The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olakunle Abimbola

  • Death of empathy

    The president is sick, with not a few fixated with morbid tales and ghoulish fancies.

    But what is clear here, even in every mortal’s helpless surrender to the uncertain certainty of death, is the death and burial of empathy.  That is a roaring shame.

    In formal creative prose, you were taught — at least Mr. Pius Omole taught his University of Ibadan students, among whom was Ripples — that you knew the true character of a man, when the man was in crisis.

    Nigerians — the entire Nigerians or just the over-exposed ultra-minority that ride the media crest? — are in a crisis of empathy.  The picture is a flint-hearted, contemptible, and graceless rabble, with nary an iota of human compassion.  Sad.

    Now, rigorous presidential health comes with the presidential territory.  That is why a section of the 1999 Constitution talks of the possible incapacitation of the president; and how such emergencies could be resolved.

    And yes: the ghost of the Umaru Musa Yar’Adua presidential debacle (God rest and bless his gentle soul!) still hovers over the polity, where some players, back then, tried to hide the state of health of the president, for their own selfish ends.

    Many say that experience has made not a few hyperactive in their quest for the latest news on President Muhammadu Buhari’s state of health.  Once bitten, after all, twice shy!

    But like anything Nigerian, where even routine things pass through grotesque ethnic lens, a quest for accurate information about presidential health soon peters down into savage nastiness, with even the cream of the media swooning in its orgy!

    Yet, things need not be that way.

    In neighbouring Ghana, President John Evans Atta Mills died in office, just as Yar’Adua died here.  Before then, he was ill, though the illness was so well managed that the president never faced any harangue as Buhari faces now.  Yet, the Ghana opposition could be as cantankerous as any, particularly during its early evening radio talk show belts.

    What then was so insensate?

    When the president passed away, the whole nation collapsed in genuine grief — and not just the cant and hypocrisy of the politically correct.  Had the president survived, he would have been nursed back to full wellness by the enduring love of his people.

    The enduring picture of Ghanaians, during this trying period?  A noble, caring and compassionate people, soaring high even in their low grief, on their common humanity.  Just wished someone could say that of Nigerians, with the present hysteria over Buhari’s health!

    Still, those who insist President Buhari and his handlers should come clean with his health status have a point.  If anything, that would follow the constitutional dictates over possible incapacitation.

    But a demand to conform with the constitution is one thing.  Crass insensitivity by mocking, heckling and gloating, en route to that demand, is another.

    Besides, there is a crucial sociological angle, which many appear to happily ignore.

    The law is clear on full disclosure of presidential (and gubernatorial) health.  Yet, the sociology of the polity jumps at secrecy, in such delicate matters.  Even standard medical convention preaches tact and caution, when it comes to the individual’s health.  Hence, the confidentiality dictate.

    So, even in the case of the president as complete public property, where does the law end and where does sociology begin?  Even with that, does the medical code of strict confidentiality have any role to play, in going public with the president’s health?

    In the hullabaloo that accompanied President Buhari’s medical tourism to Britain, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo made a point: Buhari himself would tell Nigerians about his health.

    The president did when he came back: how he had never been that sick all his life; and counselling Nigerians to shun self-medication.  No previous Nigerian president ever went that public with his health.

    So, those who claim to be unaware of the president’s health only speak the half-truth.  What is not public knowledge is exactly what is wrong with him.  The onus is on his medical team to divulge, with requisite tact and decency, according to the laws of the land, and the dictates of their profession.

    But public office and public property aside, President Buhari is only human like the rest of us.  He cannot give life. Neither can he take life.  At this juncture, only common humanity rules — not the pauper, not the rich, just the human.

    So, to those who play God pontificating over another person’s health, with such brutal zeal, just remember: Buhari is your president.  But he is also another person’s husband, father, uncle, cousin and even neighbour, all bound by intense family ties.

    Pray how do you sound to these fellow humans — some brute?

    Just think about that!

     

    Gory harvest

    First, the comet of DAWN.

    The Omoluabi, of iconic portraits,

    even mien and temperate heart;

    Cohabiting a furious temper

    To develop his native West.

     

    Did he figure death would dawn so fast,

    Conflicting another’s birthday:

    Birthday bliss, death-day blues,

    Leaving the celebrator winded —

    to laugh or to cry?

     

    Then, an Iroko of the native theatre,

    Hardly de-leafed, yet reaped,

    Neither the ripest fruit condemned to saddest,

    as our bard WS decreed;

    Nor the hard and sour, turned happiest.

    Just brazen victims,

    of the Reaper’s grim illogic.

     

    Then, outrage of outrage,

    On the Sabbath:

    Serubawon, serubawoned!•

    Now, all life at Iwo, a sparkling, gurgling eternal spring;

    Then, dead as mutton, in his native Ede!

    Death finally clamps the heart of one,

    who put others’ hearts quaking with fear!

     

    Death, be not proud,

    Once cautioned John Donne,

    He, of metaphysical poesy.

    But today, death is done with  Donne,

    metaphysics and all!

     

    Death rips, reaps, barges, smacks and roars!

    He, who would dare him, is not born.

     

    Yet, sweet memories, are death to death!

    As calm water, in easy quiet, swallows a roaring fire,

    So do sweet memories, with abiding pleasure,

    kill the pangs of death!

     

    To you fallen trio, be consoled.

    Death brags, with nothing, but your empty scalp.

    Rest well.

    Always, in our hearts, you live!

     

    • Serubawon, Adeleke’s political street moniker (Literally, Yoruba for “freeze them with fear”).

     

    Olakunle Abimbola,

    For Dipo Famakinwa (50), Olumide Bakare (64) and Senator Isiaka Adeleke (62), eminent Yoruba sons, who died within a three-day interval.

     

