The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Sam Omatseye

  • Omatseye’s Obito

    A New York Times’ writer some days back said “drama is about people behaving badly”. Sam Omatseye’s latest drama Obito has its dose of people behaving badly. They call white black and want us to see white as black.  And they blame it on tradition and culture.

    In this offering, Omatseye resurrects a number of ill-behaved people from his imaginative graveyard. They hide under the king’s son’s supposed graduation ceremony to cover their lies.

    Ordinarily, the bone of contention looks simple: a king dies. But for these guys, it becomes complicated and confusing. Chiefs devise means to keep the truth in detention.

    We meet interesting characters, such as Chief Nikoro, Toritse and Alero, the reporter, whose quest for truth helps shine light on what many will love to remain dark.

    The kick-off point is Chief Nikoro’s tastefully furnished sitting room, where he is reading a newspaper. What confronts him on a page of the newspaper leads to this remark: “Dead yesterday, alive today. What tomorrow? This same newspaper proclaimed the king dead yesterday. Today it says the king lives. Our king has traversed breath and death like day and night. But like day and night, the news and chiefs cannot inhabit the same time. Yet this is a battle without an olive branch. Yesterday has never defeated today, neither has today wreathed its mother in a breathless mausoleum. Yet today threatens to betray yesterday?”

    He is still lamenting when his son Toritse comes into the sitting room. He flings the newspaper and hugs his son. He is excited about the fact that his son comes first in school.

    Chief Nikoro pronounces proudly: “It’s not for nothing that I call you my precious and precocious. You beat everybody in the school?”

    An assignment given to Toritse in school by a teacher who perhaps just wants to know the truth through his informed father sees father and son dribbling each other over the dead king’s matter. Toritse asks: “Father, is it true?”

    Chief Nikoro refuses to be drawn into confirming the truth. He fumes: “What sacrilegious tongue rolls in your head? Don’t talk like that! You don’t know who is listening.”

    Toristse probes on: “But father, is he –’’, but Chief Nikoro will not allow him conclude the statement.

    “Now, father, tell me! Is he really dead?” the boy repeats after a while.

    Chief Nikoro replies: “Stubborn boy. I have not seen him.”  He adds after further probe: “Look son, as we say, the king has travelled.”

    Toritse will have none of that “I know. He died in Germany. So, he travelled there? The newspapers were right today?”

    Chief Nikoro, a traditional aide of the monarch whose status is the source of the controversy, faults his son: “The newspapers? Their reports read like a satire. Yesterday, they reported that he was dead. This morning, they are saying he is not dead because the chiefs say so, and the hospital cannot issue an official statement from Germany. None of the newspaper reporters saw the king breathe his last. The king has gone to the bush. He has travelled to the ambience of leaves and boughs. That is the official line.”

    An interesting conversation trails Chief Nikoro’s claim when his son attempts to pick holes in it.

    Toritse says: “But dead men don’t talk.”

    Chief Nikoro answers: “The king is not a man. He is of a different breed. He is like a deity.”

    “Deity? Do deities have cell phone too?” Toritse asks.

    Chief Nikoro: “Go ask that teacher who put you up to all this!”

    In the midst of the argument, a reporter walks in. Her mission: the king’s status. Chief Nikoro replies her greeting with: “What is good about what you reported in the newspaper?”

    “We are slaves of facts as journalists. But sir, why are you dressed in black?” says the reporter fishing out her recorder.

    Reporter adds: “Tell me, chief, is black not the colour of mourning?”

    Chief Nikoro’s quest to hide the truth makes him seize the reporter’s recorder.

    “I am sad but not mourning. I am only waiting for you reporters to mourn the corpse of your lies when the truth is eventually revealed,” he declares.

    The reporter’s observations that carpenters are carving coffin and the minstrels clearing their throats and casting funeral notes on their songs further infuriate Chief Nikoro, who seeks answer to the reporter’s use of the word Obito.

    “It is short for Obituary. But Obito, for the youths, means a funeral feast. It’s a big deal,” she explains.

