The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olakunle Abimbola

  • Triumph of spite?

    Triumph of spite?

    No one can accuse any electorate of spite.

    As John Milton argued in Paradise Lost, God has given Man the free will to choose; when queried on why God “allowed” Satan to steal into Man’s paradise. But a caveat: good or evil, Man reaps the consequences of his choice.

    And so, it is with every electorate – not the least the Ondo electorate that just returned Olusegun Mimiko as governor. They would greatly rejoice at their choice, if the governor delivers the el-Dorado he promised. But they would gnash their teeth and lament to no end if they found they had sold themselves a pig in a poke. It is nothing spiteful. It is just desert for wise or foolish voting.

    But if the electorate is quite blameless on the question of spite, the various gatekeepers that drove the dynamics; and helped shape the outcome of that election were not.

    In “Ondo and the limit of spite” (September 25), Ripples x-rayed the Ondo gubernatorial election as no more than a proxy battle against Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) national leader, by a coterie of embittered interest groups: failed ACN gubernatorial aspirants, the Afenifere grandees who sought with gusto a last ditch chance to unhorse their perceived nemesis and, of course, Governor Mimiko himself, who was fighting the political battle of his life.

    A sub-set of the Ondo “battle plan” was elite hostility and conspiracy, as hallmarked by political irritants like Pastor Tunde Bakare and co; and by how the media aligned themselves in the fray (“Ondo: now the crunch”, October 16).

    Also, fatal to the ACN cause was its politicisation of South West economic integration, as distinct from making it a clinical electoral issue. If it had demonstrated it was the most committed and, given its governments’ record of performance, was best placed to swing South West integration, perhaps the outcome could have been different.

    Instead, its insistence that all South West states must belong to one party (hardly a partisan crime, but costly electoral gaffe) before integration could succeed fired the brainless but devastating primordial counter-emotion that propelled Mimiko back to office, despite a hugely suspect first term performance, considering the N600 billion trove at the governor’s disposal.

    Victory, therefore, went to the most ruthless blackmailer and the most cynical manipulator of emotions. That is hardly salutary. But the good thing is that in Mimiko’s victory have come seeds of his self-destruction; just as in ACN’s defeat has come seeds of its self-redemption. To learn the right lesson, therefore, is crucial.

    That takes the discourse to the gloating that has greeted the result. The Afenifere grandees’ holy bile and Pastor Bakare’s holy spite have morphed into reckless triumphalism, leading to a lot of gibberish, hasty attributions and crazy projections, as to be expected of a camp that got a rare victory over a perceived perpetual nemesis.

    It is all so reminiscent of Leo Tolstoy’s classic, War and Peace. After the Russo-Austrian alliance inflicted a rare defeat on Napoleon Bonaparte, in a minor battle at Schon Grabern, the Austrian part of the alliance and the cocky Russians thought of galloping from victory to victory over a now subdued French Emperor Napoleon. It took the alliance’s comprehensive defeat at Austerlitz to smash that illusion!

    Still, in the midst of all these grandstanding, clear moves are there for the politically discerning.

    Goodluck Jonathan, the man that won the 2011 presidential election by good luck, has started dropping political IOUs for 2015. After Adams Oshiomhole won re-election, the Edo governor went first to Aso Rock, praising the president to high heavens, for “allowing” his re-election – was Jonathan supposed to do otherwise?

    Then after Mimiko’s win, his first port of call, with his wife Kemi in tow, was the same Aso Villa, the Jonathans’ special guests to celebrate with First Lady and birthday dame, Patience. Of course, wily Jona and his media managers ensured the photo of that celebration hugged the choicest pages of newspapers the next day!

    In due course, en route to 2015, the pair of Oshiomhole and Mimiko, no matter their respective parties’ stand, would pay back Jona’s IOU!

    As Jonathan manoeuvres to secure a future political fortune, the Afenifere grandees swoon to secure a past (and lost) glory, putting their titanic fate in the hands of Mimiko, their new champion. “To be thus is nothing,” the evil Lady Macbeth told her regicide husband in Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth, “but to be safely thus …” As Lady Macbeth goaded her husband to inevitable doom, so would the Afenifere titans goad their new charge to over-reach himself.

    But even without the titans’ prompting, Mimiko probably harbours enough hubris to go after Governors Kayode Fayemi (Ekiti) and Rauf Aregbesola (Osun), when their own elections are due in 2014 – and why not? Didn’t this twain align against him in his own re-election? In doing this, however, Mimiko would be part of such improbable alliances, which would only expose his empty ideological core, outside a survivalist instinct; and manifest seeds of his inevitable self-destruction.

    The ACN governors therefore have their jobs cut out for them. Fayemi and Aregbesola may be beginning to stamp their developmental vision on their two states, much more penetrating than what Mimiko has done in his oil-rich state in four years. But they must do much more, and present a score card that shows a clear and marked difference. Only such clear-cut quality and excellence can withstand the three-pronged conspiracy to come: from Jonathan, fighting for 2015, from Mimiko, seeking his pound of flesh and from the Afenifere rump, on a quixotic quest for lost glory.

    Ogun and Oyo states, though not due for election until 2015, must press hard their party’s record of solid performance in government – and bond with their people as they do so. And so must Lagos which, after the Tinubu and Fashola years, would be transiting into a new government.

    But beyond partisan gains and losses, the greatest casualty of the Ondo election is clearly South West integration, ironically the most crucial agenda for Yoruba welfare and development in a neither-nor federal Nigeria. For the umpteenth time, awry politicking has put the Yoruba at a crossroads, with Nigeria itself at a fearful juncture.

    In the First Republic, from the Action Group (AG) schism sprouted the Ladoke Akintola centrist forces, which slowed down the old West’s pre-independence developmental head start. Now, 52 years after independence, with the national question still potently unresolved, the Trojan horse is wily Mimiko and his LP, backed by a medley of embittered elite, many of them close to the grave, but who hate and spite have blinded to the future of their offspring.

    The ACN must therefore rouse itself. It must consolidate its governments’ development charter, fix its vexatious candidate nomination dynamics, and kick-start the economic integration process, if only as a model of what to expect. On this score, a progressively insular-looking Lagos must take the lead.

