The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • Lateef Jakande writes back

    Lateef Jakande writes back

    By Olatunji Dare

     

     

    The following piece from Lateef Jakande, the first civilian governor of Lagos State who died last week, aged 91, was published in The Comet (since defunct) on November 30, 1999.  It was his rejoinder to my November 16, 1999, column for the paper, titled “Yesterday’s Men.”

    I am offering it unedited, as a tribute to the great man’s memory and accomplishments, and as a model of his clarity of exposition and civil discourse. 

    His legend truly lives on.  

    ***

    I have always had high regards for the writings of Dr Olatunji Dare on any subject, but what he wrote about me in his column on Tuesday, November 16, 1999, in The Comet shocked me into unspeakable disappointment.

    Not only were many of his facts wrong, his conclusions were patently absurd and sounded very much like political propaganda.

    This is what he wrote:

    “Finally, I am thinking of Lateef Jakande, Abacha’s minister of ministers, a towering figure in Nigerian journalism and one of the original leading light of NADECO.  If Jakande agreed to serve under Abacha, it could only be because he was convinced of Abacha’s honesty of purpose.  And if Abacha could appoint the high-achieving, serious-minded Jakande his senior minister, it must be because Abacha intended to move Nigeria forward.

    “All who harboured such thoughts were cruelly deluded, including Jakande himself.  He soon abandoned June 12 and made common cause with the very forces he had fought courageously in a distinguished public career spanning three decades.  In his days as governor of Lagos State, his residence was as accessible as a schoolyard.  As Abacha’s minister, he was forced to turn it into a fortress.

    “The press that had been his passport to fame was being systematically emasculated, but he uttered not a word in its defence.  He became the butt of taunts and jeers of the very people who once swore by his name.  His influence dimmed, then vanished altogether.  To borrow a phrase employed by the late Remi Fani-Kayode in another context, Jakande came across as a man ‘compelled to witness the funeral of his own reputation.’

    “Ordinarily such a funeral might even contain some redeeming grace.  As regards Jakande’s reputation, however, the pallbearers acknowledged no redeeming value.

    “Babagana Kingibe, Walter Ofonagoro and Lateef Jakande are by no means the only well-known Nigerians who enthusiastically pressed their talents and skills and reputations into a scheme that brutalized and stultified their compatriots and drove their country to the edge of ruin.  What is it that impels otherwise decent and sensible men – and women — to such self-destructive conduct?”

    First, let me state very clearly that I have never been a member of NADECO.  From its very inception, I had questioned its raison d’être and disagreed with its methods of approach.

    Second, Dr Dare said that I “abandoned June 12.”  This is a blatant falsehood.  I never at any time, in private or in public, in writing or in speech, abandoned June 12.

    I presume that that by June 12, Dr Dare meant the Presidential Election of June 12, 1993, which WE won decisively and convincingly.  It was the first time in the annals of this country that the progressives won a Presidential Election, and this was done by coming together in one political party instead of splitting votes        as we had done in past elections.  No one worked harder for that victory than I did.  And I am very proud of that victory and my humble contribution to it.

    Third, Dr Dare said I “made common cause with the very forces I had fought courageously.” This is not true.  I made no common cause with any such forces anywhere at anytime.

    Fourth, Dr Dare said that “as Abacha’s minister, I was forced to turn my residence into a fortress.  Where did Dr Dare get that story from?  There was no time when I turned my Ilupeju residence into a fortress.  In the 14 months I served in the Federal Government, my residence was “as accessible as a schoolyard,” as it had always been and as it still is today.

    Fifth, Mr Dare said I “uttered not a word when the press was being systematically emasculated.”  The truth, of course, is that the press was not emasculated during the 14 months I served in the Federal Government.  I regard conflict between Government and the Press as perfectly normal and, indeed, very necessary for the health of the nation.  I would not bother over such conflicts.  But if there was any emasculation of the press, it did not occur when I was in government.

    Sixth, Dr Dare said I became the “butt of taunts and jeers of the very people who once swore by my name.”  This too is an exaggeration.  I was never jeered at any time or in any place during my 14 months service.          But I did lose some friends and supporters because I rejected the call of a group of people who held a conference in Ibadan in August 1994 and resolved that all Yoruba Ministers, Constitutional Conference delegates and holders of other public offices should resign and “come home.”

    No reason was given for this demand.  It was a totally reckless, unwarranted and thoughtless call.  I am quite happy that nobody heeded it – not even one councilor or one Conference delegate.

    Can anyone imagine what could have happened to this country if we had allowed ourselves to be frightened into resigning our offices?  It would have been seen as a declaration of war by the Yoruba against the Federal Government in particular and other Nigerians in general.  The consequences could not have been palatable to anyone.

    If I lost my popularity because of this principled and courageous stand, I regard it as part of the price a good leader must be prepared to pay for his deep-seated conviction and for public good.  In this respect, I am in good and honourable company.  World History is replete with several inspiring and noble precedents of this experience in the footsteps of the Great Masters. And their reputations have survived their experiences.

    Dr Dare said that my “influence dimmed, and then vanished altogether.”  That is his own personal assessment to which he is fully entitled.  But he went too far when he announced “the funeral of my reputation.”

    Mr Dare was carried away by the flowery language of my late friend, Babs Remi Fani-Kayode.  But his quotation of Fani-Kayode is not apt in the present case.  In all humility, my reputation is not dead at all.               It can never die.

    My reputation is built on the solid rock of imperishable landmarks which were achieved during my tenure of office as Governor of Lagos State and as a Federal Minister of Works and Housing, and also my contributions to the development of Nigerian journalism and the World Press Institute. These landmarks are still there and will, by the grace of God, continue to be there forever.

    I am eternally grateful to my Creator that He used me in these periods to bring joy, relief, even prosperity, to millions of my fellow men through the abolition of the shift system in education, the provision of free education at all levels with free books, the creation of Lagos State University, the establishment of 13 low-cost housing estates, the construction of Lekki Express Road, Osborne Road Estate, the free supply of drugs and medical treatment, the establishment of the Nigerian Institute of Journalism, the Nigerian Guild of Editors, the Nigerian Press Organization, the organization of a World Press Freedom Committee, being the first and only African President of the International Press Institute, the presidency of the Newspapers Proprietors Association of Nigeria,, the establishment of Lagos Television, the launching of an unprecedented Housing Programme with 38, 000 houses under construction in 14 months, the Lagos metroline project, the discovery of Banana Island, the building of the NIgerian Tribune, plus efficient, selfless and uncorrupted administration in each sphere of activity, to mention only  few.

    All these in a lifetime.

    To Almighty Allah belongs all the Glory.

     

  • Tony Momoh: a media titan departs

    Tony Momoh: a media titan departs

    By Olatunji Dare

     

    With the death last week of Anthony McNonoh Momoh (simply Tony Momoh), the community of Nigerian journalists and the national policy dialogue audience were plunged into mourning again barely a month after the death of the celebrated columnist, Gbolabo Ogunsanwo, which occurred some six weeks after the passing of Bisi Lawrence, one of the most accomplished Nigerian journalists of all time.  In the first week of the new year, another journalist of note, Eddie Aderinokun, died.

    The generation of journalists we fondly call “veterans” is slowly withering away.

    Momoh would have been 82 on April 27.

    Trained originally as an elementary school teacher, he left his native Auchi for Lagos and entered journalism as a sub-editor at the Daily Times.  That humble beginning led to one of the most eventful careers in Nigerian journalism and public life.  His was a household name,

    That career culminated in his appointment, based on a competitive interview, as editor of the paper, the crown jewel of the Times Group, and the most influential newspaper in Nigeria.

    No surprise there.  Over the years, he had served in one capacity or another in virtually every department of the organization. On the way up, he completed at the University of Lagos the journalism degree programme he had begun at the University of Nigeria Nsukka, but which the civil war had interrupted.  He went on to take a law degree, also from the University of Lagos, and qualified as a barrister and solicitor of the Supreme Court.

    Momoh was a scion of the Auchi Royal Court, but he never flaunted that distinction.  He affected no royal airs. He was not the type to flaunt anything – be it his enviable job, his prodigious learning, or his connections.  He comported himself with quiet dignity, which only served to enhance his dignity and presence.

