A few days after Prof Yemi Osinbajo was sworn in as the Vice President in 2015, I received a call from a fellow who said he was an aide to the newly inaugurated VP. I asked how I could help and the male voice said the Office of the Vice President was seeking advice from select compatriots on the steps the Muhammadu Buhari administration should take to be successful.

While I wondered the yardstick by which I qualified to offer advice to the nation’s number two man and, by implication, President Buhari himself, I told the caller that the administration’s job was cut out: ensure that the rule of law prevailed at every point in its life. In other words, whosoever broke the law must face the consequences, no matter how highly placed.

The caller thanked me for the view I expressed and hung up. Of course, I had no way of knowing how useful he found my advice, but I felt a personal sense of triumph in August 2018 when the news filtered out that the Vice President had fired the Director-General of the Department of State Service (DSS), Lawal Daura, as a consequence of the siege the DSS and the police laid to the hallowed chambers of the National Assembly while President Buhari was away on medical trip to the UK.

The rumour mill would later booze with speculations that President Buhari was not happy with the Vice President’s action which was hailed by many as firm and decisive. Be it as it may, it detracted nothing from the fact that the action resonated with many well-meaning Nigerians. If nothing else, there has not been another case of the DSS or any security outfit obstructing lawmakers’ access to the green and red chambers. It is also safe to say that the singular act by the Vice President was one of the reasons many non-party actors rooted for him during the recent presidential primaries of the All Progressives Congress (APC).

Surprisingly, the public reaction to Osinbajo’s action was in sharp contrast to another firm and decisive one taken by the Lagos State Government recently in auctioning some vehicles it impounded for breaking traffic rules. Among the offenders was a widow and her son who were seen in a viral video crying and begging officials of Lagos State Special Crimes not to sell a bus they had bought on hire purchase for N1.8 million.

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As the story goes, the duo had leapt for joy when the minibus in question was presented for auction with N50,000 as the opening offer. But their joy soon turned into sadness after the offer was increased to N450,000 and they realised that it was out of their reach.

Understandably, the pathetic tales told by the driver (the son) to the effect that he was jailed for three years over the same matter and also lost his daughter before he was released from prison drew public sympathy. A legal matter was thus turned into an emotional one with many describing the state government’s action as callous. The truth, however, is that no government succeeds by pandering to the dictates of emotion.

Considering that even the Bureau of Statistics may have lost count of the number of people that have been killed by reckless motorists who take delight in driving against the direction of traffic, popularly called one-way, asking that such offenders should go unpunished amounts to disregard for the thousands of innocent souls they have dispatched into early grave.

And it is not the case that the state government took the decision to auction the vehicles without recourse to due process if the words of the Senior Special Assistant to Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu on New Media, Jubril Gawat, are anything to go by. Justifying the decision of the state government to auction 134 vehicles impounded for various traffic offences, he said that some of the vehicles were seized for offences that attract only fines but the owners abandoned them, leaving the government with no other option but to auction them.

Like I once wrote, any government desirous of positive impact must necessarily be wary of the conduct of motorists on the highway, particularly in a state like Lagos. There is a lot about driving that should give law enforcement agents an insight into the nature of the individuals behind the wheels. The patent lack of courtesy exhibited by some motorists is an indication of how discourteous they are in their day to day relationship with family members and neighbours.

The reckless way a lot of them drive even when they are on the wrong lane is also indicative of how little the regard they have for human life. Such killer motorists think nothing of the psychological trauma they live on the minds of the loved ones of their victims. Hence they deserve no sympathy whenever the law has an opportunity to take its pound of flesh.

An event can hardly be more eventful than was the annual national conference of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) at Eko Hotels and Suites between August 19 and 26. One of conference’s high points was the presence of leading candidates in the forthcoming presidential election invited as guest speakers and the speeches they delivered at the gathering. Among them were Alhaji Atiku Abubakar and Mr. Peter Obi, the presidential candidates of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Labour Party (LP) respectively. Also there to represent the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, was his running mate Alhaji Kashim Shettima.

