robbery didn’t take place in neighbouring Okuku (in Osun) or even relatively far-away Lagos.

    The difference is clearly the rigour Osun put into its security architecture, these past eight years, contrasted to the relatively sloppy thinking across the border.  Yet, Osun is 26; Kwara, 50.

    Yeah, at a time, such robberies were common place in Lagos, Kwara’s 1967 contemporary.  But again, by sheer superior thinking, such became history in Lagos.

    Education.  Eight years ago, how many of those futuristic schools dotted the Osun skyline?  How many kids were being daily fed, at the lowest rung of the Osun school system?  Indeed, how many of these kids, from the poorest of the poor, were even in school?

    Yet, barely two years into the period of reference, the Nigerian economy collapsed, no thanks to the cumulative rot in the Goodluck Jonathan presidency, precipitating the nationwide salary crisis.

    But pray, how many states lugged that burden, yet didn’t allow its education and youth empowerment vision to be impaired?  Again, ode to superior, if punishing, thinking!

    Infrastructure.  For eons, the Gbongon junction, on the Ibadan-Ife Expressway, like the Mobalufon junction, Ijebu Ode, on the Sagamu-Benin Expressway, was the grave of many travellers, victims of avoidable road crashes.

    Now, that junction boasts the Bisi Akande trumpet bridge.  Sure, many may crow about its beauty, as a novel landscape.  But its most vital intervention, again thanks to smart thinking, is saving life.  Travellers, that Gbongan grave is sealed, forever!

    Still, that trumpet blares Osun’s great infrastructural strides, these past eight years.  Yet, it was a period of high adversity!  With high prosperity, what might it have been?

    The Oba Adesoji Aderemi ring road, Osogbo, serves as the bewitching beauty of that new thinking, which manifests, like dazzling pearls, in the Osogbo city centre!

    Yet, there is nothing like infrastructure for infrastructure’s sake.  Though still work-in-progress, history would laud these efforts as critical drivers to prise Osun off its economic puddle, as “civil service state”.

    A civil service state is a euphemism for economic stagnancy.  That had been the fate of Osun, since creation in 1991, till these past eight years.

    Despite this delicate upswing, if you peruse the Osun Media & Allies Forum, a WhatsApp Osun community news forum, you could sense some renaissance flaring, on the Osun plain of sports.

    Sundry posts, on that forum, include a community cricket test at Ilesa, the Ogunjobi Gold Cup, a yearly youth football championship for U-20 and below, some Osun youths winning continental titles in weightlifting and canoeing, and some inter-collegiate basketball championships, using as hubs, the courts in the new government high schools.

    Again, these are just no accidents.  They are natural responses to certain policy stimuli, which is the way to go — just as the raft of hotels and event centres, that now dot the Osogbo city centre and other Osun major towns, are the logic of business following better infrastructure.

    As electioneering hots up, a lot of passion would burn around “afsa” (the Osun cynical street lingo for “half salary”).

    The “debt burden” would be amplified and especially vilified, with sloppy thinkers and blabby talkers waxing poetic but empty.

    Opposing partisans would howl, scream and bawl about scandals, real or imagined, in a sweeping condemnation of the present order — hardly undemocratic!

    Still, all things considered, even after addressing the valid queries, is Osun better now than it was eight years ago?

    Osun’s future is best secured by a higher notch of the current policies.  Anything less, the state risks a tragic drop into Oyinlola-era ruins.

  • Between Saraki and Coriolanus

    When political actors roar and thunder; and everyone cowers and blunders, recourse to literature — the wisdom down the ages — is rare asset.

    Somewhat, that puts some calm on the bedlam.

    That about captures the great hoopla of July 24: the hyper-excitement before; the chest-thumping after; and the dejection, laced with bluff and bluster (ironically, in both giving and receiving camps), as the whole thing morphs into a flux — and a farce — with no predictable end.

    It was the high-octane drama of APC-to-PDP defection, with Senate President Bukola Saraki, as consummate strummer-in-chief.

    Even as the press hailed or wailed, Saraki and perfidy remained yoked.

    Perfidy heralded Saraki’s emergence as Senate president.  For personal gain, he sold off his ruling party to the opposition PDP.

    On July 24, with even more solemn perfidy, Saraki reeled out defections in plenary, which he probably hoped would smash his party’s ruling Senate majority, after which, his traducers allege, he planned to jump.

    But as the republic, with bated breath, awaits the virtuoso stunts of the latest Prince of political “jump-ology”, it’s back to literature as teacher, in times of great upheaval.

    The bedlam of July 24 should stir, in poetic minds, the storm-in-paradise by Lucifer and his imperious angels, as poetically reported by John Milton, in his epic, Paradise Lost.

    “Better reign in hell than serve in heaven,” was the whoop, as Lucifer and rebellious hosts flapped their wings in fury; bristled, hovered and zoomed with rage.

    But when the hysteria cleared, Lucifer, the incandescent beautiful son of the morning, had sunk to Satan, the eternal Prince of darkness!

    It’s morning yet on the road to political paradise or hell.  But in due course, even that would be manifest, with the result and aftermath of Election 2019.

    “E don beg me,” was a cheeky quip from Himself the Abami Eda, Fela.  He claimed Justice Okoro Idogu, who gaoled Fela for questionable currency offences, had apologized, in the course of the embattled jurist’s hospital round, where Prisoner Fela was admitted.

    The media, always baying for the underdogs, went ballistic!

    Not a few also went rabidly excitable, when news came that President Muhammadu Buhari, and the hard-punching, tough-talking Adams Oshiomhole, new APC party boss, were “begging” Saraki to stay.

    But that alleged begging only echoed William Shakespeare’s tragedy of Coriolanus.  Panicky Rome begged estranged Corionalus, leading foreign enemies, not to sack his city.

    Either way though, Coriolanus was doomed.  He rippled with power, leading the invading Volscians.  Nevertheless, the plea met him at his weakest point.

    Now, the Coriolanus tragedy is vintage linkage, both to Saraki and the Nigerian media, in this unfolding and ever-gripping drama.