    Chief Nikoro soon tries to scare off the reporter: “Iriri masquerade are parading tonight, and curfew begins in a few hours from now. As a woman, you can be beheaded if you are out and about on such a night.”

    When he sees that his tricks are not working, he whispers to the reporter: “I know I have been nasty to you, but I know we can do this for each other. I apologise for my rudeness with your recorder.”

    The reporter says: “Accepted, sir. I’d better go. I have to interview others before the curfew kicks in. I don’t want to be the story in my newspaper tomorrow. “The Herald’s reporter beheaded” would not be a good headline.”

    One very interesting thing about this 96-page drama is laid out in the prologue where Nikoro is told by a native doctor never to lie to his son as a way of atoning for the death of a son he had outside wedlock. As a traditional chief, he is under oath not to discuss the king’s death.

    “If things get complicated, show him the way to the truth,” the native doctor instructs.

    Chief Nikoro resorts to technology to show his son the way. He buys him a phone with camera, takes him to the palace and allows him access to areas where he can get vital information that will help him do his assignment. Ofcourse without telling him why he was doing it.

    Tortise, who is determined to find the truth and pass his assignment, teams up with Alero, the reporter. It even turns out Chief Nikoro stylishly takes defining pictures, which confirm the king’s death and swaps his son’s phone with his so that the boy can know the truth about King Egbe.

    With Obito, Omatseye’s mastery of language is on display. My most favourite line in the book is “the truth of culture and tradition”. I laughed out loud when I read this line in my car Tuesday night. This is what Donald Truth will describe as alternative truth. There are many other fine expressions that will see an average reader turning the pages until the end where the reporter returns to Lagos after completing her task of establishing that the king is truly dead and not on any imaginary trip.

    I also like the blend of prose and poetry in the dialogues. The characters are also well-developed. Chief Nikoro, Toritse and Alero loom large and are bound to be the stars when the play gets staged.

    This is another great outing from the author of My Name is Okoro, Crocodile Girl, Tribe and Prejudice, among others.

    This drama speaks truth to culture and tradition unwilling to bow to modernity and civilisation, but threatened by technology. It sure will be worth your time.