    If ACN does all these and does them well, it may yet win the big war, after losing the battle with the Ondo debacle.

  • Civil War 2012

    Civil War 2012

    I  enjoyed your historical analysis you titled “Albert agonistes”. I think Prof. Achebe has forgotten Nigerian history so soon or must have been suffering from hangover or senility or amnesia. Please post this article on the website to educate those of his like minds. – Chief Ayo, Ilesa.

    Achebe has long been writing in vain for the elusive Nobel Prize. His latest book showed he is filled with malicious rage and perhaps fractured mental balance. Thank you for dissecting his despondency and silly belly-aching. – Anonymous

    Those of you hiding Achebe for There was a Country are Yoruba who think Awo is infallible. Achebe is eminently right to relive, as catharsis, his experience during that our dark episode ; just as Soyinka wrote hisThe Man Died, and he – and we – his compatriots are the better for it! This is neither bigotry nor anti-Yoruba outburst. Awo didn’t deny that he didn’t order food blockade but he gave his reasons why he had to do that (The Nation08-10-12). My advice, however, is for Achebe to let go. There was a Country should act as the ultimate catharsis. – +2347068194122

    I read your piece and reaction to the ridiculous assertions of Pa Chinua Achebe about the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, in his new book. Your postulation and analysis are inviting, realistic and academically stimulating. I have some vital questions for Pa Achebe and his horde of blind supporters: what would have been the fate of Nigerians if the Igbo had won the war? –Dave Blankson, +2348058514944.

    Re: “Albert agonistes”. Ojukwu could not take orders from Gen. Gowon and unlike Brig. Ogundipe who was the most senior military officer then, he declared a republic within Nigeria and dragged the Igbo and Nigerians into a war they were not prepared for. In war, there are casualties and collateral damages but Ojukwu should be blamed for this and not Awolowo. Prof. Achebe will end up doing himself more harm than good in his latest “tale by candlelight”! –Kayode A, Abeokuta, +2348073821313.

    It is very unfortunate that you chose to attack the personality of Achebe, instead of intellectual analysis and constructive criticism. The issues raised: 1. Should starvation/deprivation be used as war tool, like Chief Awolowo did? 2. When you declare “no victor, no vanquished”, should the people (losers) be denied of their life savings in various banks, just like Awolowo did, giving 20 pounds to each Igbo family irrespective of the amount they had in the bank? How about the banning of used clothes – the only cheap ones the Igbo could afford at that time, etc. I hope you can direct your pen to a professional debate and not on personalities. – +2348035181866.

    I think your piece was educative and analytical with reasonable facts. With all due respect to Prof. Achebe, his views are extreme, biased and lack analytical merit. Achebe should continue to enjoy his self-exile, instead of throwing “ethnic bazookas” that would continue to create needless tension at home. – +2348023185207.

    I am worried about the approach and response of you guys in The Nation to issues that have bearing on the Yoruba. Achebe’s new book which is not even in the market yet is being dissected and you guys are taking part for a whole. How do you review a serious intellectual work from a mere excerpt meant to market the book? Please The Nation is a highly respected newspaper. Don’t destroy it – Dr. Sam Aghalino, Unilorin, +2348039435843.

    Ripples: Thank you, Dr. Aghalino, but you, an academic of all people, should know that informed controversies do not destroy newspapers. Rather, they help build newspaper brands. As for your Yoruba/The Nation bother, my answer is simple: Nigeria is a federation and the media is federalised. So, let every shade of opinion fly.

    The war came and went. But 42 years after, the atrocities and other issues of the war are still being discussed. You know why? Those things that led to the war are still with us. I may not want to discuss Achebe’s position on Awo. Even as a Biafra veteran who fought on the side of my people aged 15 in 1967, Pa Awo remains a man after my heart for his high level of discipline. But he was very wicked to the Igbos. Achebe has every right to write his memoirs anytime he feels it is right for him. – +2347052461117.

    Well done comrade. I suggest people read the books, Brothers at Warby John de St. Jorre (Faber and Faber Ltd, 1972) and Biafra Story by Frederick Forsyth (Penguin London, 1969). The other voluminous book is Crisis and Conflict in Nigeria by AHM Kirk-Greene (a documentary source book, 1966-1970, 2 Vols, Oxford University Press, London 1971). The only solution to all is the convocation of a national conference. Thank you. – Col. Gabriel A. Ajayi, +2348037258268.

    “Albert agonistes”, a breakfast well served. One wonders why some people are held in perpetual bondage because of their unforgiving spirit of their own past mistakes, and the mistake of others. ‘Let go’ should have been the rhythm Achebe is dancing to now in quarter-to-end of his life, as against creating more civil wars within a conquered nation. – Yinka Ayanleye, +2348023178156.

    Please can you let Achebe and his ilk know that Col. Adekunle Fajuyi chose to die because of Ironsi, an Igbo man; that Soyinka risked his life going inside Biafra to persuade Ojukwu to recoil from war, and suffered solitary confinement for 22 months because of Igbos; that not a single Igbo was killed in Yorubaland and my Igbo lecturer at the University of Ibadan was most at home. Such a pity an 81-year old would choose to foul the air before departing. – +2348065475303.

    The Yoruba intelligentsia got it wrong in your response to Achebe’s book. I am happy that you agreed that the Civil War was a gang-up against the Igbo but your allegation that the Igbo ganged up against Abiola remains pure fiction, even if a few of our leaders misbehaved. After all, we did not starve or reduce the Yoruba class to nothing with an equivalent amount of 20 pounds. Igbo too were part and parcel of the June 12 struggle, men like MCK Ajuluchukwu, Arthur Nwankwo, Joe Igbokwe, Udenta Udenta and others. – Arinze Igbueli, +2348058054767.

    For those of you with the rare gift of intellectual pen power, the truth which hitherto has been kept from the public is out. What indeed triggered the pogroms was the provocative Igbo youths taunting northerners over the killing of the Sardauna. Can you please delve into the archives for the copy of Drum Magazine that featured on its pages the photograph of the body of Sarduana derisively (between February and March 1966) by the Igbo. Please ferret the Drum edition out, for the sake of posterity. – John Jimoh, Ijebu-Ode, Ogun State, +2347064370351.

