Sometime in October 2016, a colleague on The Nation Editorial Board asked if Ripples would be available to review a book, soon billed for launch, on Nigerian contemporary politics and history.
The book’s title was provocative – how a people who never fought a war became the losers of that war. It promised something, if the author could rigorously pull off his argument.
But it turned a damp squib – for the author just went on a fanciful binge of emotive bombast and ethnic slurring, though he was very careful, on the surface, to project formidable erudition. Still, it was all to a skewed end.
On launch day, a captive and zestful audience was eager to hear what they wanted to hear. But it was Ripples’ duty, based on facts from the book, to pronounce the exact opposite.
It ended civil enough, though it could easily have turned another “civil war”. In fairness to the zesty author, he was just a soul brimming with ideas and eager to joust – but not shy of unabashed self-exhibition. We parted shaking hands.
But why this long preface? It is the umpteenth matter of the national question, among Nigeria’s many ethnics; which has become a cacophony, parallel to the nationwide hangover of hisses, grunts and moans, after decades of wild parties and wanton waste.
Indeed, while misery is democratized (for hunger boasts no ethnic monopoly, just as the mindless sleaze that resulted in this present meltdown was a pan-Nigeria rot), the parallel privation-driven dissonance, is leading many ethnics to re-examine, even more acutely, their place in the Nigerian common wealth.
Indeed, it echoes a grim paradox of the modern state, particularly the post-colonial states of Africa, as examined by Prof. Wale Adebanwi, in his new book, Nation as Grand Narrative: The Nigerian Press and the Politics of Meaning.
In that analysis, Adebanwi, citing sundry authorities, painted a classical state-nation dichotomy of African states. Whereas the African state looks so real (“densely corporeal”, he dubbed it) in its physical might, it is so ghostly and flighty, if its claim is nationhood, with any common core (“elusively spectral”, he called it).
That, of course, offers a robust intellectual foundation for Nigeria’s “re-structuring”: from a dysfunctional unitary state masquerading as federal, to a functional federation, where all of the ethnics are more sure-footed about what they pool into, and what they get from, the common wealth.
So, the issue is not if “re-structuring”, or “true federalism” or any of its much bandied variants is desirable. After languishing in the jungle of military rule for eons, and moving round in circles, on the federal question, in almost 18 years of continuous civil rule, it is clear Nigeria’s eventual salvation is in a vibrant federal state.
But can the agitators measure up to the strict muster of the ideal? That is doubtful, which is quite reminiscent of the author cited at the start of this piece, who promised, via his new book, much vigorous thinking but delivered instead flabby emotions!
First, it would help to start from the recent beginning, before moving to the very genesis.
The renewed clamour for a restructured Nigeria came immediately before the 2015 general election; and reached new hysteria after that election was lost and won.
The one fancied the fond hope to gain from the pre-election gaming of “restructuring”, which turned forlorn by decisive defeat. The other was sheer hysteria to cope with — or more aptly, cunning escapism from — the shattering angst of electoral wallop.
That about captures the portrait of the newfound Salvation Army of “restructuring” from the South-South and South East, and their brash orchestra.
The curious irony, though, is that mainstream elements from these parts of Nigeria had been most comfy with the ancien regime from 1999 — and even before — and its arch-centralist ways.
What might have changed? A Saul has turned to Paul, with the speed of light, even without the blinding lights on the way to Damascus?
Even more curiously, the South-South, under President Goodluck Jonathan, had an ample, if not golden, opportunity to push for restructuring. But their elite-in-power manifested the same avid rapacity, for which they lampooned and excoriated the “Hausa-Fulani”. With frenzy, they gobbled up the national barn – bumper harvest with tender seedlings, restructuring be damned!
An extremist strain of the South East now puts its faith in “Biafra”. The moderate mainstream now embraces “restructuring”, with the ardour of a neophyte clasping his new dogma. Yet, more than any other, the South East elite had, pre-2015, been the most zestful collaborators in the Nigerian power racket, which suddenly has become a hateful gargoyle!
With talks of a putative Igbo presidency, would the restructuring ardour cool after, just as it did with the South-South, under Jonathan? Time, as Jimmy Cliff, the reggae superstar crooned, will tell.
That returns the discourse to the South West battalion of the restructuring Salvation Army, in a patriotic blitz to save Nigeria!
On restructuring, not even the meanest or most cynical of foes could doubt the resolve and constancy of these war-hardened South West veterans. From time immemorial, that had been their regional anthem.
But pause and ask: what drives the message of this contemporary army?
Yoruba nationalism? That’s legitimate. The Nigerian crisis of nationhood stems from the fact that each component ethnic projects its essence as the exemplar for a cobbled state, yearning for a winning formative ethos.
So, Yoruba nationalism cannot be bad, any more than Igbo, Hausa, Itsekiri or Tiv nationalism. In any case, Nigeria craves a sound federation because of its many proud but competing nationalities.
Yoruba irredentism? That is bad. Irredentism is a precursor to domination, for it projects a superiority complex that suggests domination is a divine duty, for which the dominated must be grateful. That was absent from the Yoruba pristine push for federal Nigeria, from the Obafemi Awolowo era.
But now? Many South West veterans, in this patriotic war, sound nativist, if not outright irredentist. That is to be decried — for irredentism cannot be bad for the Fulani, but good for the Yoruba.
Still, that might well be strains of frustration, borne out of phobia for a clear receding influence, on this polity of many pathologies. So striking a blow for federalism, and fighting off creeping irrelevance, might just be two sides of the same coin.
Which calls on the starry-eyed to be wary. Restructuring for a productive federation is the straight-and-narrow way to Nigeria’s salvation.
But beware: there also appears a parallel wide and merry way. It teems with gamers, for personal or group relevance; and leads the naive, bristling with innocent ardour on the federal question, straight to nowhere but perdition.
Category: Olakunle Abimbola
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National question or just gaming for relevance?
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Magu agonistes
Shorn of its classical flavour, this headline simply means the agony (or many agonies) of Magu.
But why might Ibrahim Magu, acting chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), be in agony?
Did he, like Diezani Alison-Madueke, former minister of Petroleum Resources, just forfeit US $153 million (N34 billion) to the Federal Government, which the presiding judge, Justice Muslim Hassan, ruled were proceeds of crime, allegedly laundered on her behalf?
Were Mrs. Alison-Madueke to be docked, does this verdict not become some support evidence for conviction, like the sword of Damocles, dangling over her?
Sword of Damocles? Many in the Diezani camp would love that, despite its eternal dread and harsh moral stricture, for the sword of Damocles never comes down!
Not so, the millions of the dispossessed baying for blood — and rightly so! That furious breed would wish the sword of Lady Justice, too slow for their liking, swished down with a zing, and chopped off every sticky finger!
Or is Magu facing the storm like Andrew Yakubu, former Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) managing director, who just got caught out “icing” US $ 9.8 million and 74, 000 Pounds Sterling, in an indifferent facility. One cheeky fellow, on facebook, promptly dubbed that dodgy facility the “Central Bank of Southern Kaduna”!
Or is he, for that matter, James Ibori, former Delta governor, who just left a British gaol house. Despite his conviction and punishment, Ibori faces a life-time exertion, yarning his odyssey was a British tale by the moonlight.
From his tumultuous welcome, his Delta people seem to believe him; even if that results more from wishful thinking, than from dutiful reason. From outside Delta? Ibori draws disdainful rebuff.
So, why is agony the lot of Magu, when he is no former convict like Ibori or lugging heavy but reasonable suspicion like Dr. Yakubu and Mrs. Alison-Madueke? Indeed, why — when his noble chore, to propel a corrupt-free society, is directly linked to the due exposure (and disgrace) of this trio?
