The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olakunle Abimbola

  • Ilese: Return of the natives

    No prize for guessing right: the credit for this headline goes to Thomas Hardy and his novel, Return of the Native.

    But unlike the grim story of Clym Yeobright, the Paris, France-returnee to his native Edgon Heath in England, this is a gaily “annual convocation of Ilese-Ijebu people”, in the very words of the commemorative brochure, to mark the 12th Ilese Day celebration, which started on August 7 and climaxed on August 13.

    Ilese is a community contiguous to Ijebu Ode, in Ogun State.  According to unofficial figures, the town boasts a population of some half-a-million people, a good chunk of which are youths, many of them students of the Ogun State College of Health Technology, sited in the town.

    But that population excludes Ilese-Ijebu natives, living and driving their businesses outside the town.  As a tool of indigene mobilization, township development and sheer civic pride, the “Ilese-in-exile” would appear the ultimate target of Ilese Day.

    It is, so to say, the communal end-and-of-year bash, and start of another; when indigines, many of them having made good outside, come back home to felicitate and party, crowing Kennedy-speak: ask not what your town can do for you; ask rather what you can do for your town!

    That appears the message from the KK (formally, Otunba Kunle Kalejaye, SAN)-chaired Ilese Day Planning Committee; and Mr. Popoola Ojikutu, secretary, under the umbrella of the Ilese Development Council (IDC), chaired by Otunba Segun Demuren and Omo’oba Segun Adebanjo, secretary.

    With the massive turnout by indigenes, and the festive and carnival-like atmosphere the town wore throughout proceedings, particularly in the last two days, that message appeared to have resonated well

    Still, the Planning Committee put together a carefully calibrated programme of events, part-service (what your town can do for you); part-duty (what you can do for your town); and general business/financial education for personal use, viz: free medical check-up, free eye test, an Annual Enterprise Development Seminar for 2016, a grand finale quiz competition, football competition among youths, Woro traditional dance, a cooking competition for Ikokore, the Ijebu special cuisine, beauty pageant and music performance extravaganza, the Ilese Day Grand Finale carnival, which featured five groups and a band of stunt-pulling Okada riders, and a gala nite to round off the celebrations.

    Among performers at the music and showbiz extravaganza, Terry G Plkin (real name, Michael Ogunyomi), a student of Tai Solarin University of Education, Ijebu Ode, stood out, with his unique stripping and teasing act.  He stripped off no less than 30 clothes, starting with an Aladura (white-farment church) soutane!

    But the grand finale carnival garnished the celebrations with a pan-Nigeria mix.  Sappers Barracks, a military formation, is located in Ilese.  Though based in Ilese, members are from different parts of the country.  The Sappers performance, therefore, pushed a subtle lesson: every Nigerian domiciled in Ileseland was an integral part of that community.  To boot, the Sappers came with three Eyo masquerades!

    Otunba Kalejaye made that telling point, when the Sappers, in their glorious maroon colours, made their grand entry: with the barracks community part and parcel of Ilese, there is little chance of any communal violence.  Other communities nationwide ought to take a huge lesson from that spirit of community amity and integration.

    Ilese Day is necessarily youth-driven.  For one, the town is host to a tertiary school.  For another, the college has conferred on the town some élan, associated with youths flouting their educational status.

    Yet, the Beauty pageant — and indeed, the youth funfair nite, where perhaps too many strutted, sang and danced to thrill the appreciative audience, in a town hall packed full with hollering youths — was a thoughtful mix of business and fun, laced with Ilese history and civics.  Miss Oluwafunmi Imoleayo Ayeni, a graduate of the local College of Health Technology, Ilese, emerged winner from a packed field of 14.

    What most would see in that funfair nite was fun.  But behind that fun was business, hard core business.

    For starters, to enter for the pageant you buy a N5, 000 form.  But the winner’s prize is a car.  That is no unattractive prospect!  But standing between application and winning is the rather hard part of mastering Ilese tradition, history and contemporary civics, to answer rather tricky questions at the quiz segment.

    So, to triumph, the winner must invest in and study a book on Ilese, specifically rolled out to prepare the contestants.  But the beauty of that is the youth are motivated to learn about the local history and culture, with a glittering prize in view.

    Then the carnival proper!  Imagine the costumes of some 600-strong youth: the design and tailoring, all offering boom times for the local guild of tailors and fashion designers!  That would appear a pocket-friendly — and fun-filled way — to re-flate and energise the local economy, get local enterprises productively busy and empower local entrepreneurs.

    Then, the local food vendors!  The parade grounds, for the grand finale carnival, offered an excellent mart for all sort of players, small and medium, to sell their wares and offer their services.  Of course, alongside is the souvenir business: commemorative hats and other branded gifts.  All help to boost the local economy; and put money in the pocket of the enterprising.

    So, when the guild of Ilese tailors was publicly toasted for sewing, free-of-charge, the giant banners dotting strategic parts of town, before announcing; and after thanking those who attended and calling for an encore in 2017, the gesture was an excellent show of community recognition.

    Even then, the business part of it would appear not so hidden: the guild perhaps was so charitable because of the business boom the festival yearly offers it!  Talk of win-win!

    But still talking of charity qua charity, the 2016 Ilese Day also offered excellent opportunity for local philanthropists to show compassion for the less privileged, with the launch of the Rufus Olukayode Odusanya Foundation, with a rather striking acronym of ROOF, with its self-set mandate of providing “bursary awards to students attending secondary schools established in Ilese” from 2016; and, by 2017, “provide bursary awards to students of underprivileged parents that gain admission into university”, harnessing funds from “interested community supporters and interested donors”.

    Still, again, the business cum empowerment part of this charity is not far away.  The livewire for the charity is the Catland Microfinance Bank Limited, the community-owned microfinance bank.  “Catland”, by the way, is the English translation of Ilese, “Ile Ese” (Ijebu for “home of cats”).

    Now, if the Ogun government is watching, it may not be a bad idea to structure the yearly  Ilese Day into a state-wide calendar of tourist destinations to be vigorously marketed, after the famous Ojude-Oba festival, which the neighbouring Ijebu Ode hosts every year, after the Muslim Ileya (literally in English: time to go home) festival.

    Ojude Oba, Ilese Day and such festivals may well gift Ogun a belt of cultural tourism, from which the state can reap quite some cash, in these times of dwindling revenue.

     

  • Fajuyi and case for ethnic federalism

    Fajuyi and case for ethnic federalism

    It is the season of restructuring.  So, we may as well start defining that elixir, in all of its possible ramifications, including ethnic federalism.

    On July 29, exactly 50 years after his supreme heroism, the cream of the Yoruba gathered at Ibadan, their political capital, to extol Col. Adekunle Fajuyi.

    Fajuyi, with his Supreme Commander and Nigeria’s first military Head of State, Gen. Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi, was felled during the July counter-coup of 1966.

    But Prof. Niyi Osundare, guest lecturer and globally acclaimed poet, argued that despite Fajuyi’s acclaimed heroism, he has not morphed — and may never  morph — into a pan-Nigeria hero.

    Reason? Nigeria’s hero chamber — no thanks to radically differing values — bubbles with anti-heroes!

    “Tribal considerations,” the erudite scholar rued,   ”continue to trump national imperatives; and a dreadful vice on the national stage may be an enviable virtue at the tribal level.”

    Indeed!  Obafemi Awolowo was clearly the greatest thinker and doer of his generation — if not, as yet, contemporary Nigeria.

    Yet, outside the Southwest, where he is revered, next only to Oduduwa, the Yoruba progenitor, many regard him as an “arch-tribalist”.

    Sani Abacha, in contrast, was perhaps the most venal Nigerian soldier that ever lived.  Yet, no less than two public institutions, in his area of the country, continue to be named after him, Abacha loot be damned!

    Beside Awo and Abacha, Nigeria has a rather long chain of hero-villians (heroes within, villains outside): Sir Ahmadu Bello, former premier of Northern Region (revered in the North but reviled outside, as avatar of systematic northern domination), and Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu (Biafra rebel leader and unadulterated Igbo hero but sniggered at outside).  Somewhat,  Olusegun Obasanjo, achieves the opposite (scorned by his native Yoruba, but acclaimed by others, especially in the North).

