The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Idowu Akinlotan

  • On Idowu Akinlotan’s pedantic partisan tirades

    Mr Idowu Akinlotan, back-page columnist with the The Nation on Sunday, is without doubt a very fine writer of prose in the league of Herbert Unegbu, Allah-Dey, Gbolahan Ogunsanwo, Professor Alaba Williams, Dan Agbese, Ray Ekpu, Dele Giwa, Tola Adeniyi (Aba Saheed), Henry Onyedike (Henry Waters), Olatunji Dare, Stanley Macebuh, Gbenga Omotosho, Pini Jason, Sam Omatseye and Dan Agbese, just to name a few. I can readily confess that I hardly miss his weekly ‘sermons’ unless forced by circumstances beyond my control to act otherwise.

    But I must confess that for some time now his essays have tended to elicit loud guffaws of pitiable laughter from me rather than coaxing me into any deep introspection and retrospection. The reason isn’t far-fetched: Mr. Akinlotan uses his “Palladium” column to regularly vent petulant bias and prejudice against the person of President Muhammadu Buhari and his ruling party, the All Progressives Congress (APC).

    The Scottish-born English prose writer Thomas Carlyle had posited that “…for all right judgement of any man or thing, it is useful, nay essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.” But Mr. Akinlotan’s turned this maxim on his head, and his relentless weekly dosage of clichéd argumentum ad hominem aimed at Buhari and the APC is, to say the least, in bad taste, unconscionable and utterly reprehensible.

    “Criticism,” warned American poet, essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, “should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring, a south wind, not an east wind.” Bereft of its overt querulousness and rabid hatred, there is, alas, nothing guiding, instructive and inspiring in Mr. Akinlotan’s vituperations.

    There was a time in the past that I wondered if the publisher of the newspaper, who is known to be one of the leading lights of APC, and his senior editors, was savouring any kind of secret morbid joy from allowing Mr. Akinlotan not only to hibernate, but in fact luxuriate, as a mole or fifth columnist within the media and political family!

    It was not until the aftermath of the “O to ge!” (Enough is enough!) tsunami in Kwara State that demystified Senate President Bukola Saraki and upended his erstwhile granitic grip on the politics of the state that I finally realised that patience and perseverance do indeed have huge pay-offs. Former Ekiti State Governor Ayodele Fayose and Saraki were two most notable metaphoric tse-tse flies that chose to perch on the scrotum of President Buhari. And while many of his supporters were clamouring for him to unleash the full weight of the federal might to give both politicians their well-deserved comeuppance, the president chose to walk the talk of one-time British Prime Minister Winston Churchill who had intoned, “I do not resent criticism, even when, for the sake of emphasis, it parts for the time with reality.”

    And with the benefit of hindsight, it is now crystal-clear that Buhari was spot-on with his strategy of ignoring the antics of both men, no matter how discomfiting or destructive. If the Presidency had orchestrated the impeachment of either Fayose or Saraki or both men – as an Olusegun Obasanjo would have imperially done – he would have inadvertently turned them into heroes and martyrs whose political influence and reach would have extended from Calabar to Sokoto and from Maiduguri to Ibadan for all time. But see how a patient and persevering steering of the ship – as opposed to any adversarial manoeuvrings by the Presidency – has totally dissipated the electoral value of both men in their erstwhile fiefdoms in a most effortless manner!

    A Yiddish proverb posits that if one is out to beat a dog, one is sure to find a stick. It is obviously referring to the class of critics with a tar-and-rubbish mentality – one to which Mr. Akinlotan obviously belongs – that French Jesuit preacher Louis Bourdaloue had in mind when he said: “If a man is devout, (they will) accuse him of hypocrisy; if he is not, of impiety; if he is humble, (they will) look on his humility as a weakness; (and) if he is generous, (they will) call his courage pride.”

    Mr. Akinlotan and like-minded traducers of Buhari known to relentlessly see only his character and leadership defects lament over why he still won re-election. They keep pouring scorn on the voting majority that facilitated his victory until it has gotten to the point where one can logically ask just who is fooling who? Between Buhari who his implacable critics dub authoritarian and dictatorial and those who pour scorn and vilify law-abiding citizens who freely spoke with their votes, who poses the greater danger to our nascent and forever fledgling democracy?

