The Nation Newspaper

Tag: politics

  • Royalty and Politics

    Looking at a king’s mouth, one would think he never sucked at his mother’s breast”, observes an old man in Things Fall Apart . Last week, the good people of Oyo town, distinguished Yoruba sons and daughters as well as numerous Nigerian well-wishers, rose as one to pay homage to one of Nigeria’s most illustrious monarchs ever.

    The Alaafin of Oyo, Oba Lamidi Olayiwola Adeyemi, had turned eighty. Looking every inch as regal, as resplendent and as royally distinguished as ever, Oba Adeyemi is in a class of his own among monarchs. It was carnival time in the land of Sekere and Dundun music.

    The event was a moveable royal feast worthy of the epic munificence with which ancient Oyo monarchs entertained their honoured guests in olden times. It was also a classic enactment of the Yoruba abiding fealty to their traditional institution, no matter the advent of ambiguous and traumatic modernity. As royalties collided with royalties and spiritual fathers jostled with secular notables to honour the great monarch, you had a sense that this was the Yoruba nation at its chivalrous and cohesive best.

    Snooper should have been there. A personally signed and royally embossed invitation card had arrived a week before the commencement of the week-long fiesta. But the pressure of work and a mix-up about Alaafin’s itinerary from palace sources sent yours sincerely on a wild goose chase a day before the concluding book launch at the International Conference Centre in Ibadan.

    Given the obvious distress and disorientation of the post-colonial state in Nigeria and the rest of Africa, irony and counter-factual fantasies pervaded the entire ceremony. What would have happened had the old Oyo Empire survived its tribulations in the hands of local jihadists who up-ended the empire and the colonial invaders who finally smashed up its institutional architecture? You get the sense that while the celebrations were going on, the redoubtable Yoruba intelligentsia was also thinking its way through what has become a classic colonial cul de sac.

    At the ripe age of eighty, the Alaafin has already passed into legend in his life time. How do you begin to write about a living institution? If there is any lesson to be taken away from the life of this exceptional monarch, it is that grit, determination and rigorous royal husbandry pay spectacular dividends.

    No other Oba could have come better prepared for the throne. The unmistakable branding and occult assignations of future royalty having been positively identified by his late father, Alaafin Adeniran Adeyemi, the young prince at a tender age was farmed out to live with other royalties in order to imbibe the arcane rituals of royalty and its cloak and dagger politics. The death of his beloved mother at an early age and the need to insulate the future Oba from domestic hostilities would also have weighed heavily on the mind of his wise father.

    The finished product is a perfect embodiment of learning, culture, wit and royal scholarship. The Alaafin is a living treasure of Yoruba history, his memory and power of instant recall a tad short of the miraculous. To add to an already formidable survival kit in the merciless ring of royal and anti-royal politics, the future Alaafin took on martial art and boxing, a trade he plies till date in the privacy of his palace.

    Even the great monarchies of ancient Europe would have secretly applauded this well-rounded education of a future African king. Like his ancestors who went to bed with their daggers fastened around the waist even as the sheath served as pillow case, the Alaafin is not the one to shy away from battle.

    Due to the violence-suffused and blood-soaked nature of their recent history as people of multi-national empire, the Yoruba are often reluctant to start a fight. They have seen too many desperate and bloody scrapes in the last three hundred years of their history. But woe betides anybody who mistakes their civility for cowardice or their restraint and happy go lucky nature as tantamount to a lack of appetite and aptitude for fatal confrontation.

    Perhaps it needs restating that the Oyo Empire was a child of providential necessity. Despite the protracted bloodshed on the Ife plains that accompanied the Oduduwa ascendancy, the subsequent revolution of centralized authority and decentralized governance in Yorubaland was achieved through a combination of persuasion and diplomatic negotiation rather than outright conquest.

    It was when Oduduwa’s people arrived at the northern most fringes of the Yoruba nation and found themselves immediately surrounded by hostile and implacable non-Yoruba people that they were forced to hone their martial instincts. So successful was this militarization of the psyche and martial mobilization that it led to offensive pre-emption and the founding of a new empire.

    Given the signal failure of the post-colonial state in Nigeria to deliver this kind of protection to its captive-subjects and the poverty of education of its political elite, it is not surprising that there is a soaring nostalgia among many Yoruba people and other denizens of old kingdoms in pre-colonial Nigeria for a revalidation of traditional rule as a therapeutic succour for the deep psychic wounds and political destabilization inflicted on Africans by colonial rule and its post-colonial incubus.

    In a gushing tribute to his newly enthroned monarch, the Obaro of Kabba, Oba Solomon Dele Awoniyi, in this paper this past Saturday, Segun Ayobolu spoke highly of the visionary drive, the administrative and managerial capacity of the new Oba. The column concluded by endorsing Basil Davidson’ famous but controversial thesis that at the end of the colonial era power ought to have been “returned to acknowledged African chiefs and kings” who “were often persons of genuine authority and expertise who drew their status and prestige from a long, pre-colonial history….”

    This is a historical impossibility, a heroic but romantic view of history akin to trying to step into the same river twice. Given its immanent logic, and whatever its ideological constructs about “dual mandate” and “civilizing mission”, western civilization was hardly a benign and benevolent intervention in Africa. It was primarily a mission of economic predation and only secondarily of political redemption. The global order does not wait for anyone to get their act together.

    In order to facilitate its project of imposing a new order on a “lost” continent by engendering a total disruption and destruction of its old traditional structure, it was a historic necessity for colonialism to create a new class of African elites to man the foreign system so created by imperialist fiat. Any traditional ruler is welcome as long as they buy into the new project of western modernity. And they will have to slug it out with new entrants into political reckoning with fresh energy and drive to spare.

    As a living symbol of his people’s past grandeur and glory, the Alaafin has been able to straddle the perilous gorge between modernity and tradition with wisdom, wit, self-effacing panache, an acute presence of mind and exemplary political pragmatism. It is a tough act to follow, like the dazzling gyrations of a master trapeze artist on the high wire. Forty seven years after mounting the throne of his ancestors, Oba Adeyemi remains firmly in the political and royal saddle. His doting and admiring father would be applauding from the imperial ceiling.