    Perhaps only Nnamdi Azikiwe kept some national affection outside his Igbo nativity.  But then, Zik sought to be a nationalist without a nation.

    So, he may well have ended a plastic historic figure, for he appeared the least developmentally impactful, among the first three regional premiers — when compared with  Awo (West); and the Sardauna (North).

    “The likes of Adekunle Fajuyi are not recognized as national heroes,” Prof. Osundare told his audience, “because there is yet no ‘nation’ to be a hero in or of.”

    But could it have been otherwise? The Yoruba beatification of Fajuyi issues from their Omoluabi credo.  How can Nigeria fit into that, when their appears no pan-Nigeria Omoluabi equivalent?

    But from contemporary history to contemporary present.  A lot of bile has been expended on President Muhammadu Buhari’s alleged “northernisation” of key appointments.  The president may well be guilty as charged.

    Still, such skewing is hardly novel. When President Jonathan was there, the pendulum of favour swung to his native South-South, and catchment South East.  But Ripples can’t remember the beneficiaries back then scream and foam in the mouth  about “injustice” — the injustice that favoured them!

    Under the brief Umaru Yar’ Adua Presidency, the locus of power was clearly northern.

    Again, only Obasanjo ran against the grain.  But then, he appears the acclaimed master of shadow over substance. As perception-correct as his appointments were, that his presidency laid the foundation for the present mess shows how suspect the substance was.

    Still, even under Obasanjo, the Yoruba jaunty cap assumed the symbolic moniker of “power shift”!  Even to the uppity Yoruba, vicarious power, even via a prodigal son, was not quite bitter!

    Besides, before you hurry to smite Muhammadu Buhari as an irredeemable “northern tribalist”, do an ethnic analysis of the staff of the Vice President and the ministers. The result might just be revealing!  You can call it ethnic-driven. But the principals may well counter it is trust-driven!

    This ethnic core captures Nigeria’s stark reality.  Though some plastic “nationalists” would scoff it is septic, coming up with a counter antiseptic would appear beyond the ken of their cosmetic laboratory!

    With this clear ethnic-driven symbolism of power, therefore, it is unclear which trumps which: the sense of outrage over the “injustice” of appointments; or the sense of bitter envy from the howling — the howling that would rather be the happy beneficiaries, “injustice” be damned!

    The ethnic locus of these bitter criticisms shows some sociological Freudian slip, of a country wilfully living in denial.  But that denial cannot wish away the ethnic compass.

    Indeed, with hardly any consciousness of “Nigerianness” (except perhaps in sports, when the national team is winning, as the Dream Team VI, against all odds, did against Japan, in the ongoing Rio Olympics), the basis of thinking, appointment-making and protest, over felt injustices, would appear ethnic!

    So, Nigeria’s continuing crisis of nationhood is simply the crisis of injustices, which the ethnics mete out to one another.

    That would continue, so long as the tribe continues to drive federal power (no matter what the Constitution says) in a consumptive federalism, in which the capture of federal power could mean an ethnic capture, wholesale, of Nigeria’s resources.

    But that can change, if the tribe — no evil sociological tag, ab initio —  becomes the driver of Nigeria’s productive federalism.  That means transferring Nigeria’s rich resources to the care of the locals.

    Ay, the locals are eminently entitled to eat.  But before they do, they must drive their resources with a frenzy, ingraining the basic ethos that there is no easy money.  Isn’t that more refreshing than the present salivating after a central dole?

    Besides, other things being equal, that should boost pan-Nigeria wealth in real terms.  Fierce but positive regional competition, as it was in the 1st Republic, would only increase that harvest.

    Imagine!  Everyone leveraging on their native traits, using the local tongue to galvanize selves to stupendous productivity; and local mores, taboos and strictures to own public economic assets and banish graft and corruption, even with the all-too-demonized tribe acting as fulcrum!

    Eldorado?  Not quite.  But it would be a new breath, of economic rebirth — and perhaps a tactical tribal retreat to launch a new national ethos of mutual respect, hard work and shared values in productive federalism!  No part of Nigeria is, after all, so useless it cannot take care of itself.

    That again brings the matter right back to Fajuyi, and the crisis of Nigerian national heroes and anti-heroes.

    The Yoruba Omoluabi credo (which Prof. Osundare coined as ‘Omoluabiism’) — selfless, considerate, honourable and heroic — made Fajuyi to opt for heroic death, instead of shameful life, while confronting the mutineers that killed his guest and supreme commander.

    Still, the Yoruba have no monopoly of virtues.  So, every ethnic group in the Nigerian federation can boast of traits it could deploy for own development.  That is the exciting promise of ethnic federalism.

    For too long, the tribe has been a key factor in Nigerian underdevelopment.  But the same tribe can be turned into a driver of progress and development.

    Federalism, structured on ethnic groupings and cultural contiguity, may well be the elixir. That was what Awo pushed more than 50 years ago — and it would appear equally, if not more, valid today.

  • My degree is more foreign than yours

    If this headline parodies My Mercedes Benz is Bigger than Yours, that 1975 novel by Nkem Nwankwo (1936-2001); or even the poem, “The Motoka”, by Ugandan Theo Luzuka, it is probably because  some snob effect — or put more starkly, bragging right — drove those works, if satirically, as it tends to drive the contemporary Nigerians’ penchant for foreign degrees.

    But the snag is: intellect seldom brags.  It rather commands with quiet authority, well arrayed on rigorous and logical scaffolding.  It is vanity, hung on emptiness, that brags!

    Yet, this latest fad, of foreign degrees, even from neighbouring Benin Republic, not to talk of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah’s country, on to UK and USA, comes with the fizz of rare pride, of solid personal achievement, with no less globalised atavism of a neo-Okonkwo, making good outside Umuofia!

    Quietly, these education émigrés ripple with quiet pride, a quiet that screams more than the market din: My degree is more foreign than yours! — if  not from the appreciative beneficiaries, then from proud, ecstatic parents, in an exciting bubble of superiority complex!

    Sometime in the last century, a certain Reuben Abati graduated with first class honours, in Theatre Arts, from a Nigerian university.  This year, indeed a few weeks ago, Abati’s daughter just graduated, also with a first class, but this time in Law, from a UK university.

    From the way the news trended, both on traditional and new media, it was something of great cheer — and just as well: you don’t produce a first class everyday!

    But the bounce to the news, Ripples guessed, was less the first class — after all University of Lagos’ Ayodele Daniel Dada, just broke all the breakable records, en route to corralling the best-ever first class degree in the history of that university.  It was rather, that feat was achieved from a  British university!

    Dr. Abati earned his own feat here — and not even from Nigeria’s first generation academies of Ibadan, Lagos, Ife, University of Nigeria, Nsukka and Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.  Yet, he went on to hone his skills to becoming one of Nigeria’s finest newspaper columnists.

    For the junior Abati, however, both dad and daughter — and indeed, not a few of their compatriots, would appear to agree: even the best of Nigerian Universities is not good enough, particularly if you have the cash to splash to fund a foreign degree!

    New century, new education temper?

    Yet, the key to Nigeria’s development — and renaissance — would appear locked in the Nigerian university, which itself appears hopelessly locked out of reckoning!  How then can a country truly develop?

    True, only a critical mass, not the rabble, changes society.  History has proved that again and again.  Still, if a chain is as strong as its weakest link, it logically follows that even the mass cannot be completely left out.

    Put another way, no matter the armada of whiz kids flaunting avant-garde foreign degrees, boasting the cutting edge in science and technology; and the proverbial state-of-the-art knowledge in the humanities and culture, the bulk of Nigerian thinkers, entrepreneurs, innovators and scholars, to build a future clan, would still come from the Nigerian university system.

    Besides, technology is neither machine or gadget.  It is bending your environment to your will.  So, even with your hyper-degrees, you are alien to your land — and are proudly so — how do you bend that land to your will?

