The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Ekiti: Out of self-peonage

    On July 14, Ekiti snapped out of self-peonage.  From their odyssey, you could see the grim trap — and shame — of electoral folly; and the putative release — and joy — of electoral wisdom.

    Ekiti Kete are living proof of the severe beauty of democracy.  Choice is never wrong.  But you enjoy your wisdom, or endure your folly.

    But before you clobber the Ekiti masses, held captive by Ayo Fayose’s subversive “ponmo” aka  ”stomach infrastructure”, the big rod is for the Ekiti elite progressives, whose umpteenth fissuring birthed Fayose’s Stone Age demagoguery.

    From the results, Dayo Adeyeye’s Ise-Orun glorious vote haul cancelled out homeboy, Kolapo Olusola’s handsome lead in Ikere-Ekiti.

    Had Adeyeye not fallen out with Fayose, pleading grand betrayal, Olusola, other things being equal, could have coasted home to victory; and Fayose’s hegemony of shame continued.

    Yet, Adeyeye himself had no business with the political conservatives.  He stormed off, in a huff, over Kayode Fayemi, as Action Congress (AC) gubernatorial candidate, in 2007.

    Adeyeye’s, therefore, is a grim metaphor, for how South West progressives self-dissipate to swell the conservative ranks, to retard the region.

    From the Action Group (AG) blowout in the 1st Republic (1960-1966) and the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) crisis of the 2nd Republic (1979-1983), to the Olusegun Obasanjo reactionary South West “capture” of 2003, it’s a Sisyphean curse of self-dissipation, with catastrophic consequences.

    Remember Sisyphus in Greek mythology?  He was the one eternally condemned to rolling a stone up the hill.  But no sooner had the stone reached the top than it would roll back, for Sisyphus to restart his harsh chore!

    That has been the South West progressives’ gather-and-scatter tale.   They would work hard; quarrel even harder; self-dissipate and hand over power to the conservatives, to duly shatter, what they had built.

    That happened in post-Bisi Akande Osun.  It was utter paralysis during the Olagunsoye Oyinlola years (2003-2010), before the current Rauf Aregbesola restoration, bordering on renaissance (2010-2018).

    In Oyo, those years were just chaos.  Obasanjo’s political garrison commander, Lamidi Adedibu — not Governor Rashidi Ladoja — held sway.  Aside from partisan terror, Adedibu’s thugs levied war on the populace, with the Police looking elsewhere.

    Even in Ogun, where Otunba Gbenga Daniel flirted with conservative progressivism, the latter years of the self-christened Ogidi Omo collapsed under hideous crimes and sundry insecurity.

    Though current governor, Ibikunle Amosun, is at best a progressive centrist, contrasted to an Aregbesola, a progressive radical, there is a huge difference between Amosun and OGD, in quantum and quality of infrastructure delivery.

    This just confirms the potency of progressive peer-influence in the West, with the more interior states, taking positive cues from coastal Lagos, blessed with the gubernatorial continuum of Bola Tinubu, Babatunde Fashola and Akinwunmi Ambode, blazing a golden developmental trail.

    That positive peer influence would appear to have galvanized Oyo, under Abiola Ajimobi, another progressive centrist, to urgent renewal; with its huge and stellar infrastructure delivery and enhanced security, after the antediluvian tenure of Adebayo Alao-Akala, under “Alaafin Molete” Adedibu’s amala-and-abula politics.

    Which, in a way, makes this Fayemi Ekiti triumph, over the Fayose plague, all the more exciting, with the prospect of Ekiti rejoining the developmental train.

    Still, like the Greek Sisyphus, Fayemi is condemned to clearing Fayose’s debris (the months of salary backlogs, for starters), instead of picking up from where he left off four years ago.

    But let no one, four years hence in 2022, come bickering again over unconsummated pre-election deals, driving bitter partisans to fresh re-alignments, across ideological lines, that most times short-change the people.

    Fayemi, both in the vortex of such past allegations and clear victim of their blowouts (witness Fayose’s stupendous triumph in 2014), has the singular duty and honour to ensure such don’t repeat themselves.

    And Adeyeye too, after 11 years, must have realized you don’t look pretty by cutting your nose to spite your face, as he makes a triumphal return to his progressive habitat.

    Still, the South West progressives must learn to fix their intra-party politicking, and make jockeying for nomination just, fair and equitable.  Otherwise, a travesty like Fayose would always be a heartbeat away.

    Fayose! That has got to be the most damning blight on Yoruba civilization in recent history — empty, brash, boastful, uncouth, rude and crude: an unfazed believer, if ever there was one, in the ultimate triumph of evil over good!

    In 2014, he heralded his come-back, with fierce thugs in tow, by sacking a sitting court in Ado Ekiti.

    Four years later, he is exiting power by seizing state radio to announce fake election results! What outlawry!  What (un)gubernatorial banditry!

    But then, since the apple never really falls far away from its mother tree, Fayose’s power nativity could only but bear a monstrous offspring.

    Fayose first came, in 2003, with Obasanjo’s desperation to “capture” the West, after Obasanjo’s ringing rejection of 1999.

    Even after that collapsed in shame, the intrigue that yoked political father and son tearing them apart, he clawed back in 2014, under another desperado, Jonathan, essaying yet another West “capture”; after returning evil for the Yoruba support, in his 2011 presidential win.

    Jonathan was another Obasanjo creation.  Like Fayose, he fell out with his godfather.  Incidentally, Fayose has been a blight on Ekiti, just as Jonathan was a blight on Nigeria.

    Besides, Fayose marks the last of Obasanjo’s failed era — Olagunsoye Oyinlola (Osun), Rashidi Ladoja and Adebayo Alao-Akala (Oyo), Gbenga Daniel (Ogun) and the late Olusegun Agagu (Ondo).  Fayose (Ekiti) is clearly the worst of the lot: neither intellect nor comportment; just plain demagoguery!

    If the other Yoruba states have cause to rationalize these others, for some admirable traits — Agagu was a brilliant mind; and Oyinlola, like Alao-Akala, is an avuncular and personable soul — the Ekiti have no business tolerating Fayose’s starkness twice!  Happily, all that is in the past now!

    Notwithstanding Obasanjo, responsible for all this debacle, is apoplectic; and on another deceptive power-racketeering, en route to 2019!  He must think most Nigerians ardent fools!

    Still, Fayemi as governor, should imbibe better people skills and emotional intelligence, the two crucial fields Fayose has milked, in his soulless people deceit.

    Brilliance and erudition need not be a dissonance in governance.  They are key to driving developmental policy, as Fayemi excellently proved during his first coming.

    But people skills yoke the people to you, even during the hardest and most trying of times.

    Brilliance as hubris was Fayemi’s spectacular failure the last time round. This second coming provides excellent opportunity to correct those grave flaws.

  • Mandela@100: Beyond freedom

    Amidst the shouts of Amandla that perfused the cities and the townships and the streets and shacks of South Africa and the clenched-fist salutes that projected into the air like a vast forest of black bulbs the day Nelson Mandela took the oath of office; amidst the encircling euphoria, you could hear, if you listened closely, a still small voice tinged with reproach, saying “Madiba gave away too much.”

    That voice belonged to the generation of urban youths who drew their inspiration and motivations from Umkhonto (MK) Chief of Staff Chris Hani rather than from Mandela.

    At the celebration of the centenary of Mandela’s birth last week, that voice had become loud and insistent.  Nineteen years after the great man vacated power and five years after his death, he continues to enjoy public esteem on a scale that at times seems like hero worship. But more and more and more black South Africans who have seen little or no change in their circumstances since the fall of apartheid are questioning some of the choices and compromises he made in the negotiations that led to majority rule.