    Like a terrible yoke, history must weigh heavily on this enlightened traditional ruler, and it has not always been a happy history. The burden of remembrance is often accompanied by the pains of recollection. It could not have escaped the Alaafin how a new Islamic order from the desert fringes of the country and without any valid claim to superior civilization beyond religious fanaticism and cavalry mobility toppled an internally weakened and bitterly polarized Oyo Empire.

    According to knowledgeable sources, the reigning Alaafin, already wounded in battle, was captured by the marauders and taken to the house of a rogue Yoruba warlord in Ilorin where he was grotesquely tortured into renouncing his traditional faith before being given the Khashoggi treatment by his savage interlocutors. It was a horrific execution. The warlord in question suffered a similar fate in a power tussle shortly thereafter.

    A century and three decades after this momentous event which sent the empire on a tail-spin, it was the turn of the reigning Alaafin Adeniran Adeyemi, the father of the current occupant of the throne, to taste the bitter pill of the clash between traditional authority and colonial legitimacy predicated on imperialist disruption of the old order.

    To give teeth to the new order, the Macpherson Constitution vested direct political power in the new power elite,  an arrangement which suddenly saw the Alaafin subordinated to the Chairmanship of late Bode Thomas in the Oyo Divisional Council. A bitter confrontation soon ensued with Bode Thomas accusing the Alaafin of rank insubordination for not standing up to greet him.

    It was a proxy confrontation between the AG and the NCNC. But for its frank political undertones and partisan furies, the misunderstanding could have been easily resolved. After the mysterious death of the Action Group stalwart events moved to a cataclysmic climax. Following the finding of the Floyd Commission of Enquiry, Oba Adeniran was deposed and banished into exile in 1955 and he died five years after in 1960.

    A decade later and at the turn of the seventies, the same Yoruba disunity and elite power rivalry almost cost the Alaafin the ascension to the throne of his forefathers. The smell of intrigues was overpowering. Even after the then Prince Adeyemi’s nomination was ratified and given the seal of approval by the Western Nigeria government the murmurs of disapprobation persisted.

    Read also: Alaafin Lamidi Adeyemi glides to 80

    It led to the brief closure of The Nigerian Tribune on the order of the military government of the then Brigadier Adebayo. To register its displeasure, the newspaper was about to publish a fiery editorial titled “We shall be back to Square One” when security men pounced on the premises. Yours sincerely fled through Oke Sapati, Minor Seminary before descending on Oke Padre in the early hours of the morning.

    In all this, and despite the presence of enemy forces, the Yoruba have remained their own worst enemies. Atavistic feuding stretching back to seven generations, elite rancour, petty malice and collision of bloated egos remain the order of the day. In a post-colonial coliseum of permanent hostilities, you cannot blame your adversaries for exploiting your weakness.

    In the jungle of hostilities and injustice that is post-colonial Nigeria, every ethnic group leverages on its strengths and advantages as countervailing strategies of survival and self-preservation: while the north directs its political and military aggression against the nation and the east replies in kind with economic aggression, the west responds with an intellectual aggression which leaves nothing standing in the wake of its relentless bombardment.

    It is a recipe for perpetual chaos and the nation as post-colonial hell. And it could go on forever or for the foreseeable future until there is a nationalist political class with the vision and will to make Nigeria a safe and humane habitat for all its citizens.

    This is where a man of Alaafin’s immense stature, royal prestige, political pragmatism and universal appeal could make the difference. At eighty, the great Yoruba monarch has earned his spurs and epaulettes. All the accolades and encomiums have been richly deserved.

    As a concluding project to a reign of glorious distinction, Alaafin should now devote his grandeur and remarkable intellectual energy to finding an answer to the Yoruba Question within the Nigerian Conundrum. Here is wishing Iku baba Yeye many more years on the throne of his illustrious ancestors.

  • Politics as theatre of the absurd – with a difference

    …the dog in dogma, the tick in politics, the mock of democracy the mar of Marxism, a tic of the fanatic, the boo in Buddhism, the ham in Mohammed, the ash in ashram, a boot in kibbutz, the pee of priesthood, the pee pee of perfect priesthood… Wole Soyinka, Madmen and Specialists (1971)

    The real cultural moment of the Theatre of the Absurd was the period after the Second World War between the mid-1950s to the late 1960s mostly in Europe. With Paris as its centre, the leading playwrights were Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco and Jean Paul Sartre. But “absurdism” continued to be a powerful international current of theatre and performance well into the late 1970’s. This was why, when I arrived in America in 1971 for my graduate studies, the American incarnation of the absurdist theatre was still very strong. And since I went to school and lived in the West Village in New York City that was the heart of the Off-Broadway movement, I got to personally see many plays and performances that were vintage “absurdism”. All of which is to show, dear reader, that when I claim to be seeing politics looking like the theatre of the absurd, I know what I am talking about!

    For my current crop of students that are nearly two generations from the high tide of the cultural moment of the theatre of the absurd, this is how I try to make them grasp the essence of this theatre movement or tradition: when you have been sitting for almost forty-five minutes watching a play and you still don’t understand what is going on, don’t lose patience but give the play another forty-five minutes to make its point(s). And if that entire period comes to an end and you are still baffled about what is going on, then know that you have been watching a play, a performance in the absurdist mode. Of course, most of the students cannot comprehend why anyone would sit through an incomprehensible, meaning-defying performance of 90 minutes when nobody is forcing them to do so. And so, I have to tell them why I sat through all the performances of absurdist plays in my graduate student days at New York University: regardless of the awesome challenges to comprehension and understanding in the plays, they were for the most part often extraordinarily intriguing, wondrous, haunting and sometimes cathartic. This is especially true of perhaps the most quintessentially absurdist play of all, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. [More on this point later in the discussion]

