The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olakunle Abimbola

  • October 1 

    At 57, this year’s October 1,  National Day 2017, was fated to enter and exit with minimum fuss.

    Nigeria’s Golden Jubilee (though without much gold to show) was seven years past. The Diamond Jubilee (with a promise of true diamond to come?) is still three years away.

    Yet, some maladies came to blow away that anonymity, replacing it with raw fear — a deja vu of horrors once endured?

    It all started with the Nnamdi Kanu Biafra advocacy, which not only set the whole of the South East on virtual fire, but also sentenced other areas to an emotive tinder.

    Then came the baleful riposte, from some Arewa “youths”; who growled that should the Indigenous People Of Biafra (IPOB) be serious with its secessionist threat, then the Igbo, living and earning their living in the North, must quit that region by October 1 — or else!

    That raised the bogey, of a possible 50-yearly bloodbath — 1967, 2017, 2067? — while Nigerians grapple with Nigeria’s unending crisis of nationhood.

    Well, October 1 has come and gone; and the ballyhooed thunder of slaughter has all but stilled!  But could it be another Ides of March and the Julius Caesar tragedy?

    The Ides of March is come, the intrepid Caesar faced down his prophet of doom.  Ay, countered the other, but it’s not gone.  In truth, before the Ides of March eclipsed, Caesar himself was history!

    For starters, Nnamdi Kanu’s IPOB has, in Achebe-speak, run itself lame before the real dance began.  Kanu himself has vanished, a cheap fugitive from the law, though there is some infantile propaganda, as to his living — or dying.

    Still, given that the IPOB campaign was driven by the impassioned orchestration of Igbo “marginalization”, it is interesting that the Anglophone Cameroon issue is flaring at about the same time.

    Remember the 1961 plebiscite, in which the Anglophone south-western flank of Cameroon voted to join the Francophone majority to the east and north, while the northern tract of the same English-administered territory opted to stay, as Nigeria’s Sardauna Province?

    Why these southern Cameroonians decided for a new country was partly the ominous political crisis, in the new Nigeria, less than one year after independence.  But the local and more pressing decider was the charge of “domination” by the then Eastern Region majority — the Igbo.

    Chinua Achebe it was who, among the many Igbo aphorisms in his works, said a man that, for donkey years, ran away from a certain ailment, yet ended up dying the same death, had simply lost his care.  Anglophone Cameroon fled from feared Igbo domination in Nigeria.  Now, it is crying blue murder, under alleged domination by Francophone Cameroon!

    Ironically, the same Igbo would-be dominators of yore are themselves howling “marginalization” in a Nigeria that just turned 57, even after a futile violent attempt at secession (1967-1970).

    Now, what is happening?  Some political karma at play?  Or just the spectre of unrelieved domination, that turns everything a fevered nightmare of exclusive “Igbo marginalization”?  Mere analytic projections, crying for more definitive researches!

    Still, President Muhammadu Buhari’s Independence Day speech sharp rebuke of Igbo elders, who should have cautioned Kanu, was spot on.  If angry youths can work themselves into a lather that knows no history, elders cannot permit themselves that ruinous luxury.

    Well, with the callow Kanu running himself out of town, the Nigerian national question is resolved?  Hell, no!

    Indeed, the South East excitement, making October 1 loom as some sure Armageddon to come, exposed the stark fault lines — at least among the pigeon-holing elite, jousting for political gravy, but never shy of using their fellow ethnics as tragically disposable battering rams.

    Take the North.  Faced with the rather irascible IPOB taunts, the Arewa political elite played the Nigerian-unity-isn’t-negotiable card.  Yet, that’s another illusion, if not outright delusion.

    Nigerian unity — or otherwise — would have to come from the people themselves, not from some self-appointed champions, living up to the old cynical quip: patriotism is the last bastion of the scoundrel.

    Still, you could hardly fault President Buhari’s hardline stance.  He wasn’t elected to dismember Nigeria.  He was elected to improve it as an entity.

    Having admitted that, however, there often is a gulf between frozen law and living reality.  De jure, Nigeria is one and ought to be united and strong.  But de facto, it is hardly so.

    The National Day anniversary thus offers another window for serious thinking to turn Nigeria, warts and all, into that dream country it is capable of being, if only everyone would work hard at it.

    That is why the North must drop its instinctive opposition to re-working the federation to a more workable, productive and prosperous one, away from the present centralist desert that delivers stupendous poverty from stupendous wealth.

    In return, proponents of “restructuring”, must cease serving it as some anti-North comeuppance; for that region’s past excesses.  If the country is successfully reworked, it would be win-win for all — and the long-suffering northern masses would perhaps be the greatest beneficiaries.

    That brings the matter to the grand “restructuring” and “true federalism” barons of the South West.  Since 1949 when, with Path to Nigerian Freedom, the immortal Obafemi Awolowo started his federalism push, Nigeria’s West had always been champions of re-federalization for development.

    Yet, when the opportunities at a rare consensus came calling, what some Yoruba elders, former young Turks under Awo, offered was mere dross.

    While some were busy pointing at real or imagined “Yoruba enemies”, others were goading IPOB on, promising a Yoruba support they lacked the capacity to deliver.  Yet others, poor young romantics, spurred by these elders’ open show of ethnic supremacy, foamed in the mouth, proclaiming the Paradise Republic of Oduduwa.  What hubris!

    The main dampener, to the near-consensus over restructuring, is the eminent bad faith, on which horse it galloped into town.  It all started with the fad to hate and demonize the “Hausa-Fulani”, just because a certain Muhammadu Buhari was president.

    Then, to the South West progressive grandees, flashing their Awo franchise as Geoffery Chaucer’s Pardoner would, in Canterbury Tales, flash his papal pardon, hot, fresh and smoking from Rome, it was additional gall, that a certain Bola Ahmed Tinubu, midwifed the Buhari coalition!

    Still despite this human dross, the Nigerian government should seriously address re-federalizing towards a productive Nigeria.  That should be the principal message from National Day 2017, after the aborted thunder and fury.

  • Osogbo rendezvous

    September 15, and a galaxy of stellar minds, gathered at Osogbo, the Osun capital, to discuss the Nigerian condition.

    The prism was sharp — whither the South West, Nigeria’s perennial opposition since 1960, since its 2015 displacement of the South East and South-South, perpetual power sharers with the North?

    You could, of course, counter, as Rauf Aregbesola, the perspicacious Osun governor, argued at the occasion, that a South West faction had always been in government since 1960.

    Ay, but those didn’t belong to the progressive mainstream, under the tutelage of the Obafemi Awolowo school.

    Olusegun Obasanjo, after all, was president for eight years (1999-2007).  His Yoruba folks scorned him all through his first term.  He willy-nilly corralled them, by military ambuscade, in the second.

    But Obasanjo’s was a mere camouflage (military imagery again!) to compensate the Yoruba for the Abiola presidential injustice, but ensure the beneficiary was a Hobson’s choice, from the Yoruba conservative rank.

    Nevertheless, the Yoruba mainstream, which Aregbesola called “Afenifere” (Yoruba political progressives) at the confab, romped into federal power, courtesy of the epochal Muhammadu Buhari presidential win of 2015.

    That was a historic first, powered by a North West-South West entente, under the All Progressives Congress (APC) alliance.

    Now, APC was sweet battle whoop; and even sweeter victory roar.  But ideologically, it would appear a damp squib.

    The reason is clear: both North West and South West are Nigeria’s most ideologically stubborn, whether pre-Abacha 1st Republic (1960-1966), with the three regions (later four) of North, West, East, (and later, Midwest); or post-Abacha geo-political coinage, courtesy of Dr. Alex Ekwueme, 2nd Republic Vice President (1979-1983), of North West, North East, North Central, South West, South East and South-South.

    Now, the North West, with its unfazed conservatism, cohabiting with the South West, with its unapologetic social democracy, may well equate the Yoruba quip of two ferocious rams sharing a sole drinking pot.  That could be recipe for chaos!