The presidential candidates had taken turns at the occasion to address the gathering of learned friends, as lawyers are wont to call themselves, with Atiku advocating the handover of federal universities to states where they are located as a panacea to the ceaseless strike actions embarked upon by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU). Atiku, who said the Federal Government cannot continue to shoulder the cost of university education in the country, also advocated the country’s restructuring, saying “I am a product of developed powers and I know what the regional governments did with those powers. That is why I am advocating for restructuring. “

On his part, Obi spent most of the time allotted him lamenting the nation’s problems but offering little in terms of solutions, save his vow to tackle the worsening exchange rate of the naira by encouraging manufacturing and export of goods and services. Obi, who said the 2023 election would not be about tribe and religion but about character and competence in leadership, added: “Nigeria is in a mess. We got here simply because of the cumulative effect of bad leadership. The coming election is not about tribe and religion but about character and competence. We need a bold transition from a highly insecure state to a highly secure state.”

Convinced that Nigerians have the ability to see through what he called the sophistry and worn out rhetoric of pretentious politicians, Shettima pointed at the personal accomplishments of Tinubu and himself while they held sway as governors of Lagos and Borno states as the basis for seeking the mandate of Nigerians for an opportunity to replicate them at the federal level.

Shettima recalled how Tinubu set the template for the rejuvenation of the internally generated revenue (IGR) of Lagos State such that today, the state’s IGR has ballooned from a paltry N600 million in 1999 to N51 billion. The implication, he said, is that from its condition as an economy driven by danfo and molue in the era before 1999, the state’s economy is now in the jet age, ranking as the third largest in Africa. The feat, he assured, will be replicated in Abuja if Tinubu becomes president in 2023 while he as Tinubu’s able lieutenant would bring his experience to bear on the security front as the governor of Borno State in the heat of Boko Haram insurgency.

“We have antecedents. I built some of the best schools in Nigeria. Go to Borno and see wonders. You will never believe that it is a state in a state of war. So we are going to replicate our achievements in Lagos, in Borno so that our nation will be a better place,” he said.

While Atiku and Obi drew cheers from the conferees on account of what they said while Shettima drew rapturous applause impelled not only by the strength and substance of his speech but the eloquence and conviction with which it was delivered. So convincing and captivating was the APC vice presidential candidate’s delivery that Obi intuitively joined the crowd of admirers that clapped vigorously for him.

Surprisingly, social media enthusiasts elected not to celebrate the elegant mix of brain and carriage on display but rather chose the path of derision, making a mockery of Shettima’s dressing and turning him into the butt of cruel jokes on social media, the platform for the flippant, the superficial and the ephemeral. Tagged the Shettima challenge, imitations of his dressing in oversized blue jacket, a red tie long enough to tether a refractory horse and a pair of canvass went viral. The army of mischief makers was led by no other than Charles Oputa, the ubiquitous bundle of contradiction who by his own admission is still a boy at 70. Cut out for the mundane, he has since made a job of posting pictures of himself mimicking Shettima’s dressing.

Shettima has since explained that his choice of dressing to the occasion was meant to spite the crowd after the findings he made before going to the conference showed that he was going to meet a hostile crowd. Lost on his detractors is the fact that corporate dressing is not alien to the APC vice presidential candidate who rose in banking career from head of accounts in the defunct Commercial Bank of Africa Limited in 1993 to General Manager in Zenith International Bank before his appointment as Commissioner for Finance in Borno State in 2007. Hence he is not one to be told the size of suit, the length of tie or the pair of shoes he should wear. His choice, like he said was deliberate and anyone who knows the worth of knowledge would not discount his edifying speech at NBA conference for the so called Shettima challenge.

My best moments as a primary school pupil were the periods scheduled for reading Yoruba literatures, particularly Alawiye, the definitive series authored by the inimitable story teller, J.F. Odunjo. Needless to say that the series were choked full of delightful stories imaginatively packaged and arrestingly presented.

I still recall one of those sessions on a day in Primary 3. It was the last period at some minutes to 2 pm and I was very hungry because I had not gone for the usual launch break at 11 am. We were doing a joint reading and got to a point where the main character in the story said, “Mo fi moinmoin mu eko tutu (I had a meal of cold pap with moinmoin)”. The sound of it caused a litre of saliva to drop from my jaw. The teacher, who had noticed what happened because I was seated on the front row as one of the smallest pupils in class, jokingly alerted the other pupils to it and I instantly became an object of derisive laughter.