    Caius Marcius Coriolanus was a brave general of old Rome.  For his valour, he earned intense patrician love.  But for his alleged vanity and pride, from the plebs came no less passionate loathing.

    Much of the plebeian hate came from deliberate mind-poisoning from the Tribunes — state-installed ombudsmen, to gauge the masses’ grievances, soon after the overthrow of the harsh Tarquin kings.

    By private bile, however, the Tribunes profaned a sacred public duty; and pumped the excitable plebs full of anti-Coriolanus hate.

    Pray, how are these Tribunes of old Rome different from a section of Nigeria’s current media, unleashing visceral hate and base emotions, along faith and ethnic lines, by manipulating the people’s angst, in a most difficult period of Nigerian history?

    But back to Rome.  Coriolanus, pushed by doting mom, Volumnia, declared for Consul.  During electioneering, the Tribunes poisoned the plebs to reject him.  A short-fused Coriolanus blew his tops; and earned banishment from Rome.

    Rome’s loss was the Volscians’ gain — and the Volscians, Rome’s nemesis, put at bay only by the war volcano named Coriolanus, promptly pressed their new advantage.

    But then, vanished were the toxic Tribunes, that baited the catastrophe.  Vamoosed too, were the excitable plebs, in mortal fear of slaughter, capture and conquest!

    Rome was only ransomed by the plaintive plea of Coriolanus’s mother, using as bait his infant son and distraught wife.  But saving Rome equated Coriolanus’s doom in the Volscians’ camp!

    Again, might the current media-goading and hate-gaming be inviting an inevitable crunch, where the media gamers would bale, leaving in the lurch these neo-plebs, now baying and all excitable?

    Still on begging, trust and allied matters, you can’t but tap into another tragic play, Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta.

    Barabas the Jew, its tragic hero, was a zestful and unconscionable serial betrayer, driven by nothing but endless chicanery, just to preserve his hoarded trove.

    Eventually, Barabas would burn, cursing and bitter, in a secret cauldron he had fashioned for his enemies, even as his would-be victims jeered at his painful end.

    Might the Barabas tale weigh on Saraki’s mind, as he floats mid-air, torn between the taunt of his former(?) APC colleagues and the hail from his new(?) PDP landing pad?

    Despite deafening, if contrasting partisan bellows, it is not the best of times for Omo Baba Oloye.  He seems to have burnt his candle of trust from both ends!

    Pray, how do you build an enduring political career, on eternal intrigue and everlasting distrust, from both friend and foe? Talk of chilling lonesomeness in pulsating company!

    But beyond the giddy theatrics of defection and counter-defection, something good may well be happening, both to the ruling party and to Nigeria’s troubled politics.

    A quarter to the election high hour, a rather perplexing realignment is playing out. The ruling party’s most virulent and most lethal moles are exiting. nPDP, now renamed rAPC, heads back home to PDP.

    You can’t but pity President Muhammadu Buhari for the havoc this vicious band had unleashed on his development agenda, under the parliamentary prefects of Saraki and Yakubu Dogara.

    It’s a dire lesson the ruling party has learned the hard way.  It rode to power in a mishmash alliance.  But in power, it found itself stuck by that same mishmash.  If it regains power in 2019, it must burn off this treacherous flab.

    Still, might some spiritual dynamics be draining off its life-threatening fat, to where they came from?  Even then, it must rigorously screen National Assembly candidates jostling for its ticket.

    Also, by some strange chemistry, most of Nigeria’s troublers of Israel appear herding selves into a neat pen.  Even former President Olusegun Obasanjo, still mouthing holy but empty platitudes, drifts towards his not-so-immaculate habitat.

    If things peak along these lines, then the choice between Nigeria’s good and evil couldn’t have been starker.

    Noxious forces, ever plaguing this country, could be clinically guillotined.  All it takes is wise voter choice — and Nigeria could then have its life back.

  • Ekiti: Out of self-peonage

    On July 14, Ekiti snapped out of self-peonage.  From their odyssey, you could see the grim trap — and shame — of electoral folly; and the putative release — and joy — of electoral wisdom.

    Ekiti Kete are living proof of the severe beauty of democracy.  Choice is never wrong.  But you enjoy your wisdom, or endure your folly.

    But before you clobber the Ekiti masses, held captive by Ayo Fayose’s subversive “ponmo” aka  ”stomach infrastructure”, the big rod is for the Ekiti elite progressives, whose umpteenth fissuring birthed Fayose’s Stone Age demagoguery.

    From the results, Dayo Adeyeye’s Ise-Orun glorious vote haul cancelled out homeboy, Kolapo Olusola’s handsome lead in Ikere-Ekiti.

    Had Adeyeye not fallen out with Fayose, pleading grand betrayal, Olusola, other things being equal, could have coasted home to victory; and Fayose’s hegemony of shame continued.

    Yet, Adeyeye himself had no business with the political conservatives.  He stormed off, in a huff, over Kayode Fayemi, as Action Congress (AC) gubernatorial candidate, in 2007.

    Adeyeye’s, therefore, is a grim metaphor, for how South West progressives self-dissipate to swell the conservative ranks, to retard the region.

    From the Action Group (AG) blowout in the 1st Republic (1960-1966) and the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) crisis of the 2nd Republic (1979-1983), to the Olusegun Obasanjo reactionary South West “capture” of 2003, it’s a Sisyphean curse of self-dissipation, with catastrophic consequences.

    Remember Sisyphus in Greek mythology?  He was the one eternally condemned to rolling a stone up the hill.  But no sooner had the stone reached the top than it would roll back, for Sisyphus to restart his harsh chore!

    That has been the South West progressives’ gather-and-scatter tale.   They would work hard; quarrel even harder; self-dissipate and hand over power to the conservatives, to duly shatter, what they had built.

    That happened in post-Bisi Akande Osun.  It was utter paralysis during the Olagunsoye Oyinlola years (2003-2010), before the current Rauf Aregbesola restoration, bordering on renaissance (2010-2018).

    In Oyo, those years were just chaos.  Obasanjo’s political garrison commander, Lamidi Adedibu — not Governor Rashidi Ladoja — held sway.  Aside from partisan terror, Adedibu’s thugs levied war on the populace, with the Police looking elsewhere.