     

  • Ondo: now the crunch

    Ondo: now the crunch

    Lionisation and demonization come with electioneering. You lionise your own and demonise your opponent; and vice-versa. It is all a show of emotions, as contestants cosh their opponents with a quick one, and hope to sucker in the electorate with a quick vote.

    As in shooting wars – despite the Geneva Convention – all appears fair in electoral wars. And so it has been with the Ondo gubernatorial electioneering, with the election billed for October 20.

    The Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) has “rushed” incumbent Olusegun Mimiko with a charge of Judas to South West integration; and a likely scapegrace to pan-Yoruba economic integrity and prosperity, in a troubled Nigeria not all sure of its future. They have also taunted Iroko with the paucity of his Labour Party (LP) platform: it is a small pond in which the Iroko loves to play as a big fish. In due time, the ACN insists, both dried pond and dead whale would be history.

    But the Iroko has charged back waving the primordial card, claiming some indigenes of Ondo State are more indigene than others. He fingered Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, the ACN national leader, as head of “aliens” come to invade his native Ondo in political conquest; and dismissed Rotimi Akeredolu, SAN, the ACN candidate, as no more than a colonial day District Officer (DO), come to underscore that conquest. All foul is fair in electoral war!

    Why, even Lawyer/Cleric, Pastor Tunde Bakare who, were he making his argument in court would have been dismissed as a meddlesome interloper, has waded into the fray; consolidating his emerging notoriety of abusing his pulpit and insulting his congregation with brazen political yammering passing as activism, instead of preaching the gospel as his calling demands. The learned man of God is all scholarly, all articulate and appears to have mastered the devastating polemics of the political gospel. Yet, he appears to have totally lost the Christ message to the lowly and the humble: it is not what you eat that defiles you. It is rather what you say!

    Even in the media, gladiators have weighed in on both sides. That is quite legitimate, for media endorsement or non-endorsement is part of a rich and robust legacy in a democracy; so long as such interventions help the voter to make reasonable choices.

    Yet, many writers on the Ondo election are beginning to manifest the partisan conspiracy and media charlatanism that made many in 2011 glumly rationalise that grand folly: claiming to vote for Jonathan, not his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Now, one year after, there is mass lamentation and gnashing of teeth over the ill luck of Goodluck! Talk of the burden of bad choice!

    That brings the discourse to the electoral crunch of October 20. But before then, a preface of the dramatis personae.

    Two governors would qualify as among the most pivotal to the fortune of Lagos State: Alhaji Lateef Jakande (1979-1983) and Asiwaju Tinubu (1999-2007).

    In plucking the proverbial low hanging fruits and boasting rapid fire responses and achievements, Alhaji Jakande is second to none. His progressive mass education policy and rapid, almost breath-taking delivery of housing stock, as landmarked by his numerous people-named “Jakande Estates” that dot the metropolis, not to talk of his futuristic Metroline fast rail mass transit that the military killed in 1984, are the stuff of which legends are made. But the Action Governor only built on traditional governance as he knew it.

    Not so, Tinubu, who opted for governmental modernisation. That explains the exponential growth in internally generated revenue from N600 million monthly to some N23 billion now. True, Lagos had always been blessed with good administrators according to Gov. Fashola at an ICAN annual lecture. Perhaps too, Lagos had always been “rich”, compared to other states.

    But the Tinubu era fiscal modernisation policy vaulted Lagos from its “rich” potentials to an active driver of its economy, independent of a bloated and arrogant central government, despite Nigeria’s flawed federal system. The immaculate Babatunde Fashola government is ample proof of this transformation.

    Now, what have all these got to do with Ondo? Plenty! October 20 is an electoral clash between following a present routine; or upping the stakes with a new paradigm.

    Those going berserk over Mimiko’s “achievements” are resigned to the present Ondo cosmetics of churning around fat Federation Account receipts (and Ondo earns highest in the South West, as an oil producing state) with mediocre vision and pedestrian projects as Mimiko has done for the past four years; or opting for a new paradigm to vault the state, ala Lagos, to start running its show, and deliver prosperity to its longsuffering people, in the context of an integrated South West, however Nigeria navigates it shark-infested pseudo-federal waters.

    So, those who dismiss Akeredolu as just another DO from the Tinubu colonial army, would do well to vet the track record of previous DOs: Babatunde Fashola is first, and his record in Lagos is universally acclaimed. Many, in the passion of winning an argument at all cost, tend to separate his tenure from its Tinubu era nativity. But that is tantamount to separating an aircraft in full flight from its belaboured take-off. It is a most asinine and illogical distinction.

    The second DO is Kayode Fayemi in Ekiti. Despite its universally acclaimed brain power, it has taken the coming of Dr. Fayemi to start a deliberate and consistent pattern of development, contrasted to the ruinous ad hoc methods of past years.

    The third DO is Rauf Aregbesola. In less than two years in office, he has stamped his infrastructural genius on the State of Osun (as he before did in Lagos urban renewal, as Tinubu’s Works and Infrastructure commissioner); and proved that Osun need not be at the mercy of the visionless and the dim-witted.

    Ibikunle Amosun (Ogun) and Abiola Ajimobi (Oyo) have barely scaled their first anniversary for any vigorous assessment. But whatever path they choose to tread, it won’t be for lack of directions, from party mates, heading older governments in the South West.

    True, there are some quality governors, even in the PDP, which boasts no coherent post-election compass. Rivers’ Rotimi Chibuike Amaechi is one. Niger’s Mu’azu Babangida Aliyu is another. But all these are scattered across the country.

    No part of Nigeria, as at now, boasts a bevy of contiguous states under one party, which not only has a coherent and integrated plan but also a demonstrable prototype of implementing that plan. ACN, to be sure, commits avoidable hubris by preening it has the Yoruba integration franchise.

    But it can claim legitimate bragging right that having demonstrated competence in other neighbouring states, the Ondo electorate has something novel to look forward to, en route to economic integration of the South West, if it wins on October 20.

