My dear Osahon:

This missive has been so long in coming that I must hasten to assure you that “out of sight” has not been “out of mind.”

I trust you and yours have fared tolerably well, all things considered.

Compliments of the season.

The querulous whom we shall unfortunately always have among us, I dare say, will probably rejoin even before I can expatiate:  What season?

And they would be justified because we are enmeshed, all at once and ineluctably, in overlapping and interlocking seasons.

The season that comes immediately to mind is what people back home call Yuletide, the period leading to Christmas.  Two of every three phone calls, emails, or text messages I get these days relate to that season.  They come from persons I have not heard from in a long while, and from whom I will hear nothing again until it comes around again.

Their messages drip with pious supplications on my behalf to the Almighty and to our forebears for a healthy and happy ending to the season, and a healthier, happier, and most prosperous entry to, and habitation in, the succeeding season.

Here, they call this “the holiday season.”   They do so in keeping with what has come to be called the “cancel culture,” but you rarely find the term applied in that manner.  Rather, it is those who insist that nothing was benevolent about slavery and that racism is alive and very well in America that are charged with fostering a cancel culture and heartily denounced.

They call this the holiday season for good reason.  The days are shorter and the nights longer. Life’s rhythm slows down to a languid pace, allowing for time to recharge and recalibrate for the new year.

The preferred term “Happy holidays” has in addition the great merit of being politically and culturally neutral, covering as it does all the festivals and festivities of this time of year.

This has also been a season of flooding, hardship, and general misery in Nigeria on a wider and more intense scale than in recent memory, a season of loss and displacement.

But this is above all the political season, perhaps the longest such period in Nigeria, enveloping the other periods I have identified.  It is often called the silly season because no policy, no programme, and no prospectus is so silly or half-baked that you will not find some articulate persons canvassing, promoting, or defending it earnestly.

Yet, that miasma is the stuff of realpolitik.  In my view, the term “silly season” smacks of condescension toward politics and politicians.  It deserves to be retired.

The political season, as you will have apprehended, Osahon, is the subject of this missive, the first I am addressing to your good self this year, I believe,

I have been observing proceedings from a distance and trying to make some sense of the confusing and confounding signals I have been getting from all manner of sources, each claiming to be reliable and authentic.  To keep me in my place, they remind me at every turn that they are “on ground.”  I hear them.

If they think they can muscle me out of the discourse on our country’s future by such tawdry tactics, I must tell them here and now that they are labouring under a grave misapprehension. For, unknown to them,   I have in my corner a person who can decipher the political tea leaves far more perceptively and accurately than just about any diviner of that esoteric art, and more unerringly than any psephologist employing the most arcane cybernetic tools ever devised.

Need I reveal that the person is none other than your good self, Osahon?

For you are “on ground” in practically every aspect of the game as insider, theorist, adviser, guide, strategist, past master, archivist, griot, savant, proselytizer, philosopher, and lexicographer. As always, I will be drawing again on your vast expertise for elucidation and illumination.

I have been asked time and again:  What is this particular general election about, other than its being required every four years by the country’s basic law? What are the issues at stake?  Even if the poll meets the highest standards, what will it prove, and what will it settle?

I wish I could answer those questions with confidence.

I have heard it said again and again that there are so many issues awaiting resolution that staging  a general election before tackling them will amount to an exercise in futility and that, in whatever case, the present shape and structure of Nigeria cannot make for a satisfactory outcome.

How, for example, do you continue to run a federation with the instrumentalities of a centrally- administered system?  How do you organize the political units to make them responsive to the yearnings of the people for affirmation and fulfilment?

How do you proceed when the very institutions and political officials claiming the power and the mandate to tackle such issues have constituted themselves into entrenched obstacles to the quest?

A six-zone federal structure proposed by Dr Alex Ekwueme, vice president in the Second Republic, has been embraced in some quarters as one of the ways of re-shaping the federation.  But it is in my view a soulless arrangement, rooted more in crude geography than in sociology and culture.

So tenuous is its hold on the public consciousness that, more than 30 years after it entered the discourse on Nigeria’s future, you are unlikely to find many Nigerians at home or abroad calling         themselves indigenes of Ekwueme’s zones.

The scheme merely collapsed the extant states into six smaller but by no means more coherent and more manageable entities.  One of them, the so-called South-South Zone, betrays in its name the haste in which the scheme was incubated.  It was as if they ran out of points on the compass.

These and other pressing issues cannot realistically be addressed before the general election.  But the general election is already shaping up as a civil war by another name.   Can they be addressed after the general election, when the smoke will have cleared?  Will the new people who have invested fortunes in the race yield the turf to a different crop of reapers?