    Even in Ogun, where Otunba Gbenga Daniel flirted with conservative progressivism, the latter years of the self-christened Ogidi Omo collapsed under hideous crimes and sundry insecurity.

    Though current governor, Ibikunle Amosun, is at best a progressive centrist, contrasted to an Aregbesola, a progressive radical, there is a huge difference between Amosun and OGD, in quantum and quality of infrastructure delivery.

    This just confirms the potency of progressive peer-influence in the West, with the more interior states, taking positive cues from coastal Lagos, blessed with the gubernatorial continuum of Bola Tinubu, Babatunde Fashola and Akinwunmi Ambode, blazing a golden developmental trail.

    That positive peer influence would appear to have galvanized Oyo, under Abiola Ajimobi, another progressive centrist, to urgent renewal; with its huge and stellar infrastructure delivery and enhanced security, after the antediluvian tenure of Adebayo Alao-Akala, under “Alaafin Molete” Adedibu’s amala-and-abula politics.

    Which, in a way, makes this Fayemi Ekiti triumph, over the Fayose plague, all the more exciting, with the prospect of Ekiti rejoining the developmental train.

    Still, like the Greek Sisyphus, Fayemi is condemned to clearing Fayose’s debris (the months of salary backlogs, for starters), instead of picking up from where he left off four years ago.

    But let no one, four years hence in 2022, come bickering again over unconsummated pre-election deals, driving bitter partisans to fresh re-alignments, across ideological lines, that most times short-change the people.

    Fayemi, both in the vortex of such past allegations and clear victim of their blowouts (witness Fayose’s stupendous triumph in 2014), has the singular duty and honour to ensure such don’t repeat themselves.

    And Adeyeye too, after 11 years, must have realized you don’t look pretty by cutting your nose to spite your face, as he makes a triumphal return to his progressive habitat.

    Still, the South West progressives must learn to fix their intra-party politicking, and make jockeying for nomination just, fair and equitable.  Otherwise, a travesty like Fayose would always be a heartbeat away.

    Fayose! That has got to be the most damning blight on Yoruba civilization in recent history — empty, brash, boastful, uncouth, rude and crude: an unfazed believer, if ever there was one, in the ultimate triumph of evil over good!

    In 2014, he heralded his come-back, with fierce thugs in tow, by sacking a sitting court in Ado Ekiti.

    Four years later, he is exiting power by seizing state radio to announce fake election results! What outlawry!  What (un)gubernatorial banditry!

    But then, since the apple never really falls far away from its mother tree, Fayose’s power nativity could only but bear a monstrous offspring.

    Fayose first came, in 2003, with Obasanjo’s desperation to “capture” the West, after Obasanjo’s ringing rejection of 1999.

    Even after that collapsed in shame, the intrigue that yoked political father and son tearing them apart, he clawed back in 2014, under another desperado, Jonathan, essaying yet another West “capture”; after returning evil for the Yoruba support, in his 2011 presidential win.

    Jonathan was another Obasanjo creation.  Like Fayose, he fell out with his godfather.  Incidentally, Fayose has been a blight on Ekiti, just as Jonathan was a blight on Nigeria.

    Besides, Fayose marks the last of Obasanjo’s failed era — Olagunsoye Oyinlola (Osun), Rashidi Ladoja and Adebayo Alao-Akala (Oyo), Gbenga Daniel (Ogun) and the late Olusegun Agagu (Ondo).  Fayose (Ekiti) is clearly the worst of the lot: neither intellect nor comportment; just plain demagoguery!

    If the other Yoruba states have cause to rationalize these others, for some admirable traits — Agagu was a brilliant mind; and Oyinlola, like Alao-Akala, is an avuncular and personable soul — the Ekiti have no business tolerating Fayose’s starkness twice!  Happily, all that is in the past now!

    Notwithstanding Obasanjo, responsible for all this debacle, is apoplectic; and on another deceptive power-racketeering, en route to 2019!  He must think most Nigerians ardent fools!

    Still, Fayemi as governor, should imbibe better people skills and emotional intelligence, the two crucial fields Fayose has milked, in his soulless people deceit.

    Brilliance and erudition need not be a dissonance in governance.  They are key to driving developmental policy, as Fayemi excellently proved during his first coming.

    But people skills yoke the people to you, even during the hardest and most trying of times.

    Brilliance as hubris was Fayemi’s spectacular failure the last time round. This second coming provides excellent opportunity to correct those grave flaws.

  • nPDP, rAPC and allied nomads

    By nPDP and rAPC, nomadic opportunism seems more and more structured; in Nigeria’s troubled political party space.

    No doubt, a present blight.  But that blight may yet birth the right realignments, to give Nigeria’s shambolic political party system a healthy jab it sorely needs.

    The present woes, where folks just band together for power, sans any shared values, is traceable to Gen. Ibrahim Babangida’s 1991 new breed experiment.

    That cut off the parties’ umbilical chord from their 1st Republic (1960-1966) and 2nd Republic (1979-1983) paterfamilias, peaking in the present ideological flux; which most times means no ideology at all.

    That has bred political stragglers-of-fortunes.  They are nothing but great misfortune to all.  In everyday street lingo, they are “food-is-ready” politicians.

    In 2015, nPDP (New Peoples Democratic Party) was the base.  It was the escapist band that fled the crashed PDP which, but for its power delusion, was but a shell, since former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s exit from power in 2007.

    Tragic fall guy, former President Goodluck Jonathan, only added his own peculiar stumble-and-fumble to the meltdown.

    nPDP traced new fortune to the new ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).  But see the misfortune it has wrought that party, these last three years, under the retrogressive agenda, of the pair of Senate President, Bukola Saraki and House Speaker, Yakubu Dogara?

    It was hardly any wonder, therefore, that the nPDP faction that announced its exit to PDP was whining over pork, for which it had violently growled and passionately salivated, like a starved dog.

    Don’t get it wrong, though.  In politics, there is legitimate pork.  But again, as the Yoruba love to quip, the priest must eat from the proceeds of his shrine.  But trouble comes when priestly greed gets so gargantuan and so humongous, that the shrine itself becomes fair game for gobbling!