    Therefore, this piece is not to begrudge the Abatis, and likes, their goaod fortune.  It is rather a stricture against the decay of an otherwise promising university system, which many practically regard as beyond redemption.  It is not.

    Still, there is nothing abominable in foreign education.  Indeed, as far back as antiquity, there is certainly something to be said of travel, whether for education, medical care, or even plain adventure.

    That was what gifted the Athens of Pericles, with its sparkling constellation of pan-Grecian philosophers, scientists, dramatists and general scholars, the golden moniker of Periclean Greece; just as the United States of today could easily boast as the global magnet of anything stellar — pre-Donald Trump’s explosive xenophobia, at least.

    Even before Obafemi Awolowo’s democratization of the Nigerian education space, by his revolutionary free primary education programme in the old Western Region; and Yakubu Gowon’s liberalization of university access in the early 1970s, privileged and determined families had always sponsored theirs to study abroad.

    Yet, a time was when UI’s University College Hospital (UCH) was ranked fourth in the whole of the Commonwealth — which included India (clear favorites among not-so-rich Nigerians for medical tourism), Singapore and Malaysia, countries either then behind Nigeria, or on the same level.

    That was possible, not only because Nigerian scholars and professionals knew they could hold their candle to anyone, and were determined to create a buzzing local chapter of the global academy, Nigeria played hosts to scholars from various parts of the world, as much as it pushed out citizens to tap knowledge from other climes.

    Not anymore!  Now, it’s a ruinous one-way traffic.  As Nigerians thirst for foreign knowledge, hardly anyone ranks Nigeria’s scholastic well deep enough to drink from.  Again, it’s the curse of giving out everything and receiving nothing — the old curse of Africa, in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons!

    And that curse is writ large: in oil, you export crude cheap, but buy back refined petroleum at a premium.  In trade, you spend your last forex to import barely anything, even those you could easily make.

    But it is in education that curse appears most potent.  At one level, some very brilliant Nigerian youths, thanks to their parents’ deep pockets and heroic sacrifices, keep foreign scholars employed by streaming into foreign universities, costing Nigeria humongous forex, which could be averted were the Nigerian tertiary sector deemed sound enough.

    At another, the best of Nigerian brains emigrate to build foreign climes and, in their frustration, point to their homeland with the proverbial left hand of utter contempt!  Yet, they can’t claim those lands their own, even if they naturalized one thousand times!

    The political military — blast them and may we never witness such again! — may have destroyed the Nigerian education system by their anti-knowledge penchant.  But it’s now 16 years, going to 17, after formal military rule.  It is therefore time to re-build, not to continue piping the dirge of how bad the situation has become.

    On this score, the Buhari Presidency must do its urgent bit to fix the troubled education sector.  With deliberateness, sincerity and persistence, result would eventually come.

    In the short run, however, it is time for an urgent restructuring in educational thinking.  Let those who can, send their children and wards abroad.  But let nobody feel Nigerian education is too bad it cannot be fixed.  It is not.

    So, less on crowing about foreign degrees.  That is no open sesame to development. But more on fixing the Nigerian degree to globally compete.

    Therein is the straight and narrow path to national redemption and renaissance.

  • Season of restructuring

    Since May 31 when Atiku Abubakar, former vice president, latched onto restructuring, the Federal Republic has been in a whirr.

    Alhaji Atiku, debonair, suave, polished and cosmopolitan, may well be earnest; or was simply gaming, with a crafty eye on 2019.

    But it is legitimate skepticism, demurring to hold the former vice president to any fixed core of beliefs, the way you would hold an Obafemi Awolowo to ethnic federalism (upon which 1st Republic theory and praxis the present clamour for regional federalism rests); or a Bola Tinubu, with fiscal federalism (the most impassioned but reasoned challenge to Olusegun Obasanjo’s unfazed imperial presidency, that birthed this 4th Republic, 1999-2007).

    Yet, almost across the board, a near-unanimous roar has lauded Alhaji Atiku: the near-elixir — in the books of many — that may make the difference between Nigeria floundering from ruin to bust, and final disintegration; or cobbling some functional solution to the eternal crisis of federalism — and nationhood.

    It would be absolutely fallacious to accuse Afenifere, the Yoruba socio-political pressure group, of jumping on the Atiku latest bandwagon.  On restructuring, it had been there from Genesis; and there is no Revelation yet that it would end its clamour.

    Still, after its rather rash political sinking with Goodluck Jonathan, and its election-eve National Conference of 2014, Afenifere has, with both hands, seized Atiku’s latest activism for self-revalidation and relevance.

    Its younger cousin, the Afenifere Renewal Group (ARG), has also weighed in — no surprise at all — though its members are part of the ruling All Progressive Congress (APC); and President Muhammadu Buhari has poured ice-cold water on the idea.

    But the surprise really, is from the Eastern front, where Nnamdi Kanu’s Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) and vandal militancy, from the mainly Ijaw corridor of the  South-South, are in great tizzy.

    Why, even good, old Ike Ekweremadu, controversial deputy president of the Senate, is also talking the talk!  But central sinecure at all cost, which his rather soulless essence as Nigeria’s first minority deputy senate president underscores, is violently contradictory to restructuring.

    Indeed, the Eastern buzz has been most virulent, most truculent and most animated, many a time bordering on the explosively impassioned and uncivil, especially in the social media, the Nigerian cyber-jungle with savage lingo.

    Yet, the Eastern political elite, with their northern counterparts, as eternal central power collaborators, have been the most responsible for the current Nigerian bind!

    Still, it is good the Eastern Saul, hitherto unfazed power player in Nigeria’s consumptive federalism, of office sharing and central pork, is turning, under our very eyes, into a radical Paul, hollering and hectoring at Nigeria’s future redemption, in productive federalism!

    Why this radical change?  Simple.  Each time a vital segment of the Nigerian elite loses power and privilege, some dramatic activism births.

    True, this may be less true of the South West, with its penchant, before the advent of the Buhari Presidency, for opposition politics.

    At the trenches back then, in trenchant clamour for a Sovereign National Conference (SNC) to resolve the ‘National Question’, were the late Alao Aka-Basorun, with his braves.  Though that campaign boasted other pan-Nigeria names like Olisa Agbakoba, SAN, then president of the Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO), the spirit was clearly South West’s and its opposition politics hell-raising.

    But not even all that, with the grave injustice of June 12 and the Sani Abacha anti-South West iron purge, could stop the South West softening somewhat, on the altar of vicarious power, towards Obasanjo’s devil-may-care imperial presidency.  That explains Obasanjo’s foxy snare of the South West political mainstream, and the Alliance for Democracy’s electoral burial of 2003.

    The North and the South East had navigated diametrically opposed tracks.

    The North, because between 1960 and 1993, which witnessed MKO Abiola’s stupendous presidential election win, had always been in power — and looked set to be eternally so.

    Even then, at the height of the Jonathan Presidency, when seeming power wilderness gored the North, a desperate Arewa lobby called on the North to focus on own interests, outside Nigeria’s, as it is wont.

    The South East, on the other hand, ever assured of sharing power, even as junior partners, was always bellicose at the very idea of restructuring — outside the traditional power balance, of cohabitation with the North.  So was the South-South, though with less bellicosity.

    That was perhaps why, at the height of the South West campaign for the  Abiola mandate revalidation, Emeka Ojukwu, Eze Igbo Gburugburu, would claim his Abacha-era constitutional conference “mandate” was “superior” to Abiola’s historic win.  Or Okwesilieze Nwodo, as aborted 3rd Republic Enugu governor, would foreswear himself to self-exile, should MKO’s mandate be revalidated!

    But how times have changed!  In this new season of restructuring, it is the South East hollering, but the South West — aside from Afenifere, which has a peculiar motive by its activism — near-funereally quiet.

    Could the dominant political segment of the Yoruba be too busy “eating” (on account of their power alliance with the North) — and you don’t talk when you eat! — to share the East’s current  hyper-excitement on restructuring?

