The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • My Lagos story (1)

    My Lagos story (1)

    In my consciousness, Lagos was that city of the fast-paced life, where everyone was trying to swindle everyone else and only the wiliest survived, a city where crime stalked the streets and fear was a constant companion.  I had heard stories about its sheer villainy told and retold.

    So, despite the opportunities said to abound there, going to Lagos was the last thing on my mind.  After leaving high school in Zaria, I headed to Kano, which had become like home.

    You can therefore imagine my apprehension the day I received an 82-word telegram from the Central Bank of Nigeria asking me to report for a job interview in Lagos in four weeks.  I had sent my application to the Kano Branch of the CBN, not to the Headquarters.

    The same Lagos, about which I had heard blood-curdling stories?  To head there, left entirely to my own devices, with no guide and with nowhere to lodge?

    Though unemployed, I did not go for the interview.

    Some six months later, in August 1963, Lagos bobbed up on my horizon but in far more agreeable circumstances.  I was offered a place at the Federal Advanced Teachers College, in Akoka, Yaba.  I would be travelling by bus — railway workers were on strike— from Kaduna, in company of returning and new students, many of whom I knew.   The prospect of such a journey of adventure was exhilarating

    The day after we left Kaduna, the bus pulled up on the sparkling Akoka campus, at night.  A rickety bridge across a stream at the end of an unpaved road linked Abule Oja and environs to Akoka, also home of St Finbarr’s College, where Rev Father Slattery, the soccer luminary, was the legendary principal.

    I still remember my first foray into the city.  A casual stroll from campus took us through Onitiri and the entire stretch of Atan Cemetery to St Agnes Bus Stop where we boarded the Lagos Municipal Transport Service (LMTS) bus that had originated at the Yaba bus terminal and proceeded to St Agnes through Montgomery, or had approached from the Ikorodu Road end. The fare was six pence.

    The bus took us all the way down Herbert Macaulay Street, then a single carriageway with traffic flowing in one direction, to Ijora Causeway, past the Railway Terminus at Ebute Metta, through an underpass, and then on to Carter Bridge, Idumota Square and all the way down Nnamdi Azikiwe Street, stopping finally near the fountain on Tinubu Square.

    No visit downtown was complete without stopping by at Kingsway Stores.  It was there that I first rode on an escalator.  Leventis Department Store was a block up the Marina, and down the other side was the UTC Department Store.

    Each had a delicatessen that was like a meeting point for yuppies and would-be yuppies.  From the UTC restaurant on the second floor, you got a stunning view of the sea and ships waiting to berth at the Apapa Wharf.  The shore line was less than some 60 feet from the UTC building.

    Across Broad Street from UTC was perhaps the most frequented by men who set much store by their wardrobe. Esquire it was appropriately named and it was chockfull of dress shirts bearing the most reputable designer labels of the day, among them Rael Brook, Double Two, Aristocrat, Arrow and Van Heusen — the real stuff.  Not a slap-on label originating from some sweatshop in Bangladesh or Thailand

    Shopping or, to tell the truth, window-shopping in these stores and in the shops on Nnamdi Azikiwe and Broad Street, was a monthly routine, with occasional bus rides to the Bar Beach, to see wave upon wave from the Atlantic Ocean crash on the shoreline with the sound of a dozen thunderclaps

    Ikoyi and Victoria Island seemed remote, unattainable, Adeniran Ogunsanya Street was the crown jewel of Surulere, or what they called New Lagos, a planned, graceful settlement, the precise opposite of the chaotic, older parts of the city.

    Small, single family-owned bungalows with well-kept gardens and lawns dotted Yaba.  You did not have to leave home at 5 am to reach Lagos in time to start work at three hours later.  And you were reasonably sure to be home within two hours of closing from work.

    It was in Lagos I had my first dress suit, a protocol- black affair made to measure by Ogundero the Tailor who catered to the most fastidious clientele, and matching bally shoes. It was in Lagos, at Birch Freeman High School, that I had my baptism as a classroom teacher.

    It was there that my hairline began to recede and it was there, some 20 years Iater that my first grey hairs sprouted.  It was there that I ate my first meat pie and my first scotch egg.

    I was in Lagos when Chief Obafemi Awolowo, and later Chief Anthony Enahoro, and stalwarts of the Opposition Action Group were sentenced to prison on a charge of treasonable felony.  I was there when the majors struck on January 15, 1966.  I had gone to Lagos that day and had ventured as far as the Race Course, close by Parliament Buildings.  I had noticed a few soldiers here and there, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary.  By the time I got back to campus, everyone was talking about the military coup.  They asked me about what I had seen in Lagos.  I had nothing to report.

    Months earlier, on an excursion to Parliament, our group from campus had gathered round Minister of Finance Chief Festus Okotie-Eboh’s limousine when the man himself suddenly materialised, with his trademark bowler and traditional loincloth trailing him like the tail of Halley’s Comet.

    “What are these Communists doing around my car?” he shouted as he approached us, police orderly in tow.  We dispersed quickly.  It was notorious that Himself the Omimi Ejo had a pathological aversion to bearded men.

    The National Stadium was an open field.  Not even its huge signboard and its massive wrought-iron gate could disguise the fact that it was little more than a statement of intent.  Driving toward Ibadan on the scrappy Ikorodu Road, you had the sense that Lagos effectively ended at Obanikoro and that Ikeja was another town entirely.  Going from Ikeja to Agege was like journeying through the countryside. A trip to Badagry and back took a whole day.

    Back then, the most the national soccer squad could hope for in their yearly encounter with Ghana’s Black Stars was a draw.  A humiliating defeat was the usual outcome. How exhilarating, then, that the junior team the Academicals, beat their Ghanaian counterparts in 1966 and broke the myth of Ghana’s invincibility

    On Saturday nights, we would walk to Casino Cinema after dinner, watch the movie on offer – any movie would do — and on the way back call at Kakadu (KKD) Night Club to check things out. You could expect to find Roy Chicago, Fela Ransome-Kuti (as he then was), Victor Uwaifo, or Gentleman EC Arinze in scintillating performance.  In the wee hours of the morning, we would head back to campus, walking past Atan Cemetery and through unlit streets without a care in the world.

    I was there when Lollipop Girl Millicent Small, backed by Fela, thrilled huge audiences in Lagos and television compere Rosemary (Miss Independence) Anieze’s riveting show “Saturday Squares” captured the beat and the rhythm and the spirit of the Swingin’ Sixties and showcased many a budding artiste. The Daily Times was then a generic name for newspapers.

    I left Lagos in 1966.  When I returned four years later to study at the University of Lagos,  I found the city vastly  transformed, though not always for the better.  But it remained stubbornly familiar, and welcoming.

     

  • Serubawon : The principle and the legacy

    Serubawon : The principle and the legacy

    One of the more colourful politicians thrown up by military president Ibrahim Babangida’s duplicitous transition programme was a tall, solidly built young man who had about him an air of refinement that was accentuated by his exquisite tailoring.  His trademark dog-eared cap, a sartorial archaism that he parlayed into a fashion statement, bespoke a cultured sensibility.

    But what he inspired most was fear – primal fear.

    I cannot personally vouch that he knocked a state commissioner unconscious with a single punch during a cabinet meeting to consider the state’s appropriations, or that he once lifted an uppity permanent secretary by his ears and slammed the poor fellow on to the wall some 30 feet away.

    But tales of his predilection for that kind of behaviour were the stuff of political gossip, and had led to his being called Serubawon, literally, the one who scares them witless.  By some accounts, he had not merely bestowed that name on himself.  He actually gloried in it.

    The tales were probably apocryphal, yet they put associates and adversaries alike on notice that to trifle with His Excellency Serubawon was to court danger.

    But somehow, the governor’s reputation for getting things done without fuss and without challenge seemed not to have registered on the State Assembly, in which his party, the one that was a Little to the Left, held practically all the seats.