    That is the exciting prospect before Ondo voters. They should not allow anti-Tinubu bogey and allied fears to blight that prospect. It is time to think right and vote right; and in so doing, avoid sure future lamentation.

     

  • Albert agonistes

    Albert agonistes

    Caveat Emptor: the title of this piece, after John Milton’s Samson Agonistes, takes nothing from Prof. Albert Chinualumogu Achebe, without doubt Africa’s most popular novelist. It is only to get into the genre of literary-powered political forays, as the literary giant first did in his The Trouble with Nigeria (1983); and now, with his newly released Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970) memoirs, There was a Country.

    Both express Achebe’s long running agony on how Nigeria savagely did in – and, in his fervent view, continues to do in – his native Igbo people. In the professor’s cosmos of demons, as far as Nigeria’s sad narrative is concerned, the Hausa-Fulani post-colonial empire builders run neck-on-neck with their Yoruba co-conspirators, in an unconscionable bid to crush the Igbo.

    And in the hottest part of this Achebe hell reigns Obafemi Awolowo, in Achebe’s view, the Igbo Enemy No. 1. Though Chief Awolowo has been resting with his creator for some 25 years now (leaving behind his profound thinking and winning developmental ideas to rattle and dazzle a stiff-necked Nigeria), the literature professor’s enduring clinical hate for, and analytical prejudice against the Awo persona would appear undiminished, the stuff of which professorial spite is made.

    That was clear from Achebe’s The Trouble with Nigeria. It is reinforced in There was a Country; at least from the excerpts released by Penguin, the book’s publishers; and published in The Guardian of London, in which Prof. Achebe literally canonisedAwo as the philosophical king of Nigeria’s post-independence systemic and systematic crushing of the Igbo.

    Yet, wild or jaundiced, Prof. Achebe has his points, particularly in the sickening festival of mutual hurts – and hate – that is the story of Nigeria.

    To be sure, the Civil War (1967) was an unconscionable gang-up against the Igbo by the rest of Nigeria. But so was the June 12 annulment crisis (1993): a pan-Nigeria gang-up against the Yoruba. The Goodluck Jonathan opportunistic abridgement of the zoning policy; and his resultant “pan-Nigeria mandate [as Ripples put in a previous piece] of Southern Nigeria and the Middle Belt” (2011) was a pan-Nigeria gang-up against the political North. Again, as Ripples earlier put it, Nigerians at crucial junctures in their history, always band together for injustice to inflict pains on the section at the receiving end.

    While the East was at the receiving end during the Civil War, there is nothing to suggest that a section of the Igbo, Prof. Achebe’s perpetual “victims”, did not merrily join the pan-Nigeria gang-up against the Yoruba on June 12; and against the political North in 2011.

    Witness: the Uche Chukwumerije (now a senator of the Federal Republic) Goebbels show for Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, in a bid to sustain the criminal annulment of the 12 June 1993 presidential election that MKO Abiola won and for which cause he lost his life. Chukwumerije’s orchestrated threats and war drums sent the Igbo scuttling across the Niger. And didn’t the late Ikemba Nnewihimself gloat that his Abacha-era National Constitutional Conference “mandate” was superior to MKO’s presidential mandate?

    Also, witness: the scandalous over-voting in the South East, in the southern electoral conspiracy to crown Goodluck Jonathan at all cost; and give the Hausa-Fulani hegemony its comeuppance!

    In all of these, where fits in Achebe’s emotive tale of the Igbo as perpetual victim, always sinned against but never sinning, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles?

    Still on the Civil War: it was one mass slaughter to be decried, no doubt. But before that war, was the first coup (15 January 1966); where the idealism of Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu, and his fellow braves badly miscarried. Then came the counter-coup (29 July 1966).

    But in-between the two coups were the pogroms, the mass murder of the Igbo in the North, that turned the Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi government a nightmare.

    The pogroms triggered the war, which was just as well – for whichever people would fold their arms and swallow the brazen elimination of their kind, without lifting a finger? But something else also triggered the pogroms: provocative Igbo youths taunting Kaduna locals over the killing of the Sardauna, Alhaji Ahmadu Bello, and other northern leaders in the first coup.

    Of course, at independence (no thanks to British perfidy) was an uneasy North-East power cohabitation, which left the North that worked least for independence, in the power cockpit; but which nevertheless rewarded Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe’s nationalist strivings with a ceremonial presidency.

    If the January 1966 coup threatened this delicate cohabitation, the post-coup taunts sent the Hausa-Fulani hegemony into blind panic, realising their loss of power might just be the loss of everything. That drove the counter-coup, which drove the Civil War. So, whereas the Civil War was sold as a patriotic endeavour to keep Nigeria one, it was actually a northern plot to consolidate federal power, if not by the ballot box, then by the bullet.

    In Things Fall Apart and its tragedy, Achebe created the Okonkwo complex: that brash penchant to rush at a problem (consequences be damned!), even if you were not in full control. As Okonkwo rushed to his doom, many blamed Emeka Ojukwu for “rushing” headlong to war; and committing his people – as if many in his shoes, under those circumstances, would have done otherwise.

    But so did Achebe, Okonkwo’s literary creator, in a stunning case of life following art. Unlike Wole Soyinka who tried to explore a “third force” (neither Igbo secession nor northern unification farce) to checkmate the war, and paid a hefty price of 22 months in solitary detention in a Lagos gulag, Achebe jumped into the war, on his native Biafra side, as war ambassador.

    Unlike Ojukwu however, Achebe emerged from the war with an eternally poisoned psyche. That would explain his wild charges against Awo as Igbo Enemy No. 1; and even wilder charges against the Yoruba as stoutest obstacles against Igbo success in Nigeria.

    The Yoruba, with their Afenifere (live and let live) credo, have more productive things to do than mount themselves as blocks against other people’s success; even if, to be fair, there is a great deal of rivalry between the two peoples, as is to be expected in a federation.

    The Civil War and its heart-rending horror and bitter after-taste resulted from serial errors for which everyone is today a victim. Explosive and insensitive comments in There was a Country, therefore, are highfalutin distractions (with literary licence to boot!) that do no one no good.

