The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olakunle Abimbola

Falae: from muck to muck?
This renewed charge of alleged obtainment by Chief Olu Falae, the Afenifere chieftain — is it that same Falae we all knew and revered?

And that same Afenifere that, for so long, with devastating bragging right, preened and savaged everyone with their squeaky clean essence?

There is something brutally rigorous about the ethos of the Roman masters, in the classics.

That clearly explains why Julius Caesar could proclaim Caesar’s wife — note, the wife, not Caesar himself — must not only be above reproach, but should, indeed must, be seen to be so!

Now, if Caesar’s spouse was expected to scale such great heights, in private and public rectitude, what height was Caesar himself expected to vault? It would appear the political equivalent of Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative.

That also, it would appear, explained the Roman strict military code. A misfiring general would much rather end his own life, than suffer the supreme indignity of being paraded, in chains, in the streets of Rome.

Nor, nearer home, is such ethos exactly novel. When the traducers of the late MKO Abiola taunted him with sickening bail conditions, after annulling the free mandate he won in the June 12, 1993 presidential election, he reportedly scoffed: Iku ya j’esin (better to die than be mocked)!

And thanks to Wole Soyinka’s gripping play, Death and the King’s Horseman, it was only such a rigorous code that would compel Olunde, the Elesin’s medical doctor son — with his western education to boot! — to challenge his father to be man enough to do dire duty, following the death of his king, after fattening, for years, on the sweet lollies of office!

But back to politics from fiction. Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the Afenifere doctrinal avatar, was never far from political sainthood. His piqued rivals often growled and, mala fide, dismissed him as “holier than thou”.

Back in 1978 when presidential candidates were thrusting their papers upon the then Federal Electoral Commission (FEDECO, now INEC), with Chief Michael Ani (now dead) as chair, Awo wasted no time declaring his tax returns, which then had hit the million naira mark.

Tax was what you did in private; and it is an open secret that the world over, citizens would rather not pay tax, if they could get away with it. His presidential rivals back then, including the Great Zik of Africa, manifested such a syndrome, leading to a lot of media hoopla. Not Awo!

But such saintly attitude drove the story by the defunct National Concord, about the Awo Maroko land deal. In lieu of cash, Awo’s law firm had negotiated payment in land with the client it represented in the land dispute. That party won and duly consummated the agreement.

Still, Awo in his autobiography, Awo, had explained his grand strategy: law was his profession. Politics was his vocation. He needed a viable profession, he reasoned, to fund his rather demanding vocation.

That was why he proudly referred to himself and his disciples as oselu (politicians), in contrast to his venal and corrupt rivals, who he contemptuously dismissed as ojelu (parasites)!

That such a straight land transaction could elicit such media uproar, therefore, was tribute to Awo’s rather “holy” public persona. The Nigerian polity back then, seemed to share the sentiments of Geoffrey Chaucer, the old English poet: If gold rusts, what would iron do?

Awo did nothing wrong in earning fair wages — even if in kind — for his hard forensic labour. Still friends, defensive, felt queasy; and fiends, malicious, ecstatic; triumphantly gushing: holier-than-thou had been unhorsed! Yet, Awo did no wrong! Remember the Caesar quip about his wife?

But why this long tie-back to the Awo essence, as man and politician? It is because, with the advent of another obtainment allegation against Pa Falae, one of his supporters, some top hierarch at the Ondo State Social Democratic Party (SDP), is already manifesting an empty sophistry, in defence of a suspect, if not entirely, lost cause.

It is a neither-nor rationalisation a contemptuous Afenifere, at their full glory, would have mocked with clinical derision.

Falae obtained money from nobody, he seemed to reason. His evidence? First, he submitted, the initial claim was Papa obtained from Sambo Dasuki, the Jonathan era National Security Adviser (NSA)-turned spigot for slush electoral funds. That “lie” had now changed colour, he triumphantly enthused, with Papa allegedly obtaining from a special coded account from the Central Bank of Nigeria!

Case dismissed and Papa’s image restored? Not quite.

For starters, it isn’t clear if the first alleged obtainment is the same as the second. The only similarity is the alleged sum: N100 million. Besides, if Papa earlier admitted he indeed collected N100 million for SDP to mobilise for Goodluck Jonathan’s doomed presidential encore and drum up support for PDP, where was the lie in all of this?

And more worrisome: what if the CBN obtainment was indeed a second in the series? Do we then brace ourselves for yet more muck, if the Papa obtainment were indeed a series? Holy Moses!

Just imagine: with Awo alive, and his most trusted lieutenants, say a Michael Adekunle Ajasin or an Abraham Aderibigbe Adesanya, listed with the Demo duo of Remi Fani-Kayode (aka Fani-Power) and Adisa Meredith Akinloye, Yoruba conservative rivals Awo loved to slam as ojelu, as having obtained, from the government of their day? That is the Awo-era impossibility post-Awo Falae has found himself, even though an avowed Awoist!

Incidentally, Pa Falae, horror of horrors, is listed with a Fani-Kayode! That, of course, is no conclusion of guilt. But in the severe beauty of Awoism’s puritanical politics, such mere listing is damaging enough, if not outright fatal!

Classical Awoists don’t do grey — just black or white; not unlike a severe Nigerian political interpretation of Kant’s categorical imperative! And Falae, with his Afenifere commune, crested the public wave as fiery Awoists, clutching the political, nay spiritual, franchise of Awoism, and would brook no defilement of their holy grail.

For Pa Olu Falae, these are not the best of times: evening years savaged by extreme chill, after the merry sunshine of youth, built firmly on integrity and unassailable character.

But these are logical results from options he deliberately made, even with ample warning, from the generality of the Yoruba, majority of who are Awoists at heart. Ripples just hopes and prays he rides the storm and clears his name.

Still, his odyssey should be a fitting lesson to others, especially younger and aspiring politicians —and that quip comes from a rather common saying: as you lay your bed, you lie on it!

History may well remember Pa Falae more by his grand mistakes of old age, than the fine strivings of youth, on which he built a solid reputation. Sad!
- Correction: Christopher, not John, was the patriarch of the ill-fated Adubes: John, Joy and Lucky, all four, massacred in Rivers, in the build-up to the 2015 general election, as mentioned in this column last week.
March 22, 2016
Wike’s Rivers of blood

There is a tragic déjà vu playing out in Rivers. So please, compare and contrast.

Pre-2015 general election, and the Civil Society Network Against Corruption (CSNAC), in a petition to Madam Amie Bensouda, the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor, put that pre-election butchery in grim perspective.

In a petition it dated February 22, and which Olanrewaju Suraju, the CSNAC chairman signed, it listed the following, among the no less than 100 killed, maimed or displaced in the build-up to the 2015 elections in Rivers, alleging high powered conspiracy from the then Presidency, high ranking members of the Police and other security agencies, including the Army and the DSS.

The alleged victims: Kingsley Emenike, Police Corporal Ifeanyi Okorie, Charles Eruku, Mebaka Opuogoliya, John Adube, Joy Adube, Lucky Adube, Ebuka Mbamalu, Ikechukwu Ogarebe, one Ezekiel, Sampson Chinnah, Kerian Wobodo and Charles Wobodo, among others.

It is not clear if Kerian and Charles Wobodo were relations; but the gory tale of the Adubes, John, Joy and Lucky, captured the insane slaughter back then: a whole family, starting with their patriarch, John, was nearly wiped out, because of their partisan affiliations.

The petition did not also state if Corporal Okorie was among those felled, when partisan thugs rained bullets at the Okrika All Progressives Congress (APC) campaign rally, killing a few, including some Police personnel; and maiming many more.

The allegations back then was that partisan opponents should not campaign in Okrika, the home town of the then First Lady, Patience Jonathan.