    It was at such a time as this, and with such hate-blinded writers hell-bent on passing votes of censure in their newspaper columns, that one-time British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan blurted out: “I have never found, in a long experience of politics, that criticism is ever inhibited by ignorance.” It would therefore amount to an exercise in futility to expect Mr. Akinlotan to mull over his one-way criticisms of Buhari and the APC, regardless of the feeble and cosmetic attempts he infrequently makes to ‘critique’ the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and its candidates, ostensibly to portray a balanced perspective.

    In concluding, here is free advice for Mr. Akinlotan: Look, you’ve been sounding like a broken record on the same issue ad nauseam – it is time to move on to other topical issues. “If you hate a person,” averred German novelist Hermann Hesse, “you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of us doesn’t disturb us.” One can only wonder what Mr. Akinlotan feels and sees in himself but refuses to avow whenever he stares back at the image in a mirror, that he equally hates so much in Buhari. The answer, as that evergreen Negro spiritual states, is most assuredly blowing in the wind.

     

    • Okoye is an Abuja-based financial inclusion expert

  • Re: Fayose grieves the heart

    SIR: I find Idowu Akinlotan’s above captioned write-up in The Nation of Sunday October 19, quite interesting.  I wonder how Akinlotan came away with the impression that Ekiti people hate Dr Fayemi and that what he described as his insufferable urbaneness alienated him from the people.

    Akinlotan obviously accepted all the banal and jejune analysis that blamed Fayemi’s ‘defeat’ on this self-same aloofness and disconnect from the populace and attributed Fayose’s victory to his providing ‘stomach infrastructure’ – that insult to the Ekiti people!

    Akinlotan made so much of the fact that the stadium erupted each time Fayose spoke. For Akinlotan’s information, that crowd was not the ordinary Ekiti people as he made, but was made up largely of PDP supporters mobilized from all over the country, who were doing the job for which they were paid!

    Every discerning person knows that Fayose’s ‘victory’ was orchestrated from Abuja and that he also owes his swearing in to the same federal might which ensured Ekiti courts were locked up for a whole week, thus denying several innocent litigants, access to justice, just to ensure the case regarding his ineligibility was not heard. That, after he led thugs to assault judges in the court premises!

    The only redemption left for Ekiti would be if the APC legislators would be resolute enough to resist the lure of lucre and refuse to defect to the PDP so they can keep  Fayose in check. But I am not so naive as not to know that is a tall order indeed!

    Incidentally, there are already talks of impeaching the Speaker, even though there are only six PDP members.

    But then the Jonathan Presidency has its own mathematical  interpretations as we saw in the governors forum election where 16 won a majority over 19. Also in Rivers and Edo states where a handful  of  House Of Assembly members, with the backing of the Police have been threatening to impeach both the speakers and the governors!

    One can only appeal to the President to please back off from the road to anarchy that he is treading all over the place. As he himself declared in the past, no position is worth the bloodshed that may ensue.

    As for the Ekiti APC legislators, they have a chance of writing their names in gold if they remain steadfast and refuse to fall for the lure of lucre. A good name is better than silver and gold. They should strive to make Ekiti remain the land of honour.

    • Abiodun Sopitan

    Oregun, Lagos

     

     

  • Yes, Lagos has always been different!

    SIR: I read with some considerable amusement and sympathy the article written by Idowu Akinlotan on the back page of Sunday Nation of 25th May, the writer was in total innocent of the recent history of the Western Region and the colony of Lagos.

    Starting from the 1950’s and with the advent of the Action Group at Ibadan, Lagos politicians were divided into two broad camps – Gedegebe l’Eko wa and Lagos belongs to the West. Even though the old Western Region extended to what was then known as Idi Oro, some Lagosians mostly Brazilian Returnees claimed that Lagos was a distinct political entity. Awolowo stuck to the belief that Yoruba West could not be separated from Lagos including indigenes of Brazilian extraction. Some die-hard indigenes thought otherwise. Common institutions like Western Regional Production Development Board, Western Nigerian Marketing Board, Finance Corporation and Property owning organizations belonging to the West did not have the blessing or financial contribution of ‘Gedegbe l’Eko wa’ people. This situation encouraged Nnamdi Azikwe and his NCNC to have a strong foothold in the Lagos Metropolis. Investments like the Airport Hotel, Nigerite, Dunlop, Niger Biscuits, Nigeria Textile Mills, Tower Aluminum, WIN, Pepsi Factory and many others, were established by the West in partnership with expatriate industrialists.