    That appears the nPDP mentality — and that greed appears driving that nPDP faction to its old PDP vomit.

    But nPDP was 2015.  The 2018 strain of that virus is rAPC — Reformed APC: what the nPDP faction just rechristened itself.

    The polity has seen how nPDP nailed the final coffin of PDP.  But it’s early days yet, how rAPC may savage APC — for the Nigerian political mart thrives with the arch- charlatan baiting the arch-gullible; and both merrily rushing into a doomed marriage, from which they would, ever after, lament and gnash their teeth!

    If you doubt, ponder the Ekiti Fayose debacle, from which Ekiti Kete just wriggled out on July 14, with a Fayemi gubernatorial encore.  Merrily in 2014, Ekiti threw out, with a vengeance, sustainable development, for Fayose’s “stomach infrastructure” — no thanks to Fayemi’s huge image problems.

    But because they were driven by emotions, when reason ought to do the job, they sold themselves a Fayose pig in a poke.  Fayose’s demagoguery drove Ekiti into the Stone Age, in which inexplicable owing of months of workers’ salaries is even the least dent.  About everything sacred by Ekiti, Fayose had profaned!

    That same scenario might be brewing on the national front, with President Muhammadu Buhari’s arch-demonization, while grappling to correct cumulative past bad choices, with the attendant excruciating national pains.

    Which brings the matter back to rAPC, for it’s in such throes that charlatans thrive and demagogues teem.

    What makes rAPC now different from nPDP of 2015, you might riposte?  Didn’t both cash in on a seeming helpless situation, with citizens scared things were breaking down?

    Ay!  But only on the surface — which gauges flared emotive responses by pain-avoiding humans — does the similarity end.

    If you move beyond emotions, which seems to freeze hard thinking, 2015 was a free-fall.  But now, 2018, is the hardship of picking up the pieces; and putting up the crucial infrastructure, to birth a new era, and force development.

    Both stages are painful — extremely so.  But while 2015 would appear a pain of death; now would appear a pain of new life, after living for too long in the thick shadows of death!

    Still, what did nPDP contribute to the recovery process, in the National Assembly, where it somewhat seized power?  Nothing but soulless sabotage, of the infrastructure re-stock.

    That is clearly crossing the red line from legitimate intra-party factional struggle, to an utterly repugnant dashing of citizens’ hope and right, after the paralysis of the Obasanjo-inspired PDP era.

    First, Saraki sold out his party, including its right to deputy senate president (DSP) to PDP, for a personal gain to nick the Senate presidency, in a controversial exercise that reeked more of perfidy than a legitimate election.

    Thereafter, it conspired with the PDP — which clearly wants the new ruling party to fail, so it could regain power, the only thing it knows and ever wants to know — to parody John Keats, the English romantic poet in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: ‘beauty … is all you know, and all you need to know’.

    That red line, from partisan scuffle to citizen sabotage, came from the soulless subversion of infrastructural provisions in the budget, these last three years.

    By that wicked and callous act, key national road arteries that ought to have been delivered by now, to the relief of citizens, are still struggling to be completed.  A good example is the Lagos-Ibadan expressway.

    Its smooth, newly delivered parts show the worldview of the PMB executive, by making budgetary provisions for the swift completion of that crucial road.

    But from the bad part glares — citizens and voters be damned! — the counter-Stone Age vision, of the Saraki-Dogara-led National Assembly (NASS), by its wilful decision to sabotage the project, by dissipating budgetary votes, for three years running.

    To make matters worse, such soulless dissipation has earned the saboteurs dirty pork, in the so-called constituency projects, to feed the unending pit of these legislators’ greed.

    It’s an unconscionable vote for personal greed over collective need, which gives an otherwise legitimate concept, of constituency projects, a very bad name.

    Such mindset is too ruinous; and ought to be routed from any decent parliament.  But these ones glory in the destruction of their own environment; and strut over the death of their constituents’ dreams, simply because they feel their electors are manipulable.

    So, whether nPDP, rAPC or even the Saraki-Dogara NASS, electorate manipulation is their market.  Playing on emotions, in painful times, is their currency.  Yet, those who think deep can easily figure them out.

    Which is why neither nPDP nor rAPC is good for any polity. They are political merchants, on the lookout for the highest personal profit, at the expense of citizen wellness.

    Even if rAPC succeeds in crippling APC, it would only mutate into a future virus, plaguing a future government, as nPDP has plagued APC.

    The people are the ultimate victims; for they are doomed to moving round and round, eternally gnashing their teeth, in an eternal circle of pain.

  • Lagos state of nature

    So, the Lagos government stumbled in its waste clearing duties. But should that justify an increasing number of Lagos residents reverting to their state of nature?

    Or which 21st century people, except in a state of nature, would blight highway medians with packs of refuse; making fresh piles, as soon as the refuse trucks finish their clearing rounds?

    State of nature!  On that, literature, the wisdom over the ages, has been rather ambivalent.  Yet, the natural state’s sinister side appears more resonant.

    Philosophers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (French) and John Locke (English), romanticized man’s pristine “goodness”; and rued the rupture latter-day organized society had inflicted on that utopia.

    To Locke, the “law of nature is reason”.  Common sense would naturally drive pain-hating humans to maximize their pleasure, and reduce their pain — true.

    But the snag is, common sense is not common!

    Still, other philosophers have balked.  Mozi, of ancient China, talked of each (wo)man strutting with own “morality”.  With every person bristling, with own moral supremacy, the collective is doomed.

    The English, Thomas Hobbes, was thunderous in his put-down: the state of nature is constant “war of all against all”.  Therefore, life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.  Only the Leviathan, the mighty symbol of modern governance, can impose some order on that natural chaos.

    In English literature, the Scot, R.M. Ballantyne, in Coral Island, gushed about man’s innate goodness, as a party of three juveniles, marooned by a shipwreck on an island, manifested their best human traits.

    But this golden tale was later shattered by a mean one, by the English, William Golding, who in Lord of the Flies, saw absolutely no gold in man’s innate instincts.  The British school boys, similarly marooned after a crash-landing, descended into savages.