    Where he sought to move at a furious gallop, the legislators seemed to love nothing better than hearing their own voices proposing, amending, and raising points of order.  They were even plotting to impeach him

    One cold, dusty morning in December 1992, as the legislators were settling down for business in the State Assembly just across from the central market, in Osogbo, they espied a motley crowd armed with shovels, pick-axes, machetes and all manner of cudgels.  Before they could figure what it was all about, the assembly was under siege.

    Shouting foul imprecations and bellowing blood-curdling threats, the invaders smashed their way into the chamber and set upon the lawmakers with maniacal fury.

    Casting off their ornately embroidered agbada reflexively and displaying the comprehensive agility of the decathlete, many of them escaped through the most improbable exits. Those who could not escape or hide got a good dose of the serubawon treatment.

    It was a focused, results-oriented assembly that reconvened two weeks later, a real partner in progress with the state’s chief executive, Isiaka Adeleke.

    Elected Senator in 2007 on the platform of the ruling PDP, some 14 years after he had pummeled the Osun Assembly into unconditional surrender, and again in 2015 on the platform of the APC, he was priming himself for the 2018 gubernatorial election in Osun when he died suddenly.

    In the outpouring of grief that marked his redemptive return to politics, the Serubawon element of the prior phase seems to have been forgiven and largely forgotten.  But it was not lost on the future generation of politicians.  It seemed to have registered powerfully on the mind of a young Ekiti man then eking out an existence in Ibadan, in the rough-and-tumble world of municipal transportation.

    But first things first.

    Shortly after Orji Uzor Kalu took office as governor in 1999, Abia State was in ferment.  The air was saturated with talk of impeachment, with assassination plots, cabinet changes and rumours of major changes in the top ranks of the bureaucracy.

    Matters took a frighteningly violent turn on June 26, 2000, when hundreds of youths, reportedly incensed by rumours that the legislature was plotting to impeach Kalu, descended upon the State Assembly in busloads.  They smashed up the place, battered those legislators they regarded as Kalu’s opponents, and helped themselves to whatever they could haul away.

    Mission accomplished, the mob headed to Abia White House on a solidarity visit with Kalu who, in keeping with his administration’s open-door policy, welcomed them.  He listened attentively to their report on the sacking of the State Assembly and other measures they had taken to “sanitise” the undutiful legislative branch.

    Their intervention, he told his visitors, accorded perfectly with the finest traditions of democracy and freedom of expression. Thereafter, nary a murmur of dissent was ever heard again from the state legislature.

    Next stop:  Ekiti, and back o the young man who was eking out an existence as a transporter in Ibadan at the time of the serubawon episode.

    Ayodele Fayose’s first tenure as governor had ended in scandal on a scale almost beyond belief, impeachment, and disgrace.  He had been charged with serious fraud, and with complicity in the murder of two political opponents.  Some 11 years earlier, in 2014, he was running for the same office, against an incumbent widely perceived to be a better candidate on almost every metric.

    How it happened is still not clear, but Fayose won by a landslide, in what remains one of the greatest political comebacks in Nigerian politics. It was widely expected that he would embrace that second chance as an opportunity for self-redemption.

    Instead, Fayose loosed mayhem on the state capital even before taking office, leaving no doubt as to what he would do on taking charge. He personally led a phalanx of okada operators and motor-park touts and thugs-for-hire to the courthouse where a petition against his election was about to be heard, where they beat up judges and other officers of the court, in one instance renting a judge’s gown and shredding court papers.

    From that triumphal outing, it was but a short step for Fayose to present the State’s Budget to the State Assembly, adopt it on its behalf without debate, and sign it into law in just one day.

    The Serubawon Principle was also operative in Anambra, at the time of Governor Chris Ngige. His predecessor, who served two terms, owed his election to the spectral Chris Uba, the so-called godfather of Anambra politics.

    If you wanted to be governor, you sought his help.  It did not come cheap.  On winning, you  had to indenture the state’s treasury to him.  After he had helped himself to whatever he thought was his due, there was little left for anything else.  But that was the governor’s business. And that was the condition under which Ngige’s predecessor had governed.

    In Ngige’s case, the condition was that he had to step down after taking office, so that Uba could install another governor, probably on terms more favourable than Ngige was  willing to entertain.

    The pact was undergirded by an infernal oath taken stark naked, in the dead of night, before the dreaded Ogwugwu Shrine, in Okija, in Ihiala Local Government Area of Anambra State.

    When Ngige tried to repudiate this pact, Uba’s forces invaded the Government House,            seized Ngige, and held the state capital, Awka, under siege for several days until residents of the city rallied to rescue him.  While the mob operated, the forces of law and order were nowhere to be found.

    Finally, Lagos, the stronghold of the opposition APC that seemed set to dislodge the hugely discredited Goodluck Jonathan administration in the general elections scheduled for May 2015. Jonathan postponed the poll by one month, hoping the interval would help him turn the tide. It did not work.

    He hopped from one city to another, handing out sacks stuffed with the most sought-after foreign currencies to just about anyone he thought could advance his election fortunes.  No luck

    Then he hit upon the Serubawon Principle.  He recruited Gani Adams and the Oodua People’s Congress (OPC) and assorted motor-park touts to put up a show of force and terror, the kind of which the city had never witnessed. They immobilised the metropolis for an entire day.

    The United States, the UK, and France ganged up to ensure that it didn’t work.

    But the Serubawon Principle lives on.  I suspect that somewhere, one desperate politician or another is waiting for the slightest opportunity to operationalise it.

  • Will Paradise be postponed, again?

    Will Paradise be postponed, again?

    I have been thinking of the year 2020.

    This must seem capricious, given the exigencies and the sheer volatility of the moment.   Need I recite the litany that everyone knows so well?

    Twenty-wetin’?  I can almost hear the reader gasp in disbelief.  Twenty-wetin’?

    But those who are not too far gone in their cynicism, especially those among them who have also been paying close attention to what some of the best authorities have been saying, will have no difficulty apprehending  that the year 2020 must now be the focus of the national policy dialogue.

    To cite just two of the best authorities aforementioned:  The World Bank Group said six weeks ago that the recession had bottomed out and would end soon.  And only last week, the Minister of Information, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, drawing on a report from the Central Bank of Nigeria, said the recession was fast tapering off and would end by June.

    Let nobody call this optimism unfounded.  At the height of the recession, the government’s main problem was how to find the money to pay all the bills.  Now the money has been pouring in from sources expected and unexpected in such abundance that the problem now is how to spend it.  The wheel has turned full circle, from the oil-boom days of General Yakubu Gowon’s regime.  The good old days are about to return, even if only slowly

    Then, an acute shortage of foreign exchange, the U.S. dollar especially, virtually grounded manufacturing. Now, there is so much foreign exchange in supply that the banks which used to hoard them and sell to buyers at rates that it would be polite to call usurious, are literally begging customers to come buy.  But takers are few and far between.  They are stuck with a glut.

    Only three years now stand between our exit from the one and our entry into the other; between a desultory 2017 and a 2020 full of the great expectations encapsulated in Vision 20:2020

    Here is the first of several Vision Statements, formulated in 1999:

    By 2020, Nigeria will have a large, strong diversified, sustainable and competitive economy that effectively harnesses the talents and energies of its people and responsibly exploits its natural endowments to guarantee a high standard of living and quality of life to its citizens, The Statement continued.

    The whole thing had begun life as Vision 2010, in the time of the debauched dictator Sani Abacha. He inaugurated the Vision 2010 Committee in September 1996 and charged it to produce a report no later than September 1997. The Committee was chaired by Ernest Shonekan, whose tragi-comic pretence of being head of state Abacha had tolerated for 83 days before summarily kicking him out back in 1993.

    Its remit was, first, to determine why, some 36 years after independence, national development lagged         far behind Nigeria’s vast potential and, second, to envision where Nigeria should be in 2010, five decades  after attaining sovereign rule.