    Today, the question that arises is this, with industrial complexes in Agbara Estate, in Ikorodu area both in Ogun State, where does Lagos begin or where does Western territory end? Today, more than 25% of workers in the public and private sectors live in Ogun state but work in the heart of Lagos.

    That the idea of regionalism is being resuscitated is a reaction or defense mechanism to the deteriorating situation in the country. ‘To your tents O Israel’ seems to be the clarion call in today’s unstable Nigeria. it is a combination of doctorinaire politics and realism.

    Lastly, one may ask if subsequently the country breaks up into new nation states, and an Oduduwa nation finally emerges, where does Lagos stand? It is time we started reading the handwriting on the wall.

    • Deji Fasuan,

    Senior Citizen, Ekiti State

     

  • Whose budget

    Whose budget

    Against the background of the directive by the leadership of the All Progressive Congress to its members to shun the consideration of the 2014 Budget, our Sunday columnist, Idowu Akinlotan, aka Palladium, had in his usual inimitable style, submitted that the directive by the party was not only wrong-headed, but would at best, supply a cheap alibi for a document that has hardly ever worked, and one which for all practical purposes, is designed to fail.

    He simply couldn’t understand why the party would want to be blamed for the farce that was presented in the name of the national budget.

    I beg to disagree. I do not accept that simply because money bill is involved, Nigerians cannot be persuaded of the need to appreciate the larger governance issues which underlie the directive. In any case, what the experience of the last 14 years has taught – at least as far as the budget and the budgeting process is concerned – is the need to shun all pretences about the exercise as anything but farcical.

    What the APC has done may seem to many as no more than a mere fly in the ointment at this time – an unwelcome distraction to those whose egos are threatened; it seems to me as not just a symbolic but a necessary step to halt the steady descent to fascism. In due season, it might well be part of the effort to locate the budget conundrum within the larger conversation on the polity. It is therefore not a question of settling for a half loaf when there are no guarantees that the loaf on offer is not laden with toxins.

    Now, to Budget 2014. I have tried to scan through the 1820-odd pages of the 2014 appropriation bill with planned expenditure of N4.642 trillion of which N3.53 trillion is for recurrent and the balance of N1.1 trillion is for capital spend. Perhaps, if we hadn’t been at this ritual in delusion to the point of making it our lifestyle, we’d probably just ask our lawmakers to do whatever they please while we move on with our lives. Unfortunately, it seems that not a few Nigerians still live in the delusion that the PDP budget would perform the magic that the previous years’ couldn’t hence the uproar.

    No doubt, a lot has been written about the profile of the national budget as been out of sync with the demands of an economy that is said to be rapidly modernising. As it is, no longer is the need to pretend about the virtual regression of the exercise into a placebo. Even if we veer off the annual mismatch between recurrent and capital estimates, we are still left with the bizarre assumptions, the in-built entitlements and layers of earmarks that leaves little imagination as to whose interests the document is supposed to serve.

    I look at the provisions for the Presidency for instance. At this time, we are supposed to have gone past the need for the 11th super jet for the Presidential fleet for the Big Man under whose watch the economy is said to be growing in leaps and bounds, and yet have left far more people at the margins. How about adding the purchase of canteen/kitchen equipment expected to gulp N131,750,000?

    By the way, there is a minor provision for massaging bed – N2.1 million.

    This year, the Vice President’s kitchen will also wear a new look with N8 million equipment earmarked in the budget. Also provided for is a state of the art laundry equipment expected to cost taxpayers N23 million. Never mind that the State House Clinic, designed to deliver first aid before sick officials get evacuated abroad also get N105,731,002.

    You think the Presidency’s officials don’t read? There is provision for library books and equipment that comes to a princely N10,740,600. This year, computer software acquisition at the seat of government would take a chunk of N105,670,000; this is different from the a provision for the upgrading of accounting packages for the State House headquarters in Abuja, Dodan Barracks and Marina for another N50 million. And if I may add another, the Hyperion Enterprise Performance Licence (the public sector budget planning software) on which the nation would also spend N55.67 million.

    So much for their love for e-governance.