    Momoh’s editorship coincided with a turning point in Nigerian politics – the preparation for the                 return to party politics and constitutional government after 13 unbroken years of military rule.  It was an exciting time to be the editor of Nigeria’s most influential newspaper, and as he soon found out, a treacherous time as well.  On that, more, shortly.

    At Kakawa Street, the storied home of the Daily Times in its glory days before it relocated uptown to a more commodious setting, Momoh earned a reputation for fairness, probity and forthrightness, and for leading by example.  He applied himself to the task at hand with intensity. You rarely found him on the owambe circuit.  Not for him the flash and the dash that went with being editor of the nation’s most prestigious newspaper.

    He was a much sought-after presenter or symposiast wherever issues relating to journalism were being discussed in Nigeria or abroad. His written presentations, based on a firm grasp of theory and practice, were lucid and incisive; his oral delivery was forceful, and he sometimes came across as combative.  It was nothing personal; it was all about journalism, which he cared for passionately.

    And it is in journalism rather than law that Momoh’s fame, his legacy, will endure.  He would           have made a theatrical but formidable figure in the courts, delivering his submissions with verve and vigour. But he never went into full legal practice. He operated from his chambers as a legal consultant.

    He earned fame through the many books, pamphlets and papers on journalism ethics, media law, media history, press freedom, media-government relations, media’s role in national development, and many other related subjects.

    In his “Point of Order” column for the Vanguard Newspapers collected in three volumes, he bore faithful witness to the major events of the era and, through incisive analysis, guided the reader in interpreting, and situating them.

    It was also as a journalist that he made legal history in the celebrated case of Momoh v The Senate of the National Assembly.

    “Grapevine,” a gossip column in the Daily Times, reported that members of the National Assembly, senators in particular, were parlaying their exalted office into business solicitations, whereupon the Senate summoned the paper’s editor, to appear before it to disclose the source of the information contained in the publication.

    Momoh declined, claiming a constitutional right to protect his sources, especially given the fact that the Constitution vests the news media with the duty of upholding the responsibility and accountability of the government to the public.

    The Lagos High Court found for him, holding that reporters enjoyed a qualified privilege to protest their sources.

    There was jubilation in the media. The courts, per Tony Momoh, had struck a significant blow for press freedom in general, and for investigative reporting in particular.  The victory was short-lived, however. The Court of Appeal reversed, drawing on American jurisprudence on the subject, but without underscoring the heavily circumscribed conditions under which the court can ask reporters to disclose their sources.

    Momoh had written himself into legal literature. That was not all.  Before the Court of Appeal, he had deployed his legal training to make a robust case as plaintiff.  It was a fine outing for the lawyer/journalist.

    Several years later, as the Brits would say, they kicked Momoh upstairs to serve as General Manager for the Group’s titles.

    It was from that station that military president Ibrahim Babagida appointed him Minister of Information and Culture, at a time the government was threshing to find a formula to revive the economy.  The vaunted Structural Adjustment Programme generated only a great deal of heat, and hardly any light.

    It was Momoh’s remit not only to explain government policy, but to sell it to the public.  It was a tough sell.   The writer and pamphleteer in Momoh went about the task writing epistles to his compatriots on one aspect of public policy after another.  The novelty soon wore thin, without winning the government more friends or sympathisers.

    Much more significant was his convening, early in his tenure, a conference at the Administrative College of Nigeria in Topo, Badagry, to fashion a National Communication Policy for Nigeria. No conference of that compass had been convened before, and none has been held since.  It remains an abandoned project. The published proceedings and recommendations will doubtless constitute the point of departure for revisiting the subject.

    Two incidents in Momoh’s life provide a window into his character and worldview.

    In the first, he was confronted at Ishaga, in Surulere, Lagos, by a carjacker training a sub-machine machine gun at his head and barking at him to get out of his official car.  He would have lost nothing by surrendering the vehicle.  But instead of doing that, Momoh lunged at the gunman.  They mixed it. Momoh gained the upper hand and dispossessed the hoodlum of the weapon.  The hoodlum fled as an irate crowd closed in on the scene.

    In the second, armed robbers broke into his book-strewn residence in the dead of night and demanded money in foreign currencies. They threatened his wife and even roughed up his son.  They got into a fight, during which they found that Momoh was no softie.  In the end, they fled without getting the foreign currency they were demanding, and without taking anything from the house.

    “I am not an inordinate man of valour, but I will not stand oppression, he wrote of both incidents decades later.  “You cannot hold a gun to my head and force me to do what my spirit frowns at.”

    The key phrase here is “what my spirit frowns at.”  Momoh was a person of deep spirituality.   He was guided by the Spirit, and lived his life according to the teachings of the Grail Message.

    In the five decades he spent in active journalism as trainer, editor and administrator, and in public life as a Minister of the Federal Republic and statesman mediating the political tensions roiling Nigeria,  not a whiff of scandal swirled around him.

    That is achievement enough.

    And in this clime, there is no greater legacy.

     

     

  • Like winning the lottery

    Like winning the lottery

    Olatunji Dare

     

    Whoever said that old age sucks was expressing a truism that every person who has grossed the proverbial three score and ten years not only knows but feels.

    But the coronavirus pandemic has upended even this truism, turning an actuarial handicap into a blessing of sorts, by propelled persons who belong in that demographic right next to the ranks of those on the priority list for what may well be the most precious gift in these dark and darkening days: the scarce anti-Covid vaccine.

    The rollout of the vaccine has been as desultory as its formulation and manufacture were hope-inducing. The quantity reaching the public fell far short of what had been advertised, trust Donald Trump.

    From early morning till late at night in mid-winter, long lines of frazzled citizens spilled from the streets and snaked round the passages and corridors on to the halls of designated vaccine centres.

    Most went home disappointed and returned the next day; same outcome. There simply wasn’t enough vaccine to go round.

    And not just in the United States, where Covid-19 deaths had averaged more than 1000 a day for weeks on end. In post-Brexit UK, and in Europe, the rollout has been just a problematic, sparking rows among governments and manufacturers and among the manufacturers themselves, and fueling what has been called vaccine nationalism.

    The dangerously vacuous but highly conceited governor of Kogi State, Yahaya Bello, will dismiss this narrative as “political Covid.”

    The late Western Nigeria premier, Chief SL Akintola, had an answer for people of Bello’s ilk.

    “When adversity comes to the forest,” that unrivalled master of Yoruba, would say in that evocative language, “even the pawpaw plant will demand to be counted as a stalwart.”

    This is the context in which Yahaya Bello, an accidental governor and Covid denialist with scarcely an exceptional entry in his résumé, not only seeks to become Nigeria’s next president but actually sets in motion the machinery for pursuing that quest with public funds.

    It is also, sadly, the context in which major political actors are importuning former president Goodluck Jonathan, a byword for cluelessness, to come claim the second term he was denied six years ago when the APC machine and its presidential candidate, Muhammadu Buhari, sandbagged him at the polls.

    That is a measure of the depth to which Nigeria has sunk. Under military president Ibrahim Babangida, we had a national Army of “anything goes.” Now, some 25 year later, ours seems to have become a country of “anything goes.”

    But I digress.

    Amidst all the snafus that have marked vaccine production, distribution and administration, the infernal virus has been spawning ever more durable variants that surface in the farthest corners of the world almost as soon as they are identified in one location, rendering the global war against Covid more and more fraught.

    You have been accorded a privileged place in the ranks of million yearning for the vaccine all right. But given all the attendant discontinuities, would your turn ever come? How would you know anyway, since those seeking answers to those questions have gotten nowhere?

    Meanwhile, new cases are surging everywhere.

    Then the phone rings. It is the family doctor’s nurse, asking whether you would like to take the vaccine. It was like being told that you had won the lottery.

    Of course, I replied eagerly.

    “When?”

    “How about yesterday?” I asked jocosely.

    “No, but we can do tomorrow, 3 pm at the Methodist Hospital Atrium,” she said. I reckoned that, with some luck, I would be back home by 10 pm.

    The parking lot was fuller than usual, but there was no other sign a mass vaccination event was in progress. No overflow crowd; no crowded passages or hallways. You were shepherded, masked like everyone else, along a marked, socially distanced path, to four stations.