    In reality, the whole thing was to provide a setting for Abacha to transform himself into a civilian president, under a new Constitution that would grant him two six-year terms.   He did not live to pursue his scheme

    On taking office in 1999, President Olusegun Obasanjo exhumed the Vision 2010 document, dusted it up, breathed new life into it and projected it as the blueprint for catapulting Nigeria to the league of the 20 biggest economies in the world by the year 2020.  His bid to amend the constitution to allow him a third term —to implement Vision 2020, among other projects — crashed on a procedural vote on the floor of the Senate.

    On succeeding Obasanjo, President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua  more or less embraced Vision 2020, renamed Vision 20: 2020, but his mantra was The Seven-Point Agenda.  Until he died two years after taking office,  it was hard to tell which was goal and which was mechanism: The Vision, or The Agenda

    Among its specific targets:  By 2020, a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of not less than $900 billion and national per capita income of not less than $4,000 per year, and generation of 60,000megawatts (mw) of electricity by 2020.  These targets, Vice President (as he then was) Goodluck Jonathan said while launching the Vision Document, might even be achieved earlier.

    In fact, Jonathan could hardly wait until 2020 for Nigeria to be counted in the league of world’s 20 largest economies.  His administration re-calibrated the economic data and came up with the finding that Nigeria, not South Africa as was generally supposed, had far and away the largest economy in Africa, and the 16th largest in the world.  And as if the Vision was not sufficiently freighted already, he grafted an Industrial Revolution on it.

    Given present realities, it seems clear that the targets set out so clearly and eloquently in all the Vision documents are unlikely to be achieved.  When 2020 comes three years hence, will Paradise be postponed again?

    That won’t be the first time.

    Most of the good things in Vision 20:2020 and its antecedents were supposed to bring should have become commonplace some 17 years ago, in 2000, the magical year that marked all at once the end and the beginning of a decade, a century and a millennium, a conflation that occurs only once in a thousand years.

    That was the year Paradise was going to be regained.

    There would be education for all, health for all, shelter for all, water for all, transportation for all, food for all, clothing for all, shelter for all,  and money for all. There would be absolutely no need to worry about admissions into schools and universities, for there would be enough places for everyone.  Hunger would vanish from the land, and so would homelessness and disease.

    When they were peddling these nostrums in the 1980s, the target year of 2000 seemed quite safe.  Almost like a thief in the night, it came and went.  But the Paradise it promised never came.  In Nigeria, it was postponed, until 2020.  And now that 2020 is nigh upon, and with everything indicating that the targets are unlikely to be achieved, will Paradise have to be postponed again, perhaps to 2030, 2040, even 2050?

    President Muhammadu Buhari’s Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (2017-2020)  two years late in the making, treads basically the same paths and promises the same outcomes as the Vision Documents I have here examined, though couched in far less portentous tones.  One can only hope that it will fare better than what came before.

    A much earlier Paradise envisioned in the Second National Development Plan (1970-74) launched shortly after the end of the civil war, a time of giddy optimism when Nigerians thought all things possible and petrodollars poured at a rate that overwhelmed the national exchequer, should not pass unremarked.

    The goals of the Plan were to establish Nigeria firmly as

    • a strong, self-reliant nation;
    • a great and dynamic economy;
    • a just and egalitarian society;
    • a land of bright and full opportunities for all citizens, and
    • a free and democratic society.

     

    It hardly got off the drawing board.  Less than a decade later, President Shehu Shagari was setting up a Presidential Task Force, supervised by one of the most influential members of his cabinet, to import rice.

    Some five decades and several Vision Documents later, how to produce enough rice for Nigeria’s teeming population lies at the heart of the national policy dialogue, and the prospect of generating enough electricity recedes with each passing day.  Toothpicks remain high on the import list.

  • Perilous times for the PEP

    Perilous times for the PEP

    These recessionary times are fraught with anxiety.

    Endlessly, you worry about money, family, work, health, career, relationships, and just about everything under the sun and even beyond it.

    That anxiety is compounded if you are a politically exposed person (PEP), the type who may for any reason whatever register on the radar of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) or the Department of State Services (DSS)

    What kinds of cues, verbal and non-verbal, are likely to raise the PEP’s hackles, disrupt his exterior calm or otherwise put him out of sorts?

    In the normal run of things, these cues often come from persons who usually defer to them – persons from whom the PEP has a right to expect a great deal of deference – personal assistants, stewards, drivers, gardeners, guards, and the whole lot.  They have been with him for so long that they are virtually family.

    As has been said, no man is a hero to valet, and no lady a heroine to her maid.  Vulnerabilities open up here and there, but the relationship has endured. Over the years, no signals from this extended family have disrupted the relationship in any fundamental way.

    But lately, the steward has been reporting only spottily and going about his chores indifferently. The driver keeps talking back or mutters under his breath instead of following instructions.  The gardener, inscrutable even in the best of times, has become positively taciturn.

    When he deigns to mow the lawn or trim the hedges, he goes about it as if he is doing you a favour. The guard takes his time opening the gate when you get home after hours.  He is in no hurry to switch the generator on or off as determined by the municipal power supplier.

    Collectively, they adopt a sneering tone toward the lady of the house.  They no longer make the children feel welcome in their company.

    They have not asked for pay increases.  They have not complained about conditions. They seem to have discovered the power in silence, and to have chosen to exercise that power.

    But to what purpose? What does it all mean? What could account for this collective sullenness in what has been a cheerful household?

    If you are a PEP, these are ominous signals.

    Should you call them together or separately, tell them what you have noticed, and demand an explanation?  Or perhaps maintain your equanimity in the hope that the situation will work itself out? Could it even be that you were only imagining things and tormenting yourself needlessly?

    If the PEP overhears his aides chatting animatedly about the EFCC and the DSS without a care as to whether he or anyone was listening, that is not a good sign.  But there may be nothing to it, since those agencies dominate the headlines and the front pages these days, conducting raids that uncover mountains of cash in the most sought-after currencies.

    Money owned by nobody in particular, or abandoned because it has become an encumbrance, like the “stockpile of dollars” found on the grounds of the Executive Mansion in Akwa Ibom following the change in government, or because there is just no way to spend it even in several lifetimes.

    Nor should he be alarmed if they went on to talk about fortunes stashed in faux septic tanks, abandoned at airports, buried  in farms, piled up in steel vaults tucked away in rat-infested rooms in derelict houses in the most distressed parts of town, lodged in bank accounts in the names of a battery of untraceable proxies, or warehoused in ultra-luxury flats inhabited only by persons of galactic net worth.

    If they should add amidst knowing glances that EFCC and DSS operatives would shortly be turning their attention to flower beds and cemeteries in the neighbourhood and ruins of ancient dwellings back in the villages and palaces and places of worship, not sparing their sanctums,     there might be something to that.

    The PEP may well recall how, in Babangida’s time, Colonel Yahaya “Jungle Expert” Madaki had disclosed at the end of his tenure as military governor of Katsina State, that he always took the most sensitive official materials to the palace of the monarch of his ancestral village for safe-keeping.   The colonel did not trust the bureaucracy one bit.

    The suspicion is widespread now that some of the people running the country today may be doing the same thing, only that what they are shipping out is public money, heaps and heaps of it.

    At this point, the PEP should begin to worry about how much his aides really know? Were they taunting him, or just bluffing?

    The driver knows his going out and his coming in and is not totally innocent of the transactions thereof.   The gardener knows where stuff could have been buried.  The steward knows the kinds of things stewards usually know and has supporting documents. The gateman knows what those heavy sacks they are continually lugging in and out contain.

    “How times have changed?” I can almost hear the PEP reminisce.

    In the good old days, empty overhead water reservoirs used to be the preferred storage for the kind of money that has been a staple of the news. So were chest freezers, until one-time U.S. Congressman William J. Jefferson, Democrat of Louisiana, gave the game away.