Why is there more zest in some Deltans rationalizing Ibori’s guilt, than in Nigerians massing in Magu’s corner, in his titanic face-down with organized corruption, located in some otherwise sacred institutions of state, stained by profane characters — democratic institutions conceived for the people’s welfare but now programmed, it appears, to ensure their ruin?
That is the grand paradox of contemporary Nigeria, where, as in WB Yeats’s “The Second Coming”, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity”.
To the unwary, therefore, the forces behind this vile paradox are formidable, so much so that beside them, the all-mighty Nigerian state is not unlike puny Lilliputians beside the mighty Gulliver, in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
But to the perceptive, these all-mighty powers of evil are no more than a tussled and ruffled dog, barking away its panic. That cannot be strength. It is pitiable weakness. That about sums up the palpable panic, in the camp of the corrupt, towards the Magu Senate confirmation.
Perhaps a brief tie-back to the EFCC evolution is necessary, to properly situate the Magu fright, in the camp of the guilty, who in any case, are always afraid.
President Olusegun Obasanjo did well to inspire and establish the EFCC, as part of his zero tolerance for corruption agenda. The snag, however, was that while Obasanjo always piously piped his integrity, like the Wole Soyinka tiger proclaiming its “tigeritude”, not many could recognize that immaculate tiger if they saw one! What is the myth of the tiger, if it didn’t instil recognition by instant dread?
Besides, Vice President Abubakar Atiku was always a victim of unsavoury whispering campaigns, that always mumbled the worst. Perhaps by the occupational hazard of being a politician, the former veepee had not felt obliged to make a scapegoat of his many traducers and their evil sotto voce. That has not quite endeared his image in the emotive streets.
And, of course, Nuhu Ribadu, EFCC’s first chairman, was a diligent and zestful fellow. But he was too voluble, a dash too boastful, leading to too many barks that fell short of actual bites. Besides, despite his personal honesty and commitment, he laboured under a presidency that was all noise, but which hardly anybody, when the chips are down, could vouch for.
That has drastically changed. Perhaps for the first time ever, both President Muhammadu Buhari and Vice President Yemi Osinbajo would appear to ooze unchallenged integrity; and yet don’t crow about it.
As anti-sleaze czar, the president would appear to have chosen an alter ego in Ibrahim Magu. Though taciturn, Magu is very formidable by his personal conduct and fierce commitment to his cause.
Though he has inherited, from Ribadu, the media histrionics (by the way, a brilliant strategy to wrong-foot the brazen, thieving class, with their conspiring dreg of hustling lawyers and rotten judges), he appears a more formidable, if not implacable, foe who could not be subverted by throwing a rotten apple his way; or by penetrating a roguish and hypocritical Presidency.
There then lies the panic that has gripped Nigeria’s organized corruption; and shaped their desperate war cry: Stop Magu by all means necessary!
Only the obtuse and the dense would not see through the childish pranks of Bukola Saraki’s Senate, by purporting to have withheld confirmation for Magu, the media orchestration of such a tragic joke, and expect that would be the end of the matter.
And now, like the Yoruba “egbirin ote” (web of intrigues), where one checkmated plot is only the undying phoenix for yet another, in a frenetic relay of evil, there are talks of Nigerian governors blocking Magu’s nomination.
Despite all the empty cant, this confrontation has nothing to do with the public good, but their majesties’ alleged divine right to press financial opacity, with all the impatient fervour of the unquestionable monarch!
Ripples is not about committing the favourite media sin of, wholesome, tarring the two key democratic institutions of the Senate and the Governorship. Even as the Senate hobbles under the dark shadows of its leadership, some senators still do stellar work, and are excellent representation of their people’s hopes and aspirations.
The governors too, follow the same pattern. Hugely unpopular as a group, some governors continue to push noble claims as bright visionaries and passionate development agents.
But this reported Senate-governors’ gang-up against Magu’s confirmation, concerning a reported probe over the N552 billion Paris Club refund to states, can only further damage these key institutions, in the estimations of right-thinking people.
That is why senators and governors of goodwill must dissociate themselves from this reported plot; and align with this worthy crusade to rid Nigeria of graft, resultant underdevelopment and mass poverty.
Magu, by his focus and diligence, has done more than enough to earn an easy confirmation, for a job he has done so well. Let the Senate do the needful, and stop baiting the disgraceful.
The anti-sleaze czar should be toasted by all for patriotic duty, not roasted by unpatriotic elements, profaning the high temples of state. -
2Face and friends
But Rehoboam rejected their [elders’] advice and consulted the young advisers who served him, with whom he grew up.” — 1 Kings, 12:8, The Bible, New English Translation (NET) version
By inspiring but abandoning the February 6 protests, Reuben Abati suggested popular artiste, 2Face Idibia, was a duplicitous two-face Janus.
That is pure gas, especially coming from Abati — and that is no ad-hominem fallacy.
2Face has far more honour, if the matter is Nigeria’s wellness, than Abati and other over-certificated folks, complicit but unfazed, in the Goodluck Jonathan debacle, from which this polity still hobbles.
To be part of that historic disgrace, and yet piously prattle, as disinterested “public commentator”, and even plant some low-life conspiracy theories in people’s mind, is the height of unconscionable duplicity. Talk of the real two-faced Janus!
Still, for 2Face, honour is one thing. Culpable lack of understanding, before plunking, both legs into issues, is another.
Courtesy of the opening biblical quote, how did Rehoboam, son of the wisest man in history, lose his kingdom; perhaps crowning himself the most foolish man in history?
He took the advice of the youth, who spoke his own sentiments; and shunned the elders, who understood the issues.
“With a dozen rash words,” theologian, Russel Dilday, entered his dire judgment, “Rehoboam, the bungling dictator, opened the door for four hundred years of strife, weakness, and, eventually, the destruction of the entire nation.”
No. The idea here is not to disparage the youth. Didn’t the wise poet, William Wordsworth, say the child is father of the man? A wise and wizened elder today was, after all, yesterday’s rash and callow youth!
But young or old, understanding issues, before acting, is key. Just imagine if Rehoboam had taken the right call?
Perhaps the kingdom of David would have held. Maybe there would have been no conquest and dispersal. No Jewish Diaspora to feed Adolf Hitler’s holocaust machines. No frantic re-founding of the State of Israel in 1948. And probably, no Israeli-Palestinian mutually assured destruction!
But pray, what has the ruin of ancient Israel, and woes of its modern cousin, got to do with staging democratic protests, in contemporary Nigeria?
For starters, the issue is not romanticizing democratic dissents, as many seem to do. Or insisting on the people’s right to protest. Those are trite and settled.
Rather, rationale behind the protest is the issue. What is it intended to achieve? And after the feel-good bawling, and irreverent screaming, what next? When is a protest functional? When is it just a distraction?
You won’t get the right answers, unless you clinically grasp the issues.
No doubt, there is pain and anguish in the land. But what caused the pain — wayward policies of the present? Or, execrable choices from the past?
If the past has so blighted the present, that present pains are inevitable to save the future, why protest then, even if it were a democratic right, and the land were a babble of anguish?
For rogue comfort, abort the future — the same misjudgment that landed us in this cul-de-sac? Or heckle the present government to abandon its straight-and-narrow path (that is indeed difficult), for the wide-and-merry way, that leads to perdition?
Stop whining, often thunders the received wisdom — more of received folly, really — from bristling critics, fix the problem! Fine. But did anyone think righting wilful wrongs, including the free and frenzied stealing under President Jonathan, wouldn’t break more than a sweat? Strange!
Still, it is amazing how mere coincidences often trigger past wisdom, which eternally rebuke present unthinking.
