The Nation Newspaper

Category: Louis Odion

  • The last of Awo’s cavalrymen

    The last of Awo’s cavalrymen

    It appeared odd, if not outright farcical. Reappearing after disappearing briefly from the dinning-table that memorable morning in 2001, the steward miraculously produced a medium jar of Milo, to the culinary relief of the choosy one among the guests.

    Not until our chief host casually waved off the chef who had tried to tender the change from the little grocery shopping did it become clear to some of us why Chief Bisi Akande had momentarily been distracted from the hearty banter earlier as he gave out some bank notes from his pocket for an errand obviously intended to be discreet.

    Actually, one of the visiting editors would prefer beverage drink to the Lipton tea available for breakfast. It happened that such “indulgent” brew was not normally served at the governor’s table at the Osogbo White House then, reflecting his abstemious taste.

    On noticing the abstention at the other end of table from the feasting going on, Baba Akande, long famous for his disdain for protocols, beckoned the waiter and simply mobilized him from the pocket of his trademark “danshiki” to do the needful just across the road outside the Government House, rather than show off power to the august guests by summoning the whole department supervisor, lest he ended up making a big ceremony of a simple matter.

    Fleeting as the foregoing drama might appear, it typified the culture of frugality Osun State would know after Akande was sworn in as the second elected governor in 1999.

    Such virtue is surely now a rarity in high places in Nigeria as extravagance is commonly glorified instead of modesty, debauchery preferred by those of whom chastity is expected.

    As Baba Akande then joins the octogenarian club, there can be no better moment to pause and reflect on an exemplary life, whose cocktail of trials and triumphs truly inspires, a reminder that politics is at its noblest when guided by high principle.

    Today, on account of the prevalence of political “cross-breeding” of the past three decades in the South-West in which actors often switch parties and forswear allegiance with the unpredictability only matched by the fabled volatility of British weather, the term “Awoist” clearly now bears different meanings.

    Well, let it be first acknowledged that it is within the perimeter of liberty by mutants to lay claims. A fact already conceded by the sage himself. While offering clarification on the prospects of immortality, Awolowo had famously declared those who could truly be called “Awoists” in future would not necessarily be those related to him by blood or old association, but by shared values.

    So, if Awoism could be defined in broad terms as a fierce fidelity to a progressive ideology, stubborn resolve against compromising principle however the temptation, and that unquestioning loyalty to the cause of friendship as exemplified by the very literal meaning of “Afenifere”, then Baba Akande could perhaps rightly be described today as Awo’s last general standing in more than one way.

    Indeed, the referenced mission to Osogbo that fateful weekend in 2001 was more of fact-finding. Osun had been engulfed by a debilitating industrial crisis. Workers wanted higher wage. Akande, in turn, opened the books to show that the state’s meager earnings could not fund the raise the labour wanted.

    As tension swirled around the province of the fabled “living spring”, a homeboy who happened to be a senior journalist decided to weigh in, perhaps as a civic contribution to his troubled homeland in search of solution. Drawing on “professional solidarity”, he pressed this writer as THISDAY editor then and a few other newspaper editors to visit from Lagos to not only engage the governor directly but also have a first-hand feel of Osun reality with a view to better understanding the raging crisis.

    So, for more than two hours, we literally grilled the governor in a brutally frank exchange in which no hard punch was spared. Like a seasoned matador, Baba Akande took all the darts, not dodging any, sometimes resorting to native humour to explain his difficulties.

    From that frank conversation, his position was unambiguous: the only option available to meet the workers’ demand then was to go on borrowing spree. To him, that was unthinkable on ethical grounds. It simply meant stealing from the unborn generation.

    There were a few other things he also could not contemplate, out of ideological fidelity to welfarist values. One of which was the bias for social spending in form of free and compulsory education to Osun children so much that between 1999 and 2001, a colossal N522.85m had been spent as subsidy on education. The magnitude is better appreciated considering that Osun’s entire annual budget then was a few billions of Naira.

    Expectedly, before leaving town, we visited a number of projects being undertaken by Akande including the construction and furnishing of hundreds of modern classrooms to meet the inherited huge deficit at both primary and secondary levels.

    Leaving Osun two days later, one could not but now see Akande and the Osun impasse in two inter-related lights. One was the uncommon fortitude he brought to bear in defending Awo’s core value – free education as a tool to fostering an egalitarian society. Second was the dialectical crisis arising from the former. Osun’s fiscal failure spoke, in turn, directly to the crisis of federalism in Nigeria. Indeed, the state, like most others across the Nigeria, would only continue to manage poverty, given the prevailing queer federal architecture.

    For instance, studies confirm that Ilesha is rich in gold. But Nigeria’s own warped federalism forbids states from exploiting the riches of their soil to better themsleves. Everyone is made to forfeit ownership to a buccaneering Leviathan at the centre which, in turn, dispenses crumbs to the federating units by a principle that glorifies predation than production.

    So, the gripping irony: even though living by the river, the proverbial swamp-dweller is left to die of thirst.

    The enduring fiscal crisis can hardly be divorced from one grave oversight at the founding of the present Republic, however. By 1999, the nation had clearly grown weary of military occupation and appeared too impatient to see the back of the now discredited generals to have had the presence of mind to detect before hand that the working document handed down as chart for the democracy voyage ahead was, at best, faulty.

    Once the euphoria petered out, disillusionment naturally set in. So, barons of Alliance for Democracy like Akande contemplating the imposition of a progressive agenda soon found they were a minority pitched against ruthless conservative forces, fiercely committed to preserving the existing predatory order at the centre.

    In hindsight, it would perhaps not be too harsh now to accuse the early optimists of sheer naivety in trusting Obasanjo too much on account of merely professing being “born-again democrat” and expecting a fulfillment of the inaugural promise to consider structural change.

    But adapting military stratagem of ambush for a purely civil outcome, OBJ would intensify such lip-service to seduce the grandees of the progressive community in South-west into lowering their guard at home until they were routed electorally in one fell swoop in 2003.

    Alas, the newly politically displaced would realize too late that the hyena remains and acts like the hyena, regardless of the fancy apparel deployed as disguise.

    Ironically, that electoral defeat of 2003 would now appear Akande’s own defining moment. Others would have willingly entered into any deal to secure comfort, however temporary. But Akande was not ready to compromise his principle of prudence and accountability. Not even OBJ, the eternal narcissist, would fail to admit Akande’s honesty in a rare acknowledgement of good in any human being other than himself.

    While fielding questions a year after PDP’s historic capture of South-West (except Lagos), he said: “Chief Bisi Akande of Osun State is the only governor whose integrity I can vouch for.”

    But honesty is only one of the qualities that set Akande apart. Equally discernible in his political odyssey is the virtue of consistency – a rarity in a political environment where folks would trade honour and betray associates just for mere accommodation by anyone in power.

    Rather than be tamed, he parlayed that political adversity to an opportunity to rededicate himself to the advocacy of progressive values.

    Not surprising, his has since remained a trenchant voice for a return to fiscal federalism as originally conceived by the 1960 constitution as the most sustainable prescription for equity and justice in the increasingly conflicted Nigerian family.

    A true measure of character is said to be where an actor stands in the season of moral crisis. Nigeria’s 90s was undoubtedly defined by the popular resistance of military despotism symbolized by June 12. When it was most perilous, Akande stood to be counted among those who valiantly fought the military.

    By falling for the carrots dangled by IBB and Abacha, not a few Awoists would forfeit their own reputation. Those who returned from the dingy dalliance with the military during that momentous decade found themselves carrying mortal scar forever. They became enfeebled by emotional fracture arising from being estranged from old comrades, thus losing their voices in the civil space henceforth.

    Also, the murk that permeated the Jonathan era would prove pestilential for some other Awoists of old. Ordinarily, being found in varying compromising positions with barons of the then presiding conservative party would be enough heresy already. With the details of how dollars meant to buy arms to fight Boko Haram was also generously shared in South-West ahead of the 2015 general elections by desperate Jonathan to buy support now public knowledge, many more have since become a bit more subtle in openly displaying their Awo cap in Yorubaland, more out of shame than self-restraint.

    In their quiet moments today, those implicated in that abominable tryst must be feeling bitter regret, humbled by shame at being found to have toiled all their youth building a worthy name only to be caught in strange – if not seedy – company in their hoary days.

    Coincidentally, it was in the same season that Akande’s political stock rose sharply. The titan from Ila-Orangun would undoubtedly go down in history as the man who as Interim Chairman inspired a broad coalition of progressives and some conservative rebels to unseat the ruling reactionary party in Nigeria in 2015.

    Thus, Akande would seem to have fulfilled yet another of Awo’s old prophecies: “For the progressive to be in power they need the support and collaborations of some conservatives. After attaining power, the conservatives would on their own, walk away. The progressive would now build a great party that would move the nation forward.”

    If we then remember the sordid circumstances under which likes of Atiku broke away from APC last year, we cannot but be in awe of the sage’s prescience.

    No less compelling, therefore, is the need to also salute Akande’s abiding faithfulness as the last of Awo’s cavalrymen standing.

     

    • This piece was first published in January 2019. Mr. Odion is the Senior Technical Assistant on Media to the President

     

  • Invoking Gibran in a troubled time

    At first, it could be mistaken for a pornographic studio. The walls are sculpted with assorted portraits of nudity, sensuous imageries, certain to trigger the testosterone, if not stoke the loins.