    Like Nkrumah, Mandela prized the political kingdom above all else.  Secure that kingdom, and everything would follow thereafter, Nkrumah had declared.  Political independence was secured in South Africa, but except in a few cases, it has not translated into significant black empowerment.

    Whites have retained the obscene privileges that apartheid conferred on them and even wangled some measure of power-sharing in the political realm.  In the economic realm, however, there was no talk of sharing, and scant recognition of any obligation to do so.

    It is fashionable and convenient for the white population and commentators to blame the situation in South Africa today on majority rule.  Not a few even take perverse satisfaction in it.  “We told you so, that South Africa will gradually go the way of Zimbabwe,” where the black majority wrested political control but the economy or what remains of it stayed firmly in white hands and the country descended into turmoil

    As in Zimbabwe, and indeed throughout sub-Sahara Africa, those who took over in South Africa after the collapse of apartheid bear not a little responsibility for the discontents of independence.  They failed to translate promise into performance on a significant scale.  For the most part, they did not practise accountability and transparency. Under their watch, the South African state was “captured” by a cabal of corrupt barons.

    But the blame has a much deeper root:  the economic structure that came with independence, a structure designed to perpetuate the inequities of colonial rule and apartheid.

    Nowhere are these inequities starker than in landholding.  Whites constituting just 25 percent of the population of South Africa hold 87 percent of the most productive land, leaving scraggy, barren patches to the majority.

    But this statistic does not tell the story adequately.

    A 1990 journey through southwestern Africa by this reporter and Dan Agbese, Haroun Adamu, Felix Adenaike, and Onyema Ugochukwu provided a vista that has not changed much. From the Namibian capital, Windhoek, where we had witnessed ceremonies marking that country’s independence, we embarked on the road trip to Johannesburg in a Volkswagen Kombi, with two chaperons whose task was to shield us from the indignities of “petty apartheid,” especially in the countryside.

    Our mission was to report on South Africa’s political transition to the attentive audience in Nigeria, and for the benefit of a government that had no diplomatic mission in South Africa.

    Nine hours into the trip, we stopped for the night in Upington, in the semi-desert karoo, home to the author and playwright Athol Fugard, and half-way between our point of departure and our destination.

    For those nine hours, we drove through parcel after parcel of uncultivated grassland that stretched as far as the eye could see, fenced in with razor wire.  Our chaperons said it was not unusual for individuals to own a million hectares of such land.  You paid a fee to the owner to hunt game (bush meat); for all practical purposes, the land was otherwise fallow and might as well have been abandoned altogether.

    It was the same story on the second half of our journey:  vast stretches of uncultivated but demarcated land, owned exclusively by absentee whites.

    On assignment in Kwazulu-Natal the following year, I brought up the land question with the Chief Minister, Mangosuthu Bethelezi.  How could so few whites have so much land unto themselves when the black majority has so little?

    He replied that he had been appealing and would continue to appeal to white landowners to release on negotiated terms parcels of land they do not need for distribution to land-starved blacks.  That approach has not worked.

    That is the pernicious legacy of apartheid, a legacy that they have not decisively addressed in South Africa.  Land redistribution, to call it by its proper name, is something the authorities will have to undertake if South Africa is not to go the way of Zimbabwe where Britain reneged on a promise to provide funds to help purchase land back from whites, and blacks had to resort to seizing white-owned farms, with the encouragement of a beleaguered President Mugabe.

    Mugabe is gone, but land remains as central to the fortunes of Zimbabwe as ever.  Campaigning last week in Zimbabwe’s presidential election, Mugabe’s successor, Ernest Mnangagwa, promised to follow a different tack.  He assured an assembly of white famers that they would be allowed to keep their farms.  He said Mugabe’s land reform had empowered influential politicians, soldiers and tribal chiefs who know nothing about farming and urged members of his audience to work together with the government to rebuild the country and restore its status as the region’s food basket.

    He will discover sooner or later that this policy will do little to keep in check Zimbabwe’s large army of land-hungry citizens.

    For the sake of future stability, if not equity and justice, some land distribution will have to take place in South Africa.

    To be sure, ownership of land alone does not make for success in agriculture.  Possession or acquisition of specialised knowledge and skills is essential.  Access to credit is essential.  A system of supports is essential.  Training will have to be reinforced with re-training.

    Any meaningful land reform must be informed by this strategy.

    White farmers and landowners in South Africa who have profited so much from the system have an obligation to give back by releasing land they do not need, and by equipping aspiring farmers with the skills and knowledge they require to make an impact on the economy.  They owe nothing less than that to Nelson Mandela who, to the disenchantment of a growing number of South Africans “gave away too much.”

    The international community should not just issue ringing condemnations of the seizure of white-owned farms by desperate, dispossessed blacks.  It should help mobilise funds to purchase land for redistribution, acquisition of knowledge and skills that will enhance production on new farms, and for a comprehensive review of apartheid-era pensions and other entrenched privileges.

    If at Mandela’s birthday anniversary next year the voices of the disenchanted grow louder and more insistent still, it will be because of the indifference of the white minority to the deepening privations of the black majority, and the fecklessness of the ruling authorities.

    Even if only out of enlightened self-interest, they must strive for a happier and more optimistic anniversary.

  • Stomach infrastructure 2.0

    How times change. Welcome Stomach Infrastructure 2.0. From a concept associated with the basest instincts for which the Ekiti electorate was only a little while back terribly savaged; its morphology into a permissive tool of electoral politics obviously says a lot says about the confounding dynamics of electoral politics in the nation’s perennially shifting moral firmament. Today, the Ekiti electorate are eminently entitled to rejoice in that the end-game somewhat justifies the means given their experience of pervasive meltdown in the last four years under the impertinent Ayodele Fayose.

    Not so however the debilitating poverty, the bye-product of which was the open trading of votes for all its terrible portents in what is at best a pot of porridge, now threatening to put a seal on the strain of the perversion unleashed by Fayose four years ago.

    That of course takes nothing away from the victory of the winner – Dr Kayode Fayemi, the new governor-elect. Take it or leave it, Fayemi’s 197,459 votes as against the 178,121 votes garnered by his PDP rival Professor Olusola Eleka would ordinarily have settled the matter. And that is even without the sweetener, the victory so spread across 12 as against his challenger’s four out of the 16 local governments as to make any disputation about unassailability to be quite frankly, suspect.

    And to imagine that this is the same Fayemi that could not take even a single local government in the 2014 gubernatorial election as an incumbent running against Fayose!

    Now, the story is that the election, like that of 2014, was somewhat flawed. It might well be. But then, the contest, as one might imagine, isn’t so much one of saint versus sinner, but which of the sinning party had the upper hand. If it came to anything, it seems a matter of one merely cancelling the other out. In any case, given the terrible injustices suffered by Fayemi and his party the Action Congress of Nigeria four years ago, perhaps only the most starry eyed idealist would expect Fayemi and his party, APC to play the dove while Fayose and his rampaging mob are allowed a field day to re-enact the 2014 magic. This time around, it seems a case of the game-master being beaten flatly at a game in which he claims to hold the ace!

    But then, talk of a tragic dimension to the farce: isn’t it sad, considering the impressive pedigrees of the two Ekiti sons supposedly sparring, that both not could, at any point during the husting, spare the time for an eyeball to eyeball debate if only to allow the electorate to size them up? Whereas Fayemi – who having been in the saddle for four years with clearly laid out plans for governance – could be deemed familiar to the electorate; not so Olusola Eleka, the PDP candidate who chose to remain in the shadows and so could not be held to anything, and so was practically missing in action. This of course left the enfant terrible, Ayodele Fayose, whose name although was not on the ballot, to strut the space, consumed as it were, by a messianic complex that bordered on the schizophrenic.

    For the 49-old professor of building engineering, the universe remains open and wide – in or out of public service.

    More than a week on, the debate rages on how the Ekiti battle was supposedly lost and/or won. Understandably, there are a throng out there who would swear that money played a major part in deciding the outcome. In all of this, the Ekiti electorate, for trading their cash for votes, are supposed to be the villains perhaps just like in 2014, when they supposedly voted for the god of the stomach against rational expectations.

    Quite frankly, I do not disagree that poverty could for most part explain such clear aversion to rational choice.  But then, this would apply all the elections that have held at all levels from the second republic till date in different parts of the country – with differences merely one of degrees rather than real substance. The big issue of course is that Ekiti, home to a proud and fiercely independent people, a people reckoned among the politically sophisticated in the world has in the last four years become a byword for everything base in electoral politics. That is what makes everything truly troubling.

    In other words, much as some of the current attempts to revile and cast our Ekiti folks with borrowed robes might come across as opportunistic and cheap, equally hard to ignore is the ugly spectre that flowed directly from the last two gubernatorial elections in the state. Which leaves the current task as simple as finding answers to the lone question of how a people so deep and knowledgeable could have been sold for so cheap.

    This is where the next four years might just make the difference. After four years of pointless and misdirected activism and the banality that governance has been reduced, the state can at least do with some focus and direction. To start with, it seems utterly incongruous that a state said to boast of the highest number of professors and PhDs would rank among the poorest in the Nigerian federation. It just doesn’t add up. Mercifully, the governor-elect has spoken of the values that define the Ekitis and the need to restore them. He spoke of respect for leaders, commitment to the people and aversion for brigandage and criminality and so on; these are certainly important although it remains to be seen how these could be achieved without a solid material base which in the end is measured by the overall improvement in the material conditions of the people. Stomach infrastructure might in the end not be so bad after all!

    As they say – what is the worth of Omoluwabi when the stomach is empty?

    For Fayemi, it is no doubt a familiar terrain. Which is why expectations are very high, this time around. Four years might seem a long way from now, the reality is that there is so much to be done. The reason he cannot afford those costly distractions.

    My congratulations, dear governor-elect.

  • nPDP, rAPC and allied nomads

    By nPDP and rAPC, nomadic opportunism seems more and more structured; in Nigeria’s troubled political party space.

    No doubt, a present blight.  But that blight may yet birth the right realignments, to give Nigeria’s shambolic political party system a healthy jab it sorely needs.

    The present woes, where folks just band together for power, sans any shared values, is traceable to Gen. Ibrahim Babangida’s 1991 new breed experiment.

    That cut off the parties’ umbilical chord from their 1st Republic (1960-1966) and 2nd Republic (1979-1983) paterfamilias, peaking in the present ideological flux; which most times means no ideology at all.

    That has bred political stragglers-of-fortunes.  They are nothing but great misfortune to all.  In everyday street lingo, they are “food-is-ready” politicians.

    In 2015, nPDP (New Peoples Democratic Party) was the base.  It was the escapist band that fled the crashed PDP which, but for its power delusion, was but a shell, since former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s exit from power in 2007.

    Tragic fall guy, former President Goodluck Jonathan, only added his own peculiar stumble-and-fumble to the meltdown.

    nPDP traced new fortune to the new ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).  But see the misfortune it has wrought that party, these last three years, under the retrogressive agenda, of the pair of Senate President, Bukola Saraki and House Speaker, Yakubu Dogara?

    It was hardly any wonder, therefore, that the nPDP faction that announced its exit to PDP was whining over pork, for which it had violently growled and passionately salivated, like a starved dog.

    Don’t get it wrong, though.  In politics, there is legitimate pork.  But again, as the Yoruba love to quip, the priest must eat from the proceeds of his shrine.  But trouble comes when priestly greed gets so gargantuan and so humongous, that the shrine itself becomes fair game for gobbling!

    That appears the nPDP mentality — and that greed appears driving that nPDP faction to its old PDP vomit.

    But nPDP was 2015.  The 2018 strain of that virus is rAPC — Reformed APC: what the nPDP faction just rechristened itself.

    The polity has seen how nPDP nailed the final coffin of PDP.  But it’s early days yet, how rAPC may savage APC — for the Nigerian political mart thrives with the arch- charlatan baiting the arch-gullible; and both merrily rushing into a doomed marriage, from which they would, ever after, lament and gnash their teeth!

    If you doubt, ponder the Ekiti Fayose debacle, from which Ekiti Kete just wriggled out on July 14, with a Fayemi gubernatorial encore.  Merrily in 2014, Ekiti threw out, with a vengeance, sustainable development, for Fayose’s “stomach infrastructure” — no thanks to Fayemi’s huge image problems.

    But because they were driven by emotions, when reason ought to do the job, they sold themselves a Fayose pig in a poke.  Fayose’s demagoguery drove Ekiti into the Stone Age, in which inexplicable owing of months of workers’ salaries is even the least dent.  About everything sacred by Ekiti, Fayose had profaned!

    That same scenario might be brewing on the national front, with President Muhammadu Buhari’s arch-demonization, while grappling to correct cumulative past bad choices, with the attendant excruciating national pains.

    Which brings the matter back to rAPC, for it’s in such throes that charlatans thrive and demagogues teem.

    What makes rAPC now different from nPDP of 2015, you might riposte?  Didn’t both cash in on a seeming helpless situation, with citizens scared things were breaking down?

    Ay!  But only on the surface — which gauges flared emotive responses by pain-avoiding humans — does the similarity end.

    If you move beyond emotions, which seems to freeze hard thinking, 2015 was a free-fall.  But now, 2018, is the hardship of picking up the pieces; and putting up the crucial infrastructure, to birth a new era, and force development.

    Both stages are painful — extremely so.  But while 2015 would appear a pain of death; now would appear a pain of new life, after living for too long in the thick shadows of death!

    Still, what did nPDP contribute to the recovery process, in the National Assembly, where it somewhat seized power?  Nothing but soulless sabotage, of the infrastructure re-stock.

    That is clearly crossing the red line from legitimate intra-party factional struggle, to an utterly repugnant dashing of citizens’ hope and right, after the paralysis of the Obasanjo-inspired PDP era.

    First, Saraki sold out his party, including its right to deputy senate president (DSP) to PDP, for a personal gain to nick the Senate presidency, in a controversial exercise that reeked more of perfidy than a legitimate election.

    Thereafter, it conspired with the PDP — which clearly wants the new ruling party to fail, so it could regain power, the only thing it knows and ever wants to know — to parody John Keats, the English romantic poet in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: ‘beauty … is all you know, and all you need to know’.

    That red line, from partisan scuffle to citizen sabotage, came from the soulless subversion of infrastructural provisions in the budget, these last three years.

    By that wicked and callous act, key national road arteries that ought to have been delivered by now, to the relief of citizens, are still struggling to be completed.  A good example is the Lagos-Ibadan expressway.

    Its smooth, newly delivered parts show the worldview of the PMB executive, by making budgetary provisions for the swift completion of that crucial road.

    But from the bad part glares — citizens and voters be damned! — the counter-Stone Age vision, of the Saraki-Dogara-led National Assembly (NASS), by its wilful decision to sabotage the project, by dissipating budgetary votes, for three years running.

    To make matters worse, such soulless dissipation has earned the saboteurs dirty pork, in the so-called constituency projects, to feed the unending pit of these legislators’ greed.

    It’s an unconscionable vote for personal greed over collective need, which gives an otherwise legitimate concept, of constituency projects, a very bad name.

    Such mindset is too ruinous; and ought to be routed from any decent parliament.  But these ones glory in the destruction of their own environment; and strut over the death of their constituents’ dreams, simply because they feel their electors are manipulable.

    So, whether nPDP, rAPC or even the Saraki-Dogara NASS, electorate manipulation is their market.  Playing on emotions, in painful times, is their currency.  Yet, those who think deep can easily figure them out.

    Which is why neither nPDP nor rAPC is good for any polity. They are political merchants, on the lookout for the highest personal profit, at the expense of citizen wellness.

    Even if rAPC succeeds in crippling APC, it would only mutate into a future virus, plaguing a future government, as nPDP has plagued APC.

    The people are the ultimate victims; for they are doomed to moving round and round, eternally gnashing their teeth, in an eternal circle of pain.

  • Ekiti: The morning after

    It is all over now in Ekiti, bar the sulking and the wailing and the gnashing of teeth in Governor Ayo Fayose’s camp, and the exuberant rejoicing in Governor-elect Kayode Fayemi’s circle — a mirror image of the outcome of the 2014 Ekiti gubernatorial election.

    When one placed Fayemi and Fayose on the scale in that contest, one saw in Fayemi an incumbent whose record spoke eloquently for a second term, as did his overall approach to the business of governance:  urbane, deliberative, steeped in the detail and nuance of policy, goal-oriented, and unobtrusive for the most part.

    In Fayose one saw a brash challenger who had had his chance as governor and blown it spectacularly, a bumptious con-artist whose idea of governance consists in staging stunt after tawdry stunt, given to cheap populism and not a little demagoguery, and withal not foresworn to violence as a means of winning and retaining support.

    Fayose’s scandal-plagued first term had ended after only two years in impeachment and self-imposed internal exile.  Politically, he was washed up.

    Given a choice between Fayemi and Fayose, surely, the learned and discriminating people of the “Fountain of Knowledge” who know only too well the antecedents of the twain, would heartily renew the mandate of the one and indignantly reject the advances of the other.

    So went the conventional wisdom.

    The outcome is history.  Fayemi took a comprehensive shellacking, winning none of the 16 local governments in contention.  Eight years after being disgraced out of office, Fayose returned in one of the most amazing political comebacks in Nigeria or anywhere.

    The Nobelist, Professor Wole Soyinka, was one of the few who questioned the outcome of the election sharply, saying that it was a mystery and that the truth would be known one day. But his skepticism was drowned in the schadenfreude that pervaded the corridors of Federal Might.

    Fayemi also had his doubts.  But “the people,” he said, “had spoken.” And that was what counted.

    Thanks to Captain Sagir Koli of the Nigerian Army, who had witnessed the entire scheme from inside and secretly recorded it, we now know that “the people” had played no part in that outcome.   The election had been rigged with scientific precision on a scale almost beyond belief, and the result was fake through and through.

    Thanks to the perversity of the Constitution, Fayose kept his gubernatorial perch.

    But instead of parlaying his comeback into an opportunity to redeem himself and atone for the depredations of his first coming – a murder rap, and a poultry project that gulped more than N2 billion without producing an egg, to mention just two such — Fayose waged war ceaselessly on all that is honest and just and decent and wholesome and of good report, and kept Ekiti permanently on the boil.

    He governed on the Caligula Principle:  “You can hate us, so long as you fear us.”  High court judges failed to do his bidding at their peril.  Bank managers soon learned that to carry out his instructions without fuss was the beginning of political wisdom.  Serving civil servants and eminent sons and daughters of Ekiti who dared to criticise him and traditional rulers who refused to genuflect before him learned a bitter lesson.

    He sank deeper and deeper into infamy, bringing into disrepute virtually everything he touched and every idea he embraced. The “stomach infrastructure” agenda that was thought to have blinded the electorate to his unsettling inadequacies became an empty slogan, then vanished altogether.

    Following a re-match this past weekend, it is in Fayose’s camp that they are sulking and wailing and gnashing their teeth. In Governor-elect Fayemi’s camp, there is exuberant rejoicing and a triumphal air.

    What a difference an election cycle makes.

    Fayose, it is necessary to state, was not an official candidate in the election just concluded, but you could not tell from the way he carried himself.  He had framed it as a contest between good and evil, as a test of strength and power and will between himself and President Muhammadu Buhari, between  the APC and the PDP, and finally between himself and Fayemi.

    Fayose’s lackluster deputy governor, Professor Kayode Olusola whom he had foisted on the PDP as the party’s candidate for the election might just as well have been a poodle.  If he had any ideas of his own, he never gave them utterance.  He was content to tag along and nod in consonance with his principal’s inanities and profanities du jour.

    He was at bottom a prop for Fayose’s third-term gambit. He would be practically unconscious not to know that.  But he went along all the same. They went into the election with little to show for Fayose’s four years in office, only stunt after harebrained stunt.

    This time, there was no Jonathan, no PDP machine, no rogue senior military and police officers, no contractors in hock to the establishment, no fixer to turn loser into winner and winner into loser.

    The figure from the spirit world who feeds on jollof rice has been demystified.  A return to political office now seems unlikely for Fayose.  But it would be unwise to count him out.

    Look closely at the results.  The Fayose/Olusola ticket took 47.4 percent of the vote, to Fayemi’s 52.5 percent, the precise margin by which NOIPolls had called the election for the  Fayose/Olusola ticket.  In plebiscitary terms, that is a decisive loss.  But the ticket won in the state capital, Ado-Ekiti, and scored impressive victories in four of the 16 local government areas.

    It was probably not true then and certainly not true now, contrary to Fayose’s claim at his post-election news conference four years ago that if he raised his hand high, “the people” would cheer vehemently, and that if he lowered it, the cheering would subside. Or that if he pointed in one direction, they would go in that direction.

    But he has a significant base that makes up in what it lacks in numbers with passionate intensity.

    The challenge before Governor-elect Fayemi is to strive to unite Ekiti; to cater not just to his own base, but the entire electorate.  He must see his return to power as a mission of reconciliation, not revenge.  Without resorting to his predecessor’s cheap populism, he must be engaging.

    It is no surprise that the PDP has vehemently rejected the election outcome.  Weeks before Election Day, its well-oiled propaganda machinery had asserted over and over that the poll would be rigged by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for the benefit of the ruling APC and the Federal Government.

    It even went so far as to alert the “international community” to that prospect, and to paint before the world an apocalyptic future for democracy in Nigeria. Having boxed itself into a corner, it has no alternative than to insist that the election was indeed rigged.

    Now it claims, with a fringe advocacy group, that it has iron-clad proof of election skullduggery that it will set out before the courts at the appropriate time.

    To which the APC and the Governor-elect and his supporters rejoin:  Bring it on.  That is to be preferred to Fayose’s lawless announcement of fake results of an election in progress.  That which could have plunged Ekiti into turmoil, or was most likely designed to achieve that very end, if the National Broadcasting Commission had not moved quickly to terminate broadcast.

    Even in the face of bitter disappointment, Fayose can still render a lasting service to the Ekiti people whose name he has taken in vain, and whose values he has desecrated with impunity, by ensuring a peaceful and orderly transfer of power, and by creating a climate in which Ekiti State can realise its potential and pursue its destiny.

  • When ‘go slow’ is virtue

    Two deals on the table with Africa’s Big Brother showing no signs of shifting grounds on either, it seems one moment the world had better listened to the underlying message. For much as it is tempting to see every instance of dilatoriness as merely the mutation of the same old affliction of state stasis, I must however confess that the typically go-slow Buhari administration seems to have made a wise choice in its studied ‘tardiness’ over the hot-button aspiration for a continent-wide free trade area.

    You know the story already.  I begin with the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCTA), an initiative which stakes a grand ambition of pooling together the 55 African Union member states closer by removing such barriers to trade like tariffs and import quotas, allowing the free flow of goods and services between its members. On March 21, 44 African countries – minus the two continental economic powerhouses, of Nigeria and South Africa – had signed the instrument to kick-start its take-off.

    Way back then, President Buhari had spoken on the so-called $3 trillion continental free-trade zone covering the continent’s 1.2 billion people and what it meant to the nation’s economy: “We will not agree to anything that will undermine local manufacturers and entrepreneurs, or that may lead to Nigeria becoming a dumping ground for finished goods.”

    Only last week, at a news conference during a visit by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, he also made it quite clear that his administration was in no hurry to sign the agreement:  “In trying to guarantee employment, goods and services in our country, we have to be careful with agreements that will compete, maybe successfully, against our upcoming industries.”

    “I am a slow reader, maybe because I was an ex-soldier. I didn’t read it fast enough before my officials saw that it was all right for signature. I kept it on my table. I will soon sign it”, the president was reported to have said, tongue in cheek.

    A little while back, I watched the president address the same concerns before a European Union delegation that had called on him to sign the West Africa-EU free trade agreement – the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), put up precisely for the same general reasons covering 16 West African countries (and Mauritania) and the European Union.

    “Our industries”, I heard the president say then, “cannot compete with the more efficient and highly technologically driven industries in Europe”.

    “We are not enthusiastic about signing the EPA because of our largely youthful population.”

    Never mind the profound irony in the biggest economy on the continent being unable to take on the challenge of regional or continental trade on the grand scale; however, away from the penchant to play the numbers and, if you like, the egoistical game, it seems one of such times when a perceptible lack of enthusiasm for the big league must be seen as borne of profound self-awareness.

    In a way, the AfCFTA deal is important – perhaps far more than its symbolism. That intra-African trade presently stands at a miserable 15 percent obviously says a lot about the extent to which the economies of the countries suffer disconnection and disarticulation from each other. And irrespective of what one makes of the statement credited to Chiedu Osakwe, Director-General, Nigerian Office for Trade Negotiation (NOTN), AfCFTA’s Nigerian negotiator that AfCFTA was “much more than a trade agreement but about strategically reorganising the geo-economic landscape of Africa, Nigeria’s leadership position, competitiveness and modernisation”, or even his debatable allusion to its potential to address  “the issue of unemployment, market access and economic growth for Nigeria and Africa”, there is no doubt a lot to be said of the merits of a more robust continent-wide trade as having the potential to strengthen the bonds of African brotherhood.

    The big problem, as always, is how to achieve this in such ways and manners to deliver maximum benefits to the disparate actors.

    Can we frankly say that we are ready for a global free trade agreement as envisaged under AfCFTA or even the EPA? What will Nigeria be bringing to the table? What would be the basis of reciprocity since Nigeria currently lacks the competitive edge?

    What safeguards are there in a continent where even neighbours are known to act contrary to each other’s national interests as it is often the case with our ECOWAS neighbours?

    The point is, there is a world of difference between our continuing pretence to being the continent’s economic powerhouse and the hard reality of a truly industrialised self-sustaining economy. The fact simply is that our industries are simply not there yet, either in terms of their competitiveness or in any real sense of global appeal.  The same with our educational system. The much that can be said is that they are not ready to take on the challenge of grooming our youths for the economy of the future. One direct result of that is the current situation in which one out of two youths are either unemployed or unemployable.

    Today, for all our  pretences to real time manufacturing, our basic infrastrcutures are still basically antedeluvian which of course renders any real prospects of competitiveness herculean.

    But then, what might yet prove to be the greatest obstacle are the countless other bilateral trade agreements by AU countries with the rest of the world. It goes without saying that a number of these agreements actually run counter to the spirit of AfCFTA. As for Nigeria, it seems easy to see that many of the agreements not only have potentials to undermine current efforts at shoring up manufacturing capacity through large scale dumping of cheap products that are not necessarily manufactured on the continent, they might in fact prove injurious to our national recovery efforts. Of course, with most of African countries still largely yoked to their former colonial, trading patterns, it remains to be seen how the AfCFTA framework will deliver on the expected goals.

    Yes, South Africa has signed – convinced it was in its national interests. Being the continent’s indisputable manufacturing powerhouse, it should have done so, long before now.

    As for Nigeria, it seems one moment when ‘go slow’ could turn a virtue. By opting to take it easy, the president is perfectly in order.

  • The pollsters are back

    You know we are waist-deep in the silly season when, as now, pollsters who have been in hibernation burst upon the landscape purporting with the least diffidence to be ascertaining or to have actually divined what Nigerians want or don’t want, what they are thinking or not thinking, how they feel about a certain issue, who in their estimation is up or down in the political sweepstakes, and how they plan to vote on Election Day.

    And yet, as I have argued on this page more than once, Nigeria remains the pollster’s worst nightmare.

    Nobody knows the country’s population to the nearest 25 million.  Nobody knows with confidence the demographic make-up of that population, nor its spatial distribution.  Some 50 years after the economist Wolfgang F. Stolper published a book on Nigeria with the felicitous title “Planning without Facts,” there is still no reliable body of facts on which public policy or the measurement of public opinion can be grounded.

    Because we do not know the size of the population or its characteristics, it is impossible to draw a probabilistic sample, one in which every member of that population has an equal chance of being selected.  And because it is impossible to draw such a sample even with the best effort, it is unsafe to invest poll findings in Nigeria with the authority they have ceased to command even in better-ordered societies.

    And so, anytime I come across yet another poll setting out to gauge or purporting to have ascertained the state of public opinion on one aspect of Nigerian life or another, I approach it with a judicious dose of skepticism.  When it claims to be scientific and comes seductively dressed up in the jargon of psephology, I am doubly sceptical.

    I find myself inclined that mode now regarding the findings recently issued by NOIPolls on the state of play in the Ekiti gubernatorial election scheduled for Saturday.  More on that later.

    But first, it is necessary to recall some polls conducted in the unpromising atmosphere I have described, and to explain why they lacked the ring of plausibility.

    In the run-up to the 2007 General Elections, one newspaper reported in mid-February 2007 that the PDP’s candidate Umaru Yar’Adua was ahead of the ANPP’s candidate General Muhammadu Buhari, and Vice President Atiku Abubakar, who was fighting for his political life.

    The evidence?

    An internet poll in which 2,085 surfers of the newspaper’s web site indicated whom they would vote for among the three candidates.  The group was self-selected.  It did not represent the population, nor even that substratum that had access to the Internet.  It represented only itself.  The outcome applied only to that group.

    Projecting the outcome to the general population is impermissible.  Nor was that the only flaw.

    In the poll, 764 respondents (37 percent of the total) said they preferred Yar’Adua; 752 respondents (36 percent) picked Buhari, and, 592 respondents, constituting 26 percent of the total, picked Atiku.   Between Yar’Adua and Buhari, the result is a statistical dead heat.

    There was no basis, therefore, for asserting, as the newspaper did, that Yar’Adua was “ahead” in the polls. To say that he was “marginally” or “slightly” ahead would have been just as inaccurate, more so when no margin of error was stipulated.

    Much more egregious was the case of another newspaper which published with the authority of Holy Writ what it called “exit polls ” for elections due to be held some three weeks later.  As a rule, exit polls are conducted while an election is in progress.  Voters emerging from the polling booths in key precincts selected scientifically are asked whom they voted for.

    Based on their responses, the pollster can project with confidence the likely winner.  But what the newspaper at issue published had nothing in common with an exit poll.

    By its own account, the newspaper “randomly” selected a sample of 3,700 respondents nationwide, 100 from each of the 36 states and another 100 from Abuja, drawing on a list of 10,000 mile phone subscribers furnished by an unidentified source  Then, it “mined” the data to reflect the “psychographics imperatives” of Nigeria’s voting patterns and trends.