But a particular story that used to fascinate me a lot was the one about the tortoise sneaking into his father-in-law’s farm to steal yams. Unfortunately, he was caught in the act and his exasperated father-in-law dragged him home and tied him to a tree in front of his house. It was on a market day, so everyone who saw the tortoise tied to a tree on their way to the market rained insults of him, telling him how shameless he was to steal from his father-in-law of all people. The father-in-law savoured every moment of it.

But the table turned against the father-in-law when the passers-by were returning home from the market in the evening and still found tortoise tied to the tree. They hurled bigger insults at the father-in-law than they had done to tortoise in the morning, asking how he could be so callous to tie the tortoise to a tree all day. Unknown to the father-in-law, there is a limit beyond which one’s agitation for one’s right could become undesirable. There lie my fears for university lecturers over the strike embarked upon by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) since February 14.

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On Tuesday, a meeting between a delegation of ASUU and that of the Federal Government for an end to a one-month warning strike that has now entered its seventh month ended in a stalemate. Reports quoted some ASUU representatives at Tuesday’s meeting as saying that they walked out of the meeting with the government delegation because the latter offered nothing new towards meeting the demands of the university lecturers among which were enhanced pay packet and better funding of universities.

But the Minister of Education, Mallam Adamu Adamu, told journalists in Abuja on Thursday that the meeting was deadlocked because ASUU insisted on being fully paid for the six months they had been away from their duty posts while government insisted on enforcing its no-work-no-pay rule in respect of striking workers. Ironically, Adamu said, other unions like the Academic Staff Union of Polytechnics (ASUP) which had drawn inspiration from ASUU to embark on industrial action had all agreed to go back to work.

The strength of a good warrior, a Yoruba adage says, lies in his ability to know when to advance and when to retreat. Like the father-in-law in the tortoise story, it would seem that ASUU has reached that point in the struggle where it must review its strategy because of the sensitive nature of the matter at hand and how capable it is to impact negatively on the goodwill of the lecturers. It has become like the mosquito that perches on the scrotum. The owner must handle the mosquito with care. Otherwise he could do an incalculable damage to his scrotum and the mosquito escapes unhurt! A woman whose wrapper is snatched in the market place by a lunatic in the market cannot afford to run after the mad man naked. Otherwise, onlookers might think the woman is actually the one that is mad.

Morally speaking, ASUU has a lot more at stake in this matter than the federal government which already has a reputation for reneging on agreements with workers. The Yoruba say that if one would not eat the yam for the sake of the palm oil, he should eat the palm oil for the sake of the yam. If ASUU would not call of the strike because government failed to fulfill its own part of the bargain, it would do well to give a thought to the future of hapless students, many of whom are already growing depressed. Chances are that they could channel their energy into negative activities if ASUU remains obstinate, because an idle hand is the devil’s workshop.

There is also the plight of poor parents who are going through thick and thin to ensure that their wards become educated. That their children are not in school does not mean that they are not spending money on their education. Many of the students live in private hostels outside the school campus because the school cannot provide them hostel accommodation. The owners of the hostels would not stop charging for the bed space because lecturers are on strike. There are insinuations already that ASUU appears indifferent to the plight of students and parents because many if not most of them are engaged in one private practice or the other.

This, however, is not to say that ASUU should not demand for what rightfully belongs to its members. The days are gone when the teacher’s reward was deemed to be stacked somewhere in heaven. Today’s average teacher wants his reward here and now, and with extras where possible. The pursuit of their rights must however be done with human feeling. If they cannot actualise their agitation in the current political dispensation, another government is only a few months away.

It is instructive that since Bishop David Oyedepo yielded his pulpit to former President Goodluck Jonathan to campaign as the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in his bid for reelection in 2015, many other church leaders have since drawn inspiration from the founder of Winners’ Chapel, turning the auditoriums of their churches into campaign grounds for preferred aspirants and candidates. For instance, the presiding pastor of Abuja-based Dunamis Church, Paul Enenche, has in recent times turned his church’s 100,000-seater auditorium into a forum for endorsement of political office seekers.