  • Technical varsity to run disruptive model

    Technical varsity to run disruptive model

    When pioneer students of the Technical varsity, founded by the Oyo State government, resume next month, they will find they need more than reading their books to make good grades.
    Vice-Chancellor of the University, Prof Ayobami Salami, said their grades would be determined by the right balance of scores they get in the theoretical and practical aspects of their courses.
    Salami spoke when he led a team from the university to the headquarters of The Nation in Lagos on Thursday, where he was received by the Editorial Board Chairman, Mr Sam Omatseye, and other senior editorial board members.
    The former Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academics) of the Obafemi Awolowo University ( OAU ), Ile-Ife, said courses would be graded on a 60:40 ratio – with theory attracting 60 per cent of score and practical 30 per cent.
    He said students would be taught by both academics and experts on the field (including artisans). While lecturers teach and grade the theoretical aspects, experts with hands-on experience in the field – regardless of their educational qualifications – would teach and grade the practical aspect of the courses.
    Salami said with this system, the university hopes to groom students thoroughly conversant with their subject areas who can fit seamlessly into technical roles required by their programmes of study.
    He said: “If you score 55/60 in theory and score 15/40 in skill that will be 70 which will give you an A in any university but a failure in Technical University because it has not been balanced.  Whether you have A, B, C or D is not a matter of the total mark you scored but the distribution.  So you can score 60 per cent and score B and someone can score 80 per cent and score C depending on the balance of the skill and the theory. That is the way we want to go.  So that by the time the graduate comes out of our university, he is not loaded with the theoretical concepts and principles.  He has the skill to back up the certificate.”
    However that is just one area the university plans to be different from others.
    The Vice-Chancellor said all students of the institution are expected to graduate bilingual as well as get training in two vocations.
    Surrounded by 13 Francophone out of the 18 countries that make up the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Salami said Nigerians have been losing out on international jobs because many professionals cannot speak French.  He said Technical University graduates would be able to claim these juicy international appointments after undergoing the institution’s Language programme, which would include two immersion sessions at the French Language Village in their first two years of study.
    Regarding vocational training, Salami said by their third year, each student would have been certified experts in two vocations with which they could start their own businesses.
    He said the best ideas would also learn to write proposals and get funding to run
    Courses being run by the university which sits on 200 hectares of land along the Ibadan-Lagos expressway are dictated by the needs of the Nigerian economy.  Salami assured that the institution’s aim to remain on the cutting edge of teaching and learning necesitates that its curriculum is designed in collaboration with industry experts, who he said would also be involved in its implementation.
    He said this was a departure from the norm in conventional universities where academics sat to design courses based on what they think society needs.
    When asked about the sustainability of the institution beyond the present political dispensation, Salami said the institution would not depend on the Oyo State government for funding in perpetuity and would charge competitive fees.
    He said: “Oyo State government is starting this university – mid-wifing it – let me say serving as a facilitator.  It is not going to be funding it in the long run.  So there is an exit plan. The plan is that government will midwife it – for now they are paying for everything – but after a while there is a systematic programme that maybe 20 per cent this year; I am just talking hypothetically – from 100-60-20-30 to zero. Overtime, the university will be paying for its own staff while the government will be responsible for just infrastructure.
    “The model is actually a PPP model.  So, let me say that we are going to charge like private universities.  It is government university but with a private sector orientation.  However, in order not to shut out children of the poor, there must be safety nets.  We have created a scholarship basket for which we are approaching government at all levels, corporate organizations, foundations, philanthropists to contribute.”
  • Learn about Nigerian civil war, Omatseye urges youths

    Learn about Nigerian civil war, Omatseye urges youths

    Nigerian youths have been urged to learn the history of the country, especially the circumstances surrounding the Nigerian civil war which took from 1967 to 1970. This was at the reading of ‘My Name Is Okoro’ a new novel by journalist and public commentator, Sam Omatseye at the University of Lagos, on Thursday.

    Using the name ‘Okoro’ which is answered by the Igbo, Urhobos and Binis in Nigeria, Omatseye highlights travails of minorities caught up in the battle between the Biafran and Nigerian troops.

    But citing the trends of recent books such as There Was A Country by Chinua Achebe, Roses and Bullets by Professor Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo and Half Of A Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Adichie amongst others, a student asked why nearly 50 years after, Nigerian writers still focused on the Nigerian civil war.

    Responding, Omatseye, a fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters and the Chairman editorial board of The Nation newspaper said: “Today, we’re talking about restructuring. The whole issue of the civil war was based on the idea of restructuring. Today, we have IPOB, today, we have MASSOB, today, we have Niger Delta Avengers. It shows that the issues of the civil war have not been resolved.

    “In the United States, a book comes out every year.  An industry has been created around the United States civil war that every year, books come out on the US civil war, even after 150 years of the end of the year. So, that is how crucial that story is to them.”

    According to the author who studied History at the University of Ife said he was motivated to write the novel because a lot of the Nigeria/Biafra battle took place outside Igboland, yet many literatures have managed to obliterate the minority.

    “There is still that gap in the narrative of the civil war. We have not really talked much about it,” he said.

    Reviewing the novel, Dr Chris Anyokwu of the department of English, University of Lagos, said: “If there is any new dimension My Name Is Okoro adds to the Nigeria/Biafra war novel tradition, it is that it is not only the Ndigbo that suffered the pogrom but minorities did as well.”

    A highpoint of the reading was when Mr Olawale Edun, chairman of Vintage Press, publishers of The Nation newspaper, bought the novel for every student present, to which he got a wild cheer.

    “The greatness that I am here to support is the greatness of the students,” Edun said.

    The reading, the second in the series by the department of English where it hosts writers, had in attendance students as well as members of the academic community which included the university deputy vice-chancellor Professor Duro Oni, the dean Faculty of Arts, Professor Muyiwa Falaiye, the head of department of English, Professor Hope Eghagha and former heads of the department of English, Professor Karen King-Aribisala and Professor Adeyemi Daramola.

    “We believe that having writers here to share cultural exchanges with our students at the faculty would encourage the so much talked about town and gown relations,” said Eghagha.

    “Creative writing as we know is one of the strongest means of English studies and here at the department of English, we’re trying to reinvent that.”

    Omatseye is also author of the poetry books; Dear Baby Ramatu, Lion Wind and Other Poems, Mandela’s Bones and Other Poems and the novel, Crocodile Girl. He writes a feisty column, In Touch, on the backpage of The Nation newspaper every Monday, and some of the columns have been published in two collections – In Touch: Journalism as National Narrative and A Chronicle Foretold

  • Unilag hosts Sam Omatseye for book reading

    The department of English, University of Lagos (UNILAG),  will be hosting the reading of Sam Omatseye’s books on Thursday, 8th September 2016. Although emphasis will be on his latest  prosework, ‘My name is Okoro,’ Omatseye is expected to throw more light on reasons for the book as well as a glimpse into the place of the minority in the Nigerian civil war  and more. The event is for 10am at the department.

  • To catch a thief

    To catch a thief

    The law embraces the apparent thief. The thief catcher, however, has to answer to the law. That is a paradox with a Nigerian DNA.

    So we saw Sambo Dasuki, bright-eyed but subdued, in his dark-hued danshiki walk voicelessly out of the court, flanked by lawyers and associates. We wonder what roils inside his billion-dollar soul. He has said little. He has neither denied the flurry of statements from so-called miscreants who famously crackled out of his office with choice dollars. Neither has he defended himself.

    Like a ram on sacrifice day, his face only reflects a muted melancholy. In dazed stupor, the ram keeps mum before the ominous eyes of butchers, the ferocious glitter of knives, the bowl awaiting its entrails and offal, the platform on which its neck will squish under the descending blade, the innocent giggle of children drooling for a happy meal.

    Of course, a small dug hole that indicates that burial is not an option except for the waste and blood that will rush out of the buxom flesh when the sullen ceremony of cutting and slashing is over.

    All of the butchery represents the people, who have already made judgments on Dasuki. But that is the majority opinion, but not the majority opinion of the law. Two majorities? By law, majority opinion is the opinion of a few people on the bench. It reflects the superciliousness of lawyers and judges that they equate their narrow standpoint with the viewpoint of all of us.

    President Muhammadu Buhari must be privately moaning this. He believes the guys stole. They broke the law. They farted on our holy of holies. They danced on the grave of our fighting men. They adorned themselves for that. Everybody knows it is wrong. So, why are they surprised when they are not allowed on the streets, but away in outer darkness, the key thrown away somewhere in the marshes of Bayelsa?

    With his septuagenarian laugh and martial eyeballs, Buhari is still not a temperament for 2016. He is a romantic of the 1980’s. In the presidential chat, the ramrod man of still winsome mien sparked fire in the eye when he reminded the questioners that somebody took N40 billion from the Central Bank, that the IDPs are groaning, that a man call El Zakzaky with his rambunctious men defied the army, and a good government is not supposed to sit idle and watch impunity like a Nollywood show.

    A deep chasm lay between the questioners and the former general. For him, it was a case of good versus evil. That made him into a sort of messianic force. The others thought good began with law and you could not be right with mere appeal to might like Greek philosopher Meno. If they invoked law, Buhari echoed law and order.

    Yet those who want law believe also that the good ought to be punished. The irony is that the law, as Thoreau famously said, never made anyone a whit more just. So, there. Kanu, by common consent, railed against the law. The Shiites have no right to deny anyone the right to move. Those who stole our money must account.

    But this is a democracy, and one of the lies of democracy is that majority always wins. This is one of those test cases of majority in a coma. Buhari’s war on corruption is a noble cause. But by defying the courts, it is a case of impunity chasing impunity. Two wrongs, where is the right?