Moremi Ojudu, daughter of Femi Ojudu, political adviser to the president, led a wing of the February 6 protests, which reached for the Ikoyi, Lagos, residence of Asiwaju Bola Tinubu. Now was that contrived friendly fire to spin some positives from the protests? Or the All Progressives Congress (APC) revolution consuming its own children?
Whatever it was, the Tinubu angle enriches the narrative. Now, the Lagos State that Governor Tinubu met in 1999, unlike the situation at Abuja, was relatively well run.
Indeed, aside from the possible exception of Sir Michael Otedola (God bless his soul) and Col. (as he then was) Olagunsoye Oyinlola, all Lagos governors had always been above the national average. Indeed, just as Tinubu was reference point during his era, the iconic Alhaji Lateef Jakande was the gubernatorial golden boy of the 2nd Republic (1979-1983).
Yet, the first two years of Governor Tinubu, particularly from emotive critics that didn’t understand, talk less of sharing his strategic vision, was sheer hell on earth.
Who, indeed, would forget the whispering (but hugely popular) campaign on the “Bola oracle” at Alausa, busy guzzling civil servants’ salary (when the government was leveraging the ORACLE software to sanitize the Lagos wage bill)?
Or the heroics of Labour Leader, Ayodele Akele who, just as the 2Face protest of February 6 tried to do, led an impassioned campaign against Governor Tinubu, on the explosive planks of pain and hunger!
But without those early but painful reforms, would Lagos be the roaring exemplar it is today? Back then, painful reforms took no less than two years!
Now, with the serial rape of Abuja, what quick therapy or painless magic is available, and for a harried government that isn’t even two years old? That about sums up the naiveté behind the 2Face protests!
Still, just shuffle the times, between 2001 and now. You probably would locate a constant: a nihilistic but loud minority, averse to any strategic pains, no matter how inevitable; and prone to happy manipulation by naive, or worse: subversive lobbies, under the aegis of some public good.
But by far, the greatest letdown has been the media. Even if the people are too stressed to think hard, is the press, with its much vaunted brain power, also incapable of some introspection?
And the colourful, post-protest headlines! “Protests rock …”! “Labour paralyses Lagos”! And in all of these, a crowd no more than 500, in a city of 20 million? Some rocking paralysis! That sure must be the Nigerian media’s contribution to modern journalism lexis, if not outright fiction — and all these in times of extreme national angst!
And to think that these same papers were busy romanticizing criminality, when some Niger Delta elements were blowing up oil facilities, just to make the silly point it is chic to cut your nose to spite your face! By the way, does anyone remember the boast to make Nigeria ungovernable, just because an election was lost and won?
It is all adding up in national hunger — and anger!
No one can take away anyone’s right to protest. But like Rehoboam’s fatal gaffe, 2Face and friends blundered on this one without much thinking.
That it went largely shunned, despite a laughable media hype to the contrary, shows the quiet majority understand the issues far better than the noisy, bristling minority. But it doesn’t mean they feel less pain.
It is crunch time. We must atone for past licentiousness, or embrace sure future ruin. Let nobody give democratic dissent a bad name. -
Death and the sick countrymen
You are right – this headline is a parody of Death and the King’s Horseman, the Wole Soyinka classic, specially cited in his Nobel Prize for Literature win.
If you link this parody to yet another WS play, Madmen and Specialists, you might just chafe at the madness that has seized the Nigerian populace, in the rash orchestration of the “death” of a man alive but taciturn; by the voluble that claim life but, by their spiteful conduct, are dead and rotten.
Just as you ask in that ultra-dark play, Madmen, who is the madman and who is the specialist, you begin to wonder, in this morbid fever: who is the dead and who is the living!
Indeed, another WS great, The Man Died, his Civil War prison memoirs, holds the clincher: the man dies in them, that cannot arrest their beastly id!
The Buhari death wish is, therefore, the philosophical death of those who somewhat wish their nemesis would vanish — some Greek classical drama-like deus-ex-machina, come to spring them from the dire comeuppance of their past crimes!
Well, long may they endure their well-earned anguish! No matter the dark plots of anyone, only God, the Almighty, gives life; and only he, can decree when one’s time is up. And he is not, it appears, about to serve as their deus!
But pray, what is the hubbub over the purported death of a 74-year old? That his sun is setting at noon, though he lives into young old age, given the Biblical term of three-score-and-ten?
That he is one of the irredeemably corrupt, selfish and venal he is sacrificing his old age to battle, so that younger Nigerians would have a future?
Or that he has made his peace with corruption, like the Nigerian client priests of sleaze, who now bait catastrophe by goading their congregation to free murder, to trigger faith and ethnic chaos, a potent but satanic device to divert attention from a dire ethical crisis, and retain the old corrupt order?
Only in Nigeria — where the most vulnerable, are also the most gullible, and therefore, the most voluble, in pushing their own destruction!
Which explains why the madness is less with the vicious few, mainly ultra-corrupt elements, that have a serious axe to grind with President Muhammadu Buhari and his government.
Acute and strategic lots, those! Indeed, life for Buhari is sure death for their nefariousness, outside of which they have no life! So, these vile elements would cook up just anything, no matter how absurd, to survive.
You can, therefore, understand the grand folly of the virulent robots that amplify the evil agenda of the well-oiled corrupt machine, even if yelping from temporary pains, from a rotten order being put right. But whoever gains without pains?
How did we get to this terrible pass, which merrily canonizes the vile as saints but demonizes the righteous as devils?
Col. Azubike Nass, an Enugu-based retired army officer, offers an apt Biblical parallel. That dream in Biblical Egypt, in which seven lean cows swallowed seven fat ones. That decoded, translated to seven years of boom, preceding seven years of bust.
However, unlike Pharaoh that deliberately stored grains during the bumper years, for the lean and agonizing years, Nigeria blew everything as if there wouldn’t be tomorrow. Despite his huffing and puffing, the profligacy started under President Olusegun Obasanjo. By the time Goodluck Jonathan happened on the presidency, the last of the family silver was up for pawn!
But just as there was a manic seller in President Jonathan and his crowd, there were no less crazed buyers in unconscionable Nigerians, spanning the religious (dis)order, the media, the traditional institutions, the judiciary and other equal-opportunity hustlers, that always think actions have no consequences.
That explains the 2015 election-time bazaar, by a president more than desperate for re-election, and was cocky he had enough cash to splash.
But even with this open secret, of an old order sacking the collective till, just to sate the insatiable greed of its partisans, why is there so much uproar in the street, so much so that not a few romanticize sheer anarchy, just because there is no quick fix?
It is tough, you must admit, when the pocket hurts. Reason scampers before irrational rage. A hungry man, after all, is an angry man.Still, at the expense of a more secure and less corrupt future?
That echoes another Biblical parallel: in the post-Red Sea wilderness, between Egypt and Canaan, the Promised Land, the stiff-necked Israelites barked at Jehovah to either divine instant el-dorado, or pronto, return them to old slavery in Egypt!
So, what is the present rumble aimed at? To return Nigeria to post-2015 era, where the common wealth, as could be seen from the many ongoing cases of alleged sleaze, was conquered treasure of a few? And then after, what?
Turn the clock back to 1984, the first coming of this same Muhammadu Buhari, as military ruler. To be sure, that government was high on impunity (more than any military government before it); and had a quaint idea of mechanical “discipline”, in the whip-coerced queues its War Against Indiscipline (WAI) programme decreed.
But what came after it? The Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha era. The one liberalized corruption and democratized poverty. The other was epitome of the head of state as an irredeemable thief!