    That was 1958 — 100 years, and two World Wars, after Ballantyne’s 1858 fictional paradise.

    Even in psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud spoke of the id, the ego and the super-ego — the id, a function of raw cravings, the psychological equivalent of the state of nature.

    But both the ego and super-ego are a function of personal and societal checks, anchored on heavy fear of sanctions; and dire consequences for wrong doings.

    Which brings the issue right back to the Lagos scandalous refuse question.

    Twenty-first century Lagos appears to have slipped back into the stone-age on refuse culture, leaving Nigeria’s “Centre of Excellence” an environmental blight and a waiting ecological disaster.

    It’s time for the Ambode government to wield the big stick, and roll back this shameful atavism.

    Until the Lagos government-Visionscape-PSP refuse players crisis, refuse-as-eyesore was almost a thing of the past.

    But then came the crisis.  Part-paralysis, a logical result from the sudden rupture of hitherto functional, if not efficient, services.

    Part-active sabotage — alleged refuse dumping, by some cadres of the warring PSP operators, alleging economic strangulation by Visionscape, the new refuse turf royal.

    So, refuse came back with a vengeance — and choice dumps are city-wide road medians.  As a result, Lagos groans under hundreds of illegal dumpsites — road medians, roundabouts, junctions.

    Even aside from concentrated illegal dumps, a nasty practice is afoot, where people package their refuse, and in the thick of the night, place them by high median concrete barriers, on major roads.

    So, the PSP “wartime” tactics — alleged or real — of offloading refuse, bang on the road, is bringing out the beast in Lagos denizens.

    Everybody is paying a stiff price: the government in citizen anger and battery; waste managers in increased operational costs; and Lagosians in a debased environment, only a heartbeat from epidemics.

    That is the new epidemic in town.  It, willy-nilly, has condemned waste managers to gingerly moving their compactors, picking up bags of refuse, every inch of the way!

    That’s not all.  Street sweepers hitherto limited to sweeping and packing accumulated dust, are rendered useless; at the sight of smelly garbage.

    And, the ubiquitous illegal dumps!  Even here, at a junction off Fatai Atere Way, across the road from Sterling Bank, in the heart of Matori Industrial Estate, a dump luxuriates, with the occasional pig strolling in, to wallow and feast on the dirt!

    In the atavistic language of Victorian Lagos, Prof. Michael Echeruo’s work on the quaint world of aborigines and settlers of 19th century Lagos, that set the city’s cultural temper till this day, Lagos is again going “Fanti” — but on the refuse plane.

    Yet, the government would appear at last getting a hang on the refuse crisis.  With Visionscape-PSP operators operational cohabitation, regular clearing has resumed.

    Though not quite back to the pre-crisis days, the streets could indeed appear clean, particularly immediately after the gangs just finished their clearing rounds.  A few days after, however, the roads are clogged again!

    That suggests the turnaround time of the clearing gang lags behind the frenetic generation of the refuse.  The government should urgently work on that.

    The faster the turnaround, the more efficient, more effective and more impactful the exercise would be; and the cleaner Lagos would become.

    But even with slower turnaround, the roads are no places to dump refuse.

    Even in those pre-2001 days, when Lagos had its notorious mountains of refuse and the city’s essence was filth, nobody dumped packaged garbage on the roads.  There were instead refuse outlets — “Ile Ile”, the locals called it in Yoruba — in strategic locations in each locality, where folks took their refuse.

    Aside from these congested outlets and untreated dumpsites that rose to become refuse mountains, the only problems was free-wheeling littering, compounded by the absence of street-sweepers — which the Lagos government, as part of its waste management reforms, introduced.

    But this new practice of dumping packed garbage on the road, without a care about environmental wellness, is a new low in urban retardation.

    That is why the government should not spare anything to stamp it out, before it morphs from the moral epidemic it is now, into a public health epidemic, which the state can ill afford.

    The first thing to do is to mount a media enlightenment blitz against the evil, warning of dire sanctions soon to follow it, if not discontinued.

    Then, the government should put in place a neighbourhood refuse watch, with specific mandates to ferret out these environmental saboteurs and bring them to justice.

    As each dumper is dragged into the net of the law, the punishment should be given maximum publicity.

    Then, neighbourhoods should be sensitized to form intelligence units, monitoring and exposing illegal dumping.  In return, however, waste managers must scale up their operations, and make waste clearing prompter and more efficient.

    Lagos can’t afford the present “state of nature” of dumping refuse just anywhere.  The government must play the Leviathan to stamp out the practice.

  • Afenifere and the Titans

    Afenifere, the Yoruba political Titans, and newfound friend, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, should go read John Keats’s “Hyperion”, the epic poem.

    Both appear to share a common blight: morbid fear of change; which Heraclitus, the Greek physical philosopher, nevertheless reasoned, is the most permanent thing in life.

    Hyperion is a throwback to Greek mythology. The Titans, first set of Greek gods, were falling into disgrace.  The Olympians, that overthrew them, were rising, in a celestial coup, according to Greek fable.

    But then Hyperion, their sun god, still retained his fiery powers.  If he dug in and won, the Titans could regain their glory.  If he gave in, all was lost.

    But the dazzle and sparkle, the beauty and glory, of Apollo the Olympian god of music, light, truth, poetry and latterly, the sun, decided it all.  Hyperion decided to give in with grace, rather than risk eternal disgrace.

    By that singular grace, the Titans live eternal in the Greek and Western mind, even as the Olympians took over.  That death-turned-life was captured in Keats’s “Fall of Hyperion”.

    Hyperion, therefore, is the myth as classic metaphor for change.  Change will come when it must.  But how does that change leave you?

    That question appears to plague both Afenifere and Obasanjo.  Its lack of resolve also tends to goad both to endless gambits — gambits that lead to their umpteenth baiting of fate, which may ultimately prove fatal.

    What is more?  From their present posturing, neither seems to have the grace of Hyperion nor the wisdom of Solomon.  Yet, both traits are key to navigating change and staying sane.

    Fact is, since President Obasanjo quit power in 2007, he has not reconciled himself to the inevitability of a falling, if not yet fallen, Titan.

