The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Comrade

  • Latest comrade in town

    Guess the latest unionist agitator in town?  Comrade Senate President, Omo Baba Oloye, Dr. Bukola Saraki!   Did you catch him pump his fist in the air the other day?

    Ah, that would make Adams Oshiomhole green with envy, as the Americans would say! But when did the alliance between an elitist eighth Senate, which has not quite been able to throw off the perception crisis of its forebears, and a populist Labour movement, always mouthing aluta continua, victoria ascerta, even if it stumbles from one defeat to another, in an industrial space spiked with more than its fair dose of neo-liberalism, start?

    And wonders and wonders, Omo Baba Oloye was not alone!  With him, as captured by a picture which The Nation published in its February 9 issue, was Senate Leader, Ali Ndume, product of Saraki’s rebellion against — and conquest of — his party, in the all-important task of choosing principal officers for the Senate.

    With them on the aluta dais was Trade Union Congress (TUC) President, Bobboi Kaigama and Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) President, Ayuba Wabba, both comrades in the new battle to force Babatunde Fashola’s Power Ministry to force service; before brow-beating longsuffering power consumers, to pay even more for the darkness they get now, instead of light.It was at a rally at the National Assembly, Abuja.

    That rally kick-started the nationwide picketing of DISCOs (electricity distribution companies) and GENCOs (electricity generating companies), as the new Great Satan (to use Iran-speak, in its high rhetoric with the United States), in the eyes of a baleful electricity — or sorry, darkness — consuming masses; and their organised Labour champions and chaperons.So, between the elite National Assembly and a rabidly populist Labour, when did the entente start?  Well, maybe there is no entente, as such.

    Maybe elitism and populism have not morphed into some strange alchemy, which sees both diametrically opposed economic dramatis personae hug themselves like some long lost lovers.

    Maybe there is only politics of perception, which winning symbolism symbiotically works for both sides!For once, Labour seems happy to have in its corner the Senate, an all-important ally against the Power Minister Babatunde Fashola, SAN, who for the umpteenth time, needs to work on his emotional intelligence.

    It is only a Fashola, who would believe in the manifest goodness of his crusade of rescuing the power sector by asking angry consumers to pay first, and ask question later. He dubbed it a bitter pill that must be downed for the future good of all! For another, the embattled Saraki, with his Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT) trial set to open soon, would appear to need some healthy dose of populism to weather the fierce journey ahead.  Smart bloke!  He knows the battle would be fought in the law court as it would be in the street.

    If he must win that perception game, he could not afford the folly of the Roman Coriolanus, who mocked the plebs that their breaths reek of garlic. Even if they do, Omo Baba Oloye perhaps has enough courtly street wisdom (and common sense) to merrily gulp them down! So, when next Bukola Saraki comes throwing his punch in the air, in your neighbourhood, know he is preparing for the long haul.

    To win the perception war, is a task that must be done, so seems to say Bukky, the latest unionist agitator in town!

  • Letter to the comrade

    Letter to the comrade

    Dear Sir,

    I really do not know how to start this letter. Well, I will start the usual way. How are you sir? How are Adams, Jane and Steve? And how can I forget to ask about Madam? How is it to be married again? And not to just any woman but to a beauty in almost every sense? Madam, I guess, must be a solid source of inspiration. Even from afar she inspires me. So, I assume she must be inspiring you and making you feel good and tempted to sing: “I feel good, parararara. So good”.

    Sir, the major reason why I am writing this letter is because of your impending exit from power. It looks like it was yesterday when the Court of Appeal returned your mandate that was stolen by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)  and handed over to Prof Oserhiemen Osunbor, who some days back indicated interest in taking over from you on the platform of your party, the All Progressives Congress (APC). Time sure flies. Your second term of four years is rounding the bend. Time really flies.

    Baba Anthony Anenih has not quite recovered from the blow you dealt on him. Now, he even has more to worry about. No thanks to Dasukigate.

    As you must be aware sir, dozens of people have already indicated interest in being the next governor of Edo State, the home of the great Oba of Benin, the leopard who we were told was ill in the Savannah bush. Among those who have shown interest are clowns, pretenders and those who truly mean business. By their fruits we shall know them, says the Bible.