    The respondents were then asked by phone whom they would vote for as president or governor if the election took place that day, and which party they would vote for. Their responses provided the data for the poll the paper was reporting.  The research design stipulated a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percent.

    The poll was an improvement on the one I cited earlier. And yet, it was riddled with methodological shortcomings.

    The sample was in no way representative of the population. Kano and Lagos have more than twice the population of, say, Osun, Ekiti, Kogi, Kwara, and Abuja FCT. But in the poll, all of them were assigned the same sample size. Women constitute a far greater proportion of the national population than the 30 percent they were assigned in the poll.

    The sample size for some if not all the groups also raised some questions.  Did youths, howsoever defined, make up only 30 percent of the Nigerian population?  If so, that would be anomalous, as I will explain presently.

    GSM phone penetration in Nigeria was already substantial at the time of the survey.  But the cell phone was not so widespread that any person who owned one could be classified as a typical member of the Nigerian population. Nor could it be assumed that the respondents were registered          to vote and were likely to vote.

    All of which brings us to the first major poll on the Ekiti gubernatorial elections scheduled for next Saturday, July 14, released by NOI (as in Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala) Polls, which advertises itself, not without some justification, as “Nigeria’s premier public opinion polling institution.”

    Between June 18 and June 23, 2018, investigators interviewed 1,000 randomly-selected residents   of the state, aged 18 and above, who owned mobile telephones, were registered voters and fully intended to vote in the contest.  The sample, comprising 52 males and 48 females, was drawn to reflect population size, the distribution, and employment status across its three senatorial districts.

    NOIPolls is reporting that the PDP candidate, Kolapo Olusola, is leading in the race with 34 percent, trailed by the APC candidate, Kayode Fayemi, with 26 percent, with the remaining 30 contestants having virtually no prospects. More than one of every five respondents (23 percent) said they had not yet decided or were not prepared to reveal their choice.

    Based on its findings, NOIPolls concluded although Olusola “currently leads the race with a significant 8-point margin, we opine that the election remains a keenly contested race between the two leading candidates . . .”

    But do these findings really point up an 8-point margin for Olusola?

    With a margin of error of plus or minus three percent, Olusola’s 34 percent could translate into a low of 31 percent or high of 37 percent.  By the same reckoning, Fayemi’s of 26 percent could translate into a low of 23 or a high 29 percent.

    The margin of error could operate in such a way as or erase what had at first blush seemed an advantage or disadvantage.  We do not know for a fact how the margin of error will operate here. But it is statistically impermissible to claim, as NOIPolls has done, that Olusola was leading Fayemi by 8 points at the time of its survey.

    The sampling raises some questions as well.

    To remark just one:  Young persons, defined as adults aged between 18 and 35, were grossly under-represented (35 percent) in the NOI survey.  According to current projections, Nigeria’s population stands at 182 million.  More than one-half of this figure is aged less than 30 years, a threshold that accords with Third World demographic trends.

    Nor is it plausible that persons aged 61 and above constitute only 8 percent of the population of Ekiti State.  I intuit that this is another instance of under-representation.

    However, nothing in the foregoing should dampen the PDP’s giddy excitement that it is on the cusp of keeping its beloved Ekiti State in the fold, nor lead the APC to grieve that bringing Ekiti back into the progressive community is a will-o’-the-wisp.

    Five days henceforth the situation will be clearer.  Hold your peace, Ayo Fayose.

  • Lagos state of nature

    So, the Lagos government stumbled in its waste clearing duties. But should that justify an increasing number of Lagos residents reverting to their state of nature?

    Or which 21st century people, except in a state of nature, would blight highway medians with packs of refuse; making fresh piles, as soon as the refuse trucks finish their clearing rounds?

    State of nature!  On that, literature, the wisdom over the ages, has been rather ambivalent.  Yet, the natural state’s sinister side appears more resonant.

    Philosophers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (French) and John Locke (English), romanticized man’s pristine “goodness”; and rued the rupture latter-day organized society had inflicted on that utopia.

    To Locke, the “law of nature is reason”.  Common sense would naturally drive pain-hating humans to maximize their pleasure, and reduce their pain — true.

    But the snag is, common sense is not common!

    Still, other philosophers have balked.  Mozi, of ancient China, talked of each (wo)man strutting with own “morality”.  With every person bristling, with own moral supremacy, the collective is doomed.

    The English, Thomas Hobbes, was thunderous in his put-down: the state of nature is constant “war of all against all”.  Therefore, life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.  Only the Leviathan, the mighty symbol of modern governance, can impose some order on that natural chaos.

    In English literature, the Scot, R.M. Ballantyne, in Coral Island, gushed about man’s innate goodness, as a party of three juveniles, marooned by a shipwreck on an island, manifested their best human traits.

    But this golden tale was later shattered by a mean one, by the English, William Golding, who in Lord of the Flies, saw absolutely no gold in man’s innate instincts.  The British school boys, similarly marooned after a crash-landing, descended into savages.

    That was 1958 — 100 years, and two World Wars, after Ballantyne’s 1858 fictional paradise.

    Even in psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud spoke of the id, the ego and the super-ego — the id, a function of raw cravings, the psychological equivalent of the state of nature.

    But both the ego and super-ego are a function of personal and societal checks, anchored on heavy fear of sanctions; and dire consequences for wrong doings.

    Which brings the issue right back to the Lagos scandalous refuse question.

    Twenty-first century Lagos appears to have slipped back into the stone-age on refuse culture, leaving Nigeria’s “Centre of Excellence” an environmental blight and a waiting ecological disaster.

    It’s time for the Ambode government to wield the big stick, and roll back this shameful atavism.

    Until the Lagos government-Visionscape-PSP refuse players crisis, refuse-as-eyesore was almost a thing of the past.

    But then came the crisis.  Part-paralysis, a logical result from the sudden rupture of hitherto functional, if not efficient, services.

    Part-active sabotage — alleged refuse dumping, by some cadres of the warring PSP operators, alleging economic strangulation by Visionscape, the new refuse turf royal.

    So, refuse came back with a vengeance — and choice dumps are city-wide road medians.  As a result, Lagos groans under hundreds of illegal dumpsites — road medians, roundabouts, junctions.

    Even aside from concentrated illegal dumps, a nasty practice is afoot, where people package their refuse, and in the thick of the night, place them by high median concrete barriers, on major roads.

    So, the PSP “wartime” tactics — alleged or real — of offloading refuse, bang on the road, is bringing out the beast in Lagos denizens.

    Everybody is paying a stiff price: the government in citizen anger and battery; waste managers in increased operational costs; and Lagosians in a debased environment, only a heartbeat from epidemics.

    That is the new epidemic in town.  It, willy-nilly, has condemned waste managers to gingerly moving their compactors, picking up bags of refuse, every inch of the way!

    That’s not all.  Street sweepers hitherto limited to sweeping and packing accumulated dust, are rendered useless; at the sight of smelly garbage.

    And, the ubiquitous illegal dumps!  Even here, at a junction off Fatai Atere Way, across the road from Sterling Bank, in the heart of Matori Industrial Estate, a dump luxuriates, with the occasional pig strolling in, to wallow and feast on the dirt!

    In the atavistic language of Victorian Lagos, Prof. Michael Echeruo’s work on the quaint world of aborigines and settlers of 19th century Lagos, that set the city’s cultural temper till this day, Lagos is again going “Fanti” — but on the refuse plane.

    Yet, the government would appear at last getting a hang on the refuse crisis.  With Visionscape-PSP operators operational cohabitation, regular clearing has resumed.