The cumulative destruction of that era, birthed Obasanjo’s delusion of grandeur, Umaru Yar’Adua’s tragic power captivity and Jonathan, as Nigeria’s unsympathetic undertaker, led to the meltdown that made the Buhari second coming inevitable.
Pray, is Nigeria fated to moving round in futile circles?Still, the Buhari Presidency must accept fulsome blame for its own self-crucifixion. How can a government, ranged against virulent enemies, wilfully refuse to beam what it is doing, in a time of excruciating pains, which calls for citizen understanding, empathy and support?
This bizarre stand has handed its enemies the knife to slaughter it at will, and the tar to demonize it, to their heart’s content.
Make no mistake: a casual foray into the social media shows a sizeable number of genuinely disillusioned citizens. But very many too would appear paid hacks, hired to cook fake news, fan hideous hate, float silly rumours and give the most innocuous of policies the most bizarre of slants.
Viciously turning the social media into an anti-social tool appears a well-funded billion-naira business! As for the traditional media, the most hysterical may well be those refusing to admit the era of free money is gone!
That racket may be a journey to nowhere. But it won’t abate, unless the government mounts a vigorous and well-funded counter-campaign: hope against its enemies’ agenda of hopelessness, love against virulent hate, facts against diabolic rumours, and a systematic and deliberate projection of its accomplishments, to silence the nay orchestra, now making hay.
That is Buhari’s only way out of the present self-crucifixion.
Meanwhile, those who killed themselves, by the hate of wishing others dead, had better wake up from the dead!
It is a national emergency. Every life is needed for salvage. -
The priest, the governor and the state
The furore, over an Auchi, Edo State, priest’s latest fatwa on Fulani herdsmen, appears the latest excitement in a tense polity.
Apostle Johnson Suleiman, in a video gone viral on cyberspace, had told his cheering Omega Fire Ministries Worldwide audience to “kill” any Fulani herdsmen they found lurking around his church premises.
He claimed the new fatwa was contingent on a telephone intelligence that some “Fulani herdsmen” were after his life, based on his principled stance on the southern Kaduna crisis.
Now, southern Kaduna is a tale of blood and gore, of hideous mayhem, all pressed in the alleged mass massacre of local Christians, by an alleged Muslim cabal, allegedly supported by the powers-that-be.
Though there appears no “smoking guns” regarding official complicity, a vibrant rumour mill, projecting ancient but mutual animosities, magnified by equally bitter media allies, has given the allegation an ugly life of its own.
That manoeuvre has created two opposing armies of fearsome hate, arrayed in ethnic, religious and regional battalions, sworn to dooming each other in fierce verbal combat — or much worse! Pray, in matters of faith and perceived ethnic slur, who indeed keeps his head?
Not the good apostle, he of the incendiary pulpit! Apostle Suleiman would appear the classical neophyte, ready to risk all in defence of his adopted faith.
After sentencing poor Kaduna Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, to a “divine” death sentence, for the temerity to attempt controlling religious fanaticism, Muslim or Christian, in his state, the crusading Apostle and fiery Holy Michael of besieged Christendom Nigeria, also feels obliged to christen El-Rufai “the short man devil that calls himself governor”, in the final flurry en route to proclaiming his latest Fulani fatwa!
Why? Perhaps because the good Lord still gives the governor life, while the angry man of God had proclaimed him dead!
Still, let it not be supposed that the opposing Muslim partisans, for whom the much hated “Fulani herdsmen” are nothing but scary faces of gargoyle, are angels, meek and innocent. Far from it.
For too long, Islam has, in the North, been projected as the swashbuckling faith of power, before which other adherents must bow and cow. That has, over the years, come with soulless impunity, which has chiselled away at citizens’ most fundamental of rights — the right to life.
By commission or omission, you could routinely get away with murder, only if you killed in the name of Allah — never mind that that was convenient screen for base bigotry against citizens of other faiths; or even sundry criminality. That has resulted, in the victims’ camp, in bitterness and dissonance.
But, in the great theatres of this war, like southern Kaduna, with its chequered history, the battle would appear on two fronts. While the victims count their losses in lives and limbs, the aggressor class are savaged with wholesale demonization, by the media, sympathetic to the victims.
That, with time, becomes received wisdom — or, more accurately, received folly — as every Fulani is no devil any more than others are saints.
That is the sentiment of explosive resent that super-sympathizers, like Apostle Suleiman, tap into — perfectly understandable, given the extant atmosphere of mutual and vibrant hate.
Still, crusading for the cheated is one thing. Goading congregants to free murder, under whatever guise, is another.
That was the point, it would appear, the man of God entered the Department of State Services (DSS) radar.
But even before dealing with state intervention in the matter, on what plank, secular or divine, might Apostle Suleiman stand, on charging his church members to kill other citizens?
On his Christian creed? Even at the point of arrest and subsequent crucifixion, the last miracle of Jesus, the Christ, did was restoring a cropped ear — a big blow for non-violence, no matter the provocation.
If you plead the Mosaic law of “an ear for an ear”, could the Apostle then be practising Judaism in Christian garb? Or is it that Christ was too divine, to be relevant in this era of cocky impunity by the hateful Fulani?
In the secular world, is the Citizen Apostle simply rooting for self-help, despite the apparent danger to himself and his flock? If he was, what sort of citizen might he be?
Of course, the reported DSS attempt to arrest Suleiman added even a more grotesque twist to the ridiculous drama, of a man of God baying for blood.
Enter, Ekiti’s Peter Ayodele Fayose, the perfect example of a gubernatorial burlesque, if ever there was one.
Somewhat, the much hated “Fulani herdsmen” are drawing Christian clerics, spanning the good, the bad and the ugly, to the Fayose burlesque.
At Yuletide 2016, Fayose drew fulsome, if impolitic, praise from The Redeemed Church of God’s Pastor Enoch Adeboye, provoking a raft of reactions, for or against.
Fayose’s unscripted citation, on that grand occasion, was his heroics against killer “Fulani herdsmen” — admittedly one of the few good policies the excitable governor can boast, applying due process to a clear and present danger.
Less than a month after, again relating to “Fulani herdsmen”, Fayose was rushing to save an apostolic loose cannon from DSS arrest!
Again, on what plank might the governor stand, embarking on such outlawry?
That, a governor, sworn to keeping the law, can foil other organs of state, doing their work? Or that the creed of a governor installed by law, on due process, is to push for self-help, over and above due process, using his exalted office as abused collateral?
And just imagine, the putative collateral damage in Nigeria’s pseudo-federalism, when the governor, though chief security officer, doesn’t have any of the state security arms under his control? And just suppose, a crazy trooper, just tired at a governor standing on his official dignity, each time they try to do their work, and cocks a gun — or worse!
Bedlam in the human rights chamber, now as quiet as the grave yard?
Let neither the outlaw priest nor the outlaw governor test the will of the law. Both are assured of nothing but doom, whatever fancies colourful emotions conjure.Emmanuel Olaniran Oladesu, PhD
A prophet is not without honour, states the Bible, except in his own country, among his own people. Not here! Ripples today celebrates Dr. Emmanuel Oladesu, the humble and unassuming Political Editor of The Nation, who just earned a PhD in Psychology of Education, from the University of Lagos.Kudos to the newly certified man of learning and character who, by the way, nearly missed secondary education for lack of means. It’s the stuff inspiring tales are made. Welcome, the latest scholar in Nigeria’s newsroom!
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Sheikh Prof. Alhaji Dr. Tragic Mimic
How about these two for comic comparison: Sheik Prof. Alhaji Dr. Yahya Abdul-Aziz Awal Jemus Junkung Naasiru Deen Jammeh Babili Mansa and Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga?
Babili Mansa, Wa Za Banga – some bathetic end-rimes?
And all that “pleasure”, after a dig at some fictive comic names? Dead wrong!