    With illumination made dim by a syncopation of delicately angled recess lights and the antique windows shaded by sparse curtains, the air around the four-floor covent hewn from ancient cave literally reeks of erotica this sunny afternoon.

    But this is no America’s Heff Hefna’s sybaritic lair; it is the lofty shrine, the museum sheltering not only the remains of Gibran Khalil Gibran (arguably one of Lebanon’s greatest philosophers ever), but also the cream of his paintings and literary oeuvres that redefined universal thought in the 20th century.

    Predictably, camera is forbidden.

    Unquestionably a commercial success long before death, Gibran is today regarded the next bestseller of all times after China’s Lao Tzu and Europe’s William Shakespeare, with his writings already translated into 108 languages and his prodigious paintings also displayed in museum in the United States and Mexico.

    If he spoke to the depth of the human condition, it was probably because of the crushing experiences he suffered at a tender age. Son of a father described as an alcoholic, he was led away at tender age of 12 from Lebanon by his strong-willed mother, Kamleh, in pursuit of a better life in Boston, United States. Only for him to lose his mother, sister and half-brother within fifteen months, seven years later.

    He would begin his artistic odyssey as a painter before becoming a writer and poet. What a million words could not describe he captured graphically with a few strokes of the brush. He died at age 48 in 1931 and had willed his body be flown from Boston and buried in the monastery he bought in his native Bsharri in the north of Lebanon.

    Inside the basement, a hidden projector telegraphs on the wall a rather haunting quotation from Gibran’s verses: “I am alive like you and I am beside you.”

    Further down is his simple bed and austere writing table. In another corner is a fireplace-like enclosure through which the iron casket bearing his embalmed body can be glimpsed.

    The curator, Joseph Geagea, would simplistically reply an inquisitive member of the mission from Nigeria (Fejiro Adesida) that the perceived obsession with nudity was only Gibran’s expression of a preference for intimacy with nature, if not a yearning to, in fact, break loose from sartorial captivity. Those naked may not be self-aware, Geagea added, but those in the nude are aware of their nakedness.

    Well, a broader appreciation of Gibran’s stated naturalism would be a cry to man to walk the straight path: keep life simple, relationships true, promises real and the environment clean.

    Today, with his native Lebanon, West Asia region and the world at large roiling in a turmoil that is both ethical and political in texture, the words of the sage from Bsharri could indeed not be more prophetic. In combating the political establishment, he denounces “the nation that places wealth above values”. As for worship, he emphasizes spirituality above religiosity. No wonder a tension often simmered between him and the religious entrepreneurs of the era.

    Today, such values and virtues are, sadly, in greater deficit not only in Lebanon but the world over and the human condition increasingly gets desperate despite supposedly phenomenal leaps in knowledge and advance in technology.

    For instance, as we gathered for barbecue and drinks in the icily cold night on the Ceedar height on the fourth day of our arrival in Lebanon on a cultural exchange programme facilitated by the Wole Soyinka Foundation and hosted by the CEDAR Institute of the Norte Dame University, Beirut, one of the faculty members of the retreat, Professor Edward Alam, had to excuse himself abruptly from the gathering, following a distress call from home in Beirut.

    Israeli fighter jets were reported to be flying menacingly low above Alam’s penthouse apartment, apparently on yet another bombing mission to neighbouring Syria now reduced to utter rubble by the seven-year civil war sparked by the Arab Spring, inflicting one of the worst human tolls and refugee crises in human history.

    It is a frightening spectacle the children of a lesser military god trapped in West Asia have learnt to endure daily as “almighty” Israel strives to impose her supremacy in the region since her unilateral declaration of statehood in 1948.

    Worse still, in Lebanon, local politics remains poisoned today by ethnic suspicion. Oil and gas have for long been discovered in commercial quantity offshore of the country’s shelf of the Mediterranean Sea. But that resource cannot be explored yet for the benefit of the people because the politicians are unable to agree on the sharing formula of the expected fortune!

    Leaders of various religious faiths, in turn, prosper from spreading the message of hate and division. Religion is exploited to advance narrow political agenda.

    So, Professor Joseph Rahme is sure Gibran would today be turning in great pains in his tomb at the sorry turn of events.

    Interestingly, Rahme, an expert in World history and one of the key drivers of the yearly cultural conversation between Lebanon and Nigeria, is a relation of the legendary Gibran maternally. (The philosopher’s mother, Kamleh, belonged to the Rahme clan.)

    We see the ethical atrophy Gibran laments about the new world also finding expression in small bad social habits here. While criss-crossing Lebanon in a caravan bus, we saw that in the road rage. We saw that in the recklessness of drivers unwilling to use seat belts or some texting furiously in slow-moving traffic, without fear of reprisal. In Nigeria, the roving FRSC operatives would almost certainly pounce on you.

    In many public spaces toured, we also saw selfishness in smokers freely puffing cigarette smoke, without regards for non-smokers.

    Lebanon is hardly immune to the corrosive influence of the social media culture and the attendant obsession with the ostentation and addiction to its enablers, either. It is an emerging universal malaise, by the way. For instance, at accident scene nowadays, we are now more inclined to approach those in distress with the cameras of our smart phones instead of helping hands, to feed the mostly callous curiosity of the waiting blogosphere. At home, precious family time is stolen as members are distracted by their i-Phones.

    So, slowly, the river of shared humanity is drying up.

    But so acute has the situation become in Lebanon that it formed the basis for a presentation at the Founder’s Day celebration at the prestigious Notre Dame University on the eleventh day of our visit with octogenarian President Michel Aoun seated.

    Targeted at the youth population, the new message is an urgent call for moderation to curb the danger increasingly posed to family values and social health. Since it has been identified as a youth affliction, it is felt that only the youth themselves can help the nation champion the crusade for caution.

    Needless to mention that even as the youths were being challenged with stirring words to rise to a new national call against social media abuse while the ceremony lasted in the university’s commodious auditorium, a military helicopter hovered overhead throughout, perhaps underscoring a greater sense of anxiety – if not insecurity – gripping the nation itself at large.

    In the midst of all this, there are a few who appear to find fulfillment in fidelity to the Gibran way, however. To Rahme, maintaining a strictly organic lifestyle is keeping faith with the memory of his great grand uncle. A scholar who has traversed the United States, Brussels, Paris, Instanbu, Cairo and London in his career, the balding scholar now prefers to live in the pristine Cedar height where he was born, a great distance from the Notre Dame University where he works.

    He prides himself on eating home-made meals prepared from fresh produce harvested from the garden behind his bungalow home. To force family members into a situation they cannot but communicate, he banishes television from his Cedar redoubt.

    However, there is one virtue generations of Lebanese forever share with Gibran regardless of where they reside – never forgetting their cradle. It perhaps explains huge remittance of estimated $8b annually from those in Diaspora and a certain inclination to maintain a presence at home even while being physically absent. The big men would erect wonderous villas, even when they probably visit home only once in a blue moon.

    We saw the universalism Gibran preaches in the naming space after the Nigerian nation and figures in Mizyara, a relatively more swanky community with even more stunning castles, built with fortune made largely in Nigeria.

    This is the ancestral home of the Chagourys, the Chidiacs in Nigeria. Driving past Gilbert Chagoury Boulevard, you see Nigeria Avenue, then Abuja street, then Lagos street, then Herbert Wigwe street. (Well, we never might be able to tell what new usuring trick the Access Bank czar taught the Lebanese businessmen.)

    It is the country of Habib Jafar, the promoter of the Nigeria-Lebanon conversation.

    Regardless of the scare by the flying Israeli bomber jets four days earlier, Alams would open the doors of his high-rise home in Beirut to us on the ninth night for a sumptuous dinner. As his beautiful wife walked in regally soon afterwards, it became easy to understand why the man with Kenny Rogers-beard had to abandon the seminary midway and surrender to wife’s insistence that the family relocated from the United States to their native Lebanon.

    While seated in the terrace, you savoured a stunning aerial view of the city at night. The affable scholar, with a romantic voice and more than passable command of the guitar, later treated us to rendition of classics by the likes of Carol King on his hand-made Spanish guitar.

    Of course, our own sweet-voiced “Mr. Shakomended” (Lanre Fakeye) swiftly “retaliated” with a newly composed potential chart-buster entitled “Cedars”, inspired by our four-day immersion in the fabled ancient community hosting the biblical grove of prized trees. Guitar sound flowed from gifted Osamudiamen Ivbanikaro-Isaac and back-up voices by the troika of multi-lingual Norbert Olisakwe, Yinka Olatunbosun and Aseobong Larry-Ettah. While journalists Tayo Abodunrin and Kazeem Ugbodaga kept reportorial silence. Of course, novelist Razinatu Mohammed was the cheer-leader.

    Truly, Gibran is not dead; the echo of his deep words still surely haunts his beleaguered homeland today.

  • The politics of age

    Easily given to ceremony than substance, it is no surprise that we seem carried away yet again by the enactment recently of the “Not-Too-Young-To-Run” Act. By “we”, I refer to citizens of my generation and the millennials, many of whom probably view the development as no more than a tacit official acknowledgement of “our own turn to eat”.

    True, there can be no downplaying the import of lowering the age ceiling for the the highest office in the land at a time the geriatric seem reluctant to relinguish the leadership stool. Now, a 35-year-old is anointed to contest the presidency against President Muhammadu Buhari next year, as against the old minimum of 40. Just as a 25-year-old is fit to become member of state assembly or the National Assembly.