    The real problem is that the war against corruption is not a movement. For now, it is still Buhari’s war. He is cheered, but from afar. It is a war of one for all, but the one is lonely. In a democracy, a sense of consensus can help drive the battle. It happens in what political scientists and sociologists call corporatism.

    That implies that all institutions instinctively work as one to pursue a collective interest. Liberal thinkers suspect such ideas because they bear the seed of tyranny. John Stuart Mill in his famous book, On Liberty, calls it the “Tyranny of the majority,” but Marxists wear it as an epaulette of honour.

    It has happened many times where a shared value or set of values is enshrined into the spirit of the law. But Buhari lacks the charisma, the strategy and even energy of moral suasion to spark such firelight of fervour across the land. If he had it, he would not have to disobey the judges.

    The bench would understand that thieves and miscreants have no place on the streets and they will find the law to keep them under lock and key. Gani Fawehinmi once told me in his chambers that, “if there is a case between a rich man and a poor man, I will find the law for the poor man.” It was a statement of values.

    The United States had a movement in the Progressives Era at the turn of the 20th century. With the big corporations running rampant with men like Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, etc, a spirit bubbled in the country to checkmate the acquisitive excesses of capitalism. Journalists, courts, businessmen, churches and a cadre of politicians were caught in this redemptive aura. The most famous member was Theodore Roosevelt who became president, one of their best ever. The movement succeeded.

    The danger is the possibility of a slide into dictatorship. Mussolini, Franco, etc exploited it. They did not triumph. French philosopher Rousseau designated it as “collective will” or “general will.” Mills objected and craved individual sovereignty.

    But both men, while denying it, agree that unfettered individuality and state-backed totalitarian control will destroy society. As Machiavelli – no lover of freedom – noted, “where everyone is free, no one is free.” French philosopher Michel Foucault noted test cases in his book, Madness and Civilisation, and concluded that inside freedom creeps subtle malignancies of tyranny.

    Buhari will have to look for the laws to help him. Or exercise patience. The civil society and media also need to isolate such judges as moral pariahs. They may know the law. But they might not know justice. Law is meaningless without justice. The individual is important. We cannot pursue the law without a Dasuki, or a Kanu or an El-Zakzaky knowing that the law took its full course.

    That is the essence of liberalism and the strength of democracy. Sophocles’ The ban play, Antigone, pursued the subject of individual right and state right. There was a famous line that “under the cover of darkness” the people support Antigone against the king. Zulu Sofola’s Wedlock of the Gods pursues the conflict of the individual and collective will.

    In his column, my former teacher Biodun Jeyifo (Happy 70th Birthday, by the way) reflected on a law now in the cooler to fast-track corruption cases, a thing Femi Falana has also harped upon. It is the measure of Buhari’s advisers that the legal framework for this battle was not put in place before launching the warfare.

    Not even the emotional framework is ready. Part of the problem is that Buhari is part soldier, part democrat, but the soldier has failed to part ways with the past. It’s a schizophrenic tension. He can learn from Churchill, De Gaulle, Eisenhower, etc who sloughed off their martial coats.

    If, for instance, Buhari steps down today, there is not a structure, not even a whiff of it, to point to the debris of his legacy. Not yet. He can start now.

     

  • Nnewi Holocaust

    Nnewi Holocaust

    I wonder what Chinua Achebe would say if he were alive to see the holocaust at Nnewi last Christmas season. Not much of a poet, Achebe mused on the bitter paradox of tragedy at Christmas in his poem, Christmas in Biafra.

    Bedevilled by adjectives, Achebe’s poem made its point in irony. God and disaster. Solemnity and profanity. Festivity and fragility. Tears to the dearest. That was Biafra in which a child pruned to bare bones could not find the strength to hail Mary. No one could extract native joy from bombs.