    At the first, they took your body temperature. At the second, you were registered for the vaccine on showing a government-issued identification card. At the third, they explained the name and nature of the vaccine you were about to receive, gave you the shot, told you the second instalment was due in 28 days, and presented you with a certificate documenting the transaction.

    At the fourth and final stop, you rested in a well-padded chair for some 20 minutes so that nurses could monitor you and report any behavior that may warrant medical intervention. If there was none, they wished you a good day. From start to finish, the whole thing lasted no longer than 30 minutes. It was a seamless operation.

    None of the five vaccines now in the market confers immunity, but regardless of the mutations, they have eliminated Covid deaths and reduced hospitalizations drastically, according to the best authorities. That is perhaps the best news to have come out of this dark encounter with the virus.

    The bad news is that the virus is going to be around for quite a while.

    The lesson from the United States and every country that has confronted the Covid menace robustly is that it is one thing to produce or procure the vaccines and quite another to distribute or administer them.

    Donald Trump (remember him?) made false claims about the quantity that would be supplied, and naively assumed that the vaccine would flow through the system like commercial goods, not taking into account special properties of the vaccines and the conditions in which they must be administered.

    The Nigerian effort has been marked by the usual false starts. Officials were discussing how to share the vaccines – federal character, equality of states, populations (inflated for the most part) absorptive capacity, etc, etc. – before perfecting a strategy for acquiring them. It has even been suggested that the vaccines be produced locally, to conserve foreign exchange.

    When they finally decided to place orders, they could not furnish the Budget Office with the data that would enable it figure out just how much was required, and at what cost. They say the figures are being crunched now. And from there, the proposal will go before the National Assembly, where enlightened debate and a swift resolution are not guaranteed.

    There is no danger, happily, that the effort will be hijacked by an ambitious First Lady with an eye on the main chance, as happened with the Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI) at the time of the loathsome General Sani Abacha. The amount budgeted for the programme ran into billions of Naira, and his wife Mariam, being “Mother of the Nation,” took it upon herself to ensure that it was faithfully executed.

    She hijacked it, thinking perhaps that it was just another item in the self-aggrandizing portfolio of the Better Life Programme initiated by Maryam Babangida, the wife of her husband’s predecessor, or even better, an opportunity for presiding over the award of lucrative contracts for vaccines.

    But it was no such thing. A national immunization drive, Dr Nataila Kanem, an epidemiologist with Ford Foundation in Lagos and now executive director of the UN’s Fund for Population Activities, told me at the time, is like a military mission. The design must be precise and comprehensive; the schedule must be exact, supply lines must be foolproof, the outcomes must be clearly articulated. Failure was not an option.

    In Mariam Abacha’s less than amateurish hands, the EPI collapsed, with disastrous consequences for Nigeria’s children.

    There is little chance of that happening now. But we shall always have among us those determined to profit and profit hugely from the misery around them. Everything must be done to frustrate their designs.

    More importantly, by the time the vaccines arrive, the logistics, the strategy and tactics for distribution and administration, should have been perfected to the highest degree possible.

     

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  • At last, Kogi’s magic formula

    At last, Kogi’s magic formula

    By Olatunji Dare

    Of the 121,000 cases and 1,501deaths from coronavirus disease in Nigeria as of January 23, 2021 (courtesy of Johns Hopkins University, which compiles and updates such figures from dependable sources,  not a single incident or fatality or rumour thereof has come out of Kogi State.

    Daily, the media are awash with rumours and reports of Covid-19 hospitalisations and deaths, certified by the competent authorities. Most families grieve privately or bury their dead quietly.  Not a few buried theirs in rowdy ceremonies that defied the Covid protocols.

    But there has been everywhere, a general acceptance that something malignant was in the air, and that the recognition of that reality is the beginning of healthy existence.  Everywhere, that is, except Kogi State.

    The state governor, Yahaya Bello, dismissed it as a hoax.  He said, it was just a species of malaria and would soon vanish. The whole thing had been confected by corrupt medical authorities and political officials to extort funds from the Federal Government.   Being a God-fearing person sworn to transparency and propriety in thought, word and deed, he would play no part in that fraudulent scheme, he declared again and again.

    Besides, on being admitted to the honourable society of accountants, he had pledged solemnly to abide by the ethics of the profession.  Nothing in the world, not even a so-called pandemic, was going to make him violate that pledge in letter or spirit.

    And to show that he was not grandstanding, he rejected on the threshold any Covid-19 funds that might be allocated to Kogi. Nor would he allow into the state the concoctions being touted as remedies for the disease.

    Whether they came out of the most reputable laboratories in the world or bear the imprimatur of the world’s leading epidemiologists, you have Bello’s word that those concoctions are no better than refined poisons, the sole object of which is to kill Nigerians in the tens of thousands.  The indecent haste with which they were produced and rushed to the market – with far less rigorous testing than a toothpaste would undergo:  is that not proof enough of the evil designs of their promoters?

    Fortified by their governor’s assurances, Kogi residents went about their businesses as they had always done, mingling freely in groups large and small to celebrate one thing or another, congregating in places of worship and journeying back and forth. The state remained open for trade and commerce and social intercourse from all corners of Nigeria.

    While they were running out of hospital beds and intensive care facilities in other states, there was not a single hospitalisation in Kogi.  While medical personnel in other states were dying or stretched to the point of physical and mental exhaustion, their counterparts in Kogi said they had never found their work so agreeable.

    While “mysterious deaths” stalked communities across the country, it was all fun and gaiety and laughter in the Confluence State. Investors fleeing other states found a safe, lucrative harbour in Lokoja, the Kogi state capital.

    Governor Bello’s confident assertion that his domain was off-limits to the coronavirus was no idle boast, it turned out.  The virus never found a way of insinuating itself into Kogi, not even in its serial mutations or permutations.

    Nigerians were mystified.

    What was it about Kogi that made the coronavirus keep a respectful distance from it even as the virus ravaged other parts of Nigeria with implacable malignancy?

    Army generals, university professors, industry barons, top civil servants, senior clergy across the faiths and regular folk, old and young, featured prominently in the daily bulletin as victims or casualties of Covid-19.

    But not in Kogi. The place seemed like a world apart, a bubble, in which the tens of thousands came and went day in and day out and automatically acquired Covid immunity in the process.

    Instead of entreating Bello to share with the rest of the country the magic formula he has employed to keep Kogi off-limits to Covid-19 in whatever mutation or permutation, they pilloried him and called him all manner of names.  They said he was anti-science, and that he combined pitiful ignorance with brazen arrogance.

    But the laugh, alas is on them.  The facts on the ground have confirmed his foresight and wisdom.  So, he just sat back and watched as hospitalisations and deaths from Covid-19 mounted across the country. Kogi stood out as the lonely exception, envied at home and revered abroad as an African success story

    At home, there is now excited talk of drafting him to run for president in 2023 so that he can replicate his liquidation of Covid-19 and other malignant diseases on a national scale. A Committee of Friends is currently on a national mobilisation tour in aid of that project.  At every stop, it has been received with great enthusiasm.

    Meanwhile the Nigerian Conference of Patriotic Journalists is set to confer him with the special award of “World Conqueror of Covid-19,” at a ceremony in Lokoja later this month.

    Abroad, the international community will move the Nobel Committee to award Bello the 2021 Peace Prize, if not the substantive Nobel medallion in Medicine, in recognition of his unparalled contributions to global public health.

    Following all the attention, and to show his detractors that he is not the unfeeling potentate they love to hate, decided recently to share, free of charge, the secret of Kogi’s stunning success in keeping Covid-19 at bay.

    It is not denialism – stubborn, dogged denialism, denialism enforced with every official and extra-official power – that has been at work in Kogi’s conquest of Covid-19.  If that were the case, why have other states not employed it in wishing the plague away?

    At first blush, the Kogi Formula appears beguilingly simple – so simple that it can be expressed in a just one word, the meaning of which every adult Nigerian knows or can figure out in the proper context.  But on close examination, the formula is nothing if not recondite, the product of pure genius.

    That formula, it can finally be revealed, consists primarily if not wholly in sensitisation.

    At a parley with journalists in Lagos last week, Kogi’s Commissioner for Information, Kingsley Fanwo, who should know, was asked:  “How has the state been fighting COVID-19, especially now that the second wave is causing more havoc across the world?”