    Of course, this change, championed by the “Not-Too-Young-To-Run” movement, was undoutedly inspired by electoral hurricanes outside our shores in recent years that swept young Turks into power.

    At 39, Emmanuel Macron emerged the youngest President in the history of France last year. The same age as Leo Varadkar, the Irish Prime Minister.

    In Austria, 31-year-old Sebastian Kurz is Chancellor.

    In Canada, 43-year-old Justin Trudeau emerged Prime Minister. Thirty-seven-year-old Jacinda Ardern is New Zealand Prime Minister. Volodymyr Groysman was only two years older when he emerged Ukraine’s youngest ever prime minister. 38-year-old Emil Dimitriev took over in Macedonia. His age-mates – Carlos Alvarado Quesanda and Jüri Ratas – are leaders of Costa Rica and Estonia respectively.

    Back home, with a demographic of under-35 accounting for more than 65 percent of national population of over 180m, at no time in history have the Nigerian youths been this reminded of the power of electoral veto within their reach.

    But let it be noted that opportunity is not exactly the same thing as purpose. The easy conjecture is to assume today that the prospects of merely having public offices overtaken by the youths is all that is required to cure the obvious leadership deficit afflicting the country. Nothing could be more futile. Weighing into the raging debate, Sam Omatseye, fellow columnist and inimitable connoisseur of poetry and history, cautioned against toasting a mere “paper victory” in his column.

    I would rather add that the new Act would not be in vain only if the youths themselves see this as an impetus to frame the next agenda: mobilizing and driving a new campaign to redefine the purpose of politics as service and not a transaction. This, to me, is at the core of leadership crisis bedeviling the nation.

    Truth be told, what has always ailed our politics is not age but the mindset we bring to electoral contest. The issue is not the age of our politicians but the age of our politics. Azikiwe, Awolowo and Ahmadu Bello chanced upon the national stage in their 30s. The second generation of leaders consisting the military faction seized and exercised power also in their 20s and 30s.

    In terms of the integrity test, those found to have looted the public till over the years did so in their prime years. We can then see that youthfulness is hardly an inhibitor of the itchy finger.

    So, if we all agreed that the nation has under-achieved relative to her potential in almost six decades of independence, it is only logical that the failure be attributed substantially to the leadership recruitment and training template adopted.

    Now sorely needed is a new politics driven by values. I share the view that perhaps the easiest take-off point should be the resolve of good people to take more than a casual interest in politics in their local communities, thereby helping to crowd out the political hoodlums. If sustained, we will sooner than later help force a new ethic that ensures politics is no longer the vocation of men without verifiable second address or the rehab centre of women of easy virtue.

    Indeed, more than any time in history, the time has come for us to see a nexus between votes bartered for few banknotes before thumb-printing on the election day and the subsequent incidence of public treasury being stolen by those who bribed their way to power.

    But the thieving politician is just as culpable as members of his constituency who put them under pressure by making unreasonable financial demands. Few years ago, a popular senator from one of the South-west states narrated his “ordeal” to this writer.

    To make a visit to his constituency every week from his Abuja base, he required at least whopping N5m to cater for all manner of requests ranging from someone doing “remembrance party” for their ancestor who died last century, to someone taking a wife. So much that he often returned to his Abuja station the next Monday broke.

    His “coping strategy”?: “Whenever I’m unable to raise such amount of money,” he said, “I simply avoid going home and so it is cheaper for me then to fly to London to spend the weekend.”

    Of course, there is no prize for guessing where the senator had to source the slush money from to indulge his constituents weekly.

    Again, how many of us can genuinely volunteer for any form of civic act like joining in mobilizing more political participation in our respect local communities without expecting instant gratification from the resident “political leader”?

    I think the first step to sanitizing political contest is to disincentivize public office. So long as the unemployed graduate realizes that a federal legislator, for instance, carts home N13.5m monthly as “running costs” apart from the documented N750,000 salary, the more intense his envy and the greater his desperation to have the lawmaker displaced in the next election round and claim their plum seat.

    Of course, displacing the current order cannot be achieved overnight. It requires some activism of sorts which the youth themselves can help champion, bearing in mind that it is only when we have men and women of conscience in the position of decision that whatever is available is judiciously applied for the need of the majority, not the greed of a privileged few.

     

    • First published June 2018

  • Oshiomhole, PDP and the unfinished business

    Finally, the eagle has landed with the emergence of former governor of Edo state, Comrade Adams Aliyu Oshiomhole, as the national chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC). By that strategic political orchestration and stratagem, the APC, under the leadership of President Muhammadu Buhari, has sounded the ultimate nunc dimittis for the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The opposition must be wishing that this had not happened.  Oshiomhole’s chairmanship of the governing APC is masterstroke in the contemplation of a revitalized winning machine ahead of the crucial 2019 presidential election in which Buhari, as the expected candidate, continues to be PDP’s nemesis and waterloo.

    It is a platitudinous fact that the PDP never wanted the APC to remain cohesive in the hope that it could profit from its internal squabbles and divisions in the build-up to next year’s general election. That was the reason it had continued with its negative profiling of the APC and its jejune antics of taunting the APC as incapable of holding congresses and national convention to elect its national executive committee (NEC).  That narrative had, sardonically, become a platform on which the battered opposition strove to draw political relevance. Unfortunately, its rash of criticisms had only portrayed it as dimwitted. And generally, the PDP has now outlandishly reduced opposition politics to petty tittle-tattle and confabulation, poking around in the APC’s internal affairs when issues that directly affect the welfare, security and wellbeing of the nation and her citizenry are blowing in the wind.

    Therefore, the manner in which the PDP and its noxious frolics could not escape essential stigmatization with regard to its unimaginative interference in APC’s internal affairs is the same manner in which its so-called quick responses to APC’s governance issues cannot escape indictment as products of frustration birthed by the historic and sensational termination of its megalomania in the 2015 presidential election. Its rodomontade that it would rule Nigeria for the next 60 years had suffered a short circuit. Its 60-year rule dream got terminated in its sixteenth year in power. The decision by Nigerians to sign a social contract with the APC is at the bottom of PDP’s histrionics. Unable to absorb the shock and in a frenzied bid to stage a come-back to power to continue the robin hood road show, it has resorted to ridiculous and lugubrious act of propaganda and blackmail.

    But one thing has been very evident in the corpus of criticisms that the PDP has hurled at the APC and Buhari’s administration since inception: the criticisms are all sheer bunkum and gobbledygook oozing out of the belly of damaged and compromised party machine whose leaders lack the moral high ground to pontificate about corruption. But surprisingly, the PDP through its publicists has been laboring hard to skew the corruption narrative against the APC and Buhari, whose moral magnitude has received national and international approbation; a leader who typifies the moral conscience of the administration and the moving force of the anti-corruption war.

    It is in the context of the sheer preposterousness of PDP’s antics that the sensibilities of Nigerians who have become seized of the facts of monumental corruption and mindless looting that charaterised the sixteen years of the PDP government get daily assaulted and ghastly bruised. For God’s sake, the fact that the PDP has the gumption to sermonize about propriety in official conduct questions and ridicules our sense of morality. The opposition party has sunk so deep into the corruption morass for it to be able to challenge the APC. Its records of malfeasance and sleaze are sordid. Its integrity capital has been greatly discounted. There is no iota of positivity in its kitty to show to a manically bewildered citizenry.

    The PDP cannot come to equity because it does not have clean hands. The totality of the political machine is soiled. The party’s unconscionable and wicked strategy to charge the APC-led federal administration with the mundane issues and primordial sentiments of religion and ethnicity in order to diminish the single-minded effort by Buhari to confront and dismantle the odious legacies of corruption, insecurity and mismanaged economy inherited from it, are reprehensible. Herein is the fallacy of PDP’s oppositional politics. It is obviously luxuriating in the aqua of hocus-pocus, thinking that Nigerians have forgotten so soon how its government mindlessly plundered the nation’s patrimony.

    There is no doubt that the leading opposition party has nothing new to offer. It has thus become a compulsive irritant, knowing full well that it cannot electorally rebound due to Buhari’s writ-large credentials and characters of financial prudence and integrity. In addition, the prospects of a much more unified party under the chairmanship of a hard-hitting Oshiomhole have raised the bar far higher than the PDP had expected. Until June 23, the PDP had been indulged by the party’s NEC under the urbane and unassuming leadership of Chief John Odigie-Oyegun. That political indulgence had served as an oxygen mask for the prostrate PDP which, at the time, should have been put where it rightly belongs through precise and sustained narratives by the APC.

    Had Oshiomhole been the chairman at that period when the nation was daily regaled by revelations of corrupt acts perpetrated by the PDP and officials of its government particularly from 2011 to 2015, he would have robustly deployed the platform of his office to further deconstruct the nature of the plundering administration and the characters that superintended it. Today, Oshiomhole has stepped in as national chairman to the discomfiture of the opposition: all gloves are off for bare-knuckled fights with the floundering opposition. It is too late for the PDP to stop the macabre dance. Regardless, Oshiomhole will take the wind of its sail, deploying his huge capacity for wits and grits.

    Viva Nigeria! Viva APC! Viva Buhari! Viva Oshiomhole! Welcome to a new  era in political party administration. The combination of Buhari and Oshiomhole would produce robust government-party leaderships that would be complementary in their vast flourish. Oshiomhole is not ready to take prisoners.  He is in the mood to completely decimate the opposition.  He has the intellectual magnitude, the oratorical clout and the sheer fecundity to deploy the power of logic in the articulation and elucidation of party and government manifestoes and programmes. He is very efficient and utilitarian.  He will consistently and persistently intervene in very coherent defence of policy decisions and choices by the federal government.