  • Between Fayose and Kanu

    Between Fayose and Kanu

    Ekiti maverick, Ayodele Fayose and IPOB’s Nnamdi Kanu, are a peculiar pair.
    The one is twice a blight on his Ekiti generation.  The other, a heady presage to avoidable catastrophe: again, for the second time, in a generation.
    They made quite a sensational pair at an Abuja court on April 25 with Fayose, all infantile jabber, declaring himself and his Ekiti Kete, self-annexed Biafrans.
    But beyond the drama of optics, they made a more telling metaphor — sweet disasters baiting their people.  Nevertheless, the people appear too roused to resist their own doom.
    In Fayose’s first coming (2003-2006) — Fayose o, Yes oooooooooooooooo! — he exited in a blaze of odium.
    But that wasn’t his ultimate humiliation.  At his fall, he was accused of all sort of heinous crimes — poultry racketeering, a killer squad to bump off political enemies, real or phantom, and gubernatorial fascism Ekiti never knew; and again unlikely to know.
    This second coming (2014 till date), he is a worrying study in noisy emptiness — yakking before thinking, and sundry empty street drama, to press his democratic folksiness.
    Vintage Fayose street shows?  The governor as executive fire-fighter; as merry glutton, wolfing at the buka next door; as ladder-clambering member of a work gang, monitoring work on a bridge — in fact, as unabashed hustler for attention, with a spider’s web line between the sane and the insane!
    So, when Fayose happened on his Biafra jabber, he provoked additional comedy to Ola Rotimi’s comic play, Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again.  Tweak that a bit, with Fayose’s melodrama? Maybe, Their Osoko Has Gone Mad Again!
    So long for Fayose’s unending ribaldry! Nnamdi Kanu’s is made of a more tragic hue.
    Now, wherever the Igbo want to be, in or outside Nigeria, is entirely their business.  But if they go about that with hateful demagoguery, then it becomes everybody’s business. That is Ripples’ only problem with Kanu and his Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB).
    Besides, there is something eerie about Biafra’s one-sided narrative, powered by a saint-versus-sinner passion.
    It was, in the build-up to the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970).  It was in its post-mortem, by Prof. Chinua Achebe, in his swan song, There Was A Country.  It is in Kanu’s current turbo-charged IPOB gambit.
    That appears the most sensational attempt at rigging history, even when some of the participant-observers still live, if aging.
    Since Nnamdi Azikiwe’s West African Pilot started amplifying Igbo achievements and toning down others’, hype appears to come with the Eastern territory.
    To be sure, hype is no crime.  Every people always project something to burnish collective pride.  But it becomes dysfunctional, when instinctive and compulsive.
    Take the land hunger that has sent many Igbo scuttling outside homeland for economic nourishment; and see how it fits into the Biafra agenda.
    Land hunger is nothing new — or bad.  In antiquity, fierce land hunger in Crete and surrounding islands, triggered the founding of Greek colonies, a cluster of voluntary diasporas, angling for economic survival.
    These settlements would mature into city states, which not only birthed pristine democracy, but also gifted the West its grand thinking — art and literature, philosophy, science, technology and IT.
    Just imagine the evolution of Greece — and Western critical thinking — without these pristine settlements!
    But tweak that a bit: can you imagine Igbo evolution in Nigeria, without these far-flung internal economic diasporas?  Yet, not a few, even among the most asset-vulnerable, would recklessly endanger all of that, in a moment of unthinking hype!
    The Biafra gambit — now, more than then — appears to fit pat into that explosive mindset, without much thought about the Igbo land hunger question.
    If the Biafra fiasco (1967-1970) didn’t curb land hunger, by making the East retain its best within its homeland, what guarantees a future Biafra gambit — success or failure — would?
    Despite the sharp contrast between Emeka Ojukwu’s Oxford elitism and Nnamdi Kanu’s explosive street populism, Biafra now, like Biafra then, runs on breathless emotions. In such campaigns, sobering facts are killed and buried.
    There is a sweet claim — that the Civil War was a northern ploy to subjugate the East; and that the West, under Chief Obafemi Awolowo, merrily played Judas.
    But Nigeria, at independence, opened with a North-East conspiracy to subjugate the West (see Hansard of the parliamentary debate of 29 November 1960, as quoted in Awolowo’s book, The Travail of Democracy and the rule of Law).
    At that session, Northern People’s Congress (NPC), with National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroon (NCNC) partisans pushed for a federal take-over of the West, under the ruling Action Group (AG). That would crystallize in the 1962 emergency.
    Besides, how do you justify the 1963 creation of Midwestern Region from the West, without a corresponding carving, for minority elements, in the North and the East?  Because the two formed a coalition federal government?
    So, when did two ganging up against one become a crime — since the East became a victim?
    In recounting the horrors of old Biafra, perhaps to justify a new one, emotive words like massacre, genocide, et al are freely deployed.  But seriously, can there be “genocide” in a shooting war, where you either kill or be killed?
    And guess the pre-war sabre-rattlers? Ojukwu accused Awolowo of “platitudes” in a May 1967 Enugu rally to avert war.  He further bragged: “I am no longer speaking as an underdog, I am speaking from the position of power.”. It turned out a costly bluff that consumed thousands of lives.
    Compare Ojukwu’s sabre-rattling back in 1967 with Kanu’s impassioned hate today, against the non-Igbo in what he dubbed the “Nigerian zoo”, and you would perhaps realize how little a once-bitten people have changed over a 50 year-period!
    But why go into these notorious though harsh historical facts?  Simple: the demagoguery of Fayose and Kanu creates catastrophes from small problems. Yet, it claims to gun for a solution!
    Ekiti would feel Fayose’s rascality, maybe in another 25 years, when his blind flight to Stone Age would have matured.
    Kanu’s sweet demagoguery may well inspire a future fresh and sweet South East mono-tales. But then, it’s a democracy, and choice is free!
    Still, between Fayose and Kanu is an emotional plane. It leads nowhere but avoidable perdition.

  • Elite children of perdition

    Nigeria’s elite children of perdition easily forget:  Goodluck Jonathan’s electoral rout of 2015 was a rejection of a feckless fellow, as it was an elite gambit at class preservation.
    Yeah, a bumbling Jonathan had to go; for his scandalous humbug was fast demystifying the elite, and the hoi polloi were rumbling — just as a reckless military provoked the Fela famous quip: uniform na khaki, na tailor dey sew am!
    So, that defeat was nothing but a fiery pyre, with crackling dry wood of elite panic: they must bury Jonathan first, before he buried them with him.
    But why did Jonathan unravel so fast, despite so much initial goodwill?  Free-wheeling sleaze.
    Yes, that probably had been the norm.  But its brazen projection under Jonathan earned a furious, mass censure, akin to the Achebe quip, in A Man of the People:  folks just stole too much for the owner not to notice!
    Candidate Muhammadu Buhari, hardly a revolutionary in spite of his ascetic contempt for graft, struck the right message; the people keyed into it; and Jonathan, with his hubris-stricken Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), became shameful history!
    Back then, no elite symbol, of the old venal class, could save their beleaguered class.  Everyone, lovers and haters, just scrambled onto the coat tail of the severe General from Daura!
    Which is what now makes that picture — of the trio of IBB, Bukola Saraki and Dino Melaye — which went viral, all the more amusing.  The picture was taken after Saraki’s and Melaye’s visit to IBB’s Minna hilltop mansion.
    Now, to their doting families, charmed friends and acquaintances, these three are excellent private citizens.  But public perception — right or wrong – may well differ.
    IBB, General Ibrahim Babangida, Nigeria’s first (and last) military president, is fairly adjudged the very quintessence of military rot.
    True, the late Sani Abacha was unfazed champion of military venality; and, from the exciting tales from Vindication of a General, Ishaya Bamaiyi’s new memoirs, as Abacha’s chief of army staff, the military plutocrats back then just might have buried Abacha, before Abacha would bury them, with him.
    Still, the IBB regime clearly owned that devil-may-care rapacious temper, that drove Abacha to new greed. IBB not only crowned corruption as the cornerstone of state policy, he annulled the sanest election in Nigerian history.
    Saraki,  as Senate president, projects himself as a doughty cohabitant of state power.  But while President Buhari tries to clear Nigeria’s towering mountain of sleaze, Saraki pushes his democratic right, with the Senate he heads in tow, as the very antithesis, of this noble historic duty.
    That much was clear from the Senate’s carping, climaxing in Ibrahim Magu’s non-confirmation as EFCC chair.
    But that has provoked a counter executive sleight of hand — even if very noble in the circumstance — that purports the Constitution does not require Magu’s confirmation, even if the EFCC Act says so.  Is it not trite, argues the Presidency, that any law inconsistent with the Constitution is void, to the extent of that inconsistency?
    Talk of a de-jure key democratic institution, tragically pushing itself into de-facto irrelevance, because of the hubris of a few of its members!
    As for Dino Melaye, Saraki’s unfazed sidekick, in Magu and allied senatorial wars, the beam on his university degrees, real or phantom, clearly shows he is no more, as his adopted name suggests, than grating din.  It’s tough luck that the highest legislature in the land is his echoing chamber!
    Still, IBB and friends have a democratic right to free association; and to pictorially toast themselves, schmoozing in great camaraderie, as long-lost lovers.
    But should acute Nigerians interpret that, given IBB’s past record and Saraki/Melaye’s current labours, as worrying symbol of the ethically challenged ancien regime, rousing itself, after two years of searing heat, to gamely confront its nemesis?  Only the good Lord knows!
    Still, the problem is less with individuals, no matter how powerful they fancy themselves; but more with the broad spectrum of the Nigerian elite.  They, like Emperor Nero of old Rome, fiddle over puffery, while their kingdom is on fire.
    Take the Judiciary.  First, the new Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Walter Onnoghen, plays the Pontius Pilate, washing his charges clean, of any perceived glitch, in the anti-corruption war.
    But did that performance, by the original Pilate, erase the grave piracy of justice, of nailing the Christ, on trumped up charges, even if, by the Christian doctrine, that was spiritually pre-ordained?
    Can the CJN, in all good conscience, say the Judiciary under his watch is less corrupt, than under his predecessors?  O, the judicial throne is safe but the estate is sinking!
    And the lawyers!  In truth, many senior lawyers have bought into the anti-sleaze war.  A good many others too decry the alleged technical shallowness of those charged with prosecuting high profile graft cases, and call for drastic changes.
    But it is also true that many a silk picks no bones about defending the decadent order that had pumped them, to near-bursting point, with sweet rot.
    Many hitherto too busy eating to talk, from the rot of yore, now lash out as fiery, crusading angels of corruption, though they hide behind legal cant.
    Well, here is great news, for this judicial Sodom and Gomorrah!  The awe of the courts is less in the impressive gown and foreboding wig, which nevertheless contribute to their grim dignity.  It is more with the societal acquiescence to polite adjudication.
    The moment irate citizens go the Fela way: court na house, nay mason dey build am, the game might just be up!
    And that’s not as difficult as it seems, does it?  Even as Ekiti governor-elect, Ayo Fayose tried it, and the response was the easy bedlam of fleeing gowns and tumbling wigs!
    Just imagine the society butting into that outlawry, just because the courts are perceived the biblical house of worship turned a den of thieves?
    If polite society collapses, the judiciary gets buried without trace.  So, its flowers had better quit posturing, and roast the few corrupt elements, before these corrupt few roast, with themselves, the upright majority.
    Still, you could excuse judicial nervousness at any change.  Not so the media, perhaps the most vibrant trigger of change, in all human history.
    The grandmasters of the early Nigerian press, John Payne Jackson and son, Horatio (Lagos Weekly Record), George Alfred Williams (Lagos Standard) and John Bright Davies (Times of Nigeria), among others, set the tone, of doughty social activism, that served the newspaper press so well, in its titanic clash against military despots.
    Herbert Macaulay (Lagos Daily News), Ernest Ikoli (later of Daily Service) and Nnamdi Azikiwe (West African Pilot), among others, built on the robust legacy of the early colonial era, in their own independence struggle age.
    Though critics accuse many of these greats of striking a happy marriage between public good and private bliss, history is clearly kind to them, by the way they have shaped the temper of the Nigerian newspaper press.
    But pray, what would history say of the Nigerian press today?  Strangers from Mars playing the ostrich, in culpable finger-pointing, while the soul of their country blaze in filth?   Analysts-turned-pundits, obliged to live or die by rogue punditry, when naked facts point to a more redemptive lane?
    Purveyors of pure fiction, faith and tribal champions, driven by explosive bigotry, when the times call for for the exact opposite — universal ethos that lifts all?
    At a critical pass, when corruption either kills Nigeria or Nigeria kills it, vital segments of the media, the judiciary and an errant parliament are marooned in Distraction-land.
    Nigerian elite children of perdition play Emperor Nero while their estate goes up in moral smoke!