And now, pre-2016 National Assembly and Rivers State of Assembly legislative re-runs, the similarity, in casualty count, is simply eerie.

The election tribunals and Court of Appeal ordered the re-runs, after voiding the returns for most of the Rivers legislative seats, federal and state; before the Supreme Court, in a bizarre verdict, endorsed the governorship poll, held the same day, and under the same bloody conditions, as the state legislative elections. The re-runs are fixed for March 19.

On March 5, in a chilling replay of the Adubes’ massacre, gunmen invaded the Rutachi Street, Omoku, home of Franklin Obi, at around 9 pm, and killed Obi, his pregnant wife, Iheoma and 18-year old son, Bestman. The late Obi was Rivers APC Ward 4 chairman; and the murderers severed and took away his head. Also slain was Chukwuladi Adiela, an APC stalwart in the same Ward.

This is the reportage of that nerve-jangling murder, by the Punch of March 7, quoting Victory, Obi’s daughter, 16: “Last night, I was inside when I heard my mum crying. We heard the sound of a gunshot and hid somewhere in the room. I opened the curtain of my room and I saw the men cutting off my father’s head. They (gunmen) then came to our room,” she added, “and ordered me and my brother to come out; and as we were coming, my brother was moving slowly and they shot him. Then they left with my father’s head.”

And what was Governor Nyesom Wike’s response to that gruesome murder, involving a political opponent? The beheading was a cult affair, the perpetrators had been arrested and why was APC making so much fuss, claiming cultists as its own!

That from a supposed chief security officer, sworn by law to protect every citizen, as governor to all? But even assuming cultists were indeed victims, so cultists are not entitled to state protection, in a polity founded on the rule of law? Might Wike’s Rivers then have made its grim peace with outlawry, and the resultant anarchy?

On March 7, in Buguma, Asari-Toru Local Government of Rivers State, Ofinijite Amachree, aka Kpom Kpom, another APC chieftain, was killed and burnt, after clashes between APC and PDP supporters.

Another five, according to a report by The Nation on the Rivers pre-re-run fracas, were clubbed to death: an unnamed four in Obibi, Etche Local Government and one Gabriel Cookey, in Opobo, the headquarters of Opobo/Nkoro Local Government.

Another AP report quoted Rivers APC chieftains as alleging that 32 of their members had so far been shot, clubbed or beheaded in the run-up to the March 19 re-runs. Compare to the 100 slain before the 2005 general election, and you perhaps would appreciate the Rivers of blood flowing under Governor Wike!

It is only fair though, to enter the defence of the Rivers PDP, which claims it had no hand in the murders; but instead blames “satanic cult clashes”. But again, which lawful government sits back and lets “satanic cults” slaughter its citizens, no matter their partisan hue?

Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, after the 2015 presidential election, declared no electoral crime would go unpunished. But he didn’t reckon with a judicial lobby unfazed at putting the law at the service of electoral violence, thereby reinforcing murderous electoral conduct.

Now, the Supreme Court, finding for political violence, has worsened the security situation in that troubled state. Indeed, if Wike got his governorship, splashing in a guggling pool of blood, why shouldn’t the lawmakers? Had they the luxury of pressing their cases at the apex court, perhaps they would have been certified okay to swim into power in the blood of others, just as their governor!

But that supreme folly would appear to have put the Buhari Presidency on the spot. Before the 2015 election Rivers killings had come the grand subversion of legal authority by the Jonathan Presidency.

Indeed, the Wike penchant for impunity, and trash power talking, started back then. Wike was Education minister of state, but Jonathan’s not-so-hidden viceroy in Rivers. Mbu Joseph Mbu, then Rivers commissioner of Police, was busy subverting Rotimi Amaechi’s gubernatorial authority. Of course, Dame Jonathan’s crass vituperations inspired that grand subversion.

Now, Rivers APC partisans would wish they had their own Mbu Mbu to wring Wike’s gubernatorial neck. They would wish a grand abuse of federal power, with the same Police, DSS and Army, that aided the PDP Rivers impunity back then, at their own beck and call too — and certainly, they would be thrilled to see Wike shrill and complain as Amaechi did, under the ancien regime.

That is the un-coded message in their the-Federal-Government-has-abandoned-us mass complaint.

But abusing federal might is absolutely unacceptable, not the least for a government that rode to power on the mantra of change. President Buhari should not fall into that temptation.

But the president should put everything in place to nab the Rivers killers — not only the crazed cultists, but their big political sponsors. Slaughtering fellow citizens should never be accepted as normal electoral behaviour.

It is not only vile and barbaric, it is extremely savage — and it doesn’t matter if the victims are PDP, APC or even the so-called “cultists”.

On the March 19 re-runs, the Federal Government should put in place formidable security to enforce peace and order, even if, as the mass violence is sure to scare away not a few, it may appear too late to achieve a free and fair process. Still, on the day, the free killing and ballot snatching of 2015 must never be tolerated.

As for the Supreme Court, Their Lordships should savour, in unanimous horror, the Frankenstein monster their Rivers verdict has created.

March 15, 2016
Ese: odyssey of a nation

The story of Ese Rita Oruru, 14, appears the odyssey of a minor whose youth faces sunset at dawn.

If indeed she is five months pregnant, she would be only a child, in her womb, carrying another! That has life-long implications — and complications.

However, Ese is only a metaphor for a nation at war with itself, but living in denial: permissive youth, distracted families, dysfunctional homes and subverted institutions. The result: subverted mores, laws and processes.

Even closer, you see the traditional fault lines: Muslim vs Christian and North vs South; each guarding its turf, and spewing deep distrusts, biases and prejudices. That unleashes a fierce but mutual cultural antipathy.

In that moral netherworld, the natural (and rational) sense of universal good or bad is lost. Evil is never evil without stupid justifications. Good is never good without asinine reservations. There is nary a sense of national outrage, no matter how outrageous the crime.

It is a national and collective tragedy.

What are the facts here? Yunusa Dahiru aka Yellow, 25, took Ese Oruru, 13, from her Opolo, Yenagoa, Bayelsa State, home to Tofar-Danga, in Kura local government, Kano State. When the story climaxed, Ese had not only been converted to Islam, she had landed a pregnancy, at a mere 14 years!

A unanimous Nigerian outrage should have greeted Yellow’s misconduct, which clearly landed Ese in yellow peril — and there is outrage, all right.

But that anger is modulated by regional biases: moderated to protect, from ridicule, the northern ethos, no matter how skewed; or over-flared, to express southern ire, to the point of cultural and religious profiling.

However, religious profiling also introduced a cross regional inanity: the imperative to defend your faith, no matter what, under mass attack. That would explain the rather ridiculous intervention, with all due respect to the scholar, by Prof. Ishaq Akintola, director of Muslim Rights Concern (MURIC).

He claims Islam has no age barrier in marriage — a right claim, experts in Islamic jurisprudence say, but in a wrong context. In the context of the Ese saga, does it then mean a 13-year-old can be married off, even with the consent of her parents?

To the extent that all foreign faiths, including Christianity and Islam, are cultural imperialism, there is always going to be controversies over the right Islamic position. But when a foreign culture is hazy, what is the position in Prof. Akintola’s native Yoruba?

It is clear, however, that the good professor just cracked under a felt anti-Islam blitz. He had earlier told Punch that Ese’s purported conversion to Islam was a nullity, since a minor couldn’t be converted from the faith of his or her parents.

But back to reportage and North-South bias, taking Daily Trust (North) and The Sun (South) as examples.

Daily Trust’s March 6 story: “Ese & Yunusa affair: the untold story” gave the impression Yunusa and Ese were some love-struck Romeo and Juliet, that eloped to marry, shunning opposition from their respective parents.

But the very supposition, that a 13-year-old can “elope” with a 25-year old, is galling. That would appear a clear deodorisation of clear crime; and suggests some social permissiveness, which the newspaper may not be proud of, but felt obliged to rationalise.

That was unfortunate because even if Ese really “eloped”, in the eyes of the law, she did not know what she was doing. So, it was the lawful duty of the adult, Yunusa, to caution and redirect her.

Besides, why did he take the girl to Kano and not remain in Yenagoa? A damning motive that suggests Kano offered a more socially permissive milieu to whatever he planned to do?

On the other hand, The Sun of March 7 interviews with Ese and mum: “I don’t know how I got to Kano” (Ese) and “Irate youths almost killed me at emir’s palace” (mum), gave the impression Ese’s parents were victims of daughter’s kidnap by a total and unconscionable stranger. Facts don’t support that.

For starters, even from The Sun interviews, how come Mrs Oruru quickly connected her daughter’s disappearance with Yunusa’s, if Ese’s family and Yunusa did not have some prior relationship?

From the Trust story, it turned out Yunusa had known the family for no less than 10 years. So, in all of those years, how much did the Orurus monitor Ese’s relations to male customers at her mum’s eatery, to ensure the minor didn’t get in harm’s way?

Still on parents’ negligence, Yunusa’s parents would appear even more indicted. Yunusa’s father really sounded ridiculous to everyone but himself, when he claimed Ese followed his son willingly, so the Police should release Yunusa.

Besides, aside from formalising Ese’s purported conversion, what else did Yunusa’s father do to sway his son from his illegal action?

O, the purported conversion! There is certainly something grimly cynical about trotting an under-aged girl to a Chief Imam, invest her in a new robe, gift her a new name, and declare her a Muslim, newly minted!

And it is extremely provocative for fellow Nigerians, of different faiths, to helplessly suffer the capture of their children and wards, because they are locked up in emirs’ palaces, as trophies of forced conversions and worse: forced marriages.

Ese’s is only one of hundreds of such crimes, though mercifully, she was not forcefully married before her seven-month odyssey ended.

Such brazenness drives the southern profiling of the North, an unfortunate profiling that labels that region as some paedophiles’ haven, in which every single being is guilty. That cannot be. But that is why northern governments should deal with their deviants — and be clearly seen to do so.

Back to the Trust story, one is rather impressed at the robustness of northern traditional institutions, at the centre of which is the Emir’s Palace: the office of the district head, the Hisbah Board, the Shari’ah Commission, leading all the way to the Emir’s Palace.

That the palace voided Ese’s purported conversion, on her procured age of 18, underscores robust checks-and-balances, that result in self-correction.

Unfortunately however, there would appear wilful human subversion of processes, as those institutions are robust. A serious case is Ese’s pregnancy. If indeed she was under the care of one Muquaddas Kura, an aide of the Kura district head, who got her pregnant under his roof?

Again, the Kano government (and by extension, other northern governments) should weed off such wilful subversions, to eliminate charges of institutional cover-ups.

But for those subversions, Ese would perhaps have been set free in a week or two, and thus forestall the pregnancy she now carries. So, all those involved in that subversion and cover-up, from the Emirate Council to the Police, should be fished out, prosecuted and punished.

By the way, why hasn’t anyone spoken to Yunusa? Why is he quoted through secondary sources, when he is alive to state his own side?

After all said and done, Ese is pregnant, a mere child carrying a child. Beyond the tempest of blame and counter-blame, this national shame won’t not be over until she is well taken care of; and her future rehabilitated.

March 8, 2016
Ambode, legacy beckons

Remember “Ambode, history beckons”? (10 November 2015) That was Ripples’ challenge, during those not-too-halcyon days of Governor Akinwunmi Ambode’s rather stormy beginning.

As if on cue from some hell, tanker drivers and allied articulated trucks descended on Lagos with a vengeance; while a rebellious LASTMA snapped, napping and snoring to press its ire.

Traffic robbery went on a tail-spin. Neighbourhood thieves declared burglaries their new growth area. Outlaw Okada riders danced vigorous Shoki on major highways, thumbing their noses at the law that barred them. Swashbuckling marine robbers cum kidnappers swooped on their victims, and zoomed off in speed boats, with their loot, in provocative triumph.

Lagos, hitherto assumed solid and settled, was going under — and the new helmsman was the culprit-in-chief! The governor that exited was a strongman. The governor that took over was a sissy. When The Economist weighed in, all hell broke loose!

The London weekly dismissed the new governor as clueless and near-useless in a savage putdown, to which the government’s publicists felt obliged to issue a sharp riposte.

Grand distraction! You don’t bandy words with a medium so set in its ways, a supercilious newspaper (in)famous for its condescension (though not unfounded, in many cases) towards Africa and its umpteenth sad tale of bad leaders.

Better to focus on your job; and sadistically watch The Economist gobble its own vomit, if the vice-hold of its neo-liberal ideology would allow. That was November 2015.

But now?

The narrative, from all objective indices, has changed. The governor appears growing into, and settling well, in his job, one of the toughest in the country. And his entry winning strategy would appear two-pronged: infrastructure (basically fixing inner-city roads) and security, with the well-reported Light Up Lagos project as an adjunct of the government’s security policy.

A third prong, on the policy front, is job creation, courtesy of the N25 billion Lagos State Employment Trust Fund Law. Under the Fund, to run over four years, N6.6 billion has been allocated under the 2016 budget. However, its impact, on job creation in Lagos, cannot be gauged until much later.

On the other hand, there is ample evidence of state-wide general rehabilitation of roads. Visit the far reaches of Lagos, particularly the non-elite areas of Alimosho and allied company, which Governor Babatunde Fashola was said to have touched least, compared with the upscale areas like Lekki, Victoria Island and Ikoyi, and Ambode’s work loudly speaks.

Denizens of Okota, Isolo, Egbe, Ikotun, Egbeda, Abule Egba, Agege and so on clearly see a determined government focused on fixing bad inner roads. From Ikotun down to Oke-Afa in Isolo, to Okota Road, then on to the popular Cele junction with the Oshodi-Isolo Expressway, it has been a smooth and jolly ride, with that critical artery nearing completion.

Work is also advanced on the six-lane artery, of interlocked stones, that links Okota Palace Way, with Amuwo Odofin, en route to Mile 2 and Festac Town. This project, however, was started; and a part of it completed, under Fashola.

All of these projects, according to Governor Ambode at his second quarterly town hall meeting at City Hall, Lagos, were parts of the completed 300 major roads, 66 other major ones as work-in-progress, and 80 other inner roads embarked upon in the 57 local governments in the state. This is aside from the 114 roads, two in each local government, to be completed in six months.

But the crowning glory of Ambode’s infrastructural intervention would appear the flyovers to be constructed at both Ajah, in the Lekki area and Abule-Egba, near Agege. Both sites are notorious for terrible traffic snarls.

While the governor’s road record is glaring, he felt confident enough to crow to his guests, at the City Hall town hall meeting, that crime, under his charge, had dropped by 65 per cent — and he sounded very credible.

He sounded believable because his government just invested N4.8 billion from the Lagos State Security Trust Fund (LSSTF) on security hardware: patrol cars, patrol bikes, choppers, communication gadgets and allied technology. Beyond the frills of launch was also the operational innovation of dedicated dumps to fuel the cars.

Integrated into the security programme is the Light Up Lagos project, an aggressive scheme in which the city is progressively lit up, thereby denying criminals of nightly havens. Also allied to all this is the demolition of markets which, the authorities say, double as virtual snake holes for felons.

The market demolition bit though is a double-edged sword: unless the market folks are resettled, loss of income could trigger further crimes.

Still, from the nervous transition from the Fashola to the Ambode era, Lagos presently appears to enjoy a new lease: the governor growing into his job and getting more confident by the day; and the people seeming to believe in their new helmsman, after an initial doubt.

But it’s not celebration time yet. Outlaw Okada riders are still a pest, flitting to and fro on expressways where they are barred, and remaining, as ever, the menace they have become. So, are unruly Danfo drivers, scandalously socialised into bad road habits, because of no effective sanctions. Ripples just hopes the newly inaugurated mobile courts would bring them to order.

Even on roads, it’s not yet uhuru. Fashola, the governor’s predecessor, is now Power, Works and Housing minister. So, these two great sons of Lagos must collaborate to fix federal roads in the state. A constant eyesore is the Berliet-Ilasa-Hassan failed sections of the Mile 2-Oshodi expressway, for Oshodi-bound commuters. And talking about housing, the governor should try and resume the Lagos Homs project, the ambitious mass housing project his predecessor started.

But beyond individual administrations, the beauty of Lagos is its ever deepening developmental institutions.

LASTMA (traffic police) and KAI (environmental police) date back to the Bola Tinubu era. Despite public complaints of overzealousness against both, they are alive and well. LSSTF bears Fashola’s signature. Yet, it is on its wings that Ambode is deepening security in Lagos with clear success.

When in December Ambode delivers the first phase of the Lagos light rail, from Okokomaiko to the Lagos Marina, it would yet be another salute to positive continuation. That project has also spanned three administrations: Tinubu, Fashola and Ambode. So, has the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), which construction started at the dusk of the Tinubu era.

Lagos therefore, coasting towards its golden jubilee by 2017 (created 1967), despite the current economic challenges nationwide, appears confident of itself, despite its rippling developmental tension.

By “Ambode, history beckons” (10 November 2015), Ripples only called on Governor Ambode, then under intense pressure, to choose either the hard-won successes of most of his predecessors; or fold over, embracing the rare failure of one or two.

It is pleasant to report that the governor is finding his own niche; like his illustrious predecessors, that vaulted formidable obstacles to make a roaring success of their tenures. Though its morning yet, the governor appears primed to push his own legacy.

Lagos can only be the better for it.

March 1, 2016
Supreme curse

Want to gauge the health of a nation?

First, gauge the moral health of its judiciary (Their Lords Temporal and their officiating lawyers), its clergy (Their Lords Spiritual) and its editors (famed keepers of its Fourth Estate).

Indeed, a society that condones corrupt judges, amoral pastors and hustling, integrity-challenged editors is pretty doomed.

Ripples, for obvious reasons, cannot pronounce on the venality or otherwise of the media. That would be tantamount to playing judge over own case.

Generally, however, a certain Hades appears to have deadened the senses of key pillars of Nigeria’s decent society. That contagion has afflicted all: the church, the courts, the media and even the bureaucracy, given the alarming tales of the soulless padding of a supposedly corrective budget.

The rot, in this system, is real and deep!

But the most devastated, it would appear, is the church. It seems to have lost its sense of moral outrage, despite being, with the mosque, the chief custodian of societal morality and spirituality. With its seeming indifference to the Buhari anti-corruption war, Nigerian Christendom appears embarrassingly unfazed by the galloping decadence in the land.

Very early in the day, Father Matthew Hassan Kukah, Catholic Bishop of Sokoto, had practically told President Muhammadu Buhari to forget about sleaze; and get on with the business of governance.

It never occurred to His Lordship, perhaps, that governance is all about maximising resources for development; and graft, the most vicious strain of which now plagues the land, is not unlike pouring water into a sieve.

Pray, how do you retain those resources, to get on with the so-called business of governance, if you don’t seal the sieve?

Another Matthew, saintly Pastor at the Pentecostal Kingsway International Christian Church (KICC), offered Buhari his saintly kiss: the president shouldn’t spend more than 20 per cent of his time fighting corruption! Has the good pastor been doing a spiritual audit on the president’s time management?

Between the two Matthews, one Catholic, the other Pentecostal, you could feel the Church’s rather coy body language towards, if not outright disavowal of, the sleaze war: a front at which it ought to be a natural ally and ardent champion.

But should you still be in doubt, Anthony Cardinal Olubunmi Okogie, retired Archbishop of Lagos and hero of pressing the people’s right under military misrule, left you with none. In a well publicised statement, the revered man of God thundered, in holy rage: what the hell was all the noise about Buhari’s change mantra?

All these would appear to have prepared the grounds for Bishop David Oyedepo’s holy gaffe at Uyo.

Officiating at the thanksgiving for the Supreme Court validation of Akwa Ibom’s segment of the rotten Siamese-elections in Akwa Ibom and Rivers states, the founder of the Living Faith Church Worldwide, aka Winners’ Chapel, declared: “We are celebrating the victory of light over darkness”!

Without blinking. Without any sense of irony.

That perhaps shows how far gone the Church is, in the abject loss of its moral compass!

Still, it is only fair to mention that, as all this anomie plays out, Reverend Chris Okotie, Presiding Pastor at Household of God Church, Lagos, has come down hard on the widespread cant in the church.

In a series of well-reasoned articles in newspapers, he has condemned the wide and merry way the Church has chosen; and told the president to stick to his straight-and-narrow against graft.

That Nigerian Christendom places Okotie at the periphery of its “Holiest of Holies”, and not its sacred centre, may just underscore how far Christian Nigeria may have departed from righteousness, as its central core.

But despite Pastor Okotie’s stout intervention, a disturbing cross-validation appears afoot, with Bishop Oyedepo’s Uyo sensational declaration.

As Their Lords Temporal legally beatified “free and fair” elections, of lost lives and hacked limbs; and also technically knocked out the card reader, the technology deliberately inserted to prove bloated ballot, Their Lords Spiritual appear not averse to consecrating same with spiritual humbug!

This grand conspiracy against polite society, by its supposed Palladium of the courts and the church, would appear just too devastating for the hurting citizen of conscience! Arise o, compatriots! O, citizen of conscience, you are on your own!

Still, the Supreme said it found for law. You perhaps would give them the benefit of the doubt, since only Their Lordships, with their ensemble of erudite lawyers, are learned in the arcane business of Law and allied matters. The rest of us are only educated — and most times, poorly so!

But what would the church give as excuse, for so tragically spurning its core? Perhaps the hard and harsh slugging for spiritual market share!

In that blessed jungle, where by the way there is no paddy (apologies to musician, 2Baba), the gladiators, particularly the prosperity-mouthing Pentecostals, see no evil, hear no evil, just gun for market share!

That has been devastating for society.

For starters, the Hades that numbed the apex court and the church, also appears to have numbed the Budget 2016 racketeers, reported civil servants, who would not depart their old evil ways, despite the mass suffering in the land; and are absolutely unimpressed by any strange mantra about change.

Make no mistake: the buck stops on the table of President Buhari, who ought to have done all due diligence before pushing out the document. But that some devious civil servants still essayed such a risk, with the prevalent mass anti-sleaze national temper, just shows how deep our country is in rot.

So, you still think Muhammadu Buhari, the fiery archangel against sleaze, is the new sheriff in town? Nope! Hades, the Greek god, and ruler of the dead in Greek cosmogony, is! And the land appears eerily draped in its heavy shroud!

That takes the matter back to the press, the vaunted Fourth Estate of the Realm. Truth be told, many a journalist may well be venal, skewing their pens to the dictates of the highest bidder. After all, everyone has sinned and fallen short of glory!

Still, many are no more than misguided theorists, who fail to notice the tectonic shift in the nation’s mood against sleaze, the raw agony in the land, and the mass determination of a people to make things right. Alas, they continue to barge their stubborn heads against the wall, risking analytical irrelevance and tempting readers’ utter contempt.

But the controversial Supreme Court verdicts, the decadence in the church and the indifferent segment of the media, for whatever motive, are all symptoms of a serious affliction: a supreme curse of moral apathy hovers over the land.

For that curse to be soundly defeated, and for the nation to regain its soul, the Buhari administration must do more to mobilise the people, to push without cease.

That is the only way to compel these failing critical pillars to abandon their wide and merry way to perdition; and embrace the straight and narrow path that leads to national salvation.

February 23, 2016
Fables, 50 years after

It is only 50 years, after Major Kaduna Chukwuma Nzeogwu’s coup d’état changed, forever, the face of political Nigeria.

But the dramatic twists and turns that have hallmarked this historic juncture echoes Ghanaian, Ayi Kwei Armah’s novel, Two Thousand Seasons.

Two Thousand Seasons is a celebratory fable of Africa’s pristine goodness; but deprecatory flak at its wayward children, whose naivety allowed first Arab, and later, European colonialism; complete with the stream of consciousness narrative technique.

Fifty years after Nzeogwu, Nigeria’s contemporary narrative canvass quakes with no less dramatic fable of 1st Republic sainthood; and a political stream of consciousness that would rather not tell the sorry tale as it was, but as the present colourful narrators would rather wish!

It is the high season of historical spin.

Another golden anniversary — and opportunity — for serious soul searching, to save the nation from its wild past, seems lost to wilful manipulation.

But how can we honestly chart the future, with our indifferent present, if we cannot grapple with, and throw off, our notorious past?

By the splurge of publications, particularly from the perceived 1st Republic “Sinners’ Corner”, there seems a determined effort to rehabilitate soiled images. No crime, to be sure.

From the southern flank, the camps of SLA Akintola and Festus Okotie-Eboh were particularly bubbly — and for good reasons.

Beyond SLA emerging, over the ages, as some dark angel in the Yoruba black-or-white political cosmos, the famed orator from Ogbomoso would appear fairly charged with subverting parliamentary democracy. The violent shock from that wilful subversion eventually overthrew the 1st Republic.

Akintola Taku (Akintola balks), was the sensational Daily Times headline of 26 May 1962, as the drama in the Western House unfolded, on 25 May 1962.

Akintola’s refusal to quit, after he had lost the numbers to stay on as Premier, triggered the House of Representatives federal self-help to declare a state of emergency in the West. That later inspired the wetie (mass arson and general anarchy) crisis, that eventually forced the military putsch.

These were grave, wilful and fatal subversion of democratic institutions. And wetie itself was direct mass insurrection against in-your-face electoral banditry in the Western elections of 1964.

Two allies, SLA’s deputy, Remi Fani-Kayode, boasted the Demo party would win whether the people voted it or not. Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa-Balewa’s government would rather secure an ally, than do the right thing by law.

That made SLA some patron saint of barefaced electoral robbery; and no less brazen state-aided crime to keep electoral loot. That delinquency has plagued Nigerian politics till today.

Now, that is a dire historical portraiture to log; and the SLA family and loved ones do no wrong by sprucing up their paterfamilias’s image. But it can’t be at the huge cost re-writing history.

In the final analysis, we have a country to build; and we may as well face the chore with as much historical sincerity as possible.

The burden from the Okotie-Eboh front is no less heavy. Offspring of the flamboyant Itsekiri merchant-pillar of the National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC) of his day, now — not untrue — portray PM Balewa’s Finance minister as a stupendously wealth party hierarch, who sustained NNPC with his munificence, even lending the party money.

But then, much earlier, the late Harold Smith, a former Oxford-trained British colonial official in Nigeria, had come up with a rather unflattering picture of Okotie-Eboh as allegedly venal, with rather low personal morality, bordering on concupiscence.

Major Nzeogwu, in his ill-fated coup speech, also descended on alleged “10 per-centers”, frittering the nation’s treasure for instant personal pleasure. The martial ire that anchored the coup, before its paradise dissolved in alleged ethnic manipulation, didn’t exactly lack popular support. This was clear in the West, which mostly bore the emerging fascism, gradually swallowing the Federal Republic.

Now, Smith alleged venality. Nzeogwu scorned “10 per-centing”, as a capital developmental crime against the Nigerian state and its citizens. The Okotie-Eboh clan also claim their patriarch was so rich he was lending his NCNC money to run its affairs.

Could the Omimi-Ejoh then have made a re-coup of 10 per cent from each loan — perfectly legitimate economic earnings, but in political morality not so squeaky clean?

Honestly, from Smith’s ruinous portraiture, the Itsekiri chief would appear some guardian angel of venal politics, a plague that has stuck with Nigeria — witness the Buhari high profile war against corruption.

Still, maybe Smith was wrong and the Okotie-Ebohs are right. Again, they do no wrong trying to salvage their forebear’s image. But Nigerians, that continue to bear the full brunt of these epochal blunders, are entitled to the truth to safely navigate the future.

From the Arewa front has come this main debate: the pair of the Sardauna, Alhaji Ahmadu Bello, Premier of Northern Nigeria and Alhaji Tafawa-Balewa, his viceroy in Lagos — were they Nigerian nationalists or northern irredentists?

The North insists — and passionately too — that they were Nigerian nationalists. With all due respect, Ripples begs to demur. In the domination-prone temper of Nigeria’s immediate pre-independence and 1st Republic politics, they would appear more of northern champions, than Nigerian nationalists.

Still, it would appear a game of domination gone awry. The southern pair of Nnamdi Azikiwe and Obafemi Awolowo must have, at a time, thought the North was there for the picking, since it lagged behind in key developmental indices, as the parameter was clearly advance in Western education and civilisation.

Besides, if the North were not some perceived soft target, why would the pair accept independence under such crushing anti-South conditions: skewed political geography, no strict protocols to protect minority interests, and an impossible three-region federation, where one (the North) is vaster than its two combined southern cousins? By the way, that structural imbalance continues to evoke needless tension.

With a sleight of hand, however — the major grouse of Harold Smith’s revolt and anger in Blue Collar Lawman, his unpublished book — the British turned things round for the North. And suddenly, the putative dominated became the dominator!

In that book, Smith alleged the British rigging of the census to provide the North the right demographics to dominate. He also claimed the British fiddled the Independence vote to gift the North the kingdom soon to pass from imperialists’ hands — allegedly rewarding the North for its elite loyalty; but scourging the South for its elite rascality.

For the starry-eyed romantics thundering as if impunity and institutional subversion debuted with the military, Awo provided many examples of such in his book, The Travails of Democracy and the Rule of Law: CJN Adetokunbo Ademola letting off a cocktail jab at someone “who must oppose for opposing sake” (judiciary playing politics); PM Tafawa-Balewa who grumbled that Awo “called himself” Leader of Opposition (head of government subversive of the Constitution); and East Premier Michael Opara who snapped the Federal Government had powers to “abolish” misbehaving regional governments (executive outlawry against Nigerian federalism).

Nigeria may have progressively decayed over the years. But the seeds of that decay were there from the very beginning.

Fifty years after Nzeogwu’s coup, therefore, offers a golden opportunity to fix the basics — not to weave new colorful fables, which could doom the country from ever learning from its past blunders.

February 16, 2016
Buhari’s anti-looting drive
On the rule of law debate viz-a-viz the fight against corruption, Ripples has moved on. But not some reader-citizens who want to contribute their bit to the public debate now trending, to use that online lingo, in the public space. Col. Innocent Azubike Nass is my guest today. Please enjoy.

There is this popular argument that President Muhammadu Buhari is not properly following the “rule of law” or “due process of the law” in his anti-corruption (more-specifically anti-looting) fight.

This often suggests that for an effective anti-corruption fight, the president should first change certain criminal procedures/laws before seriously tackling the monumental corruption in our society. That could be as good as advising him to soften or give up the fight, under the excuse of judicial hindrances.

In the annals of American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), there are innumerable cases of re-arresting a suspect on trial who has been granted bail.

There are also cases of other law-enforcement agencies taking related actions, such as Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) arresting and deporting back an in-coming witness or plaintiff who has valid court papers and visa.

Many of the current arch-proponents of ‘Government must obey all court orders on bail’ do not seem to care to mention this other side of the coin to balance the argument.

Nigerian society has reached a heartlessly devilish dimension of looting and sharing of the commonwealth of the nation by a few well-entrenched, well-networked and deep-pocketed elites; who had serially proven to have ways of outsmarting and compromising certain judicial processes to evade justice. They deploy their wealth and influence to that effect.

The current cases involve the looting and sharing of war fund, while our fighting soldiers were being humiliated and killed in hundreds for lack of appropriate weapons and equipment in the fight against Boko Haram.

Thousands of civilians were killed and several hundreds of thousands displaced from their homes and living in refugee camps; both in Nigeria and in the neighbouring countries, while those that looted and shared the war fund live and swim in obscene wealth and luxury, with properties and bank accounts littered in Nigeria and in foreign countries, just as majority of Nigerian masses live in abject poverty and helplessness.

So, does an elected president have the executive power to take certain radical actions if he is convinced it is in the over-riding interest of the nation and the people?

In about 1864 (during American civil war between the Union side and the Confederates), President Abraham Lincoln, through an executive order/decree, suspended the legal “writ of summons”, made a law that was back-dated (retrospective effect) and used it to try some detained saboteur suspects, and those convicted were executed within days after the review of the judgment.

He did that because he was convinced that the masterminds of the saboteur network could exploit existing legal loopholes to beat the law, while their foot-soldiers were more easily trapped. Lincoln wondered how he could sanction the execution of convicted foot-soldiers (“the little solder boy who deserts”) while their masterminds remained free to do more harm to the society, under the subterfuge of legal technicalities. Lincoln saw the survival of the United States as greater than the lives of those few individuals.

For that decision, President Lincoln came under sustained attacks and media condemnation, as well as litigation, all orchestrated by some American human-rights activist groups and public affairs commentators. But the overwhelming majority of Unionist Americans (who had less media publicity) tacitly supported Lincoln. Posterity had since reckoned that he acted in over-riding national interest for the survival of the United States.

During the Second World War, shortly after Japanese forces attacked and destroyed American naval base at Pearl Harbour in late 1941, which drew the United States into the war, the United States judiciary found itself in a delicate and controversial situation. This was related to the security measures being taken to identify and weed off internal saboteurs, most of whom were of dual-citizenship (particularly Japanese-Americans and German-Americans).

There were reported cases of saboteurs and spies caught while transmitting information to the enemy (the Axis powers). The detention, investigation and trial of these suspects became a problem under the law, as civil libertarians cried out loudly against abuse of fundamental human rights of suspects (who by law were presumed innocent until court proves otherwise), and the rule of law as enshrined in American constitution.

There was also wide-spread public hysteria calling for severe action against enemies of the nation, irrespective of the niceties of the legal due process. In a celebrated case brought by a group of civil libertarians to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1942, Chief Justice Robert Jackson, against the strong argument of civil libertarians on the issues of “interrogation without the due process of law” and prolonged detention of suspects, gave his famous ruling that the United States “Constitution is not a suicide pact”.

Chief Justice Robert Jackson argued that the constitution and laws of the United States were made for good, order, peace and harmony within the society. That is the spirit of the law. But an unanticipated situation had arisen whereby evil-minded forces threaten the values and the very existence of the nation, exploiting the liberal values to destroy the very same society. In that case the spirit of the law overruled the letters of the law. The Supreme Court sanctioned the mass internment of Japanese-Americans. It vacated the decision two years later when the war situation had stabilized.

The purpose of this recollection is to show that even the judiciary has a very crucial patriotic role to play in checkmating the forces that threaten to destroy our values as an ordered human society, rather than take subterfuge under legal helplessness and technicalities.

President Buhari needs decisive actions in the anti-corruption fight, if effective impact is to be achieved. A loud minority of opinions and commentaries could dominate most media outlets. That could be acceptable as part of the dynamics of change.

But the overwhelming majority of Nigerian masses (and sizeable minority of elites) enthusiastically support Mr. President to give entrenched corruption a tough fight and stubbornly resist the desperate fight-back by corruption network.

Yes, there is a genuine fear of abuse of such executive presidential power. Nigeria’s recent history is replete with such abuses. But under the present situation, the president has got to take resolute action, and take responsibility for the outcome.

There could be no other effective way to pull Nigeria out of the woods.
- Col. Nass, who retired from the Nigerian Army in 2006, is based in Enugu.
February 9, 2016
Supreme Court, Rivers and death of electoral sanity

Go forth, electoral bandits. In the next bout of re-runs in Rivers and elsewhere, kill, maim, rape and raze! It is perfectly legal!

Besides, if Ezenwo Wike and co can get away with electoral murder, so could you!

Isn’t that the latest message from the Supreme Court of Nigeria, by its decision on the Rivers gubernatorial poll?

Without a doubt; though legal puritans would hee-haw, and insist on awaiting their Lordship’s formal reasons for what appears an outrageous slaughter of electoral reason.

Still, don’t we all feel a sense of déjà vu? Haven’t we traversed this path before?

No, this is not making a Judas of the Nigerian judiciary. But by its characteristic softness on electoral turpitude, and its seeming penchant to aid and abet electoral larceny, hiding behind narrow legalism, it would appear as guilty of undermining Nigeria’s political evolution, as the executive and the legislature.

The Supreme Court, in 1979, found that the twelve-two-thirds of 19 states was 12 two-thirds states; not 13. That was clearly more of legal gerrymandering, given that the apex court only canonised the legal opinion of an involved partisan, Chief Richard Akinjide, SAN, national legal adviser to the then National Party of Nigeria (NPN).

Besides, the pall of politics, on a matter that ought to be 100 per cent judicial, rested on two troubling pillars: the then Federal Electoral Commission (FEDECO) had, in previous decisions, always interpreted twelve-two-thirds of 19 states as 13, even in registering political parties. Also, the Supreme Court decreed its clearly controversial decision would not serve as precedent.

But why — if it was so sure its decision was unassailable: in law, in good conscience and in common sense?

Still, what if the judiciary had let the 1979 election run its legal course, and not given political cunning a legal jab in the arm?

For starters, President Shehu Shagari and his NPN would have escaped that crushing legitimacy burden, which they never overcame, all through their four years and three months in power. Besides, they probably would not have imbibed that fatal electoral permissiveness; bating them to rig first, and sort out the messy aftermath with an indulgent, if not collusive, judiciary.

Besides, the 2nd Republic would probably have survived. If it had, Nigerians would have been saved the trauma of the most vicious strain of military rule, spanning 1984 to 1999, not discounting the diarchy from January 1992 to November 1993, during which the freest election in Nigerian history was annulled.

That era hit its nadir with Sani Abacha’s fist-of-mail tyranny, his brazen raid on the public till and the near-unravelling of the Nigerian military.

In 2008, the Justice James Ogebe-chaired Presidential Election Tribunal, with the full complement of five justices, beatified the odious Umaru Yar’Adua presidential mandate. Among its infamous stands was that non-serialisation needed not invalidate a ballot. The Supreme Court later gave that rotten election its blessed kiss.

But thank God, the goodly Yar’Adua himself (God bless his soul) was unconvinced, though surrendering the most looted presidential ballot in Nigerian history would appear a no-option. He set up the Lawal Muhammadu Uwais-chaired Electoral Reforms Panel.

That panel had a certain Attahiru Jega, later to become Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) chair. The foreign and domestic flak the 2007 elections drew must have made quite a mark on Prof. Jega and his INEC. A direct response, at saner and more sanctified polls, were the computer-chip voter card and its authenticator, the card reader.

With that technology, the prospects that the 2015 polls would be free of soulless ballot-stuffing and criminal figure-cooking were quite high. Besides, the instant audit of voters, with the card-reader recording accredited voters, against the ones that actually voted, would give electoral transparency a fillip.

Though the final details of their Lordships’ decision are yet to be out, unlike the two lower courts before it, the Supreme Court, perhaps itself buried in arcane legality, has all but buried the card reader as a force in sane elections! Yet, that technology appears the scientific curb on the self-destruct Nigerian politician, merrily eager to poison his own ecology, en route to grabbing power.

And how sweet, of Nigeria’s apex court: betraying hardly any institutional memory, no sense of history, neither a sense of sociology nor morality, hardly any antenna to pick the angst of the cheated and the bullied, just narrow and crass legalism! For all you know, the apex judicial conclave in the land was in Mars when the Rivers electoral shame unfolded!

Yet, here was the damning verdict of the Independent Election Monitoring Group (IEMG), South-South zone, dated 12 April 2015, and signed by one Esther Achor, Esq.

On Rivers’ general electoral anarchy: “Shocking cases of cold blooded killings and beheading, obstruction of votes, arson, voter intimidation, ballot snatching, missing result sheets, presenting of fake ballot papers, multiple thumb-printing, campaigning at polling units, compromise of ad-hoc staffs, absence of level playing environment, violence against media personnel and impunity were witnessed in different magnitude across the length and breadth of the state. These acts were brazen.”

And on the card reader: “In a number of cases, the card reader functioned well. In others, it was abandoned for manual accreditation, contrary to the rule of INEC; and this facilitated irregular thumb-printing/massive rigging.” Did anyone smell wilful sabotage, for a preconceived end?

That is the profane Rivers poll that the Supreme Court has given its sacred kiss!

Besides, where is the correlation in all of this judicial anomie? A judiciary that voided almost all of the Rivers House of Assembly seats, contested same place, same time as the governorship, is the same judiciary — and the brightest of its flower, to boot! — okaying the Rivers gubernatorial poll, even after the Governorship Election Tribunal and the Court of Appeal had held it was a grand fraud!

When the Supreme Court played blatant politics with the law in 1979, the ultimate result was a collapsed democratic republic; and trauma of military rule as Nigerians never knew before.

The eventual cost of this Rivers electoral brutality looms in the belly of time. But on one thing, Ripples is sure: the organised anarchy of military rule is gone and best forgotten. But if our courts continue to aid and abet electoral pillage, against good conscience and common sense, they may well be working overtime to birth free-wheeling anarchy.

If that comes, even their Lord Justices would realise, in Fela-speak, wig-and-gown na stuff, na tailor dey sew am! At the earliest hint of the military’s overarching power hubris, the immortal Fela had declared: uniform na khaki, na tailor dey sew am!

The moral? Only an ordered society respects persons, positions and institutions. If you doubt, ask brother jurists in Somalia!

In the immediate, however, the Rivers re-runs come with great peril. The bandits that pulled Wike’s electoral barbarity are probably ready to pounce. But the other side, latterly weaned from the folly of awaiting justice, and now buoyed by “federal might”, would certainly not lay to be slaughtered.

Is this then a judiciary-paved road to electoral Mogadishu? Ripples hopes not!

February 2, 2016
Afenifere and the kiss of death

For the umpteenth time, Ripples is constrained to cite the tortoise in the Yoruba tale. Asked when he would return from his trip, while bidding his folks farewell, he promised to return, only when he was disgraced!

Indeed, ace playwright, the late Ola Rotimi, was so fascinated by this tortoise quip that he used it to anchor the tragedy of Kurunmi, the ill-fated Aare Ona Kakanfo and Ijaye warlord, in his tragic play, Kurunmi.

Kurunmi, generalissimo of the Oyo imperial army, bated himself to self-ruin by his classic confrontation with Ibadan, the Oyo imperial garrison, under the command of Basorun Ogunmola, in those 19th century years of blood, gore and plunder, in the pre-colonial Yoruba country.

Good old hubris, couched in Yoruba native-speak, assailed the tortoise. That explains his irrational answer. The same hubris goaded Kurunmi’s tragic unhorsing; just as it is behind the unfolding but spectacular unravelling of the Afenifere gerontocracy, in contemporary Yoruba political country.

Pa Olu Falae’s popular censure, following the old man’s N100 million “obtainment” from Dasukigate, would appear a gripping sub-plot of that high drama.

Indeed, Chief Falae’s unfolding odyssey would appear the stuff of which Grecian tragedies are made.

Like Kehinde (last to come) in the Yoruba concept of twins, that nevertheless claims seniority over Taye (precursor), Chief Falae zoomed past about everyone to eminence. His Taye (to revisit that Yoruba twin metaphor), included battle-hardened veterans of the Awolowo political combat of the 1st Republic, that claim a near-divine right to the Awo political franchise.

Though a latter-day Afenifere joiner, his delicate positioning between Awoist high orthodoxy that balks at injustice from any quarters, and the Babangida-era new breed progressives that accused Shehu Musa Yar’Adua and co of perfidy, at throwing MKO Abiola’s June 12, 1993 presidential mandate, splendidly paved Falae’s way.

The Awoist old guard was uneasy with MKO, given Abiola’s past brush with Awo. Yet, they couldn’t, by their ideological DNA, be indifferent to the annulment. That a Yoruba man was victim was grand bonus.

On the other hand, though MKO was not ungrateful for Afenifere’s rally, he appeared more at ease with the younger elements, not the old fundamentalists. Falae, again appeared the merry median between the two.

At things would pan out, Chief Falae had the historical distinction of announcing the birth of the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO), the final vehicle to battle Gen. Sani Abacha to the virtual death. He also — need we recall? — beat the great Chief Bola Ige to the Alliance for Democracy (AD) presidential ticket in 1999.

How Falae blazed the historic NADECO trail is rendered in Clapping With One Hand by a participant-observer, Olawale Oshun, in the first of his trilogy on the June 12 saga. The other two books are The Open Grave and The Kiss of Death.

But as Falae bolted to the top before everyone, he appears fated, by Dasukigate, to career down the abyss, also before anyone!

There is a story making the rounds — that Falae was booed in church, while telling his own side of Dasukigate. At best, the story might be true. At worst, it is only apocryphal.

But true or false, its believability only underscores the Yoruba obduracy against fallen heroes, particularly when accused of venality and abject lack of character. The Akure high chief now treads that perilous path.

But even as Falae’s odyssey unfolds (at least in the angry Yoruba streets), he may yet remain a hero to the Afenifere gerontocracy. What if the N100 million Chief Falae collected was less for the Social Democratic Party (SDP), of which he is national chairman, but more for Afenifere, in which he is regional champion?

This puzzle is not illegitimate because of the dissonance coming from within SDP. A national source claimed the chief rendered only N5 million; and even then, did not disclose the source of the “donation”. The Ogun SDP was even shriller in disowning Falae, claiming the state branch of the party never got a dime.

So, where did the money go? Or is Papa stoically not ratting on others?

The angst in the South West is as much shock at the Dasukigate chink in Falae’s hitherto formidable integrity armour, as it is linking Afenifere (Afenifere of Awo, the immaculate avatar), to free-wheeling sleaze in contemporary Nigeria.

Indeed, Afenifere of late had developed the disturbing conceit of the tortoise that courted nothing but disgrace. The body’s 2015 pre-election and electioneering manoeuvres were disgraceful — and wilfully self-destructive.