    To be honest, I couldn’t resist the thought that the service-wide votes earmarked for software acquisition and licences would actually suffice to start our local Silicon Valley. My little arithmetic actually put the annual spend on them to be in multiples of billions; amounts that could be retained not only to boost local software development efforts, but to kick-start the revolution in the sub-sector.

    This is what officials who are more often than not, vendors for foreign software firms would rather ship abroad in dubious acquisition and licensing fees!

    I guess it’s no longer fruitful to press the point that whereas a comparatively lean Presidency would get N33 billion in allocation, and the National Assembly N150 billion, the works ministry, whose business is to fix our pot-hole-infested roads is allocated a mere N128 billion (the capital estimate is actually N100 billion).

    The same goes for the Police commands in the 36 states and the federal capital; they are supposed to make do with N292 billion of which a huge chunk of N285 billion goes for recurrent expenditures.

    While the ‘paltry’ vote for the works ministry answers to the question of why the Lagos-Ibadan expressway may not be fixed despite the fanfare of its flag-off by President Goodluck Jonathan, the police capital vote, which comes to a mere N6.7 billion would seem at the heart of all that is wrong with the police institution.

    The issue, in the circumstance, is hardly one of making sense of an exercise so revealing of the crass opportunism of our rulers. Rather, it is whether we should dignify a process that has become everything that a disciplined exercise should not be.

    That, to me is the crux of the matter. Today, despite the denials, we know that the economy is in deep trouble. Unfortunately, that has very little to do with the global price of crude; neither is the nation currently experiencing insecurity on such a scale as to threaten oil production. We are simply told that the nation cannot pump enough crude to fund its budget – no thanks to oil thieves said to hold the nation by the jugular. End of the matter. As if that is not bad enough, the nation’s finance minister, has been issuing all manners of waivers and concessions to party hacks and all manners of men.

    Never, it seems, has the nation’s economy known this scale of aided fall.

  • Achebe: Some things are better left unsaid – A rejoinder

    Achebe: Some things are better left unsaid – A rejoinder

    Any deep thinking person who had followed up on the reactions of some Nigerians to Chinua Achebe’s latest book, There was a Country, would easily come to a conclusion that ethnic bigotry has remained the fundamental problem this country is yet to sincerely engage. The unintellectual and jingoistic dismissal of Achebe’s book by many a Yoruba Nigerian was as disappointing as it was laughably sad. Prominent among these sentimentalist criticisms of Achebe’s book was the one written by Mr. Idowu Akinlotan.

    Mr Akinlotan’s grouse with Achebe’s book is what he calls the “author’s unrepentant and undisguised partisanship.” He writes thus: “After reading the Guardian (London) excerpt of the book, I concluded this was a book he [Achebe] should not have written, for sometimes, the merit of a book is compromised by just one page, one paragraph, even one sentence. …Achebe should have left unsaid many of the things he wrote in the book. His reputation as a world-renowned writer was already secure, having written one of the 50 most influential books of all time. Why did he feel impelled to write this [fated] book, one which doubtless reinforces the suspicion many hold about his private and public animosities?”

    Interestingly, Mr Akinlotan had earlier informed the reader of his column that he had not read the book and would refrain from doing a review of the book. What do we call what he has written above: a pre-review, the type that comes with presumptions, assumptions and illogical judgements perhaps? The sharp-witted columnist was quick to “conclude” that Achebe’s memoir will be of little “value” and perhaps should be disregarded. Achebe’s only crime in the excerpt is that he dared accuse Chief Obafemi Awolowo of genocidal intents against the Igbo through his blockade policies that led to the deaths of many Igbo civilians during the Civil War. Most Yoruba in Nigeria are often quick to throw reason and caution into the air to defend the person and deeds of Awolowo.

    Mr. Akinlotan should have waited to read the book before jabbering. In this same book which Awolowo only got about two paragraphs of deserved criticisms that seem to have upset some Yoruba to frenzy, the likes of Ojukwu and Gowon have pages of criticisms on the egotistical roles they played during the Nigerian Civil War. But the typical “unreading” Nigerian who becomes an authority on hearsay would like Palladium shout abuses only to realise they have misjudged their target.