    Comrade Sir, my concern this morning centres around the controversy being generated by the belief that you have an anointed candidate already. You have not told us anything like this; what you have told us is that you would not be neutral when the time comes for a choice to be made.

    Permit me to quote you: “ I come from a tradition that neither succumbs to blackmail nor can be frightened away from what I believe is right… If 10 aspirants ask for my support, I can only support one and if I’m going to support anybody as a sitting governor, I should have looked at the person, his records and do my own evaluation.

    “I’ve worked with people and I know the strengths and weaknesses of all those I have worked with. Even in school a principal will write testimonial for his pupils and in the case of teachers, he will write a report of evaluation of the performance of all the teachers he is working with.”

    But no matter what you have said or not, many seem to have read your mind and already a family feud has been ignited between your alleged choice and a member of his family who had earlier sought his blessing to be your successor.

    The Bini Leaders of Thought (BLT)  also joined the fray recently. A portion of a communiqué at the end of its meeting is instructive. It reads: “BLT believes that god-fatherism in Edo politics was detrimental to the social, economic and political development of the state. God-fatherism is not acceptable to BLT and the good people of Edo State. It should not be reintroduced under any guise.

    “The people of Edo State should be given free hand to determine their next governor. Popular participation bestows responsibility for governing one’s own conduct, develops one’s character, self-reliance, intelligence and moral judgment. In a democracy, there is no substitute for popular participation. Even a benevolent despot who could govern in the public interest, would be rejected by the classic democrat. Man can only know the truth by discovering it himself.”

    Let me say it here loud and clear sir. You have the right to be involved in  the choice of who succeeds you.

    But, I want to remind you of the theme behind the great book Merchant of Venice. In the book, a rich man lent a poor man some money and it was agreed that if he refused to pay at a particular time, the rich man was going to take a pound of flesh. The rich man was happy the poor man missed the deadline and all efforts to get him to be merciful failed. Eventually, he was asked to take the pound of flesh. He was, however, reminded of the letters of the agreement: pound of flesh. Nothing more, nothing less. And there lay the dilemma: how to ensure what his knife would cut would not be more than a pound when weighed and how to ensure no blood was drawn in the process of cutting the pound of flesh. The agreement did not indicate that some blood would be taken. At the end, the rich man had to bow to the rule of law.

    Sir, the essence of recalling this story is to advise you that in whatever you do in supporting a successor, allow level-playing field. Don’t bend the rule to favour anybody. Don’t force your choice on the people. Let there be a primary and if for instance the party agrees to a consensus, let it be a consensus in every material particular. I beg you sir do not bend the law to get in someone who shares your vision.

    Please let me add this as my final take: In making your choice, which I think should be in consultation with leaders of your party and other stakeholders, have this in mind: Edo State is no longer a place where  a learner should be presented for the management of the state’s resources. So, the state needs somebody with experience, good qualification, good interaction with the Presidency, and with a global world view.

    I must also point out that carrying along everybody does not mean some people will still not disagree at the end of the day because of personal well-being and other pecuniary interests. But just satisfy yourself and your conscience that whatever you do is in line with democratic tenets.

    For now, I want to rest my case. I sure will have cause to write on the processes leading to your final exit in November. I wish you well sir. Say me well to Madam Iora, Adam, Steve and Jane.

    Sincerely yours, ‘Korede.

  • Comrade and Esama

    What is the Igbinedion family fighting the comrade governor self?”

    “I think we should blame the comrade governor.”

    “How can you say that? The comrade governor is not a frivolous person. The people come first in anything he does.  Tell the Esama to pay up his debts to the state.”

    “Well, you can believe what you like. But my own problem is that why is this coming out now?”

    “But the comrade governor has explained the reason behind his crusade against the Igbinedion family. But let us even put that aside; it is not in dispute that Lucky was found guilty by a competent court for corruptly enriching himself. So, what are we talking about?”

    “Well, if you know him, go and warn him. No one fights the Esama and gets away with it o. I am telling you a fact. And the war has started already.”