    Even if Nigeria breaks up today, peoples of the former territory would still find ways of relating with themselves – after all, that Yugoslavia is defunct does not automatically raze Serbs, Croats and the rest from the face of the earth. So, why is Achebe, 81, using yesterday’s hurt to poison the well for tomorrow’s generation?

    The trouble with Achebe, like his Trouble with Nigeria, is his unrelieved bigotry against others, ironically served as red hot jeremiad, protesting anti-Igbo bigotry.

    That is the story of his just released bitter Civil War memoir. It is a most dangerous distraction.

  • Trapped in the past

    Trapped in the past

    Kano sure does have them.

    There was Mallam Aminu Kano (1920-1983) of blessed memory, the patron saint of the northern talakawa; and undisputed muse of the Nigerian masses.

    So radically committed to the talakawa cause was Mallam Aminu that Second Republic President, Alhaji Shehu Shagari, once said Mallam Aminu was a professional agitator; so much so that were he president, he would bear a placard against himself before being reminded he was president! As an iconoclast and champion of the liberated masses, he was well and truly sublime.

    But there was also the tragi-comic Sabo Bakin Zuwo, of blessed memory. The lexically challenged Bakin Zuwo, who had no formal education but who jokingly declared himself “student” at the “Mallam Aminu Kano Political School, Sudawa, Kano”, sentenced many to wild guffaws when, at the hustings for the 1983 general elections, he said Kano boasted many “minerals” like Coke, Fanta and Mirinda! When after the Second Republic had crumbled and the messianic pair of Muhammadu Buhari and Tunde Idiagbon were handing out jumbo jail terms to errant politicians, Bakin Zuwo released his parting bazooka.

    Accused of warehousing N3.4 million (a mighty sum in those days!) in Government House Kano, the irrepressible Bakin Zuwo gave an apocryphal quip: “Government money in government house – so what the heck!”, or something to that effect. The media screamed Banking Zuwo, a bathetic pun of his name; and the immortal Banking Zuwo was born! He got 300 years in the slammer. Bakin Zuwo was as ludicrous as Aminu Kano was sublime.

    And now, here is Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso. Now, where does Governor Kwankwaso stand in the sublime-ludicrous continuum? He certainly is no Banking Zuwo, some lexically challenged comic and butt of media jokes. But neither is he a sublime defender of the talakawa, as the immaculate and incomparable Mallam Aminu was.

    But he certainly is a doughty defender of his native Kano, with his radical offensive against the creation of more states in the South East; and a straight-shooter when the issue is the North and its political ascendancy or decline. Indeed, Governor Kwankwaso is as radical in his attack of whomever or for whatever reasons bring Kano to ridicule; as he is inconsolable in his lament over what he called the political decline of the North.

    Ike Ekweremadu, deputy president of the Senate and chairman of the Constitutional Review Committee of the National Assembly, stoked the governor’s fury. Senator Ekweremadu used the slicing of old Kano into Kano and Jigawa states; and the seven states in the North West geo-political zone to make a case for the creation of one additional state in the South East; to make it at least at par with the other four geo-political zones of South West, South-South, North Central and North East.

    That would appear fair, on the face of it. If other zones have six states each, why should the South East have just five? Why indeed should the North West have seven states, two more than the South East, and one more than the other zones?

    But an irate Governor Kwankwaso used a welter of statistics (in a lengthy interview with The Nation, Saturday September 29), to remind Senator Ekweremadu (the young man of no more than 50 years!) and his ilk that going by the 2006 census figures, the combined population of South East and South-South is 37 million, just one odd million more than 36 million that the North West alone recorded. So, how dare they question the right of Kano and allied states to have as many states as their land mass and population merited?

    He therefore not only canvassed for more states for Kano but also pushed for the merger of states with an average of two million population, reeling off the likes of Bayelsa, Ekiti, Ebonyi, Taraba, Gombe, Kwara, Abia, Cross River, and even Enugu, Ekweremadu’s state, which peaked at just over three million people!

    And with a seeming Banking Zuwo affliction as regards federalism and its tenets, he queried why these puny states should have equal representation in the Senate with his humongous Kano; forgetting that in a federation the Senate is an electoral equaliser, while the House of Representatives is based on population. The governor signed off with the lament that the insults from the likes of Ekweremadu could emanate simply because the North is now “politically down”! What hubris!

    Governor Kwankwaso’s “facts” are a classical example of card-stacking; in a structurally skewed Nigerian federation. But then, the power elite craving more states, along the present sharing paradigm, handed the governor his ammo. He bombed them so spectacularly!

    But the Kano governor would appear far less formidable, if the paradigm were to change to productive federalism from the present consumptive unitary system, posing as federalism. That way, the people of Kano would sure have the right to carve themselves into as many states as possible. But they have to pay for that luxury: not awaiting some virtual freebies from a bloated and unfocused centre!

    Everybody earning his keep would clearly teach the governor that he would need quality and not quantity population to create and run a state. That should wean him from the wastefulness and needlessness of creating states (and local governments) as political tool to corner national resources, as against mobilising scarce local resources to forge a lean and efficient administrative infrastructure to push scarce resources to gain sustainable development and prosperity.

    Governor Kwankwaso would probably fall into a swoon, were the South West to demand more states for the old Western Region, after all, numbers don’t lie! Look at the stats: old Western Region, now South West: six states; old Eastern Region, now South East and South-South: 11 states; old Northern Region, now North Central, North East and North West: 19 states.

    But the regnant political school in the South West realises that pushing for more states, under a moribund corrupt and sharing system, is akin to the Biblical wide and merry way that leads to perdition. Hence, their angling for regional federalism to drive their own business.

    The Igbo elite sure have a right to have their due under the present system. If that means creating one more state for them, so be it. But they must realise their salvation is not in a sinking centre, but in their own hands.

    Governor Kwankwaso is something of a paradox. From his interview with The Nation, he boasts a laudable and futuristic education policy. Yet he himself came off as one whose mind is irredeemably chained to the past, the way he laments the current “weakness” of the North; and bludgeoned the South East for making a reasonable demand.

    The governor’s latest radical campaigns on onshore-offshore dichotomy and opposition to the South East demand for an additional state look steeped in the past. It has little to contribute to a restructured Nigeria, where everybody earns his keep.

  • Ondo and the limit of spite

    Ondo and the limit of spite

    The build-up to the October 20 gubernatorial election in Ondo State is sinking into a hierarchy of spite. At each level of that hierarchy is a concert of hate.

    It tragically limits the right of the Ondo electorate to be pitched and be treated to life-changing electoral menu. It also tragically limits the significance of that election, for a Yoruba nation resolved to finding its bearing in a Nigeria on quicksand, no thanks to the country’s abiding violent contradictions.

    At a level on the spiteful hierarchy are hurting Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) gubernatorial hopefuls, who lost the party’s governorship ticket, and left the party in protest. As is the rule with estranged politicians and universally with neophytes to justify new company, demonising former company, as a rule of thumb, is alive and well.

    At another level are the Afenifere grandees who have thrown their hat into the ring, for a high-octane proxy war. Surely, as a native of Ondo State, Pa Reuben Fasonranti, the Afenifere leader whose controversial election fissured the once formidable voice of the political progressives in Yorubaland, has a stake in the Ondo election. So does Chief Olu Falae, another eminent Ondo elder. And so does, for that matter, Pa Ayo Adebanjo, the most combative and straight-shooting of the Afenifere titans who seem to chafe at the thought of a callow generation staking a claim to the Yoruba progressive franchise.

    To be fair, Pa Adebanjo, in his published reaction to Dr. Jide Oluwajuyitan’s piece, “Sons and fathers” (“Re: Sons and fathers”, The Nation, September 20), stated that he attended Governor Segun Mimiko’s flag-off campaign only because he was invited. But it needs little perceptiveness to realise the Afenifere titans’ gripping interest in the Ondo poll transcends Governor Mimiko’s civility.

    At the apex of the Ondo hierarchy of spite sits Governor Olusegun Mimiko, campaigning hard for an encore. With the governor’s campaign’s constant stream of hate and scare-mongering, about some alleged “foreigners” come to cart away the Ondo gubernatorial loot, Dr. Mimiko about exemplifies the cynical quip of patriotism being the last bastion of the scoundrel. When the turf is suspect patriotism, then raw xenophobia becomes a scalding, emotive tool.

    All levels on the spiteful hierarchy are, therefore, united-in-grudge against the ACN and its “leadership” – a euphemism for Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, the party’s national leader.

    The estranged ACN former aspirants accuse him of “imposition”: of a rival in Rotimi Akeredolu, SAN, the ACN Ondo gubernatorial candidate.

    The Afenifere grandees fret at Tinubu’s alleged political conquest of the South West, a region the old lieutenants of Awo maintain they have a spiritual watching brief, just to ascertain its progressive political health. After the dismal collapse of Project OGD, during which Otunba Gbenga Daniel, former governor of Ogun State and favourite of the Afenifere elders, as a counterpoise to the Tinubu perceived threat, sensationally self-destroyed, scrambling to the Ondo war front for the last stand-off makes logical sense.

    That sweetly dovetails into Mimiko’s rather plebeian pitch to the Ondo electorate to beware of a certain District Officer (DO) and his alleged overlord from Lagos. The rallying cry: the invading Lagos army must be stopped at all cost. Repeat: at all cost! Sweet emotion! But the Ondo election should be made of sterner stuff, given the sophisticated Ondo electorate.

    Still, on the ACN. There is a lot to be said for urgently pushing more equal opportunity in the party’s consensus candidate selection system. That would save it from perennial charges of “imposition”; and the consequent demonization of its leaders.

    It is also a moot point if the ACN’s apparent get-Mimiko-out-at-all-cost strategy is wise in the short run. As Ripples has always argued, a Labour Party, LP’s Mimiko appears, on its face value, ideologically closer to ACN than the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), with its barren mainstream philosophy of structural underdevelopment. Ideological affinity, in the absence of party unanimity, would appear best suited for the South West, trying in the integration project, to preserve its people’s future by making the best of the Nigerian debacle.

    Even then, this ideological affinity argument is terribly vitiated by some notorious facts about LP and Dr. Mimiko. For one, LP has morphed from its perceived rooting in social democrats (like Britain’s Labour Party) to an empty, ideologically vacuous electoral platform open to about anyone with electoral stress and enough cash.

    For another, Dr. Mimiko the politician has proved a consummate, sly, shifty but unfazed player in free-wheeling, ideologically neuter politicking, where old enemies become friends and old friends, enemies; so long as the end justifies the meanness (apologies to Prof. Wole Soyinka).

    Witness: the anti-Labour posture of a Labour governor, during the January anti-fuel subsidy removal protests, which ensured the protests were most ineffective in Ondo State, in the whole of the South West. But surely, there must be more to elections and electioneering, particularly in a national season of anomie, than equal opportunity racketeering to coral power at all costs?

    Besides, Mimiko logs a frightful track record of serial betrayal of political colleagues (witness the late Adebayo Adefarati in Alliance for Democracy, AD and Olusegun Agagu, in PDP). The ACN accuses him of similar breach of faith in the current dispensation. That clearly makes trust and mutual confidence building an uphill, if not an impossible, task.

    So, with both party (LP) and candidate lacking in brand integrity, the ACN-Mimiko match-up was always a probability. The crunch certainly is here!

    Still, the October 20 election is not about Mimiko per se (though as sitting governor he would strive to retain his seat, in a warped political milieu where losing an election is often tantamount to a Roman emperor vanquished in a power tussle, and falling on his sword) or about Tinubu and his party (though the ACN appears to offer a sharp alternative, in the context of a South West that needs regional integration to further assert itself in the troubled Nigerian federation).

    It is rather about the democratic right of the Ondo electorate to a better deal. Which of the contending parties is likely to guarantee that? The electorate would decide that. But how can they make a sound decision when the whole place is cluttered with xenophobia, spite and allied din?

    The election is also about the strategic place of Ondo in the South West economic integration agenda. Which of the contending parties is best placed to give Ondo its pride of place in this agenda of regional economic rebirth and sustainable development? These are the pertinent questions.

    Governor Mimiko would do well to review his service in the past four years and state his future agenda, instead of his present barren tactics of fear-mongering and mind-poisoning. His opponents too should clearly state and vigorously sell their programmes.

    The October 20 election is far too important to be limited by hate and spite.

  • Enter Femi Falana, SAM II

    Enter Femi Falana, SAM II

    Falana ran tie, t’ara eni l’anran! (Falana, mind your own business!)
    On 10 September 2001, Gani Fawehinmi (1938-2009), Nigeria’s first Senior Advocate of the Masses (SAM 1) became SAN; and cured the Nigerian legal profession of its open sore: of shutting Gani out of a well-deserved silk – at least in the eye of the hoi polloi.
    When the great and universal Gani eventually became SAN, it was clear the SAN institution needed Gani more than Gani needed that institution – for how could that body claim to be real when the greatest socially-conscious attorney of this generation, and perhaps for generations to come, was kept out of its ranks?
    As it was with Gani, so was it, on 12 September 2012, with Femi Falana, Nigeria’s second Senior Advocate of the Masses (SAM 2), when he took the silk.  Like Gani before him, the institution of SAN needed Mr. Falana more than Mr. Falana needed it.
    True, Mr. Falana was not formally crowned SAM by scandalised University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) students, who felt Gani deserved the silk, for his stellar contributions to social justice, law as a tool for development, human rights and more.  But the Gani-Falana parallels, en route a thorny road to SANship, is remarkable.
    Like Gani, Falana is a people’s lawyer.  Like Gani, Falana is a legal iconoclast, especially when he jousts with the lawless, over-pampered ruling class, who like to play god with the lives of the rest of us.
    Like Gani, Falana is a courtroom dramatist: and the newspapers, ever on the side of the perceived underdog, respond equally dramatically with “Gani/Falana wins round one …”, after clinching an opening injunction, even if the case is far from final determination.
    And like Gani, Falana, though a fire-belching courtroom revolutionary, is at heart a legal reformist who does the establishment a load of good by constantly reminding it of its dirty and stinking underbelly; and asking it to clean up or risk being cleaned out.
    Of course, a bullying panicky ruling class misconstrues this explosive activism as rebellion; misunderstands this fervent peaceful reformation, through the instrumentality of the law, as revolution through the back door.  As a result, it reaches for the sledgehammer by denying such “radicals” their due.
    That logically explains Femi Falana’s belated admission into the SAN institution, like Gani before him, until the whole thing bordered on the ridiculous.  Until September 12 when Mr. Falana got his due, 11 years after Gani’s belated elevation and three years, almost to the date, after his glorious passage (Gani died on 5 September 2009), the conclave of SANs without Mr. Falana looked odd.
    But when comes SAM 3, after Gani and Falana, the next brilliant legal mind to be denied his or her professional due, because of legal activism or radicalism?  That, to be sure, is a humbling question for a society that sorely needs an equal opportunity reward system to snap out of the current paralysing mediocrity and pervasive corruption.
    Yet, neither Gani nor Falana could lay claim as the purest legal mind of their respective generations, which somewhat dovetailed.  That honour without doubt belonged to the late Chief Fredrick Rotimi Alade (FRA) Williams, QC [Queen’s Counsel] and Nigeria’s first SAN.  In every respect, the great FRA was a giant in law as he was in build.  Indeed, FRA was worth every pound of law his massive frame could boast.  He was not called “weight of evidence” by gawking peers for nothing!
    Indeed, FRA was the classical lawyer, a veritable approximation of the lawyer’s creed: that everyone is entitled to legal defence.  So, in his long and remarkable career, his fixed ideology was to render legal services and apply his prodigious forensic intellect to whoever could afford them, was apolitical in taking briefs and, if law were not some codified morality, many would even wager good, old FRA of blessed memory was amoral: just an unfazed servant of the law, when it got to legal brass tacks.
    Indeed, a cynic once growled FRA would take a brief from our Lord Jesus Christ, would avail the devil himself the same privilege, and promptly plead the lawyer’s creed of legal representation to all!  Strictly in law, he was right.  But in the unlearned eye of the hoi polloi, he was fatally flawed.
    But that took nothing from the sheer depth of his learning, the sheer breath of his brilliance, his sweeping contribution to legal scholarship and the sheer formidability of his advocacy skills, so much so that he was a near demigod in the courtroom, revered by friends, feared by foes and honoured by judges, the closest, if any, to the approximation of a living legal institution.
    Indeed, whoever growled over FRA’s latter-day legal progression, and his apolitical professional bent would do well to study the politics of the First Republic, and capture how involved he was in the Action Group’s Awolowo-Akintola blowout.  Did that scalding experience sober FRA and made him swear to ever after put politics at arm’s length?
    Still, these ratiocinations would only resonate with the legal patricians.  To the hurting plebs, victims of military impunity and the dictators-wannabe of the intervening democratic republics, including the current Fourth Republic, all these must be empty air to justify the late FRA’s perceived social insensitivity in his law practice.
    It is in the streets therefore that the likes of Gani and Falana are kings.  No one can take anything away from Gani’s profound scholarship, prodigious learning and Spartan character.  The same can be said of Mr. Falana.
    Indeed, Mr Falana cut his teeth in the radical advocacy tradition of the Alao Aka-Basorun (in whose chambers he started legal practice) school.  So, far he has stayed true to that narrow and risky path.
    Besides, the Falanas of the Nigerian legal cosmos reacted splendidly to the challenge of military rule with all its abuses; and made the piquant point that even the military could not claim to operate above the laws of the land which, by the way created the military establishment itself, ever before some smart alecs in Khaki dreamed the profitable business of coups for personal fortune but collective ruin.
    That is the proud legacy of Mr. Falana.  That is the crux of his “crime” against the establishment.  That is the simple explanation of his scandalously belated admission into the apex professional conclave of lawyers in the country, which he thoroughly deserved.  Though the battle was long, he has won his race – and gloriously too!
    Falana ran tie, t’ara eni lanran!  But this Falana, against conventional wisdom, has made it his professional business not to mind his own business, but that of the weak and the underprivileged that needed to be protected by law – and many times, gratis!
    That is the abiding sweetness of the legacy of Femi Falana, SAN, SAM.  May your tribe never shrink, however loud the establishment roars!

  • What do the Yoruba want?

    A grand family meeting, like theAugust 30 Yoruba Assembly held in Ibadan, Oyo State, would as of necessity come with many viewpoints. It is not unlike the fall of the proverbial mighty elephant, at which knives of all shapes make a proud showing.

    A lobby at the one-day confab complained of Yoruba “marginalisation” in federal appointments. That is true; and the complaint is valid. If the Yoruba are integral part of the Nigerian federation – which they are – it is their moral and legal right to share from the federation’s benefits. If their share declines, vis-a-vis other partners’ in the federation, they naturally must complain for the imbalance to be righted.

    Still, let it not be forgotten that “marginalisation” – as valid as it is – started as a survivalist cry from the Yoruba mainstreamers, who lost out in the electoral sweepstakes of April 2011. The mainstreamers’ political view is that development in the old Western Region must start with as many federal appointments as the region could possibly coral. That is the plain sharing mentality, which has put everyone in the ditch; and which the Ibadan assembly was trying to correct.

    The futility of such appointment-led development thesis is shown in the Obasanjo example. Olusegun Obasanjo, a Yoruba, was two-term elected president, the ultimate position which decides who gets what. Still, his tenure was a disaster for Yorubaland, so much so that at the height of his presidency, he blithely boasted that Lagos – the crown jewel of the region, former federal capital and still the commercial capital of the country – was a jungle. And he probably was proud to leave it so!

    The mainstreamers’ federal-pork-is-paramount-to-development theory is contrary to the progressives’ view that the South West must be stand on its own, independent of any federal pork. Indeed, since the Awolowo-Akintola tango of the First Republic, these two starkly contrasting political viewpoints have driven the dynamics of politics in the region.
    In any case, there is need for conceptual clarity. Without prejudice to the legal and social rights of the Yoruba in Nigeria as presently constituted, why would they complain that a system is doomed (that is the sum total of the Ibadan meeting: that the present Nigerian system is unsustainable) and yet insist they are marginalised under the same crumbling system? Is that not a contradiction in terms?

    Away from the mainstreamers now, even Adeniyi Akintola, SAN, a legal luminary of no mean calibre and a man with genuine generosity of spirit, proudly announced himself as a Yoruba and Ibadan “irredentist”. “Irredenta”, the word from which “irredentist” emerges, means victims of ethnic imperialism.

    In the context of restructuring therefore, the Yoruba of Kwara and Kogi states, clamouring for realignment with their kith and kin in the South West, are rightly victims of the irredenta of the current Nigerian structure, which groups them as part of the “North”, when really they ought to be part of the South West. That much was said by the area’s representatives at the Ibadan summit.

    But in the context of Nigeria, what does Yoruba or Ibadan irredentism mean? A Yoruba poised to grab more than its due? Or within the South West, in a restructured Nigeria, an Ibadan primed to resume its old imperialism; that climaxed in the disastrous Yoruba civil war, the Kiriji War (1877-1893)?

    Akintola, a bosom friend of decades but unfazed Ibadan nationalist nevertheless, could not have meant what he said in these two imperial senses. Neither could the Yoruba conferees. But there is always a chance of misrepresentation – and wilfully so – by anti-restructuring elements, eager to muddy the waters and scuttle the campaign.
    But Gen. Alani Akinrinade, convener of the Assembly, was very clear at his pre-summit media luncheon comment: that the Yoruba had always been federalists in their political evolution; and would want such productive federalism replicated on the Nigerian front, so that different sections of the country could develop at their own paces and, by so doing, strengthen the Nigerian union, and save it from perennial but life-threatening crises. On “marginalisation”, he said it would not have mattered who held what, if the country was well run.

    Which leads to the next logical question: what do the Yoruba want? From the Ibadan summit’s communiqué, it would appear what any right-thinking Nigerian would want, after 98 years of false steps, since the Lugard amalgamation of 1914. A nasty Civil War (1967-1970), ruinous military rule, the 12 June 1993 presidential election annulment crisis and 13 years of shambling along under civil rule (with the Boko Haram insurrection as the latest nation-threatening crisis) only underscore the feeling that something fundamental is wrong with the country.

    So, the call for a restructured Nigeria is sound. The present Nigerian structure, with a rich but idle centre, is not only a recipe for mindless corruption, but also a charter for underdevelopment, borne out of perpetual crises. With each subsequent occupier trying to coral the common wealth for its own ethnic champions (the latest being Goodluck Jonathan’s Ijaw presidency, handing former militants suspect marine and oil pipeline contracts), it is as if every section is grabbing what it could from a sinking Nigerian ship. Now, if the idea is not for the ship to sink without trace, then restructuring towards a new beginning makes eminent sense: having a federal government; with much stronger six regional governments, as development centres.

    With a skewed structure settled, there is the imperative of whittling down the cost of governance, especially at the centre, which under the proposed new dispensation, would support regional economic activities, after taking charge of central agencies like defence, external affairs, currency and customs.

    To cut down cost of governance, the Yoruba conference suggested adopting Westminster system of choosing ministers from elected parliamentarians in the House of Representatives. If this happens, what role will the Senate, a key institution of electoral balancing in a federation, play? These are areas of serious debate en route to arriving at a mutually acceptable new constitution.

    Perhaps the most disturbing of the Ibadan Yoruba Assembly’s communiqué is the suggestion that vigilantes should hold a pride of place in the region’s security system. This suggests impatience with the present debate over the Nigeria Police.
    Still, the South West must be careful on this sole suggestion. Vigilantes are no substitute to a decentralised police. The time for state police has come. The South West political elite and civil rights groups should press on full throttle for its actualisation. On the other hand, those who stone-wall state police, even with the glaring challenges of insecurity, must know that they risk the putative reign of ultra-nationalist militias. That is the road to Yugoslavia. It is unnecessary.

    The Yoruba have taken a stand on Nigeria’s future. Let the other zones join in the debate. To be sure, it promises a furious jaw-jaw. But it is certainly better than a bloody war-war.
    This serious talk is imperative, if Nigeria must be saved.