You will recall that, in military president Ibrahim Babangida’s duplicitous preface to the still-born Third Republic, there was great official expectation that the transition would spawn a new breed of political actors that would take over the game and lead Nigeria, finally and irrevocably, to its historic destiny.

Do you see in the Labour Party’s presidential candidate Peter Obi and his Obidients the fresh face of Newbreedism?  And can Afenifere’s endorsement of Obi, per Chief Ayo Adebanjo, be construed as a manifestation, at long last, of the “handshake across the Niger” that former Biafran leader Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu once regarded as the golden key to Nigeria’s future?

Permit me to conclude this missive on a personal note, Osahon.   Are you by any chance related to Emmanuel Obahiagbon, one of the leading intellectual lights in the former Bendel State in the 1970s and probably well beyond? His 1974 lecture at the NYSC Orientation at Auchi Polytechnic clings in my memory to this day, both for its content and delivery.

Later, as a producer with Radio Nigeria, Benin City, I would invite him once in a while to feature as a discussant or moderator on my show.  He never disappointed.  He was a man of enormous learning –an alumnus of the London School of Economics, I believe – and charming elocution to boot, though possessing nothing like your sesquipedalian dexterity.

Still, I suspect some consanguinity there!  Small world indeed, if my hunch is right, and goes to confirm what has been said of the apple.

He wore his learning lightly and was content to introduce himself simply and disarmingly as a cabinet maker, not as proprietor of one of the leading furniture manufacturing shops around.

That would be all, Osahon, until I hear from you,

Best, always.

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo cemented his reputation as a statesman and trouble-shooter of global stature with the announcement last week that he had, as Chief Africa Union Mediator, brokered a ceasefire in the war that had for two years convulsed Ethiopia, its dissident Tigrayan province and exacted a fearsome human and material toll on the region.

The conflict has displaced more than one million citizens.  Much of Tigray and the adjoining region lies in ruin.  Famine, no stranger to the area, looms again, exacerbated by drought and climate change. Misery of biblical proportions is a constant companion.

The “cessation of hostilities,” to borrow the diplolingo in which the announcement from South Africa couched the breakthrough, did not come a moment too soon.  At the outbreak of the war, this newspaper had in an editorial called on the AU to invoke its mediation and conciliation protocols to broker a truce.  It is tragic that the conflict escalated and dragged on for two ruinous years before the AU stepped in.

And when it did, it could not have found a more accomplished person to lead its mediation team.

Obasanjo’s skills in the delicate art of mediation and conciliation belie his reputation for the gruffness, brusqueness even, that came with being the victorious commander of federal troops during the Nigerian civil war and subsequently a general of the army and military head of state.  Those attributes may even have proved assets rather than liabilities in his mediation practice.

The story has been told of how he deployed those very assets in getting the fractious principal figures in Zimbabwe’s national liberation struggle to forge a common purpose and thus hastened the termination of minority white rule in the territory.

On the surface, Robert Mugabe, leader of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), and Joshua Nkomo, of the Zimbabwe African Peoples Union (ZAPU) were committed to the same goal:  freeing their country from white minority rule and establishing Black majority rule by armed struggle, the truculent white minority having foreclosed all peaceful means to change.

Personality differences, among other issues, stood in the way of their working harmoniously.  Mugabe was ascetic, brainy, introverted, and cagey.  Nkomo was genial, easy-going, and avuncular.  Mugabe was a doctrinaire Marxist; Nkomo was a liberal.

Mugabe derived the bulk of his support from the majority Shona nation; Nkomo’s flowed largely from the  Ndebele nation.  Differences rooted in ancient hatreds among the Shona and the Ndebele perfused relations between ZANU and ZAPU.

Each craved political and financial support from Obasanjo’s military administration which espoused Africa as the centrepiece of its foreign policy and was prepared to back it with hard cash and matériel.  But Obasanjo was not going to dissipate scarce resources catering to two rival liberation movements that had fundamental differences in strategy and tactics.

How to get the twain to engage more in collaboration than competition?

Read Also: Obasanjo’s image should be on naira notes – Omokri

Obasanjo invited Mugabe and Nkomo to Lagos.  Talks with them separately and together were not going well.  So one day, at the end of a long, unproductive private session with the twain, Obasanjo brought out two loaded revolvers from a drawer, placed one before Mugabe and the other before Nkomo.

“I am leaving you to sort yourselves out,” he said tersely.  “The person I find still standing on my return is the person Nigeria will do business with.”  Whereupon he walked out of the room and locked the door from the outside.

Returning several hours later, he found the twain subdued.  The pistols lay before them, untouched.  Talks made rapid progress.  Subsequently, Nigeria’s aid, backed by its diplomatic clout, flowed to ZANU and ZAPU.