    Ethnicity blinds us! I felt my sensibilities assaulted when I read Mr. Akinlotan’s rationalisations of war crimes. All wars have moral question marks on them and I am yet to see a just war. But in his defence of Awolowo, Mr. Akinlotan struggles in vain to rationalise the moral questions he himself found as problems in the excerpt from Achebe’s book. For one, he sees nothing wrong in having millions of Igbo civilians killed in a war the Federal forces claimed was a “police action” intended to keep the country together. Starvation for the columnist suddenly becomes a lofty weapon of war without any “diabolical” intent. Mr. Akinlotan sees nothing morally wicked in a rehabilitation and reconciliation process that saw the Federal Government give £20 to Igbos wanting to convert their Biafran currency back into the Nigerian pounds irrespective of whatever amount of money they had deposited into the banks. Nor did Akinlotan say anything about the policy of indigenisation which at the instigation of Chief Awolowo the Federal Government introduced after the war to further deplete the economic base of the Igbo who mostly relied on the commerce of imported second-hand wares to survive. For the columnist, to maintain the saintly and heroic qualities most Yoruba have constructed and attributed to Awolowo, the aggrieved Igbo and other minority groups in Nigeria must be hushed to silence. Awolowo’s villainous roles during the war, for him, are at best mere “guesswork” and cannot be validated by any form of historical reflection. Suddenly, Ojukwu and Azikiwe have become canonised for their villainies too, all to ensure that Awo’s false reputations are not stained. Not until we come together as a people to acknowledge the heroic as well as villainous deeds of our so-called past heroes, not until we come to terms with the fact that we are not happy with one another, that we are living a lie, we will remain in the doldrums.

    For a columnist who is known for his deft analyses of socio-political and historical happenings in Nigeria and beyond to lose his sense of moderation and restraint in discrediting a book he knows nothing about simply because few lines supposedly put Awo (his tribal hero) in a bad light means that ethnicity should be the first of the problems we must engage should we want to be a country. For Akinlotan, the few lines Achebe penned, justified and historically valid indictments on Awolowo’s roles during the war, necessarily mar his book. And since, for him, Achebe lacks the intellectual acumen to interpret human motives and actions, not minding the fact that he (Achebe) has written one of the “50 most influential books of all times,” we should dismiss the old writer as “paranoid”. But let’s humour Mr. Akinlotan a bit since he is a master of human motives: How does one explain that a federal troop that mostly consisted of Northerners, who had earlier carried out a genocidal butchery of the Igbo, would now engage the Igbo in a brotherly and humane war? Or that the great Awolowo whose undisguised ethnic politics and sentiments would be so humane in prosecuting a war against a people whose political representatives proved to stand between him and his ambitions of ruling the country? Why is it so difficult for many Yoruba to accept faults in Awo? Does Palladium expect Achebe to praise Awo for initiating a harsh policy that led to the deaths of his tribesmen?

    If after 40 years Achebe still manifests “a disturbing streak of extreme traumatisation” as Mr. Akinlotan would have us believe, it only means that the scars of the war are anything but healed. It means that many more Achebes and other vicarious victims of the war are still pining in the injustices done to them by their fellow compatriots. It means that we are yet to become a country. Palladium believes Achebe has written the book for fame. He writes: “[Achebe’s] reputation as a world-renowned writer was already secure, having written one of the 50 most influential books of all time. Why did he feel impelled to write this [fated] book, one which doubtless reinforces the suspicion many hold about his private and public animosities?” It is only people of little minds and meagre ambitions that will think that a man in the twilight of his life, a man who has won all the fames deserving of his name, would release a book at 81 for fame and reputation. Achebe must remain silent in the face of historical injustice simply because he wants to keep his reputation intact. If Achebe had only blamed Ojukwu or Gowon, the Yoruba critics may not have been enraged this much. But now, his genius is challenged for daring to accuse Awo of genocide.

    Mr. Akinlotan must understand that Achebe was only trying to call the attention of the country to the massive injustice it has done to some of its citizens. It is a cautionary book which in my own opinion seeks to draw our attention to the fact that a man who chooses to forget where the rain has begun to beat him will never know when and where it stops. Why do we shy away from our history and yet hope to progress? For Palladium to dismiss Achebe’s call for the Civil War to be included in the teaching curriculum of schools in Nigeria is sad. For us to grow as a nation, we have to be more cautious and tolerant of others’ feelings and opinions. We have to be fair and courageous enough to see faults and strengths alike in the people we uphold as heroes and villains. Nothing should be “left unsaid” if truly we desire reconciliation and progress.

     

    • Anyaduba is a graduate student of Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife