The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olakunle Abimbola

  • Annus Horribilis 2012

    Annus Horribilis 2012

    Tatalo Aremu, The Nation on Sunday columnist that takes no prisoners, as he snoops around, launching his fearsome Sunday-Sunday heavy bazookas at those who trouble Nigeria’s Israel, plumbed the depth of pessimism the other day.

    In his 23 December 2012 piece he titled “An avoidable tragedy”, Tatalo wondered why, with a touch of combative hyperbole, Nigerians could in all good conscience regard 2012 a horrible year, when their irresponsible leaders had always connived and conspired to make things horrible for luckless Nigerians in their care.

    “What you have in Nigeria,” he thundered with patriotic rage, “is not Annus Horribilis but Homo Horribilis”! That is as dire a sentence as can ever be.

    Is Tatalo justified? Maybe. Maybe not.

    But nature and nurture did conspire in 2012 – a horrible year by all accounts – to expose the dirty underbelly of Nigeria’s unconscionable power elite, and their antediluvian thinking; as well as the masses who they so ingloriously mislead to, not to love their neighbours as themselves as the Bible and the Quran command, but to hate with passion on as intensely private a business as religion and ethnic make-up.

    In 1899, Joseph Conrad found the European Heart of Darkness down the river in Belgian Congo, in blind and mindless greed. In 1954, William Golding, Nobel Prize winner located, in his Lord of the Flies, that the human core might well be more evil than good, contrary to previous thinking.

    Both Conrad and Golding, were they to still be alive, would have found further validation, for their fictional theories, in 2012 Nigeria; with mass murder and free-wheeling mayhem that have been the evil signature of Boko Haram; and the bumbling response by the Goodluck Jonathan Presidency, which spread the fog of hopelessness beyond measure.

    Year 2012, the Annus Horribilis Nigerians would rather forget, had pretty little to cheer. But it at least showed the troubled republic in its true state – closer to the Thomas Hobbes’s pre-Social Contract state of nature, where life was nasty, brutish, cruel and short; than to the modern welfare state, where the security of the citizen is guaranteed; and the welfare of all is the chief business of state.

    Taraba and Kaduna states, united in religious chauvinism, though on opposite sides of the religious divide; and ironically too, united in grief, epitomised the dysfunction of the Nigerian state, as much as did a year of limitless tragedies.

    Taraba, a state that would, only over its dead body, harbour a Muslim governor, finally faces the spectre of one – spectre, because to the power lobby in that state, the sceptre of power in wrong religious hands, is nothing but some hell, never to be contemplated.

    Yet, the 1999 Constitution puts citizenship above religious leanings; and therefore guarantees, at least on paper, access to political power to whoever is qualified, no matter his or her faith.

    Since the unfortunate aircraft crash of Governor Danbaba Suntai on 25 October 2012, Taraba has waited with bated breath. Everyone hopes and prays the governor would be all right. But what if it goes the other way, should the state suffer a needless crisis? And not because the Constitution is not clear on what should be done but because the power elite over there think their own will should trump the Constitution?

    This is one institutional shallowness that the horrible 2012 exposed, despite grand pretences. That power heart of darkness – shaped, no doubt, by past decades of illicit domination across the religious divide – must have triggered the reported rash attempt to expel, from his official quarters, the then deputy governor and now Acting Governor, Alhaji Garba Umar, as if such rashness could vitiate constitutional provisions in case of any eventuality.

    That the man is acting governor now, and may well become governor, underscores the futility of passion over-riding cold constitutional provisions, when the rule of law, and not arbitrary passion and power, is the issue. But it shows a dangerous gulf between the cold print of law and the hot, not-so-lawful ardour. That may yet be explosive, if that gulf is not bridged.

    But flip the coin and you are faced, at Kaduna, with the Muslim opposite of the power drama playing out in Taraba. Kaduna power players, who would tolerate a Christian governor only over their dead bodies, got subdued when Goodluck Jonathan nominated Namadi Sambo as his vice-president, and the former Kaduna governor yielded the gubernatorial seat to the long-suffering, tested but hardly trusted (it would appear, given developments after his tragic death) Patrick Ibrahim Yakowa.

    Before his ascendance to the Kaduna power pinnacle, Governor Yakowa had done everything that could possibly earn him the office – a top grade state and federal civil servant, a loyal and amiable two-time deputy governor and a level-headed governor that, from reports, saw neither Christian nor Muslim but one Kaduna.

    But at his death in that chopper crash, religious lunacy ate at the soul of the state. What the law had compelled, technological freak had undone – and it was time for the religiously bigoted to rejoice! Why, a lunatic even posted praises, on his Facebook wall, to his peculiar “Allah” for the death of another, who never did him any wrong!

    To the conventional mind, these were raw savagery, unbefitting of 21st century Nigeria – just as the conventional global mind expected the British public school tradition and discipline to have held Golding’s fictional school boy characters in Lord of the Flies from descending into savages, just a few days after being marooned on an island, after an air crash.

    But just as Golding’s novel was a wake-up call for the darkness of the human heart, though the globe boasted civilisation and evolution, the Kaduna and Taraba tragedies and the evil reactions to them by the power elite, accurately reflected the darkness of the Nigerian power mind, which needs a blinding flash of constitutional reforms to treat. Add Boko Haram, the mass murderous gang to the mix, and the stark, tragic reality of today’s Nigeria is all but clear.

    The greater tragedy, however, is that while the grim situation is all but clear, the authorities efface comical optimism that borders on wilful determination to see the house entirely collapse, while playing the ostrich.

    The Nigerian state is terribly sick. It is weak and tottering, bordering on total collapse. To be saved, it needs a radical constitutional fix. Yet, with the current attempt at constitutional amendment, the federal pretenders offer no more than effete palliatives, reminiscent of the failed efforts of the Abacha and Obasanjo eras.

    This may sound a dire New Year’s Day pronouncement, ala Amos the Biblical prophet of doom; but the political elite and the powers-that-be must work harder at an all-inclusive constitutional talk, where nothing is taken as given.

    Anything short of that radical restructuring may well make the horrible 2012 the signifier of a well and truly horrible era for a country battling for survival. That won’t make 2013 much happier than 2012!

    Despite this dire prognosis, a happy New Year to you all, readers of this column.

     

  • Refugees, Refugees everywhere

    Refugees, Refugees everywhere

    Refugees, refugees everywhere – that is the story of Nigeria in 2012; and you would be amazed at the ‘democratisation’ of the victims, the spread of the suffering and the multiple direction of their panic fleeing.

    For starters, the commander-in-chief, chief symbol of state security, got banished from show-boating the power and the glory of the Nigerian state, at Abuja’s Eagles Square, at important national occasions.

    Though President Jonathan loves to project power in military ceremonial garbs with the Field Marshal’s epaulette sitting on his big shoulders and a blaze of medals bedecking his broad chest, the wise president, in 2012, was content to limit his heroics to the closet at Aso Villa.

    Besides, as Boko Haram blasted Maiduguri, Nigeria’s terrorism capital, and sent murderous ripples through most of the North East states of Borno, Yobe, Gombe, Bauchi and Adamawa, the president stayed away from this vortex of trouble. This self-imposed ban and the dash from Eagle Square into Aso Rock closet on ceremonial days, are the making of His Excellency as a presidential refugee!

    But that was only the high end of the refugee crisis. At the low end, when the masses, sore, confused and angry at the abject failure of the state to protect them, the fleeing has been more abject, more confusing and more desperate – with many even fleeing to neighbouring countries.

    Between November 30 and December 5, according to a report in The Punch, which quoted a NAN report which itself quoted a UN newsletter, the Nigerian Red Cross said some 1, 042 refugees, made up of 520 children and 306 women, had arrived at the Diffa region of Niger Republic, fleeing from Boko Haram violence in Nigeria. The refugees reportedly settled in the villages Guessere and Massa, 25 kilometres away from the Nigerian town of Diffa.

    Year 2012 ended as it started. In January, Boko Haram launched heavy bombs and gun attacks on Kano, with the police headquarters at its target. That attack claimed 150 lives. On Christmas Eve 2012, gunmen suspected to be Islamists attacked two churches during Christmas Eve services: First Baptist Church, Maiduguri, Borno State and another unnamed church in Firi village, near Potiskum, Yobe State, claiming 12 lives, including that of a pastor and a deacon, according to a report in The Nation of December 26.

    This attack echoed the one that presaged the horrible harvesting of death and limbs that 2012 would be; and the humongous refugee crises to result from those attacks: the horrendous Christmas Day 2011 bombings at Theresa’s Catholic Church in Madala, Niger State, which instantly transformed happy celebrants of Christmas mass into horrific body bags, that would make many Christmases to come anniversaries of grief, instead of the universal gaiety that Yuletide symbolises. No less than 29 worshippers perished in that attack.

    Boko Haram attacks on Christian shrines and worshippers came to a mad climax in June. Here is the tragic report, in the words of Human Rights Watch in its 96-page document, Spiralling Violence: Boko Haram Attacks and Security Force Abuses in Nigeria: “On three successive Sundays in June 2012, for example, suicide bombers detonated explosives at church services in Bauchi, Bauchi State; Jos, Plateau State; and Zaira and Kaduna, Kaduna State – all locations of past episodes of inter-communal violence. The June 17 attacks on two churches in Zaria and two churches in Kaduna killed at least 21 people and set off several days of reprisal and counter-reprisal killings between Christians and Muslims, resulting in some 80 more deaths.”

    Aside from churches, university campuses were not left out of the orgy of violence. The Mubi, Adamawa State tragedy, in which gunmen massacred no less than 26 students of The Federal Polytechnic, Mubi, the Adamawa State University and the Adamawa School of Health Technology, all in the Wuro Fatuje off-campus hostels. The massacre reportedly started at around 10 pm on October 3, with Nigeria still celebrating its 52nd independence anniversary. At the end, the casualty figures rose to no less that 40, according to unofficial sources.

    Neither were high-profile military and police targets: the church facility at the Command and Staff College, Jaji, Kaduna State (November 25), and gunmen storming the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) Headquarters in Abuja (November 26); perhaps to underscore the impotence of the Nigerian state in the face of free-wheeling terrorism.

    These church and campus attacks left refugees streaming south-ward, with many of the youth swearing to abandon their studies rather than go back to risk their lives. The Mubi attacks were however not conclusively linked to Boko Haram.

    Indeed, in the first nine months of 2012, no less than 815 people had been killed from 275 attacks, according to the Human Rights Watch document already quoted. This number is more than half of the no less than 1, 500 casualty figure for three years: 2010, 2011 and 2012.

    At a period during this grim year, worst-hit governments in the South East of Nigeria often arranged transport to evacuate their indigenes from the troubled spots and also burials for victims of the attacks.

    The year 2012 has been Boko Haram’s bloodiest year, leading to the worst cases of internally displaced people in the country – a grim irony of Nigerians becoming refugees in their own country, which should be a natural refuge.

    The sad tale is, with the Federal Government’s tepid handling of the problem, the prospect does not appear better for 2013.

  • Ngozi! and Sege’s agony: a tale of two citizens

    Ngozi! and Sege’s agony: a tale of two citizens

    Sege’s agony (December 18)

    In ‘Sege’s agony’, no mercy for Baba. – Ichie Emma Ezeh, Enugu +2348061149491

    Re: ‘Sege’s agony’ – very informative and educative piece. Constantly being in the news is the tonic that keeps the “Ebora Owu” going! Chief James Ajibola Ige will forever be my hero for his humility, accessibility, simplicity and his principle of operating from a position of relative obscurity. Ogbeni Aregbesola is a man with sound intellect, sharp memory and organisational competence and I do not think he will fall so easy to the avuncular wisdom of Uncle Sege as did his seniors because his political associates have learnt from the benefit of hindsight, insight and foresight to deal with ‘Baba’ from a securely comfortable distance, a stand that pays off handsomely in the long run! Compliments of Yuletide to you. – Kayode A, Abeokuta, 2348073821313.

    It is another embarrassment, affront, trauma and insult to Yoruba integrity that Gen. Obasanjo unveiled the statue of Uncle Bola Ige. Gen. Obasanjo conspired against the indomitable Awo’s presidential ambition in 1979. Bola Ige was rigged out of existence in 2001, under his presidency. Obasanjo’s chicanery also rigged out the the Alliance for Democracy (AD) progressive governments in the South West, except the no-nonsense Bola Tinubu of Lagos. The ACN governors must therefore be focused and implement their much touted regional integration without any delay. The ailing industries in the South West should be revived. They should stop chasing shadows, and avoid being distracted. – Ayodele Fagbohun, +2348169482226.

    Read your sardonic piece, ‘Sege’s agony’ and it struck me that you are the one in concealed agony at the surreal spectacle of Gen. Obasanjo unveiling the statue of his friend, Chief Bola Ige, callously murdered under his watch as president. To imagine that an ACN putative political ideologue, Governor Rauf Aregbesola, was the host is the ultimate in political morbid humour. So, many improbable people seem to be dancing on Ige’s grave! And with Ige’s son as witness, it doesn’t get more weird! – Dr. Bisi Olawunmi, +2348033647571

    Ripples: This is a completely different ‘doctoral dissertation’ of the event. But are you sure your ideological leaning is not playing a trick on you?

    Does your warning against Aregbesola “getting too comfy with this man” not suggestive of your discomfort at this apparent rapprochement? You politicians are a different breed – no permanent friends or foes? Maybe Obasanjo will still laugh last. He is genius at capturing people. He is on repeat performance. – Dr. Bisi Olawunmi.

    Ripples: ‘You politicians’ – who, me? A politician? Some laugh! Anyway, I concur: politicians cook up phony and unholy deals. That’s why the media must be alert to warn. But does that make the commentator a politician?

    Some, if not all the time, I see you people as callous and wicked. You referred to a three-time president as irrelevant? Haba! Do you wish for such an opportunity? Then retrace your steps. Your comments are not ‘Omoluabi’ [Yoruba for well-bred] – +2347033045653.

    Stop abusing an elderly man. You should know that whether people like it or not, Obasanjo is a human being and a great Yoruba man. Maybe if you had the opportunities God had given him, you probably would have been a worst person than him. – Segun, Orile-Iganmu, Lagos, +2348083556806.

    Your article, ‘Sege’s agony’, is a timely warning to all ACN governors, particularly the Ogbeni governor of the State of Osun. He should watch his back, as Obj is capable of anything to ‘capture’ the South West back for PDP. A word is enough for the wise!!! – Chief Apelogun, Ilesa, Osun State, +2348188810889.

    Obasanjo is not irrelevant. Everyone knows you can never see anything good in him. One time you will age and retire, and younger people will write about your own agony. – +2348098829997.

    Ogbeni wasn’t comfy. He deliberately invited Sege to taunt him with Cicero’s greatness. But you’re right: Dictum sapient sat est (a word is good for the wise). – Leke Ikumapayi, +2348184972087.