    Though not quite back to the pre-crisis days, the streets could indeed appear clean, particularly immediately after the gangs just finished their clearing rounds.  A few days after, however, the roads are clogged again!

    That suggests the turnaround time of the clearing gang lags behind the frenetic generation of the refuse.  The government should urgently work on that.

    The faster the turnaround, the more efficient, more effective and more impactful the exercise would be; and the cleaner Lagos would become.

    But even with slower turnaround, the roads are no places to dump refuse.

    Even in those pre-2001 days, when Lagos had its notorious mountains of refuse and the city’s essence was filth, nobody dumped packaged garbage on the roads.  There were instead refuse outlets — “Ile Ile”, the locals called it in Yoruba — in strategic locations in each locality, where folks took their refuse.

    Aside from these congested outlets and untreated dumpsites that rose to become refuse mountains, the only problems was free-wheeling littering, compounded by the absence of street-sweepers — which the Lagos government, as part of its waste management reforms, introduced.

    But this new practice of dumping packed garbage on the road, without a care about environmental wellness, is a new low in urban retardation.

    That is why the government should not spare anything to stamp it out, before it morphs from the moral epidemic it is now, into a public health epidemic, which the state can ill afford.

    The first thing to do is to mount a media enlightenment blitz against the evil, warning of dire sanctions soon to follow it, if not discontinued.

    Then, the government should put in place a neighbourhood refuse watch, with specific mandates to ferret out these environmental saboteurs and bring them to justice.

    As each dumper is dragged into the net of the law, the punishment should be given maximum publicity.

    Then, neighbourhoods should be sensitized to form intelligence units, monitoring and exposing illegal dumping.  In return, however, waste managers must scale up their operations, and make waste clearing prompter and more efficient.

    Lagos can’t afford the present “state of nature” of dumping refuse just anywhere.  The government must play the Leviathan to stamp out the practice.

  • Once upon a Fourth of July

    Following the official acknowledgment of Chief MKO Abiola as winner of the 1993 presidential election and the proclamation of June 12 as “Democracy Day,” Walter Carrington, former United States ambassador to Nigeria, has figured prominently on practically every roster of persons who deserve to be honoured for their momentous contributions to the struggle to re-establish government based on the consent of the people.

    Carrington’s tour of duty coincided with a period when all the things Nigerians said could never happen in their country happened time and again. There was, first, the contrived confusion in the run-up to the presidential election, the capstone of a transition that had been eight years in the making.  Then the annulment, the Interim farce, and the infernal Sani Abacha.

    Through it all, Carrington lived up the title of his collection of his speeches, “A Duty to Speak” he released to mark his to 80th birthday.  In that time of tyranny, he never flinched from speaking truth to power.

    Among my many interactions with him, one in particular clings in my memory.  It was the Fourth of July reception in 1997, marking the 221st independence anniversary of the United States.

    Even for a time of year when the skies parted and seemed in no hurry to close up, the rain that fell that Friday morning was unusually heavy.  And it threatened to wash out the most eagerly awaited event in the diplomatic calendar.

    Then, it lifted just as suddenly as it had begun.  The clouds dispersed, and bright sunshine suffused the landscape.  A cool, crisp wind wafting across from the sea that provides a stunning backdrop to the official residence of the Ambassador of the United States dissolved the muggy heat of the preceding days.  Nature in its mysterious ways had turned adversity to advantage.

    By 4:30 p.m, the grounds thronged with guests.  Everyone who was somebody, thought he was somebody or aspired to be somebody, was there.  Stewards in their starched, snow-white uniforms drifted with clockwork precision from one cluster of guests to another, offering trays of tantalising snacks.  Other stewards followed with cocktails.

    In small and large groups, long-lost friends and comrades and colleagues carried on animated chatter about – what else – the latest barbarities that Sani Abacha and his confederates had visited on the people, the general hopelessness to which they had sentenced their compatriots, and the indifference of an international community daily terrorised by Foreign Minister Tom Ikimi’s gangsta diplomacy.

    Freed at least for the moment from fear of being abducted, kidnapped, disappeared, mugged, or killed in a drive-by shooting, they compared notes, reviewed strategy and tactics,, and planned the way forward.

    Some notorious secret and -not-so-secret agents of the Abacha regime had infiltrated the reception in one guise or disguise, but it was easy to keep them at bay or avoid them altogether.

    All too soon, it was time for the main event.

    Carrington took his place at the podium.  One step behind him stood his elegant Nigeria-born wife Arese.  To his right, a United States marine stood at ramrod attention, cradling the Stars and Stripes.

    On the occasion of his country’s independence anniversary, Carrington began, nothing would be more fitting than revisiting  the circumstances that had led  British colonies in the New World  to renounce foreign rule way back in 1776, and the very words that had inspired and sustained the struggle unto victory.

    Whereupon he began to read in that resonant and sometimes haunting baritone, the storied text of the (American) Declaration of Independence.

    “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and they are endowed by their Creator with rights that, among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted among them, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter it, and to institute a new government.”

    The authors of the Declaration never really held these propositions to be truths, of course, much less self-evident truths. Black people did not count as men and women, only as property to be bought and sold and put to the most brutal exertions. They had no rights whatsoever.  More than There has been great progress. Carrington is himself a symbol of that progress. But in the daily lives of a great many black Americans, the “color line,” as Du Bois, called it, remains almost as formidable an obstacle in the 21st century as it was in the 20th.

    On that day, however, in that place and at that time, the lofty ideals of the Declaration counted for much more than its inconvenient truths.

    A hush fell upon the assembly.

    “All experience has shown,” Carrington continued, his voice precisely modulated, “that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while the evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.  But when a long line of abuses and usurpations evince a desire to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such a government, and to provide new grounds for their future security.”

    It was as if time itself and indeed all the elements stood still,  The only thing astir was that haunting, almost taunting, baritone, projected far and wide by the public address system and the wind.

    But Carrington was not yet done.

    “The history of the present king is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States.

    “To prove this, let the facts be submitted to a candid judge.

    “He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions of the right of the people

    “. . . He has incited domestic insurrection among us.

    “A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

    The hush had deepened with Carrington’s rendering of each line of the litany of woes residents of the American colonies suffered during British rule. But virtually every line reflected the barbarities the loathsome General Sani Abacha and his regime were visiting upon the Nigerian public.

    By the time Carrington was done, the whole thing had taken on an unsettling resemblance to the proverbial calm before the raging storm. The assembled guests looked nervously at one another, shook their heads in sorrow and sighed deeply in despair and unspoken rage.

    If Carrington had ended this command performance by saying nothing more electrifying than “Eminent sons and daughters of Nigeria, the future of your country lies in hour hands,” I suspect that most of the guests would have yanked off their ornately embroidered apparel and fancy suits and stormed Bonny Camp and Kam Selem House.  And the revolution would have begun in earnest.

    Abacha never forgave Carrington.  The regime’s propagandists put it about that Carrington was embittered because the government had refused to “settle” him with a lucrative oil concession.

    In reprisal, Abacha renamed Eleke Crescent, which threads the embassies and missions in Victoria Island, Lagos, for the Rev Louis Farrakhan, America’s bête noire and leader of the Nation of Islam.  The official address of the U. S. Consulate, previously 2 Eleke Crescent, became 2 Louis FarrakhanCrescent.

    To spite Abacha’s confederates, and in grateful acknowledgment of the ambassador’s support  for the democratic forces at a crucial moment in Nigeria’s history, Lagos State Governor Bola  Tinubu re-branded the road Walter Carrington Crescent, the name it bears to this day.

    In the back and forth, a bit of national history was erased.  I gather that Eleke, for whom the street was originally renamed, was until his retirement a highly-regarded official who had served as a pillar of the Ministry of External Affairs in the years following independence.  Curiously,  no one seems to remember his first name.

    But I digress.

    As further reprisal, Abacha’s goons invaded a private residence where a reception was being held for Carrington on the eve of his departure from Nigeria, on the preposterous pretext that they had received reports that “armed robbers” were operating in the neighbourhood. When the guests relocated to another venue, the regime’s goons followed them there and dispersed them.

    While all this was going on, the regime celebrated Carrington’s departure as a signal achievement of Ikimi’s “area boy” diplomacy.

    Today, Abacha and his enablers are justly held in loathing abhorrence.  But Walter Carrington who spoke truth to power in the time of tyranny stands splendidly vindicated.

    Whatever the flaws of the men who wrote the American Declaration of Independence, its noble sentiments have inspired a nobler vision and animated struggles for freedom and justice across continents and generations.

    Its words have not changed.

    But on this Fourth of July, with Donald Trump in the saddle – Trump, the demagogic, xenophobic, race-baiting repudiation of almost every noble sentiment espoused in the Declaration, their resonance is much diminished.

     

    • This is an expanded version of a previous column

  • Afenifere and the Titans

    Afenifere, the Yoruba political Titans, and newfound friend, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, should go read John Keats’s “Hyperion”, the epic poem.

    Both appear to share a common blight: morbid fear of change; which Heraclitus, the Greek physical philosopher, nevertheless reasoned, is the most permanent thing in life.

    Hyperion is a throwback to Greek mythology. The Titans, first set of Greek gods, were falling into disgrace.  The Olympians, that overthrew them, were rising, in a celestial coup, according to Greek fable.

    But then Hyperion, their sun god, still retained his fiery powers.  If he dug in and won, the Titans could regain their glory.  If he gave in, all was lost.

    But the dazzle and sparkle, the beauty and glory, of Apollo the Olympian god of music, light, truth, poetry and latterly, the sun, decided it all.  Hyperion decided to give in with grace, rather than risk eternal disgrace.

    By that singular grace, the Titans live eternal in the Greek and Western mind, even as the Olympians took over.  That death-turned-life was captured in Keats’s “Fall of Hyperion”.

    Hyperion, therefore, is the myth as classic metaphor for change.  Change will come when it must.  But how does that change leave you?

    That question appears to plague both Afenifere and Obasanjo.  Its lack of resolve also tends to goad both to endless gambits — gambits that lead to their umpteenth baiting of fate, which may ultimately prove fatal.

    What is more?  From their present posturing, neither seems to have the grace of Hyperion nor the wisdom of Solomon.  Yet, both traits are key to navigating change and staying sane.

    Fact is, since President Obasanjo quit power in 2007, he has not reconciled himself to the inevitability of a falling, if not yet fallen, Titan.

    Yes, post-2007, he emerged as some giant Gulliver, towering over the Lilliput dwarf into which Nigeria had shrunk, no thanks to his presidency’s neo-Liberal policies, which had spawn mass poverty, powered by elite greed.

    But that didn’t quite blunt his phobia for change, that dread of vanished public fawning that only power secures, as could be adduced from his alleged “third term” gambit.

    That fear drove Obasanjo’s virtual roasting, on his death bed, of ill-fated President Umaru Yar’Adua; and his no less merry burial, of the effete President Goodluck Jonathan, for being the ultimate fall guy, for Obasanjo-era bad politics and policies.

    Sensing early signs of a radically changed era, that phobia still drives Obasanjo’s latest neither-APC-nor-PDP hyper huff-and-puff, in which Nigeria’s Hobson has conjured up ’his’ African Democratic Congress (ADC); in which Nigeria’s Narcissus just announced a melting heart for Afenifere!

    But neither too, has Afenifere reconciled itself to its loss of influence, since the five South West Alliance for Democracy (AD) governors lost power in 2003, ironically through the perfidy of this same Obasanjo.

    Since that 2003 loss, the fear of creeping irrelevance has also hustled and bustled Afenifere into many gambits, the climax of which was its 2015 election-eve whoring with Jonathan, on the restructuring question.

    But that itself would birth an election-time manna turned poison, from which the once strutting puritans, of the Nigerian public space, still reel.

    Which is why it’s rather sweet to see both serenade each other in new-found romance, nevertheless fated to end in a debacle.  Why?  Because it is fired by mutual plotting against a common hate — Muhammadu Buhari — than mutually reinforced clinical thinking for public good.

    Even then, the sensational appearance of an Awolowo — Dr (Mrs) Tokunbo Awolowo-Dosunmu — at the tryst was enough grave rebuke of Obasanjo’s callow, if not callous, youth.  The immortal Awo must be beaming from his grave!

    Obasanjo, in Not My Will, his post-military head of state memoirs, had gloated that the power Awo craved all his illustrious life, he, a rural Ibogun boy, was gifted on a platter of gold!

    Has the cunning of old age, just schooled the callow youth of yore, that the Awo Rock he once scorned and mocked, is sudden cornerstone of his present plot?  Yet, Awo’s memory won’t be mocked, by progressive reaction!

    An Azikiwe might not have been part of this sizzling romance.  Still, Zik would beam no less.  Didn’t the same Obasanjo, in his same Not My Will, heckle Zik as starting life as Zik of Africa but ending it a diminished Owelle of Onitsha?

    But how is Obasanjo ending his — a once-upon-a-time global citizen, now locked in a Yoruba ethnic laager, poised to feud to the death with a Fulani president, for no more than shared hate, bred by vacuous ego?

    Afenifere!  Why does that once puritanical enclave now somewhat echo that Yoruba quip, of a sheep doomed to eating faeces, for schmoozing with dogs?

    Shortly after the 2015 elections, an alleged N100 million “obtainment” scandal hit one of Afenifere’s leading lights.  Till now, even after much hee-haw, that scandal still hangs.

    At the dawn of Obasanjo’s “third force” racket, the same Afenifere noble went serenading both Gen. Ibrahim Babangida and Obasanjo, for opportunistic coronation.

    Though nothing came of the IBB flirt, the Obasanjo tryst ended in fiasco, when the Ebora Owu ordered the surrender of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) registration papers!  Partisan opportunism never met a more pitiable crash!

    Yes, a sole member can’t equate Afenifere’s collective conduct. Yet, not huffing over over these matters suggests a creeping, worrying moral flexibility, if not outright debasement.

    That seems a far cry from the barging moral puritans of 1998, that in a huff stormed out of the old APP, snorting “Abacha People’s Party!”  That moral elasticity would also tend to explain the Obasanjo tryst.

    Still, since its 2015 electoral debacle, Afenifere has hugged the public space, grimly staying relevant with its “restructuring” campaign. That, to be sure, is its crusade from the very genesis; and it deserves plaudits for its tenacity on that score.

    Still, with increased desperation, Afenifere gives the impression even that is a coin with golden and crooked sides.

    The golden side flashes restructuring, which births the re-federalization Nigeria sorely needs; and which every patriot ought to embrace.

    But the crooked side glares with ethnic arrogance, tribal slurs, sectional disdain and bristling antagonism, when even-handed dialogue would do just fine.  That should explain Afenifere’s latter-day associations and alliances.

    Perhaps Afenifere’s own outraged “Olympians”, the Afenifere Renewal Group (ARG), would step up, and put the old Titans out of their misery.  Perhaps it would not.

    But Afenifere should at least have the honesty to admit it can’t stamp “Yoruba” on every of its whims and caprices; except of course it can produce a plebiscite that earned it such powers.

    As for the Obasanjo dalliance, grant Afenifere its democratic right to its friends. But if 2003 is any guide, it could well be the final treachery and mutual end, of two Titans, lacking the grace of Hyperion to navigate change.

    That would be a pity.  Still, as you lay your bed, you lie on it.