    Now, factor in the slew of PDP rogue elements in the winning coalition, brutal power careerists, neither outside pissing in (to borrow that irreverent American quip), nor inside pissing out, but brazenly pressing their democratic right to piss in from inside — decency be damned! — you could then imagine the ensuing post-power melee.

    That would explain the near-consensus that the post-power APC has been a study in how not to be a winning party.  But while the hyper-critical media, mostly of the southern hue and boasting differing motives, got the end result right, they got the process frightfully wrong, because of their emotive approach.

    Without those PDP rogue elements, embedded in the wrong places, pushing private or at best group agenda, the APC is no better or worse than any party, come to power, wearing the ideological version of Dolly Parton’s coat of many colours.

    That reality prompted, as part of the Osogbo conference agenda, the idea of federalizing political parties, along geo-political lines, with local demands driving each party’s national charter, though with APC as case-point.

    The jury is still out on the workability or even desirability of such party federalization.  For one, it is a novel idea, likely to gather moss, as the days wear on, on the political front.

    For another, the Nigerian party system received a kiss of death from Gen. Ibrahim Babangida’s wayward political experimentations.  Compared to the organic parties of the 1st and 2nd republics, his post old breed-new breed guinea-pigging has left the formal party system a hollow shell, devoid of any ideological direction, talk less of rigour.

    There is therefore an urgent need to revitalize the party system, if Nigeria’s delicate democracy must be deepened.

    Still, Olubunmi Adetunmbi, Ekiti North senator (2011-2015), lead speaker for the topic, gave it a brilliant shot.

    The gathering also x-rayed Osun’s schools feeding system, a social democracy classic, and signature South West intervention, even at the best of times; and an imperative, even at the worst.

    The worst of economic times — that is where both the Buhari presidency and the Aregbesola governorship, have found themselves.

    Yet, for the society’s most vulnerable, Osun has pioneered this schools feeding programme, as part of its larger social safety-net agenda.  The Federal Government too has adopted the programme, running as pilot in 14 states already; with the possibility of all 36 states buying into the idea.

    That is a distinctive South West programme on the Nigerian national front; and the Osun government should be immensely proud for pioneering it.

    For the pilot states, across geo-political zones and ideological blocs, the salutary message is clear: development is primal; and that basic human imperative, especially among the society’s most vulnerable, must trump political and ideological differences.

    Like former Senator Adetunmbi, the other lead speakers, Prof. Mobolaji Aluko, famed public intellectual and founding vice-chancellor of the Federal University Otuoke, Bayelsa State (the South West critique) and Dr. Charles Akinola (who as director-general, Osun Office of Economic Development and Partnerships, is the policy wonk strutting the Osun safety-net programmes), discharged themselves creditably.

    So did the panel chairs and their discussants: Prof. W. Alade Fawole (Obafemi Awolowo University, OAU, Ife), Kanmi Ademiluyi (former Editorial Board Chairman, Daily Independent) and Dr. Akin Akande (OAU) — a last-minute stand-in for Kayode Komolafe, deputy managing director of This Day, who could not make the session for some personal challenges; and their panels: Dr. Bisi Olawunmi (Bowen University, Iwo), Dr. Harry Olufunwa (Federal University, Oye-Ekiti), Sanya Oni (Editorial Page Editor, The Nation), Dr. Emmanuel Oladesu (Political Editor, The Nation), Ismail Omipidan (Political Editor, Sun) and Sulaiman Salawudeen (Ekiti correspondent, New Telegraph).

    The conference consensus, chaired by Chief Bisi Akande (represented by Chief Sola Akinwunmi), was that the result, of the last two years, was a mixed bag.

    Still, the conferees warned that was no reason for some shrill irredentist baying, in some quarters; adding that with proper restructuring, Nigeria’s consumerist pseudo-federal system may well be tweaked into a productive and prosperous one.

    Governor Aregbesola put it all in devastating statistics, saying that all Nigeria’s ballyhooed “petro-dollar” wealth amounted to was a mere N8, 000 a month, if you share the current oil output among its 140 million citizens — N10, 000 less than the national minimum wage!

    Yet, poor Osun, as part of a South West economic zone, in a productive federal Nigeria, could easily gross N2.5 billion as monthly tax, even with the lowest paid earning N25, 000 a month.  That would build better roads, more schools, and other infrastructure, physical and social.

    The moral?  Waiting for Abuja’s monthly dole has beggared everyone, while breeding a noxious breed of the corrupt, that gobbles up the common patrimony!

    It’s time to properly federalize — but without the bogey of ethnic irredentism.

  • Biafra 2: way to Bathos

    Between Biafra 1 (1967-1970) and the ongoing attempts at Biafra 2, Karl Marx howls: history repeats itself, first as tragedy; then as farce.

    Biafra 2 appears a tragic farce, built on ”Igbo exceptionalism” — at least given the posturing of the vocal minority.

    This is that penchant for own self-serving counsel, no matter how skewed or garbled.  In that explosive emotional nirvana, the Igbo is the perpetual victim; the others, the perpetual Devil.

    The Nnamdi Kanu Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) campaign has been running on that blissful nirvana, in which Nigeria is a “zoo”; and the charmed Biafra, sheer paradise.

    Though the political equivalent of the Biblical wide and merry that leads to perdition, the civil Igbo face appears cool with, if not outright complicit in, Kanu’s excesses.

    The modern and traditional northern elite, as epitomized by the Sultan with some emirs, and some key governors, have cautioned their own lunatic fringe, that threatened the Igbo with a deadline to quit the North (truth be told, in reaction to Kanu’s unceasing torrents of hate, insults and threats).

    But their Igbo counterparts, at best, have hee-hawed, claiming Igboland is a republican bastion; where everyone presses his republican right to say anything and do anything, without regard or recourse to others, in the Nigerian space.

    It was the proverbial violently beating drum, triggering a macabre dance, fated to end in catastrophe.

    At that tragic pass, the South East governors roused themselves to “ban” IPOB (a panic-driven action of dubious legality) — not when Kanu was inspecting a bathetic column of Biafra “troops”; not when he announced the formation of a Biafra Secret Service; not when he triumphantly claimed the president was a Buhari clone from the Sudan, after his medical vacation, not the Buhari original; and definitely not when he ordered his IPOB rabble to burn Nigeria, should any attempt be made at his arrest!

    Whatever happened to the old axiom: prevention is better than cure!

    Still, that amounted to clutching at straws.  Kanu had stylishly remade himself a fugitive from the law — and good riddance!

    But his disappearing act echoed one of the many eerie parallels between Biafra 1 and Biafra 2.

    At the tail end of the Civil War (1967-1970), Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, the Biafra “head of state” vanished to Côte d’Ivoire “in search of peace”.  By then, no less than a million souls had perished from both sides of the conflict. That was Biafra 1.

    This Biafra 2, Nnamdi Kanu just vanished — “in search of peace” too?  To brew further war? Or simply scampered to save own skin, after putting others in jeopardy, by his insane brags and reckless posturing?

    Mercifully, it was after the pre-skirmishes of “Python Dance 2”, with excitable “youths” pelting a column of troops-at-manoeuvre with stones and other missiles.  Did they expect the soldiers, the ultimate symbol of the state’s monopoly of coercion, to respond with kisses?

    Still, it’s good his vanishing act has occurred before any major carnage, even if it has led to a needless militarization of the South East.  But better a militarization than turning innocent folks, or even ignorant youth, brainwashed, into cannon fodders!

    As for the “human rights” ensemble, just clearing their throats to bellow “fragrant abuses!”, after their funereal quiet on the ongoing IPOB rascality, they should remember the state does have some rights too — in its duty to keep the rest of us safe, from the gambits of a few lunatics.

    That simple principle drove the Social Contract, the philosophical pillar of the pristine government.  Besides, better to move in to avert catastrophe, than risk massive human misery, from beating a brainless drum of war.