  • Save Stella Monye’s son

    Save Stella Monye’s son

    Ace crooner, Stella Monye, needs N20 million (US $50, 000) to save her only child, Ibrahim. But why should anyone listen to her cries?
    Ever read Michael Echeruo’s Victorian Lagos?
    The magic of that book, of late 19th century Lagos Island, was its charming sketch of cultural symbols, that shaped the temper of that era.
    The returnee Saro, were mainly ethnic Yoruba. So were the returnee artisans from Brazil.
    But Western education gave them an edge, over the aborigines of Isale-Eko, to shape the new Lagos culture.
    Richard Beale Blaize (in 1880, founded Lagos Times and Gold Coast Colony Advertiser, a local newspaper); Mojola Agbebi (led the campaign to make the Baptist Church more African-friendly); John Otonba Payne (first native registrar of Lagos courts); James Johnson, “Holy Johnson”, (whose keen sensitivity helped to stabilize the Anglican Church of his day); Henry Carr (famed educationist) and the young Herbert Macaulay (soon to turn the chief British nemesis of Colonial Lagos), just to mention a few.
    Indeed, as Prof. Echeruo wrote of Victorian Lagos, Stella would most probably make the cut, of folks to be portrayed, should anyone embark on sketching the cultural Lagos, of Stella’s musical generation, of fourth-quarter 20th century.
    O, what an exciting time!
    “You don’t have to be a good neighbour,” Soni Irabor would croon, in-between radio programmes, “but you can, at least, be neighbourly”. That was from Radio Nigeria 2 FM, then on Martins Street, in the commercial hub of Lagos.
    In the evening, when TV ran from 4pm till 12 midnight, Patrick Oke, he of the deep baritone, would mesmerize viewers, hooked to his hugely popular youth-music programme.
    Stella’s boss and mentor, the late Sunny Okosuns, bossed the musical charts, outside the Juju music duo of Ebenezer Obey and Sunny Ade, and of course, the Abami Eda himself, Fela.
    Sunny may have burned up the charts. But that era’s clear musical philosopher-in-chief was Bongos Ikwue.
    Apart from Still Searching, Bongos’ hit album, his soundtrack for NTA’s agric-boosting tele-drama series, Cockcrow at Dawn, courtesy of UBA sponsorship, was a class act.
    Throw in the Lady of Songs, the late Christy Essien-Igbokwe, and you’d just appreciate a milieu of cultural giants, from all ethnic groups, that shaped cosmopolitan Lagos, in the 20th century’s final quarter.
    Stella Monye belonged to this stellar assemblage.
    When 11-year old Ibrahim happened on the freak accident, that would turn his life into a consistent dash in and out of hospitals, Stella was out serving her country: part of a musical ensemble, cooking the Nigeria ’99 theme song, en route to hosting the FIFA U-21 World Cup.
    By 1999, she was no greenhorn, still under Sunny Okosuns’ huge shadows. With hits like Oko mi ye (1984) — from the album, Mr. Wright — she had made a name for herself.
    So by Nigeria 99, she had become an exciting and enchanting brand in the Lagos landscape.
    Somewhat, Stella Monye’s musical odyssey echoes the late South African, Dennis Brutus’s poem, “A troubadour, I traverse…”.
    That poem talks of a troubadour (the poet) traversing the whole of apartheid-riven South Africa. Despite all the evil, all the killings, all the injustice, the troubadour still loved his lady, and would rather be at her service.
    In Stella, that troubadour would appear a lady doting on her country, warts and all.
    In a moving interview with Saturday Sun (April 15), she told of how the phone call, about her son’s accident, came when she and her colleagues were presenting the Nigeria ’99 theme song to Head of State, Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar.
    Still she went on tour, to promote that theme song, thinking the accident was minor; and that routine medical attention would take care of it.
    It didn’t — for Ibrahim’s butt had landed pat on spikes, as he fell from a raised water tank, piercing vital organs, and tragically altering his young life into a relay of heart-rending medical emergencies.
    And failed surgeries, over the years, particularly the 2014 one in India, for which Stella, with other artistes like K1, Daddy Showkey, Orits Wiliki, Onyeka Onwenu, Lagbaja! and Pasuma, had to mount a roadshow to appeal for funds, had further damaged more internal organs of the 28-year old Ibrahim: the left kidney, the bladder and the uretha.
    But like Dennis Brutus, Stella’s dire personal challenges wouldn’t vitiate her love for country. She spoke of other tours — part of Team Nigeria to the 1996 Yamoussoukro-Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa University Games. There, she sang the Nigerian national anthem.
    Then, an extensive tour of Germany, when she played Oya, Sango’s wife, courtesy of a Nigeria-Germany cultural exchange — Berlin, Sabrieakan, Hanover, Bonn, Bremen, Geneva (Switzerland) and Amsterdam (Holland), a proud troubadour, showcasing the artistic trove of her country.
    But the 1998 tour of Guyana, to mark the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slave trade, would mark the grandest of Stella’s patriotic travels, given the calibre of Nigerians, on that entourage.
    Gen. Yakubu Gowon, former Nigerian Head of State (1966-1975), his wife, Victoria, Prince Tony Momoh, Chris Anyanwu, ace broadcaster and former senator and Col. Tunde Akogun, then Nigeria’s highest ranking culture official.
    But that was only half of the story. Stella was lead vocalist, of a band comprising seasoned Nigerian acts: Bisade Ologunde (Lagbaja!), Zeal Onyia, Highlife ace and he of the piercing trumpet, Peter King, Nigeria’s jazz supremo and Remi Kabaka — true royals in Nigeria’s musical cosmos! The Guyana local media dubbed her the “Nigerian bomb”.
    This then is the woman who has given her all for her country; but needs her country to give something back: help save her most prized earthly possession — only child, Ibrahim.
    “When I grow old and infirm,” she told Ripples, “how can Ibrahim take care of me, when he has lived most of his life, moving from one hospital to another?” Moving cry, of a doting mother!
    According to the Urology Centre, in Indiana USA, where Dr. Ayo Gomih is medical director, Ibrahim would need US $50, 000 for a life-saving surgery — and time is running out!
    Stella has done a lot for her country. Pray what, in her hour of grave need, can her country do for her?
    Lagos is 50, bravo! But as part of the celebration goodwill, let Lagos rally round a culture icon that, with others, has helped to shape her into today’s success story.
    Let Delta, Stella’s nativity, also stand by a distinguished daughter.
    Finally, let golden hearted Nigerians prove their worth. Stella Monye and son need everyone.
    For more information, you can reach Stella on +2348037305052. Her account details are: Stella Monye, First Bank account number 2021451638.