    Yes, post-2007, he emerged as some giant Gulliver, towering over the Lilliput dwarf into which Nigeria had shrunk, no thanks to his presidency’s neo-Liberal policies, which had spawn mass poverty, powered by elite greed.

    But that didn’t quite blunt his phobia for change, that dread of vanished public fawning that only power secures, as could be adduced from his alleged “third term” gambit.

    That fear drove Obasanjo’s virtual roasting, on his death bed, of ill-fated President Umaru Yar’Adua; and his no less merry burial, of the effete President Goodluck Jonathan, for being the ultimate fall guy, for Obasanjo-era bad politics and policies.

    Sensing early signs of a radically changed era, that phobia still drives Obasanjo’s latest neither-APC-nor-PDP hyper huff-and-puff, in which Nigeria’s Hobson has conjured up ’his’ African Democratic Congress (ADC); in which Nigeria’s Narcissus just announced a melting heart for Afenifere!

    But neither too, has Afenifere reconciled itself to its loss of influence, since the five South West Alliance for Democracy (AD) governors lost power in 2003, ironically through the perfidy of this same Obasanjo.

    Since that 2003 loss, the fear of creeping irrelevance has also hustled and bustled Afenifere into many gambits, the climax of which was its 2015 election-eve whoring with Jonathan, on the restructuring question.

    But that itself would birth an election-time manna turned poison, from which the once strutting puritans, of the Nigerian public space, still reel.

    Which is why it’s rather sweet to see both serenade each other in new-found romance, nevertheless fated to end in a debacle.  Why?  Because it is fired by mutual plotting against a common hate — Muhammadu Buhari — than mutually reinforced clinical thinking for public good.

    Even then, the sensational appearance of an Awolowo — Dr (Mrs) Tokunbo Awolowo-Dosunmu — at the tryst was enough grave rebuke of Obasanjo’s callow, if not callous, youth.  The immortal Awo must be beaming from his grave!

    Obasanjo, in Not My Will, his post-military head of state memoirs, had gloated that the power Awo craved all his illustrious life, he, a rural Ibogun boy, was gifted on a platter of gold!

    Has the cunning of old age, just schooled the callow youth of yore, that the Awo Rock he once scorned and mocked, is sudden cornerstone of his present plot?  Yet, Awo’s memory won’t be mocked, by progressive reaction!

    An Azikiwe might not have been part of this sizzling romance.  Still, Zik would beam no less.  Didn’t the same Obasanjo, in his same Not My Will, heckle Zik as starting life as Zik of Africa but ending it a diminished Owelle of Onitsha?

    But how is Obasanjo ending his — a once-upon-a-time global citizen, now locked in a Yoruba ethnic laager, poised to feud to the death with a Fulani president, for no more than shared hate, bred by vacuous ego?

    Afenifere!  Why does that once puritanical enclave now somewhat echo that Yoruba quip, of a sheep doomed to eating faeces, for schmoozing with dogs?

    Shortly after the 2015 elections, an alleged N100 million “obtainment” scandal hit one of Afenifere’s leading lights.  Till now, even after much hee-haw, that scandal still hangs.

    At the dawn of Obasanjo’s “third force” racket, the same Afenifere noble went serenading both Gen. Ibrahim Babangida and Obasanjo, for opportunistic coronation.

    Though nothing came of the IBB flirt, the Obasanjo tryst ended in fiasco, when the Ebora Owu ordered the surrender of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) registration papers!  Partisan opportunism never met a more pitiable crash!

    Yes, a sole member can’t equate Afenifere’s collective conduct. Yet, not huffing over over these matters suggests a creeping, worrying moral flexibility, if not outright debasement.

    That seems a far cry from the barging moral puritans of 1998, that in a huff stormed out of the old APP, snorting “Abacha People’s Party!”  That moral elasticity would also tend to explain the Obasanjo tryst.

    Still, since its 2015 electoral debacle, Afenifere has hugged the public space, grimly staying relevant with its “restructuring” campaign. That, to be sure, is its crusade from the very genesis; and it deserves plaudits for its tenacity on that score.

    Still, with increased desperation, Afenifere gives the impression even that is a coin with golden and crooked sides.

    The golden side flashes restructuring, which births the re-federalization Nigeria sorely needs; and which every patriot ought to embrace.

    But the crooked side glares with ethnic arrogance, tribal slurs, sectional disdain and bristling antagonism, when even-handed dialogue would do just fine.  That should explain Afenifere’s latter-day associations and alliances.

    Perhaps Afenifere’s own outraged “Olympians”, the Afenifere Renewal Group (ARG), would step up, and put the old Titans out of their misery.  Perhaps it would not.

    But Afenifere should at least have the honesty to admit it can’t stamp “Yoruba” on every of its whims and caprices; except of course it can produce a plebiscite that earned it such powers.

    As for the Obasanjo dalliance, grant Afenifere its democratic right to its friends. But if 2003 is any guide, it could well be the final treachery and mutual end, of two Titans, lacking the grace of Hyperion to navigate change.

    That would be a pity.  Still, as you lay your bed, you lie on it.

  • Anti-people parliament

    Neither Senate President Bukola Saraki nor House of Representatives Speaker Yakubu Dogara was at Basorun MKO Abiola’s Grand Commander of the Federal Republic (GCFR) investiture. Strange, wasn’t that?

    Yes, June 12 was canonization for MKO, Nigeria’s democracy martyr. He lost his life, lost his wife, lost his means of livelihood, huge and sprawling, for winning a democratic election.

    No people do such a crime, sans penance, and live happily ever after.

    But June 12 was also the beatification of the very basics of democracy: the sanctity of the people’s will. Every vote must count, despite the grand delusion of Gen. Ibrahim Babaginda and his tragic military clique.

    That the two heads of Nigeria’s central legislature appeared unimpressed by the severe beauty of this golden symbolism — hence their absence — beggars belief. Yet, their forte, the celebrated custodian of the people’s weal, ought to be more excited by it all than most.

    But with June 12 still “trending” (as they say on social media), came another blast of rot from the past.