    “What do you mean by that?”

    “Were you not around on Tuesday? Didnt you see those women in red who protested against the governor. The red they wore means war. It means trouble for the governor. He is in big shit. “For you to know the import of the protest, let me quote the women for you: ‘We are women and as mothers, sisters and aunts to Chief Gabriel Igbinedion, we say no to any form of disrespectful behavior for the person of Chief Igbinedion. We as mothers cannot see evil in the land and support it. We are against the action of the governor particularly on Chief Igbinedion and his household. We are here because of the hardship we are going through in Benin City. We cannot pay the Land Use Charge. We pay for water; we pay our children’s school fees? The cost of transportation to New Benin is a problem for us. We voted for him to repair Edo State for us, not only in Iyamho, his village. Let him fix things in Edo State. The House of Assembly kept quiet because they are under him. Now women have come out to tell them that we are not happy. We are dressed in red to say that there is danger in Edo State because the governor is not doing well.’ Can you understand it now? The red attire is known as ‘Ododo’ in Benin Kingdom to signify danger and war.”

    “Forget it. I don’t believe in all those traditional nonsense. The women were simply working for the N200 they received. There is no significance in what they did. If I were the comrade governor, I will open up on these guys. Even the Esama was once quoted as saying his son would go to jail after seeing what he stole. ”

    “What are you saying and who are you calling guys?”

    “They are guys. You are free to call them whatever you like but when people have sunk that low, they have lost all the respect they ordinarilly should have and for me, they deserve to rot in jail.”

    “I think you are being unfair to these gentlemen. The Esama, for instance, has contributed a lot to this country’s development. The history of the education sector cannot be written without him occupying a pride of place. The aviation sector’s history cannot be written without him taking a major chapter. The history of the television industry, especially the private broadcasting arm, cannot be written without the Esama being well-regarded. So, stop deriding him.”

    “My friend, stop deluding yourself. I am not impressed by all you have just reeled out. The man simply set up businesses to make money and when the money was not enough, his son helped him grab more from the commonwealth. He did not do Nigeria or Edo any good by setting up those businesses. So, look for something else to say.”

    “All I will tell you is that you should go and advise your governor to retrace his step. Women will soon go naked on the street of Benin if he continues this way and you know what that means.”

    “What does that mean?”

    “It means his end has finally come.”

    “My friend, stop deceiving yourself. If I were the comrade governor, I will simply adopt the Obasanjo strategy if the women decide to go nude on the streets of Benin.”

    “What do you mean by the Obasanjo strategy?”

    “When Obasanjo was president and some women protested naked against him, he was angry that only old women with already expired boobs protested. The fresh women only led them. He advised the fresh women to dare protest naked and he would unleash the male inmates from the prisons who had not had sex in a long while on them.”

    “ That is barbaric!”

    “So, what the Esama and his son have done is not barbaric?”

    “They are innocent until proven guilty.”

    “The son has been proven guilty and the father will have his day in court too.”

    “I really don’t know what you are talking about.”

    “You will soon understand when you will be visiting them at the prison. You should advise them to invest in renovating the prisons in the country. Since we are not sure of where they may end, let them just improve the condition of all the prisons so that anyone they find themselves will be good enough for them.”

    “You are simply talking rubbish. Oshiomhole is just too controversial for my liking. To him, everybody is a thief, except himself. He is just full of himself. I remember when he was NLC president and he had issue with Heinkein Lokpobiri, who was then a senator, he kept saying: ‘We will drink this Heinkein’ as if the senator is a beer. Now, he and the same Lokpobiri, who is now a minister, are now in the same political party.

    “The files of Lucky’s tenure are there for everybody who cares to check. Oshiomhole should explain to the people of Edo State how he spent the federal allocations and internally generated revenues running into trillions of naira in seven years. He should tell the people of Edo how much he is paying as land tax for his house in Iyamho worth over N10 billion and other properties he has acquired in the last seven years in Dubai, Cape Town in South Africa, in San Francisco, United States of America, a high rise apartment in Atlanta also in America and in London. He is calling everybody a thief but Oshiomhole is the biggest thief in Benin City today. Like Lucky said, I believe Oshiomhole has failed; the people of Edo State now know him better. Oshiomhole is the least qualified person to talk about corruption in the country today because his actions and programmes in the last seven years in Edo State epitomise corruption.

    “He has called everybody in Nigeria a thief; called former President Olusegun Obasanjo a thief; called former President Goodluck Jonathan a thief, he called (ex-Minister of Finance, Ngozi) Okojo-Iweala a thief, and others. Yet, he cannot prove his cases. I don’t think he knows the meaning of a thief.

    “He lives in the glass house and throwing stones. President Muhammadu Buhari will soon find out the real Oshiomhole by the time we provide documents against him.”

    “Are you through or you still have more to say?”

    “I am through.”

    “Okay, let me give you my final take: Tell Lucky to produce the evidence that the comrade governor has houses in Dubai, Cape Town, San Francisco, Atlanta and London. If he cannot produce the evidence, he should just shut up forever. As for the women,  they should not be deceived. Many of them don’t know why they were in the street. Why is that whenever there is a problem, politicians will buy head tie for women and give them N200 to protest? You want the government to improve your lives but you don’t want to pay taxes. All over the world people pay taxes and not protest against it. The Igbinedion family should just pay the government what is due it in terms of taxes and stop instigating the people. Nemesis will soon catch up with them.”

  • Comrade and his women

    Comrade and his women


    [dropcap]W[/dropcap]e arrived Abeokuta in the first ink of dusk, at about 5:00pm. We were visiting the city’s most iconic figure, the white-haired, white-bearded, tall, grand fellow of many battles and accolades.

    Before we made the turn to the bush, a sign was unmistakable. Louis Odion, the writer in resting, who sat beside me in the car, read the sign. Roared Louis in a guttural register: “Any trespasser will be shot and eaten.”

    The imprimatur of the poet. All around were trees. We drove on, and a sense of rural splendour fell over me. The serenity of trees. Birds. Leaves in lush colour. Earth Edenic. Modernity alienated. A shadow cast not by twilight but by the peculiar colouring of a forest. It was as though I was on my way to my mother’s home village in Delta State.

    In a few moments, we saw what looked like a clearing. Looking farther, a big house, unpainted but tasteful, with a grandeur one would describe as quaint. Nothing ornate. Not the windows, not the stairwell. It was a house sitting in arboreal paradise.

    The vehicles parked, and in a few moments, the guest of honour, the sprightly Governor of Edo State, Adams Oshiomhole  and his elegant wife, Lara, materialised from a vehicle. We moved in and waiting was chief host, playwright, poet, writer extraordinaire Wole Soyinka. It was billed as a lunch but the vagaries of technology associated with his flight arrangement turned it into a dinner. Former governors, Babatunde Raji Fashola and Rotimi Amaechi, had visited earlier in the day.

    As we sat, I delved into wordplay and described the setting as “Adamic.” The Edo Governor appreciated it and turned to his wife and they exchanged a joke about the Garden of Eden, and the wife quipped that if the Governor was the Adam, then she would be the Eve. At that moment I started to contemplate Adams, just as W.S. served wine and later asked us to the dinner table with his wife Folake.

    I thought here was Adams, and the story of the man in the past few months revolved around women. The first was his wedding. He, a Nigerian, above 60, and the bride young and from Cape Verde. The news generated quite an attention.

    Those who attacked, especially young men, were probably envious it was not them. Those women who condemned the bride, mostly girls, were also envious she was not them. I wonder what W.S. thought about the couple during the bonhomie of conversation over wine and food.

    He, too, wedded Folake, but to less flurry of envious rage, maybe because we did not have Internet or Facebook then. But essentially he was a prophet of his own nuptials with his play, The Lion and the Jewel. I told myself, we had two lions and two jewels at the table.

    Nothing about this irony propped up in the conversation, and so I reined in my mischief. I took my time to watch, speak with and listen to a man I had admired all my life. That was enough peace for me eating his jolof rice, fried plantain and fish with the lubricating grace of red wine.

    But what I also thought of were Oshiomhole’s other women. The one was former so-called coordinating minister of the economy, Okonjo-Iweala and, of course, the big-eyed oil minister Diezani Alison-Madueke. When the Edo Governor started lashing out at the other women, attention swiftly turned from his beauty parlour to the beasts of the economy.

    Adams had noted how the so-called World Bank, Harvard and all the phony accolades of western brilliance of the finance minister gave us nothing but poverty. Ngozi was a failure. She was a disaster. When the Edo governor reeled out her financial iniquities, I felt especially vindicated.

    Very early I was not moved by her resume. She was not trained for the Nigerian economy, just like her bow-tie colleague now roosting like hens in another African agricultural employment. She was trained about the dependency of African economies.

    I know because I attended quite a few of them and I inoculated myself against their paradigms. She did not and that explains why she met a buoyant purse and left a leaky one.

    Then he visited the United States with President Muhammadu Buhari, and when he returned he unleashed a bombshell. One minister stole as much as six billion dollars from our purse.

    How much is that in naira? In my own calculation, it is at least N1.2 trillion. That money will pay all the salaries owed the state workers, build quite a respectable cancer centre in the country. He would not say who the minister is out of decency. But we cannot but know that the finger pointed at the oil minister. She was the only one who could have had that kind of access.

    The American officials cannot say such a grave thing without evidence. Diezani was the worst of the Jonathan era. She was a disgrace of a minister just as Jonathan was a scandal of a president.

    We raked in the most money in that era, we are broke today because of them. Adams had to come out with the facts because he, too, was outraged. It was Adams the activist, the fulminating labour leader that squared off against Iweala and Madueke.

    Was it not in the same era we had other women, like Mama Peace, and Stella Oduah. Mama peace, the first lady, with whom many Nigerians lost patience, spoke as though the nation was a Mammy Market and all Nigerians were subaltern, backwater denizens without culture.

    The evening eventually came to an end after close to four hours of exchange of jokes, ideas, etc. I could not but also note the sheer number of carved masterpieces in W.S. home. I called back his recollections of his search for an African artifact to as far away as Brazil. He wonderfully delineated the adventure in his memoirs, You Must Set Forth At Dawn.

    We left into the bush again, and then back into the urban jungle. But it was a gradual descent into modernity. We saw buildings here and there  interspersed with bushes until it was bricks and tars and cars.

  • ‘Comrade’ in Hall of Fame

    Dean of the Faculty of Pharmacy of the Olabisi Onabanjo University (OOU) in Ago-Iwoye, Ogun State Prof Femi Oyewo, has been inducted into the Hall of Fame of the National Association of Nigeria Students (NANS).

    She was inducted last Tuesday at the university auditorium in Sagamu.

    At the event were the Vice-Chancellor, Prof Adejimi Adesanya, chairman of NANS Campus Affairs Committee Comrade Oluwafemi Williams, Deputy Senate President of West African Students’ Parliament, Koffi David, president of Pharmacy Students’ Association Nigeria, Comrade Kayode Okeowo and students.

    Special Adviser to President Goodluck Jonathan on Youths and Students, Mr Jude Imagwe, in his goodwill message read by Okeowo, described the inductee as a mother of all students.

    Imagwe said: “Prof Oyewo is a mother to all students, who has dedicated herself to the struggle for the democratisation of education in Nigeria. She operates on a creed that, the academic is the only tool to eliminate prevalent ignorance, poverty and disease in the country.”

    In her acceptance speech, said she was a Kegite in her undergraduate days at the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) in Ile-Ife. She urged the government to make education a right of every child and not a privilege.

    Prof Oyewo said: “The youth are the leaders of tomorrow and a leader who does not provide quality education for the people that will lead after him is a failure. I have always believed in mentoring students, because I always have interest in students’ activities. I never give up; we need more role models in our education sector.”

    NANS Hall of Fame started during the tenure of Moses Osakede. Anyone who is inducted into the hall automatically becomes a lifetime member and a comrade of the NANS.