    We had our own expressions of the absurdist theatre in Nigeria. The plays that readily come to my mind now are Ola Rotimi’s Holding Talks and Wole Soyinka’s Madmen and Specialists. To this day, most critics and scholars of Soyinka’s drama still consider that play baffling and, ultimately, indecipherable in its central metaphors and conceits. But no critic denies its power, its status as an artistic tour de force. I personally think that the critics and scholars are wrong, that the central tropes and conceits of the play around the term, “As”, are not as inscrutable as they are thought to be. But I have argued, it seems, in vain and most critics persist in their denial that the play has any “meaning” worth uncovering. Since that is not the issue in contention in this discussion, I say, let it pass. What is in contention here, what I wish to emphasize in this piece about the theatre of the absurd in relation to politics is, precisely the moment, the crisis conjuncture when absurdity comes without any apotheosis, any catharsis – as in Trump’s America, Nigeria of the APC/PDP, and the global rise in political movements of crude, retrogressive divisions between the peoples of our common earth, together with the terrible experiences of confusion and suffering that come in their wake.

    Let us briefly examine my central claim in this piece that “absurdity” in the theatre of the absurd was/is haunting, illuminating and, sometimes cathartic while, in politics, “absurdity” is simply absurdity – terrifying, destructive, apocalyptic. In its simplest and most common expressions, absurdity is senselessness and chaos where you expect to find reason, order, reassurance. The “absurdity” that was/is in absurdist plays bears a close resemblance to this commonplace understanding of the term. However, to the extent possible, this is motiveless absurdity, the kind of absurdity that comes regardless of how strongly you strive against it, like the absurdity that a man or woman perceives in her or his life regardless of how much she or he tries to have order, meaning or dignity in her or his life. Seen in the light of this framework, absurdity derives either from life or existence itself or from historical crises of epic proportions. That is the imaginative universe of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and of Soyinka’s Madmen and Specialists. And no wonder: Beckett’s play has the historical background of the Second World war as its source of imaginative projection; Soyinka’s play has the immediate historical context of the Nigeria-Biafra war and the more general backdrop of all the internecine civil wars of postcolonial Africa as its composite source of inspiration.

    If “absurdity” in Absurdist Theatre is “motiveless”, that is far from what we find in politics as theatre of the absurd. Here, absurdity has a motive and a purpose, as strange as this may seem to us. Take the case of the currently most absurd act in international or global politics: the brutal assassination and dismemberment of the Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi in the Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Ankara, the Turkish capital. The Saudis had to have known that they could not get away with it; but they carried it out all the same. That is the first level of the absurdity. The second and far more stunning absurdity is that they will get away with it, barring any unforeseen development that completely neutralizes the awesome spending and buying power of their fabled oil wealth. In effect, the world will simply have to put up with the absurdity of the ill-fated journalist’s assassination and dismemberment. In order words, this is absurdity all right, but it is absurdity with a difference.

    But of course, the political theatre of the absurd of Donald Trump, the American president, is without equal in the contemporary world. Where does one begin, where does one end the litany of absurdities, all completely perpetrated in the open, hiding in plain sight? Trump tells lies like no other leader in modern political history in any part of the world has ever done. Sometimes, the lies are mutually self-cancelling, even in the same speech. Here is the most recent one, told as if the American electorate is mostly made up of total idiots: He, Trump, together with his party, are going to give middle class Americans a tax cut of 10% before the elections that will take place in less than two weeks from now. But everyone knows that as Congress is in recess now until after the elections, there is no way in the world that legislation can be passed to effect that 10% tax break for the middle class before November 6, the voting day. And indeed, everyone now knows, nearly two years into the presidency of Donald Trump, that facts and truth are no deterrents to his propensity for telling patently absurd lies.

    The “absurdity” of the Theatre of the Absurd was/is “motiveless”, existential; in the political theatre of the absurd, “absurdity” is calculated, motivated, purposive; it is absurdity with a difference. I urge that we keep this distinction always in mind, otherwise we will be simply overwhelmed by the absurdities that have become rampant and rampaging in America, in our country and in the world at large. More specifically, I urge that we must learn from the absurdities of Trump and his followers. Why? At most, Trump’s active, unflinching base of support is about 30% of the American people. Add to that there is about another 10% at most who, for one reason or another, gravitate towards him and his agenda and policies. It would seem from this demographic breakdown that Trump’s agenda and policies, his incurable lying, and his terribly mediocre and dysfunctional administration hurt and damage the lives of the sold majority against him while sparing the minority that supports him. But that is not the case at all! Gradually but inevitably, the trade wars that Trump has started in international trade and commerce, his climate change denials, his withdrawals from international treaties and obligations, his white nationalist embrace of racists and neo-fascists, together with his misanthropy and misogyny, all are deeply injurious to everyone including all his supporters in America and the rest of the world.

    Perhaps the most salient point at which Trump’s political theatre of the absurd meets that of the APC/PDP Janus-faced political governance in Nigeria is to be found in the scale of the greed and the besotted self-interest of the American president and the Nigerian political elites. Axiomatically, it is well-known that no ideology, no basic policy alternatives separate the APC from the PDP, despite the APC’s claims to the contrary. Indeed, as we all know, ideology and policy differences are stated and touted only during elections in Nigeria; as soon as incumbency follows an electoral victory, ideology and policies vanish as distinguishing, consequential vectors.

    Trump is singularly like the Nigerian political elite in this respect: as long as the business and commercial interests of himself, his family and his cronies are satisfied, policy and ideology can go to hell. Under Trump, institutions of the state, of the bureaucracy, of the judiciary, of domestic and foreign security services, of foreign diplomatic services and the interstate system, of education, health and human services. all have been degraded to so-called Third World levels, precisely because they have all been subordinated to the primacy of the self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement of Trump, his family and his cronies. Sounds and seems very Nigerian?  Yes, but remember that America is the heartland of global capitalism and if Nigeria can ill afford such levels of institutional decay, far less so can America with its dependence on its historic, if crumbling global hegemony. Permit me to express this in very concrete and graphic terms: Trump has been in office for nearly two years now; still, many diplomatic posts, many open bureaucratic and administrative posts remain unfilled simply and precisely because to Trump, they have no bearing or relevance to the naked, overweening pursuit of his self-interest. Seems very Nigerian, doesn’t it?