    But to be fair to that lobby, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo’s contribution to the debate just showed how contentious is restructuring’s definition.  In that intervention, Mr. Osinbajo kept faith with the Bola Tinubu’s school of fiscal federalism.

    Under that rubric, Lagos has found economic stability and increasing prosperity — and that is within this present system of federative ruin, that restructuring hopes to change.

    But is fiscal federalism robust enough to reform a failing system, from consumptive to productive federalism?  Maybe, Osinbajo appears to contend.  Never! The classical restructuring army barks.

    The North, in a way, would appear an entirely different proposition.

    A Muhammadu Buhari, by socialization and orientation, has been honest: he would seldom entertain restructuring. Besides, as Col. Innocent Azubike Nass (rtd), noted in his contribution to the debate, it would be quite fraudulent to hold Buhari to a restructuring agenda, ala Jonathan’s national conference recommendations, when he never made it a core campaign issue, en route to winning the presidency.

    Neither would a Nuhu Ribadu, as modern as Buhari is traditional.  Or even a Nasir el Rufai — as digital and sophisticated as they come, and never shackled, as Buhari and Ribadu, as a former member of the uniformed forces.  Yet, from his Accidental Public Servant, El-Rufai would appear as centrist, as both Buhari and Ribadu.

    So, despite Atiku Abubakar’s conversion, could centrism be core to the northern political mind, as decentralization is core to the South West’s — or indeed, the entire South’s, if the current restructuring clamour, in the South East and South-South, is not just some fad of the moment?  And why?

    Ripples believes in restructuring, and has always said so.  But not as some opportunistic clamour to assuage the loss of power and privilege,  after an election lost and won, as this present crusade suspiciously appears.

    At that crucial juncture, every party would sizzle down and talk to one another, instead of talking at one another, as it is now.

    By the way, why not frame restructuring as a campaign issue in 2019?

  • Bukky’s angels

    Bukky’s angels

    Bukky’s angels?  First, ponder two band of angels: one from John Milton’s Paradise Lost; the other, from contemporary America.

    Englishman John Milton (1608-1674) probably had a point to prove in language politics; in those days when Greek and Latin were the core languages of court.

    By how times have changed, with Greek and Latin virtually entombed in antiquity!  But English has bloomed — core language of the modern court, from scholarship, to diplomacy, to global business.  Why, even an irate segment of EU is sniping: at Brussels, with Brexit, UK should exit, with its English!   Some hope!

    From Paradise Lost to the United States, with Charlie’s Angels: a TV detective series that ran on American TV from 1976 to 1981, starring Kate Jackson, Farrah Fowcett and Jaclyn Smith, three ravishingly beautiful angels, sworn to smashing crime, as their adored Charlie proclaimed!

    But nobody ever saw Charlie.  He was only a voice — but all-knowing and all-seeing!

    Charlie’s angels were angels for good: finding out crime anywhere, and fixing it.

    Not so, Lucifer’s angels.  In Paradise Lost, Lucifer, the son of the morning and hitherto brightest of all archangels, got consumed by sheer pride and conceit.

    His host swooped, bristled, quivered and rippled against the Almighty, on account of Lucifer’s beauty and hubris;  quaking, after their doomed hero: better reign in hell than serve in heaven!

    They got their wish — and the once luminous Lucifer, archangel of the high heavens, got hauled down as Satan, chained to the pit of hell, infernal king of darkness.

    Still, Bukky’s angels?

    Well, unlike Charlie’s angels that swooped for the public good, Bukky’s angels are the contemporary Nigerian equivalent of the satanic gang, brusquely resisting their imminent lost paradise of filth.

    Like Lucifer and his host, they would rather reign in the continued Nigerian hell, of corruption and dysfunction; than serve in a dream Nigeria: corrupt-free, workable, equitable and fair.

    That is the crux of all the excitement on Saraki’s senatorial front.

    Bukky’s angels are the quivering and rippling and threatening and swearing senators, bound by no laws but their conceit and whims; held by no parliamentary etiquette, but their rotten and uncouth temper; and ever ready to bristle their wings in anger, hinting at their unlimited capacity for mischief, when, where and how they damn well please!

    They are the unfazed guardian angels of Bukola Saraki, controversial president of the Senate, who is not comfy on, but is self-glued to his throne of thorns, since his spiky installation on 9 June 2015.

    Yes, it all started in June 2015 when Dr. Saraki, by selling off his party, delegitimized an otherwise legitimate bid for Senate president; and Ike Ekweremadu, by selling his soul to crass opportunism, assumed a position he had no claim to, by his party’s minority status.

    Folks say trying to get rid of Saraki is political.  It is.  But so was Saraki’s premeditated perfidy against his party and its entitlement by right, by law and by convention, for infernal careerism.

    So, one political motive cancels out the other, right?

    But pray, what would cancel out the criminal raps on the neck of Saraki and Ekweremadu?

    Threat-belching senators, with the malady peaking with that kindergarten one to impeach the president?

    Or, gambit for time, by Saraki and his lawyers, to frustrate court processes, instead of vigorously and swiftly establishing his innocence?

    Still, the embattled Senate president tends to miss something.  Whereas the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT), if Saraki is convicted, might be soft landing; for its penalty is just some years’ suspension from politics; the alleged forgery case, if found guilty, fetches him gaol and ruin.

    Just compare the images. At CCT, Saraki has the “Accused’s Box” to himself, with a chair to boot.  But when he appeared in court for the forgery charge, he was herded in the dock, standing with three others — the first Senate president to clock such ignominy!

    Yet, the Saraki camp’s strategy remains the same: stalling by bluff and bluster, powered by senatorial blackmail, and not a tad rascality.

    When the CCT case broke, Saraki’s senatorial angels caused the CCT Chairman, Justice Danladi Umar, to appear before a senate committee, a classic case of wanton self-help and criminal arm-twisting.

    The forgery charge birthed a similar scenario: the fuming band also summoned the federal Attorney-General (AGF), to explain his temerity to dock a citizen — though he be senate president and his deputy — indicted for alleged crime!

    What hubris!  A Senate created by the Constitution, challenging a constitutional fiat from that same grundnorm!

    That conceit provoked a counter-conceit from the AGF, who first spurned the summons, which was unfortunate.

    But it does underscore that strengthening institutions in a delicate democracy requires utmost and mutual decorum.  The moment a Senate makes a habit of reckless orders, aimed at illicit self-help, by brow-beating others, citizens would start — and not illegitimately too — calling its bluff.  That shreds the dignity and integrity of the country’s highest legislative chamber.

    Well, the Senate would ram through its legalistic summons, for the AGF eventually appeared. But it heard what it didn’t want to hear.  Besides, it was clear who won the moral war.

    The Senate, under Bukola Saraki, has reduced everything to reckless gaming, hoping that the consequent noisy spectacle — even if it is scandalously unedifying — would somewhat block the people’s nose from its oozing rot — that turns hollow, an otherwise hallowed chamber.

    Add all this to the sewer-speak from Dino Melaye — he of the uncouth and irrational din — and you would easily realize how low the Senate had sunk.  Yet, it is still sinking!

    The more the Muhammadu Buhari Presidency strives to pull a rotten country towards rectitude, the more Saraki’s Senate desperately rallies to shove it back into the sewers, believing in the inevitable triumph of evil over good.

    How so tragically misguided — just like Lucifer and his doomed angels!

    Saraki may well herd his tragic ensemble into the hell in which they so wish to reign.  In any case, in building a better Nigeria, it’s only a matter of time before they are consumed by own folly.

    But parliament would bear the long-term collateral damage, long after this unfortunate 8th Senate would have been history.

    The more this Senate craves illicit power, the more it loses authority, respect and prestige, and the more it is fated to domination by the executive.

    But it’s doubtful if the Saraki Senate would care, having worked itself into some Samson complex.

    It would spectacularly crash, to be sure, bound to self-destruction as it is.  But unlike Samson, who at least had some moral grudge against Delilah, for betraying him, Saraki and co would crash alone.

    Political self-destruction is a democratic choice.  Though it’s still some three years to election time, the electorate nationwide must start pencilling down those senatorial irritants, and ship them to the political Siberia they belong.

    The Senate is there for good governance.  But the reverse is the case in this 8th Senate, because its leadership has serious ethical and integrity challenges.

    May Nigeria never see such a Senate again!

  • Restructuring and elite consensus

    Restructuring and elite consensus

    Saturday evening, July 2.  Rendezvous: Jazzhole, upscale culture mart, in upscale Ikoyi, Lagos.

    Wale Adebanwi, en route to a new professorial chair at Oxford University, England, had gathered a lean but powerful assemblage, for a select reading of his new book, The Nation as Grand Narrative: The Nigerian Press and the Politics of Meaning (NY, USA: University of Rochester Press, 2016).

    That gathering was minute.  But it was well and truly distinguished.

    Kunle Ajibade, the convener, Prof. Niyi Osundare, ace poet and public commentator, Prof. Adigun Agbaje, famed professor of political science, Basorun J.K. Randle, the grand old man of numbers and letters, Erelu Bisi Fayemi, critical voice in gender and development studies, and Nike Ransome-Kuti, she of the great Ransome-Kuti clan.

    Also in-house were Jimi Agbaje, charming, urbane and avuncular, Yinka Odumakin, young Afenifere warrior, Tunde Fagbenle, until very recently, a columnist with The Punch, Funke Awolowo — and son — daughter of Segun Awolowo I, and eldest granddaughter of the great Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Laolu Akande, from the Presidency and delectable spouse, and a certain Fafa Princewill, a bearded gentleman who somewhat, and with relish, regaled the house with his brand of Ijaw-centric history, in the context of Nigeria’s troubled nationhood.

    After tributes to Adebanwi’s scholarly genius, focus and fecundity, the house moved into the business of the evening.

    Prof. Osundare, serenaded journalism — one of at least three areas of study that tickle Prof. Adebanwi’s genius, the other two being political science and anthropology —  pronouncing it “superior to history”.  Whereas history mops up the past, he reasoned, journalism laps up the present, in preparation for the future, which history dutifully records as the past!

    Going back to the era of the Tatler and Spectator, of David Steele and Joseph Addison, pioneers of British journalism (18th century), which by the way shaped journalism as we know it today, he insisted that journalism — news, features and even the column — constituted invaluable sources to the historian, as (s)he thrives to capture the true spirit of the epoch.

    Tributes fully paid, Adebanwi proceeded, reading from his book, the media recording of critical junctures of Nigeria’s political evolution: the 1953 media excitement after Anthony Enahoro, on 22 July 1953, in the House of Representatives, had raised the self-government motion by 1956; the June 12, 1993 presidential election annulment, and the  follow-up media crisis of infidelity to truth and principle, and, of course, the 1999 transition to civil rule election, which presidency Olusegun Obasanjo won.

    At these critical junctures, Adebanwi noted, citing notorious facts of history as his research revealed, the Nigerian press was no sole bastion of perceived common truth, or principle or even felt ideology.

    Rather, they were captives to interests — group interests — which regrettably, the author grimly noted, was fast morphing into individual interests, with the collapse of ideological politics (no thanks of Ibrahim Babangida’s experimentation with new breed politics, of the late 1980s and early 1990s).

    Adebanwi’s unflattering verdict?  From the 1950s to the present, the Nigerian newspaper press has declined from being captives to group interests to now, captives to individual interests!

    By some freak of history though, the Nigerian newspaper appears heading exactly where it started.

    Great owner-editors of the Lagos (and therefore, Nigerian) early press, John Payne Jackson, and successor-son, Thomas Horatio Jackson of the Lagos Weekly Record, James Bright Davies, the brave soul who owned and edited Times of Nigeria, and even Herbert Macaulay, of the Lagos Daily News, pushed legitimate personal interests, even if those interests, according to Fred Omu in his Press and Politics in Nigeria, 1880-1937, commingled with perceived collective good, particularly regarding the economic domination by the European merchants of their day.

    Even the so-called ‘wrap around’ adverts, which many a journalism purist still regards as editorial heresy — completely pawning your prime news pages for crass commerce — had some echoes from the past.  Back then, the convention was to devote the front page to adverts, shipping and other commercial news, in the early Nigerian newspapers in Lagos.

    There appears a big difference, though.  Whereas the old masters could lay some claim to nobility of purpose, at that crucial juncture of Nigerian press history, it would appear a cynic’s haven for the present players: the advertiser that slams his message in your face because he has the cash to splash, the newspaper investor that projects nothing but brazen self-interest, just because again he has the cash to drive the business, and of course, the ethnic pressure group that, through the media, screams injustice! — not when that ‘injustice’ favours it, but only when it hurts its interest!

    That, of course, brings the discourse to “elite consensus”, which at once animated the gathering.  But how can that be, in a people who seldom agree on any basics?

    In the glory days of regionalism, which nolstagia is firing the present clamour for restructuring, the Sardauna’s government named key projects after the northern premier: Ahmadu Bello University, Ahmadu Bello Stadium.

    But could Awo, in the West, have named the University of Ife and Liberty Stadium (both which ironically now bear his name) without the West convulsing with an earthquake of “nepotism and cronyism”?  Or, for that matter, Zik, in the East?

    In the waste years of military rule, Sani Abacha’s grand thievery was settled.  Yet, to this day, landmarks named for him still stand.  It’s doubtful if such could hold in the South West.

    Even in the present corruption hurly-burly, not many Yoruba would rationalize Baba Olu Falae’s alleged obtainment.  Yet, a good number of Igbo would jump out demonstrating that “our brothers”, Olisa Metuh and Ike Ekweremadu, are being “persecuted”, even in a case before a court of law!

    How can you secure elite consensus, under such violently differing fundamentals?

    Although Adebanwi submitted that was still possible, citing the Awo era elite consensus of persuading parents to free farm hands to enjoy free primary education, in a basic agrarian society, Ripples insisted that, for Nigeria, that might just be a bridge too far.

    Yorubaland is like the Brits.  Though the English, the Scots and the Welsh may have differences, they are all tribesmen in the British nation.

    But Nigeria?  Not unlike putting Poles, Russians, the French, the Iberians, the Slavs, etc, in the same geographical enclave.  The natural elixir for that, it would appear, is federalism.

    Though Prof. Agbaje would play the purist, “complexifying” (in his own very words) the subject; and insisting Nigeria was technically no federation as Ripples had maintained, that hardly vitiates the point that the ideal, for a country like Nigeria, is federalism.

    At the end, however, even that little gathering could not agree on a consensus on elite consensus!  That, as it were, showed how complex the Nigerian situation is!

    Still, there are settled virtues, that make humanity thrive: honesty, diligence, fair play, equity, justice, empathy, etc.  If only the Nigerian elite are settled on these fundamentals, Nigeria’s so-called complexity may, open sesame, just disappear!

  • Osun: Another pseudo-storm

    Osun: Another pseudo-storm

    Leaders Beware: Christian or Muslim, you may find this piece irreverent, since Ripples does not particularly care about Hijab or any religious frock.

    These wears are a cultural imposition that came with these foreign faiths.

    But Ripples is adamant on fairness and equity — and so should any fair mind — particularly when it concerns structural injustice.  That looks “fair” just because it had “been there” for so long!

    That alone drove this intervention in the current Osun Hijab pseudo-storm.

    What was the basis of “secular” uniforms in Nigerian schools? Lagos of the 19th Century, as captured by Prof. Michael Echeruo in his book, Victorian Lagos, may well offer a glimpse.

    “Lagos remained almost thoroughly a ‘Christian’ community,” quipped the Revd. Mojola Agbebi, a radical Christian cleric, in Victorian Lagos.  “Its government was British and so, Christian; its elite was educated and so also Christian.  The mass of the people were, however, ‘uneducated’ and pagan (read African traditional worship).”

    “In between,” he continued, “came the Muslim community, but, for a long time, it had neither the political nor economic power to enforce an appropriate position for itself in Lagos life.”