    Still, on eerie parallels.  Biafra 1 ran on the explosive bathos of the northern pogroms, the post-15 January 1966 coup unfortunate slaughter of the Igbo in the North; in the run-up to the Civil War.  From the northern leaders’ handling of the Igbo quit threat, they would appear living in eternal regret of that epochal bestiality.

    But something triggered that slaughter from the Igbo side.  Segun Ayobolu, that cerebral Saturday columnist of The Nation, just quoted late academic, Billy Dudley’s testimony of the taunting, by some Igbo in the North, of the locals; on the killing of northern leaders, during the first coup, later christened the “Igbo coup”.

    In Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the famed novelist, also referred to a certain number by Cardinal Rex Jim Lawson, highlife music impresario, now dead, which sounded like the harrowing bleat of a ram under slaughter, to which triumphant northern Igbos capered with gusto, to the bile of the hurt northern locals.  The bleating “rams” were northern leaders, “being slaughtered”, during the first coup!

    The tragic result was the pogrom — and the July 1966 revenge coup.

    But while the pogroms always “jump out” of Civil War history, to milk eternal sympathy, no one has mentioned the tragic trigger-taunts, without which it is doubtful the pogroms would have taken place.  That is regrettable but hardly surprising, for it fits pat into a deliberate one-sided narrative, on the Igbo side.

    This one-sidedness is evident in this Biafra 2, which may well turn out a big farce.  By what looks like a southern media conspiracy, the devil are the northern lunatic fringe that threatened the Igbo with expulsion; not the IPOB lunatic fringe that started the hate blizzard.

    Even, “Python Dance” is the fault of a proactive Buhari Presidency, looking out for the law-abiding majority in Igboland, not the rash Kanu and his IPOB, with their ceaseless baiting of catastrophe.

    Very soon, everyone would forget — fond hope! — that Biafra 2 has little to do with the so-called “Igbo marginalization” but a crafty scheme by the greedy political fat cats that lost unearned privileges by casting their lot with former President Goodluck Jonathan.

    They cannot reconcile themselves with their bad political judgment.  Nor imagine themselves without the unceasing gravy of the Jonathan era.  The deus-ex-machina, like in riveting classical drama, where the playwright is out of his depth?  Agitation for Biafra 2!

    Ironically, central to all of this mess is Chinua Achebe, iconic novelist, whose famous debut, Things Fall Apart and swan song, There was a Country, appear to have a strong nexus with the macabre drama of the moment.

    In Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo, the tragic hero, started life as a wrestler.  He ended life as a suicidal.  Between wrestler and suicidal, there is little introspection.

    Biafra 1 is only 50 years ago.  But its survivors, by tolerating this IPOB nonsense, have not shown much introspection.  Pity!

    Then the Achebe swan song, There was a Country.  With all due respect to Prof. Achebe’s golden memory, among family, friends, loved ones and even the huge colony of literary offspring, across races worldwide, that swan song, by its one-sided rendition of the Biafra tragedy, created the ogre that birthed the Kanu IPOB menace.

    To the battery of critics and analysts in the southern media, their mischief of political correctness has only constructed some anti-North media terrorism, which nevertheless is goading a people with a history of trauma to further disaster.

    But it is the bounden duty of the Buhari presidency — screech of “human rights” be damned! — to ensure history doesn’t repeat itself, beyond this present farce.

  • Midterm: challenges, opportunities

    It’s mid-term, with its burst and buzz of politics; and its cacophony of desires.

    The 2019 round of elections loom.  So do the 2018 dress rehearsals: the Ekiti and Osun gubernatorial polls.

    Former Vice President Abubakar Atiku has already fired, the president’s way, a jeremiad of alleged use-and-dump.

    So has Atiku protégée, Women Affairs Minister, Aisha Alhassan, got seared, bragging to the wrong folks, who promptly leaked that costly brag!

    Politics is, indeed, revving up!

    So, in the excitability of the moment, some insist on focus, full-trot, on 2019.  Hardly surprising, in a milieu of near-zero institutional memory, with political hustlers eternally looking for the next electoral scam.

    To such a lobby, there can’t be a future in the past, to parody country artiste, Vince Gill, in his album, I still believe in you.

    That you could see, as the vulnerable opposition tries to blot out the past, as prelude to avoidable future mistakes.  Aim?  To sucker the voter yet again, and assure needless future lamentations!

    But countering this view is another lobby that insists on the political rear-view, as a clear window into institutional memory — doing a rigorous analysis to situate the past, understand the present and generate ideas to shape the future.

    This would appear the spirit shaping a one-day conference in Osogbo, the Osun capital, fixed for Friday, September 15, looking at the political epoch of 2015: the electoral win that consummated the political entente between the Nigerian Northwest and Southwest.

    That alliance also led to the electoral sack of a sitting president and defeat of a federal ruling political party — the first time both would happen, in Nigeria’s chequered political history.

    Since independence, and post-Civil War era, the North had always shared power with both the South East and South-South political mainstreams.

    Indeed by 1979, scant nine years after the traumatic Civil War (1967-1970), Dr. Alex Ekwueme, had become Vice President under President Shehu Shagari. Joseph Wayas was also installed as President of the Senate.  That, like all others post-independence, followed the Northwest-Southeast-Southsouth power paradigm.

    Even in 1999, when President Olusegun Obasanjo emerged, it was an Army Arrangement (AA) — apologies to Fela — in spite of the Southwest political mainstream.  ”You want a Yoruba to right the Abiola annulment wrong?”, seemed to growl  the ‘owners of Nigeria’, real or apocryphal, “you’d have one: Olusegun Obasanjo.” Hobson’s choice!

    Since that epochal change, however, a lot has happened — biting economic blues, a natural follow-up to the past gravy of a few, gobbling up the future of the majority.

    Then, numerous crises, real and contrived, starting with the Niger Delta Avengers’ bombing campaigns, the IPOB secessionist agenda, and Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) anti-”Islamization” crusade, which really appears nothing but vacuous cant by political losers, kicking back on the combustible religious front.

    Throw in the rather lethargic pace of the Buhari Presidency, the late formation of the federal cabinet, the Bukola Saraki-led Senate converting itself into internal but vicious political opposition, and a rather long bout of presidential illness, and you can imagine the high level of distraction the government has faced.

    Yet, how has it been, shorn of the acute frustrations of the magical lobby, stung that there is no Sesame Street in a polity, facing near-ruin, from decades of sleaze and collapse of state institutions?

    The Osogbo Conference, to be chaired by Chief Adebisi Akande, with its triad of star speakers, would hopefully offer a more rigorous view.

    Prof. Mobolaji Aluko, public affairs intellectual, long-term professor of chemical engineering at Howard University, USA before becoming pioneer Vice Chancellor, at Federal University Otuoke, FUO (2011-2015), tackles the first sub-theme: “The Southwest in National Governance: An Appraisal of the First Two Years”.

    The Southwest is clearly Nigeria’s bastion of social democracy (progressive politics, in local parlance), since the epochal free primary education policy of the Obafemi Awolowo era.  It would appear meet, therefore, that a signature Southwest programme, the schools feeding system, now running as pilot in 14 states after a federal adoption, emanated from Osun, despite its lean purse, and the vicious economic times.

    Dr. Charles Akinola, who as director-general,  Osun Office of Economic Development and Partnerships, runs the Osun social safety net policy, complete with the school’s feeding programme, will take the second sub-theme: “From Osun to Abuja: Investing in Social Infrastructure in a Recession”.

    The third sub-theme is about generating fresh ideas to fix the Nigerian political party system, atrophied since 1991, when Gen. Ibrahim Babangida started his old breed-new breed political experiment. That cut off the organic link between political parties and their members, and pushed the party as near-exclusive fiefdom of a few rich members.

    Since it’s a period of restructuring, can Nigerian political parties be rebuilt along federal principles?  Senator Olubunmi Adetunmbi (Ekiti North senator 2011-2015), acute development economist and politician would speak on this theme: “Federalizing Political Parties to Conform with Local Needs.”

     

    Much ado about Ibadan Yoruba summit

    Across the other geo-political zones, there has been quite a response to the Ibadan political summit of September 9.  

    Though there are 2015 electoral losers in the region trying to claw back at relevance aka “restructuring”, and using that braggadocio as 2019 blackmail tool, federalism had been a Yoruba agenda since the Kiriji War (1877-1893).  

    The Kiriji Treaty, which the British midwifed to cement peace in the Yoruba country, was squarely built on guaranteed federalism, among  the Yoruba sub-ethnic groups, as opposed to Ibadan hegemony, that sparked the Kiriji War.  So, Yoruba federalism issued from protest against intra-Yoruba domination.

    Chief Obafemi Awolowo, in his Path to Nigerian Freedom (1949), with his rigorous federalist thinking, only codified the Yoruba distaste for domination, internal or external, but located such distaste in the emerging Nigerian federation.

    That the Southwest was in opposition for so long was because the Awo political mainstream stubbornly stuck to the federalist ethos, while the other regions cut power deals — until the current nationwide “restructuring” epiphany!

    So, let no one impute any extra meaning to the Ibadan conference.  Federalism has always been the pristine Yoruba agenda.

    But perhaps that calls to one of the themes of the Osogbo conference of September 15 — rebuilding Nigerian political parties on the federal principle, fired by local geo-political charter of demands?

  • Neither settled nor hopeless

    As a shock therapy, you can hardly fault President Muhammadu Buhari’s homecoming broadcast of August 21.  As granite as they come, it halted, at least for now, the free descent of free speech into wayward threats.

    To be sure, it came with some sweeping name-calling, which could well gall genuine restructuring crusaders; as distinct from latching, fair-weather hustlers.

    Still, how do you decisively stop, in its tracks, such reckless bedlam, except with a presidential speech equivalent of Operation Shock and Awe?

    Indeed!  The polity was cascading into a free fall: a ruthless orchestration of presidential illness, with the traducers baiting the Acting President to jump ship,  pleading a most subversive strain of “public interest”.  Yet, no law was broken.  Yet, the ship of state was purring.

    Such was the media siege that one crank woke up, and in a jiffy at an Enugu press conference, announced a “Biafra interim government”!  That sent the journalists gathered reeling with a guffaw, before the severe crank cautioned it was no laughing matter.  Of course, it wasn’t!

    Worse: those named in that “cabinet” were mute for at least 48 hours, until the DSS threatened a probe.  Perhaps running scared, they dissociated themselves from the chutzpah.

    Surprising that folks, first to moan “human right”, at the first sign of trouble, would be so sanguine about baiting trouble!

    Earlier, Nnamdi Kanu’s IPOB had tested the waters, proclaiming no further elections in the South East, starting with the Anambra governorship, until it got its referendum on secession. Kanu would later gather some romantics in black, his so-called Biafra Secret Service (BSS).  Might the black be symbolic of wilful baiting of needless ruin?

    Some so-called “Southern leaders” followed that up with own threats: no restructuring, no election in 2019.  Who gave them such a grave mandate?

    So, everything was careering out of control until the president’s broadcast, which imposed some reality check — and just as well.

    Yet, the president’s stance that Nigerian unity was settled was as extreme as the slew of grating bluffers, pushing secession or even “restructuring”, as their final answer.

    Both extreme positions are highly provocative and insensitive — at least to the still extant reasoning lobby, clustered mid of the two extremes.  That is where to go.

    Mr. President, Nigeria’s unity is not settled.  If it were, there wouldn’t be threats and counter-threats, all over the place.

    If it were, Basorun MKO Abiola (God bless his soul!), who would have turned 80 this month, would not have served his presidential term in gaol, and ultimately lost his life, for winning a free election.

    If it were, “marginalization” would not float in the air, as some dysfunctional national anthem, throated by denizens of a dysfunctional nation.

    Ripples is not particularly taken by the Igbo elite’s umpteenth howl of “marginalization”.  Nor is it, given the two-some’s bazaar under President Goodluck Jonathan, by the South-South elite’s claim.

    Both partied without break under the ancien regime, just as both had been faithful partners with the northern power elite, they now love to hate, from 1960 till 2015.  If there is marginalization, therefore, they are both complicit.

    But there is a pan-Nigeria colony of the oppressed and dispossessed, to feed the greed of this — wait for it — pan-Nigeria unconscionable elite, which even includes reactionary elements from the South West, in the perpetual days of opposition.

    Ironically, these elite now bait this dispossessed clan  — Igbo, Hausa, Fulani, Yoruba, Efik, Edo, Ijaw, Junkun, Tiv, Ebira, Kanuri, etc — to enlist in their latest class fancy: secession, “restructuring” or even retention of the present ruinous status quo.

    No matter the elite motivation, the objective situation of grinding poverty and mass disorientation has positioned this selfish elite to bait their economically besieged

    victims to point fingers at the “other people”.

    That is why Kanu thunders in the South East, explosively profiling the non-Igbo.

    The South-South “militants” get hailed for blasting their environment into deeper poverty and misery.

    Even the poorest northerner could have a rakish sense of empty power, a near-monopoly of his elite, which nevertheless has condemned him to the poorest of the poor among Nigerians.  That could well make him fanatically endorse the present dysfunction.

    And, of course, the Yoruba!   Not even their much-vaunted sophistication seems to see through the fierce irredentist campaigns, waged as “restructuring”, by their political veterans, that lost face after sinking with Jonathan in 2015.

    The enemy is the “other people”!

    Still, even with rogue elite motivations, it is clear the Nigerian commonwealth needs radical re-tinkering.  That is where pristine restructuring comes in, as a peaceful and rational process to birth fundamental fairness and strengthen the polity.

    Simply, restructuring — as Ripples understands it — is remaking Nigeria into productive economic zones, where the locals would eat from the sweat of their brows. It is the antithesis of the present sickening central gravy, which breeds greed, corruption and rot — and ruins everyone.

    To restructure is an intensely economic doctrine, but served on the political charter of federalizing resources native to every part of the country. Everyone, along the six geo-political zones, would now milk their resources, develop at their own pace, and pay agreed tax cuts to the centre.

    But it could also strike naked fear with the section of the country that feels vulnerable, just as it could also make those that feel invincible strut and preen like cocks, in a fit of wilful arrogance.

    That would appear to explain the North-South divide over restructuring, especially with the dross of mischief, irredentism, condescension and sheer ethnic supremacy that have come with its post-2015 vociferous advocates.

    Campaigners would, therefore, do well to carefully couch their message.  Opposers would also do well to banish, from their psyche, panic and irrational fear.

    Pristine restructuring is win-win, if well and carefully broached.  Right now, Nigerian unity is neither settled nor hopeless.  But it could be, with fairness and justice to all.

     

    The Revd. J. O. Alabi (1918-2007) — 10 years after

    For the Alabi family of Okebukun quarters of Ola, in Ejigbo local government of the State of Osun, 30 August 2017 remains ever fresh in memory.  That was when their patriarch, the Revd. Joseph Odetola Alabi, departed — 10 years.

    Ordained minister in 1959, the late Alabi received further training at Oklahoma Baptist University, and Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Missosuri, both in the United States.  Until his retirement to Ola, he pastored First Baptist Churches, in Minna, Fiditi and Ilorin; and was active in the Nigerian Baptist Convention affairs, before retiring to Ola to plant further churches and mentor many people.

    By August 30, it would be 10 years since his death.  But his memory has been sweet.  Indeed, sweet is the memory of the righteous!

     

  • Season of hysteria

    “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity — W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

    This week’s is no ode to aphorisms.  But even this famous opener, by Irish poet Yeats, is incomplete to adequately do the job at hand.

    Ace radio sportscaster, Ernest Okonkwo (God bless his soul!) always offered his electrified audience a golden advice, from the mid-1970s through the 1980s, when Nigerian football was well and truly domesticated.

    “When you cheer a goal, you’re only reacting to an impulse,” he would remonstrate, his dramatic way of urging the fans to cheer the national team non-stop. “But when you cheer every movement that leads your team to score, you’re part-creator of that goal.”

    Back then stars, with Okonkwo-exclusive monikers, like “Chief Justice”, Adokiye Amiesimaka, “Mathematical” Segun Odegbami, “Chairman” Christian Chukwu, “Block Buster” Alloysious Atuegbu, “Quicksilver”, Slyvanus Okpala, among others, were in full flight.

    Yet, a third aphorism is part of the teaching infrastructure of creative prose.  ”You never know the true character of a man,” goes the saying, “until he is in crisis.”

    These three sayings about capture the current Nigerian season of hysteria, in which the unwritten code is yak to no end as to the Armageddon to come, when common sense dictates reasonable quiet, lest a fatal distraction, of those trying to fix this economic miasma, which has worsened Nigeria’s crisis of nationhood.

    In this theatre of din, natural or contrived, the sane voices are mute; hopelessly drowned by the passion of loud vacuity, as it was in Yeats’s Ireland of 1919, in the chaotic run-up to the war of independence against Britain (1919-1922)

    That Ernest Okonkwo charge: better to rally as part of a solution, than staying aloof for the sweet blame game, is true of the ball fans of his days, as of present-day Nigerians, on the political front.  To both generations, the appeal has fallen on deaf ears.

    Not a few expected Muhammadu Buhari, the Leviathan to, “open sesame”, snap his magical fingers; and send vanishing all the systemic rot he inherited!

    That has not — and couldn’t have — happened.  But that it hasn’t has birthed a loud lobby of finger-pointers, hell-raisers and wilful demonizers,  with a queer epiphany: the new demons are not the old crooks that sacked the common till but the braves now working hard to fix the problem; with Buhari himself as demon-in-chief!

    That is why Goodluck Jonathan, that best-forgotten presidential bumbler, would merrily vomit the rubbish he did at the PDP Abuja circus, and still expect right-thinking people not to squirm.  No surprise there — Jonathan’s child, from his eternal infantile blather, is always the supreme father of his man!

    Of course, that you know the true character of a person, when in crisis, is as true now as it was in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the 1954 novel in which the best of British public school boys (metaphor for the best of western civilization) descended into feral brutes, just because they were marooned in a strange environment for a few days.

    This Lord of the Flies analogy is especially piquant.  It would appear even the best of Nigerian media commentariat (symbolic of the best of polite minds in the polity), lexical flourish and all, has succumbed to this gripping hysteria with, of course, different motives and motivations!

    A rich media medley, indeed: the plain paid-to-bleat mischief-maker; the gross ethnic baiter and supremacist to boot; the “restructuring” neophyte, all worked up to a tizzy, growls it’s his newfound faith, with its sure quick-fix, or Armageddon, in a fit of fatal fixation; and, ode to hysteria — the sheer pest of blogosphere and cyberspace, which just yaks, yaks and yaks, with neither rime nor reason!

    This screeching dissonance, fired by a falsetto of high emotion, is a neat tie-back to Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity”!

    Yet, when the history of this troubled era is written, an ugly profile of the Nigerian elite would leap off the books.    Indeed, today’s elite are not unlike a grotesque Shakespearean drama, where Roman patricians become the rabble, and the rabble become the patrician — such is the tragic descent of temper, in the Nigerian media.

    Nigerians griped, as Jonathan and gang pawned the last family silver, on the altar of benumbing greed.  Yet, for ethnic, religious and even clannish reasons, this same people now shun a common rally, to nail corruption, the common vicious enemy.

    Sadly, the signals were early enough — of a self-abdicating elite over a nation-slaying monster (simply because that elite is so rotten it knows no other way); and a media that merrily surrenders its sacred historic duty to that elite’s profane hysteria.

    Father Matthew Kukah, Catholic Archbishop of Sokoto, fired the first salvo by cooking a controversial broth.  He claimed, with great sophistry, that fighting corruption, on such frontal scale, was mutually exclusive to running sound governance.  He called on Buhari to forget the past and move on!

    Christendom Nigeria — at least, the vocal minority — took the cue: culpable indifference. Both holy father and sacred bastion echo the holy cant in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:  Brutus killed Caesar not because he hated Julius but because he loved Rome!  Father Kukah doesn’t hate corruption less.  He only loves Jonathan more!

    But pray, after the Jonathan debacle, what was more lethal to the polity than corruption?  And shouldn’t the Church be the unapologetic partner-in-chief in that war?

    Then, Nnamdi Kanu’s IPOB came with its searing, equal-opportunity hate; and the best a distracted media, arrayed in ethnic combat formations, could do was face the looming danger from the one-shoe-fits-all prism of self-determination — no crime to be sure!

    But IPOB’s right to “self-determination” has pushed others’ right to the same principle: in an Igbo quit order and ultra-dangerous anti-Igbo song in Hausa, reportedly circulating all over the North! Hate begets hate. Hysteria begets hysteria.  Cynicism trumps cynicism!

    The latest hysteria is the “restructured” utopia to come.  That utopia, in magical post-Nigeria, would purify the most corrupt former Nigerians, and make them white as snow in their new ethnic homelands!  Call it the political equivalent of the biblical transfiguration!

    No wonder, separatists are speaking in a rich range of tongues, under the broad canopy of “restructuring” — secession, balkanization, disintegration, regionalization, greater autonomy for states, etc.

    Pray, on which spot, on this long and hazy continuum, do you and your lobby stand?

    On the restructuring front, a Yoruba Gerontocrat Army decrees an attack on the Igbo, by the “North”, is an attack on the entire “South”.  Yet a counter order, from this great Southern Army: by October 1, every Yoruba and northerner must quit the South-South!

    Great southern solidarity there!  It doesn’t get more bathetic, does it?

    Unfortunately, in this fit of high hysteria, Nigeria loses the historic opportunity to rebuild a saner polity, from the ashes of Jonathan-era ruins.

    Still, the culprits are less the PDP-era crooks, bitterly licking their wounds; but more the starry-eyed romantics, doubled over in sweet lamentation over the present, in a quixotic voyage to a magical future!

  • Nigeria — ever ripe for anything?

    The ripest fruit was saddest,” crowed the rebellious “Abiku”, in Wole Soyinka’s version of that poem; even as the plaintive parent’s plea, of J.P. Clark’s version, melted the heart.

    With a casual poetic linkage, brimming with no less irony, could one then hold that Nigerians would always consider their country “not ripe” for anything?

    Remember, Nigerians were once adjudged the happiest in the world.  So, are they ever wary of “ripeness”; so as to avert the sure sadness to follow — at least in the poet’s book?

    That cliché, “Nigeria not yet ripe,” filled The Nation’s Boardroom, as if on a theatrical cue.   The Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Ibrahim Idris, was in the house on a courtesy call, with a raft of Police rednecks in tow.

    No prize for guessing right: the subject was state police — and the unanimity, on the police front, was so total you would think it was some received wisdom.

    Traducer-in-chief was Sam Omatseye, chairman, The Nation Editorial Board, who then fresh from vacation, seemed sworn to debating the IGP, till kingdom come, on the state police question.

    But the avuncular IGP, and his legion, were ready — not to debate Sam per se, but to flaunt the received wisdom (“not yet ripe”, went the golden cliché), which appeared fired by near-divine finality!

    That “unanimity” was newly reinforced, courtesy of a new intellectual charter, a public lecture entitled “Providing strategic solutions to emergent security challenges: the essentials of synergy amongst security agencies and civil populace”.

    The lead speaker, Prof. Etannibi Alemika, a professor of criminology and sociology of law, at the University of Jos, would appear to know what he was saying, given his excellent track record in criminology and allied fields.

    Not so, the rest of the field of speakers, even if they were also a bevy of cerebral and distinguished Nigerians: Lt. Gen. Abdulraman Dambazau, sitting minister of the Interior, Oba Rilwanu Akiolu, Oba of Lagos, Alhaji Yahaya Abubakar, the Etsu Nupe, Musiliu Smith and Sunday Ehindero, two former IGPs, both of who served under former President Olusegun Obasanjo, among others.

    Despite the brilliance, the exposure and the eminence of this great ensemble, why would they not be in a position to postulate “Nigeria is not ripe for state police”, thus gifting sitting IGP Idris his newly reinforced “unanimity”?

    Simple: with all due respect, being former top police officers, they would appear too close to the problem to realize its full gravity. Worse: they are too protected by the system, to realize perhaps other less privileged citizens are far less protected.

    And perhaps, worst?  They are too sucked into the ultra-centralist thinking, that has always shaped the Nigerian ruling class, to think there is any other way.

    Such thinking vaulted the former IGPs in the group to the acme of their police careers.  Such thinking, even after retirement, has stuck them at the core of affairs, which has guaranteed them some gilt-edge privileges, all-life long — privileges so rare to their compatriots, to the point of near-impossibility.

    Besides, look closely at the security profile of the “Nigeria-is-not-ripe-for-state-police” orchestra.  None perhaps is serviced, at any time, by less than five police guards.

    Contrast that to citizens with absolutely no direct security cover — like the luckless denizens of Ikorodu and suburbs, victims of Badoo cult killings, who the Police just told to vacate their abodes, if the area is too secluded!  In another breath, the same Police, plagued with wilful delusion, would crow it is up to par in its duties!

    Besides, the lobby that endorses the present police system live in secure and prosperous neighbourhoods nationwide, which experience near-zero crime rates.

    So, if it is not an ego question to retain the status quo, it is simply a honest ignorance of what obtains in the “other world” of fellow citizens.  That is why the state police claim, in the face of mounting crime rates, jars on less privileged citizens.

    Or, on current public officers, whose shoes on the job painfully pinch; and are therefore obliged to disavow the merry orchestra of false security, when indeed there is roaring fire on the roof.

    That best explains why Akinwunmi Ambode, the sitting governor of Lagos, disagreed with the IGP’s “unanimous” conclave on state police.  The governor should know.

    First, the raw statistics.  According to the governor, represented by Dr. Idiat Adebule, his deputy, the Police is spread too thin, when linked to the teeming Lagos population. “Lagos State, with a population of over 22 million,” the governor claimed at the event, “has less, than 30, 000 police officers.”

    Ambode has adequately followed up on the Fashola-era security solution, in the hugely successful Lagos State Security Trust Fund (LSSTF).  Among many other successes, LSSTF has all but banished day-time robberies in Lagos.

    That has inspired other states to copy the initiative.  Even better: there is a proposed initiative, which the IGP just announced, to instal a similar body in Abuja, to galvanize public-private sector partnership, to improve funding for the police.

    Still, from its halcyon days, of almost a reasonably crime-free Lagos, crime in Lagos has spiked.  Among its recent virulent strain, is what ace columnist and essayist, Prof.  Adebayo Williams, would call the “ritualization of poverty”, with Lagos all but drowned in ritual kidnapping and killings; and ritual dens discovered in the unlikeliest parts of the sprawling megalopolis.

    Yet, LSSTF has continued to fund the federal police.  But the result is clearly with diminishing returns.  Why?

    The answer is simple: the scale of crime has so much broadened that an entirely new paradigm is called for — bigger, deeper and far more vigorous than the present rather limited canvas of central police.  That is the attraction federalization of the police holds, under which rubrics is state police.

    Federalization of the police!  That is a logical result of the federal doctrine.  But shorn of its esoteric sounds, it simply posits that if a federal state harbours essentially different peoples, policing and general crime fighting must be built on these differing cultural, sociological and even anthropological blocs.

    This is a far more fundamental approach to “community policing”, the alleged failure of which current central police chiefs have dismissed state police.

    Federalizing the police attacks crime from the very roots.  Imposing “community policing” on the current central system is attacking the problem from the top.  That perhaps explains the alleged disastrous results.

    But that doesn’t invalidate the imperative of federalizing the police, even with the spectre of possible abuse from local potentates — as it was in the 1st Republic (1960-1966), and as is likely, with some present and future gubernatorial misfits.

    It only exposes, in full Technicolor, the conceptual vacuity of a federal sop on a unitary architecture.  It is fated to end in misery.

    Federalizing the police is key to securing Nigerian citizens.  And let no one continue to mouth the cliché, “Nigeria is not ripe” — ripe for anything at all!

    It is nothing but a cliché — and the hallmark of clichés is the spontaneous absence of thinking.  Yet, effective policing demands vigorous — and fresh — thinking.

  • Army versus Fayose

    Army warns Fayose”, screamed the Nigerian Tribune front page lead headline of August 4.

    Since 1999, that would appear the first time a newspaper would report a seeming headlong clash between the military and any democratic institution.

    After coming a sad cropper under Sani Abacha, necessitating a scramble back to the barracks, the Nigerian military had worn its “submission to civil authorities” like a cloak of garish colours — and just as well.

    From the coup hero, interventionist swagger, that ended the 1st Republic, it had staggered, through several phases, to its professional ruin.

    The early years of innocence came under Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi and Yakubu Gowon.   The mirage of the military as the messiah was raised, albeit controversially, under Murtala Mohammed.  But it was also dashed under Olusegun Obasanjo, his successor after a failed coup, who birthed the Shehu Shagari civilian interregnum.

    Muhammadu Buhari, with Babatunde Idiagbon, boasted the franchise of the military as harsh dictatorship, without the civil pretences of the years of innocence, epitomized by Gen. Gowon.

    But the first steps to eternal disgrace would come during the wayward power years of Ibrahim Babangida, when a hitherto collective junta morphed into a lone, reckless risk taker.

    That, of course, would fire the final institutional burial, in the grave of politics and misgovernment, under the stark Abacha.

    But Abdulsalami Abubakar, the last of the military rulers, would play the army tortoise, leading the soldiers back to the barracks, but not before they had earned utter disgrace!

    Still, the army, at the return to democracy, would endure more institutional buffeting — and rightly so — with elected President Obasanjo purging it of the so-called “political soldiers”.

    Though that entailed severe institutional blood-letting, it was widely acclaimed in the polity — imperative to keep the military re-focused to its core defence duty, from the fatal distraction of politics.

    So, if the military always trumpeted its “subordination to civil authorities”, as imposed by the Constitution, it knew where it was coming from.

    Not so, Peter Ayodele Fayose, second-term Ekiti governor who, with his indecorous conduct, would pass as Nigeria’s most indelicate governor.

    Ironically, the crude Fayose is a creation of Obasanjo’s sweet-and-sour public persona, just as the “civil” military, as constituted today.

    Obasanjo purged the military of political soldiers.  But he also inspired the rise of Fayose, with his PDP’s garrison-like take-over of the South West in 2003, after drawing electoral blanks in 1999.

    Indeed, the earliest manifestation of Fayose, as the most virulent strain of gubernatorial unreason that Nigeria ever knew, started when he put second-term Lagos governor, Bola Tinubu, with other esteemed guests, under virtual house arrest.

    That was in the Iyin Ekiti country of home of the late Gen. Adeyinka Adebayo.  Tinubu and co were there for a social event.  It was 2003.

    That was clear outlawry.   A sitting governor, by the 1999 Constitution, is free from arrest or any form of restriction.  Yet, because it was against the opposition, the Obasanjo presidency, which controlled lawful coercion, looked elsewhere.

    Today however, Fayose, Obasanjo’s Frankenstein, anti-opposition monster of yore, is busy pouncing on and running his mouth on the old man.  Indeed, what goes around comes around!

    Though Fayose exited in a blaze of odium in his first coming (2003-2006), he has, in his second coming, broken every basic etiquette of polite society; driving his high office to the sewers.

    His morbid electioneering newspaper advert, predicted the “death” in office, of the then APC presidential candidate Buhari, should he win; simply because President Umaru Yar’Adua died in office, and the trio of Abacha, Murtala and Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa, all northern leaders, also did.  That was well and truly shocking.

    In his high morbid fever, though, he conveniently forgot President Shehu Shagari, from the same political geography, didn’t only survive his tenure, he is today alive and well.

    Still, if Fayose’s sewer manners could be excused by his crude verbal spits, it was even more shocking that news media that claim to be epitome of decency, for whatever windfall, could stain their front pages with such lunacy.

    Now Fayose, with Femi Fani-Kayode, are caught in their own warp of malice, on the Buhari health question.  The more they pine, to fulfil an evil prophesy, the more the Almighty Himself appears to decree they labour in vain.  Problem is, they seem too consumed by hate to listen!

    It is this penchant to bristle and bustle; and yammer whatever absurdity off the subconscious, that has pushed Fayose to his latest, if needless, military controversy.

    Though not many appear to notice it now, that flippancy has ruptured the delicate protocol between the civil authorities and the military; prompting the military to tell Fayose to go smash his head against the Olosunta rock in Ikere-Ekiti, instead of dabbling into defence matters he knew nothing about.

    “Governor Ayodele Fayose should stop politicizing the military and military op(eration)s; seek other avenues for your relevance,” the army riposted in a brutal putdown.  That portrayed the governor as an idle busybody.

    That the army, which should be seen and seldom be heard in a democracy, should treat a governor with such contempt, should normally alarm anyone.

    But no one appears alarmed in Fayose’s case.  That is indicative of how low he has crashed his high office.

    In his usual garrulous manner, Fayose had alleged, mimicking Transparency International (TI), widespread corruption in the anti-corruption war.

    “The fight against Boko Haram,” Fayose claimed by a release by Lere Olayinka, his media factotum, “has become a cash cow for some top military officers and corrupt politicians in the Buhari government, with the creation of fake defence contracts and laundering the proceeds abroad in the UK, US and elsewhere.”

    But the snag is the TI charge is so open-ended you couldn’t say it was referring to the present, or the Jonathan military command!  Besides, must an elected governor run his mouth over hazy defence matters?

    Sadly, indecorum ruptures the order of things faster that most would admit.  When the Murtala regime barked “with immediate effect”, it elicited thunderous cheers.  But that military impunity, creeping then, but entrenched before long, not only ruined the military themselves, but also smashed state institutions.

    A military-elected governor confrontation, which the flippant Fayose has sparked, cannot be good for our democracy.  Indeed, it is a dangerous call, which should alarm everyone.

    That is why Fayose must cease blighting his high office, while the military too should resist any provocation to play in the Fayose sewers.

    Nigerians should honour and respect the military for their supreme chore to die, so the rest of us can live.  But the military too should live by the democratic code of total subordination to civil authority.

     

  • Onagoruwa: And the man died

    Onagoruwa: And the man died

    “The evil that men do live after them; but the good are interred with their bones” —Mark Anthony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

    This Mark Anthony quip, at the felling of Julius Caesar, may well drive the memory of Olu Onagoruwa, SAN, the fiery-angel-turned-devil in the books of many, as he finally exited these plains.

    Dr. Onagoruwa was a brilliant lawyer; and a piercing forensic mind to boot.  But he didn’t earn his stripes and fame with those twin-traits alone.

    He earned them as an acute public conscience, always on the lookout for the common good, in those early years of military rule.

    Though not many realized it back then, military diktat was leading Nigeria on a free fall to perdition.  Onagoruwa, with Gani Fawehinmi, SAN, SAM, his best friend turned bitter foe, were among the few, in their generation, that swore such wouldn’t happen under their watch.

    Among the others were Prof. Wole Soyinka, Nobel Laureate; the late Tai Solarin, radical and unorthodox teacher; the late Prof. Ayodele Awojobi, restless academic and engineering genius; and of course, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti,  maverick musician, unfazed iconoclast and nemesis of the Nigerian military-in-government.

    Indeed, Fela and Gani, thanks to their gripping social crusading — the one with biting and irreverent music; the other, with the Law, aided by explosive media play — earned the rare distinction of first-name terms with adoring Nigerians.

    Onagoruwa and Gani, brilliant lawyers both, leveraged their immense media penetration, in their endless battle against creeping military dictatorship.

    Onagoruwa took many brilliant steps, well cheered by his appreciative compatriots. But he also took one wrong and fatal step, which condemned him as the Moses of Nigerian democracy — his Abacha debacle.

    Moses, the iconic prophet, spearheaded the great Jewish exodus from slavery in Egypt, all through 40 years across the Red Sea, through the wilderness, to the Promised Land of Canaan.

    Due to extreme provocation by the stiff-necked Israelites, however, and a rather harsh reaction from the prophet, Jehovah condemned Moses to just glimpsing the Promised Land, but never reaching there.

    Onagoruwa’s Achilles heel was the fatal error of joining the Sani Abacha government, the starkest military despotism Nigeria ever knew.

    Until he died on July 21, he survived the oppressive Gen. Abacha, and 18 years of restored democracy.  But from the vibrant military-era conscience of the people, he had become no more than a ghost of his old self, aside from being partly paralyzed by stroke.

    Yet, he worked more than most in his generation, not only to put the military in check, but also to push the democratic ethos of the rule of law, the very antithesis of military impunity.

    How did Onagoruwa get to that terrible pass?

    It was during the June 12 debacle, after Gen. Ibrahim Babangida had annulled MKO Abiola’s presidential mandate.  The crisis consumed IBB, earning him a forced exit.  But Abacha, the taciturn one not a few called the Khalifa (successor) in the IBB court, somewhat sold a dummy as a so-called “people’s general”.

    Abiola was said to have bought the dummy, believing Abacha would restore his mandate.  He reportedly advised people of conscience, among the progressive rank, to join Abacha to legitimize his government, as a prelude to revalidating the mandate.  It was a dummy skillfully sold and dumbly bought!

    But that was only one leg of the snare.  The other leg was the reported pitch by Gen. Oladipo Diya, Onagoruwa’s Odogbolu, Ogun State, co-native, who emerged the regime’s No. 2 man, to the lawyer to join the new government.

    Still, despite Diya’s high-falutin cant on the earnestness of the Abacha regime, the general almost lost his head at the end of it all, just as Onagoruwa lost his immaculate reputation, in the progressive community, during that regime’s earlier phase.

    Nevertheless, Diya was a soldier. If soulless military power raised him, fair game that crass opportunism also broke him. Still, he got somewhat lucky.

    Yes, he got ridiculed and humiliated and terrified, by the military equivalent of the valleys and the shadows of death — saved only from execution, for alleged coup plotting, by the sudden death of Abacha himself, Diya’s traducer-in-chief.

    But at least, he escaped with his head on his neck, even if tragically bowed; though as the living relic of the starkest and most brutal Nigerian military despotism ever.

    Not so, Onagoruwa.  That was a goodly man consumed by the evil of military rule; which often thrived because of the naivety, if not outright collusion, of a venal civilian elite; always on the look out for the military era wealth-without-work; and privilege-without-responsibility, which, 18 years after military rule, still leave the country prostrate.

    But for the late Onagoruwa, even that would appear less personally jarring than his sensational fallout with Gani, his friend and forensic comrade-in-arms against military rule, benign or malignant.

    Gani, the charismatic but famous loner, had warned Onagoruwa to beware of Abacha’s subversive charm.  So, when Onagoruwa fell, Gani sensationally disowned his friend, mocking his stumble with a serves-you-right, I-told-you-so gloating.  That must have hurt deep!

    The final straw came with the murder of Toyin, Onagoruwa’s brilliant lawyer-son, by suspected agents of the brutal Abacha state — perhaps because Onagoruwa had the temerity to walk out of his Federal Attorney-General job, on account of some stiff decrees the Abacha junta rolled out, but which the embattled minister of Justice publicly disowned?

    Indeed, Onagoruwa was a practical manifestation of the leitmotif of Classical Greek drama — that only the dead are well and truly happy; for the malevolent gods think little of blighting life-long bliss with devastating end-life tragedies.

    Or the imperative of the Christian prayer for people, particularly public figures, to end well.

    Here was a true patriot, that held his own in a stellar class of giants of public conscience, when Nigeria still boasted genuine heroes and true role models — Wole

    Soyinka, Gani Fawehinmi, Tai Solarin, Ayodele Awojobi: Titans that fought against civil and military rascality, to save their country from avoidable ruin.

    Yet, his Abacha-era stumble may condemn this brave, in the books of not a few, as some loathsome collaborator with the vilest military junta in Nigerian history.

    That would not only be monumental injustice to his sterling memory but also great disservice to his doughty labour, as rare moral and legal guide, to save the Nigerian military from its own hubris.

    But like the stark Abacha, the very epitome of the nadir of military misrule, the Nigerian military was the tortoise in the Yoruba tale, sworn to tarrying on its power journey of perdition, until it earned total disgrace.  Tough luck — and monumental irony — Onagoruwa somewhat ended as part of its collateral damage!

    But that should, and cannot, define his place in history.

    Still, the Onagoruwa personal debacle should teach the collective wisdom that military quick-fixes can never be an option, even in wobbly polities like Nigeria.

  • Christian dealers

    What do you make of the “Islamization” claim by the Nigerian Christian Elders Forum (NCEF)?  Mischief, alarmism or just arrant blackmail?

    That forum alleged rock-hard “Islamization”.  But it tendered fur-soft evidence.

    Why, the NCEF (or in any case its media confederates) even flaunted its “Christian” retired army generals, to underscore its “warning”!  What was that — intimidation?

    What if the Muslim lobby were to react in kind, and flaunt their own retired “Muslim” generals to back their threat?  What then?

    The country would then quake, with a putative religious war, simply because some eminent Nigerians abuse their access to media space?

    But lo!  The so-called “Christian” and “Muslim” generals share a common nativity in the Nigerian Army.  The Nigerian military itself, which many of these “generals” have mugged and raped, en route to easy wealth, bear more guilt than any single body, for the Nigerian debacle.

    So, if crass opportunism united the generals, why would political cant, which the NCEF pushed as faith solidarity, separate them?

    Meanwhile, what’s NCEF’s proof, that rogue “Islamists” are turning the Federal Republic into a Mullah’s theocracy?

    That security appointments, under President Muhammadu Buhari, is skewed in favour of northern Muslims.  A fair charge, to be sure; and to be decried.  But then, every regime has always appointed people it could work with.

    President Goodluck Jonathan appointed an Igbo Christian as his chief of army staff.  Another southern minority Christian was his DSS chief.  By those, was he trying to “Christianize” Nigeria?  If Buhari followed largely the same principle, how can the charge to Islamize Nigeria logically hold?

    But even that was morning yet, on NCEF’s day of illogic.  More scandalous reasoning would follow, in its quixotic claim!

    In its own words: “The objective of the Islamists [again, note the reckless name-calling] is to supplant the Constitution of Nigeria with Sharia ideology as the source of legislation in the nation.  The conflict between democracy as national ideology and Sharia as a usurping ideology is responsible for the crisis unfolding in Nigeria.”

    Proof?  An alleged political “Taqiyya”!  ”Taqiyya” is a Muslim doctrine that permits the faithful to lie or deceive, just to get out of danger.  In its purest form, it is strictly self-preservatory, though like any other doctrine, it can be abused.

    So, by NCEF’s alleged political Tayiyya, the Buhari “Islamists” were pressing, into service, Boko Haram and Fulani herdsmen as lethal ammo, for “stealth/civilization Jihad”!

    Boko Haram killed far and wide under Jonathan.  Was it, back then, Jonathan’s stealth weapon to Christianize Nigeria?  Everyone knew it was a terror machine against all.

    So, how can a degraded Boko Haram, largely limited to suicide bombing, in mostly Muslim areas, become a lethal weapon to Islamize — and Islamize by first wiping out the Muslim population?

    Then, Fulani herdsmen.  That some criminals, in the ranks of herdsmen, have committed and continue to commit atrocious crimes, is utterly condemnable.

    But also true: these crimes, in the last two years in the southern media, have been slanted as though they had the backing of the Buhari government.

    Yet until killings, either by herdsmen or any other group, are treated as strictly crimes, they would continue, no matter who occupies the Presidency.

    By its tone, NCEF’s barely concealed antipathy towards fellow Nigerians, simply because they are “Hausa-Fulani”, was glaring.

    Or how do you interpret its ringing jeremiad, over the so-called grazing reserves, because it thinks the “Fulani herdsmen” were the prime, if not sole, beneficiaries?

    Clearly preferring ranching — a good alternative, to be sure — it pilloried governors amenable to grazing reserves, designed to stem clashes between farmers and herdsmen; and dismissed them as Judases  eager to trade off “ancestral lands”.

    But what if the fallow land could earn rent from the would-be grazers?  Would that be a bad idea?

    By the way, after all the anti-Fulani raving and railing, has this immaculate Christian lobby banished, from its immaculate table, the herdsman’s products of beef and milk?

    Besides, NCEF went on and on about the killings by Fulani herdsmen — hardly illegitimate. But mum it was, on the sad fate of a defenceless Fulani community, almost wiped out by some gunmen in a Taraba village.

    Nor was anything mentioned about the Southern Kaduna 54, which the local Fulani communities, of Adara in Kajuru local government, claimed were massacred earlier this July.  On these, the southern media saw no evil, felt no evil!

    Maybe in NCEF’s holy books — and those of its media confederates — some lives are more precious than others?  That’s the ditch you bury yourself, when you mix faith with politics!

    About the rest of NCEF’s vaunted “Islamization” claim is based on old wives’ tales, arising from power struggles and sundry tensions that come with the power territory.

    The Nigerian Presidency has always rippled with power plays.  President Olusegun Obasanjo and Vice President Atiku Abubakar literarily exchanged executive punches during their second term (2003 – 2007), with a polarized media fanning the embers to drive copy sales.

    Baba Gana Kingibe was prematurely sacked, as secretary to government of the federation (SGF), under  President Umaru Yar’Adua, because of such alleged power plays. Later, a “Katsina cabal” tried to stonewall Vice President Jonathan from gaining the presidency, even when the president was fatally ill.

    Right now, there are tales, many probably real, others merely apocryphal, of reported attempts to undermine Acting President Yemi Osinbajo’s authority.  But even NCEF would admit President Buhari never loses an opportunity to openly back his deputy.

    So, if these past  internal struggles were no proof of “Islamization” or “Christianization”, how can they now be proof of that explosive charge?  Because a Fulani is president, NCEF has lain the charge, and an uncritical media can howl free bigotry?

    NCEF, like its parent body, the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), has failed to leverage its Christlike tenets to partner with the Buhari Presidency to fight corruption — Nigeria’s prime life-threatening problem.

    Little wonder then, both CAN and NCEF have condemned themselves to chasing shadows, after freely barring themselves from the substance of fixing the moral ruin, left behind by “Christian Brother” Jonathan.

    After all the howling and thunder, however, NCEF’s sensational allegations could well be the latest in a well-calibrated distraction agenda.

    The first was Niger Delta Avengers’ bombing campaign.  The second was Nnamdi Kanu’s IPOB crusade of hot hate and bigotry.  And now, Phase 3? A “Christian” lobby screaming wolf when there appears none!

    That all of these manoeuvres come from camps that lost out in 2015, pushes a dangerous precedent: a democratic right to sabotage, not to accept, an election result.  That would come back to plague the polity.

    Christian leaders should live the tenet of their faith, or risk becoming mere dealers in mischief — and a blight on their faith.