    In 2009, Speaker Dimeji Bankole’s House of Representatives tried to bully Lagos lawyer, Festus Keyamo, now SAN, for demanding answers to a 2008 Newswatch story, alleging a scam in bulk car purchase for House members.

    The House goaded the Inspector General of Police (IGP) to criminalize Keyamo’s legitimate inquiry, prompting the lawyer to launch a legal challenge.

    Ten years after, the courts just found for the lawyer, voiding the House’s impunity at investigating criminal allegations, setting free its own; indicting others.

    That verdict proves the National Assembly’s (NASS) penchant for rank impunity and bully tactics isn’t new.

    Even then, this 8th NASS, under Saraki and Dogara, has raised these ugly traits to some sickly fundament of parliamentary policy, most times over-reaching itself; and thus echoing the Achebe brat that challenged his “chi” to a wrestling bout.

    That appears the tale, of a butchered budget as always, from the presidential camp, after the June 20 signing of the 2018 Budget.

    But that would appear only the climax. The preliminary malady started much earlier, when the 8th Senate reached for the hubris of bullying critical organs under the Presidency, just as the Bankole House tried to bully Keyamo, to cover up alleged infractions of the law by some of its members.

    Saraki was in the vortex of an alleged car-import scandal, blown open by the Nigerian Customs Service (NCS). That triggered a Senate imperious summons, “in uniform”, of Col. Hammeed Ali (rtd), who promptly called its bluff on the uniform question.

    That birthed a sterile controversy, that arrayed partisans in two opposing camps, not fired by common sense, but uncommon inanity.

    Then, the Dino Melaye show of shame, of alleged escape from police custody. Again, the Saraki Senate thought the best way to deal with it was to summon the IGP to come explain why the Police nabbed a senator, who enjoyed no immunity, for alleged crime.

    When it found out its bully tactics was a tad too specific, it re-tuned its pitch: “invitation to security agencies”. The IGP responded by sending a representative, which he argued was allowed by law.

    What followed was another chain of inanities. Avoiding to be bullied, a reckless Senate growled, equalled subverting democracy! Pronto, Senate the Formidable decreed the IGP “enemy of democracy”, unfit to occupy public office. Senatorial bluff never got so reckless, so cheap, so empty!

    But at the end of this baiting and counter-baiting, Dr. Saraki found himself linked to alleged Ilorin cult killings and the hideous Offa robbery — the alleged perpetrators of both claiming to be Saraki’s “boys”, as well as the Kwara government’s election enforcers, with sweetheart relationship with the Kwara State House!

    And all these in a futile bid to bully IGP over Melaye?

    But the climax of the NASS malady would dawn, with President Muhammadu Buhari’s new charges, that NASS brutally marked down key infrastructures in the budget but willy-nilly marked up its own estimates: from N125 billion to N139.5 billion.

    The president’s charge was clear: counterpart funding for Lagos-Ibadan expressway, 2nd Niger Bridge, Mambilla Power Plant, East-West road, Boni-Bodo road and Itakpe-Ajaokuta rail project, chopped by an “aggregate of N11.5 billion”.

    In the face of Boko Haram, vote to secure unity schools nationwide was slashed by N3 billion; Enugu Airport terminal building project scythed from N2 billion to N500 million and take-off grant for Maritime University, Delta State, cut from N5 billion to N3.4 billion, the president further alleged.

    By its knife-crazy budget activism, the people’s parliament would appear at war with every segment of the people, East, West, North or South!

    Might NASS be embarking on a deliberate sabotage of its electors, including Labour and retired workers, whose estimates also went under the knife?

    Talk of the Achebe brat wrestling his “chi”!

    But Abdulrazak Namdas, the House Committee on Media and Publicity chair, entered a six-paragraph defence for his chamber, ranging from “late” submission of the proposals to meet the January-December budget cycle, late defence of estimates, and presidential bad faith.

    But the most revealing is Paragragh 4 of his statement, here quoted in full: “Before 2015, the budget of the National Assembly was N150 billion for several years. It was cut down to N120bn in 2015 and further down to N115bn in 2016. In 2017, the budget was N125bn and N139.5bn in 2018. This means that the budget of the National Assembly is still far below the N150bn in the years before 2015.”

    The big question: what was a barrel of crude selling for pre-2015; and what is it selling for now?

    A Freudian slip was never so revealing; never so damning, in its crooked honesty! Nothing, not even a crippling recession, would vitiate this NASS’s greed!

    And from the Senate? An “Awada Kerikeri” — Yoruba for the stupendously comical —analogy from Shehu Sani.

    Holy Shehu’s conscience once beat him up over a N13.5 million monthly allowance. But now, over an unconscionable budget mutilation — the people be damned! — all it could spew is some comical tale, of a tailor that sewed kaftan instead of agbada for his client! Very funny!

    You can’t, in all good conscience, claim everyone in this 8th NASS is bad. But you can legitimately say most in there yielded space, to the vocal moral cretins, to brand the collective in own rotten image.

    Still, NASS has made its bed. En route to the next election, it must lie on it. But the electorate be damned, if they should ever allow such a wayward, reckless, selfish and venal brood, to ever again profane their legislative chambers.

    In any case, Nigerians must realize how little even the best of presidents can do, when swarmed by a reactionary and retrogressive legislature. That’s the nightmare playing out in this 8th NASS.

    That is why the people must pay as much attention to NASS representation as they do the presidency. Which is why most of those in this 8th NASS must be booted out.

    Nigeria needs a citizen-parliament, not a band of anti-people elements, bivouacked in the people’s legislative chambers, fomenting endless mischief.

  • June 12 like no other

    Twenty-five years after Nigeria’s ultimate electoral crime, today is June 12 like no other.

    In 1993, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, with his deluded junta, cancelled the presidential mandate Basorun MKO won on June 12, 1993; thus inflicting on Nigeria the political equivalent of a spiritual curse.

    Today, June 12, 2018, exactly 25 years after that epochal poll, President Muhammadu Buhari is lifting that curse.

    He is correcting the grave injustice of 23 June 1993, when the IBB junta, in a fit of swashbuckling impunity, pushed out an unsigned document to purportedly annul the MKO mandate, freely given by 14 million Nigerians, for or against.