The entire nation was scandalised in 2015 when the secret romance between then President Jonathan and then President of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor, blew open as the latter’s private jet allegedly used by the Jonathan government to ferry the sum of $9.3 million to South Africa purportedly in search of arms was impounded in Mandela’s country.

With these in mind, the ridiculous height to which many church leaders have taken the campaign against Tinubu’s choice of Kashim Shettima as running mate would not come as a surprise to any discerning individual, including the blasphemous claim by some of them that the party or candidate we vote for as Christians in the 2023 elections will determine which part of heaven or hell we will find ourselves in the hereafter. What is a surprise is the ludicrous arguments they have advanced to buttress their specious campaign against same-faith ticket.

Both Tinubu and the party he represents have made it clear that their decision to look in the direction of another Muslim from the north for the vice president position was informed primarily by the need to put competence above religious and ethnic sentiments in the search for solutions to the country’s myriad of problems. The Christian Association of Nigeria, a body that is yet to be led by a northern Christian since it was founded in 1976 save the tenure of Onaiyekan, a Yoruba man from Kogi State, believes it has the moral right to query Tinubu’s choice of Shettima instead of a competent northern Christian. Does that now mean there are no competent northern Christians to lead CAN?

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The choice of a running mate for any election is informed by more factors than competence. The first factor a presidential candidate who wants to win an election would consider is the political clout of the individual being drafted as running mate. It is the most critical factor because the foremost objective of the presidential candidate is winning. It is for the same reason that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) shunned the North/South rotational principle and picked Alhaji Atiku Abubakar as its candidate, knowing full well that the man that has been in the saddle for seven years is not only a northerner like Atiku but also a Fulani man like him.

Besides political clout is trust, a virtue the candidate must see in his would be deputy, which does not come with being a Christian, a Muslim, a traditional worshipper or a pagan. Hence in picking his running mate, Tinubu needed a candidate who is not only competent but also possesses the right mix of influence and trust. It thus means that while it may be possible or very easy for Tinubu to get a competent Christian from the north as his running mate, it may not be that easy to get one that combines the triple virtues of competence, influence and trust. He has no choice in the matter if in his search for a running mate the only individual that ticks the right boxes turns out to be a Muslim.

CAN will be better off channeling the energy it has dissipated in the clamour for a Christian running mate for APC to negotiating with the ruling party and others like the PDP for positions that are of even greater relevance than vice president jokingly referred to by many as spare tyre. Anyone with the faintest idea about democratic governance would agree that the Senate President and the Speaker of the House of Representatives are more strategic positions than the vice president. If the President is the head of government, the Senate President and the Speaker of House of Representatives would be its neck which, like the human body, determines the heads position at every material time. There also other positions like the Chief of Staff to the President, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, the Minister of Defence and the Attorney General/Minister of Justice, to mention a few.

Jonathan, a Christian, was not only vice president but also metamorphosed into the nation’s substantive president. But what other memorable impact did his tenures have on Christian community than the scandalous co-option of the then CAN president Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor and his private jet to ferry a whopping sum of $9.3 million in raw cash from Nigeria to South Africa purportedly in search of arms? There is no argument as to the fact that Boko Haram developed into the monster it is now because Jonathan, a Christian President, failed to nip it in the bud. Was it not under the watch of Christian President Jonathan that close to 300 female pupils of a secondary school in Chibok, Borno State were abducted by insurgents?

What miracle will a Christian vice president perform in Aso Rock where a Christian president had failed?  How much influence does Prof.  Yemi Osinbajo, a Christian but a high ranking pastor of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, wield in government as vice president? How much has his presence in government impacted on the Christian community? Many of us were witnesses to the scenarios that played out at the Presidential Villa when President Muhammadu Buhari had to be hospitalised in the UK and ministers were taking files to him in London while Osinbajo was Acting President.

The same-faith ticket of Tinubu and Shettima is a step that will in the long run liberate the nation from the shackles of religious sentiments and set it inexorably on the path of progress. We have the choice of embracing it and reaping its dividends or rejecting it and remaining in bondage to it.

Finally, there is hope of respite from the boredom that has characterised the nation’s politics since the unceremonial exit of the rambunctious former governor of Kano State, Alhaji Sabo Bakin Zuwo. The emergence, penultimate Saturday, of the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Ademola Adeleke, as the winner of the governorship election of Osun State is in every sense a cause for optimism that the nation’s political firmament may soon witness the return of the comic extravaganza that made Zuwo the darling of every Nigerian.