That, at any rate, is the story.  The rest is history.

Obasanjo earned his reputation as a mediator on a larger international canvas as co-chair of the Eminent Personalities Group established by British prime minister Margaret Thatcher to deflect widespread criticism that was lending aid and comfort to South Africa’s apartheid regime.  Even as the rest of the world was tightening sanctions on the regime, Thatcher baulked at getting the Commonwealth to follow suit.

It has been said that when the British are confused, they set up a committee.  In keeping with that truism, which applies to all governments and organizations, the Commonwealth settled for the EPG mechanism.  Thatcher hoped that it would deflect criticism from Britain’s pernicious engagement with South Africa.

The EPG did nothing of the sort.  Thanks largely to Obasanjo’s forceful steering of the proceedings, the EPG turned in a report that spelled the beginning of the end of apartheid.

The EPG marked Obasanjo’s grand entry into international politics as an authentic  player

I had the privilege of personally witnessing Obasanjo’s approach to mediation up close on several trips with him to several African countries.

The first was to Togo, in 1988.  Officially, it was to attend a conference on the contents and discontents of the partitioning of Africa, where Obasanjo was to deliver a keynote address.  During lunch break, a limousine from President Gnassingbe Eyadema’s fleet pulled up in the foyer of Hotel le Deux Fevrier, to ferry Obasanjo and his two companions to the palace where Eyadema spent his afternoons, a tribute to French elegance.

Already ensconced in the lounge were Dr Jonas Savimbi, leader of the Angolan liberation movement UNITA, and three aides.  Savimbi enjoyed the backing of apartheid South Africa in its military campaign to destabilize Angola’s MPLA Government.  For that very reason, and because of his record as a one-time operative of the notorious Portuguese secret police PIDE, all but a handful of African countries held him in utter detestation.

Togo was one of the few countries he could visit as an honoured guest.

Ours, then, was not an accidental gathering.  It was an ambush.

Halfway through a five-course lunch, there was a lull in the small talk.  Obasanjo cleared his throat.  “Jonas,” he said, looking Savimbi in the face from across the dining table, “I take the position that the friend of my enemy is my enemy.”

Everything stood still.

“Apartheid South Africa is Africa’s enemy,” he continued.  “You are South Africa’s friend. Therefore, you are Africa’s enemy.”

Savimbi’s face contorted with subdued indignation.  This was not what he had bargained for.

He responded with a labored explanation about how African countries had treated him like a pariah, and how he was reduced to accepting help from anywhere to keep alive the struggle of the Ovimbundu majority for inclusive rule.

Obasanjo was unmoved.  Though a private citizen, he had spoken not just for himself but for Nigeria indeed the OAU member-states. Gnassingbe’s ambush had failed.

During Obasanjo’s 1990 trip to South Africa to “listen, learn, and encourage” about its halting measures to dismantle apartheid, I witnessed first-hand again Obasanjo’s approach to statesmanship.

We were meeting with Zeph (Zephaniah) Mothopeng, the leader of South Africa’s more radical but less-known radical liberation movement, the Pan Africanist Congress, PAC, in his cramped office in downtown Johannesburg.

The diminutive, nattily dressed man behind the desk spoke little.  Two much younger aides did the talking.  There could be no accommodation with the apartheid regime.  No negotiation.  State assets would be nationalized.  The land would be redistributed.  The black majority must take immediate control.  And so on,

As they made their case with fervour, Mothopeng nodded approvingly.  They seemed unprepared for compromises that would have to be made to end apartheid rule.  They were living in a time warp.

Obasanjo was not in the least amused.

He told Mothopeng that time had passed him by, and that he had surrendered the leadership of the once-formidable PAC to extremist elements in its ranks.  This was an abdication of responsibility for which Africa would not forgive him.  And so on.

I cringed as Obasanjo spoke.  Perhaps it was just as well that he did not mince his words,  By the time the apartheid regime entered its final unravelling, the PAC had become little more than an adjunct to South Africa’s history.

Obasanjo’s approach to statesmanship may not follow the standard laid out in the canonical texts on war and peace.  But it works and has helped to advance democracy, peace, and justice wherever he has been called upon to mediate or whenever he felt that he had a duty to intervene.

I have been thinking of the passive voice lately.

In writing or in speech, it usually creates more problems than it is worth.

At first blush, it is just an alternative way of communicating thought, action or feeling.  In that respect it is about as helpful as the “alternative facts” of Donald Trump’s world.

Like those “alternative facts,” it serves as a medium for evasion, deflection, dissembling, self-exculpation, and self-preservation.  It is dodgy. No wonder it is the refuge of public officials  and authority figures.  If the passive voice did not exist, they would have had to invent it.