    Today, MKO gets honoured with the Grand Commander of the Federal Republic (GCFR), reserved only for Nigeria’s past Presidents or military heads of state.  His running mate, Ambassador Baba Gana Kingibe, also gets invested with the Grand Commander of the Order of the Niger (GCON), reserved for Nigeria’s Vice Presidents.  That is a tacit acknowledgement of a presidential term crookedly denied.

    From 2019, June 12 becomes Nigeria’s Democracy Day, burying May 29, the civil take-over date in 1999, former President Olusegun Obasanjo had hoisted, to bury June 12, with its troubling MKO ghost.  Talk of the reverse burial of the spiteful undertaker!

    But even more pungent symbolism: the late Chief Gani Fawehinmi, SAM, SAN, iconic arrowhead of the June 12 resistance army, also gets a posthumous GCON.

    That is for the hundreds of Campaign for Democracy (CD) protesters, mown down on Lagos streets, by a rogue military under Sani Abacha as Defence Minister, for mounting civil protests against the brazen annulment.

    Also, for the brave Chima Ubani, grand Marshall of those Lagos June 12 protests, who would die much later in an auto crash in the North.  He must be smiling from his grave.

    June 12, 2018 thus marks the beginning of concrete and laudable steps to bring a final closure to the ultimate crime by IBB, his reckless junta and their no less criminal civilian collaborators.

    Even then, are these steps perfect?  Definitely not.  For one, the president’s proclamation, which he personally signed, still referred to MKO as “presumed winner”.  That, with all due respect to the president, appears a historical fraud.

    Yes, “presumed” could be technically correct, because the final results of the elections were never formally declared.  But that proved nothing for, thanks to the Modified Open Ballot System (MOBS) adopted, the final results were an open secret, given certified collations from election zones nationwide.

    Then, the Kingibe question.  Should he have shared from the current gains, because he virtually threw off his mandate, by joining the Abacha government as Foreign minister?

    Legitimate query.  Still, it’s better to do right in an imperfect situation, than stall because you await the perfect moment that never comes.  So, let Kingibe be.

    Besides, despite the MKO rehabilitation — which cannot be under-stressed in any way: you don’t kill both a man and his wife for winning a free election and hope to live happily ever after? — the philosophy behind rehabilitating June 12 is even more electorally immaculate:  the people’s choice is inviolate; and you cannot wipe it away without dreadful consequences.

    That is the eternal disgrace IBB and his deluded junta, with their civilian collaborators, must grapple with till they enter their graves — and God, in His infinite mercies, has preserved most of MKO’s principal June 12 traducers to taste this disgrace.

    IBB: Each time MKO “resurrects” on June 12, IBB gets buried, for being the arrowhead of an evil junta, that played God with their compatriots’ electoral will and goaded their country to needless catastrophe.

    History would even be harsher to him, for his epigram may well read: Here lies a wayward general, who nearly baited his country with ruin, by organizing its sanest election, yet cancelled the results!

    Obasanjo: A master-writer of self-fawning history, this June 12 bubble has exposed him in his full nakedness — and the sight is not pretty!

    The author and finisher of a presidential library, of vacuous philosophical and moral value, you could feel his full emptiness, as he falls flat in basic human virtues: charity, gratitude, fairness, justice and conscience.

    Sani Abacha: Manifestation of the quintessential Yoruba proverb, of the opportunist that would rather perish, than let go of his freebie.

    He expired still clutching his toy.  But he lost his honour.  Still, Abacha’s faith would appear far better than those now consigned to the living dead.

    The living dead aside, it is even more alarming the decay, sustaining the June 12 injustice, has inflicted on Nigeria’s moral infrastructure.

    In 1993, the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) was most vociferous on condemning the annulment crime, while its Moslem counterpart, the Nigerian Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs (NSCIA) hee-hawed, save the public bucking of that cant by its late secretary-general, Dr. Lateef Adegbite.

    Twenty-five years later, at the correction of that epochal injustice, CAN’s loud silence is well and truly stunning.  Even if you dismiss the Pentecostals as mainly lost in their holy mammon, what of the Catholics — no Father Mathew Kukah, to cook fresh polemics that leaves you winded and lost?  No people’s priest, from the Lagos front, to rally the troops in a whoop of moral victory?  Indeed, no thundering release from the CAN Secretariat? And the Anglicans and the Baptists?

    Might less than six years of a “Christian” president, in Goodluck Jonathan (2010-2015), have gifted Nigerian Christendom the moral pathology NSCIA manifested when the June 12 crisis broke out in 1993?

    And Afenifere!  The restoration of June 12 ought to be its sweetest victory, for it waged the battle when the war was bitterest.  But no thanks to its self-imposed dissonance, it is acting as if its own very victory is mere ash in its mouth!

    The reason is its latter-day ultra-nationalism, and the anti-Hausa-Fulani ethnic baiting by many of its guiding lights.  Why, an Afenifere elder last year granted The Punch an interview, claiming the so-called Hausa-Fulani were “Yoruba enemies”!  Well, it so happens the so-called “enemy” has granted MKO the honour a prodigal Yoruba son could not, even in 10 lifetimes!

    Many have pilloried Vanguard’s Ocherome Nnanna for his anti-Yoruba bigotry — and frankly, the man deserves all the flak that has hurtled his way.

    But the true Yoruba must be seriously perturbed at, from their own ranks, the flare of ultra-nationalist venom, anti-Fulani poison and a heady roar of irredentism and ethnic smugness, mostly from these old folks, simply because a Fulani president, not of their preference, holds the reins.

    If the Yoruba command respect in Nigerian political discourse, it is not because they are the brightest or the most talented or even the most articulate.

    It is rather because of their penchant to stick to justice and fairness, even if many of theirs end up holding the short end of the stick.  It is that spirit that landed this great June 12 victory, 25 years after, when all seemed totally lost.

    So, let every Nigerian clamber back on the spirit of June 12.  It is the Justice-to-all credo Nigeria sorely needs to navigate the present bend — one of the most challenging in its chequered history.