His reign as Kano State governor was painfully short. He had barely been sworn in for three months when he and other political actors of the Second Republic were booted out of office via a coup d’état. Yet he had done enough by the time he left in December 1983 to etch his name on the psyche of every Nigerian who knew the true worth of a comedian governor in a country where governance is nothing but drudgery.

Right from the build-up to the election that brought him in as governor in October 1983, the discerning Kano electorate had taken notice of Zuwo’s penchant for theatrics with his exciting responses even to the most insipid of questions from unimaginative interlocutors. The story is told of how Zuwo told a journalist that his running mate as the candidate of the Peoples Redemption Party (PRP) in the run-up to the 1983 governorship election was no other than Abubakar Rimi, his fierce political rival at the time. The journalist asked why his biggest rival would be his running mate and he retorted: “Don’t mind him; he is always running after me!”

Zuwo’s governorship aspiration had coincided with a time Nigerian university students were protesting the poor living conditions on their campuses, prompting his interviewer to ask how an end could be brought to students’ unrest. To this, Zuwo asked: “How can students rest? From their hostels, they go to the classroom, from the classroom they go to the library, from the library they go to the cafeteria, from the cafeteria they go to the toilet… Students can never rest!”

In an age when the union of Nigerian students was a very influential pressure group and the then civilian government of Alhaji Shehu Shagari was growing increasingly unpopular, another journalist asked Zuwo whether he thought the Shagari administration still had the support of Nigerian students. “Of course,” he quipped. “UI Ibadan, they are in support; UI Lagos, they are in support; UI Kano, they are in support; UI Sokoto, they are in support. In fact, all the UIs in Nigeria are in support of the government!”

Asked what mineral resources he was banking on as sources of revenue for his government if he became the governor of Kano State, he wasted no time in drawing the attention of his interviewer to the fact that Coca-Cola, Mirinda, Pepsi Cola, and other forms of mineral drinks were being produced in different parts of the state. He said: “You guys (pressmen), you always say we don’t have mineral resources in Kano. We have Coca-Cola, Fanta, Mirinda, and a newly invented one Sipirit (Sprite),” he said.

It was no surprise to anyone that Zuwo took his antics to the height he did when he was pushed out by a military coup and a sum huge enough to fund the state’s budget for two years was reportedly found under his bed in the Kano State Government House. Confronted by security agents with the allegation that he diverted government money into private use, Zuwo said he did nothing wrong by keeping government money in government house. His admirers deemed his brilliant defence great enough to earn him a change of name from Bakin Zuwo to Banking Zuwo.

Events have turned full circle 39 years after Bakin Zuwo’s unceremonious exit from the nation’s political space, and the destination for his transmogrification is no other place than Osun, with Adeleke as the protagonist in the unfolding times. Many who think that Zuwo’s reported histrionics are nothing more than tales by moonlight are about to witness a replica of them in flesh and blood.  While the governor-elect may not be endowed with as much verbal dramatics as Zuwo, his physical intelligence highlighted by his penchant for vigorous dancing at the slightest opportunity sets him up beautifully for bigger comic exploits.

He gave a hint of it the other day when he returned from the US on the eve of the election and announced gleefully that he was backloaded with local and foreign currencies that ranged from the naira to the euro, the dollar, and the pound sterling. In the build-up to the governorship election he lost to the incumbent Governor Gboyega Oyetola in 2019, he was said to have threatened to dance in the reverse gear from his Ede hometown to Oshogbo, the state capital, if he emerged the winner. Sadly, he lost the election, and Oyetola’s success robbed us of what would have been an unforgettable spectacle.

Mercifully, there is always a second chance. A reliable family source informed the writer that contrary to the popular thinking that Davido, the governor-elect’s nephew and music star would supply the beats for his daily dancing session in the Osun State Government House. A committee had been constituted to find a musician with the right beats because Davido’s music is devoid of the percussion and talking drum needed to get the best of the governor’s dancing skills. Be it as it may, the happy times are here again, especially in the State of Living Spring.