    Meanwhile, the Lagos official census, by 1891, was: 10, 269 Christians, 21, 103 Muslims and 54, 230 pagans (again, read African Traditional worshippers), according to Victorian Lagos (page 82).

    Still pushing the Agbebi analogy, the Lagos government was British — and Christian.  So, its mode of operations, routine work and rest days, public holidays, as well as its education policy — and school administration — was Christian.

    If the school administration was Christian, then it logically follows the uniform prescribed for the schools would be Christian.  So, the uniforms were as “secular” as their British (read Christian) origin allowed.

    Indeed, it wasn’t until February 1899 that the Lagos government — thanks to the efforts of Liberian Edward Blyden, who worked in the Lagos service as Political Agent for Native Affairs, but resigned in 1898 — that the Lagos government introduced a government-sponsored Lagos Muslim School.  Dr. Blyden, though himself a Christian, was champion of Muslim education.

    To Dr. Blyden’s memory, from grateful Lagos, is the Edward Blyden Memorial Primary School, Lafiaji, Lagos — which, as kids on Lagos Island in the early 1970s, we used to mock as “Edo Foro”, somewhat punning Edward for Edo (Yoruba for liver).

    But even that school, like other public schools back then, was run as a “secular” school, hinged on Euro-Christian tradition!

    Why that disproportionate domination?  Simple.  Christianity (back then, less than 100 years in Africa) came with colonial empire building.  Islam (which, quoting Agbebi again, had been around for 1003 years) came with trans-Africa Arab trade.  But both were foreign doctrines.

    While trade might cohabit with local culture, if the cash is right, imperialism imposes its own.  But aside from a Christian-led government, Christian missionaries pioneered running schools.  So, even when Muslim missions later followed suit, the European concept of the school uniform was well-neigh settled.

    So long for the much vaunted secularity!

    As it was with Lagos, then the British colonial capital, it is with Federal Nigeria.

    On the balance, even with the Muslim lobby’s Arabic scrawl on Nigeria’s currency and their gamely push to brand their faith as the religion of power of independent Nigeria, British colonization has ensured much of the country’s so-called “secularity” had Euro-Christian roots.

    Yet, Nigeria has a huge Muslim population.  In the name of equity, don’t Muslims too have rights, of self-expression, under the law?

    That tucks the matter back to the Osun Hijab controversy.

    Since an Osogbo high court ruled that Muslim girls could wear the Hijab as accessory to their uniforms in public schools, an emotive army has been screaming : it’s secularity or nothing! But whose secularity?

    On this score, some newspapers have written editorials, exhibiting the disturbing penchant, of the Nigerian contemporary press, to brandish specious analysis as the zenith of rigour!  They also leave themselves open to not unfair accusations of anti-Muslim bias.

    The Punch editorial was predictable: arrogant, bigoted, total and sweeping!  It was an unabashed beatification of its well-executed agenda of editorial mischief, nay diktat, against Aregbesola and his Osun government.

    You doubt?  Check how the newspaper always slants its Osun stories, towards its favorite cauldron of religious Armageddon!

    In a buzz of self-praise over a self-fulfilling prophecy, the newspaper even growled at the Osun government to junk its education reforms, simply because the chaffing, all-mighty Punch balks!

    But the Osun government need not be dismayed.  If you search the literatures enough, many a newspaper would have roared at Chief Obafemi Awolowo that he was wasting time and resources, executing his epochal free primary education programme.  But history is a wiser judge!

    But perhaps The Punch suffers some structural defects?  How many of its Editorial Board members are Muslims, for instance?

    And how many there, are imbued with enough sensitivity to delicately approach this debate?  Or even the scholarly humility to research the root of Muslim rights in a so-called secular Nigeria, beyond the baying rage of an all-knowing and all-wise crusader!

    The Nation too wrote an editorial on the matter, on which Ripples also disagrees.

    After all the excitement, however, a court has passed a verdict many feel is controversial.  But when a party disagrees with a judgment, due process demands appeal, not resort to self-help.  To endorse self-help under any guise, particularly when the so-called secularity of school uniforms is founded on smoke, is indeed tragic.

    But the conceptual mischief — if not outright and wilful confusion — in the brouhaha beggars belief!  The huffing Osun Christian elements scrambled their children and wards to school with a pot-pourri of Christian worship cloaks: soutanes, surplices, choir robes!

    But can all these be defended as the  normal, everyday wear for Christian girls, the way the Hijab is a Muslim girl’s, 24 hours-a-day?

    And now, parting shots — from Christian voices of Victorian Lagos.

    First Bishop James Johnson, “Holy Johnson” in Lagos church history and moderate cleric.  He was Saro with Ijebu roots.  But he talked of the Ijebu contempt, for 19th century local Christians’ British affectations — “long trousers, shoes and socks, and … umbrellas,” English customs that came with the gospel.

    And the iconoclastic Mojola Agbebi: “… the white man’s names, the white man’s dress, are so many non-essentials, so many props and crutches affecting the religious manhood of the Christian African”

    That about captures Ripples’ attitude to zealots on both sides of the divide: you can still practice your faith without becoming either a western or Arab caricature.  Still, everyone has a right to express themselves, their own way.

    The Hijab controversy is, therefore, a mere symptom.  The real disease is the skewing of Nigeria’s official public life against Muslims, no thanks to the British  (read Christian) imperial legacy.

    Nigeria’s so-called secularity is a near-farce, being Christian-driven.  So, Muslims too have a right to be integrated into that “secularity”.

    That is the tale of the Osun Hijab — and the Nigerian state should listen; and make amends.

    That is what is fair and equitable to all.

     

  • So long, MKO?

    So long, MKO?

    So long, MKO.

    that appears the not-so-veiled message, from Basorun Moshood Kashimawo Olawale (MKO) Abiola’s native South West, on his June 12, 1993 presidential election annulment heroism — 23 years after the rest of Nigeria had moved on.

    To start with, the Eastern-most reaches of Yorubaland are too trapped in reaction to remember such a tragic epoch, which nevertheless secured the current democratic order.

    In Ondo, Olusegun Mimiko has flirted with progressivism, frolicked with conservatism and made his final, blissful peace with reaction.

    It is no surprise he wouldn’t be bothered by June 12, and whatever its political symbolism is.

    In Ekiti, noisy Ayodele Fayose, gubernatorial equivalent of the empty barrel that makes most noise, is so deafened by his own grating he won’t even “hear” the wind of June 12 whistle past him.

    In central Yorubaland, of Oyo and Osun, however, came some ironic reassurance.  Ironic, because here, political conservatism is strongest in the  South West; and political reactionaries are in no short supply.  Many of these reactionaries openly nailed MKO’s mandate, even while it was still hot!

    Yet, it was this seeming bastion of conservatism — not to talk of reaction — that kept faith with MKO’s memory and supreme sacrifice, by declaring  the next day work-free, after June 12 fell on a Sunday.

    That fidelity comes with extra sweetness: Oyo, with Ibadan, its capital, is the culture and political capital of Yorubaland.

    And Osun, despite its lean purse and the plain mischief of negative branding on the religious front, approximates most, by its developmental policies and programmes, the Awo exemplar of a welfare state, as well as how MKO’s presidency could have panned out, in people-centred social democracy.

    Lagos, the South West super mart, made wonderful foxtrots on the day — June 12.

    But on Monday?  Alas!  Lagos was back at its frenetic hustle.  As they say, “L’ojo Monday, Eko o ni gbagba ku gba!” (On Mondays, Lagos brooks no nonsense).  Eko hustle is no respecter of June 12!

    But it was in MKO’s native Ogun that the June 12 no-show was most galling.  Aside from a low-key procession on the day, there was no work-free day.

    But maybe that June 12 quiet, on the Ogun front, was no surprise —  after all, Abeokuta, of MKO’s nativity, produced two personalities that helped to foil Abiola’s mandate; and to sustain the annulment.

    Olusegun Obasanjo worked more for setting up the Interim National Government (ING) Trojan horse, than revalidating the election; and Ernest Shonekan, another Egba son, assumed subversive duty as “Interim Head of State”, on account of that contraption, that a court later declared illegal.

    Yet, it is such exhibition of near-zero institutional memory, as Ogun crassly showed, that condemns contemporary Nigeria to repeating avoidable mistakes!

    Well, if Nigeria appears done with MKO — supreme sacrifice be damned! — is MKO done with Nigeria?

    Hardly!  And the unfolding political developments are grave indicators.

    In 1993, Abiola, a Yoruba man, won a clean pan-Nigeria mandate — the cleanest in Nigerian history.

    But the rest of Nigeria banded with some military renegades, led by Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, to annul that election and sustain that crime; using ethnic slurs to tar the South West rally for justice.

    Not a few believed it was a northern plot.  But the North countered IBB and co represented nobody but their power-crazed selves.

    Still, that belief set off a chain of events that though led to the restoration of democracy, forced the North to steer clear of the Presidency.

    That process would climax with the willy-nilly coronation of Goodluck Jonathan as Nigeria’s first minority president, but not without opposition from some treasonable northern elements, in the last days of President Umaru Yar’Adua.

    In 2015, Muhammadu Buhari, a Fulani northerner, won another epochal mandate.  For the first time in Nigeria, the opposition routed the ruling order for federal power.

    But a minority from the South-South (witness the so-called Niger Delta Avengers), with not-so-veiled sympathy from the South East, is launching armed economic sabotage to frustrate, if not scuttle outright, that free mandate.

    It’s a classic but tragic retardation, only a Nigeria could muster!

    By the June 12 plot, a majority power clique, nay criminals, suborned the rest of Nigeria to thwart an election globally hailed as very clean; and levy a war of intimidation against Abiola and his native South West.

    But by 2016, that rascality had morphed into a minority plot — by sore election losers from the Niger Delta — inducing the fond among the majority South East, against the rest of Nigeria.

    This extant plot wagers, rather stupidly, that by bombing soft oil installations, and melting into the swamps, it could bend the rest of Nigeria to its sinister will!

    In Nigeria’s rotten cosmos of equal-opportunity injustice, impunity is going ga-ga!

    South West won a mandate but the rest of Nigeria clobbered it into surrendering it.  Now, South-South lost a mandate, but it fancies it could clobber the rest of Nigeria to, willy-nilly, reverse that loss.

    The moral?  Impunity is bad, no matter its source: majority or minority.

    Besides, there is a bit of karma creeping in here.

    You don’t throw a man into the can (from which he didn’t come out alive), kill his wife by state-sponsored terror, ruin his multi-billion Naira business and throw his family into disarray — just because he won a free election.

    Yet, that is Nigeria’s crime against MKO.  Only the most tragically deluded would, therefore, assume Nigeria, without doing right by the man, would live happily ever after!

    That takes the matter right back to MKO and a putative South West retreat, over the grave injustice done the man.

    But why might the South West retreat over the Abiola matter?  Because they have a bit of federal power?  That would be both asinine and ungrateful — and the Yoruba pristine world belies both.

    That is why the South West must press for Abiola’s right, even if posthumously, now that it has a rare influence at the centre.

    Though MKO didn’t consummate his presidency, the Nigerian state must work out some apology, followed by official recognition of his foiled tenure — and the South West must unapologetically lead that push.

    By that, Nigeria would officially repudiate the grave injustice of June 12.

    And to the spiritual: also appease the raging ghost of MKO, which continues to hover over the polity.

  • No deal with outlawry

    No deal with outlawry

    Just as well the Niger Delta Avengers (NDA) first spurned dialogue, and resumed bombing critical economic infrastructure.

    That is lesson number one: never strike a deal with outlawry.  If you did, you would lose your essence as a state.

    Despite all the fire and fury, firestorm and thunder, bombing and shelling, the NDA is nothing but outlawry agenda sworn to criminal enterprises; to benefit a few but ruin the majority.

    Ultimately, that majority would not be the Arewa talakawa (poverty after all, has no tribal mark) or the urban “sophisticats” in the South West; or even NDA’s kindred spirits, Nnamdi Kanu’s Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB).

    Both NDA and IPOB seem acting out a twin but ultra-dangerous conspiracy.

    It would be the Niger Delta poor.  Their lands and swamps have, for decades, been ravaged by an insensitive, oil-guzzling Nigerian state.

    Now, with the so-called Avengers,  the latest mutation of militants, they are being raped by home-grown robber barons, who kill, rob and plunder — but blame outsiders for their crime.

    Now, by NDA’s latest gambit — an ecological equivalent of cutting your nose to spite your face — they are preparing the Niger Delta (whether in or outside Nigeria) for a future of sustained underdevelopment.

    When that period comes, the Niger Delta would wake up with a start — that their most implacable enemies are bivouacked indoors.  Blasted is that community where criminal elements rule the roost!

    Indications that NDA is nothing but grotesque ode to outlawry?  Follow this simple narrative.

    A certain Government Ekpemupolo, aka Tompolo, was to be docked for alleged mega sleaze.  Instead of having his day in court to clear his name, as any lawful person would, he vanished.

    Not even a bench warrant could produce him.  The closest to his “appearance” was some lawyers arguing his case in absentia.  With all due respect, despite the legalistic bluff by his lawyers, that is brash outlawry.

    Shortly after, bombs started booming — the Avengers were in business.  Sure, Tompolo has issued strident dissociations from the Avengers, pleading with NDA  to stop the bombing, but speaking from both sides of the mouth.

    Besides, a man speaking behind a curtain, when he could communicate face-to-face, always lugs a huge credibility problem!

    By its latest sound bites, a so-called Joint Revolutionary Council of the Niger Delta Liberation Force (JNDLF) has been busy shooting from the hips, exultant and quite triumphant.

    But alas! It makes quaint demands for negotiations sans negotiations: halt corruption trials against suspected PDP and Niger Delta looters.  Halt the Goodluck Jonathan probe. Unfreeze Tompolo’s account.  Release Nnamdi Kanu.  Release Sambo Dasuki.

    And if Ripples may add: bring back the corruption gravy!   The Avengers, by their demands, are pressing, at gunpoint, their divine right, and that of their pan-Nigeria confederates, to loot the public till!

    Why is no one surprised?  NDA is nothing but avengers for corruption.  Any country that humours such decadence, tolerating a group that brashly dons the badge of rot, courts  wilful death.

    In that triumph of the moment, JNDLF brags about how USA and “other nations” pleaded with it to shelf its threat of taking down six different targets, via a missile attack.  It also blabbed about how its “international partners”-in-crime (apparently mercenaries) had withdrawn their “chartered” submarines for the Avenger menace, pending the fire next time.

    That could be excitable bluff by a braggart assembly, over-reaching itself.  Before the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970), Emeka Ojukwu bragged no power in Africa could vanquish Biafra.  His Biafra wannabe, IPOB’s Kanu, also once swore: in Ireland alone, he had enough IPOB scientists to blast Nigeria to its knees.

    Both, however, turned a damp squib — Ojukwu’s bluff, after consuming no less than two million lives; and Kanu, straining to escape trial, with the Avengers’ threat his most pathetically potent fall back!

    But if this threat is real, how did these Niger Delta folks stockpile such awesome arsenal, with the security agencies snoozing?

    That beams the focus on another face of the Jonathan Presidency.

    From the facts in the public space, Jonathan’s presidency was an epitome of rot.  But it would appear that rot was only a stinking outer layer, cloaking a more sinister core.  There appears a direct correlation between the mega loot of the public till and arms stockpile — at least from the Niger Delta front.

    Throw in Tompolo and his alleged racket at the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA), for which he has refused to appear in court, his scuttling into a hole and the belching of bombs from virtual nowhere, it takes no especial acuity to put the pieces together.

    The clincher, of course, would be the vandals’ campaign for the release of Dasuki, alleged chief operator of the illicit spigot, that splashed public money into private pockets. But, of course!  Who will flies embrace, as the Yoruba say, but the man with the very bad sore!

    So, the effete Goodluck Jonathan may have run the country aground in just six years.  But his security agents may also have looked elsewhere, while the vandals of the swamps loaded themselves with scary arms.

    That would be gargantuan betrayal — if established: both to his presidential oath and to a country of 170 million people that gave him, a minority of minorities, a rare opportunity.  It also explains the militants’ pre-election boast to cripple Nigeria, should Jonathan lose.

    But by far the most ominous, for Nigeria’s democracy, is that you can lose democratic elections but take up arms to sabotage the winners.  That is the pure treason behind this current madness.

    But no less ominous, for the economy, is the tragic conceit that you could, at gun point, spring those accused of humongous sleaze from justice.

    That is an outlaw agenda —  and that appears the sum total of Avengers’ grand demands. Any self-respecting government would balk at  such inanity.

    “It is the fashion these days to be a desk general” was Wole Soyinka’s witty conclusion to the play, Jero’s Metamorphosis, written in the early 1960s.

    Between the 1960s and now, there seems a metamorphosis, of sorts, from desk generals to swamp generals!  Those swamp generals, whose heroism exclusively issues from bombing oil installations, are entitled to their delusions, like some Don Quixote tilting at windmills.

    Still, there is a difference between stealing in to rupture pipelines, and launching missiles against civilian targets elsewhere.  That would be worse than war crimes.  Fortunately, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has enough gaol rooms for war criminals.  Maybe, it is high time Nigeria contributed its quota to these vilest of criminals!

    Negotiation over the Niger Delta is no crime, though it is strange how little of that went on when “son the soil” Jonathan was president.

    What Jonathan did was not restructure, to correct the age-long problem, but tilt the till for his thieving countrymen, young and old.

    So, the issue is not,  not negotiating per se.  It is not negotiating at gun point, with a group with questionable motives, fired by hideous political conspiracies.

    Any state that cuts a deal with such an outlaw ensemble only nails its own coffin.

  • Iyabeji: what a dramatic exit!

    Solomon Grundy, it was, in the old English poem, who was born on Monday and who exited on Sunday, completing his life mission in a week.

    Iyabeji was certainly no Solomon Grundy, for she lived all of 82 years.  But her final day was certainly more dramatic, if less poetic, than Grundy’s.

    That day, June 2, started at 8 am with consciousness without consciousness.  She woke up, all right, but with continuous jerks, which medics later said might have resulted from low blood pressure, medically known as hypotension.

    That started a very bumpy day, through three hospitals, two tertiary, one secondary.  But that day — and her life — ended at around 10:30 pm.  Iyabeji had gone home!

    But who is Iyabeji (Yoruba for mother of twins)?  She was my mother.

    Republican Ripples was conceived as a newspaper column equivalent of the musical Lagbaja, a human essence, with no particularistic identity.  Sure, the column still bears a picture and the writer’s name.  But that is because of journalism convention.

    So, the columnist is just the medium of that essence: seldom any first person narrative, though the newspaper column allows that; and certainly, no personal or personalized stuff.  Everything is focused on the public space, from the prism of a republican, that strikes a bell for equity and equal- opportunity citizenship.

    But this is one occasion I must crave an exception.  The reason is simple: the departed was my pillar.  If anyone hailed this column, the person to thank is Iyabeji.

    She had little education — earning her first school leaving certificate, via adult continuous education, when she was well into her 40s.  To her however, her children’s education, even as a single parent, was non-negotiable.  From her humble purse, she saw her three children through university.

    To us, her children, she was just Iyabeji — my elder sister is Kehinde (a twin, but her Taiwo, a male, died in infancy), I am Idowu (immediate younger sibling to twins) and Sola (whose amutorunwa — culturally pre-ordained name — is Oni, the fifth in the Yoruba line of twins) — just three of us.

    To her immediate folks, however: the Olufojudes, of Ogbogbo, near Ijebu Ode (her father’s line) and the Onadipes, of the neighbouring Erigo, also near Ijebu Ode, in Ogun State (her mother’s family), she was just Ajoke, her oriki (cognomen), to her seniors; and Anti Ajoke, to her juniors.  Anti, the contemporary Yoruba corruption of the English aunty, is closer to sister than the English meaning of aunt.  But her formal name is Oludayo Ajoke Aina.

    The high drama of Iyabeji’s death followed the whistle-stop rush to three hospitals, in a 14-hour blitz.  That was a revealing window on the Nigerian health system.

    It wasn’t the best.  But it also showed glimpses of promise.  It was the proverbial good, bad and the ugly.  But maybe the bottle is half full, rather than half empty?

    At 79, Iyabeji had suffered a threatened stroke, with her mouth line getting a bit disjointed.  She was rushed to the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital, Ikeja (LASUTH), where the stroke was promptly arrested, without any loss of limb.  The facial distortion also returned to normal a few weeks after.  But the hospital told us we would have to manage her condition for the rest of her life.  That meant periodical clinic appointments, which we tried, most times, to keep.

    So, when the June 2 fatal emergency dawned, the first point of call was the LASUTH  Emergency Unit, that same unit that so splendidly arrested her attempted stroke.  Besides, the hospital also had her medical records.

    But alas!  No bed space.  But the medics still rallied to gave her first aid to stop her fits, which had continued all morning, working on her on a wheel chair, and passing some drips into her body.  That would hold her, the medics said, for four hours, enough time to seek relief in the next referral centre: General Hospital, Gbagada.

    So, to Gbagada, we headed; hoping for the best, though time was flying.  But her state was much calmer, her high temperature much lower, though she was still unconscious, even if life, vigorous life, was still trapped in her frail body.

    At Gbagada, however, the can-do spirit and medical promptitude of LASUTH vanished!  For almost one hour, the Gbagada’s Emergency Unit virtually sleep-walked.  The medics would just not be bothered — perhaps they didn’t realize what medical emergency meant?  When they eventually snapped awake, they came to the glorious epiphany that they had no bed space!

    Meanwhile, I was dying with anxiety in the car, while my sister was waiting on their lordships, the All-mighty Gbagada medics!  It was another crucial hour wasted.  Could that have made a difference between life and death?  And pray, could this facility and LASUTH be owned by Lagos State?  Two siblings but two radically different working cultures!

    But could it just be an off day for that hospital?

    Anyway, thoroughly licked, we had to carry our cross to the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH), Idi  Araba.  But LUTH suffered something I would call operational schizophrenia: between the prompt medics and lax administrative staff.

    When we reached LUTH, it was already normal work close time, with a rather heavy traffic.  But the sight of a lovely, tall, dark, slim and bespectacled female doctor, in green uniform and plastic slippers-like shoes raised our spirit.  Somebody at last was taking charge — and she was very nice too!

    Though after preliminary examination, she confided her condition was “very bad”, there was hope in the calm way she said it.  She stormed the Pharmacy, urging the people there to please quickly cost the admission pack so they could start work.

    That was the general spirit among the medics, during the four odd hours or so Iyabeji spent there, before giving up the ghost around 10:30 pm: prompt, caring, empathetic, dutiful — and hope-inspiring, even when everything looked bleak.  When accosted the following day, after Iyabeji had passed on, to thank her, the female doctor just said she did nothing beyond the duty expected of her — and that with the sweetest smile you ever saw!

    To these patriotic and dutiful Nigerian doctors and nurses, our eternal gratitude.

    But the LUTH challenge came with tallying the bill — which was not much: a mere N9, 700.  It was only the drugs and medical disposables that cost much, over N40, 000 in less than five hours!  But the LUTH support staff were as tardy as the medics were prompt.  That caused a lot of stress, particularly after just losing a loved one and you are making funeral plans.

    Iyabeji, your journey from here was fast but bumpy — very bumpy!  But glory be to God, for I had prayed: if you must pass on, please do so without causing us unnecessary pains.  God answered that prayer.

    Adieu, good mother, model parent.  If I am a quarter the parent to my children, what you were to me and my siblings, I would be doubly fulfilled!

    Good night, mama rere!