    Indeed, the almost four years of tolerating the irritability of the PDP are over for good. The opposition is advised not to joke with Oshiomhole. Enough of political sarcasms and innuendoes that had been thrown as barbs at the APC and Buhari for a period of aeon. PDP’s characteristic criticisms that had bordered essentially on ad hominem; that had been highly tendentious most times and, at other times, vitriolic and incendiary should be moderated if the opposition must enjoy little peace. In fact, the PDP is now in between the devil and the deep blue sea. Whether it becomes irresponsible or not, it should know that it has Oshiomhole to contend with per time.

    The role of the opposition is not, as it were, to cry wolf where there is none or to become irresponsible in raising the alarm before international organisations without verifiable factual bases nor is it to play on our centrifugal proclivities at the expense of our centripetal and agglutinating fulcrum. The PDP and Oshiomhole’s opposite side- Prince Uche Secondus- will come under the sledge hammer if they continue with these odious tactics. Clarifications: the APC-led administration is not averse to criticisms, but the criticisms must be constructive.

    • Honourabe Obahiagbon, a former member of the House of Representatives, writes from Benin.

  • Sex-for-mark as metaphor

    His guttural voice oozes the geniality only long practice at the game could confer. Excitement over the coming harvest would, in fact, seem telegraphed subtly by his very ring-tone – a line from a classic number by Miliki grandmaster himself, Ebenezer Obey, to wit: “Adura fun awon to ‘nsoro wa lehin o, Edumare dari ji won o” (Prayer for the backbiters, Forgive them O God).

    But just when you thought he had already secured the mug’s handle, came an accident between the cup and the lips. So, his intumescent smile turns detumescent frown. Since the audio of the x-rated conversation went viral last week, the owner of the complicit male voice has been identified as Professor Richard Akindele, thus a suspect in a clear sex-for-mark deal gone awry, casting a sleazy shadow over Obafemi Awolowo University.

    So, it is clear the lyrical prayer invoked at the outset against “backbiters” was not granted after all.

    The details are no less lurid. In the viral audio posted on the social media obviously by the no less suspect prey, we hear the predator – a supposed professor of Accounting and, worse, described as a senior pastor in the local church – haggle over sex with the ardour of a parsimonious housewife at a grocery store. But wait, could the tongue that preaches holiness also be incubating carnality in the same breath?

    Inverting some strange mathematical logic into a clearly illicit transaction, the audio Prof then postulates that nothing other than five bouts of sex would incentivize the upgrading of the soliciting female student’s miserable 33 point to 40.

    Scared apparently by the whopping quantity, the young lady expressed wonder, “Is it food?”

    While the 4-minute bargain lasted, it was clear the presumably young lady has been dodging the Prof’s cocked short-gun for a while.

    Since then, the Prof has not only gone into hiding but also kept a silence that can only incriminate. How ironic – a professor of Accounting is now shy to give account of what really happened.

    It will, however, be myopic to assume that it is only the tutor and his female quarry who are in the dock here. Equally on trial is the moral integrity of those sociologists call “significant others” in a society increasingly challenged ethically.

    In more ways than one, both characters, therefore, hold a mirror on the larger society. The Prof speaks to those in a position of power who prey on the vulnerable. Be they the prosperity cleric who bears false prophesy to the gullible flock and so soil their cassock with filthy lucre. Or lawmakers who parlay legislative license to award unconscionable pay to themselves. Or the reporters who feast on blackmail.

    In the female student, we see a covetousness to bag what was not earned. Maybe, she was doing “runs” (euphemism for campus prostitution) while her mates were burning the proverbial midnight candle. Her male counterpart does “sorting” (cash offer) to lecturers instead.

    To be sure, no one is saying sexual harassment in ivory towers is a new phenomenon. Back in my student days many, many years ago at the Federal Poly, Ado- Ekiti, for instance, I won’t forget hearing a senior lecturer at the department office telling a female classmate of mine sobbing over her poor score, “You caused it by not cooperating and your arrogance”.

    The same lecturer – old enough to be our dad, if not grandpa – later began to eye me with malice and envy. At the next slightest opportunity, he went as far as singling me out in the middle of a lecture in a packed auditorium for a vicious ridicule, simply because he always seemed to find me around his target.

    From my subsequent UNILAG days, I am also still haunted till date by the echoes of lamentations by hapless fellow female students returning from a particular lecturer who, though often camouflaging with a cleric’s white collar around campus, was said to have perfected the art of pulling female students by the strap of bra on the shoulders while pretending to be playful.

    Of course, then, there was subtlety to such sexual extortion and victims would discussed in hushed tones. Not on the scale of impunity now on display.

    Today, it is a perhaps a measure of our now clearly vandalized moral universe that indifference – rather than outrage – has been the response from both high and low quarters. It only suggests the normalization of an abnormality, the tendency of quibble or equivocate – if not surrender – in the face of evil.

    We see that in the apparent double-speak by the OAU management. When the scandal broke initially, there was a pledge to get to the bottom of the infamy. We would hear another tale last weekend. But the university only mocks itself if it now says it can no longer act simply because the lady in question had refused to step forward.

    Really, the debt OAU owes the public here is a moral one, not legal technicality. Phone numbers and call logs can be verified, if indeed there is a strong commitment to seek the truth. To say nothing of the aforementioned Miliki ring-tone.

    There was also a mention of ongoing MBA exams in Moro. Was the Prof present or billed to attend? Was it a mere coincidence that the lady repeated the Prof’s name and the addressee, in what would then seem a fleeting moment of gumption and discretion, had to bark at her to stop mentioning his name?

    A good precedent was, in fact, set in 2016 following similar media reports of an epidemic of sexual predation at Auchi Polytechnic. The Federal Ministry of Education did not demand or make a public show of the appearance of any of the victims as pre-condition to do the right thing.

    Working together with relevant agencies like the DSS, EFCC and the National Board for Technical Education, the Ministry unleashed a manhunt, resulting in the dismissal of 12 lecturers for trysts and extortion.

    Elsewhere at the University of California, authorities did not shop for legal technicality when a professor of Architecture, Nezar AlSayyad, was accused of sexual harassment by a Phd student in 2016. An enquiry instituted by the school management eventually established numerous other incidents of inappropriate behavior by the tutor dating back to 2012, though the man at the centre of the storm continued to deny. The school had to pay the student $80,000 compensation.

    No less disturbing also is the continued silence from the Ife Diocese of the Anglican Church (where the Prof is said to have built a reputation as a powerful preacher) since the scandal broke. If the accused chooses to keep sealed lips, the church, as a supposed bastion of chastity and the repository of social virtues, cannot afford such luxury. The least expected of the church in the circumstance is to encourage him to come out and defend his integrity or have him excommunicated until his innocence is established.

    Again, we expect the women-based NGOs to take up the gauntlet. It is possible that the chief reason the lady is reluctant to step forward and state her case is the fear of victimization by other sex rats lurking around the OAU faculties. It is the duty of such bodies to rally around her and help broker a deal of protection.

    In the final analysis, the challenge lies ultimately with the larger society to return to the building block of the community – the family unit. Social re-orientation is sorely needed for a rebirth rooted on strong moral values.

    Confident and conscientious children don’t fall from the sky; they are often the products of stable and ethically-grounded parents. You don’t expect dads and mums who themselves are found wanting to give what they do not have.

    Re: Gates and the Nigerian ostriches

    Let Nigerians know that Bill Gates will only say things that can be backed up with real data. The class to which he belongs makes him very careful and whatever he says can be defended anywhere in the world.

    Please remind them that many very brilliant Nigerians like Dr. Vincent Ahonkhai spent their most productive lives working for Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and  just retired. Nigeria as a country does not engage Nigerian professionals to execute solutions to problems in Nigeria, largely because of regional quota considerations etc. Mediocrity of course, is the result.

    If there is conscience remaining anywhere in Nigeria, Dr. Vincent Ahonkhai who actively executed these projects for Gates Foundation all over the world especially in West Africa, should be found and brought back to Nigeria to help out, instead of the “ostriches”.

    Bill Gates is not looking for reelection to any office. He and other rich people like Aliko Dangote are driven by their convictions. Our people are dying needlessly or being pushed to extreme human desperation as selling their young children even before they are born, because of the activities of politicians and civil servants! Very sad.

    I take the trouble to write this rejoinder as my own contribution to make us Nigerians seek a return to our old decent ways when the lower class had confidence that the upper class, consisting of politicians and civil servants, would make them enjoy the promised dividends of Nigeria’s Independence – peace and economic emancipation of all Nigerians.

     

    • Olu Edeki,

    abuome.edeki@gmail.com

  • 2019: Governors of consequence

    2019: Governors of consequence

    At the last count, no fewer than four national dailies have named them “Governor of the Year” for both 2016 and 2017, either jointly or individually.

    The casual observer will likely put this down to the infrastructural spectacle they evoked in their respective states at a time the rest of the nation stewed in the worst recession in recent memory; which should not surprise considering their comparative fiscal edge.

    Such perspective can hardly be faulted. But a more nuanced reading will not just be an acknowledgment of the significant factor Governors Akin Ambode of Lagos and Nyesom Wike of Rivers embody in Nigeria’s political economy in the immediate past, but the intimation of the decisive roles they are historically fated to play in the emerging 2019 permutations.

    Already, Buhari’s restored buoyancy after a grave ailment and PDP’s recovery from a self-inflicted coma appear to set the stage for a titanic rematch after the 2015 electoral upset.

    Nothing hints of this mounting adrenaline on both sides than the new seeming balance of barbs and insults. For the first time in recent years, spokesmen of both ruling party and the main opposition are trained journalists and former colleagues at THISDAY who could not be said to be strangers to open brinkmanship as former top-flight political appointees, with perhaps equal knowledge of the use of both traditional and new media. No one can lay claim to the monopoly of abuse and heckling language anymore.

    With Buhari candidature in 2019 almost certain, strategists of a rejuvenated PDP are undoubtedly left with few maximalist options and cold calculations. The first step is to affirm a northerner as their flag-bearer in the coming slugfest.

    Next, emphasis will be where the most votes are. With estimated 19m registered voters, the North-West surely holds the ace and therefore becomes the ultimate battleground. With the North-East boasting less than 10m, there is another cogent reason to deny Atiku Abubakar the ticket and anoint someone from Buhari’s North-West.

    Those already being touted in this direction include Ahmed Markafi (Kaduna) and Aminu Tambuwal, the incumbent Sokoto governor wildly speculated as now merely marking time in APC, but already back in PDP in heart and soul.

    APC ideologues may consider it unflattering, but the argument remains that the 2015 electoral outcome might have been different had PDP fielded a Muslim northerner instead of Christian Goodluck Jonathan in response to north’s then un-satiated sense of entitlement over Umar Yar’Adua’s truncated presidency in 2010. This, it is contended, provided enough incentives to northern PDP governors to therefore sell out in their respective jurisdictions to the enemy purely out of base ethno-religious considerations.

    To this school of thought, fielding a much younger Turk in whose presence the conservative North will feel more at ease and, more crucially, be spared the sneaky fear of suspect health of a Buhari with all the ominous implications, might just be the perfect recipe needed to finally break the general’s fabled captive crowd in Arewaland, particularly the North-West.

    To further rally the North, part of what PDP strategists might also sell is assurance of an extra term bonus. In a recent interview, the immediate past chair, Ahmed Markafi, hinted that the North is entitled to two terms under PDP; suggesting that the North under PDP will relinquish power in 2027 whereas APC is 2023.

    With the North likely to be divided between Buhari and whoever PDP presents, attention will naturally shift to Lagos and Rivers as the centres of gravity in the South.

    With colossal 6m registered voters, Lagos alone boasts almost half of the South-west vote and more than half of the electoral strength of the entire North-east. Being the bastion of Bola Tinubu’s awesome political machine and accounting for more than half the size of the nation’s economy, there is no contesting the countervailing weight the former federal capital provided the opposition against PDP throughout its 16-year reign, triggering the momentum that eventuated in the vanquishing of a ruling party in 2015 for the first time in the nation’s history.

    In the months ahead, APC will certainly depend on Ambode’s stellar testimonial from the reengineering efforts of the last three years to woo voters not only in Lagos, but the entire South-West. The cosmopolitan character of Lagos also means that its electorate is perhaps the most enlightened and sophisticated in the country, liberated as it were from the narrow ethno-religious considerations that often inform political choices elsewhere. But then, those  who despise Igbo in South-East or think they can contemn the Ijaw in South-South will soon also find they have to contend  with their kith and kin who constitute significant voting blocs in Lagos.

    Lately, at the national level, there is no doubt that Buhari worship has become the new obsession among APC partisans looking to profit bountifully from the coming electoral season.

    Among the growing choristers would be found failed first-term governors opportunistically seeking Buhari’s anointing to survive the approaching electoral judgment day and some second-term governors who, after a mediocre occupation of their respective provinces, now simply covet the opportunity to name their successors in a last-ditch orgy of self-aggrandizement.

    However, Lagos is different due in part to its undiminished capacity to continually generate fresh ideas to solve socio-economic challenges even when Abuja seems incapable of clarity of thought and direction.

    For instance, we saw that in its foresight to partner with Kebbi State early in the day to deliver rice on fairly large scale. The success story of Lake rice within two planting seasons has since inspired many other states to join the bandwagon of big-time rice-farming, with resultant increase in the nation’s self-sufficiency in the production of the popular food staple.

    By and large, with innovative solutions, Ambode is sustaining the tradition of excellence for which Lagos is reputed, offering accommodation and opportunities for all, irrespective of ethnicity and religion. What makes it even more striking is the quiet manner Ambode does it.

    The scale of the ongoing physical transformation is perhaps best measured in the hitherto forsaken rural Lagos where massive investment in social infrastructure has significantly altered the landscape.

    At the other end of the political spectrum, the dynamics shaping Rivers’ own exceptionalism are however dissimilar. With a record 1,487,075 votes out of accredited 1,643,409 of a total of 2,324,300 registered, the oil-rich state delivered the highest number to PDP nationwide in 2015, to emerge the new bastion of opposition to the ruling party in Abuja.

    In a classic role reversal, Rivers is now to PDP what Lagos was to APC on the road to 2015.

    Conscripted by circumstances into leading the opposition, gutsy Wike has undoubtedly risen to the challenge by deftly working the optics and amplifying the sonics. First the optics: against perceived inability of APC to list a single project completed in Rivers, Wike’s own bragging rights today are fueled by an array of significant infrastructural footprints across the state.

    So impressed during an official visit, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo could not resist the temptation to join the public chorus in Port Harcourt by addressing Wike as “Mr. Project”.

    The sonics: whereas most of his contemporaries across the two zones have conveniently resorted to political silence out of sheer survivalist instincts, Wike is the new voice of Niger Delta agitating for fairer deal for the proverbial goose laying the golden eggs feeding the nation.

    In the wider national politics, the feelings of marginalization are real in South-South and the South-East. In Igboland, the river of bitterness arising from feeling of political estrangement surely still runs deep, even if the APC’s spin doctors still choose to live in denial.

    After two harrowing years of cold shoulders during which a concatenation of terrible misspeaks and mishandling of the IPOB issue drew him farther from the Igbo, Buhari suddenly began to reach out to the South-East lately. A rare two-day presidential visit to the zone was rounded off with Buhari’s appearance at APC’s grand rally in Awka ahead of Anambra’s November 2017 governorship elections.

    But concerted as the charm offensive was and massive as the deployment of the fabled “Federal might” was, APGA still managed to reassert its supremacy within that territory with an emphatic margin. And if the outcome of that polls is any guide, then a lot surely still needed to be done to market APC to Igbo voters generally.

    Of course, for APC obviously desirous of wangling even a toehold – if not foothold – in Igboland, there are multiple lessons to be learnt from that misadventure. Chief among them is the peril of building your battle plan around political charlatans or yesterday’s men brandishing expired talisman. They failed woefully on the appointed day.

    Real men are known in the hour of crisis. At PDP’s own moment of tribulation, Wike showed faith. To foreclose the chance of escape from the battlefield and make defeat or surrender the only option left, the general elected to destroy the ready source of temptation – he bombed the bridge after his troops crossed. Raymond Dopkesi and other folks of little faith chose to float a new party as “Plan B”. A few others waited for nightfall to sneak into Judas Modu-Sheriff’s lair to cut a deal of convenience.

    But resolute Wike openly declared he would rather swim or sink with PDP. So, when the legal lifeline came from the Supreme Court, he easily claimed the moral victory as well.

    The emergence of his nominee, Uche Secondus, as the new chair at the party’s recent national convention would seem to have further confirmed Wike’s preeminence as key player in a revamped PDP and a major influencer of things to emerge.

    If nothing at all, Secondus’ rise certainly barricades Rivers as a PDP fortress. Surely, the times ahead will be interesting indeed.

  • Treaty-master and a nation at the nadir 

    Treaty-master and a nation at the nadir 

    There are a few telltale signs that a nation has lost her own dignity and prestige on the world stage. Perhaps, the most easily recognizable is the weight her passport carries at a foreign border post and how her citizens are treated on a foreign soil, particularly when at fault.

    True, Nigeria’s stock on the global stage has been in decline over the years. But even at that, nothing could have prepared anyone for the sheer evisceration, the diminution of the Nigerian humanity as depicted by the plethora of horror videos emanating lately from Libya’s open slave market and the adjoining transit camps of desperate immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa longing for Europe.

    For the young women, graduating from Libya’s torture chambers and rape bouts is however not a guarantee that they would survive the perilous sail on the Mediterranean Sea. Two out of 26 bodies of such ladies recently discovered refrigerated in a dark vessel off Italian coast were identified as Nigerians. They were found to be pregnant.

    Worse, in what only suggested absolute contempt for the Nigerian state, their remains were hurriedly interred by the Italian authorities without according the bereaved families even the least entitlement in the difficult circumstance – the opportunity to pay the customary last respects.

    We see the vanishing Nigerian pride also in the waves of unprovoked and later unchallenged xenophobic attacks against her citizens in South Africa.

    Nigeria’s steep fall from the height of respectability of the 70s in both regional and international arenas could only have resulted from the cumulative failure of diplomacy in the intervening decades.

    This must indeed be a troubling moment for Akin Oyebode, professor of International Law and Jurisprudence and one of Nigeria’s truly progressive scholars who turned 70 last Saturday. The celebration of this icon has animated the progressive boulevard of the nation’s academic community in the past few days.

    Were he asked to contextualize the referenced indignities suffered by Nigerian migrants today, the Ekiti-born scholar would likely put it all down in his accustomed wit to Nigeria’s loss of her “nuisance value” in the global arena. If the 1970s are still remembered today as the golden age of Nigeria’s diplomacy, it is only because of the character and coherence demonstrated by the political leadership of the era.

    Over the weekend, President Muhammadu Buhari led the stream of stirring tributes for the erudite professor attaining the platinum age. Indeed, not many could be said to be as consistent as the Ekiti-born scholar in the past half century in exploring the far reaches of International Law through research, writing and propagation to fashioning the African perspective to world diplomacy.

    Central to this Pan-Africanist standpoint is the fierce reminder that Nigeria and indeed all self-respecting post-colonial states must define their own truths and realities from their own interests, not the dictations from the western powers. It is, therefore, impossible to read and digest his “International Law and Politics: An African Perspective” and not feel the awesome presence of a truly authentic African thinker.

    On a personal note, this writer had the privilege of being taught International Law by Professor Oyebode (doubling as the HOD of the Law Faculty) at the University of Lagos for his Master’s degree in International Law and Diplomacy many years ago. A true master of his art, his erudition always electrified the packed lecture hall, spiced with  a terrific sense of humor that made arcane technical concepts looked so simple and otherwise mundane events of history truly memorable.

    However, the simplicity of his airs sharply contrasts the rigidity of his principle. Once the Vice Chancellor of Ekiti State University, he did not hesitate before tendering his resignation letter once he sensed his values conflicted with those of the new political leadership of the state then.

    Overall, there can be no doubt about the surfeit of professed solutions to African problems. But the enduring question is whether the errant nation, the wayward continent, is willing to heed the wise counsel of the philosophers like Oyebode.

    In a paper he delivered back in 1986, he observed: “The fact of underdevelopment of Nigeria’s political economy circumscribes the role of the country on the world stage. The sophistry of Africa being the centerpiece of our foreign policy has worn thin. Without genuinely radical reordering of our society, the country would be unable to fulfill its mission in Africa and beyond.”

    Thirty-one years later, those words surely continue to speak to the Nigerian reality. That the allure of migration now seems too irresistible to our youths to the point of embarking on suicidal trips through Libya is only a reflection of harsh economic climate at home. It is the immutable law of nature for man to lust after greener pasture. When opportunities abounded at home and Naira was strong, the temptation for our ladies to go prostitute in Italy and young men flocking to labour camps elsewhere in Europe to slave was certainly less.

    It is perhaps a measure of the insipidity of our contemporary foreign policy that a nation that birthed the Emeka Anyaokus, Bolaji Akinyemis and Oyebodes seems no longer capable of speaking eloquently and respectably on the world stage today.

    Oyebode’s possible anguish could then only be in context of the curse of talents left to lie fallow. Nothing could truly be more traumatizing than the spectacle of a land brimming with great minds being sentenced to a darkness and squalor inflicted by mediocrity or the scion of the proverbial meat-seller left a supper of bones.

    Of course, in retrospect, the carnage that Libya approximates today is another graphic illustration of the failure of African diplomacy of which Nigeria cannot, by any stretch of imagination, shirk responsibility. It was largely in the interest of vengeful western powers that erstwhile Libyan strongman, Moammar Ghadaffi, be swept out of power in the ferment of the Arab Spring. But the aftermath only left Africa with more instability.

    At the defining moment, the African Union ceded the initiative to buccaneering outsiders and, instead, conveniently chose to marinate in idiocy. It explains why Libya is now a lawless province with no fewer than five militia armies laying claims to different chunk of the once prosperous country. It explains why, even when Nigerians are either sold as slaves or butchered openly, there is no constituted authority to hold accountable today from the perspective of International Law.

    Oyebode’s forte in International Law is treaty. From his antecedents, it is safe to also assume Prof has been suffering insomnia not so much for Morocco’s treacherous bid to gatecrash into ECOWAS from North Africa, but more for Nigeria’s apparent timidity, if not indifference, to what should ordinarily be treated as a clear and presence threat to her continued dominance and influence in the West African sub-region.

    Regardless, here is wishing Prof happy birthday.

     

     

    A Commodore’s last voyage

    Part of the paradox of human nature is that those who made a career of putting others to death by the sword always become uneasy themselves at the sight of same weapon in the hand of a stranger.

    Such would seem the case of Bode George, erstwhile supremo of Peoples Democratic Party, whose dream of becoming national chair of the party evaporated like smoke last weekend.

    How ironic that BG, a retired Commodore, who was never shy to adapt martial language in describing how political opponents would be crushed, ended up not being able to even throw a single punch this time in what could be classified the most important battle of his entire political career. Without the veto of gun and bayonet, the old naval warrior looked so ordinary in the civil contest.

    Rather, after withdrawing from the race on the convention’s eve, he lapsed into a grumpy mode. In his bitter tirade, he lamented the influence of money in the race. He took liberty to introduce himself as a long-standing apostle of righteousness. So, the “Atona (pathfinder) of Odualand” should not be expected to soil his nobility with the carnality of buying and selling delegates at the bazaar called convention.

    Ha!

    Silence would have been most dignifying after BG threw in the towel. To begin with, who does not know that delegate election is euphemism for discreet “buying and selling” of votes?

    The bitter truth is that the highest bidder often carries the trophy. Even in the so-called advanced democracies, the inducement is only fancifully packaged as “free lodging”, “free transportation” etc bankrolled by contestants. Such unwholesome tales were heard even in the United States last year during the conventions by the Democrats and the Republicans.

    Having evolved with PDP right from 1998 as he rightly claimed, BG is certainly the least morally competent today to decry money politics in Nigeria.

    If outgunned or outspent by the young Turks, the least expected of a supposedly self-respecting dinosaur like BG is concede victory, in obeisance of the unwritten oath of the political underworld that once benefited him. At 72, clearly there are few political options left for the old mariner.

    Worse, BG indulged in another vulgarity peculiar to the typical Nigerian politician upon losing their stake in the power casino – retreating into the ethnic hideout. He equated his inability to clinch the PDP crown to Yoruba humiliation. For effects, he launched into needless self-praise, reminding everyone of not only his “Atona” chieftaincy but also the Yoruba definition of “Omoluabi” (the virtuous citizen).

    But such obscenity of self-adulation would have been forgivable were it backed with proven testimonial of political virility at home. In the last 18 years of elections and democracy in Nigeria, never has BG won his polling unit at Evans Street treet near the iconic Massey Hospital on Lagos island. Not even once. Not even when his political lord and master, OBJ, twice deployed “fed eral might” against Lagos in 2003 and 2007 in furtherance of “operation totality”.

    So, to what do we attribute this obsessive bragging?

  • Soyinka and Trump’s illegitimate kids

    Soyinka and Trump’s illegitimate kids

    This must be a depressing hour indeed for the man who “fashioned the drama of existence” and first black Nobel prizewinner in Literature, Professor Wole Soyinka. A comment uttered in what could only be a protest against the willful trampling on the dignity of the African immigrants and other “underdogs” has, alas, been twisted out of its moral joint and now forms the singsong of some idle parrots, the horde of little minds, barricading the social media.

    Ahead of the now historic November 8 (2016) US polls, Kongi told a gathering of students in America that in the event that that loose-cannon Donald Trump won he would not wait to be reminded before ripping his Green Card and evacuating the acclaimed God’s own country, his present station.

    Asked again by The Interview (Nigeria’s wave-making monthly magazine) amid the widespread shockwave that trailed the news of the Republican candidate’s victory, the literary giant neither quibbled nor wavered.

    But that did not seem to impress the cyber stalkers who, akin to the typical lynch mob lurking in Nigeria’s urban centre forever itching for a chance to festoon someone with a burning tyre, cannot wait to see the much esteemed octogenarian descend into the obscenity of publicly shredding what many would lie, if not die, to possess.

    Never one to shy away, particularly when epistolary rats are foolish enough to disturb his tail, the literary lion has since tackled his cyber assailants efficiently and effectively in a vigorous rejoinder entitled “Red Card, Green Card – Notes Towards the Management of Hysteria”.

    But this is beside the point. For me, I think the real tragedy is two-fold. For “the hysterical” not to see the Trump’s rise clearly as an urgent invitation to debate Nigeria’s place in a putative new world order defined by a man that can technically be certified as a mad man and, instead, be more obsessed with the banality of watching Soyinka physically tear his Green Card is very, very alarming indeed.

    Second is the possibility at all that a generation of Nigerian Pharisees now exist and are so blissfully ignorant of the history of their own very fatherland to, even for a drunken moment, ever doubt Soyinka’s words once the issue borders on the defense of human dignity.

    So, as we can now see, it is not only America whose moral capital seems on the decline on account of Trump’s thunderous disavowal of all the lofty values the rest of the world had associated with her in the last half a century; same ethical atrophy is clearly discernible in contemporary Nigeria with the rise of youths with neither a sense of history nor a social conscience, but more conversant with even the minutest details of, say, the soccer celebrities of European soccer leagues.

    If they had bothered to read and understand their nation’s history, they would not have easily forgotten that Soyinka had in the 90s cast away the coveted national honour CFR medal earlier bestowed on him in 1986 by General Ibrahim Babangida in protest of the June 12 annulment and the subsequent clampdown on dissent. He later risked death in leading a global campaign against Abacha despotism – was actually sentenced to death in absentia – until democracy was restored in Nigeria in 1999.

    So, could anyone have forgotten so quickly the legend of “the mystery gun-man” who stormed a public radio station in 1965 and forced the presenter to play a pre-recorded statement censoring the ruling party over perceived repression of the opposition? Again, when it was most dangerous, someone visited the Biafran enclave from the campus of University of Ibadan with a view to persuading the secessionists to return to the peace process.

    For this, he was clamped into solitary confinement by the Gowon regime for more than two years. The title of his prison memoirs “The Man Died” was inspired by revolutionary George Magaski who in his own “Letter To Compatriots” memorably declared, “The man dies in him who keeps silence in the face of tyranny.”

    So, to the cowards who today luxuriate in the anonymity of the cyber space, against the aforementioned heritage of uncommon sacrifice in pursuit and defense of noble values and honour, how much weight does a mere American Green Card carry?

    Today, these spoilt brats sired in philistinism, immersed in cheap intoxicants of ignorance, seem least troubled by the farrago of nasty things Trump said about vulnerable African immigrants, especially Nigerians.

    But all decent people like Soyinka, who treasure their own dignity as members of the human race, should be appalled. Racial integration thought irreversibly cemented in US on account of the Obama ascendancy eight years ago is what is invariably called to question by Trump’s tantrums.

    Kongi would then seem to find it exceedingly hard continuing to inhabit a space, however alluring, where a bare-faced racist holds court. Ordinarily, given his world celebrity status, Soyinka would not have needed to beg or lie to get visa into America. His offer to rip his Green Card once the US falls under Trump’s shadow should, therefore, be properly seen as a symbolic gesture of protest on behalf of his nameless compatriots among other vulnerable categories about to be meted undeserved humiliation.

    Now, as the rest of the world braces for an uncertain future, it is most logical that we first attempt to locate the trigger to the present meltdown. Prophesy two decades ago by Samuel Huntington in his seminal book, The Clash of Civilizations, on the perils of globalisation is coming to pass with chilling accuracy.

    Obsession, as he put it, of triumphalist west upon the collapse of the old Soviet Union and the socialist/communist tradition in China and elsewhere to export and implant its cultures and values around the universe with little or no regard for local sensibilities in other civilizations meant the battlefield would inevitably shift from old geographical borders to the temples of faiths and the shrines of ethnic nationalism.

    As a corollary to Brexit which shook Europe four months ago, Trump’s triumph was undoubtedly fueled by the rising tide of ethnic nationalism. The hell-raising far-right rabble are also already out in Hungary, Poland, France and Germany, baying for blood. The aborigines of affluent western nations are simply no longer willing to accept massive immigration into their countries as part of the price for globalization. Hence, the new battle cry – “Take back our country!”

    But the great paradox is that it is all a self-inflicted pain. There is no way the immigration flood largely from Syria recorded at the borders of recognizable western nations in the past two years can be isolated from the miscalculations a decade and a half earlier by the allied powers with the frenzy of “regime change” after September 11 in 2001. For instance, rogue Saddam Hussein was hurriedly uprooted from Iraq in 2003 in pursuit of a phantom weapon of mass destruction (WMD) without a coherent contingency plan to manage the aftermath in the highly combustible Middle East.

    Eight years later, the social media, a powerful tool brought by globalization, helped stoke the fire of the Arab Spring which paved the way for eccentric Moammar Ghaddafi, but a stabilizing influence in North Africa and parts of the Arab world, to be bludgeoned to death on the street of Tripoli.

    In neighboring Syria, Bashir Assad has managed to survive the Arab Spring for six years, but at a horrific human toll.

    Now, the lethal arsenal Ghaddafi left behind have been harvested by Hussein’s demobilized fighters who formed the core of ISIS, which straddles a chunk of Iraq and swath of Syria.

    What then seems utterly insufferable to Soyinka and other men and women of conscience around the world today is the unwillingness of the resurgent nativists as privileged members of the western establishment to accept that intolerance of others’ values and faiths from the outset is at the root of the moral crisis that has engulfed the world community in the past decade, of which Donald Trump is the latest mutation.

     

  • GEJ, Abdullahi, Oduah and the missing verses

    GEJ, Abdullahi, Oduah and the missing verses

    Even days ahead of its unveiling, a new book by ace journalist and APC spokesman, Bolaji Abdullahi, is surely stirring the political waters already. Since teasers began to appear in Simon Kolawole’s TheCable last week, many can hardly wait anymore for tomorrow’s presentation in Abuja to grab copy and see what fresh angles “On A Platter of Gold: How Jonathan Won and Lost Nigeria” brings to Segun Adeniyi’s earlier block-buster, “Against The Run of Play”.

    Abdullahi is by no means a casual chronicler of the momentous events that shaped the Jonathan presidency; he was an insider having served as minister.

    Perhaps the juiciest extract featured thus far by TheCable is the sensational claim by Stella Oduah that she lost her Aviation portfolio in the last dispensation due to the machinations of now embattled Diezani Allison-Madueke (then the powerful oil minister) in what seems to illuminate intensely the psycho-sexual tension within the Jonathan presidency. History reminds us that empires had risen and fallen over nothing more than lust or wounded love, and the remains of many great men were found near discarded skirt and camisole.

    According to her, Diezani strongly believed leaks of her incurring a bill of whopping N10b jetting around “privately” emanated from the Aviation ministry. To exact a pound of flesh, Oduah alleges that Diezani funded sustained media spotlight on her own N250m bulletproof BMW cars scandal.

    (A presidential panel headed by then NSA Sambo Dasuki had found the Aviation minister culpable in the shady $1.6m auto deal.)

    “She thought I was the one who leaked the issue of private jet that put her into trouble with the House of Reps,” she says, adding “For her, it was payback time. Diezani was paying people to keep the story alive. At the same time, she was whispering in (the president’s) ears that he had to take action.”

    But the real meat is in her next comment: “I knew all along that Diezani could not deal with having another female around who had the kind of access I had to the president.”

    In what suggests more than official relationship with GEJ, Oduah was quoted by the author to be uninhibited enough to then pointedly demand of the president, “Did Diezani ask you to sack me?”, which he flatly denied.

    Of course, in power circles then, it didn’t require much political intelligence to know there were actually five powerful women around the President. Aside Oduah and Diezani, the three others included First Lady (Mama Peace herself), the president’s ebony-black mom and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the “Coordinating Minister” and thick-set Amazon of the exchequer.

    Romantics are likely to swoon over that and interpret as omen that GEJ was a “ladies’ man”.

    This however makes Jonathan the stark opposite of his successor, President Muhammadu Buhari, said to be very, very “shy among women” (apology Information Minister Lai Mohammed). It then perhaps explains why women today enjoy less visibility around PMB’s wooden paternalism.

    Responding to a question posed by a foreign journalist in faraway Germany following First Lady Aisha’s philippic against the presidency last year, Buhari hardly betrayed any emotion in dismissing her sense of political judgement outside what he considered her exclusive jurisdiction: “My wife belongs to the kitchen, the living room and the other room.”

    Now, the puzzle is the definition of the “access” Oduah alludes to. Of course, everyone agrees that, both in and outside office, GEJ remains a perfect gentleman, with amazingly charming smile and killer athletic build capable of making the opposite sex drool, ordinarily.

    So, could Oduah be referring to a “special pin no” from which other top female officials around Jonathan were restricted? The kind that conferred extraordinary privileges like having their proposals or memos approved with dizzying dispatch, without second look, let alone scrutiny.

    The only conclusion that could drawn from Oduah’s revelation is that she and Diezani were both shamelessly locked in a cold war over long-suffering Madam Patience’s fine husband. Now, if a scavenger gets swollen-headed over the possession of a treasure found by accident, what’s expected of the original owner? Between the feuding princesses, every waking moment seemed spent agonizing over which plot the other might be hatching to monopolize the king’s attention.

    In the circumstance, the puzzle then: what time did they really have left for official duties? We can, therefore, only continue to speculate and imagine the titanic battle poor Jonathan must have waged against falling into the sort of temptation Adam found irresistible in the biblical Garden of Aden.

    When similarly charming Bill Clinton found himself in such tight corner as president at the Oval Office in Washington in the 90s, he succumbed to curvaceous Monica Lewinsky. The ghost of that affair with its salacious details would come back to exact a price that almost cost him the presidency. Though he survived narrowly, he would endure the shame for the rest of his life.

    One of Clinton’s predecessors, John F Kennedy, was not that lucky. His hyperactive testosterone is believed to have been largely fueled by the side effect of a medication he took for Addison’s disease. Compulsive philanderer, aside the steady stream of paramours smuggled into the White House through the back door, among his other conquests were government secretaries and one Judith Campbell who incidentally happened to be linked to mafia boss Sam Giancana. This shred of evidence formed the basis of the enduring conspiracy theory that JFK’s assassination in 1963 involved the mob.

    Elsewhere in Zimbabwe about the same time Clinton was being tempted, Robert Mugabe had also come under the bewitching spell of Grace inside the White House in Harare. Sashay after tantalizing sashay up and down the presidential office, the salivating ex-guerrilla apparently began to see his dashing secretary in a totally different light. Incentives then came to work longer hours in the office. The death of the much-beloved Ghanaian-born First Lady would finally open the door for Grace to be formally unveiled to the nation as the new presidential consort.

    Following Mugabe’s ignominious fall from power last week, pundits may still be divided today over the political epitaph to engrave on his political tombstone. But regardless, there is consensus already that Grace’s vain ways contributed in no small measure in stoking public anger against the old comrade.

    Well, the good news is that GEJ left office in 2015 through the electoral door, certainly not through any proven peccadilloes. Maybe, the ghost would have been finally laid to rest had the usually blunt Oduah, presently a senator representing Anambra, taken a step further to stave the ambiguity that incriminates. By either confirming or denying the long-standing rumour in some mischievous quarters that that “access” had, in fact, some amatory taste.

    Or, since she is known to be single and available, did she ever, at any time, have a crush on the Prince Charming from Otuoke?

    With the raft of grave charges still pending at the British court, we wager Diezani would, on her own, wish to be spared this sort of question, at least for now.

  • Mugabe and Bob Marley’s prophesy 

    Mugabe and Bob Marley’s prophesy 

    As distraught Zimbabweans suffered the misfortune of viewing the political funeral of Robert Mugabe in slow motion in Harare in the past few days, older compatriots must have been haunted by the ghost of his iconic and far more illustrious namesake – Bob (Robert) Marley.

    It was in the same Harare (then Salisbury) that the Raggae immortal  stood in 1980 as a star guest at Mugabe’s inauguration as first leader of independent Zimbabwe and, amid the stirring percussion of guitar, horn and cymbal, rendered a freshly composed number with eponymous title to a deliriously ecstatic crowd and extravagantly expectant nation.

    “Every man has got his right to decide own destiny,” he begins “And in his judgement, there’s no partiality…”

    Alas, thirty-seven years later, Marley would have wept at the sorry sight Zimbabwe had become and the epic betrayal of the promise of 1980.

    Moments after his party ZANU-PF formally disowned him on Sunday and served 24-hour impeachment notice having declared his psychedelic wife persona non grata, Mugabe appeared in a televised national broadcast flanked by the cartel of avenging generals.

    Looking spent but defiant, the old fox from Kutama continued to cling tenaciously onto the presidential stool, even as political vultures circled overhead.

    Meanwhile, the Harare streets were throbbing with placard-bearing citizens marching in solidarity with the military intervention of last Wednesday.

    But in what must have filled the uniformed enforcers surrounding him with amusement, Mugabe ended his rambling speech by taking liberty to announce official itinerary stretching to next month. The dinosaur was seeking to preserve the sitting order in a sunk Titanic.

    With that, it became evident that Mugabe, like all deluded tyrants in history, had completely lost touch with reality. He seemed incapable of realizing that the game was up; that his captors were now directly scripting the power-play pre-determined to completely strip him bare, beginning with his defenestration at ZANU-PF’s emergency caucus.

    Overall, the Mugabe tragedy is yet another reminder of the often limited shelf-life of political heroism in Africa and should renew the old debate about the propriety or otherwise of allowing the blood-tainted hands that liberate to also rule. (The reason why Charles Taylor, who led a bloody rebellion in Liberia against despotic Samuel Doe in the 80s, ended up in 2006 worse than the former Sergeant.)

    We hear the message subliminally in another line in that same song by Marley: “Soon we’ll find out who is real revolutionary. I don’t want my people to be tricked by mercenary…”

    Obviously, Mugabe stayed too long in power for his own tragic flaws not to be exposed. Perhaps, on account of his lead role in an atrocious guerrilla war, he was psychologically ill-equipped to administer a post-war nation requiring true reconciliation and exemplary statesmanship.

    In retrospect, what could be termed the only great moments in Zimbabwe were in the first decade of independence. It witnessed the quantum leap in literacy ratio. Its status as the food basket of the Southern African sub-region was consolidated, making it one of the most prosperous countries with enviable GDP.

    Instructively, these great advances happened when the governance template was relatively inclusive.

    Soon, Mugabe forgot another profound line in Marley’s evocative Zimbabwe: “Divide and rule will only tear us apart…”

    Only that would explain the maniacal venom he went about the land reforms, invariably perpetrating on industrial scale the racism he and fellow guerrilla fighters had accused Ian Smith of decades earlier.

    After Smith’s unilateral declaration of the independence of Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe was originally called) in 1965, his white minority clan sought to perpetuate the control of more than 70 percent of Zimbabwe’ land in the hands of a white caste accounting for less than one percent of the population.

    While such arrangement was obviously unsustainable and provocative, Mugabe’s abrasive handling of the historically emotive issue worsened things. The country would probably have been better for it had he imbibed even a quarter of Nelson Mandela’s political dexterity and conciliatory spirit that helped minimize racial tension and eruption in the early years of post-Apartheid South Africa.

    Even during the relatively “stable” 80s, he nevertheless had zero tolerance for dissent. Sustained brutal crackdown on political opposition that decade left thousands dead, aided and abetted by compromised leadership of the armed forces.

    So, at the approach of the new millennium in 2000, it was clear the Zimbabwean strongman had run out of fresh ideas to govern. As the asphyxiating effects of economic blockade imposed by western countries kicked in, Mugabe, like the trickster Marley muses about, easily resorted to the bogey of “land reforms” to rally the dominant black population behind him and his party.

    But the big tragedy was that the black provincials who inherited the big farms from the white lords soon discover they lacked the expertise to manage such enterprise, thus doubling Zimbabwe’s economic woes.

    Of course, Gucci Grace or disGrace (as Mugabe’s erstwhile-secretary-turned-wife is contemptuously called) was the temptress. She had sneaked into power through the back door first as Mugabe’s mistress as his much beloved first wife lay terminally ill.

    In the second half of Mugabe’s reign, she acted Shakespeare’s darkly calculating Lady Macbeth and the vain Imelda Marco of 20th century the Philippines rolled into one.

    It is a reflection of her cantankerous nature that diplomatic immunity had to be invoked twice for her to escape trial for criminal charges on foreign soil, the latest being alleged physical assault on her son’s girlfriend in a South African hotel suite.

    At home, it is a measure of the life of debauchery she seduced old Mugabe into that, just last month, she also got embroiled in a litigation involving a $1.3m wedding anniversary ring. The Lebanese she paid the fortune to supply a 100-carat diamond band, as the story goes, attempted to swindle her by supplying a counterfeit worth not more than $30,000. What was meant to be a secret deal eventually exploded in court with the First Lady unashamed to own up to coveting such prohibitive vanity at a time most Zimbabweans are unsure of their next meal.

    In 2014, she considered then lady Vice President a threat. She bad-mouthed her publicly. Soon, her husband granted her desire by booting Mujuri out of office. When Mugabe later sacked Mnangagwa as Vice President a fortnight ago, only a few were left in doubt that the last hurdle had been cleared on Grace’s path to succeeding her nonagenarian hubby as president.

    But hitherto power-hungry Grace has not been sighted since the armoured tanks cordoned off the presidential palace last week.

    Bob Marley must be turning in revulsion in his Kingston grave this moment.

    Okorocha’s commercial monumentalism

     

    The most recognizable symptoms of clinical delusion is usually an obsession with inanities. Bizarre developments in Imo lately should then be enough to so classify Rochas Okorocha. It explains why a man owing workers salary arrears and whose cheques to pensioners bounced and bounced, did not consider it shameful to instead splurge hundreds of millions of naira on the erection of bogus statues.

    What now complicates things is the apparent misreading of the dialectics of history by the Imo governor by the reasons cited for his decision and crass exhibition of a lack of sophistication in seeking to pass off a purely personal commercial transaction at the expense of Imo taxpayers as something done to profit the public.

    Outgoing Liberian president, Madam Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, is the latest foreign leader to have a statue unveiled in her honour in Owerri after a lavish state reception capped with bestowal of a local chieftaincy. Before her was Jacob Zuma, the sleaze-prone president of South Africa.

    Worse still, Okorocha has threatened to unveil more of such gaudy statues in the times ahead.

    Incumbent Ghanaian president Nana Akufo-Addo’s statue is rumoured to be next to be unveiled in Owerri. Presumably, Okorocha is also hoping to spread his business tentacles there. But in terms of historical impact and monumentality, one would have thought Jerry Rawlings towers above the incumbent.

    His acute delusion shows in the fallacious argument that his monuments are to perpetuate the memories of those he considers heroes and heroines..

    All told, it is, however, debatable if Okorocha’s own yardstick can truly stand the rigor of any ethical test administered by those who subscribe to values higher than easy cash and idol-worshipping.

    Without taking anything away from the healing and reconciliatory spirit radiated by Madam Sirleaf as post-civil war leader of Liberia, let it however be recognized that true immortality – the durable type – lies in the immaterial.

    History reminds us that material things are perishable. Only fondness rooted in public memory is eternal. So, in case Okorocha doesn’t know, Sirleaf’s best assurance of immortalization is ultimately how much of her good deeds would get winnowed into folklore to be told from generation to generation. Not by the golden cenotaph in Owerri contracted out presumably at inflated costs.

    Then, the real ethical incongruity. On both occasions, no attempt was made officially to conceal that the visitations by Zuma and Sirleaf had direct linkage with a school foundation run by Okorocha as a private business.

    In the case of the former, the Imo emperor and his courtiers were so shameless enough to even admit publicly that the foundation hopes to move into the door of opportunities already opened by Zuma’s visit. Using public funds to make way for your private business is, in itself, corruption.

    Alas, such sleazy hands are the very ones now seeking to erect in Owerri monuments to virtuous leadership and inspire generations yet unborn.

    As someone recently put it, little wonder then that Imo, once glorious, is now truly calcifying from state to statue..