    Your piece, ‘Sege’s agony’ is good bordering on excellence. But you should have left out paragraghs 20 and 21. Ponder this and you would get the gist. – +2348055749747.

    Ngozi! (December 11)

    I thought the Nigerian youth had no place in the present Nigerian political dispensation until I read your piece on the late Mrs. Ngozi Agbo. Please keep it up. – Prince Illo, Abuja, +2348054566282.

    Thank you. Reading your column, ‘Ngozi!’ wet my tear ducts again, six months after the death of the Campus Life Lady. She was the second woman whose demise melted my heart, like a crystal of shea butter in a furnace. Aunty Ngozi affected lives in the 37 years she lived. In fact, she was a mother and father to me! But you wrote that the award was held on November 24. It was actually held on November 30. – Wale Ajetunmobi, +2348035832227.

    Ripples: The mix-up in date is regretted. Thank you.

    To die completely is to be forgotten. He who dies and is not forgotten lives forever – Samuel Butler. Thanks so much for remembering an icon like Mrs Ngozi Agbo. She added so much value to me and my articles, during my days at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, despite the fact that she had never seen me before. Though the messenger is dead, her message lives on. May her gentle soul rest in peace. Long live the young Emmanuel Agbo [Ngozi’s son], Long live Mr. Agbo Agbo [her husband] and long live our country. – Seyi Babaeko, +2348030858606.

    Believe you me, when I saw the headline of today’s Ripples, I thought it was referring to our ubiquitous ‘Aunty Ngoo’ whose performance has made the economy very attractive to kidnappers! For the Ngozi that rippled today, I can only say RIP and may God grant her loved ones the fortitude to bear the irreparable loss (Amen) – Kayode A, Abeokuta, +2348073821313.

    Thank you for your beautiful write-up on my wife, Ngozi. God bless you. Agbo Agbo – +2348033778406.

     

  • Sege’s agony

    Sege’s agony

    Just as well the ever-preening Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, former president of the Federal Republic, just gobbled his vomit on the iconic Bola Ige, former justice minister and federal attorney-general, that assassins killed in his Ibadan home on 23 December 2001.

    He, on December 10, declared the late Ige one of the most accomplished Yoruba, nay Nigerians, that ever lived – which Chief Ige, no doubt, was. His glowing praise came at the unveiling of a life-size Ige statue, in front of Bola Ige House, the State of Osun Governor’s Office, at the Osun Government Secretariat Complex, Osogbo.

    At the unveiling were the Osun Governor, Rauf Aregbesola, and his deputy, Grace Titi Laoye-Tomori. Also there was Ige’s son, Muyiwa, one of Aregbesola’s commissioners and other government high officials.

    The Obasanjo high praise bounced from an earlier savage put-down, in which the former president dismissed his slain former power minister as not knowing his left from his right, at the time he was in the Power ministry; suggesting Ige’s alleged incompetence caused much of the present power debacle.

    But before the extremity of high praise and low knock, had come a 1999 presidential carte blanche: a ministerial offer that gave Chief Ige a free hand to choose whatever portfolio that tickled his ability, in the new Obasanjo Presidency.

    It was indeed a sweet danger of a symbiotic deal. Obasanjo needed Ige to thumb his nose at the Afenifere hegemony in Yoruba politics; that the Alliance for Democracy (AD) sweeping victory in the six South West states, in the 1999 elections, had just confirmed.

    On the other hand, Ige needed Obasanjo to “deal” with the Afenifere grandees, whose conclave preferred Olu Falae to him (though Ige was Deputy Leader, and Falae an IBB-era SAP zealot turned progressive), as AD presidential candidate, in a closed primary at D’Rovans Hotel, Ibadan.

    That sweet danger ended in mutual tragedy: the iconic Ige lost his life – many say because his hubris allowed an evil lizard to creep under the cracked walls of his political fort – but never his honour and mystique.

    Obasanjo, on the other hand, kept his presidency, and even rigged a phony South West base, after wrong-footing Afenifere into some political cul-de-sac, with the once-upon-a-time battle-tested and trusted titans floundering; and wondering, with self-loathing, how they could ever have fallen for Obasanjo’s Trojan horse.

    But Obasanjo himself ended his presidential power adventure with a terrible unravelling, only reminiscent of the tortoise in the folktale that swore never to return from his journey until he was thoroughly disgraced!

    So, if the great Uncle Sege has suddenly turned a posthumous Ige admirer, after his rather insensitive he-knew-not-his-left-from-his-right earlier comment, it is because political irrelevance savagely stares him in the face, a logical sequel to his tragic presidential unravelling – and he verily believed the Osun grandstanding would win him some plaudits. Only political fools would fall for such cheap tricks!

    Still, the Bola Ige House setting is gripping: and Ige’s son, Muyiwa, Governor Aregbesola and even former Governor Bisi Akande must especially savour that sweet irony.

    Many say, to “capture” the South West, by hook or by crook, Ige had to go, hit-the-shepherd-and-scatter-the-sheep fashion. As collateral damage, Governor Akande had to go too, even if Obasanjo had earlier damned him with faint praise, as one of the few 1999-2003-class governors that passed his solo anti-corruption screening.

    Worse still, Olagunsoye Oyinlola, to the ruin of Osun citizens, must usurp Akande, the visionary that built that futuristic Osun secretariat. Oyinlola’s parlous performance has become his eternal damnation – and ample proof of Obasanjo’s sterile mainstreaming, in a politically progressive and assertive South West.

    So, even as Obasanjo screamed “Ogbeni ambush”, his body, veteran of countless empty grandstanding, tightly hugged Ige’s Osun canonisation. With that canonisation, he must have reasoned, may come his own political redemption, with the doors of Aso Villa firmly barred against his meddling! Talk of the once rejected pillar becoming the cornerstone! That this canonisation-redemption drama unfolded in the House that Akande built, and in the full glare of the younger Ige, is indicative of who, between Ige and Obasanjo, is having the last laugh!

    This latter-day activism, a campaign against a crony lost and an investment gone awry, is a classic Obasanjo soap. At President Umaru Musa Yar’adua’s greatest hour of need, when he lingered between life and death, the thundering Sege downed him with his verbal staccato. The health-challenged must give way for fitter limbs to do the job! Yet, the late president was the darling Umoru, who Obasanjo, “do-or-die”, crowned president in the worst election in Nigerian history!

    Now Goodluck Jonathan, for who Obasanjo callously repudiated the political zoning formula that made him, has stepped out of line! His estranged godfather is therefore getting on the overdrive to unhorse him.

    To the starry-eyed, it is Obasanjo’s idea of a patriotic duty to retrieve the polity from the shifty hands of Captain Incompetent. But really, as it was with Yar’adua before Jonathan, it is Obasanjo’s Plot Perpetual for political relevance, having blown his golden chance, with his wayward eight-year presidency.

    Still, the usually feckless Jonathan seems to have developed a satanic sense of humour at Obasanjo’s expense. To the discerning Tony Anenih, the ruthless fixer who was himself ruthlessly fixed at home during the Edo gubernatorial election, may well be on his way back as chairman, Board of Trustees (BOT), of the Peoples Democratic Party – the same political durable Obasanjo elbowed out of office, at the tail-end of his imperial presidency. A sardonic joke never gets merrier!

    Author Obasanjo, in his books, boasts special talents at revealing his future anti-climax, while piously condemning others. In his Not My Will, he knocked Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, the famed Nigerian nationalist, for starting life as Zik of Africa but ending it as Owelle of Onitsha!

    Well now, the self-proclaimed father of modern Nigeria and African eminent statesman is messing around with Owu chieftaincy disputes! At least, that was the publicised reason for his Osun shuttle! How time changes!