    His response, as reported in this newspaper, bears quoting at some length.

    “We have succeeded in sensitising the good people of Kogi state. The best weapon to fight COVID-19 as far as we are concerned, is through sensitisation. When the people know their responsibilities and what they should do to keep themselves safe, it will help in ensuring that the pandemic doesn’t ravage the state.  We are still on the fact that there has not been a single case in Kogi State,” (emphasis added.)

    “All those other ones declared by the NCDC are controversial and we have rejected those figures in clear terms.  As far as we are concerned, we will continue sensitization. Before any other state, we built our communication pillars on COVID-19 and ensured that we are telling the people the right thing about the virus. That is what is working for the state. . .”

    There you have it.

    Why waste billions on vaccines that will be available only to a privileged few and produce uncertain outcomes when you can, with a rolling sensitization campaign that will cost next to nothing, keep the infernal plague at bay?

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  • After the insurrection

    After the insurrection

    By Olatunji Dare

     

    Americans and viewers across the world who watched the storming of the U. S. Capitol by Donald Trump’s rag-tag army of insurrectionists in horror and disbelief on January 6 are finding with each passing day that what they witnessed was only the foam of the event.

    Yes, they saw elements the seething, frenzied, bilious, surging crowd, men and women, young and old, scale the walls and race up the steps of the Capitol screaming imprecations, smashing windows, battering doors, pummeling police officers with their fists, baseball bats, flagpoles, lead pipes and just about any object that could be weaponized.

    They saw the rioters swamp the floor and offices of the Capitol, vandalize them, and take selfies while doing so, as if they were momentoes of a carnival.

    What they did not see was the grim resolve, the murderous frenzy with which the insurrectionists went about their task.  “Hang Mike Pence,” they bellowed over and over.  Pence the Vice President of the United States was presiding over the congressional proceedings to certify the election of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, probably the last official act of his tenure.

    And this primal scream heard around the world was not just a rhetorical demand couched in the imperative. For good measure, they had erected a scaffold on the floor of Capitol, with a noose dangling from it.  It was professional job through and through.  They were leaving nothing to chance.

    Like the sponsors of the misnamed “Save America March,” Pence is a Republican.  Security officials managed to hustle him and his wife and their daughter away just in time.

    The insurrectionists reserved an especially blood-curdling treatment for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi if they caught up with her; ditto her progressive female colleagues who felt scared almost as terrified of some fellow lawmakers they were sheltering with as they were of the mob that was closing in on them. At a moment of imminent peril, they did not feel they could take the goodwill of their colleagues for granted.

    And all this because of a transparent lie, one of the 2, 400 documented falsehoods Trump had told with a straight face since coming into office, this embodiment of vileness whose reckless disregard for facts is matched only by his reckless disregard for the consequence of his mendacity.  If lying was not in his DNA, he had become so habituated to it that he can no longer tell the difference between lying and truth-telling.  And that has been his way of getting in in the world.

    Lying has been the directive principle of the Trump Administration, the cornerstone of its strategy and tactics. He served notice that his tenure would be predicated on non-stop lying, lies small and big and contemptible when, hours after his inauguration, he claimed against pictorial evidence and against the record of the Parks Service, that the crowd in attendance at the event was much larger than the one at his predecessor Barack Obama’s, and was far and away the largest in History, period.

     

    Did it really matter, you ask?

     

    Everything matters to Trump and matters hugely.  So deep is his insecurity, despite all the braggadocio, that his ego will be sorely bruised if anything he has a hand in is not certified to be the biggest, the largest, the best, and the mostest, if not the only one of its kind that has ever existed and will ever exist has served the same purpose for his entire life.

    If you rated him lower than any person on any scale on any subject or crossed him in any way, he made you pay for it again and again, with the interest compounded.  Like Caligula, he never forgets and he never forgives a slight.  If you could somehow take out the grievances bottled up within, you have to wonder what would be left in that hulking, saturnine mass.

    Everyone knew or should have known that Trump was lying as usual when he claimed that he won the presidential election while it was still in progress.  That lie had the ballot.  He had telegraphed that if he did not win, it could only be because the ballot had been rigged.  And when he did not win, it followed that the ballot was completely, totally and absolutely rigged.

    So much for a self-fulfilling weird prophecy.

    Trump knew for certain that an election conducted under his watch, and in which he has a vested interest would be rigged by his opponents and but chose to do nothing to frustrate their design. We are to believe this of a man to whom failure is the ultimate disgrace, a man who claims omnipotence and omnicompetence on every subject or process under the sun and even beyond it?

    Claiming that he won the presidential election was the most self-serving and the most consequential of his litany of falsehoods.  That is saying a lot about a man who has made a career and lifestyle of lying. This record alone should have alerted the public that this was just another lie.

    Because the stakes were so high, Trump held on tenaciously to it, even when it was not backed by a shred of evidence.  Election officials rejected it. The courts rejected it, and so did the larger public. Only Trump’s base embraced it – the poor, disconnected and the racially entitled, whom he had inveigled into believing against overwhelming evidence that is their sole, true, steadfast defender and protector in a world stacked against them.

    At the very least, Trump bears moral responsibility for a substantial fraction of the 400, 000 Covid deaths that have occurred in the U.S. at this writing, and more than a million hospitalisations.  He dismissed the virus as a hoax, mocked the experts and deployed his hate machine against them.

    He disdained the mitigating protocols and staged raucous, Covid super-spreader rallies. A pandemic that should have united the nation in grief and firm resolve became in his hands a wedge that sundered it on scale not seen since the Vietnam War.

    And instead of charging him with dereliction of the most egregious kind, if not culpable genocide, they took up arms in aid of his deluded cause and set upon the Capitol with murder on their minds and other hands, and threaten more of the same.

    Trump kept America perpetually on the boil with his lies and infernal conspiracy theories, and the misnamed social media gave them wings.

    The lies, the “alternative facts,” took on lives of their own.  The longer they thrived, the more brazen they became.  As the election results unfolded, Trump appeared content to claim that he had won. He disputed the outcome in just six states.

    By the time he was working up the mob to storm the Capitol, his “victory” had become a “landslide.” A mere victory that was stolen warranted protests and demonstrations; a stolen “landside” victory called for nothing less than the fire and brimstone he and his followers unleashed on January 6.

    With the inauguration of a new or re-elected president every four years, the United States re-enacts a rite of renewal – renewal of the promise of America, a reaffirmation of the myths that undergird them.

    I have been privileged to observe from within at least six such moments, with all the pomp and circumstance and solemnity.  The sobering reminders of the gap between the promise and the actuality were never far from the surface, of course; but they were moments of hope and possibility, and of infectious optimism nevertheless.

    For tomorrow’s inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Washington DC is looking more like a city under siege than a theatre of renewal.  The atmosphere is more funereal than carnivalesque.  This grim backdrop will be replicated across the country.

    All because of a threadbare falsehood promoted with manic energy by a demented demagogue slinking into oblivion and swallowed wholesale by his army of deluded believers.

    For the sake of our collective humanity, the world must wish Joe Biden and Kamala Harris Godspeed. America’s ideals have never stood in greater or more urgent need of renewal and reaffirmation.

  • Nightmare at noon in America

    Nightmare at noon in America

    Olatunji Dare

     

    IN America, they are still reeling from the terror unleashed last week by President Donald Trump’s goons on the U.S. Capitol, in Washington DC, where members of the House of Representatives and the Senate were staging the final act of last November’s Presidential election: the certification of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as the duly elected President and Vice President, respectively, of the United States, preparatory to their taking office on January 20.

    Trump would have none of it.

    He had disputed the outcome even before the election, declaring that he would not accept it unless he won.  A Biden win could occur only through rigging, and he was not going to accept it.  He maintained this claim in the face of documented efforts by his fellow Republicans to rig the ballot through a sustained campaign of voter suppression, voter intimidation, and disinformation.

    They left nothing to chance.  At a time when the postal service should be at its most efficient, they set out to undermine its capacity to deliver, scrapping tens of thousands of postal outlets across the country; they took out and cannibalised thousands of functioning automated sorting machines and cut the work drastically.

    If the post office could not deliver before deadline the hundreds of thousands of mailed-in ballots, a recourse favoured disproportionately by Democrats, would not count.  Advantage Republicans.

    The right to vote is perhaps the hardest-won right in America’s civil and political life.  Millions of citizens marched and picketed for it; thousands were beaten, brutalised and jailed for demanding it; hundreds were killed in the process, many of them dispatched with a savagery that calls the humanity of their assailants into question.

    Trump and his henchmen and women placed in strategic offices in the States sought to turn voting into an obstacle course and confidently expected their hand-picked judges at every level of the judiciary to  seal the steal, a strategy he had perfected in a life time of skullduggery.

    He lost the election unequivocally.

    The master of the art of the steal bellowed at every forum, his face turning crimson, that the election had been stolen.  He pivoted on six states which the GOP had traditionally won, and challenged the election outcome there.  In every one of them, the courts dismissed his petition for lack of merit, while taking judicial notice of its shoddiness.  In one court, the judge was so scandalised by the quality of the petition submitted by Trump’s attorney that he considered a verbal rebuke too mild; he was going to report the shyster to higher officials of the judiciary and the professional Bar.

    And the matter went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where three of the justices appointed by           Trump, two of them for the express purpose of giving the Conservative justices a permanent 6-3 majority, voted to deliver a unanimous 9-0 decision against Trump, affirming the verdict of the lower courts that his petition was meritless.

    Georgia, long a reliable Blue (i.e. Republican) state, was his last stand.  Even if he was awarded its six electoral votes, that would still not have translated into a Trump presidency.  They recounted the ballots by hand, and still he lost. His Georgia petition was denied, like all his previous petitions.

    Fast running out of options, Trump confected yet another scheme: implore, threaten, cajole, or otherwise suborn Georgia’s Secretary of State to “find” him 12,000 votes that would flip the result of the presidential election in the state.  The official, a fellow Republican who knows more about honour and fidelity to oath of office than Trump can ever pretend to know, refused.

    Not daunted, Trump saw a silver lining in the darkening cloud.  The Republicans would win the two outstanding Senate races in Georgia, leaving the Republican Party in control of that powerful chamber to protect his baleful legacy and frustrate Biden’s agenda.

    Another will o’ the wisp.

    Scheme after desperate scheme fizzled, leaving the Congressional certification of Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris as president-elect and vice-president elect respectively as his last chance to flip, beg your pardon, steal the election. He was counting on Mike Pence, the vice president and his Man Friday, to execute the steal by a parliamentary subterfuge.  Pence, the designated presiding officer, said he had no such powers.

    The U. S. Congress was going through the solemn formality of certifying the winners of the 2020 Presidential election when Trump loosed his febrile followers who had massed in their thousands on the precincts of Capitol grounds from all over the country brandishing  their handcuffs, guns, lead pipes, pipe bombs, Molotov cocktails and all manner of cudgels.

    Their mission, as defined by Trump in an exhortation perfused by violent imagery: To prevent their victory at the last election from being stolen.  Republicans want to be nice, respectful of everyone, including “bad” people. Not anymore.

    “We are going to walk down to the Capitol. . . You’ll never take back our country with weakness, so you have to be strong . . . You’ll have an illegitimate president.  That’s what you’ll have, and we can’t allow that to happen. . . We will never give up.  We will never concede . . . You don’t concede when there is theft involved, and that is what this theft is all about. . . We will stop the steal.”

    They had come fully prepared.  Hadn’t Trump warned them that it was going to be rough?

    It was more than rough.  It was mob action at its most barbarous.  They raced up the steps of the Capitol their weapons, screaming and cursing, pushing and shoving the few police officers standing guard, using the pipes and crutches and their fists and their legs as battering rams in a futile bid to break the door leading to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s suite.

    Others clawed or bludgeoned their way into the Capitol and trashed it with a malevolence that you thought only the bitterest enemies fighting a war of attrition could carry out.  Americans and the whole world watched in horror and in disbelief.

    By the time the Capitol police was reinforced four hours later by the National Guard, two police officers and three members of the invading force lay dead.  If the lawmakers had not been spirited away to safer spaces, or taken cover wherever they could find a shield, however flimsy, there would have been bloodshed on a much larger scale.

    House Speaker Pelosi and Vice President Pence were marked for the cruelest treatment.

    From the White House, Trump who had said he would march with his supporters to the Capitol, watched the mayhem with bemused satisfaction on live television, surrounded by his family.

    He stopped just short of congratulating the insurrectionists on their heroism.  They were patriots, who did what they had to do, he told them in a video address. Mission accomplished, it was time to disperse and go home. “We love you,” he told them as he signed off.

    When the smoke had cleared and the hoodlums had departed, the Congress resumed its deliberations and certified the election outcome Trump had fought with might and main to block.   He cannot now claim, as he would have done if his goons had succeeded, that the election was inconclusive at best.

    Even as he fiercely disputed the election results, Trump and his lawyers and his proxies provided not a scintilla of credible evidence to back his claim that the whole thing was rigged. Their case was based almost entirely on conspiracy theories, the most ludicrous of which was that his bête noire, Hugo Chavez, the former president of Venezuela who had died some six years ago, had been seen orchestrating the fraudulent transfer   of Trump’s ballots to Biden.

    They forgot to add Fidel Castro. And Muammar Gadaffi. And Robert Mugabe.  And John Lewis.

    It has been asked insistently in America and abroad:  If the crowd that was just one step away from riotous action had comprised Blacks or Latinos, of Muslims, would the law-enforcement officials have related to them with such indifference we witnessed, to say nothing of the friendliness they showed the insurrectionists, exchanging banter and taking selfies with them?

    The inescapable truth about America lies in the answer.

     

     

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  • ‘Goodbye to bad rubbish’

    ‘Goodbye to bad rubbish’

    By Olatunji Dare

     

    That seems to be the dominant verdict cross the world on the year gone by.

    By any reckoning, the year was horrible, and much more so than any in recent memory.

    It was the year of Covid-19, the tenacious pandemic that has claimed more than one million lives worldwide, upended the rhythms of life and propagated death and misery and suffering on a biblical scale.

    It was the year U. S President Donald Trump, “the leader of the Free World,” confirmed beyond a shadow of doubt that there was nothing so debauched, so malignant, so repugnant, and so bereft of the human graces that you would not find him engaging it and championing it.

    In Nigeria, it was the year the marauders of no nation (thank you, Fela) determined that Nigeria was ripe for the taking and upped their creeping encroachment on Nigerian territory to a level that has the markings of an occupation and raised its assaults on residents of communities in their path to levels of savagery almost beyond belief.

    Goodbye indeed, to bad rubbish.

    But “bad rubbish” is no respecter of our desires or wishes, however fervent. It has a way of ramifying, of morphing into other forms that are even deadlier than the original rubbish, confounding efforts to contain, tame, or eliminate it.  It has a way of spreading, and spreading, and spreading.

    Take the coronavirus as an example.

    From Wuhan, China, it spread rapidly across the world, its dismal harvest to reap.  It has spared no part of the globe, no human population.

    That is what makes it so juvenile, and alas so dangerous, that the mimic napoleon who lords over Kogi State, Yahaya Bello, insists with supine stubbornness, against logic, against evidence, and against commonsense, that not a single case of Covid-19 has occurred in his domain.

    What is so special about Kogi that it alone, wedged though it is amidst Nigeria’s 36 states stretching from the Atlantic coast to the Sahel, has been spared a visitation by the scourge?  What incantations did he chant over the terrain to make it a no-go area for the virus?  What oblations has he made to the evil forces animating it?

    Or can it be that Yahaya Bello had secretly built a huge, invisible, antiseptic bubble and inserted Kogi State securely in it, thus rendering it impregnable to the most insidious pathogens, so much so that conducting the usual diagnostic tests would amount to a waste of time and resources?

    Time will tell.  But he should know that, when the reckoning comes, the blood of those who could have been saved by a forthright response will be upon his stubborn and uncomprehending head.

    Pardon the detour, but it has to be acknowledged that, despite its general wretchedness, 2020 was also the year in which vaccines to tame the ravaging virus were developed in an astounding feat of ingenuity and global cooperation.

    Finally, the world can breathe easier that the coronavirus will be subjugated sooner rather than later, and not by voodoo and quackery in their virus guises and disguises, but by science, the same platform from which HIV/AIDS, the avian flu, the Ebola virus, and other plagues were conquered.

    Developing the vaccines, it would now seem, was the easy part, however.

    Distribution has proved much more intractable.  False starts, botched manufacturing and delivery schedules, petty rivalries (“vaccine nationalism,” they call it), poor coordination of actual vaccine administration, not forgetting the weather, have combined to dampen popular enthusiasm for the vaccines, which was only slightly above average in the United States anyway.

    Among Blacks and the indigenous peoples, it was decidedly cool, given the sordid history                       of vaccine abuse perpetrated on them by the establishment.  In perhaps the most unconscionable of such abuses, poor Black folk in Tuskegee, Alabama, suffering from latent syphilis, were recruited by U. S. Army doctors into a program offering treatment.

    Instead of giving them the new antibiotic, penicillin’ which had proved an effective remedy, the army doctors gave them placebos. Then, they sat back and watched and took copious notes as the syphilis wasted their hapless subjects.  Many of them became blind or lapsed into mental illness.  Most died slow, agonizing deaths.

    Memories of such premeditated cruelty linger still and rankle still in the African American community.

    In most parts of Europe, vaccine distribution is running smoothly, and there is growing confidence that a vaccination rate will be attained that will render the coronavirus an irritation rather than a death sentence.

    In Nigeria, we have not made a start.  Shipments of the vaccines are being awaited, with no plans for distribution or administration.  Such plans are useless anyway; the political and bureaucratic elite will as insinuate themselves at the top the receiving line; those, who can, will buy, bribe bully or muscle their way their way to the next line and national priorities, equity, etc, be damned.

    The rest have the assurance of the evangelicals and Pentecostals that their faith will give them divine protection, the kind that no human contrivance can provide.  They are going to need it.

    That kind of protection is at least to be preferred to Trump’s formula of sustained denial, defiance deception, and disinformation in the face of a ravaging pandemic – a lethal cocktail     that his gullible followers and his obsequious courtiers, many of them otherwise sensible people, have embraced to their grief.

    Although the United States has less than one-fourth of the world’s population, it has the dubious distinction of recording more than one-fourth the global total of Covid-19 deaths and an even greater fraction of hospitalizations from the disease.  That is Donald Trump’s baleful legacy as he leaves or is dragged out of office two weeks from now discredited and disgraced, a standing rebuke to the enablers of his ruinous reign.

    American graveyards are littered with thousands of those he led to believe that the virus was fake, that it was no more bothersome than the seasonal ‘flu, and that real men (and women) don’t wear facial masks.  As the grim tally mounts, a society that has been conditioned to regard health as a commodity rather than a right belonging to all persons in society, and to privilege entertainment over health, is ruing the consequences of its false choices.

    Vaccine or no vaccine, this situation is unlikely to get better very soon, as the best authorities have warned. Trump will be gone, but a great deal of bad rubbish from 2020 is still going to be around in the United States.

    A cursory review of the front pages and the headlines of Nigerian newspapers on any day will show that the bad rubbish constituted by Boko Haram and the aforementioned marauders of no nation who are now in effective occupation of about one-third of the nation’s territory are, if anything, consolidating even as we wish them goodbye.

    Each passing day drives it home that bulletins first issued four years agoand updated every so often proclaiming that these nihilist outfits have been degraded, overwhelmed, neutralized, technically defeated or otherwise contained, are more than slightly exaggerated.

    A weary and besieged population led by the National Assembly, has been crying out for a change of strategy, which should start with the dismissal of the military High Command.   President Muhammadu Buhari is not about to allow the legislature and civil society to usurp his constitutional mandate of Commander-in-Chief of the nation’s Armed Forces.

    But that mandate goes with the duty and responsibility of protecting the lives and livelihoods of Nigerians and ensuring as far possible their safety at home, at work, at play, at worship, and on the streets.

    Only a minority of Nigerians will vouch that he has discharged that responsibility to their satisfaction.

    “The persistence of various forms of violence” in the most affected parts of the country, the president acknowledged in his New Year Broadcast, “has meant that the fabric of inter-communal harmony woven through years of investment and building trust, mutual respect and harmony(sic) has been under threat.”

    It is worse, Mr President.  The whole edifice faces existential threat, and so does the myth of “national unity” you are forever swearing by. Whatever the strategy, it is no working

    It is heartening indeed that the president evinced a new determination and outlined a new strategy in his New Year broadcast.  It consists in “reorganizing and re-energizing” the apparatus and personnel of the armed forces and the police so as the “enhance” their capacity to “engage, push back and dismantle” the operations of “internal and external extremist and criminal groups” warring against various peaceful communities across Nigeria.

    You have to ask:  What was the mission of the armed forces at their deployment?

  • Before the vaccines arrive

    Before the vaccines arrive

    By

     

    The whole world has been breathing easier this past fortnight.

    With the development and deployment of various vaccines 95 per cent guaranteed to neutralize  malignant Covid-19 disease that has upturned life in ways that seem inconceivable outside science fiction even now, we can begin to look forward to a return to the way we lived before.

    Hooray to science and to the scientists who produced the vaccines in record time.  Not even Donald Trump is calling them fake.

    Developing and producing the vaccines was the easy part, however. The transition to normality will be gradual, slow even.  For tens of thousands of persons stricken with the disease, help has probably arrived too late, given the fraught logistics of distribution and administration.

    If that exercise were a matter of going from one household to another administering the vaccines, that would be no harder than conducting an enumeration census.  Just count and document every resident.  But the mass inoculation scheme is different, and not just because of the technicalities involved.

    In the short term, there will not be enough vaccines to go round.  Almost everybody will consider himself or herself a prime candidate at this instant or the next.

    Who will get the vaccine, when, and how will they be selected?

    Debate in Nigeria on these overarching questions, I suspect, is going to be as impassioned, rancorous and divisive as the debate on the nature and essence of the Covid-19 itself.  Even now, in some quarters, they are not done debating whether the virus is fake or real¸ or whether what is being peddled as the antidote is not at bottom a scheme by the infernal duo of Bill and Melinda Gates, in pursuit of their insatiable appetite for conquest and control.

    Nor are we any wiser as to whether the search for a vaccine was not misguided from the outset, since according to a leading expert, the virus was something you could flush out of your system with any detergent worthy of that name.

    And what, pray, if the whole thing turned out in the end to be nothing but the manifestation, at long last, of the The Beast, the infernal creature with 666 stamped all over it,  the one foretold by the Scriptures?  How do you fight a monster of Biblical provenance with vaccines devised by ordinary humans?

    Better to leave all that to the conspiracy theorists, who we shall always have among us and better to leave them all in their dank lairs.  Far, far more productive to address and address forthrightly the problem of allocation.

    The vaccine is here, whether they like it or not.  It is here for everyone, including those who have fashioned careers on Covid-19 denial and fortunes from peddling fake remedies. But the proven life-saver is not there for the mere taking. Even in the short term, there is not enough of it to go round.

    So, how should this scarcest of medical, economic, social and political goods be allocated?  Who should get the vaccines?  When? And how will they be selected?

    There is no shortage of distributive strategies that have been canvassed, of which pricing – market forces – is the most efficient, according to the best authorities.  That is why the nation’s entire economy is premised on it. It may require some fine-tuning, but this is what it means in practical terms:  The vaccines should go to those who can pay for them.

    The same outcome can be achieved through competitive bids or auctions.  Those who can pay premium price get the commodity on offer first, if not exclusively

    And those who can’t?

    Their friends, relations, philanthropic organisations, maybe even the government, will pony up.  They will carry on as they have always done and live on in sufficient numbers to tell their stories.  Isn’t that what they have always done anyway?  But more on this, shortly.

    What about allocation by algorithms?  These days, they allocate all manner of scarce products by algorithms.  Why can’t they do the same thing with vaccines?

    Some have countered that the scheme can be rigged in such a way as to favour relations and friends and those willing to offer heavy inducements to the programmers who, whatever their mental magnitude and cybernetic endowments, are just as human as the rest of us

    That is no trifling objection.

    Allocation on federal character principle; state of origin, ethnic quota, gender, residence, or occupation have also been suggested.  But all kinds of objections will be raised by the usual persons.

    In the end, each country will have to devise a system of allocation that accords with its priorities, culture and system of values.

    In some advanced countries, health workers, patients of nursing homes, those in the food industry, essential services, sanitation workers, persons employed in the food and hospitality industry, are first in line to get the vaccine. Next are teachers and students. The elderly and hence more vulnerable population, follow. And so on and so forth.

    When the vaccines ordered by the federal government arrive, it would be scandalous indeed if Nigeria followed the same formula.  And why should it, when our culture and traditions are different, and when we have our own time-tested system of values?

    Given our tradition, it goes without saying that the President and the First Family and their entire household, followed by all functionaries in the Presidency should be the first set of candidates for the vaccines, not forgetting the Vice President and his suite.

    The reason is plain.  Unless and until the President and his household and aides are protected from Covid-19, no one is safe from its ravages.

    While at it, they should spare a thought for the Vice President, his family, and his suite.

    Members of the Council of State, the Federal Executive Council and their households should follow closely, and the members of the National Assembly should come next.  But I gather that the lawmakers are contending that they could get the vaccines immediately after the Presidency, if not before it. They are saying, according to my source, that since laws have to be made before they can be executed, they should have primacy.

    These lawmakers sef!  Must it always be about them?

    Commanding officers in the armed forces and the troops fighting off the menace of Boko Haram and allied terrorist outfits could do with a morale booster.  They and their families, plus serving members of the police force police should get the vaccine next.  Care will be taken in this latter case to ensure that those listed as policemen and women can execute a proper salute or a parade-ground command.

    The royal fathers, the custodians of our most cherished traditions, should follow, not forgetting their households, however large.

    Our traditional reverence for the elderly in society enjoins us to protect them from the ravages of disease. They will be next in line for vaccination.  Then, doctors, nurses, health workers, and teachers.  We will always need them.

    Given the way Nigeria is governed, the persons of consequence listed herein should constitute the first order of priority for the vaccines. Where the government cannot bear the cost outright, soft loans will be provided.

    Rest easy, those not mentioned in the foregoing list, which is but a first draft, subject to multiple revisions.

    To all, a happier, healthier and more abundant New Year.

  • Misadventures in satire

    Misadventures in satire

    Olatunji Dare

     

     

    IN the midst of the carnage that Covid-19 has loosed on humankind, the mindless terror and bloodletting that assorted Islamist insurgents and freelance marauders have unleashed on a swathe of Nigeria, and the gloom that pervades the landscape with nary a redeeming shaft of light — it might be judged unfeeling and self-indulgent that I am writing about my misadventures as a writer of satire.

    I am doing so deliberately, from choice.  My hope is that readers who have been desensitized by bulletins and graphic videos of the slaughter of innocents as they harvested their fields and by sterile arguments over who hundreds of students who were plucked from their schools and forcibly marched  into the jungle, Khmer Rouge-style, may find the piece diverting.

    Even the Nigerian mind, the Nigerian sensibility, I am persuaded, can accommodate only so much trauma.

    The first satirical piece I ever did was for an undergraduate writing course at the University of Lagos.  Our instructor, a Canadian woman who could easily have passed for one of the students in the class, returned my submission with high praise, scoring it an emphatic A.

    One of my classmates who had a great deal of media experience under his belt going into the programme – I had none – asked if I could let him read my essay, which centred on the lace craze of the late sixties through the mid-seventies.  I gladly obliged.

    His face tightened as he read one passage; he shook his head sorrowfully as he read the next, and so forth. By the time he was done, his face was contorted with resentment.

    =“No wonder she gave you an A,” he spat out.  “You denigrated your country and your compatriots before a foreigner just to get a good grade.  That’s very cheap.”

    =The way he rendered his verdict, you would think that I had committed a particularly odious species of high treason.

    =That was an early warning, from close quarters, of the perils of satire.

    =Many years later, in the wake of the return to party politics preparatory to the inauguration of the Second Republic, I did a piece for the Daily Times saying that banning university lecturers from political activity or any activity tainted by the whiff of politics, did not go far enough.

    =Why couldn’t they just shut down with immediate effect, all departments of political science in Nigeria’s universities,  clear the shelves of political treatises in all the university libraries, and ban all symposia, lectures, debates, discussions of a political nature – the kind of extra-curricular engagements that animated our campuses and kept them so vibrant back then.

    =The university community was aghast.

    =A senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Ife, as it then was, went for my scalp.  For effect, he attached a picture of himself ensconced in his book-lined campus office, a study in contemplation, unlike, you know, that book burner.

    =Stanley Macebuh of lumninous memory, the paper’s editorial adviser who also doubled as editor of its re-invented editorial page, the most engaging public affairs forum in town, added a footnote to the rejoinder from Ife, in that mischievous manner that became him so well.

    =“We humbly recommend a second reading,” he wrote tersely at the bottom of the published piece.

    =Some two decades later, I saw that very article cited in his Inaugural Lecture by a highly accomplished political scientist as scholarly evidence of the hatred Nigerians of all stripes harboured for his specialism.

    =Early in 1984, I set out to examine Decree Four, the enactment that criminalised publication of the truth, if that truth embarrassed a public official.  Trial was by a special tribunal with a civilian judge as chair complemented by two military assessors. The intent of the submission was unambiguous.  Its title, “In defence of Decree Four,” was a dead giveaway.

    Some people saw it as a grand betrayal of the media, by one of their own. Some read it as an underhanded attack on the obnoxious law.  But in the circles that really mattered, it was welcomed as a hearty endorsement of Decree Four.

    At a journalism conference at Bayero University, in Kano, Dan Agbese, then editor of the New Nigerian, told me that some of his friends in the military high command had commended the article to him, wondering why he and his colleagues in the daily press could not demonstrate discernment that perfused it.

    “And what did you tell them,” I asked Dan, holding my breath and praying that he had not been recommending a second reading of the piece to them, as Macebuh had done to my traducer from Ife.  Agbese said he just shook his head and pursued the matter no farther.

    =If you were not too distracted by the on-going War Against Indiscipline or consumed by the search for “essential commodities,” you could have heard my sigh of relief far away in Lagos.  For, if Agbese had told them the truth about that article, they would have marched me to prison immediately to keep Tunde Thompson and Nduka Irabor company.

    =In Babangida’s court, academics of a certain tendency were viewed as persons given to all manner of radicalism, due and never, and who never taught what they were paid to teach. They went on strike at the least provocation or no provocation at all just because they thought they had a monopoly on specialised knowledge and skills.

    = “Malarkey,” I wrote.  Time call their bluff. Send them packing and replace them with commanding officers from the armed forces.

    =After all, the director of army signals could be pressed into the academy as a professor of mass communication, Admiral Augustus Aikhomu, the gruff mariner who carried on as if he had scores to settle with the university community, could assume duties right away as a professor of nautical engineering.  The army’s paymaster-general would serve with credit as a professor of finance.

    Time, indeed, to call the lecturers’ bluff.

    The reactions were swift, personal.  An English teacher in a high school in one of the Eastern States, lamented that such a “wishy-washy” piece with no redeeming grace found its way into the hallowed editorial page of The Guardian.

    Its author, he said, could have been actuated only by envy of the most corrosive kind, never having seen the inside of a university.   The author in question, I might add in parentheses, has three degrees from three universities, two of them world-class.

    I must now fast forward to the matter of William Keeling, the reporter for the London Financial Times who analyzed Central Bank records, oil export receipts and other financial data and concluded that $2.8 billion out of some $5 billion in “windfall” oil revenues accruing to the Exchequer from the second Gulf War, was missing from the record.

    They plucked him from his office one evening, and put him on the next available plane to London.

    He got off too lightly, I wrote in a piece titled “In defence of William Keeling.”  They should have put him in a dugout canoe, handed him a paddle, escorted him out of our territorial waters and left him to find his way home.

    Just imagine the contumacy.  What business has a Brit investigating Nigeria’s oil earnings?  Was his home country not also an oil exporter, and did it not also reap windfall profits from the Gulf War? Why did he not write about that? Why his fixation on Nigeria?

    Many friends of the column felt betrayed, none more so than Gani Fawehimni. Need I add “the fiery Lagos attorney?” The very day the article appeared, his assistant brought a letter to me at Rutam House how the piece had “shocked” and forced him to stare at nothing, with mouth agape.”   If it was conceived as a satire, he said, “the satirical impression was too dry” to be clearly comprehensible to ordinary people” like himself.

    =If it was not a satire, he added in pained lament, then, the forces of justice and human liberty are agonisingly witnessing “another loss or crossover” of “a well-balanced thinker, intellectual, brilliant arbiter and patriot.”

    =Fawehinmi’s reaction brought to mind perhaps the earliest lesson I was taught in the art of writing satire, by Tejumola Olaniyan, who is unfortunately no longer with us.  Olaniyan had just begun an academic career at the University of Ife as it then was.  In July 2019, five months before his untimely death, he was named The Wole Soyinka Professor in the Humanities by the University of Wisconsin.

    =Concerned that “the satirical thread” in some of my articles were sometimes too slender, Olaniyan had written in his neat, disciplined script, that “bold exaggeration is the heart of good satire.

    =If I had learned that elementary lesson four decades ago, I would have been spared some of the misadventures reported here and others I am saving for another day.

    =It remains to thank friends and critics of the column for their time and attention, and their instructive feedback.  Best wishes to you all for a merry and safe Christmas.

     

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  • Ogunsanwo: The editor’s life and times

    Ogunsanwo: The editor’s life and times

    Olatunji Dare

     

    THERE is not much to add to, or take away from, Tatalo Alamu’s judicious “critical appreciation” of Gbolabo Ogunsanwo, the dashing editor and dazzling new newspaper columnist, who died two weeks ago, aged 75.  Still, I feel obliged to enter some personal reminiscences on a person I counted as a friend.

    Ogunsanwo had star quality stamped all over him.  He had boyish, movie-actor looks and comported himself with effortless dignity and grace – what the French call savoir faire. His column “Life with Gbolabo Ogunsanwo” overflowed with wit and humour, its fluidity and felicity a product of his omnivorous reading, his capacious vocabulary and his lexical inventiveness.

    Ah, the man could turn a phrase.

    Even now, I can visualize the rambunctious Federal Commissioner for Information in the Yakubu Gowon regime whom he described as “frightfully riotousdecades Today, some four years later and at 93, the fellow is not a whit less bumptious.

    Who can forget his piece on the long-retired “Papa” who “got a brand new job” when his son, the military governor of one of the Eastern (now South-south) states recalled and pressed into service to lead the government’s new transport corporation?

    Ogunsanwo’s giftedness never got into his head.  He was an engaging raconteur, but you could never accuse him of being self-absorbed.  For he was also a good listener.  He liked to hear other voices beside his own, which was vibrant and sonorous.

    He entered journalism as an instant star.  His column for the Daily Times where he made his debut drew a large, appreciative audience.  It was habit-forming.  Grateful readers pined for the next instalment, and the next, and the next.

    On encountering it for the first time, I had asked myself:  Who is this Ogunsanwo guy? Where has he been all these years?  I will not be surprised if members of the attentive audience had asked the same questions.

    It came as no surprise, therefore, when Ogunsanwo was catapulted to the editorship of Sunday Times, probably the youngest person to hold that office since the legendary Peter “Peter Pan” Enahoro some two decades earlier.

    The weekly menu of features, reviews, entertainment, celebrity gossip and essays, of which Ogunsanwo’s column was invariably the pièce de résistance made breezy, delightful reading. It catapulted Sunday Times to the top of the weekly titles, with an audited circulation of 500,000 copies. Your Sunday was not complete until you had at least leafed through the paper and communed with Ogunsanwo through his scintillating column.

    Given the altered environment in which today’s newspapers operate, it is safe bet that this record will never be surpassed.

    Ogunsanwo became a celebrity, a gadfly and man-about-town.  His wedding to his sweetheart from his undergraduate years at the University of Lagos days was the stuff of society nuptials.   He had everything going for him.  He seemed destined to reach the editorial pinnacle of the largest and most influential newspaper publishing house in Africa, with connections to the powerful Mirror Group in the UK.

    But as Ralph Waldo observed with accustomed insight, “Events are in the saddle and rule (hu) mankind.” He could have added from his observation cabin Walden Pond that it is in the nature of such events that they are unforeseeable and unfathomable.

    The events that supervened in this story began with the July 29, 1975, coup that felled the regime of General Yakubu Gowon.  A curfew was in force, and breaking it posed not a little danger. The sedate, bureaucratic editor of the Daily Times went missing as this epochal story unfolded.  He would explain later that he could not find his car keys.

    But the crackerjack reporter, Segun Osoba, an assistant editor of the Daily Times, who was given to thinking on his feet, mounted a motor scooter and braved the ride to the paper’s offices at Kakawa Street, and to the home of its publisher and managing director and chief executive, the Babatunde Jose. Back at Kakawa, Jose, a newspaper man to the core, and Osoba, put out the next day’s edition, with news and tidbits that Osoba had ferreted out from his well-placed sources.

    Staffers arrived at Kakawa the next working day to find flyers announcing, effective immediately, Osoba’s appointment as substantive editor of the Daily Times. That was exactly what the press barons in the UK who had groomed Jose for the position of chief executive of the Times would have done. These were powerful men who answered marginally at best to their shareholders, and to nobody else.  He held it as a principle that you cannot not run a newspaper on the plebiscitary principle.

    Ogunsanwo was to remain editor of the Sunday Times, though there was a lingering feeling that he too did not rise to the responsibility his office demanded.

    But Osoba’s preferment rankled.  It breached what had long been regarded as the line of succession at the Daily Times:  The editor of the Sunday Times was promoted wherever the position was vacant. Going by that tradition, Ogunsanwo should have replaced Areoye Oyebola.

    The shake-up brought together senior editors, managers who had been nursing grievances against Jose and the Fleet Street –style imperial streak that ran through his overlordship at the paper.  They put together a well- documented petition demanding Jose’s resignation.

    A new government eager to demonstrate that it had come to change the way of doing business embraced the petition enthusiastically, ousted Jose, the petitioners, as well as Ogunsanwo who had found common cause with them.

    Thus ended a phase of Ogunsanwo’s life that had seemed invested with boundless possibilities.  He was in his mid-thirties.  He had not fully absorbed that blow when his wife walked out on him  He tried his hands on trading on imported canned beer from the UK; the business hardly got off the ground.  Meanwhile, the invitations to high society events and diplomatic receptions dwindled to a trickle, then stopped altogether.

    I would come to know that feeling about a decade later when I quit my post as chair of the Editorial Board of The Guardian and editorial page editor on a matter of principle.  More than once, I actually heard the person I was calling instruct his secretary to tell me he was not available.  If I ran into some old friends and they could not make a quick getaway, you could almost see their blood pressure rising from thinking that I might ask for a loan.

    Ogunsanwo fell back on what he knew best.  He launched a fortnightly he called New Nation, on which I served as a contributing editor.  It thrived for a while and then ran into the usual financial headwinds. Some of the stalwarts of the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) which had a lock on party politics in the Southwest offered to support it financially it he would turn into a party organ.

    He refused.  Even in his privations, he would not compromise his journalistic autonomy.

    Many later, Ogunsanwo bobbed up at my office in Rutam House, at one of the turning points of military president Ibrahim Babangida’s duplicitous transition programme, and told me that he was going to run for president and was sure to win.

    For more than an hour, he sketched various scenarios according to which he would be the only candidate left standing by the time Babangida was done banning, un-banning and re-banning the dozens of seasoned politicos in the field.

    The scenarios had no room for the doubts, the prejudices, the miscues, the prejudices, and the force that make politics so unpredictable.  The whole thing was mathematically elegant, iron-clad even.

    After he left, my colleague Sully Abu whom I had invited from his office next door to meet Ogunsanwo and I wondered which of Nigeria’s professional soothsayers he had been communing with.

    In the event, Ogunsanwo did not even get to the starting line.

    I last met him some six years ago, at Asiwaju Bola Tinubu’s place in Bourdillon.  He was making a precarious living in building construction. Thereafter, I would learn that he was in South Africa, and then in Australia, but nobody could say what he was doing until news of his death in Lagos broke two weeks ago.

    Of Gbolahan Ogunsanwo, it might be said that he rose like a rocket and fell like the stick.

    But he will always be remembered for his towering accomplishments and his fundamental decency. His was a life of equanimity, a life without bitterness even in the face of betrayal and adversity.