Events leading to the collapse of theUK government just 44 days after Liz Truss took office, in  the wake of the disastrous rollout of her ill-judged economic programme provided a perfect setting for officials to press the passive voice into active service.

Truss, the prime mover and architect of the programme — with the unfortunate Kwasi Bwarteng, our brother whose tenure as chancellor of the exchequer was even shorter than hers, did not disappoint.

“Mistakes were made,” she said curtly.

She did not disappoint in another respect:  My political instincts, the troubled history of the tired formula, and my reading of the British political temperament, told me that she was not up to the task and would not last long.

Of course, mistakes were made:  mistakes that crashed the market and the pound sterling and sent interest rates and the cost of goods soaring.  But whose mistakes were they?

In the skirmishes leading to her resignation, she had said she bore ultimate responsibility for the policy, content and discontent.  But nothing short of her resignation would mollify her critics. In her resignation speech, she took less than full responsibility.

The passive voice relieved her of the obligation to address that critical issue.

Rendered in the passive voice, the foregoing sentence becomes “The speaker was relieved of the obligation to address that critical issue by the passive voice.”

The first rendition is direct and sharp and leaves the reader in no doubt as to what elements are at work, what role they are playing in the scheme of things, and their effect or impact.  That is what the active voice does.  It is the medium of forthrightness.

The second rendition is flat.  It is limp.  It lacks the vigour, the kinetic energy of the first one.  It slows down the momentum.  Plus, it employs more words to convey less meaning.  That is the passive voice.  It is the medium of dissimulation.

The active voice comes more or less spontaneously. It is the way we speak or talk.   You do not have to conjure it up.  The passive voice is for the most part contrived, and that takes some extra effort.

You do not say to the woman with whom you would like to enter into a relationship:  ‘You are loved.”  That would be the end of your dreams, for she will rightly dismiss you as an oddball.  Nobody talks like that.  “I love you” is what people in that circumstance say.

You do not, at the end of a night out with the boys, say that “A nice time was had by everyone,” not even if you have had one drink too many.  “Everyone had a nice time” is what you say almost without effort.

And so, whenever I encounter it in speech or writing, my literary alarm clock sends forth a warning that somebody who is trying to conceal something is at work.   I raise my guard accordingly.  The person may be nothing more disagreeable than an indifferent draftsman, pardon my sexism. But the chances are that the usage is a preface to a dissimulation.

Not even the most indulgent reader, however, will put down to poor or indifferent craftsmanship a newspaper story replete with the phrase, “It was gathered that. . .” as in “It was gathered that the fire broke out in the audit section of the Ministry,” and as in:  “It was gathered that the fire engine arrived  on the scene one hour after the outbreak was reported.”

If you submitted that to a news editor of the old school under whom I served an apprenticeship at Kakawa, he would have flung the copy in your face from halfway across the newsroom and demanded how you got to be in that storied place.

Who did the gathering – the reporter or a third, fourth, or fifth person, he would have asked in that stentorian, intimidating voice?   From whom was the material gathered?  And how?

Today’s copy editors are less demanding.

This is not to say that the passive voice should never be employed.  Oftentimes, its use is unavoidable in writing or speech, especially when the fact being imparted is the critical issue. we would not write,  “Obi Obembe’s parents gave birth to him 40 years ago today.”

That would be carrying fidelity to the active voice to absurdity. The passive voice, “Obi Obembe was born 40 years ago today” — is kinder to the eye and gentler the ear, leaving aside the matter of whether anyone but Obembe’s parents could have sired him.

All things being equal, prefer the active to the passive, counsels George Orwell, a reliable guide          in matters of usage.  But he quickly adds: Use the passive sooner than write anything outright barbarous.

The passive voice. I should add,  is the prerogative of those who rank higher in the power calculus.  With its variant, “There is enough blame to go around,” it comes to them almost reflexively. But it is not the language of the middling official or the subaltern.  If they employ it in answering a query, they risk drawing special punishment for gross insubordination.

There you have it.

Re:  Midterm in America

After reading my last column, a correspondent asked whether former INEC chair Maurice Iwu was not right on the mark when he declared that the United States had a great deal to learn from election officials in Nigeria.

I suspect Professor Iwu had in mind America’s penchant for passing sweeping judgment on elections in other countries as to whether they are free and fair and the outcome credible, expecting that its pronouncement would be the definitive verdict.

If that presumption was generally tolerated in pre-Trump America, it is today greeted with sneers and jeers.

I hope the African Union and election officials on the continent had the presence of mind to send accreditation teams to monitor and report on the midterm polls in the United States.

If they did not, this is the time to start planning to send observers for the 2024 General Elections in the United States.