    Absurdity – or in the plural, absurdities – is part of life. Any man or woman who lives beyond the age of forty will sooner or later make this discovery. That is, anywhere and everywhere on our planet. For those who live in the poor countries of the global South, encountering absurdities nearly all the time is the very stuff of existence itself; and of political community. That was what informed my encounter with the Theatre of the Absurd in my young intellectual and cultural adulthood. Politics as a theatre of the absurd is related but vastly different. Trump knows this; so too, does Buhari and so does Atiku Abubakar. Meet the absurdities of life, of existence with fortitude, compatriots; but meet the absurdities of the Trumps and the Buharis and the Atikus of this world with resolution and resistance, compatriots.

    Biodun Jeyifo
    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Politics and Letters

    There are times when politics takes over everything in a writer’s life to the exclusion of the finer sensibilities of literature and cultural criticism. It is virtually impossible to remember literature in the midst of hand to hand political combat. The man of letters and the mind that creates suffer immeasurably in the hands of politics.

    You kid and delude yourself that you can always return to literature in a saner and better time. But such a time never comes. In the roiling cauldron of tropical politics, the bugle of permanent political hostilities banishes the bugaboo of literary endeavour. Until you fall by your pen. If art is a jealous mistress as it has been famously observed, politics is a vicious master indeed.

    In the Third World, the obsession with politics is the father of all obsessions. It permeates and infiltrates everything in its capillary malignancy. Everything else takes a bow before politics. As Karl Marx famously avers, political criticism is not just a passion of the mind but the mind of passion itself. Like the Quran in strict Islamic cultures, the uber-text which strikes dead all literary fancies and fantasies in infancy, politics also kills literary aspirations in post-colonial Africa by sheer profusion and protusions into everything.

    Why write and get yourself in trouble when all answers are already encoded in the book of the holy Prophet?  On the other hand, why write when political engagement provides all the answers to the tragedy of the Black person? As the British War poets of the incredibly savage First World War would discover: There is a limit to how much you can write from squalid trenches or from hurling grenades at the political establishment from the permanent barricades of Nigeria.

    Yet with a slew of tributes to departed literary and cultural titans still outstanding——Ben Obumselu, Abiola Irele, Isidore Okpewho, Oyin Ogunba, Francis Oladele, Norman Mailer,Vidia Naipaul, Philip Roth,  Aretha Franklin and now Moses Olaiya— one begins to feel like a delinquent ward who has been remiss in his principal responsibility.

    So politics will take a back seat this morning as we set out on a literary excursion. It was said of a major political figure of late nineteenth century Russia that he was just a minor political hack during the epoch of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. It was the seminal revenge of letters over politics. This morning, columnist begins to make amend with a tribute to the great Trinidadian-British writer, Sir Vidal Naipaul, who recently joined his ancestor by republishing an encounter of ten years ago when the great man and his wife visited Nigeria.

  • Politics as pin pong

    The determined swerve by some of the stringent promoters of Buhari’s candidacy in 2015, to the promotion of Atiku’s candidacy in the 2019 presidential election, can only be likened to the game of pin pong. In the mind of these game masters, the masses are hapless watchers of the pin pong game, and their heads must be turned left-right-right-left, as they choose, without any emotional concern for the poor necks of their pawns.

    While they cart away all the trophies and prices on offer as the game is played and won, the masses should be content with following the game as an entertainment, like spectators. In this game, the similarity to pin pong does not extend to standard rules and regulations. Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has become the master of this game. In 2007, he crisscrossed the entire country campaigning vigorously for the late President Umaru Yar’ Adua against the vice president AlhajiAtiku Abubakar.

    President Obasanjo told us that AtikuAbubakar, would be a scourge on the nation, if we make the mistake of electing him as his successor. Our poor heads was turned to Yar’Adua as the game changer. Less than six months into that tenure the news began to spread that Yar’Adua was no good, even as the godson made the destruction of the godfather a priority. With nature moving in to starve a debacle, Obasanjo and company swung our heads to President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan.

    Again the promoters were able to sell Jonathan as the messiah in 2011. To get Jonathan into Aso Rock, all manner of gimmicks was put into the game, including the famous ‘I had no shoes story’. At the end of the tenure, Jonathan wanted to continue, but the heads of the spectators were swung to a new mantra, the change agenda. In the run up to 2015, President Obasanjo again charged the spectators to focus on President Muhammadu Buhari, as the best thing that can happen to our country.

    Now, as the 2019 election approaches, the poor masses are having their hapless heads turned in a new direction, this time to the rejected stone, as argued by TunjiAdegboyega, in his column, in this paper, last Sunday. If the masters of the game have their way, AlhajiAtiku Abubakar, is now a new creature, old things have passed away, and all things have been made anew. Yet the ordinary folks would not be let into what transpired between the promoters and the new champion, in the two hours meeting, before President Obasanjo gave the go ahead for the heads to swing in another direction.

    Unfortunately, except for the lucre that the political pin pong will generate behind the closet for a few, not much will change for the majority, should Atiku win, with the current socio-economic and political structure that our failed country operates. Indeed, except for the poor handling of the herdsmen induced killings and the political appointments afflicted by nepotism, I have no doubt that the Buhari presidency has delivered more value for each naira spent, than the game masters while in power.

    So Atiku is just the latest abracadabra from the magic bag of the game masters. But with the heads of the masses involuntarily swinging left-right-right-left, is there any opportunity for them to comprehend, not to talk of thinking through the maze the intensive game has become? Many believe that if you wait to think, you will not see the efficiency of the return serve, or when the ball has gone off the line. So while the masses concentrate on watching the game, the game masters enjoy their disarticulated distraction and feast from the game.

    Such is the calamity that has befallen our dear country, and sadly there is no solution in sight, despite the excitement in the air. Of course, the Atiku candidacy has brought some excitement for many who are disillusioned by the failings of the Buhari presidency. To raise the game, Atiku sought out perhaps the most frugal public official since 1999, the former governor of Anambra state, Peter Obi, Okwute, to match the much publicised frugality of President Buhari and the vice president Yemi Osinbajo.

    There is no doubt that Peter Obi is made of sterner stuff than his new principal, Atiku Abubakar, when it comes to managing public resources, but he will only remain a spare tyre. The most current show of the impotency of a vice president, where the principal is adamant or ignorant, is the latest faux pax of the Buhari presidency – the clearly unconstitutional, so called travel ban on 50 VIPs under the nose of one of the most cerebral constitutional law expert, vice president Yemi Osinbajo.

    So what change can Peter Obi wrought in managing public funds, under a President who celebrates extravagance in all things? If they win, can he stop the president’s men who have already started celebrating with over flowing champagne in an advert, from washing down meals with the most expensive champagne, public money can buy? If they win, while Obi flies his economy class like he did while serving Anambra state, can he stop the President already used to flying expensive private jets, from acquiring more presidential jets for his party men, to fly to parties in Dubai?

    Even if Atiku has undergone a Pauline conversion as President Obasanjo is marketing, what will he deliver by way of restructuring, as he has promised? Since 1999, we had four presidents, Obasanjo, Yar’Adua, Jonathan and presently Buhari, and none of them showed any interestin the vexed issue of restructuring. Under Obasanjo and Jonathan, a frail attempt at restructuring came up towards the twilight of their regimes. Now some of the game masters are promoting the illusion that Atiku will restructure Nigeria, without giving us a blue print of what he has promised.

    It will be interesting to get Atiku to publish his article of faith on restructuring. Those routing that Atiku will restructure the country should get him to publish what he is offering and how he intends to achieve it. It should be unacceptable to make a general promise, and when the time to deliver comes, the game masters will engineer confusion as to who promised what. While I am convinced that we will not make progress as we are currently structured, there is absolutely nothing to suggest that an Atiku presidency would make any changes to that structure.

    So, I am hilarious each time I hear Nigerians excitedly shouting that the mission to rescue Nigeria has begun with the emergence of Atiku. They forget so soon, how they have been sold a different dummy at each election circle. In their frenzy they forget to extract any promise from the players or weigh how they have vainly been in waiting for better life, fornearly twenty years with little to show for all their exertions.

  • Buhari to religious leaders: Shun partisan politics or lose respect

    President Muhammadu Buhari on Saturday called on religious leaders in the country to eschew partisan politics in order not to lose their status and public respect.
    He made the call while speaking at the Interfaith Initiative for Peace Conference in Abuja.
    The President urged religious leaders to play the roles they had played in 2015 that saw a peaceful election.
    “I appeal to them to eschew partisan politics and appeal to their respective members to read the manifesto of each political party, discuss and pray for God’s guidance before casting their votes.
    “Religious leaders should not be seen to involve themselves in partisan politics or political controversies. Otherwise they risk losing their status and public respect.”
    He commended the Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar, the Sultan of Sokoto, the Catholic Archbishop of Abuja, John Cardinal Onaiyekan and the Co-Initiators of the Interfaith who he said have continued to work for peace and peaceful coexistence as faithful Muslims and Christians.
    He also expressed appreciation to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Reverend Justin Welby for accepting to be the keynote speaker at the Conference.
    He said “Primary Elections are over, it is my hope that all who feel aggrieved would put the stability of our country first before their political ambitions and accept the decision of their political parties or seek resolution through party reconciliation mechanisms or the law courts.
    “Very soon, political campaigns will commence leading to Elections in February next year. It is my hope and prayer that we will even perform better at the polling stations and see to a peaceful completion of the entire process without resorting to negative use of religion and ethnicity.”
    Continuing, he said, “On their part, traditional rulers are also requested to enlighten their subjects, encourage them to ask questions and seek clarifications before going out to vote.
    “As your President, I will request that you encourage your subjects to come out and exercise their voting rights as responsible citizens. To all of us politicians, I ask that we discharge our political responsibilities with integrity, bearing in mind that we will one day give an account to God, the Almighty.
    “I am proud to say that our country has moved on, the era of free money, lack of transparency and accountability is over! We deserve continuity; we deserve a better future for the coming generations. I sincerely hope 2019 will move us closer to these goals and so I look forward to a peaceful, fair and credible elections come 2019.”

  • Too much politics and little governance

    THIS season of elections has brought to my mind the issue of our preoccupation with politics and politicking while governance takes a second place in our priority in the affairs of our nation. The point I am raising is universal but the consequences may not be universal. It is assumed in some countries that the campaign for the next election begins the moment a new government is sworn in. In other words, campaign for elections is an unending occurrence and therefore there is no dichotomy between politics and governance.

    In the advanced western democracies, the bureaucracies or what is now negatively referred as the “deep state” are so well established as to put governance on auto-pilot. If there is no party, government the society will not collapse. In fact people would rather be saved from the politically corrosive and divisive nature of party government. When people call for political stability or continuity of policies, they are indirectly saying they do not want political disruption arising from party politics. In the remarkable and phenomenal economic development in China and Southeast Asia, one sees politics being kept in the rear while governance occasioning economic development gathers pace. Development in these countries can be divorced from politics. Singapore and Malaysia under Lee Kuan Yew, and Mahathir bin Muhammad respectively, present us example of continuous governance without the possibility of change of government following a regular election. The authoritarian governments in those countries present us a new paradigm of government different from the western democracies where party government change is constant and when it is not it is assumed that things are not right.

    In China the government has come out publicly to state that the current president of the country, Xi Jinping will remain in office indefinitely. Even in a country like Germany, the long stay in power of the Conservative coalition of the CDU/CSU since the time of Konrad Adenauer through Helmut Kohl and now Angela Merkel with occasional intervention of the SPD / FDP has provided political stability for Germany which has allowed it to face the task of governance that has made the post economic wonder (Wirtschaftswunder) in the country possible. In other words, governance and development can only be achieved in a stable polity and even in the case of Italy, governance based on strong and well established bureaucracy can go on irrespective of political instability. This would not have been possible without solid national institutions which continue to provide sinews to knit the state together even though imperceptibly. It is not every state that can be as lucky as some of the states in Europe.

    In developing countries where there is no deep state and well established state institutions and strong bureaucracy, political stability is necessary for economic development. Where too much time and resources are spent on politics, development is put in abeyance.

    In Nigeria the pre-independence governments at the regions and at the federal level in spite of the party politics of the time benefited from the stable colonial civil service in place then. But after independence when politics crept into the civil service, we began our slippery slope to instability. When the military took over particularly under President Ibrahim Babangida, the post of permanent secretaries was abolished and replaced with director generals who were political appointees and could come from either the civil service, the universities, business or the media. Thus began the road to permanent instability arising from the entanglement of governance and politics. Since 1999, there has been an attempt to go back to a regime where politics is separated from governance as much as possible.

    Lagos presents a unique laboratory for this study in politics and governance especially since 2007 when Bola Ahmed Tinubu ended his second term in office and was succeeded by Raji Fashola whom he chose to succeed him. During the eight years of Fashola, Tinubu provided political backing to the Fashola government while Fashola concentrated on governance for the good of the state. The exceptional performance of Fashola in Lagos has been ascribed to the fact that he did not have to worry about politics and politicking in the politically combustible environment of Lagos. The same scenario that existed in the case of Fashola apparently played itself out during the Akinwunmi Ambode’s gubernatorial tenure with Tinubu and the party leadership providing political backing for Ambode while he buried his head in the problem of governance.

    Whatever may have been achieved by separating running the government from day to day politicking, this separation of politics from governance has not been without its problems as has been found out after Fashola’s and Ambode’s first terms and the trouble the two of them have experienced in securing a second term in office. This probably means it is not a perfect system and that perhaps the man in the government house should be well grounded politically. It seems our people prefer that a politician should combine the attribute of a good governor with that of a good politician. In Kayode Fayemi’s first administration in Ekiti, everybody said he did very well and too well that he forgot about politics and politicking. Nobody could have said this about Awolowo who had tight control of both party and government. In Awolowo‘s time, politics was an elite preoccupation not like now when every Dick and Harry are in politics. We have to be careful in Nigeria that thugs and militants do not take over rulership of states as was the case in some parts of the Niger Delta during President Jonathan’s regime.

    I once asked a young cousin of mine in Ekiti what he was doing for a living and he did not think before he said “I am in politics”. I was shocked because I did not know politics has become a profession. When I got talking to this young man, he told me so many lies against the leader of the opposing party to his that I had to upbraid him that as an educated person, he should not be telling lies that don’t make sense. He retorted that lies naturally came to him and that the tactics was to lie against an opponent and then allow the opponent to struggle with explaining to the public and that the bigger the lie the more effective it is politically. This is what the politics of Nigeria has been reduced to. All that matters is being elected. There are no abiding party manifestos or ideology. There is no party discipline, loyalty or commitment. Politics is the politics of the belly or what Governor Fayose calls “stomach infrastructure” which apparently worked for him very well in the governance of Ekiti for eight years.

    Before our country can settle down, we will need to have strong institutions and not “big men” or robber barons manipulating the politics of the nation and the states. We must get to a point where the states can be on auto-pilot and politics will become routine and not a matter of life and death and not the easiest avenue to wealth and prosperity and that one can make contribution to national life and be recognized without being involved in politics.

     

  • ‘Politics not for wealthy people alone’

    A Chieftain of the African Democratic Congress (ADC) in Ondo state, Gbenga Fapohunda said politics should be for all and sundry and not for few influential people in the society.

    Besides, he said the 2019 general elections should allow Nigerians the opportunity to pick their choice.

    Fapohunda spoke with reporters at the weekend shortly after declaring his intention to run the House of Representatives race at the lower chamber for Idanre/Ifedore federal constituency.

    He said “there would be a change in the manner people practice politics in the country which has promoted corruption to a higher pedestal.

    According to him, “I am contesting under the platform of ADC as a new party,and not old party in a new bottle.ADC is populated by people of high integrity. It is a credible alternative political party in Nigeria that can move the nation forward”.

    He expressed optimism that he would win the House of Representatives because he would be there to serve and not to make money.

    Fapohunda however advised the electorate not to sell their conscience,stressing that they should stand by their votes in the forthcoming general elections.

    He urged the people of Ilara-mokin,his home town to support his aspiration for the upliftment of the constituency.

  • Kogi and the end of politics

    It is quite hard to reconcile the plague currently engulfing Kogi’s political space and the memory that the province is also the cradle of the great Sunday Awoniyi. Or the colossal Silas Daniyan.

    Before he drew his last breath in November 2007, the Aro of Mopa, once private secretary to immortal Ahmadu Bello, was an embodiment of political accommodation, temperance and intellectual profundity.

    On the other hand, though a political rival to Awoniyi, Daniyan was cut from no less durable fabric. Serving as private secretary to monumental Nnamdi Azikiwe about the time his kinsman served the Arewa folk hero, Daniyan never really ever lost sight of the larger critical duty – deploying politics as tool to advance the community.

    Though preferring to invest most of his energies in the corporate world and philanthropy in the later years, he nonetheless provided what could then be termed a healthy ideological counter-foil to the Awoniyi tendency in the quest to push the development frontiers in their native Kogi State, until his death in 2011.

    But, apparently, harmony and balance prevail in the household only to the point when the political bastard has not yet come of age.

    Viewing the ongoing show of shame starring infantile Yahaya Bello and delinquent Dino Melaye, both Awoniyi and Daniyan must be turning in great discomfort in their graves indeed. The rich political heritage bequeathed by the two referenced Kogi patriarchs is now under grave assault.

    To say Kogi has been unraveling in the past few months will, therefore, be an understatement. A partnership forged between Governor Bello and Dino in sheer opportunism and perfidy has, alas, broken down irredeemably, exposing politics in its hideous form, the character flaw of man at its basest.

    With little or no inhibition, the parvenu from Ebiraland has, for instance, continued to demonstrate the grave danger a society faces when a small mind – an intellectual midget – finds himself in custody of the gubernatorial staff.

    Allowing himself to be hailed publicly as “White Lion” by barefoot sycophants, it is however clear only the metaphor of a rodent befits Bello’s ways. His ingrained infantilism was very much in evidence in a little drama at the Government House in March.

    Fresh from his habitual peregrination to Abuja, he announced the sack of the state cabinet and 21 local council administrators.

    But the ink with which the statement was written had barely dried when he had another brainwave. In less than an hour, he reversed himself.

    Maybe, that should be expected. The young man found himself in power only by the grace of perhaps the darkest political sorcery in recent memory. He ran away with the trophy earned by someone else who had suddenly dropped dead on the battlefield after slaying the enemy. The same way Dino’s victory in the Kogi West senatorial polls of 2015 was tainted by allegations of electoral heist.

    Obviously, the robe is oversize and the shoes too big for Bello’s pygmy feet ever since.

    Decked in one of his trademark gaudy apparels, this was how then groveling Master of Ceremonies Dino once introduced the governor at the Lokoja stadium: “The Almighty God voted Yahaya Bello!… May I also have the honour of introducing the youngest governor of the Federal Republic of Nigeria!!…intellectually mobile and sagacious!!!… indomitable and indefatigable!!!!… powerful and enterprising!!!!!… young but married!!!!!!… join your hands together (sic) for Yahaya Bello!!!!!!!”

    Predictably, disagreement over political spoils soon set them apart.

    Today, were a case to be made against entrusting leadership position to youthful players in contemporary Nigeria, Bello and Dino would undoubtedly furnish a robust exhibit. In the absence of ideas, filth has been elevated as the sole driver of government policies and programmes in Kogi.

    Nothing perhaps illustrates this shared seething psychosis by the duo more graphically than the very circumstances they both suffered physical handicap lately. It was not until tongues started wagging following Bello’s appearance on crutches for a crucial party meeting in Aso Rock with a leg cast in POP that his publicists admitted that it was all caused by a minor domestic incident.

    But unofficial accounts provided a clearer picture. Actually, the usually easily excitable governor was said to have lost his balance in a failed stunt after jumping off a moving bullet-proof SUV while throwing Naira notes at a crowd hailing him.

    Precisely the same story we heard after the Kogi senator was stretchered into the Intensive Care Unit of an Abuja hospital.

    In what clearly belittles the exalted office he occupies, Dino had also reportedly jumped off a moving vehicle in an escape bid from police custody. This followed an earlier self-diminishing admission on what had transpired at the Abuja airport when the Immigration barricaded his way.

    He probably thought it cool to boast on Tweeter that, “I snatched my passport back after the Immigration snatched it from me.” But it did not seem to occur to the supposed distinguished senator that only cheap thugs act that way.

    The viral video of a senator sitting on bare asphalt of Abuja highway apparently battling to recover his breath after that suicidal jump was no less pathetic. The image of a subdued overweight adult bellowing “I can kill myself!” in that clip certainly contrasts the picture of a fearless superman Dino had tried to build for myself through relentless homemade musical videos poured into the social media in the past eighteen months.

    As for Bello, not done with the outlawry of double-registration for voter’s card, farting loudly at the communal feast and auctioning inherited state assets to pay debts and fund today’s ostentation, his political tomfoolery seems further exposed by the outcome of the recall verification exercise conducted last weekend by INEC.

    How pathetic that the governor and his fixers could not summon the rigor to finish what they started zealously with state might last year. Having dissipated much energy and resources in mobilizing locals to  append their signatures to the originating petition, Bello’s fumbling enablers apparently forgot that the verification exercise was even more critical.

    Not only was the turnout abysmally poor, of the 39,285 signatures eventually verified, only a miserly 18,762 were found to be genuine. Yet, a whopping 188,500 were earlier conjured to support the recall petition filed against Dino last year.

    In most locations last weekend, a grotesque pattern emerged. Signatures of constituents were either shabbily forged or the dead mindlessly impersonated in the farce.

    The dire implication of the foregoing is that the 5 percent turnout is a far cry from the 50 percent + 1 constitutionally required to set the stage for a referendum to seal Dino’s fate.The Kogi West senatorial district has a voting population of 351,140.

    Not surprising, comical Dino has seized the result as another platform to gloat, summing it a blanket endorsement of his performance at the Senate chamber, if not solidarity with him in his present ordeal.

    It is not only Bello’s political nudity thus invariably exposed; no less culpable is the INEC. That the voter’s registers displayed across Kogi West senatorial district on the verification day were mostly riddled with multiple name entries and forged signatures as widely reported by the media surely says a lot about the corporate integrity of the umpire. Otherwise, one would have thought such impurities would have been sorted administratively before INEC announced voting.

    As for Dino, if nothing at all, no one can deny him credits for creativity. Shortly after falling out with the governor in 2016, that ingenuity supervened. He had no difficulty in adapting a Yoruba folk song, “Ajeku Iya Nio Je…”. It translates roughly as “Woe betide an inferior who challenges his superior to a battle”.

    The skit was still topping the national chart of political mischief when Dino followed up with another blockbuster which literally prophesied that his political enemy in Lokoja was jail-bound at the expiration of his current gubernatorial mandate.

    But with the dramatic turn of events in Abuja last week, the maverick senator would now seem cast in a role reversal of sorts. For his current travails only mirror the unsavory ending he himself had predicted for Bello in the melange of caustic songs.

    One, even though the Kogi police have cited gun-running as the charge against Dino, not a few however believe his real trouble started the moment he challenged the Kogi Governor to a public duel.

    Meanwhile, while the poor turnout at the verification exercise for the recall process last weekend may have put paid to attempt by those bent on yanking him off the Senate chamber, it will however be premature to assume the sword of Damocles has thus vanished.

    Now, with the gravity of the charges preferred against him, Melaye’s supporters will indeed have to intensify their prayers, lest he be the first to don prison’s uniform long before the foe derided in his song.

    But by and large, the cruel joke is on Kogi State.

     

  • Kwara CP: I am not here for politics

    Kwara State Commissioner of Police Bolaji Fafowora has said he is not in the state to prosecute any political agenda in 2019.

    Fafowora, who addressed reporters in Ilorin yesterday, said his posting was routine, but only coincided with the election period.

    The police chief, who said he might be redeployed before or during the election, assured the people that the police would remain diligent in keeping law and order throughout them.

    According to him, the police would not shy away from its responsibilities but handle every situation professionally.

  • The demands of change

    This is a season when politics is almost getting overdrive; and any comment on life’s happenings at this time may be given political colouration. But no matter.

    I am an avid reader of the Bible because it is, to any sane mind, the most complete book of knowledge and philosophy. It is recorded in one chapter of the Holy Book that God, the Unquestionable One that created heaven and earth, surveyed His environment and lamented on how bad and evil His human creations are; the reason why God, in Genesis Chapter 6 verses 5 and 6, declared with undisguised disgust, after seeing how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of man’s heart was only evil all the time, that His heart was filled with pain, and He grieved so badly.

    Let it be made clear that God did not admit He made a mistake in His earlier statement that all that He created was beautiful but was instead expressing sorrow for what people had done to themselves, as a parent would over a rebellious child. God felt sorry that “the people chose sin and death instead of a relationship with Him.”

    According to an explanatory note in my own copy of the Bible, “The people’s sin grieved God. Our sins break God’s heart as much as sin did in Noah’s day; but Noah pleased God, although he was far from being perfect.”

    We can follow Noah’s example and find “favour in the eyes of the Lord” in spite of the sin that surround us.

    It wasn’t that Noah never sinned (one such sin was recorded in Gen: 9-20) but he wholeheartedly loved and obeyed God. “For a lifetime he walked step by step in faith as a living example to his generation.”

    Like him, we live in a world filled with evil but are we influencing others or being influenced by them?

    Those of us thrust in leadership position whether in politics, the church or mosque or aspiring to leadership positions anywhere, must bear certain fundamental facts in mind:

    1. The greater your responsibility, the less liberty and freedom you have;
    2. What you stand for comes out in moments of conflicts. When people want to undermine your effort, there’s no extent they can’t go; and you better be prepared for that, as it is your character that will be put to test;
    3. When issues crop up, people will want you to take sides but always remember that the side you must take is God’s side where you are bound to find people who walk in faith with God and do his bidding;
    4. Learn not to take sadistic pleasure in causing division, as splits anywhere impacts on people hitherto connected in love and unity.

    With all these in mind, any leader or an aspiring one should try and find out who he is, whether he’s the one who’s easily provoked or he is the one who gravitates towards controversy.

    When society talks of change, we must know what and what are involved. Take-off point is that no one likes change; the very reason why change, in any society, is often met with resistance. Desirable as change is – ostensibly from bad to good – if we wait until everyone sees the need for change, it will NEVER happen. And this is where acknowledged change agents deserve our eternal gratitude. You can’t be serious in discussing a vital issue like this without referring to world leaders like Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Nelson Mandela of South Africa, our own Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Sir Ahmad Bello, General Murtala Mohammed of Nigeria, all of blessed memory and current leaders like Muhammad Buhari for the legacy of change they made happen in their time.

    Change for improvement is always a painful process. If you don’t make efforts to change and we are used to routine, change will be impossible to make, as we are currently experiencing in our polity and society at large. But those who want to write their names in gold must make up their minds to face stiff resistance, if we must have meaningful change.

    It goes beyond timidity because hesitation to hurt people is the only reason that impedes the process of change. Truth is that something dies when a change happens. Such “something” was once vibrant and useful. But when its lustre reduces, like a motor car or a TV set, change becomes inevitable. When change is necessary, something has to give way but the problem is that people find it difficult, after having gotten used to a certain possession or position from which they do not want amendment. Those are the few who covet the preservation of privilege and status quo.

    In times like this, may we as a people be imbibed with the spirit that will make us embrace and sustain the change this season demands. It just cannot be otherwise.

     

     

    Osun a dara…

    This time next week, the people of Osun State will head for the polls to elect a new governor to take over the reins of power from Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola in that agrarian state.

    On the economic index table, Osun competes well, not from the top, but from the bottom; the excuse previous governors of the state had lapped on to explain much of their little or non-achievements while their tenures lasted.

    I want to believe that Rauf Aregbesola did his homework well before he ventured to govern the state. Otherwise, he could not, with the lean resources available to that state, achieve the much he did in his eight years in the saddle. His education programme, embodied in his massive infrastructural renewal and feeding programme, as well as the massive road construction all over, belied the lean purse of the state.

    If he could not complete all of these programmes before his time is up, it wouldn’t be for lack of trying but because a multiplicity of factors conspired to limit his can-do daring. But the small man with lion heart has got his place assured in history as the one who moved Oshogbo, the state capital, from a sleepy rural town to a modern urban city.

    If Gboyega Isiaka Oyetola pulls it off and wins this governorship election, he’s most likely going to carry on with his principal’s programme. But the contest promises to be tough and exciting from start to finish.

    Senator Ademola Adeleke, who’s fast earning a reputation for upsetting the applecart with his emergence both as senator and the PDP governorship nomination, cannot be dismissed with a wave of the hand, neither can Fatai Akinbade, Senator Iyiola Omisore and Moshood Adeoti. These foursome are as formidable as they come, but whether the power of incumbency is strong enough to stop them in their tracks waits to be seen.

    Whatever the outcome, it is clear as crystal that outgoing governor Rauf Aregbesola has created a template of performance below which his successor cannot afford to fall; the reason why I’m convinced to go with the catch-word “Osun a dara”.