Awo never swam against the wish of his supporters. Indeed, his political canonisation stemmed from Awo, the ultimate policy wonk; as much as from Awo, the symbiotic politician: he led, but was also led, by his people.

But in their self-imposed season of anomie, Afenifere committed the ultimate ideological apostasy, by their own Awoist doctrine: pushed the wrong cause, backed the wrong horse, kept the wrong company, and coalesced behind the wrong person, as arrowhead to Aso Rock, in Ondo Governor, Olusegun Mimiko, ruthless political hustler and survivalist, who just defected to the wide-and-merry Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), from the supposedly straight-and-narrow Labour Party (LP).

But whoever traded with Mimiko and made a profit: the late Adebayo Adefarati, the late Olusegun Agagu, Ali Olanusi or even Bola Tinubu?

Ah, Asiwaju Tinubu! That must be the original trigger: for if Tinubu moved right, the Afenifere grandees must move left, if he moved up, Afenifere must move down, even if it were the most asinine thing to do!

But why would a conclave of wise elders and seasoned political generalissimos bait themselves into sure misfortune, just because of the fortune of one man?

Spite. Concentrated spite often brews concentrated flaws, which could well deliver concentrated catastrophe!

That applies to Chief Falae, as it applies to the Afenifere conclave.

Incidentally, the full title of the last, of Hon. Oshun’s trilogy on June 12 is: The Kiss of Death: Afenifere and the Infidels. Some grim prophecy there, it would appear!

So, have the old fundamentalists of Awoism turned infidels to their own cause, and therefore earned the kiss of ideological death?

Just a thought.

January 26, 2016
For Buhari. What about you?

In 1984, the late Gani Fawehinmi, SAM, SAN, spectacularly broke ranks with his legal commune. That clan dotted on “due process” — no crime! — and distanced itself from the post-2nd Republic corruption trials, before special tribunals.

Those trials handed convicted former political office holders jumbo gaol sentences for corruption. The Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) decreed its members should stay off the cases, since it perceived the process as skewed against justice.

But Gani, famous loner often at his best when acting solo, cut to the chase: this was humongous, nation-ruining sleaze, not to be deodorised by any legalistic cant. So, Gani balked.

Was he right? Ripples, then as an undergraduate, bristling at the “brazen injustice”, thought so. But what if Gani was right; and the rest of us were wrong?

What if Gani was so prescient he thought if Nigeria didn’t crush the elephantine greed of its thieving elite, with as little misleading legal fizz as possible, the country could, 32 years later, just be fated to another Dasukigate, quite stratospheric, when compared with the industrial-scale looting of the Abacha era?

And if the present generation, cheering or jeering Dasukigate, did not fully grasp the danger of this tragic continuum of greed and lunatic graft; and the stealing status quo were to continue?

In another 32 years: would there even be a state, from which citizens under serious censure — and rightly so for alleged heist — demand “rule of law” with such self-serving hypocrisy? And if the state had been eaten into pulp by a rapacious few, how can it guarantee any rights to anyone?

All these queries are coming up because two vital pillars of the modern state, the bar and the media, on the Muhammadu Buhari anti-graft war, are already equivocating. Yet, they know galloping graft brings clear and present ruin.

In fairness to the lawyers, and with all due respect to their most altruistic, they tend to have a rather sweet penchant for private joy, rather than collective bliss. One of them sensationally declared the alleged disobedience to court orders, by the Buhari Presidency, would endanger legal practice! Now, was that wilful truth or awful Freudian slip?

Still, a towering legal voice has spoken for the epoch, beyond the titillating aroma of present client briefs. Olisa Agbakoba, SAN, declared: any court ruling on present corruption cases should take cognisance of law as it takes of public opinion. A golden intervention there! The great Gani too, in 1984, did a procedural equivalent of class suicide, just to underscore his outrage against sleaze, while his peers got fixated with sterile procedure.

Still, from the least socially conscious to the most radical of crusading attorneys, every lawyer is covered by the lawyers’ creed: the right of every accused to legal representation.

The media has no such luxury, particularly in society-damaging times, that the free and wild looting of the Jonathan era has made of the present.

In times of great throes, the media ought to champion the spirit of the age: editorials echoing the great angst in the land, and columns speaking the pains and anguish of the meek, the silenced and the repressed.

But even with the outrage in the land, a section of the media stay wrapped in a sterile cocoon; as cold and insensitive as the uproar in the streets is hot and impassioned.

Take two of the brightest stars in the glittering sky of The Nation.

For two consecutive Sundays (January 3 and 10), Palladium, that formidable back page column on Sundays, went into a deep philosophical, analytical and theoretical trance; and with a vengeance, conjured the alchemy and metaphysics of democracy; and its inalienable rights.

At the end of that trance, Buhari (who tries hard to right grievous wrongs) had become the villain; those accused of egregious sleaze, unfairly repressed citizens; and the throes in the land, which their stupendous heists have caused, mere “popular sentiments against the so-called treasury looters.”

So called! Call that the Palladium beatification, and you are spot on!

By his third straight offering (January 18), Palladium had worked himself into virtual hysteria, dismissing both the president and the entire anti-sleaze outrage as “wrong”. Well, Mighty Palladium is entitled to his romantic fixation, fast morphing into quixotic delusion!

Sam Omatseye, in his “Catching a thief” (January 11) entered and exited with great flourish and élan, with every line dripping with charming erudition. But at the end, the columnist ended up as a finger-pointer. The anti-corruption war, he tended to imply, is Buhari’s personal battle, in which the president must float or sink! How so?

Yeah, a more sympathetic reading has suggested Sam only decried the lack of an elite anti-corruption critical mass; as well as an organised mass vanguard. That is not unreasonable — and perhaps the administration should do more mobilisation on this score.

But where stands the columnist? And, for that matter, you: the grand victim of those grand heists?

The hegemony of Western culture stands on ancient Greek civilisation. Yet at an epoch, Greece would appear even more debauched than contemporary Nigeria.

Draco (7th century BC), bristled at the mass decadence of the Athens of his day. He tackled it harsh and hard; but earned notoriety by bequeathing humanity the word, “draconian”.

Solon (6th century BC), reformed Draco’s harsh laws. He earned admiration down the ages, for he was hailed as “Solon the Wise”.

Pericles (5th century BC), an Athenian naval general, was even victim of his age’s liberality. By the instrumentality of the ostrakon (which birthed the word, “ostracise”), he was banished for a period, for being “too popular”. But he came back in triumph to be lawgiver, and presided over the most golden era of Athenian — and Greek — civilisation.

A common thread runs through the triad, over three different centuries: each faced the challenge of his time, guided by the temper of his age. But without Draco, would there have been Pericles?

From the “ten-percenters” of the First Republic, Nigerian unconscionable elite thieves have grown more brazen in their prependal crimes. A Draco shock therapy would, therefore, appear inevitable, nay imperative, to nudge them, the hard way, back to redemption. Perhaps that is President Buhari’s historical mission?

Still, let the courts be fair to all. But with glaring records of bad faith from these elite thieves and their colluding lawyers, let no procedural romantics conjure scarecrows that canonise the impunity to commit crimes and get away with them; but demonise state agents that apply legitimate measures to secure justice for the rest of us.

That is as much corruption of the public space, as unbridled stealing of public funds is corruption of the polity.

Therefore, President Buhari should shun the din of naysayers and do the needful to retrieve every kobo, stolen from the public till.

Ripples is with him all of the way. What about you?

Just 40 days of vacation and it looked like 40 years, watching from the sidelines, Nigeria’s ever gripping public theatre. It’s nice to be back. Happy new year, folks!

January 19, 2016