    The FBI found interred in his freezer bundle after bundle of shrink-wrapped dollar bills amounting to the tens of thousands, believed to have been corruptly obtained from a prominent Nigerian politician.

    Don’t count on them to acknowledge it, but they must have learned a thing or two from Nigeria’s armed robbers. Years before FBI agents zeroed in on the Congressman’s freezer, Nigeria’s armed robbers had made full access to that receptacle a prime objective of their operations.

    On breaking into a home, they would head straight for the freezer and methodically empty it in search of cash or other valuables.  They would then move to the kitchen and rummage through sacks of gari or rice or beans or yam flour, in case other valuables were concealed therein.  That was back when you could purchase these commodities by the bagful.

    For good measure, they would upend shelves piled high with books, rip apart slim volumes, shake the stouter ones off their spines, and generally leave behind a huge mess.  All this was before syndicated kidnapping supplanted armed robbery as the surest and least risky path to money.

    Back then, politically exposed persons had little to fear even from armed robbers and even less to fear from law-enforcement officials.

    Still, there are politically exposed persons and politically exposed persons.  It is some consolation if, compared with others in that league, you are a minor player. Nothing may yet come of your gnawing fears.

    The day that should worry you is the day you overhear your steward ask the steward next door across the fence, “Old boy, dem whistleblower sef, how dem dey operate?  Especially if, after that encounter, your steward’s face turned aglow and his eyes danced in ways you had not seen them do since you hired him seven years ago.

    Then you know that the game is up.

  • An assassination plot that failed

    An assassination plot that failed

    If there is anything more deplorable than the dastardly bombardment this past weekend of the country home of Senator Daniel Jonah (Dino) Melaye in Aiyetoro-Gbedde, in Ijumu LGA of Kogi State, with the object of assassinating its distinguished resident, it is the failure of the National Assembly to end its recess and rush back to Abuja to deal with what must be judged a clear and present threat to the Nigerian nation and everything it stands for.

    What is the Nigerian nation without its premier legislative body, constitutionally mandated to act as a check on the Executive and curb its tendency wherever it is implanted to overreach?  For all practical purposes, an attempt on the life of a Distinguished Senator is ipso facto also an attempt to dismember and dismantle the Nigerian nation as we know it.

    Given the amount of speaking time he gets on the floor of the Senate, to say nothing of the wide latitude he is permitted, it must be that in its reckoning, Melaye emblematises the best values of that assembly.

    The fiery passion he brings to bear on issues recondite and prosaic sometimes gets in the way of the brilliant delivery for which he was well known in debating circles in his high school days.  Even so, few will dissent from the proposition that on a good day, his firm grasp of the issues, the incisiveness with which he expounds them, his mastery  of legislative strategy and tactics, plus his comportment and deportment, unfailingly ennoble that institution and lend not a little credence to its claim to pre-eminence.

    And yet, at this writing three days after the armed attack on his residence by people with murder on their minds, Melaye’s colleagues have not bestirred themselves to cut short their recess and return to Abuja to hold an extraordinary session devoted exclusively to this extraordinary development, the despicable intent of which, it is necessary to insist, was to deprive the Nigerian nation of Melaye’s sage counsel and sane guidance on the pressing issues of the day.

    Can’t they see that a threat to any Senator is a threat to all Senators, and that an armed attack on a Senator is an armed attack not merely on all Senators, serving, emeriti and deceased, but also on the Senate as an institution and everything it represents?

    But all is not lost.

    It is not too late for the Senate to rise in solidarity with its beleaguered member for Kogi West and apprise friend and foe alike that its distinguished members will never submit to intimidation from any quarters, least of all from a desultory assemblage of gun-toting village touts who, fortunately, can’t even shoot straight.

    It is not too late to put them and their ilk on notice that they are labouring under a delusion if they think they can continually assail the Senate with impunity

    Before examining the Senate’s options, it is necessary to isolate some elements of the armed attack.

    Like the security raids that have been yielding vast, orphaned fortunes in the best currencies in the unlikeliest places, the attack was not a fishing expedition.  The perpetrators knew the house; they also knew that Melaye was in residence at that particular time.

    They must have known, too, that he was not accompanied by his security detail.  Only two vehicles were parked in the compound.  Melaye had chosen to travel light, in keeping with the modesty for which he is well known.

    The rampaging touts, cowards all, took advantage of the security vacuum to launch their satanic attack.

    Now, why was the distinguished Senator, enemy of cant and humbug, and tenacious anti-corruption crusader to boot, left so dangerously exposed?  This question will have to be the starting point in a comprehensive Senate investigation into the failed assassination attempt.

    Why was he not accompanied on the trip by a full security complement? Why were the best officers not deputed to watch over him from the moment he set out on the trip?

    Why did it take the local police chief who lives down the road more than two hours to respond to the Senator’s distress call?  And why did the police area commander based in Kabba, 13 miles away, fail to rush his men to Aiyetoro-Gbedde to lift the armed siege to the residence?

    Why have no suspects been arrested or arraigned?

    The Senate will have to summon the Inspector-General of Police, the head of the Department of State Services, the director-general of the National Assembly Secretariat and the staffers responsible for scheduling constituency visits and arranging advance payment of allowances pertaining to same – all of them will have to be summoned to explain on oath how and why these gross derelictions occurred.

    They will of course have to appear before the Senate in their official uniforms and accoutrements. For good measure, since the matter relates to competence and preparedness for the job, they should be required to bring along the originals of all their academic credentials, from primary to finishing school, not forgetting a detailed breakdown of their incomes and expenditures for the past five budget-years.

    What of the local people, whose interests Melaye has championed at every opportunity with the utmost punctiliousness, and for whom he has made incalculable sacrifices?  Ingrates, all.  They did not raise the perfunctory alarm to signal that bad people were operating in the neighbourhood, nor did they fire shots to warn the marauders that they did not have the field entirely to themselves.

    What of the monarch of Aiyetoro-Gbedde kingdom, where Melaye belongs in the titled nobility? If he is worth his crown, if he is a true heir to his illustrious forebears, the monarch should have divined the attack to the minutest detail months before it occurred.  So, why did he not warn the Senator, a member of the royal court, to stay away from danger?

    More crucially, why did the monarch not perform the traditional oblations to ward off danger and save his domain the bad publicity the armed attack on Melaye’s residence was sure to set off?

    The monarch and the entire royal court should be summoned to explain to the Senate how they could have allowed all this to happen.  They will of course have to appear in their full traditional regalia, and with the originals of the instruments appointing them to their offices.  They will also have to justify the hefty grants they receive from the Federation Account through the Local Government Council.

    This list comprises only the first wave of officials who may have by acts and omissions contributed to the treasonous assault on a distinguished member of the Senate as well as the integrity of the Republic.

    At some point, the distinguished Senator Melaye himself will have to explain under oath how he came to attract so much obloquy from his constituency and to be held in such loathing abhorrence by a vocal section thereof.

    Before the Senate went into recess, Melaye had appeared in one of its business sessions decked out in the doctoral robes of Ahmadu Bello University as further evidence that he is an alumnus in good standing. The university’s vice chancellor was wearing his workaday clothes during his Senate testimony in support of Melaye’s claim.

    For the special inquiry I am proposing, Melaye should be required to wear the academic robes commensurate with his degree.  The vice chancellor will be required to back Melaye’s claim afresh, this time with the chairman of the University’s Governing Council, the registrar, the bursar, the librarian, and the director of works and services in tow.

    All of them will have to submit their certificates, transcripts and letters of appointment (originals only, please) to forensic scrutiny.

    The Senate must get to the root of this matter, even if that means suspending every other business indefinitely.

  • Once upon a thriving postal service

    Once upon a thriving postal service

    When last did you purchase a postage stamp, an aerogramme, a money order, mail a letter to a friend  or relation, send a telegram, check your private mail box, have the mail carrier deliver a letter to your home, or transact any business through the post office?

    For many in the attentive audience, I suspect the answer is:  Long, long ago.  Parcels and packages are still dispatched through the post office, mainly by those who cannot afford the higher fees charged by courier agencies. They are rare sights these days, almost like apparitions.  But I gather that mail carriers still do the rounds in some of the better neighbourhoods.

    But by and large, the post office has long ceased to be the focal centre of towns big and small, where residents converged to transact all manner of business, from buying postage stamps to purchasing or cashing money orders and virtually everything in between.

    When I was growing up, school, the post office, and the public library defined and shaped my day and that of my schoolmates.  School over, we converged on the post office, situated strategically in the middle of the town, to collect the mail that the Armel’s Mail Transport Service had just brought in from Owo, some 63 miles away, with passengers disembarking in Kabba or boarding for Lokoja, the truck’s final destination,

    There we got to know who was arriving in town and who was leaving.  There was a good chance that you might run into an uncle or family friend who might hand you a penny, sometimes a three-penny coin, which usually went into buying stuff from the hawkers milling around the blue Mercedes-Benz truck

    For the most part, we went there to hang out.

    But the glossy catalogue you had requested from Lennard’s Mail Order Store in Bristol, in the UK, might    be in the mail that had just arrived.  A package containing the balloon or fancy sunglasses or tin whistle    you had selected from the catalogue and ordered through the post office might even be in the mail. Or notification that you had been accepted into the secondary school of your choice, with partial or full scholarship.

    Or perhaps even more exciting, a letter from someone’s girlfriend or boyfriend schooling hundreds of miles away.

    Mind you, this was an age when writing letters was a prized art.  You chose your stationery with the utmost care.  When I was old enough to play the game in high school, my favourite was the unlined blue Croxley bond writing tablet, quarto or octavo, with matching envelopes.   And it helped enormously if you had a fine handwriting.

    The letter could also be offer of employment for your brother from the Public Works Department, better known as the PWD.

    Or the latest instalment of your teacher’s tuition notes for the Ordinary or Advanced Level General Certificate in Education from the Rapid Results College, London, or Wolsey Hall, Oxford.  Or course  material for the Inter BA or BSc of the University of London. Or from some professional credentialing  body overseas.

    It could even be course material for a full degree of the University of London that generations of Nigerians had earned as external candidates, among them Obafemi Awolowo (B.Com), Chike Obi (BSc, Mathematics), Sam Aluko (BSc Economics), Afe Babalola (LL. B),and Simeon Adebo (BA, in English, and later LL. B)).

    The post office delivered the material intact and without fail, and transmitted your answer scripts to the examiners just as punctiliously, regardless of your location.

    After the mail truck had departed for Lokoja, we shifted base to the public library about a quarter of a mile away where we signed off as “scholars” from the local primary schools (we could not sign off as “students” because the real students would put us in our place), thumbed indifferently through some tomes, played table tennis, and generally had a good time. We dispersed at dusk, to resume the routine the next day.

    But hanging out at the post office was our chiefest pleasure.

    Those were the glory days of the Nigerian Postal Service (NIPOST). Not even the exodus to Biafra of an estimated one-half of its work force could do significant damage to its reputation for efficiency and reliability.  The postmaster invariably belonged in the local aristocracy.

    Then, something happened early in the Second Republic, in the time of President Shehu Shagari.  A large heap of undelivered mail was found in the bush near the international airport, in Ikeja, dumped there by those entrusted with delivering them.  More heaps surfaced later, here and there.  Mail delivered on schedule was often found to have been tampered with, their valuable enclosures pilfered.

    Public confidence in the postal system began to wane.  But worse was to come.

    The postal or money order issued by the post office at a small commission was a fully negotiable instrument, as good as cash. If you mailed a postal order with a face value of, say, N10 to your ward schooling in Kaduna as pocket money, on presenting that instrument to the post office in Kaduna, your ward stood to receive the same amount in cash.

    And it was so dependable that it was the instrument through which you paid for university application forms, the West African Examinations Council’s fees, and many other services.

    Suddenly, the instrument was no longer negotiable.  You could not redeem your postal or money order. Your money was effectively trapped in the postal system, long before the Saraki family–owned Societe General Bank swallowed up customers’ deposits running into hundreds of millions of Naira and earned the dubious distinction of bequeathing to the national discourse the metaphor of the bank as a trap.

    If the postal system had any reputation left, that reputation was effectively eviscerated by communications and information technology.

    Why buy a postage stamp to dispatch a letter that will travel by snail mail carried to destination by when you can transmit it free and have it received almost instantaneously and acknowledged in like manner?  Why send telegrams that, for all their advertised speed, might still be lying on a postal clerk’s counter by the time your text message pings on the recipient’s smart phone half a world away?  Why mail your answer scripts to your tutor overseas when you can transmit them online, free and at close to warp speed?

    Why mail packages through the post office when courier services can offer faster and more reliable service to justify their higher charges?

    These are some of the questions the NIPOST must grapple with as it seeks to reinvent itself and operate in a technetronic age that has reduced its once-healthy revenue stream to a trickle.

    Last year, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, NIPOST derived almost one-half of its total revenue of N8.84 million from Stamp Duties – taxes levied on legal documents such as cheques, receipts, marriage licences, receipts, and land transactions.  On the other hand, traditional postal activities such as mail service and parcel clearance and delivery accounted for roughly 25 per cent of total revenue.

    As part of its re-positioning, NIPOST recently replaced its 38 territories with a seven-zone structure, run on leaner resources while maintaining efficient service delivery.  But its problem is not bureaucratic or organisational.   It is operating with old tools and old methods in a world that has changed profoundly and keeps changing.

    That is the trouble not just with NIPOST, but with the postal service everywhere.

    In the UK, there has been talk of privatising the Royal Mail, one of the most efficient in the world, to cut costs and boost revenue, with no loss in delivery capacity.  In the United States, where the post office sells packaging material and greeting cards for all occasions, there has been a proposal to end mail deliveries on Saturdays, again as a cost-saving measure. They are unlikely to restore the system to its glory days.

    Like that of practically every other service or institution, the shape of the postal service of the future is uncertain.  What is certain is that the post office as we know it has probably seen its best days.

    Emblematic of this decline is the once-majestic General Post Office building on the Marina, in Lagos. In its heyday, it bustled with people and activity.  Today it is a derelict place, with shady characters lurking in the dank corners of its main business floor.

  • Matters pharmaceutical

    Matters pharmaceutical

    As you inch toward the proverbial three score and ten years, you begin to pay closer attention to                    the prescription and off-the counter drugs that have become a part of your daily regimen, particularly    their advertised side effects.

    When the drug comes packaged with the relevant literature in several languages that usually include English, you get to know the possible side effects and to decide whether taking the drug is worth the risks. More on this point later.

    But in Nigeria, drugs often come packaged with instructions in every language except English –French, German, Chinese, Greek, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Turkish, Serbo-Croat, Korean, Sanskrit, and what have you.  The friendly neighbourhood pharmacist who may have recommended the drug can tell you the dosage, but that is about all the help he or she can render.

    Do something about this, NAFDAC.  In the interest of public health and safety, insist that English must   be one of the languages in which instructions and information on drug imports are written. Allow several months for compliance. Thereafter, punish those in default.

    Trifling as that task might seem compared to the urgent challenge of keeping out of circulation fake, expired and under-performing drugs comprising 70 percent of the market, according to informed sources, it would be a significant step forward.

    Even when all regulations are in place and are duly enforced, you still have to decide whether the drug  is worth the risk.  This is because many the drugs usually prescribed for the afflictions of persons in this age group often have possible side effects that may be even more alarming than the affliction itself.

    Consider, first, a common prescription drug for treating high blood pressure.

    Ordinary side effects include dehydration, which may result in confusion, fast or irregular heartbeat, severe dizziness, or seizures. More serious side effects include non-stop nausea, abdominal pain, yellowing skin, fever, chills, signs of kidney problems, pain in the joints, persistent sore throat, and easy bleeding.

    Consider next the medication for a condition that causes blotches on the skin, discolours the nails, and makes it difficult to use fingers and joints for common, everyday tasks. Side effects include, but are not limited to, feeling faint, swelling in the face, lips, mouth, tongue or throat, trouble breathing or throat tightness, and skin rash.

    Consider as well a prescription drug used in the treatment of various kinds of arthritis.  Possible side effects include tuberculosis and infections caused by viruses or fungi, muscle aches, numbness, problems with vision, weakness in arms and legs, decrease  in blood cells that help fight infectious diseases or stop bleeding, heart failure, liver failure, and cancer.

    Consider, finally, prescription drugs that have suicidal thinking as a side effect.  One drug used in the treatment of asthma belongs in that category.  So does another, used to help adults quit smoking.

    The literature on all of them adds helpfully that what you are reading is only a summary of possible side effects and that you should consult your doctor or pharmacist if you notice others not listed.

    The consolation in all this is that the side effects were for the most part observed in an insignificant number of clinical trials.  Still, a chance is a chance.   One chance in a googol (the figure 1 followed by 100 zeros) might seem comfortingly nebulous, but it is a chance nevertheless.

    The hope must be that the time never comes when a patient faces the stark and urgent choice of continuing to live with a disabling condition or embarking on a cure that may be worse than the disease.

    Re:  With March on my mind

     

    A grave omission . . .

     

    How could I have omitted Chief ‘Folake “The Lady SAN” Solanke, who turned 85 on March 29, from the “children of March” (the phrase is Niyi Osundare’s) whom I sketched last week?

    Chief Solanke is a towering public figure in Nigeria, widely admired for her formidable forensic skills, her distinguished public service, her compelling presence, her poised, regal bearing, her impeccable grooming, her unfailing graciousness, and, of course, her exquisite tailoring.

    Chief Solanke earned a special BA in Latin and Mathematics from the University of Durham, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in 1954 and followed it up with a Diploma in Education.  She taught high school Latin and Mathematics before returning to Nigeria. Six years later, she was back in the UK, to study at Grays Inn, London, completing the programme in two years.

    She is a woman of many firsts — first woman to set up her own law firm, first to chair the old Western Nigeria Television Service, first female commissioner in former Western State (she held the portfolio of Establishments and Training), and the first to take Silk.

    It was my fortune to chaperon her when she came to Lagos with her husband, the distinguished surgeon, Professor Toriola Solanke, to chair the 1991 Guardian Lecture presented by Ali Mazrui, the multiperspectival scholar of global renown, until his death in 2014 the Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities at the Centre for Global Cultural Studies, University of Binghamton, Binghamton, in upstate New York.

    She presided over the proceedings with grace and finesse, but with firmness when the situation warranted it.  Since then she and Professor Toriola, unfortunately no longer with us, always received  me with their accustomed warmth and graciousness whenever our paths crossed.

    When Chief Solanke was elected first African president of Zonta International, a global service organisation devoted to advancing the status of women, I wrote to congratulate her on the distinction.

    A week later, my letter came back, with a handwritten note from Chief Solanke thanking me ever so graciously for the spirit behind it but pointing out that what it said was clearly not what I meant, and would I kindly withdraw and replace it with another that reflected what I had meant to say?

    I was shattered.

    “The distinction could have gone to a worthier person,” the letter said in cold print.

    In my handwritten draft, the particular sentence read “The distinction could not have gone to a worthier person.”  My secretary had in an uncharacteristic lapse omitted the critical word “not” and inadvertently turned a congratulatory message into a gross libel.  And I had signed off on the typescript without reviewing it.

    The lesson lives with me to this day.

     

    . . . And a correspondent remembers

     

    Your article “With March on my mind” ignored a particular feminine personality Mariam Abacha with whom I share the March 4 birthday.  She will be remembered as a lady to whom Gen Oladipo Diya carried a big greeting card in one of the intriguing Aso Rock days of the Abacha years.

    One of my two daughters turned to me and said, “Dad, while you and others in Ogun State shivered under Diya, Mariam got him to kneel down in presenting the big card.”

    My other daughter countered, “She must be representing all those born on March 4.”

    Lóbátán!

    That was my consolation. Mariam Abacha turned 70 this year. We share the same day and year of birth. How times fly and change.

    Thanks for the article.

     

     

  • With March on my mind

    With March on my mind

    In these days when the seasons are becoming less clearly defined, when snow falls in Sahara and you can venture outdoors casually dressed in midwinter as you would on a hot summer day, the coming of spring is still as eagerly awaited as of old.

    Heralded by March, spring is the season of new life, of rebirth and renewal; the return of long days, when the drab uniformity of winter wardrobe yields  to a riot of rich colours on the streets;  when flowers come into full bloom and fill the air with their fragrance;  when,  to borrow from Victor Hugo, “it seems that everything laughs.”

    March also marks the birthdays of many notable Nigerians, starting off with Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s on March 6, which the lady of the house proudly shares with the sage.  Fittingly, Awo’s 108th posthumous birthday lecture was given by the respected historian and author, Professor Banji Akintoye, a member of the Sage’s Brains Trust and a leading member of the opposition in the Second Republic’s Senate. Compared with that legislative assembly, faults and all, what currently passes for a Senate is a sad regression.

    Akintoye spoke on a subject that was always at the core of Chief Awolowo’s thoughts:  the imperative of true federalism in Nigeria multinational state, and the centrality of knowledge in human affairs.  He challenged Nigerian youths to emulate Awolowo who had carved a path to greatness by the time he was 40 years old

    The challenge was not misplaced, considering that in Awolowo’s home state of Ogun, the school-age population reportedly knew much more about Obafemi Martins the international soccer star than they knew about  Obafemi Awolowo. To shut History out of the school curriculum in Nigeria as they have done is to condemn the younger generation to a future innocent of the ennobling achievements of the past as well as its chastening lessons.

    Awolowo was a polymath:  economist, lawyer, journalist, philosopher, parliamentary debater, and  brilliant organiser.  He was also a writer of the first rank, though not generally recognised as such.   Consider his Path to Nigeria’s Freedom his allocutus when he was about to be jailed on a dubious charge of treasonable felony.  Consider before that his 1944 letter to a wealthy fellow Ijebu asking for an unsecured  loan in the staggering amount of £1, 400 to enable him go to study law in the United Kingdom, and this summation in his autobiography AWO on the joys of lawyering.

    “To engage , without bitterness or animosity, in the fiercest contention; to cultivate the habit of always examining  both sides of a problem, and to present the side you espouse with forensic forcefulness and assuredness; to identify yourself with your client and to enter into his feelings as if you were the plaintiff or the defendant or the prisoner at the Bar; to propound and urge points of law which are sometimes difficult, sometimes not all too tenable, or sometimes so fine and abstruse that it is not at all easy to distinguish one point from another; to be utterly fearless and unsparing in combat; to acquire an independence of outlook in all things and to enjoy immunity in all you say and do as long as it is legitimate and within the bounds of professional etiquette; to take part in fostering the cause of justice  and equity in their total impartiality before the very bulwark of the citizens’ liberty and individual freedom – all these and more are the inherent and distinctive attributes of a noble profession  which I love and will forever cherish.”

    That is a whale of a sentence, but also a beauty.  Only a gifted writer could have pulled it off.

    Former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s 80th symbolic birthday came up on March 5, just one day before the Awo anniversary, symbolic because, like many in his generation, he has no record of his birth.  Because of this gap in his personal history, he celebrated his 65th birthday twice

    The anniversary marked the grand unveiling of his controversial Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library, about which I had written scathingly when he embarked on it.  It was gracious of him — unusually gracious, some would say — to thank Chief Olusegun Osoba, former Governor of Ogun State, for allocating the choice real estate on which the majestic edifice stands.

    One day, as Obasanjo was waxing lyrical in his Otta Farm House about how the prize Awolowo had sought in vain had literally fallen into his laps, he who was reared in poverty, I interjected in a fit of impetuosity that, nevertheless, he was condemned forever to live in Awo’s shadow.

    His face tightened, his eyes bulged, and his frame swelled.  I surveyed the room for the nearest exit.  His aides told me later that he must have a high regard for me.  If any other guest had said the same thing to Obasanjo’s hearing and in his home, they said, that person would have left bearing a mark of his rage.

    That was long before his second coming as a two term-president.   Like all great men, he made great mistakes.  But given his cumulative record of achievement and his standing in his own right as a statesman of global renown, I must now take back my taunt that he was forever condemned to live in Awo’s shadow.  To his credit, he never held it against me.

    Dr Onukaba Adinoyi-Ojo, journalist, playwright and public intellectual, was killed in a bizarre accident on March 7, two days shy of his 57th birthday.  He was unassuming, personable, and full of promise.  Incidentally, the accident that claimed his life occurred as he was returning to his Abuja base from the unveiling of Obasanjo’s Presidential Library.

    I gather from those “on ground” that Obasanjo has issued no statement on the passing of Onukaba, his estranged protégé, biographer and collaborator.

    Please, Mr President, say that this is not true.

    Our much acclaimed poet and future Nobelist, Professor Niyi Osundare, turned 70 on March 12.  His     joy on attaining this milestone was somehow muted by the deaths  in quick succession  of the erudite and retiring literary scholar of the first rank, Professor Ben Obumselu, and the great Caribbean poet and Nobel laureate in Literature,  Derek Walcott, both of whom he knew quite well.

    His eloquent tributes to their memory say as much about him as it says of his departed friends.

    Subomi Balogun, corporate lawyer, pioneer merchant banker, founder and chairman of First City Monument Bank and philanthropist, turned 83 on March 12.  The celebration was modest, compared to that of the 80th as well as the 60th, which I had the pleasure of attending in his Ijebu-Ode country home in 1994 at his personal invitation.

    He is still driven by the passion for excellence and Christian doctrine that made him what he is.

    Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, a pivotal figure in the political landscape and prime architect of the grand coalition that swept the All Progressives Congress into power, turns 65 tomorrow.  To take a good measure of his political stature and influence, look no farther than the disarray and the insolvency in which the PDP has been mired since its crushing defeat in the 2016 general election.

    For the 16 years it held power, the PDP advertised itself as Africa’s biggest political party.  It had ample access to resources for all manner of grandiose projects, including a N16 billion, 12-storey national headquarters, for which its well-heeled supporters and governors in PDP-controlled states plonked down more than N6 billion at the launch.

    Today, the project stands abandoned, a monument to excess and misplaced priorities. Within months of losing power, the PDP could not even pay the salaries of the skeleton staff hanging out in its secretariat, for want of a better alternative.

    Then consider that at the time the PDP was threatening to hold power for 60 years in the first instance, Tinubu and his associates in the Action Congress, and later in the Action Congress of Nigeria, constituted the only barrier to the PDP’s total takeover of Nigeria.  Stolen election after stolen election shrank his political base in the Southwest and Edo.  Abuja tightened the screws.

    It was in this hostile climate that Tinubu set out to reclaim, ward by ward, constituency by constituency and state by state his base on which the PDP had foisted its visionless rule by electoral fraud on a scale almost beyond belief.

    They called him “the last man standing” for good reason.

  • Once upon two uniforms

    Once upon two uniforms

    First, an acknowledgement, and then a caveat.

    I owe the title of this piece to Femi Osofisan’s play, Once upon Four Robbers.  I cannot claim much familiarity with that work.  But somehow, its title bobbed up from the deepest recess of memory, and I shamelessly adapted it.

    So, to Himself the Okinba, ìbà.

    The caveat:  Other than the title, Osofisan’s play and this piece have nothing in common.

    Twenty-seven years and two months separate the dramas related here.  The first one was acted out in a hallowed courtroom of the High Court of Lagos, and the other in a rowdy session of the Senate.  The one was riveting drama, the other an unsubtle show of power.

    First, the court drama.

    The famous prisoner, jailed for expressing a perfectly legitimate request that his case be assigned to a judge other than the one before whom his prayers had been denied in as many as 10 previous appearances, insisted on turning up before yet another tribunal in his prison uniform.

    Prison officials would have none of it.  He was a prisoner all right, but they maintained that it would be unseemly for him to appear before a tribunal in prison clothes.  That may have been a concession to the fiery attorney, one of the sharpest dressers in the business.

    But he was not flattered.  He was not ashamed to be a prisoner. He was not embarrassed to be seen  in public dressed in prison uniform. Whose body was it, anyway?

    The Tribunal was just as troubled as the prison authorities.  Why would the suspect insist on appearing before so grave and dignified a body in prison clothes?   After all, he was not your run-of-the-mill prisoner but an honourable member of the Bar who, in another circumstance could be standing before the Tribunal as counsel rather than culprit.

    Perhaps the prisoner’s attorney could persuade him to appear before the court in his everyday clothes  and not in his prison uniform?

    No, thanks.  All that the law required, his sedate and urbane leading counsel replied, was that his client appear before the Tribunal. His client was ready to answer the Tribunal’s summons, without preconditions.

    The police officer despatched to fetch the prisoner returned, without him. The prisoner would not step out of the precincts except in his prison uniform, the officer reported.  The proceedings were adjourned.

    Two weeks later, the prisoner was brought to court wearing that contentious uniform, ebullient as ever, showing not the faintest sign of embarrassment and decidedly not asking to be pitied. If anyone ever looked spiffy in a prison uniform, it was Prisoner Number J60/4990.

    The press photographers clicked away.  They knew a unique moment when they saw one.

    A robust sense of humour was unlikely to be counted even among the prisoner’s minor assets.  But he had an almost infinite capacity to surprise.  And so, he urged the photographers to make a good job of taking the snapshots, and to be sure to send the prints, with his compliments, to the kabiyesi judge who had jailed him for contempt.

    The Tribunal commenced its assignment at last, under an intriguing division of judicial labour whereby a suspect, arrested by the federal authorities (unlawfully, said a judge) and detained by the same federal authorities (lawfully, the same judge said), is prosecuted by the Lagos State Government before a Tribunal empanelled by the federal authorities.

    But its discomfiture at having to try the suspect in his prison uniform was almost palpable.

    Not for long, however. Between the first session at which the prisoner did not show up and the second one at which he turned up in the prison uniform they found so discomfiting, some enterprising prison official had combed ancient statute books and found, to the immense relief of everyone in that corner, a law that apparently prohibited appearing in court or before a tribunal wearing a prison uniform.

    This deus ex machina was read out solemnly to the prisoner. He was unimpressed, and so was his attorney. It was not immediately clear whether this was a contrivance, an ingenuous interpolation. But it resolved the problem, and the prisoner soon regained his freedom.

    Prisoner Number J60/4990 was none other than Gani Fawehinmi, our Gani of cherished memory, and the foregoing is based on my column with the same title for The Guardian (January 30, 1990), reproduced in my book, Diary of a Debacle.  His attorney was the legal titan Chief GOK Ajayi (SAN), also since deceased.

    The second case about a uniform has been playing out lately on the floor of the Senate, with television cameras beaming it live to a national audience.  It has little of the texture, the subtlety of the Fawehinmi case.  But who cares for subtlety when you can have mass entertainment guaranteed to take away attention from the pains of the recession and other discontinuities of social life, however briefly?

    At the centre of the drama is an unlikely figure, Colonel Hameed Ibrahim Ali (retired), a former military governor of Kaduna State, and currently Comptroller-General of Customs and Excise, or rather the official uniform he has chosen not to wear to work, or to appear before the Senate.

    The Customs Service had been demanding proof of payment of duty on pre-owned vehicles from end-users who had bought them directly from smugglers, or from dealers who had bought them from smugglers.  Brimming with unaccustomed solicitude for the plight of the unfortunate end-users who stood to be gravely exploited, the Senate asked that the practice be stopped.  For good measure, it invited the Comptroller-General to appear before it to defend his controversial directive.

    Ali had sent two of his deputies to represent him.  The Senate would not receive them, saying that its rules precluded appearances by persons other than heads of agencies.  It was Comptroller-General Ali,  or nobody else.

    Bowing to pressures from the Senate, Ali announced that he was suspending the directive ahead of his scheduled appearance, which he made in mufti, not in his full official uniform as the Senate had demanded with all the threats and tantrums that Dino Melaye and his cohorts could work up.

    They rebuked him for insubordination, warned him severely to come dressed in his official uniform for his next appointment or face some unspoken consequence, and walked him out.  But not before he had told them that no law enjoined him to wear the uniform of the Customs Service.

    As far as I know, nobody has cited any law that Ali has breached.  Convention perhaps, or tradition.  In any case, the kerfuffle is not about law.  The Senate rarely cares about law, except when it serves its purpose.

    The whole thing is about power.  In formal terms, the balance lies with the Senate, which can, at summary proceedings, invoke its contempt powers to jail for a limited time those who disobey its orders.

    Ali could defy the Senate and end up in jail, like Gani, or walk away from the job.  The one will portray the Senate as overbearing, if not overreaching; the other will hand it a dubious victory.

    There is a third possibility.

    Ali could challenge the Senate’s order at law and then, taking a cue from Senate President Bukola Saraki, find or manufacture every conceivable distraction, explore every interstice of the law, no matter how unpromising, pile objection upon objection and adjournment upon adjournment, and with scant regard to jurisdiction hopscotch from one court to another and generally draw out the hearings until the Eighth Senate will have run its term.

  • The road to Lagos Airport

    The road to Lagos Airport

    In practically every other country, getting to – and getting out of –the major international airport is a breeze; in Nigeria, it is a fraught obstacle race.

    And so, from my waking up until the plane takes off, any day I am flying out of the Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos is one of foreboding and high anxiety.

    As a rule, I do not venture far beyond my lodgings in Anthony Village or Maryland, Ikeja, as the case may be, for fear that I might find it impossible to return in time to head to the airport. But there are many other factors over which I have no control.

    What if the skies opened and the roads were flooded and it was impossible to get to the airport before scheduled departure?  I know many domestic and international passengers who were caught in precisely that situation.

    What if an unlatched container fell off the truck and effectively blocked entry into or egress from the airport?  Such accidents are not uncommon in Lagos.  Who says, then, that a mishap like that cannot occur that very day, at a strategic point on the road to the airport?

    Another argument between stalwarts of rival factions of the road and transport workers union could turn Oshodi, by no means the most tranquil neighbourhood in town, into a riot scene, with motorists abandoning their vehicles and scampering for safety and the usual miscreants taking advantage to do brisk business as is their custom.

    The possibilities are legion, the uncertainty almost numbing.  As four o’clock approaches, I can almost feel my blood pressure rising.  That is the hour I have chosen from long habit to leave for the airport to catch a flight scheduled to depart some six hours later.

    Barring any of the exigencies I mentioned above, I am reasonably sure that I would get to the airport, complete departure formalities and still have an hour or so to catch my breath and make some farewell calls before boarding.  And if it turned out that I had a much longer waiting time, there was plenty of reading material to keep me engaged.

    My ample head start, pardon a digression, once turned out to be providential. Traffic had flowed so smoothly that day that the check-in counter was just opening when I took my place on a short queue at the departure lounge.  Confidently, I reached for my travel documents in my handbag.

    My passport was not there.  It was nowhere to be found.  My options were clear but daunting. I could give up on the flight and cough up $400 as penalty for a new reservation that might open up, or I could dash home to retrieve passport and with some luck return to the airport in time for boarding.

    Entrusting my luggage to the young man who had conveyed me to the airport, I dashed out of the terminal building and breathlessly told the first taxi operator I saw my problem.  He obviously didn’t have an operating licence but that was not the time for nice discriminations.

    “Where is home?” he asked.

    “Maryland Estate.”

    “When is your flight?”

    I told him.

    He looked at his watch and smiled.  There was more than enough time.  He signaled to one of his boys and asked him to speed me off.

    “That would be N8,000,” the driver said, as I fastened the seat belt.  That was nothing, I reckoned, compared to the $400 I would have to plonk down for a new reservation if I missed the flight?

    We made it back to the airport in less than two hours.  After completing departure formalities, I still had some two hours to unwind before boarding.

    I had never experienced such frantic, aggressive and dizzying driving, such calculated disregard for the Highway Code. My heart was literally in my mouth most of the time I was in that battered Renault, a grateful but traumatized passenger.  It was an experience I hope I’ll never have to go through again.  For the driver it was just another assignment in the line of duty.  It was as if he fully expected the N4,000 that I gave him by way of gratuity.

    To return to my travel blues:  There was a time when I harboured apprehensions that an official taking an unusual interest in my passport or my person might ask me to step aside while other passengers were being processed  and finally, long  after the plane had departed, inform me with touching solicitude that he had received “orders from above” to hold on to my passport, and to ask me to report at my earliest convenience to that sprawling complex on Awolowo  Road,  in southwest Ikoyi, Lagos, to retrieve it.

    The apprehension was no fantasy.  It would finally materialize, but on my arrival from a foreign trip rather than at departure.

    There was also this apprehension that, as the plane prepared to taxi to the runway, representatives of law and order would suddenly show up and invite me to disembark, again invoking those dreadful “orders from above.”  But it never came to pass.

    Stanley Macebuh’s famous liberal temperament, excuse a final digression, almost snapped whenever anyone voiced the phrase “orders from above” to his hearing.  To him it was a tautology, and an ugly   one at that.  “Where else do orders come from?” he would ask rhetorically.  “Do they ever come from below?”

    My flight-day apprehensions almost never materialized, I am glad to report.  Still, they assail me on each and every such occasion.  And that is because of the road to Lagos Airport.  It is an unending nightmare.

    I often wonder:  What if a passenger plane crashed into some building on landing and disintegrated in  an inferno, as in those frightful clips of doomed flights shown ever so often on television?

    With the road to the airport through Oshodi clogged even on the best days and the road from the domestic terminal only slightly less congested, how quickly would first responders get to the scene, when minutes could make the difference between dying and surviving?  How quickly would the injured be evacuated to hospitals and trauma centres?

    An air ambulance would be the fastest mode of transportation at such moments, but how quickly can one be deployed? How many of such vehicles are available in Nigeria anyway?

    It is scandalous beyond belief that the main road to and from Lagos Airport has been allowed to stand for so long in such riotous disrepair.

    Lagos State Governor Akinwunmi Ambode has asked the Federal Government, the derelict owner of the road, to cede it to Lagos for fixing.  In its place, he plans to construct a 10-lane dual carriage way that will meet the highest international standard.  The drawings and building specifications have been completed, he said.

    There should be no quibbling over the matter.  If the Federal Government cannot and will not fix the road, it should gratefully cede it to the Lagos State Government.

     

     Niyi Osundare@70

    Our much garlanded poet, belletrist, humanist, voice of reason and courage, and intellectual of global stature, charmed man of letters who survived the rage and the trauma of Katrina and carried on as if they were no more than minor irritants;  distinguished teacher and mentor; visionary who made the Environment an object veneration and celebration well before scientists and policy-makers fully grasped the need to protect and preserve it; a scholar and a gentleman:  Oluwaniyi Osundare turned 70 last Sunday, March 12.

    Welcome to the Fraternity, Ákóyéjó.

    I have the permission of its denizens to impart to you by way of induction its secret handshake at the earliest opportunity.