  • Osun: History meets the historic

    Osun: History meets the historic

    You can’t step in the same river twice 
    —Heraclitus, Greek philosopher

    The excitement reached a head, as the party hit the November 27 interchange, that flies over Gbongan road, in Osogbo.
    He was no yokel; but in his excitement, prancing and skipping, he yodelled like one.
    “Ogbeni, the Awolowo of our time,” he chirped, “don’t forget the Bisi Akande trumpet!” — and, all zeal and fervency, he pointed towards Gbongon.
    The Bisi Akande Trumpet Bridge was some 40 kilometers away, at the old Gbongan junction, with Ibadan-lfe expressway.  But this enthusiast couldn’t imagine Osun Governor, Rauf Aregbesola, letting go of his Guild of Editors guests, without showing off his architectural wonder.
    It was March 18.  The Guild of Editors chose to hold its committee meeting at Osogbo.  The governor also seized the occasion to show the elite of the Nigerian media Osun’s developmental strides.  Though Ripples is no member of the Guild, he was invited to join the August visitors in March.
    The bussed company, with the governor himself in-situ, set out, from the Oke Fia Government House, quietly enough.
    But they lost their anonymity that moment, at the Olaiya junction of Alekuwodo,  in Osogbo’s commercial hub, someone sighted the  governor, and let go a yelp.
    Before you knew it, an excited, beaming, dancing company was pumping fists and flashing “V” (for victory) signs, with their two fore-fingers, a sign original to Winston  Churchill, Britain’s World War 2 hero; but popularized in these climes by Chief Obafemi Awolowo, first premier of the old Western Region.
    The governor, himself a study in boyish excitement, returned the “V” compliment;  and an impromptu carnival of love, mutual doting and appreciation ensued.  As the convoy rolled slowly by, on the newly named Workers Avenue, so did the excited people swell in their numbers.
    But everything got to a head on the November 27 bridge, when the governor and his entourage disembarked, the accompanying officials explaining the work-in-progress; and the governor himself chipping in now and then, especially the engineering and technical details.
    The first leg of the tour was on the Oba Adesoji Aderemi ring road, that ripples with history, old and contemporary.
    Oba Aderemi (1889-1980), was Ooni of Ife (1930-1980); and was first indigenous governor of Western Region, during which time Chief Awolowo, as Premier, performed his social transformation wonders, that hauled the old West clear of the other regions, of North and East.
    But, as Oba Aderemi offers today’s Osun a symbolic tieback to the Awolowo golden age, so does its 17.5-kilometre stretch project, to a future Osun, clear historical landmarks.
    Those monuments capture its infrastructural remake, from a backwater “civil service” state that rose and fell by Abuja’s dole; to a land poised to harness its resources, in the finest tradition of the Yoruba Omoluabi.
    It is a classic case of history meeting the historic-minded.
    Those monuments?  Four bridges, really.
    Five Judges, to commemorate the five Court of Appeal justices, whose verdict reclaimed the Aregbesola mandate, after almost a four-year struggle; November 26, the day that judgment was given; November 27, when the first Aregbesola administration birthed, and August 9, the day the governor won re-election, despite the hideous plots to skew the vote, by the Jonathan Presidency, flush with success in a similar gambit in Ekiti.
    By design or by accident, November 27 and Bisi Akande Trumpet bridges appear the grandest of the signature road projects, wrapped in political symbols, that would in history, define the developmental temper of the Aregbesola years.
    Bisi Akande immortalizes Osun’s very first attempt at serious governance (1999-2003), since its creation in 1991.  But that attempt was scuttled, during the Obasanjo South West electoral tsunami of 2003.  November 27, on the other hand provided a doughty root for August 9, that day in 2014 the Osun local forces trumped illicit “federal might” to renew Aregbesola’s mandate.
    The rest of the project tour, the Osogbo Government High School, one of the 11 avant-grade public schools springing up in different locations of the state; and the Nelson Mandela Freedom Park, Osogbo, are no less impressive symbols of developmental governance.
    But the Mandela Freedom Park offers something somewhat novel — an informal museum of leisurely history.  Mingling with park seats, on close-cropped lawns, is a special section bearing busts of Titans of the progressive politics of the West, from different ages: Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Chief Bola Ige, Chief Bisi Akande and Asiwaju Bola Tinubu.
    Yet, another section of mini-galleries, boasts marble plaques, that encapsulate the tenure of every Osun governor, military or civilian, from Col. Leo Segun Aborisade, the first governor (military administrator) to Aregbesola himself.  So, as loungers relax, they can read up their history and civics.
    Dominating the park landscape is the impressive Atewogbeja Fountain, a tribute to the Osun river and its trove of fresh-water fishes.  The fountain waters are electrically programmed, at night, to tumble down in a rainbow of colours.
    Incidentally, the tour ended at Olaiya junction, with the unending tryst between an appreciative people and their governor!
    From the tour revelations, Osun, of the Aregbesola years, would appear in a flux of rapid change; to justify the Heraclitean quip: you can’t step in the same river twice!   Indeed, Osogbo had come a long way from the old rural town,  to a growing modern city, gradually holding its own in serenity and winning infrastructure, drawing new businesses across different sectors.
    So has Osun shrugged off its laggardness to, despite its puny resources, point the way in the schools feeding programme, which the Federal Government just adopted on a national scale.
    Surely then, the Aregbe legacy is assured, came what may?  Not exactly.
    Indeed, Osun is painfully poised at a critical juncture between the short-lived but enduring Western Renaissance under  Awo, before the SLA Akintola Demo forces blighted everything; and the  post-1999 Lagos of sound developmental governance and golden continuity, which has become a national reference.
    You could feel palpable panic, the way some Osun conservatives, in concert with Yoruba irredentists, tried to mould themselves into emergency Yoruba warriors against phantom Hausa-Fulani threat, when the Ife disturbance was nothing but mutual criminality.
    The Afenifere veterans that dived into bed with Femi Fani-Kayode’s subversive Yoruba nationalism would appear splashing in the Osun political river, panic-stricken that, after the Aregbe years, so much has changed you can’t step in the same river twice.
    So is Iyiola Omisore, with his trademark spew of verbal rot, perhaps gripped with the fear that, with the balance of forces, he might just be graduating, from serial failure to veteran failure, in his quixotic gubernatorial quest.
    Still, that would appear no done deal.  Even as Heraclitus declared nature was in a flux, Parminides, his Greek contemporary, countered nature was static and unchanging! That contradiction could give the conservatives some hope, no matter how tenuous.
    So, Osun could well be changing; but maybe not rapidly enough to banish that 2003 electoral ghost, that traded solid gold for glittering tinsel.  For that, the state paid a stiff price in hideous stagnation, in the dreadful pre-Aregbe years.
    However it goes, Aregbesola’s personal legacy, like Chief Awolowo’s before him, appears secure.
    But not the Osun developmental fate, ironically again, like the old West, where Awo wrought wonders only for the Demo renegades to blight everything.
    Osun’s best bet, therefore, is a post Aregbe-era of stellar developmental strides, anchored on present efforts.  That way, Osun may yet emerge the ultimate development wonder of the 4th Republic, just as the old West was the 1st Republic’s.
    Ay, Lagos holds that honour now.  But even the most doting of Lagosians would admit the post-1999 Tinubu movement (which incidentally Aregbesola was part of) only re-engineered a decaying former federal capital.  Osun, under Aregbe, never had such a head start.
    But the threat to Osun enjoying a Lagos-like golden continuation, and not enduring the old West’s reactionary roll-back, would appear to lie less with the Osun conservatives, no matter how desperate they may be, but with the governor’s own internal foes, craving pork but pretending all is cool.
    That is the direction to address, if Aregbe must, like Tinubu in Lagos, get the successor(s) to further entrench Osun’s unfolding renaissance.

  • Ode to ideas and compassion

    Ode to ideas and compassion

    For Asiwaju Bola Tinubu at 65, it is ode to brilliant ideas and deep compassion — and just as well; for no politician of his generation better epitomizes these two concepts.

    But the remarkable thing about this year’s birthday: that Tinubu philosophy, of razor-sharp ideas founded on deep compassion, is seeping into the grassroots.

    That was clear from the adoption, as part of the Tinubu 65th birthday, of 300 indigent pupils, from all of the 18 public primary schools, in Eredo Local Council Development Area (LCDA), in the Epe Local Government of Lagos State.

    That charity’s punch-line could well have come straight from the celebrator himself: “No child will be left behind”.

    Now, to some lexical arithmetic: if you graft compassion with ideas, what you get is compassionate ideas.

    That would appear the fundament of the Social Contract, that theoretical basis for the pristine government, in which the people surrender parts of their rights, in exchange for welfare and protection, by the mutually empowered Leviathan.

    Until neo-cons, under US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher (both late) seized the globe by the scruff, and left the world much poorer, hungrier and angrier, compassionate ideas, as government policy, was given.

    Indeed, the democratic concept of the vote-for-sound-governance would appear a logical flow from that given, subject, of course, to voter renewal or rejection, at periodic elections.

    But then the neo-cons came, changed state compassion to capital worship, and condemned the people to scrounging majority need from minority greed.  Governance has since never been the same!

    So, when Asiwaju Tinubu, at the 9th Bola Tinubu Colloquium, with the theme, “Make it in Nigeria: use what we make and make what we use “, declared the political economy must work for the people, he was only reasserting an instinct that had endeared him to millions of Nigerians.

    Tinubu, as grand symbol of compassionate ideas, as the cornerstone of governance, was apparent from the attendance mix at the May 28 colloquium in Lagos.

    The policy geeks were there in numbers.  So were entrepreneurs, thriving or budding, eager to mix and mingle with the governmental royals,  on fresh ideas for national economic redemption — all under the grand mastermind of Vice President Yemi Osinbajo.

    But so too were the political hoi polloi, beneficiaries of the legendary Tinubu empathy, no less eager to celebrate with their champion.

    From the inaugural colloquium in 2008, Prof. Osinbajo had been the quiet but acute mind, bossing this yearly festival of ideas.

    The inaugural theme, “Every vote must count” was a logical response to President Olusegun Obasanjo’s “do-or-die” election of 2007, that foisted the late Umaru Musa Yar’Adua as president, in what would prove the beginning of the end for the former ruling party.

    But even poor Yar’Adua — goodly soul! — recoiled at that “election”.  He therefore set up the Justice Muhammadu Uwais Electoral Review Panel.  That inspired Tinubu’s own Coalition of Democrats for Electoral Reforms (CODER), which drove the theme for the first-ever Tinubu colloquium: Every vote must count.

    So, from the harsh Siberia of opposition, when the PDP loomed, as if it would swing its threat of 60-year uninterrupted rule, Prof. Osinbajo had run the colloquium; to engage the polity on cutting ideas, in a political economy neither proud of its past nor clear about its future.

    This year, the Tinubu colloquium has engaged the Buhari government, in which Osinbajo serves as vice-president; aside from other Nigerians.  Between Tinubu and Osinbajo then, it is as Chief Obafemi Awolowo, himself the most vigorous ideas man of his generation, quipped: only the deep can call to the deep.

    Unlike the Shakespearean Ides of March that doomed Caesar, the Tinubu Colloquium is morphing into grand Ideas of March, that could well save a nation.

    So is the novel Eredo Epe charity, saving the rural poor.  No less striking was its symbolism: an act of compassion, to toast Tinubu at 65, to kick-start the birthday celebrations, their unique Eredo way.

    It is equally interesting how the Indigent Pupils Adoption Programme came about.  Shamsideen Adeniyi, former secretary to the Eredo LCDA, whose Ojo Ibukun Foundation is chief driver of the charity, recalled how he observed the acute discomfort of a bare-foot pupil, one hot afternoon, in the Eredo country.

    As his boisterous mates barged on the tar, seemingly without a care, the poor child skipped, now on the hot tar, then in the adjoining bushes — all the “kokoma” dance just to relieve the searing afternoon heat, on his shoe-less sole!  Even then, his short was tattered.  So was his shirt. Of course, he logged a rude sack for a school bag, which was all the more remarkable for its full emptiness!

    That set Adeniyi furiously thinking — with a mere N5, 000, this child could get two pairs of uniforms, a pair of school scandals, a doughty bag to carry his books and some dozen exercise books for school work.  The Indigent Pupils Adoption Programme was born — and in its first coming in 2016, it benefitted 100 pupils!

    But then, Wasiu Odeyemi, aka Wastab, another big shot in the Eredo political universe, bought into the idea, adopting 120 of the 300 beneficiaries this year, under the ambit of his Hassmowun Foundation (after his late parents, Hassan and Omowunmi who, especially his mother, were great lovers of education).

    Both foundations agreed to use the event, the second in the series, to celebrate Asiwaju Tinubu at 65; and in that, drew virtually every who-is-who in that community.

    From 100 in 2016 to 300 in 2017, Adeniyi’s Ojo Ibukun Foundation, with collaborating partners, would continue expanding the scheme until it achieves its ultimate goal — No child will be left behind.

    What is more?  Every beneficiary child would be yearly kitted throughout his or her primary school years. That is the term for adoption, and donors have bought into it.

    Asiwaju Tinubu must feel doubly proud: his persona inspiring charity to the society’s most vulnerable; and his policy temper, spawning progressive thinkers, even at the grassroots.  For Lagos, that is good news.

    In Achebe-speak, for Tinubu-esque compassionate ideas, it’s morning yet, on creation day!

  • Fani leads ‘em to Kigali

    Fani leads ‘em to Kigali

    Femi Fani-Kayode is strutting to Kigali.  Yet, the Yoruba nation — at least its media-savvy denizens — barge along, too angry, it appears, to remember their essence.

    When did the cherished Omoluabi credo (in-born nobility, founded on honour, equity and justice) start endorsing criminality, simply because the alleged perpetrator is Yoruba?

    Or what else do you call this rabid atavism over the Ile-Ife crisis, except giving tribal cover to heinous crime and brazen criminality?

    What is this — some early-day hubris, of a people set to fall upon their proud heritage of uncompromising fairness, as a diminished Roman great would fall on his own sword?

    Or a more sinister end-stage decadence, of a people that boast nothing now but once-upon-a-time fairness?

    These are troubling questions.  But they demand rigorous answers, in the hysteria of the moment.

    It started with Fani’s usually tendentious pieces (this one, a two-piece grenade) that gave the Ife crisis the stark colouration of ethnic saints and sinners.  Yet, the miscreants involved, Yoruba or Hausa-Fulani, are suspected criminals.

    Why, good old Femo, flush with emotive lather, even branded himself the Hitler of the moment!  That ought to have exposed his sinister motive.

    But no!  Other Yoruba leaders and pressure groups have jumped into the fray, each and everyone rippling with a rather explosive dose of Yoruba ultra-nationalism!

    Without risking an ad hominem fallacy, you could see through the early launchers of this emotive war, fired from tribal missiles.

    Femi Fani-Kayode has gained unfettered notoriety for cunning emotional claptrap, disguised as some reasoned real deal.  Though only the obtuse get hooked, that tribe boasts great numbers in today’s Nigeria.

    Between the old Afenifere and the Buhari Presidency, there appears no love lost; since the grandees so spectacularly backed the wrong horse at the 2015 elections.

    With disturbing Yoruba ultra-nationalism issuing from the Afenifere camp, “Hausa-Fulani”, to that frazzled assembly, sounds like throwing the red flag at a snorting bull.  Add downtown rage from the Odua People’s Congress (OPC) and allied clans, and you may well see, in full emotive gargoyle, howlers from 2015, seeking some rogue closure to their pain.

    But the real surprise, in the trending Yoruba ultra-nationalism, using the Yoruba cradle as launch pad, would appear the Afenifere Renewal Group (ARG).  That is the real tragedy, for though ARG is proudly Yoruba — and correctly and unapologetically so — its reasoned mien, since it broke away, tended to shun the supremacist gait of its pristine elder cousin.  All that seemed melted with the ARG response to the Ife crisis.

    The problem with ultra-nationalism, in a delicate federation, is  that it is good for no one.  Not a few believe “Hausa-Fulani” ultra-nationalism is expressed in the notorious “Fulani herdsmen”, that kill with murderous bravura and satanic flourish.  That has set the whole of the southern media in a tailspin of rage.

    But that scalding rage, which belches visceral hatred across regional and ethnic lines, is counter-media terrorism, which erects an intriguing match-up between physical and psychological siege.

    The Fulani herdsman slits the throat.  The hate-belching media rips the soul.  The situation is lose-lose, for the innocents, on both sides, are tarred and cooked.

    The herdsman libels his race as free-wheeling, conscienceless killers.  The howling media damns a whole people as murderous monsters, beyond redemption; and those it defends as primeval bigots.

    That can only point to the blood-soaked road to Kigali, on which hate-filled Rwandans killed first, reasoned later — when it was too late!  A shocked globe reclined from that horror!

    The Fulani antipathy, which shaped much of the reaction to the Ife crisis, and the role of the state in it all, lead the discourse right back to the subject.

    There is a strong case to be made against the alleged lop-sided arrests in the Ife communal dispute.  It takes two to tango; and apparent one-sided arrests are bound to set the alarm bells clanging for fairness.

    The Police had better issue a convincing explanation, or they risk being charged with odious partisanship; and perceived as aiding  and abetting ethnic crimes, thus actively undermining the state.  That is tragic — and treasonable.

    Frankly, President Muhammadu Buhari and his security apparatus have earned fair blame over the rampaging killer herdsmen.  These guys are felons, who the state should bring to heel and fast.  The more the Federal Government tarries over these heinous criminals, the more the president gets gravely de-marketed, along ethnic lines.

    But it is sheer fallacy to hang, on the president’s neck, the crime of a few “Hausa-Fulani”; and go ahead to hint, as many of these media reports do, at culpable presidential enabling for this gory criminality.

    For all the president’s faults, he is no devious fellow.  Besides, such supposition is illiterate and wilful.  No self-respecting media pushes such a line.

    Unfortunately, that is the line Fani is wilfully pushing on the Ife crisis, with the other so-called Yoruba leaders in tow.  But really — Yoruba leaders?  Or just soulless dealers, in willy-nilly relevance, mortally scared of creeping but sure oblivion?

    Let every felon — Hausa, Fulani or Yoruba — be arrested for their ignoble role, in the Ife fracas.  But let no one, pleading alleged lop-sided arrests, push to spring genuine criminals, under the cover of ethnic solidarity.  Failure to do justice to all leads to two fatal passes.

    One junction leads to Kigali.  Perceived government cover for crimes, under ethnic sympathy, arouses the explosive ghost of Hutu-Tutsi antipathy, that brought Rwanda to its knees, after its security agencies had been thoroughly demarketed and devalued, incidentally, by its hurting media.  It is baiting avoidable anarchy.

    The other, no less suicidal, is the road to Mogadishu.  That should be of riveting interest to the Yoruba nation.  Somalia fell upon itself, despite being of essentially one ethnic stock, because it harboured wilful criminality among its own.

    After the Kiriji War of the 19th century, is the Yoruba breeding certified felons to plague its future, whether inside or outside Nigeria?

    That is what you do when you rationalize criminality in the Yoruba cradle, simply because the victims are “other people”.

  • At 80: Ebora Owu sweet and sour

    At 80: Ebora Owu sweet and sour

    From his wild rants, Ayo Fayose, Ekiti governor, cuts the picture of a doomed dog, deaf to the hunter’s whistle.
    His gruff request for a “refund”, of “his” N10 million, the then President Olusegun Obasanjo allegedly extorted for his presidential library, from sitting governors in 2005, could well be due comeuppance for brazen hypocrisy.  But it was no less graceless, coming at the zenith of celebrating the old man at 80.
    Still, that was pure Karma at work!  As a younger man, Obasanjo himself, in Not My Will,  had poked rude jabs at seniors, professional and biological.
    On account of the February 1976 coup, which claimed Gen. Murtala Muhammad, Obasanjo had summarily condemned Gen. Yakubu Gowon, his former commander-in-chief, thundering “Mr. Gowon” would face trial — and sure conviction and execution — should he set foot on Nigerian soil.
    Well Gowon, his honour restored, is alive to see a coarser Fayose do to Obasanjo, what Obasanjo did to him!
    On Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s failed presidential ambition, he mocked: what Awo craved all his illustrious life, he, a mere boy from the Egba backwaters, got on a platter of gold.
    Why, he even slammed the great Zik of Africa as ending life as Owelle of Onitsha!
    But even as Karma’s agent, Fayose just doomed himself to a similar fate!
    It is this vigorous paradox of immaculate rot that makes the Obasanjo public persona puzzle at 80.
    The Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library (OOPL) need not be the biblical whited sepulchre, glittering outside, rotten within.  But given its suspect moral provenance, it risks boiling down to just that, despite its huge historical potentials.  Talk of a rigged process to an immaculate end!
    Since Gen. Obasanjo first hit on Nigeria, as Civil War hero, Federal Works commissioner under Gen. Gowon, Gen. Murtala Muhammad’s chief of staff, Supreme Headquarters, and later military Head of State, he had always projected public high-mindedness.
    Under his tenure as military head of state, he changed the National Anthem, arguing that the new reflected Nigeria’s African essence more than the old.  He also conceived the National Pledge, an everyday awakening of the dormant patriotism in the citizenry.
    Even as Lord of Manor at Dodan Barracks, Lagos, the Obasanjo regime pushed out official civic communications that compared the government to a dustbin, into which citizens rightly throw their garbage!  Moral?  Governments — even under juntas — must be humble and long-suffering, always putting citizen’s rights and welfare first.
    As elected president, he founded the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), with the volcanic Nuhu Ribadu as first chairman, thus mainstreaming the War Against Corruption; as well as the ICPC, to lesser applause.  Still on anti-corruption infrastructure, he established the Due Process Office, under Oby Ezekwesili, to check the soulless padding of contracts.
    Of course, under his economic “reforms”, away from the public sector-led ethos of his first coming, he crowned the local Breton Woods royals of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Charles (later Chukwuma) Soludo, Ezekwezili, and Nasir El-Rufai who, as first Bureau for Public Enterprises boss, birthed the first set of privatization of public companies; and liberalized the telecoms sector.
    But Obasanjo’s flaw has always been failure to walk the talk of his own high-mindedness.  That has been responsible for the sweet-and-sour that has pork-marked his public persona, spanning some 47 years since 1970.
    Even under the growl of Ribadu’s anti-corruption rhetoric, cynical extortion, that was the fund-raiser for the OOPL, strutted in full public glare, probity be damned!
    Or how else would you call a sitting president, doubling as oil minister, suborning the cream of the Nigerian economy, to “donate” to a private cause, dressed in public garb?  But that was even on the narrow economic front.
    On the far larger canvas of politics and constitutionalism,  Obasanjo’s, through Ribadu’s EFCC, was the ultimate paradox of an absolute corruption war corrupting absolutely!
    Tornado Obasanjo, flush with cynical puritanism, blasted the Constitution and blighted the impeachment clause.  Enter then, the tragi-comic lingo of “simple minority”, for “impeaching” state governor-enemies of the presidential Leviathan!
    The motif of the Leviathan-come-to-crush all was also all too apparent, in the fate of the hubris-stricken Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and its eventual destruction.
    That, to be sure, was mutual opportunism gone awry: Obasanjo wanted power to crow about his “greatness”; a manipulative military cabal, with their civilian side-kicks, wanted a pawn, to sustain their hegemony.  But the pawn soon turned brazen manipulator, and the PDP goose was cooked.    Good riddance!
    As usual, the Ebora Owu has claimed everything good and decent left the PDP when he did.  But that is a sweet, self-serving lie.  Fact: Obasanjo moulded the PDP from a neither-nor power machine, to a partisan monster, with a “do-or-die” electoral temper.
    Poor, naive Goodluck Jonathan was the ultimate fall guy, for he got buried under its rubble, ironically to Obasanjo’s sanctimonious applause!
    This paradox of immaculate case housing a rotten core, and its dire testimony to history, may have propelled Obasanjo’s manic essay at self-written history: My Command, Not My Will, Under My Watch — the narcissistic “My” would appear no accident! — and of course, the ultimate in self-erected shrines, the OOPL, first in Africa!
    What drives all this racket of intellect, and thunder of integrity, positioning the former president as the model of honest and enlightened citizenry?
    Perhaps Buhari and Awo.  President Muhammadu Buhari is as taciturn as Obasanjo is voluble.  But his unquestionable integrity quakes and vibrates, like when you roll a vessel filled to the brim — the telling opposite of the grating and scraping, of rolling an empty one!
    Now that Buhari is also president, history has a choice, between tinsel and solid gold, in presidential integrity.
    Chief Obafemi Awolowo (1909-1987) never attained federal power.  But in distilled public intellectualism, of plotting a way out of Nigeria’s morass, he is nonpareil so far.
    Obasanjo, on the other hand, has authored a lot of narcissistic tomes, detailing his watch, at his many layers of responsibility, in an active engagement with contemporary Nigeria, climaxing with the presidency.
    Again, between Awo and Obasanjo, history has its pick, if the subject is rigour and cutting-edge ideas.
    One clear difference between Awo and Obasanjo, though: while an intellectually restless Awo craved a more workable Nigeria, bench-marking Jeremy Bentham’s greatest good of the greatest number, Obasanjo thoroughly understood — and still understands — his Nigeria, and for good and for ill, thoroughly milked it.
    Perhaps Obasanjo’s greatest tribute?  That he was great. But only because Nigeria was puny, as Gulliver beside Lilliput!  If ever Nigeria hits its dizzying heights, he could well turn a dwarf.
    Still, to the Ebora Owu, happy birthday  at 80!

  • That Soludo yabis

    That Soludo yabis

    The Soludo bomb, that the Buhari Presidency met a poor economy, but made it poorer still, is somewhat reminiscent of Fela (God bless his soul) in his African Shrine days.
    When the irreverent Afrobeat king-priest got into his elements, and his doting votaries were taut with expectations, this breezy question-and-answer would ensue:
    “Make I yab dem?” asked the self-named chief priest.
    “Yab dem!” roared the doting adherents.
    And Fela would begin his scathing excoriation of the then extant order. Enter “yabis”, into Nigeria’s urban lexicon.
    So, when Chukwuma Charles Soludo, former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, viciously bombed Buhari on how he had further damaged a thoroughly damaged economy that he inherited, Ripples’ mind just darted to vintage Fela!
    But the Presidency’s riposte couldn’t have been more apt, with civil language to boot.
    Laolu Akande, senior special assistant to the Vice President, pointedly told Prof. Soludo he was directing his venom at the wrong quarters. Though he admitted Soludo’s democratic right to his opinion, he insisted Nigerians too had democratic right to facts.
    And the facts? The economy tottered because of past wrong-headed policies and bad judgments; which had made an overhaul imperative. He then threw, at the former CBN boss, one or two paradoxes.
    A past government, awash with petro-dollars, didn’t have any to invest in crucial infrastructure, physical or social.
    Yet, a present order struggles with tight funding. But from that little, it is making strategic investments in roads and rail; aside from a school feeding programme, part of a social investment programme (SIP), targeted at the poorest Nigerians; as well as special interventions to engage unemployed graduates.
    Akande’s clincher: “The Buhari administration is spending more on infrastructure at a time when resources are lean. When we had abundant revenues, what happened was profligacy and plunder.”
    Besides, the old order made a fetish of liberalization and modernization, so much so that local refining was almost taboo. But the newly released Economic Recovery Plan (ERP) is already projecting export of refined petroleum by 2020, under its “sufficiency in energy” sub-head, food security that would give agriculture and agric-processing a boost, improved transportation infrastructure and (re)industrialization to further domesticate the economy; and save foreign exchange from needless imports.
    Moral: as the Greek, Heraclitus the philosopher quipped, you cannot step in the same river twice (so rapid is the flux of change). So, the Buhari government and Soludo would appear talking about different economies.
    While the present government works towards a restructured economy, with stress on local refining and heavy local manufacturing (though the electricity side of the equation still looks suspect), Soludo seems fixated on Breton Woods’ sanctified globalization: a sanctimonious artificial balance of books and triumphal declaration of “growth” sans development — total fidelity to an ideology propelled on western global ascendancy; but dooming other economies as perpetual laggards.
    A pointer to this direction would appear Soludo’s clincher that he doubted the magic the Buhari government would do to bring the naira-dollar parity to the pre-May 2015 exchange rate. Naira parity —was that a Freudian slip symptomatic of a mind fixated on imports, so that watching the naira exchange yo-yo becomes some sick national pastime?
    The Soludo-Buhari Presidency debate would appear a difference between two ideological paths, destined to lead to two different destinations. The snag though is that one of the sides assumes the self-evident superiority of its own view, that it practically stamps it as received economic wisdom. Such vanity!
    Very early in the Buhari Presidency, Oby Ezekwesili, without any sense of irony, rebuked the president, who had balked at the devaluation of the naira, that excessive sticking to dogma would not fix the economy. It didn’t even occur to Madam Due Process, of the Obasanjo era, that even her comments were shaped by dogma!
    That exactly had been the mindset all through the Obasanjo-Jonathan era, with the trio of Soludo (CBN governor), Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (Finance minister, and under Jonathan, coordinating minister of the Economy) and Ezekwesili (Due Process and later Education minister), playing star roles.
    Soludo, as Obasanjo’s chief economic adviser, theorized to no end. He authored NEEDS (National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy), and its state and local government adjuncts of SEEDS and LEEDS; and as CBN czar, he floated the Strategic Agenda for the Naira, which soon landed him in hot soup with the new Yar’adua Presidency.
    But note that NEEDS and its adjuncts were not built on any concept of federalizing the economy, but on the age-old over-centralization that has brought nothing but ruin.
    Dr. Okonjo-Iweala, during the Obasanjo and Jonathan years, was a faithful votary of her metropolitan gods, merrily mouthing “growth”, wearing a smack over “healthy” foreign reserves, and reeling out fanciful “jobs” and stats. Yet, the real sector, of manufacturing and agriculture, were virtually dead. She even came up with “rebasing” that hauled a shell as the “largest in Africa”!
    As for Dr. Ezekwesili, “due process”, as laudable as that was, became almost a fetish in itself, recording fulsome “savings”! Still, none of these “savings” propelled a policy of sound infrastructure, beyond the proverbial lip service. No wonder then, that under Jonathan, less than six years later, everything went up in smoke!
    So, when Soludo claimed a bad economy was “further destroyed”, he referred to the self-promoted bubble his ideological clan pushed during their hey days. But that was no economy, despite all the arcane sound and fury. It was a mirage programmed for smoke.
    The thing though is if you “damage” an already bad economy, on the way to re-tooling it, you you have followed a natural process to renewal. That is the logical way to go, even with initial pains.
    That, Soludo and clan must appreciate. Their virtual economy model has led us nowhere but ruin. It’s time we tried another direction — of well and truly domesticating the economy.
    When that happens, the naira would find its true parity, without damage to anyone.

  • From Iroko to Arakunrin: Ondo on the march again

    From Iroko to Arakunrin: Ondo on the march again

    Oluwarotimi Odunayo Akeredolu, SAN, as simply “Arakunrin” (Yoruba for generic male, connoting “commoner”), reminds one of Shakespeare’s tragic hero, Caius Marcius Coriolanus, in the play, Coriolanus.
    In the most romantic accounts, Coriolanus was a boy-general, crucial to victories against the Volscians, fierce rival-neighbours of old Rome, though Coriolanus was hardly out of his teens.
    But a more realistic account portrays Coriolanus as a young general, but veteran of many triumphs, so much so that Rome’s survival depended almost solely on his valour.
    On the face value, there appears a gulf between Akeredolu and Coriolanus. The one is 60, well past mid-life, lugging enough life experience for his last stretch to old age. The other was young, just eyeing mid-life, as callow as they came.
    Still, similarities abound. After conquering legal practice by taking the silk, Akeredolu has turned his attention to politics.
    Coriolanus did not quite “conquer” warring, for that remained his first and abiding love. But after so much blood and gore, Volumnia, his influential mother, felt Rome must elect his son as consul, and promptly nudged the reluctant young man towards her wish.
    And there-in lies the closest comparison: politics meant Coriolanus, proud as a cock, vain as a peacock, must wear humility like a gown; which nevertheless sat rather ill on him. Provoked during his campaign for consul, by the treacherous tribunes, he blew his tops and embraced avoidable tragedy.
    Governance, it appears, is shunting Rotimi Akeredolu, SAN, the aristocratic lawyer, and Aketi, the colourful, if controversial politician, to Arakunrin, the commoner-governor.
    Would this newfound humility hold, when the chips are down, and the heat of office sears? Or will the Aketi volcanic temper, like Coriolanus’s, blast everything into smithereens? That rests in the belly of time.
    Still, in Ondo and environs, coining gubernatorial monikers, of the most theatrical hue, appears the fundament of branding a new government.
    In his eight-year suzerainty, former Governor Olusegun Mimiko relished his Iroko byname, which projected solidity and strength; and harvested tumultuous roars in Ondo streets.
    In the past seven years, Osun Governor, Rauf Aregbesola has milked his Ogbeni (simply Mr) moniker, which reinforces his projected image of the governor as the man next door — no frills, no thrills, just work.
    Aketi, as governor, has gone even a step further, in projected gubernatorial humility — a commoner-governor at everyone’s beck and call, ready to serve, at the shortest of notices. That’s a sweet change from a rather cantankerous profile, with explosive newspaper interviews, ringing with venom!
    A ready-to-serve governor, humble and focused, would register rather well with the long-suffering Ondo people, after the Mimiko years that promised so much, but delivered too little. That has left Ondo with quite some catch-up to do, at least when compared with its South West neighbours. Yet, with its oil wealth, Ondo is potentially the richest in all of the South West.
    Yes, Lagos boasts more cash from the Federation Account; and raises much more as internally generated revenue. But divide the resources of Lagos with its 20 million-plus population, and Ondo’s with its less than four million people, and Lagos appears statistically poorer.
    Still, it would be inordinate comparing or contrasting Lagos with Ondo. For one, Lagos, aside from a former federal capital, is one of the first-generation states, created in 1967. It is 50 this year. Besides, for the past 18 years since the birth of the 4th Republic, Lagos has built an awesome record in physical and social infrastructure, so much so that it is easily the national reference point.
    Not so, comparing Ondo with its clusters of South West neighbours. Ondo is far younger than Lagos. Unlike Lagos, Ondo has not witnessed progressive continuation under the same party, or more accurately, movement, for that long stretch. But neither have states like Ekiti, Osun, Oyo and Ogun.
    Ekiti, under Governor Kayode Fayemi, was a study in development policies, though a tragic shortfall in matching politics would lead to the premature electoral ouster of that government, after just four years. Yet, it is clear Ekiti was on its way to planned, deliberate and sustainable development, before the advent of the Ayo Fayose burlesque of stomach infrastructure.
    Osun, much younger than Ondo (created in 1991, compared to Ondo’s 1976) has even fared much better since 1999, despite some indifferent governments. In the past seven years, in spite of its lean purse, the Aregbesola government has shown the greatest hunger for social and physical infrastructure in all of the South West, so much so that Osun is set to break out of its extant mode: a civil service state worth almost nothing outside the ultra-narrow economics of civil servants’ salaries.
    Ogun and Oyo, second-generation states like Ondo, have made their strides too. Oyo was happy beneficiary as seat of the old Western Region. Even then, after a series of uninspiring governments since 1999, Oyo State, under Governor Biola Ajimobi, has essayed the heights Oyo should clear in sound infrastructure. But it’s work-in-progress yet.
    Ogun, in the past 14 years, under Governors Gbenga Daniel and Ibikunle Amosun, though under different parties and differing gubernatorial tempers, has maximally leveraged its contiguity to Lagos to jack up internally generated revenue and rev up physical infrastructure; in modern roads and bridges. But again, there is much more to do.
    Whither Ondo in all of these, particularly when compared with its immediate peers of Ogun and Oyo?
    The late Governor Olusegun Agagu had great vision in infrastructure, for he authored many bridges to link up the riverine areas that produce the state’s oil wealth, with the mainland that harbours its agricultural wealth. But the governor’s lack of legitimacy, no thanks to two controversial elections, blighted his agenda, from turning into legacy.
    In contrast, immediate past Governor, Dr. Mimiko, lugged fearsome legitimacy, and humongous street popularity, after retrieving a stolen mandate from the courts and winning the first second term in Ondo history. Many contend he tried his best. But many more also argue that he spent an inordinate time on political gaming, fired by cheap trickery, busy playing the end against the middle, that he failed flat to deliver on his stunning potentials.
    It is, therefore, a state rich in potentials, but tragically short on actualization, in comparison with its peers, that new Governor Akeredolu has inherited. Nothing bad in following the Iroko tradition of telling political symbolism, starting with a winning gubernatorial branding.
    But from Iroko to Arakunrin, what the Ondo people crave are unstinted service and veritable results, even if theatrical sobriquets and performance are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
    That is why Akeredolu must hit the ground hard, shun the temptation to play the Leviathan of both party and government, and give petty distractions a wide, wide berth.
    Besides, he should leverage, to the full, the South West economic integration protocol, being forged by the Development Agenda for Western Nigeria (DAWN) Commission.
    Otherwise, he risks the Mimiko self-rout of, blinded by hubris, trading putative greatness for pathetic ordinariness.
    That would be yet another hope-betrayed by a longsuffering people.