Rather, it is a living nightmare of comic power plays, bordering on a recurring ancestral curse, plaguing political Africa.
Needless to say, those comic plays have tragic consequences – and it is no comfort that they seem rooted in the African power gene!
Mobutu Sese Seko (1930-1997), was the Zairean dictator who roasted his country and seared his people on the cruel altar of un-sated personal greed. He belonged to the Cold War era.
Though he lived for just 67 years (he ruled Zaire, now Democratic Republic of Congo, for 32 of those years), he was a millennial contagion.
DR Congo still wilts from that contagion, passing, as power toy, from “Papa Doc” Laurent Kabila (1997-2001) to “Baby Doc” Joseph Kabila (2001 till date, even if his legal term has expired).
Mobutu is dead. But Mobutu’s power spirit is alive and well. Long live the Mobutu pestilence!
Born simply Joseph-Desire Mobutu, at the zenith of his power lunacy, Mobutu had flared into Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga!
His Cold War era tragic co-comics included Jean Bedel Bokassa (Central African Republic, who, at the nadir of his power debauchery, renamed CAR Central African Empire, and crowned himself “emperor”); and Alhaji (Dr.) Idi Amin Dada, Conqueror of the British Empire (CBE), the Ugandan power psychopath and savage.
You would have thought all that tragic comedy had been interred with the Cold War (1947-1991), with its insane capitalist-communist ideological posturing, until Jammeh, the Gambian tragic mimic, bobbed up.
Like Mobutu, he happened on the scene, as a pathetic soldier.
The scrawny, dark-goggled Lt. Yahya Jammeh, when he ousted the long ruling President Dauda Jawara in 1994, was the perfect portrait of the angry and hungry African soldier – angry at his parlous state but hungry for insane political power.
By 1996, the scrawny soldier, of two years ago, had begun his pseudo-democratic rebranding. As he rebranded on the “democratic front”, so did he rebrand on the wardrobe flank.
His Spartan military fatigue gave way to over-sized white agbada, complete with a bogus “tesbir” (the Muslim chaplet) and a comic sword.
The Babili Mansa (Mandika for “Bridge Builder” or “Conqueror of the River”, whichever one you find more exotic!) must project his pristine Africanness, with his devout Islamic faith!
A power dummy never got more effectively sold! Jammeh, the hungry soldier of 1994, had become Jammeh the Munificent in 2017; so cocky he could first concede an election with consummate grace, then change his mind at the ease with which you bat an eyelid, and finally tempt ultimate disgrace by essaying the election’s outright annulment, ala Nigeria’s Ibrahim Babangida of 1993!
Despite his puny country, and even punier defence forces, he was deluded enough to think there won’t be consequences! All thanks to ECOWAS, the African Union (AU) and the United Nations, however, he got rudely woken from his costly reverie!
By the evening of January 20, His Excellency, Sheik Prof. Alhaji Dr. Yahya Abdul-Aziz Awal Jemus Junkung Naasiru Deen Jammeh Babili Mansa had joined Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, in the African hall of power infamy, where they both nestle (Mobutu dead, Jammeh alive) in the dustbin of history!
It’s unclear, though, how long Jammeh would survive his arid post-power years. It took Mobutu only three months to expire, though he was 67 and had a running battle with prostate cancer.
Jammeh is 51, rippling with robust health. He might yet endure decades of exile, languishing in his self-imposed wilderness!
Neither is it clear how much, after 22 years in power, of the Jammeh contagion is left in the Gambian body politics.
But before anyone gets drunk on anti-Jammeh triumphalism, and in the chest-thumping swagger of the moment, forgets the flow of history, let it be made clear: Jammeh’s electoral crime is no worse than Gen. Babangida’s, against the 12 June 1993 presidential mandate of Basorun Moshood Abiola (God bless his soul!).
The ECOWAS that now flexed fearsome muscles, and barked bone-chilling orders at poor, deluded Jammeh, was as gentle as a lamb.
Even at a stage, when Babangida had long been consumed by his own plot, and Sani Abacha was ogling self-transmutation to “elected president” to sustain the criminal annulment, Bill Clinton, the US president and leader of the so-called free world, thought aloud that might not be a bad idea!
So, what has changed now? Was it a function of no precedence (as indeed, the Jammeh peaceful ouster is yet another one, after the Laurent Gbagbo misadventure in Cote d’Ivoire)? Or Nigeria was just a misbehaving giant, not ECOWAS, not AU, not UN could touch?
Still, Jammeh’s resolute ouster, to press the inviolability of democratic mandates, cannot be a bad thing, despite Nigeria’s criminal behaviour of 1993.
But whoever is involved in this laudable Gambia intervention should have the presence of mind to know they just doomed any power looney that might want to play the Jammeh card in the future. Better to buy into a noble convention than fret at the fate of putative power rogues!
Nevertheless, history has a way of pulling a fast one, with the most dramatic of ironies!
Exactly the same day, almost to the hour, one comic was being prised off the tiny Gambia, another comic was being installed over the mighty United States.
Between Yahya Jammeh and Donald Trump, there is little to choose, if the subject is democratic ideals. The one refused to concede an election in which he had been thoroughly licked. The other thundered he wouldn’t accept any result that didn’t declare him winner!
So, despite Uncle Sam’s much-vaunted power and glory, Americans’ bragging right as leaders of the “free world”, The Gambia as a laggard among countries on the globe and Gambians as (un?)willing victims of Jammeh’s power megalomania, Trump and Jammeh are pretty much democracy heretics.
The big difference is Trump won his bluff; and Jammeh lost his.
But that is just as well, and it might be cold comfort. But it appears Africa just lost its monopoly of churning out power clowns – and new US President Trump is glittering evidence! -
Three days in Wawa country
Making the Amalu matriarch’s funeral, at Enugu, was going to be difficult.
She, of the other room, was livid.
“You’re very stubborn — you know that?” she snapped, with supreme anger, in her supreme headquarters. “Must you make this trip?”
“I must,” was the quiet answer.
That swallowed her ire, like water consuming a raging fire. But you could still feel, in the dark room, the cold ash of impotent rage.
It was end of year, complete with baleful superstitions about travels. And there, on those cratered roads, were more than a fair share of mad drivers.
Missus didn’t hate the mission. She only loved her husband.
The journey itself — all 14 hours of it — couldn’t be more uncomfortable. With massive Yuletide East-bound travel home from Lagos, the traveller was strung virtually on the wheels, on one of the ill-reclined back seats, in the Libra minibus.
The first, out of many for the day, left its Okota, Lagos terminal, at around 6:30 am. But the passenger didn’t disembark until around 8:35 pm, at Mopol, Umunba, near 9th mile, in the Enugu country.
The driver, a cheerful rogue with a gravel voice, jived incessantly in Igbo, spiced with the occasional English, and condemned the bus to roaring laughter.
But his Achilles heels were his tyres. At Ajebandele, near Ore, he stopped to replace tyres. At Asaba, he did same. That consumed valuable time.
Indeed, at Asaba, the tyre-fixing ritual took no less than two hours. The passengers, worried and anxious, watched the Onitsha-bound heavy traffic slowly roll, in a sluggish jam, towards the Niger bridge.
Once gaining the bridge, however, the traffic was clear. And the bus skipped, like an excited deer, on a pleasurable dash — until caught up again, in the Onitsha evening traffic, on the massive Onitsha-Awka-Enugu expressway.
Onitsha, that early evening, magically winked at you, with its incandescent Christmas lightings. To a traveller from Lagos, that evoked the lost paradise of the Fashola years, when Lagos streets, at Yuletide, preened with buntings during the day, and, at night, were a blaze of colours. Not anymore!
Awka was no less enthralling, posing like some village beauty, showing off her glittering new dresses, complete with her three iconic flyovers, not entirely completed but which nevertheless sparkled, again echoing the Fashola cable bridge, in Ikoyi-Lekki, Lagos.
But then came the blues of Awka-Enugu cratered — sorry, express — way! From the blaze of Christmas incandescence, came oil lamps, burning naked on barriers at checkpoints, as brave policemen flashed down buses, to ensure travellers’ security.
Not less than four of those checkpoints were on that stretch, that night of 20 December 2016. That area, the traveller was told, was notorious for armed robberies and allied crimes, with the Oji River sector reportedly the most notorious.
But all the blues vanished the moment the traveller disembarked at Umunba. Just some 15 metres away, a vehicle was parked.
“Amalu?” posed Uche Eze, the gentleman Gabriel Sunny Amalu, the lawyer and colleague on The Nation Editorial Board burying his mother, had detailed as chaperon, with assistants, Nnabuike and Emeka in tow.
“Yes,” the traveller returned.
“Welcome!”
He grabbed the light luggage, threw it on the backseat of the parked salon car, and off went the party to the nearby Amofia, in the Ogwofia-Owa Kingdom.
Amofia! Every grain of its red earth, as plentiful as beach sand, reminds you of Chinua Achebe’s fictive Umuofia, where Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond.
Amofia’s Okonkwo would appear Joseph Amalu, Gabriel’s illustrious uncle, who was said to have started it all — not only for his Amofia clan, but pretty much for Ogwofia-Owa and environs, as recorded by the documentary, Daybreak at Udi, which in 1950 won the Oscar, at the Academy Awards.
Like Okonkwo, Amalu (Eze in the documentary) rallied for his culture, against intrusive progress the Oyibo decreed was development. But unlike Okonkwo, he eventually made his peace with that “modernity”.
Joseph Amalu’s was a classic grass-to-grace story. With nothing but his sterling character, he went to Lagos. Though illiterate in English, the colonizing Europeans soon discovered his heart of gold, and adopted him as one of theirs.
He not only signalled his siblings, to come eat of this new-found town’s munificence, he himself would later return home, to become a traditional ruler, jurist and modernizer per excellence, though he spoke no English.
Indeed, the Amalu Amofia compound is as much an echo of the Okonkwo Umuofia’s, with its many obi (huts), as it is architecture as vintage tell-tale of the Amalu family history.
Aside from the one-storey building to the left as you gained the wall-less compound, which Gabriel always told you belonged to the “big Chief Amalu in Lagos”, the rest is an array of bungalows. You could tell the age, the era, and the history of each, just by its design.
The Joseph Amalu bungalow occupies an artistic centre, from where others seem to fan out.
To the right is Ezinne Uzodumma Amalu’s (1930-2016), the matriarch everyone had come to bid farewell. And just at its back, like a chick, under the protective wings of its mother, is Gabriel’s own bungalow, with its more contemporary design.
And talking vintage: Gabriel’s late father, Michael Amalu’s Peugeot 403 salon car, nestles under a tree, just in front of Ezinne’s obi, a museum piece for present and coming Amalus. The senior Amalu retired as chief superintendent of prisons in 1964. He died in 1991.
Between mother and son’s obi, Ezinne would find her final resting place.
The toast of the December 20 wake, the funeral mass at St. Patrick Catholic Church, Nwankwo Ogwofia-Owa, and sumptuous post-funeral reception (both on December 21), with its exquisite Igbo cultural extravaganza, were Bolade Opaleye, Esq., barrister-at-law and Ripples — two Yoruba folks.
Patrick Okafor, the Amalu in-law and fizzy MC, never tired of telling everyone, how the non-natives had braved all to come give the Ezinne a befitting farewell.
And Gabriel’s “big Chief Amalu in Lagos”, Chief Godwin Chuma Amalu, turned out a winsome gentleman, and charming epitome of poise, civility and modesty, who instantly invited the duo to his Lagos home!
Thank you, Amofia, for golden memories!
But the celebration was now ended (in the poet, Gabriel Okara’s words); and Bolade and I were back in the hands of the ever true Uche Eze — Bolade to Enugu Airport and, Ripples, to the Libra park at Enugu.
Uche splendidly delivered — and the December 22 rush back to Lagos, for Christmas: the one by air, the other, by road, resumed.
The return journey was much more comfy, though the Enugu country roads were no less cratered, Awka still preened with its new flyovers, and Onitsha — why does that concrete jungle, of multi-storey houses, bawl at you: that housing is nothing but a billion-naira hustle?
Around 6:15 pm, at Berger, Lagos, came this text from Bolade: “Just landed 20 minutes ago. We left Enugu 3:45 pm. You should be nearer Lagos now. I am now going through the hectic traffic from Ikeja to Lekki. What a life!”. His flight was billed for take-off at 9 am!
Here, the rich also howl!
Do have a happy new year -
Panorama
CAll it “Panorama Nigeriana”, and you are quite right: all of the laughs, all of the cries, and the full range in-between, of a people condemned to high drama, wholesome or toxic!
That is the story of Nigeria this collection of newspaper cartoons shows, with masterful strokes.
But is it an accident that this book has no title: this compilation, by Azeez Ozi Sanni, The Nation ace cartoonist, of his cartoons published in the newspaper, between 2007 and 2010?
Bar the cartoonist’s name, and his bragging right as “Cartoonist of the Year …” , for some three hegemonic years, etched with a golden foil and, of course, The Nation logo, there is no title capturing the book’s theme.
But there is a collage, in full colour, encased in the troubled Nigerian space: of a lawless soldier doing a bla-la show — but was that a soldier, or a felon disguised as one? Of a policeman — wetin you carry? — extorting his favourite N5; of a rogue politician toasting his rare fortune, over his latest “Ghana must go” acquisition; of awesomely-armed robbers holding up a bank, of a Press whose “lips” are firmly padlocked — a hyperbole, to be sure; of high blues in a prison cell, of …”
Perfectly Nigerian, isn’t it?
Still, why no title? A mere happenstance? Or a cartoonist’s symbolic decision to, picturesquely, cut to the chase, and shunning verbiage?
O, there is yet another query: on how the cartoons are arranged, over some 162 pages. Is this too deliberate; or just another accident?
The collection opens with a tribute to MKO Abiola, the martyr of June 12, with “votaries” toasting to his ultimate sacrifice and golden memory: “To justice, wisdom and freedom …” — big sounding cant, to usher in — “Happy democracy in Nigeria.”
But it ends — well, almost — with President Goodluck Jonathan, pledging of the 2011 election — of which he was the principal beneficiary — to make all votes count.
The MKO-Jonathan contrast couldn’t be more dramatic, in peculiar Nigeria: MKO won an election and did everything to retrieve his annulled mandate.
But his death in detention only left Nigerians with the sense of what might have been.
Jonathan, on the other hand, accessed power relatively easily, perhaps because MKO’s martyrdom had taught the Nigerian power cowboys some grim lessons.
Yet, Jonathan ended up the ultimate presidential misfit, though Muhammadu Buhari appears the ultimate fall guy, of Jonathan’s ultimate misdeeds.
But that telling contrast only prepared the mind for the parting shot, loud and hard: a cauldron of luckless Nigerians, sizzling in brothy “hot soup”!
The hissing fuel belching the cooking fire, like some harmattan-dry firewood? Sectarian religious riots. Economic stagnation. Fuel palaver. Corruption. Epileptic power supply!
Welcome to the Nigerian hell!
Yet, Nigerians kid themselves, at least by the cartoonist’s punch line: “We are Nigerians … good people, great nation! Was that Dora Akunyili beaming from beyond?
But for the living: hell to some. But surely, peculiar paradise to others? How would Fela have put it — s(h)uffering and s(h)miling?
Again, was this — a sort of plot — just happenstance? Or a deliberate and crafty arrangement by the cartoonist to hit home his message, with a devastating climax?
If deliberate, then Sanni would appear some dramatic philosopher, teasing his compatriots out of their stupor!
Indeed, the sweeping leitmotif for this work would appear that searing maverick-conscience of society, often located, in Igbo Nollywood movies, in some lowly drunkard, or even a lunatic — a societal nobody, that nevertheless exposes, with relish, the folly of the high-and-mighty!
Or the free communal “yabis”, to put it in Fela-speak, of the Ado Ekiti, Ekiti State, Udi Iroko yearly festival of yore, in which not even the Ewi, the town’s paramount ruler himself, escaped the all-seeing eyes, and free-lashing tongue, against any secret peccadilloes!
So, in this Sanni observatory of cartoons, there are no off-limits. The patrician and the plebeian; the president and the pauper, hobnob in an irreverent republic, where everyone is taken through the same strictures.
Welcome to the Sanni Republic of Laughter — but for only those not at the receiving end of his sharp and searing strokes!
You’ve got to pity Olusegun Obasanjo, former president of the Federal Republic, in this collection. An icon of a debased order, who nevertheless loves to play the holy pope, his portraiture is a bit unsparing — yet not unfair!
In one of the most hilarious of the cartoons, Obasanjo beams down from a marble-like BABA throne, as high and mighty as Olumo Rock! Sprawled before him is a breed of fancifully dressed but self-debased humanity.
“Congratulations, godfather of all the godfathers!” roared a section of this patrician-rabble. “Your Highness,” another section bawled, “Any other Baba is simply a counterfeit. Long live your Imperial Majesty!”
In the cartoonist’s irreverent cosmos, it is the BABA Palace of Democratic Feudalism!
When Gani Fawehinmi, SAN, SAM, the fiery anti-establishment rod, passed away, Sanni emerged with three “crocodiles”: 1. Baba crocodile. 2. Evil Genius. 3. Unnamed.
Verdict? The pillars of Nigeria’s rotten establishment shed crocodile tears at Gani’s death. Might they then be happy — or more aptly, be relieved — in private? Your guess!
This grim life in contemporary Nigeria the cartoonist also captured with the progressive decline in Nigerians’ welfare, in their country’s first 49 years. Pre-independence: the colonial master pleaded — “manage that … we are growing”. The citizen took his share — not much, but still not unreasonable.
Twenty-five years later, the same plea, but a smaller portion, even if the pot of “government goodies” was bigger. The citizen? More ragged.
On the virtual eve of 50 years — 49 years after independence — all hell broke loose! The pot had grown bigger still but the citizen grew tinier, scrawnier and even more ragged.
And wonders of wonders! As the “leader” mumbled “manage that … we are growing”, there was virtually nothing in the citizen’s plate. Yet, the rogue government gorged itself in full view!
Still, there is some grim humor lightening up the jeremiads — as in the boy that teases his father, proposing to take him out for ice cream on May Day. But wait for it — on the “change” in the father’s lean pocket. The old man did not find it funny!
This is a compendium of life in this country, ably captured with devastating strokes, as the daily drama unfolds.
Ever want to laugh at yourself, as catharsis in these times of biting economic hardship? The Sanni collection of cartoons could well be a fitting therapy!
It’s a Nigerian panorama. You just might need the humor to navigate your balance! -
With WS on Wolexit
In vogue: hustling and bustling Prof. Wole Soyinka, our own WS, to make good his threat — to shred his American green card, should Donald Trump win the US presidency.
Well, Donald has won, goes the sharp taunt. So what is WS still doing in Trump Country?
Reminds you — doesn’t it? — of Satan taking the Christ Jesus to the pinnacle of the mount; and daring him to jump down, just to prove he was the Divine Son?
But what makes Satan think, at least according to Christian theology, that Jesus needed Satan’s validation that the Christ was the Son of the Most High?
What makes Satan even think, at least according to Christian fatalism, he could drag Jesus anywhere, to prove anything, if the Divine Father had not sanctioned that satanic rascality, divined to end in nothing but divine glory, for the Divine Son?
Of course, with his traducers, WS is far less formidable. He is no godhead. Nor is he backed by any theology or fatalism, Christian or otherwise. Nor is he, for that matter, divine by any shred of imagination.
So, you could understand the leering and the jeering and the gloating and the scoffing — in fact, the satanic triumphalism — of the rabble on cyberspace, plus their no less virulent terra firma cousins, including a female television presenter, waxing poetic and lyrical, on her Silverbird TV show: “Uncle Wole, tear it, tear it; Uncle Wole, tear it …”, she piped, in irreverent mockery, in smug foolery!
Still, what does this empty-sounding child of TV artificiality know?
As Jesus needed no Satan to prove his divine essence, WS needs no rabble to validate his essence. A lifetime work has done that — and, with WS at 82, it is still work-in-progress!
That, more or less, was the purpose of WS’s telling riposte: “Red card, green card: notes towards the management of hysteria”.
Fitting response, by the way. You can trust WS to fight his own war, in his own way, on his own terms and with his own class!
Still, were terrestrial divinity a possibility, and the criteria were a lifetime of uncompromising commitment to justice, human dignity and basic fairness, WS would be only one of the few earthly divines; and among the fewer still, among his own compatriots.
But many Nigerians appear to have made their peace with abuse, forced or wilful, they probably would marvel and rail at a WS, who still takes — and has always taken — his humanity seriously.
That would explain the virulent reaction over the Trump affair.
Why, they must have told themselves, would anyone bluff the all-mighty Uncle Sam, — he, of the famed gravy-land, anyone would do anything to access?
Bluff! Why would WS, the WS we know, bluff anyone? But that is the point: the WS we know!
What of the WS they don’t know — even if it is an open book? Enter then, the delicious territory of sweet ignorance!
Still, Ripples must admit some lead, over some of the younger folks, in this WS business.
Growing up in the 1970s, he saw live, the trio that virtually swore that, under their charge, Nigeria would never go to seeds, no matter how it tried.
The oldest of this trio was Obafemi Awolowo. In the 1970s, though Awo still lived, his legend was fully formed. He had, in the 1950s, pulled off the greatest social revolution in Nigerian history, with his free primary education programme, in the old West.
By the 1970s, however, he was playing the constant Jeremiah, as his name indeed was, warning the terrible breed, military or civilian, resolved to undo their country. Nobody listened; and the result is today’s dystopia, where Nigerians merrily flee Nigeria.
The second, was the irreplaceable Tai Solarin — he of the revolutionary new year’s wish: “May your road be rough!”, while others throated “Happy new year!”
A maverick on the side of anything decent, he was an iconoclast of toady conventions. He set up his famous Mayflower School, Ikenne, Ogun State, to push his vision of education as self-reliance. He died, virtually on active duty, on the march against Sani Abacha’s fascism, on a Lagos street, where he was tear-gassed.
WS was the youngest of this trio. Every book he wrote, every play he staged, every speech he gave, everything he did, and every gesture he made, he was resolved on one thing: banish all cant and deliver on your basic humanity — or you had him to contend with.
His play, A Dance in the Forest, presented at Nigeria’s independence in 1960, spoilt Nigeria’s independence party, by its iconoclastic truth: Nigeria’s flag independence was a joke, if the elite didn’t change their ruinous ways! The joke today is on the elite back then, who scowled at WS’s audacity.
His Jero Plays “prophesied” the locust of Nigerian desk generals — coup making parasites, who would promote themselves generals without seeing battle, or even enduring martial discomfort. “After all,” a self-deprecating Brother Jero signed off in Jero’s Metamorphosis, “it is the fashion these days to be a desk general!”
In Death and the King’s Horseman, it was fatal comeuppance for those who crave privilege without responsibility, for it took the Elesin’s western-trained medic son’s honourable suicide to force, on his traditional father, a shameful death. Yet, the Elesin was the traditional gentry man that lapped up the palace gravy but tried to dodge the fatal duty that went with the bargain!
In Unlimited Liability Company, a special purpose musical collabo, with Tunji Oyelana and the Benders, a political satire was never so mirthful! Indeed, a happy dirge for the thieving politicians of President Shehu Shagari’s 2nd Republic: elegy for the fallen politicians but sweet parody, in the ears of the people, their powerless victims.
In Ibadan: Penkelemes Years, you saw the protagonist as citizen-combatant against putative fascism in 1st Republic Western Region; and in You Must Set Forth at Dawn, you saw a sole citizen’s audacious stand against a moving train, mustering a Third Force, to stop approaching war!
That soon landed him in gaol, an experience that birthed The Man Died, WS’s Nigerian Civil War prison memoirs.
This then was the man a generation, proudly ignorant of their own history, mock over his threatened Wolexit from Trump’s America.
But even if they didn’t have Ripples’ youthful “ringside seat”, of seeing the trio of Awo, Solarin and WS strive hard to save Nigeria from itself, couldn’t they have read about the man before so recklessly letting fly their ignorance?
If WS threatens America with Wolexit, it is probably because America needs WS more than WS needs America. That should be a lesson to Nigeria: if we fix our country, shouldn’t others need us more than we need them? But that might even be vanity fair.
The basic reason for Wolexit is clear. With Trump’s entry, the American space becomes toxic for any self-respecting human.
That is the alarm of Wolexit. -
Trump: Globalization gobbles self
Just as well Himself the Osoko, Ayodele Fayose, has mouthed his usual “plebeian-nity” on the Donald Trump upset in the American presidential election of November 8.
“It is … a turning point for Nigeria and Nigerians, particularly those controlling the federal government that must change their ways as their allies who imposed them on us just lost out,” he gloated. “Most importantly, President Barrack Obama got what he did to Dr. Goodluck Jonathan.”
As apt as a butcher jiving on the latest high-tech surgery, isn’t it?
And pray, what did Obama do to Jonathan? Voted with Nigerians to throw out that un-presidential disaster? Or conspired to “rig the polls” against Jonathan, as Trump, Third World gift to America, would have mouthed?
Only in Fayoseland of vile demagoguery and mischief, powered by sweet ignorance!
Besides, the Fayose triumphalism — over nothing, really — is not unexpected. What did Awo say? Only the deep can call to the deep! But flip that: only the shallow can call to the shallow!
So, if the Ekiti governor foams in the mouth, in his infantile triumph, it is because in President-elect Donald Trump, he has found a kindred spirit, across the Atlantic, in uppity America, in political buffoonery!
Eight years after Bush the Son, and his presidential contagion on the globe over eight calamitous years, if the global bastion of presidential democracy still elects a Donald Trump, it just shows the direction they want to take their country. That is perfectly legitimate and democratic.
Still, Trump’s election is perhaps the first in American modern history to face angry protests, ala the Third World, with many, in rage, reportedly calling him “not my president”. But again, Americans’ funeral!
At the end of the day, whoever the Americans elect is their business — to enjoy or to endure.
Ripples’ business — and that ought to be every thinking Nigerian’s — is what lessons Nigeria can learn from the American choice.
Over the ages, there has been a roaring debate over the core of man: good or evil.
The Scot, T. M. Ballantyne, in The Coral Island (1858), voted for the innate goodness of man, with the excellent and civilizing conduct of three British school boys, survivors marooned, after a ship-wreck, on a coral island, off the Pacific Ocean.
But two World Wars later, Englishman and Nobel Prize for Literature winner, William Golding, pushed a counter and darker narrative, in Lord of the Flies (1954): that the core of man was evil, given the way some British school boys, despite their elite education, descended into savages. They too were trapped on another island, following a crash-landing.
This ultra-dark side of the American psyche, it would appear, the Trump phenomenon has tapped and awakened: racism, bigotry, dictatorship, xenophobia, misogyny and nativism — all Trumpian monsters that threaten to turn America’s vaunted utopia into a stark dystopia.
From the noise and fury in American streets, spanning 25 cities as at the last count, is it then morning yet on the Trump debacle day?
Still, something dire always awakens the human monster, so conventionally hidden.
In the fictive Lord of the Flies, a grim locale shred the conventional veneer of civility, to expose a rotten core of sheer savagery.
But in real-life Trump’s America, it is globalization (euphemism for investor greed), savagely gobbling its own.
Down the ages, Western thinkers always came up with a deodorizing philosophy, to veil the extant evil playing out.
During colonization, it was Christianization, and its sacred imperative for missionary trips. But that only hid Europe’s criminal greed; and its abhorrent culturicide against non-European peoples.
Perhaps it was sweet coincidence that slave trade, in the British Empire, exited in 1846, after the Industrial Revolution’s triumphal entry, between 1760 and 1840.
But it should take no especial acuity to figure that slave trade only exited because labour’s primacy in the production chain was dwindling. Yet, some smart Western minds insisted its abolition was due to their high minds, and not the low profit — if any at all — trading in slaves was posting.
“Globalization” is the latest of those buzzwords, intended to hide the cruel greed of “capital” (euphemism for ultra-greedy investors). However, this time round, this was a Western coup against the West; a coup by an infinitesimal few, against the bulk of their people.
It is this elite greed that would make America toss its factories to Mexico and China, and assume it is chic; and crow its people are cool about a so-called post-industrial age. Trump clearly shows they are not.
With that new dogma, America must “import” what it could produce, simply because its capitalists are scouring the globe for “cheap” labour, and less exacting environmental laws, to maximize profit!
That irrational philosophy birthed the irrational rage that birthed Donald Trump and consumed Hillary Clinton, and her otherwise golden history as Uncle Sam’s first female president, after Barrack Obama, its first Black president.
But the real tragedy here is not America settling for chaff instead of solid gold: for Mrs Clinton would appear the most prepared, if not the most qualified for that job, in American contemporary history.
It is rather the Nigerian elite that parrot, without thinking, the so-called “globalization”, as some canticle of merry self-destruction, by pathetic house negroes, desperate to be counted in metropolitan economic orthodoxy!
You could see it in an Okonjo-Iweala counting the beans and cooking the books, while the real economy went comatose. You could see it in a Soludo theorizing and be damned on NEEDS and SEEDS. You could see it in the glum orthodoxy of the Olusegun Obasanjo years. Merry destination? This present reality of economic death!
Their victorious, if tragic, whoop? Firm out this, out-source that! Even despite producing crude oil, you must shun refining but import processed fuel. With massive land, you must also import your food since you have cash to sell yourself short.
Your universities? They are infra-dig for your scions. Send them to American universities. Send your wives — and girlfriends — to deliver in American maternities, and come back with Baby American Citizen to crow, in high but empty conceit, about how you — and your baby — are American!
Well, it’s Trump country now and the game is up! America may well decline by voting Caveman Trump.
But maybe that shock therapy would force the Nigerian elite to know you don’t solve your problems by fleeing from them.
If only that singular lesson is learnt, maybe the Clinton loss and whatever it forebodes for America may well be good for Nigeria.
Perhaps after all, there is something good in globalization trumping its own; and Trump’s America receding into its nativist, racist (and maybe fascist), misogynist and xenophobic mode!