    Somehow, the agony of the former president is so reminiscent of Barabas, in Christopher Marlowe’s play, Jew of Malta. Barabas the Jew, never regarded anything sacrosanct. So, he built his life on free and wilful double-cross. But the first time he was ever earnest, the Malta gentry double-crossed him. He lost both his life and his wealth for the ransom of Malta.

    Obasanjo, of course, is no Barabas; and always insists his word is his bond – which could well be. But whoever wants to do a deal with him to stave off his looming irrelevance had better be careful.

    Let therefore Osun Governor, Rauf Aregbesola, take tutorials from Chief Akande and Aremo Olusegun Osoba, about a certain agreement in 2003, before getting too comfy with this man. Let history not repeat itself – for after the tragedy of that first blunder, the South West, and indeed Nigeria, can do without the sure farce of a possible second!

    Obasanjo richly deserves his looming irrelevance. He worked hard for it all his long public life. Besides, the republic is better off for it.

  • Ngozi!

    Ngozi!

    Pop artiste, Felix Lebarty, once did an ode to Ngozi, an object of his love – or more correctly, the object of his musical persona’s love. The number was a sweet-sour complaint about Ngozi, who now came for love, then came for money but hardly ever gave his doting beau what he really wanted: her heart.

    Felix’s output, a musically sweet and frothy work, fell within the matrix of 1980s musical releases aimed at captivating the youth of that era. On the same canvass played the likes of Dizzy K. Falola’s Baby Kilode? and Alex Zitto’s (a very popular act in those days) Babywalakolombo, all highly danceable party hits but all based on the theory that women are nothing but sex symbols.

    Ironically, no matter how objectionable this sexist profiling would appear, women themselves gyrated most to its sweet poison! By the way, that is no exclusive social crime of the 1980s. Even today: maybe it is the economic squeeze, maybe it is youth brainlessness which is no monopoly of any age, but you still find girls lending their bosoms and bums to the most objectionable of musical videos.

    But Ngozi, the subject of this column today, is the direct opposite of Felix Lebarty’s Ngozi.

    She is the late Mrs Ngozi Agbo. Agbo Agbo, her widower, described her as a “complete woman”, at The Nation/Coca-cola Nigeria-Nigeria Bottling Company 4th Campus Life Awards, on November 24.

    That award, aimed at spurring socially responsible youth via campus journalism, could well be a collective dream. But Ngozi was without doubt the moving spirit and most visible symbol of that dream. Indeed, future generations would credit her with its birth.

    At the 3rd Campus Life Awards in 2011, Ngozi was there. But at this year’s edition, she was gone! She was not only there last year, she promised another life, perhaps to continue her life of positive youth activism. She was heavy with child. This year however, that child is alive and well; but the mother is gone. Months after that tragic incident, it is still extremely hard to swallow that bitter pill: that she is no more.

    Nevertheless, the Bespoke Event Centre venue of the awards reverberated with her beautiful spirit: a husband that has put behind his grief to answer the call to service by the “complete woman” that too briefly became his wife; Ngozi’s son, sweet product of a marriage that ended too soon and the bevy of youth, future flowers of the country, that have savoured Auntie Ngozi’s mentoring and would forever treasure her memory. This is not to forget Wale Ajetunmobi, the young ex-Campus Life (reporting from Unilorin) graduate that now coordinates the pages for The Nation!

    And speaking of mentoring, Mr. Agbo has continued where his beautiful wife stopped. Though no member of The Nation family, he has taken over the “Pushing Out” column space, the virtual pulpit from which Ngozi weekly engaged her brood. It is a bitter-sweet tale of a “complete woman” leaving behind a “real man” to continue the good work of ceaseless service to the Nigerian youth.

    Now, if Ngozi was the extreme opposite of Felix Lebarty’s Ngozi, Mr. Agbo too would appear the direct opposite of that chauvinistic and sexist mindset that assumes no brain ticks beyond a woman’s vital statistics and cosmetics – no matter what ability that woman has shown.

    But Ngozi is not worth celebrating just because she left behind a heroic and model husband. Even that, to be sure, is not exactly routine around here! Rather, her memory is sweet and will continue to endure because in a country which governments remain scandalously remiss at catering for and mentoring the youth, Ngozi dared to be different, even as a private citizen.

    Chinua Achebe in his new book, There was a Country, referred to his generation as “A Lucky Generation” – lucky because the departing British took very good care of them, in the hope that generation would replicate such care for a future generation of Nigerians. Fond hope!

    Achebe’s contemporary and Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, had been much more censorious of that generation. He dismissed them as “wasted”, because they have been unable to recreate the el-Dorado that nurtured them into world beaters in their youth. Indeed, to lift an image from The Man Died, Prof. Soyinka’s Civil War prison memoir, Soyinka’s generation just developed a cotton wool mentality, consuming everything, producing nothing!

    Ngozi and her generation are the direct victims of this failure; and the fate of the Nigerian youth today is well and truly pathetic. That is the redemption battle Ngozi’s Campus Life initiative is all about. So far, it has succeeded beyond dreams – and the beauty is that, to quote Prof. Achebe, it is morning yet on creation day!

    Campus Life 2012 Awards makes four “generations” of champions, with two of the previous Campus Reporter of the Year winners present. Hannah Ojo (English, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife), won the inaugural “title” in 2009. Gilbert Alasa (Foreign Languages, University of Benin, Benin City) won it last year; and this year carted away the award for opinion writing. Gilbert, for weeks after Ngozi’s death, ran her picture as display picture on his face book page.

    The “current champion”, 2012 Campus Reporter of the Year, Gerald Nwokocha, is an Information Technology (IT) graduate of the Federal University of Technology, Owerri (FUTO). He is now a youth corps member and under his belt, has already tucked a daring but socially conscious investigative story of a corps member who soldiers killed, after mistaking him for a Boko Haram member. Even on the award podium that night, he kept on pushing for “justice” for the dead. Scratch a writer, and you would probably find a reformer?

    The diverse disciplines of the rank of winners this year is simply breath-taking, showing that the Nigerian undergraduate, despite the trying times, is no robot outside his core study. Check out the honours list: Emeka Attah (Political Science, Unizik) and Ngozi Emmanuel (Mass Communication, Unizik) – winners, Culture Category; Uche Anichebe, (Law, Unizik) – Investigative Prize; Habeeb Whyte (Law, Unilorin) – Personality Profile; Gilbert Alasa (Foreign Languages, Uniben), – Opinion Writing; Gerald Nwokocha (IT graduate, FUTO) – Politics (and overall winner), Chisom Ojukwu (Chemical Engineering, FUTO) – Sports and Esther Mark (Mass Communication, Unijos) – Entertainment.

    Chisom Ojukwu, it was, who made the most telling confession of the night, while speaking on behalf of other winners. It was: the prize money and winners’ plaques first drew him to the Campus Life Awards. Not anymore. Now, it is the burning zeal to change society for the better.

    Ngozi must be smiling wherever she is now! Sleep on, gallant lady. With Coca-cola Nigeria, Nigerian Bottling Company and The Nation carrying on from where you stopped, your dream for the Nigerian youth is all but assured.

  • Osun, Hijrah and equity

    Osun, Hijrah and equity

    This piece is not for the Christian bigot or Muslim fanatic. Neither is it for the emotively misguided, warring for God who could war for Himself. It is rather for the open-minded; with absolutely no hang-up about religion, the bastion of immensely personal faith.

    Look at Nigeria’s green-white-green. Isn’t green rather dull for Nigerians known for their vigour, dynamism and corky pride, when the subject is national bragging rights?

    Why would anyone therefore pick such drab colour for Nigeria, when Britain the departing colonial master had draped itself in a blaze of red, blue and white?

    Why green? A surreptitious tinge of Islamic green, as parting gift to the Sokoto Caliphate and its green flag, for its lasting partnership in the British colonising mission in Nigeria?

    Look at the Nigerian currency: N1, 000, N500, N200 and N100 notes. All have Arabic inscriptions. Yet Nigeria’s lingua franca is English, not Arabic.

    None of Nigeria’s native national communities has Arabic as their mother tongue, though a lot of Muslim scholars and clerics in these communities use Arabic as the Islamic code: for teaching and scholarly discourse; a reality that led the religiously liberal Yoruba to tag Muslims Imale (literally, hard stuff, regarding Arabic), as distinct from Igbagbo (Christianity).

    That tag underscored the relative inaccessibility of Arabic in the local Yoruba community, since they could access Christianity by English (the colonising language) and Yoruba (their mother tongue, thanks to the works of Bishop Ajayi Crowther, who translated the Bible into Yoruba). Islam enjoyed no such twin-luxury of lingo accessibility, even if both religions are bastions of unquestionable faith, and Islam had cohabited with Yoruba traditional beliefs long before the advent of Christianity.

    There appears therefore ample evidence of Islamic symbolism in the panoply of Nigerian national symbols, even if Nigeria is constitutionally a secular state.

    But look at the other side of the religious coin. The government calendar and the routine work-free days are decidedly Christian. The colonial master worked from Monday to Saturday and worshipped on Sunday. So, Nigeria’s official rest day is Sunday, after the Western, Christian calendar.

    Femi Abbas, a Friday columnist with The Nation, has claimed Seventh Day Adventists, a Christian sect, successfully persuaded Gen. Yakubu Gowon to, from half-day, make Saturday a full work-free day, since the Adventists worship on that day. But not even the strong Islamic lobby could persuade the British colonialists and independent Nigerian governments to make Friday, the Muslim rest day, work-free, though Muslims are allowed ample time for Friday Jumat prayers.

    Before aligning the school calendar with the international September-July cycle, the January to December calendar was decidedly Christian. Schools took short breaks in the first term in April (which dovetailed with Easter), second term in August and the end-of-year longer holiday in December (which also dovetailed into the Christian Yuletide, a season in Christendom starting from December 24 – Christmas Eve – to January 6, well beyond the Christian New Year’s Day of January 1).

    Indeed, ever so adaptive Yoruba Christians have promptly tagged Christmas, Odun Kekere (small festival) and New Year’s Day, Odun-Nla (big festival). Besides, the harmless Yuletide wish of “a merry Christmas and happy New Year” holds in its goodwill cheer an imposed Christian calendar.

    Indeed, Yuletide appears some unseen parallel to Saudi Arabia, which theocratic court declares as many as 10 days to celebrate the two Islamic feasts of eid-al-fitr (after Ramadan) and eid-al-adha (which Yoruba adherents simply tag Ileya – literally, “time to go home and feast”).

    The Nigerian case is even more interesting when compared with Egypt, a secular state with a Muslim majority and a sizeable Coptic Christian minority. Egypt, each year, celebrates the Coptic Christmas (January 7), Orthodox Easter (April 25, this year). For the Muslim festivals of eid-al-fatr, it sets aside three days of public holiday, and four days for Qurban (eid-al-adha). It also observes a public holiday for Al-Hijrah, the Islamic New Year, but only recognises what, in most of the Arab world is called the international New Year’s Day, January 1, though on that day, offices remain open.

    From the foregoing therefore, it would appear Nigeria is under the twin-domination of Muslim and Christian symbolisms, which is just as well: since a majority of Nigerians claim to be Christian or Muslim.

    It is also clear that though officially January 1 is not in Nigeria a Christian holiday, its root is Christian. It is the first day in the Gregorian calendar, decreed into being by Pope Gregory XIII on 24 February 1582. Besides, January 1 cannot be totally separated from the international celebration of the Yuletide, the Christmas season.

    That moves the discourse to the hoopla State of Osun Governor, Rauf Aregbesola, caused with his declaration of November 15 as Hijrah (Islamic New Year’s Day) this year.

    Was the governor right by law? No doubt. Was it politic? Not convinced: that the Yoruba are famously tolerant of rival faiths does not eliminate residual Christian-Muslim tensions, which the Hijrah declaration appeared to have goaded in many a Christian psyche.

    Was the declaration legitimate? If legitimacy is interpreted as quiescence in Osun, it would appear so: for while Osun Muslims appear happy and proud of their latest concession from the state, hardly any Christian groups have growled over the holiday.

    So, why the media hue and cry? Perhaps because a governor just accused of putative Islamisation should be very circumspect on religious matters. That is good faith.

    But much of the media flak veered beyond good faith into impish intolerance and sweeping but false claims. The most blatant of these claims that no Arab and Muslim country has Hijra as public holiday is false.

    According to www.schoolholidaysguide.com, Egypt, Malaysia (marked as Awal Muharram), Indonesia, Kuwait and United Arab Emirates (UAE) have Hijrah as public holidays, though all of these countries, except Egypt, also observe January 1 as public holiday. Saudi Arabia runs an official Islamic calendar but does not declare Hijrah a public holiday. Neither does it declare January 1. Hijrah is no public holiday in Pakistan. But Pakistan also only observes January 1 as “banker’s holiday”, according to information on this website.

    Thinking Aregbesola’s Hijrah move is impolitic, therefore, is within the explosive realm of political gains and losses. If that Machiavellian motive indeed drove the declaration, then it is well and truly condemnable.

    But if it was driven by meeting deeply felt but much repressed Muslim aspirations, there is nothing sinister about it, so long as no non-Muslim is forced to join in the Hijrah celebrations.

    The notorious fact is that the Nigerian Christian and Muslim majority, having carved the country in their twin-images, bawl and scream anytime they sense a tilt on the domination scale. That is no ode to tolerance.

    So, let all in the State of Osun beware. As citizens, Osun Muslims have a right to Hijrah. But adherents of other faiths, like African traditional believers, have rights too.

    So, when this most repressed group come to the fore to claim their own religious rights, let no one turn emergency jihadists or crusaders!

  • Exit Esho, model jurist

    Exit Esho, model jurist

    In a spate of one week, four of the most accomplished Nigerians died: Lam Adesina, former governor of Oyo State, Olusola Saraki, strongman of Kwara politics, Justice Bobakayode Esho, activist jurist and retired justice of the Supreme Court of Nigeria and Hope Harriman, debonair surveyor, estate valuer and industrialist of the live-and-let-live philosophy.

    Of the four, the passage of Justice Esho (18 September 1925-16 November 2012) must be the most roiling – at least in Ripples’ opinion. Alhaji Adesina was a thorough-bred progressive and NADECO prisoner-of-war in Sani Abacha’s gulag. But he got gubernatorial reward for his “war wounds”.

    Dr. Saraki was a prodigious philanthropist, and no matter what opposing ideologues think of his politics, he was truly caring and compassionate. But he forged his winning trait into a winning political machine – and he rewarded himself as the Kwara lord of the manor.

    The frothy Chief Harriman worked hard, played hard and enjoyed life to the fullest. He was among a rare breed whose wealth was not tied to recurring public sector racketeering, in an elite generation of equal opportunity racketeers. He was the exemplar, if there ever was one, of the stark axiom of “no food for lazy man” and its contrast: “the industrious have earned their munificence.”

    And Justice Esho? He was the model citizen who put his prodigious intellect and steely courage at the service of the common good. Imagine the Jeremy Bentham dictate of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, as the apogee of governance? Esho was the puny individual who aimed for that Bentham societal elixir, sans government might, sans government perks. His unrepentant motto was Justice for all. His only tool? Profound knowledge of the law; and stubborn courage that the law rules.

    Just imagine how different Nigeria could have turned, had the majority in the Supreme Court adopted Justice Esho’s famous dissent, in Obafemi Awolowo Vs Shehu Shagari in 1979, at the birth of the troubled Second Republic (1979-1983).

    Chief Richard Akinjide, SAN, national legal adviser to the then National Party of Nigeria (NPN), had come up with a clear legal stratagem that two-thirds of the then 19 states was twelve-two-thirds and not 13, as the Federal Electoral Commission (FEDECO), under Chief Michael Ani, had hitherto decided in all electoral matters.

    The motive was not so hidden. The presidential election was heading for a run-off, with NPN Candidate Shagari winning the majority of popular votes but falling short of the required one-quarter of votes cast in two-thirds of the 19 states of the federation. Alhaji Shagari had the one-quarter requirement in 12 states.

    On the other hand, Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) Candidate Awolowo, was running second on popular vote, though far less behind on the electoral spread requirement, so much so that had the envisaged electoral college held to pick the president as the 1979 Constitution stipulated, it would have been great injustice if Awo had won as a result of the rest of the four parties – Nnamdi Azikiwe’s Nigerian People’s Party (NPP), Ibrahim Waziri’s Great Nigeria People’s Party (GNPP), Aminu Kano’s People’s Redemption Party (PRP) and the UPN – ganging up to thwart the NPN candidate.

    But that was not even likely to happen, even if the UPN optimists were ready and eager to take their chances; and the NPN camp and their federal backers expected the worst. For starters, the rivalry between Zik and Awo was alive and well. Besides, Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo’s government’s body language that Awo was not the man was all but clear, even if Awo was widely perceived to have the best credentials. Enter then Chief Akinjide’s legal dues-ex-machina!

    The 6-1 (or more appropriately 5-1-1, for Justice Andrew Obaseki’s verdict was neither-nor) Supreme Court judicial validation of the Akinjide theory sank the new Second Republic in a legitimacy bog it never recovered from. But it was this equivalent of a roaring judicial ocean current that an unfazed Justice Esho swam against.

    The Supreme Court too must have realised its own judicial cant – who didn’t? – as it committed a further outrage that its twelve-two-third decision would not be cited as precedent at future electoral litigations!

    But that legal legerdemain by the highest court of the land cost Nigeria the collapse of the Second Republic, and the subsequent infliction on the polity, of the most virulent set of military dictators – Muhammadu Buhari, Ibrahim Babangida and the nadir, Sani Abacha. This relay also birthed the second coming of the ever-grandstanding and self-adulating Obasanjo, the luckless Umaru Musa Yar’adua and the clueless incumbent, Goodluck Jonathan.

    Besides, that Supreme Court decision further entrenched the regnant folly that the executive could manipulate elections anyhow, and suborn the judiciary to toe the line – until the judicial rebellion after the shameful 2007 general elections, with President Yar’adua clawing his stained mandate by a split 4-3 Supreme Court decision, thus forcing conscious efforts at electoral reforms.

    With the failed military-in-government and wobbling successor non-democrats in a supposed democracy, judicial manipulation of electoral matters brought the country perilously close to state failure, despite the heroics of the Court of Appeal under the presidency of Justice Ayo Salami, now ironically being tarred and tanned for doing the right thing! Yet, if only the Supreme Court of his time had shared Justice Esho’s golden sense of justice, all these would perhaps have been averted!

    The moral? Those who now play politics and expediency with the Salami case only lay land mines that may yet blow up the polity.

    Very early in his judicial career, the fearless jurist was involved in the famous “unknown gunman”, a charged political case involving the young Wole Soyinka, during the Western Region’s season of [political] anomie in the First Republic, to borrow the Nobel Laureate’s novel of that title.

    He ruled against government and the bully Leviathan bared its teeth. For his judicial temerity, the Ladoke Akintola establishment hauled Esho into judicial Siberia in Akure. For following the dictates of the law, therefore, persecution was his lot. Yet, that did not deter the judicial lion heart from giving justice, even if the heavens fell.

    Even among their peers of titan jurists, in an era regarded by legal historians as the Golden Age of the Nigerian Supreme Court, Justice Esho and Justice Chukwudifu Oputa (aka Socrates) – still very much alive – sparkled for their sheer brilliance, deep intellect, profound learning, towering character and stubborn courage to be guided not only by the letters of the law, but also by its spirit. That none of the two ever became Chief Justice of Nigeria is a salute to the Nigerian penchant to settle for the ordinary when the absolutely brilliant wastes away.

    Justice Esho was a model citizen who put his character and learning at the disposal of his country. Despite his strivings, his country bluntly refused to be a model nation. That is the tragedy of contemporary Nigeria, which the present and oncoming generation must throw over-board for the country to find true greatness.

  • Saraki the father, Saraki the son?

    Saraki the father, Saraki the son?

    There were at least two ennobling traits in the private life of Dr. Abubakar Olusola Saraki (1933-2012) that public figures today can imbibe to strengthen their homes and enrich the polity: religious tolerance and compassion.

    Dr. Saraki, a devout Muslim and an iconic figure in Kwara, married a Christian, Florence Morenike, in 1962, according to an interview he granted Tell magazine in March 2011.

    Kwara is a cultural mishmash, though being the southernmost outpost of old Sokoto Caliphate, has in Ilorin an Emirate, which links the local ruling theocracy right back to the ancestral capital of Usman Dan Fodio. As a symbol of power, therefore, Islam looms large; and its adherence or non-adherence may make or ruin many an aspiration to political leadership, even if the Nigerian state is officially secular.

    That Dr. Saraki practised his faith but left his wife to practice hers, so much so that between 1962 and his death in 2012, Mrs Saraki added to her name, another prefix of “Deaconess”, is a salute to religious tolerance that chides Nigerian Christian and Muslim fundamentalists in these troubled times. It simply shows that beyond the hot ardour of doctrine, God is one and the same.

    Then, compassion. Ripples’ first consciousness of Dr. Saraki, as a secondary school boy in the 1970s, was of a young medic who would die first, rather than turn his back on the less fortunate that needed help.

    So, when the man the Nigerian media would later dub the “Strongman of Kwara Politics” came onto his own, at the end of that decade and beginning of the Second Republic (1979-1983), Ripples knew his risen Kwara profile was just desert for years of compassionate investment, even if Ripples did not particularly care for Dr. Saraki’s peculiar politics of democratic feudalism, with all its telling oxymoron.

    So, when the Awoist Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) apparatchiks, with their famous four-cardinal programmes of free education, free health, mass shelter and integrated rural development were sneering at Saraki’s reported “feudal” opportunism, it was clear again it was empty gas driven by plain partisan envy.

    Saraki’s genuine compassion for the Kwara masses, long before any partisan kill could be made, was real. Saraki had planted slow and long. For him, it was political harvest time.

    But while these two fine traits laid the foundation for the Saraki ascendancy, his bid at democratic hegemony was clear – for in Saraki’s feudal political view loomed the rather undemocratic ethos that if a royal does not die, another does not bid for the throne.

    But unlike the rather incongruous but not unusual tenet of democratic royalty (with the likes of the Kennedys, the Bushes and to some extent, the Clintons in the United States), which throws up different figures from the same family over the ages to bid for the democratic throne (ah, another violent oxymoron!), the late Saraki was the Alpha and Omega of his own feudal universe. The Oloye was yesterday. The Oloye is today. And the Oloye would ever shall be, mortality or no!

    In such a paradise and hell of total domination (paradise for the Oloye, hell for his political rivals), the Ilorin democratic rabble, who the Oloye loved so dearly and who in return doted on their benefactor so completely, became at most times democratic zombies to be periodically pressed into devastating service to maintain the Oloye electoral mystique. Saraki’s opponents sneered this rabble was gorged silly on subversive generosity. But it was clear Saraki had trumped his political foes in real-politik.

    Still, if the Kwara masses had by and large been pacified, the elite never were so. That shaped the way for a Saraki-Kwara elite war of attrition, a war which Dr. Saraki won by and by, until he ran into the ambush of his own son, Bukola, ironically a beloved firstborn and another medic.

    While French Emperor, the great Napoleon Bonaparte met his waterloo in today’s Belgium, the great Oloye met his in the intimate mess of sibling political civil war, with the wise patriarch backing the clear wrong horse – or more appropriately, the wrong mare!

    How was Saraki supposed to triumph in that high-stake battle? He pulled his troops from the ruling state and federal party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for a new and unknown quantity, the Allied Congress Party of Nigeria (ACPN), faced the full wrath of combined state and national incumbency and threw up a woman, though darling daughter, Gbemisola, who the Oloye would willy-nilly install in a Kwara of conservative political temper and unfazed religious chauvinism. Besides, the Ilorin elite waited with bated breath for the Saraki denouement – and all the sweeter because the Saraki were cleaning themselves out!

    With all these odds, the old man still expected, at the roar of Baba Oloye, all these walls of Jericho would fall? Hubris never came in starker and more tantalising form!

    Now, all the old political friends turned fiends – Adamu Attah, Sha’aba Lafiagi, Mohammed Alabi Lawal, Salmon Adebayo, the senatorial surrogate who outsmarted Saraki but disappeared into oblivion after serving out a four-year term, et al – must have flit through the Oloye’s mind, as he faced the first major defeat of his political career and his eventual demystification.

    So, who carries the gospel of Saraki’s democratic feudalism to the next generation – Saraki the Son, Bukola, who vanquished his old man and seized the empire, even if he insists no regicide had taken place? Hardly!

    Hardly, because the political demographics have changed. The West Central State of 1967 is a different ball game from the Kwara of 2012. Besides, Saraki did not leave behind a comprehensive canon of work, ala Obafemi Awolowo, to articulate his vision and emblazon his philosophy – maybe he didn’t have one?

    And of course, because of the paternalistic megalomania of the late Saraki’s politics, he boasts no boisterous and winning disciples, ala Awoists, save, of course, Saraki the Son, albeit in a bitter-sweet form. How can Bukola politically slay his father and yet claim to continue with his legacy?

    It would therefore appear the passage of Baba Oloye has thrown the Kwara political firmament wide open. Kwara may be the southernmost horn of the old Sokoto Caliphate. But it is also the northernmost rim of the old Oyo Empire. So, it could well be a new and fierce ideological battle ground between the regnant Northern conservatism and looming South West’s social democracy.

    By the way, it would have been interesting what would have become of Kwara politics, had the Second Republic not aborted, and had three-month governor, Cornelius Adebayo, completed his term on UPN mandate.

    Whatever happens however, dogma would not win the next war. But earning the trust and reverence of the Kwara masses would. That is the abiding legacy of Baba Oloye, as Saraki the Son and his political foes lunge for the soul of Kwara, in the post-Saraki era.

     

  • Obama price

    Obama price

    Say it! Recant in your own words! Let the whole world know!”

    “Say what?” his askance eyes popped out.

    “Go on!” he jeered, a glint of triumph in his mocking eyes. “When the going was tough, you were blabbing: Obama ti d’abamo o! Obama ti d’abamo o!” [Yoruba twisted pun, which could mean Obama has turned a joke or regret]. “Now that Obama has earned a second term, you must recant. Really,” he declared, rubbing it in, “you must!”

    “O, that! But it was only an election!”

    “Yes, it was. But you swore Obama would head back to his Kenyan Luo tribesmen, by the time the Republicans had finished with him!”

    “But asodun n’iyen now! [That was just sweet talk!]. I was only jiving.”

    “No, you looked earnest enough! Why don’t you admit it?”

    “Okay, okay. I goofed. You win.”

    “Better!”

    “But you must credit the American electoral system – so transparent, even when they had challenges, as those voters in Chicago who gave up after hours of trying, because the computer crashed.”

    “Yes, you’re right,” he admitted, nodding.

    “But did you see the celebrating Kenyans? Obviously, the irony was totally lost on them.”

    “What irony?”

    “You mean you couldn’t get it?” It was the other’s turn to lase his partner with a triumphant glint. “Could a Luo man, a hapless minority, ever likely to become president in Kenya? And what rebuke Obama hands the Kenyan president!”

    “Rebuke?”

    “Yeah. President Mwai Kibaki was, for donkey years, a victim of electoral heist and political repression, during the Kenyatta and Arap Moi years. Yet, he replicated these same despicable conducts after he himself became president! See how he virtually forced the Kenyan electoral chief to declare him winner, even when the poor man could not vouch for the tally he announced? Can you imagine that?”

    “I think it is an African curse.”

    “African curse? You’re dead right!” he agreed. “Even here, all our leaders falling over themselves to congratulate Obama, with their mealy mouthed, empty and annoying cant. Have they ever learnt anything from the American democracy which they jump on the bandwagon to celebrate? I mean!”

    “As for that,” the other conceded yet again, “I think our political elite are beyond redemption. But you know, Obama’s victory speech was fine. What blew me out, however, was Mitt Romney’s concession speech. It was simply majestic and brilliant, and after such acrimonious campaign! When would our politicians concede defeat with such grace and such majesty?”

    “When the hurly-burly is done, when the battle is lost and won!” he said with laughing eyes. “But the problem is the Nigerian electoral battle is never lost and won; and the hurly-burly is never done: not with the pre- and election proper rigging, and post-election bickering, not to talk of the mindless violence that comes with the electoral territory!”

    The other burst out in a guffaw. “I can feel you: professor of Macbeth and Shakespeare expert! Indeed, it is a classic case of how not to run a democracy!”

    “But you know my real heroes of the Obama victory?”

    “Who?” the other wanted to know.

    “The WASP: White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, the American landlords and majority, since the discovery of the so-called new frontiers, after which they made savage mincemeat of the native red Indians and took over their land. But now,” he added with a sardonic, sententious air, spiced with laconic wit, “the WASP have an electoral wasp to contend with. They sting hard and take no prisoners! That is what has gifted Obama the American presidency for two terms – some historical comeuppance?”

    “You know, you have a solid point there. Very solid point!”

    “Yeah, I know!” he returned with a wink. “While a slice of the WASP voted for the other side, the minorities solidly voted for their own. Now, what sort of democracy is that, where the minority could band together to lord it over the numerical majority? Is democracy turning from majority rule to conspiratorial rule? I just wonder!”

    “Don’t be so alarmist and sinister!” the other quickly cautioned. “It’s only two elections, in an electoral history of more than 200 years for God’s sake! Your generalisation is too sweeping.”

    “You’re right; and I’m sorry, if I sounded alarmist. But I just wished one day, voters here too would behave like the American WASP – be enlightened and broad-minded enough to vote for quality and conviction and not be rabble-roused by passion and primordial sentiments. It makes democracy all the more beautiful!”

    “I agree. But here, it is a different kettle of fish.”

    “Meaning: that angels live in America and baboons live here?”

    “Of course not – and don’t be silly! It is just that unlike America, even with its bias against the Black and even other minorities, there is a national consensus on how the state should be run. Here, it’s far from that – and the chaos at elections is only a symptom of that political anomie.”

    “Meaning your favourite pitch for a national conference?”

    “And why not?”

    “I don’t see why not. But the regnant political elite would rather push their luck. To them, Nigeria is a gambit to be pushed to breaking point.”

    “That is why we must not fold our arms. Nigeria is damn too important to be left solely to the politicians and power racketeers.”

    “I agree, but back to the US elections. Obama, faced with a formidable foe and dead heat poll forecasts, told his electors that in four years, he had rapidly aged working for them – and he was evidently believable, for indeed he had aged, and his hair had turned grey out of punishing work.”

    “And if I may add,” returned his partner, “Obama was not the first to be sentenced to such excruciating work. It took President Bill Clinton just 100 days in office to grow a shock of grey in his hair and develop bags under his two eyes – bags of glory he has carried till today!”

    “Now my friend,” the other added, “show me the Nigerian equivalent of Obama or Clinton: straight-from-prison Mr. Anti-corruption, Olusegun Obasanjo, who left the presidency with rosy cheeks but bequeathed his country the gaunt cheeks of his Abacha gulag days? Or even present incumbent Goodluck Jonathan, under whose unsteady hands Nigeria faces a meltdown, yet whose hand couldn’t be steadier in his pursuit of a 2015 encore …?

    “Your point, precisely?” the other snapped, almost rudely.

    “That the presidency, or any other public office for that matter, is no booty to be enjoyed but service, service and ceaseless service to be endured. That, to me is the lesson of American democracy and the triumph of Obama, who our shameless leaders crow is the pride of the Black race – which indeed he is.”

    “Again, I agree. They admire Obama so much. But can they pay the Obama price, in selfless and quality service?”

     

  • Democratic emperors?

    Democratic emperors?

    IN November 1981, Alhaji Muhammadu Shehu Kangiwa, Second Republic and first elected governor of old Sokoto State (now Sokoto and Kebbi states), fell off his horse and died while playing polo, in the 1981 edition of the Georgian Polo League.

    Did the governor, as a public figure, have the right to endanger the life of a public property, even if he had his inalienable private right to play polo?

    In October 2012, Danbaba Danfulani Suntai, governor of Taraba State, crashed in a small aircraft he was personally flying, sustaining serious injuries with all the passengers on board. Now, did Mr. Suntai have the right to risk his life as governor, even if he had a private right to indulge his passion for flying?

    These are hard questions in a republican and federal state, satisfactory answers to which would help to strengthen state institutions and deepen democracy. Where, for instance, do the personal rights of a governor end and where begin state strictures, in exchange for immense gubernatorial – or even presidential – benefits, that come with that office?

    In other words, did Governor Suntai have the right to fly himself, even with his pilot’s licence, knowing full well the avoidable dangers such an adventure constitutes to the life of the Taraba governor, which though he is, he is not a sum total of?

    And even on his hospital bed in Germany, is the governor culpable of risking the lives of hapless aides constitutionally sanctioned to be with him and even risking the collective asset of his state – the crashed aircraft, which the governor does not own – even if he knew that the flying of the plane should have been left to more professional hands?

    If indeed the governor could be legitimately charged with culpability in risking the lives of lesser mortals in his suite by his decision to fly, what logic drove the evacuation of the governor to a foreign hospital, while leaving other victims of the crash at home?

    And if the logic of flying the governor abroad is for better care, is Nigeria, a republican state, now saying that though republican tenets proclaim every citizen equal before the law, some of its own citizens are more equal than the others, as in George Orwell’s famous satire, Animal Farm?

    Even more on the basis of justice and equity: should the governor get rewarded with better care for executive recklessness, while the victims of his actions are abandoned to their fate, even if the government can counter-argue that it is giving the governor’s aides the best care it could afford?

    This annoying double standard and brazen lack of respect for the rights of the underdog must have fired the ultimatum Femi Falana, SAN, issued to the powers that be to fly the other crash victims abroad as the governor or face a legal challenge – but more on that presently.

    The Yoruba – and certainly other cultures – have a wry way of dismissing unbridled excesses that lead to foretold but needless disasters, even in the most private of affairs.

    “Omo yo tan, o npe baba re l’eranko” [The wayward brat calls his doting father a fool], goes a Yoruba proverb. But who does not know that the parents just need to cut off their munificence to bring the brat crashing and begging?

    A more detailed anecdote, made more popular by Juju music ace, Ebenezer Obey, spoke of a vain, rich man who rolled out everything, in a reckless celebration of the unknown festival of wealth and prosperity. In the heat of it all, he fell off his galloping horse, broke his neck and died!

    Thanks to Chinua Achebe and his classic Things Fall Apart, the non-Igbo are exposed to similar societal sanctions, in Igbo traditional society. One of those follies, as pointed out by the master storyteller, is the all-muscle-no-brain who felt himself powerful enough to challenge his chi (personal god) to a wrestling bout!

    All these underscore only one thing: order is the first law in heaven – and is certainly not the last on earth! So even in the primordial state, modes of behaviour guide the community. In the complex modern state, these modes are codified into the Basic Law, which not only creates public offices and institutions but also clearly states the relationship among state officials – such as a governor and his aide-de-camp, chief security officer (CSO) and chief detail: all these three, incidentally put in harm’s way by Governor Suntai’s decision to fly an aircraft, though it must be stated that the governor could not have wilfully endangered his own life, not to talk of the other three’s.

    And just as well the three victims: Dasat Iliya (aide-de-camp), Timo Dangana (CSO) and Joel Danladi (chief detail) have been flown to Germany for medical care, as with the governor, according to newspaper reports of Sunday, November 4.

    It is not clear how much this change of heart had to do with Mr. Falana’s threatened suit, though the story spoke of bowing to public opinion, with the additional spin that the governor, perhaps to salve his conscience, had insisted on their coming to Germany.

    There is nothing to suggest that spin, of the governor insisting his security aides should be brought to join him in Germany, is contrived. But it is a moot point, with the reported extent of the governor’s injury, if he is in any condition to bother about the state of his fellow victims in the crash.

    Besides, there is ominous gathering of clouds that the polity is set for the Taraba version of Vice President Goodluck Jonathan Vs Yar’adua Cabal constitutional outrage, with a Taraba cabinet lobby reportedly suggesting that though Deputy Governor Garba Umar is good enough as deputy governor in the eyes of the 1999 Constitution, he is not good enough to act as governor during the governor’s medical leave, in the eyes of this puritanical lobby – and Alhaji Umar’s personal faith appears to be the culprit! See how a reckless individual action can put the whole polity in a tailspin?

    While wishing Governor Suntai quick recovery, his odyssey should serve as timely warning to the president and Nigeria’s gubernatorial tribe that stringent conditions come with the office of president or governor – and that is strictly obeying the laws that created these high offices.

    If Governor Suntai had obeyed these laws, he would not have decided to himself fly a plane (when a full time pilot could be procured for that chore), put himself and his security aides in jeopardy and gift his state a potential but needless constitutional crisis, in a North East that already has its hands full with the murderous Boko Haram insurrection.

    The president and the governors are not democratic emperors, which is a contradiction in terms. Rather, they are creations and servants of the Constitution, without which they are nothing but ordinary citizens, as others in a democratic republic.