    Fast forward, December 2015. A different kind of unkindness. Chicason, a company whose services routinely warmed the homes and bellies of its customers, met tragedy. The victims might have visualised many scenarios at Christmas: cookouts, parties, family reunions, laughter, jokes, music, dances, frothy moments of alcohol, swagger. Especially in the Southeast where the Christmas season lights up every village and hamlet into a carnival.

    Yet, many marked their Christmas season like the woman who had sent a housemaid to get some gas. The maid was recruited only three months earlier. The boss was not sure where she was. She only knew she had lost the poor girl and wondered what she was going to tell her parents. At the Christmas party, she would not be there. Her seat vacant, staring and ominous. It would be the story for all those who either died or were hospitalised. Their seats were empty, their presences only imagined. It was inevitably an absurd moment. It calls to mind the absurd play titled ‘The Chairs’ by Romanian-French playwright Eugene Ionesco. An old couple receive invisible guests at their homes, and they all are seated in chairs expecting an orator to address them. The audience does not see them. Only the hosts. That is how the relatives will mark both Christmas season and New Year.

    The problem, as Ionesco’s play shows, is that imagination will not bring the guests alive.  No one could wish them on their seat in flesh, fork in hand, plates of rice and chicken in front of them. We cannot see the victims of the Nnewi disaster. They have retreated into memory. All kinds of stories were invented to fill the void, just as in Ionesco’s play. For what we cannot see or explain, we invent fillers. Some said the Chicason group had fallen victim of its sacrilegious prosperity. It had expanded into the province of the goddess of the Mimili Ele River. The goddess in its fury had slithered into the gas plant and fiddled it into a leak. A spark ensued. Death, disaster. This was a big agony. But the Chenobyl disaster in the 1980’s where a nuclear plant leak obliterated whole Soviet communities warns us that gas can be man’s great enemy. If you read Svetlana Alexievich, the Nobel Prize-winning journalist’s account of that incident in her book, Voices From Chenobyl, we should never take care for granted.

    Others said a prayer session had happened earlier and a pastor had forewarned of a disaster. So, are the gods to blame, a la Ola Rotimi? We give prophesies flesh after the facts. When they don’t happen, we give ourselves credit. The prophets do no wrong.

    No one was able to say what Chicason did to offend the gods or the Lord of Christmas. It offended neither law nor man, but fire came in its fury. No one wondered why a big commercial hub like Nnewi could thrive without a major fire station.

    Few could tell us how, in the whole of Anambra State, only one major fire station thrives. Few have lamented that fire is a special corollary of development. Not a place like Nnewi should be allowed a second without the full gear to fight one of humanity’s major foes. Nnewi has a variety of businesses from cars to electronics to food to pharmaceutical. It is seen as an epicentre of the Igbo inventiveness. Many turn profits out of bonfires, whether it is the Chicason company, or the cell phone makers, or car battery firms. A fire begins with a spark. The spark in this case comes from neglect, the failure to provide the infrastructure of safety. As Robert Herrick notes, “A spark neglected makes a mighty fire.”

    The reports had it that the fire department came all the way from Awka, Anambra State capital. It took about two hours to arrive at the scene of the holocaust. Too late. The pictures are scary. Fumes darken the air. In brilliant omens, fire burns structures while human bones pop and flesh singes. Many scurry away in fright. Bodies fall and the bush, as in the war that lasted 30 months in the 1960’s, become refuge.

    Is this tragedy a story of complacency? As one of the city dwellers said, if the disaster happens today, Anambra State is still not ready. It is like the apocalypse. Earth residents know it is coming. They cannot prepare. They cannot pray. They cannot run away. They can only develop stoic reserves and hedge themselves with fatalistic resolves. The day comes and disaster will happen. As Thomas Hardy wrote in his novel, Tess of the Durbervilles, ”The people down in those retreats will not stop saying in their fatalistic way: It was to be. There lay the pity of it all.” That is what Nnewi, Anambra, is subjected to. That tragically is the story of Nigeria.

    They can learn from Lagos, where every local government hums with state-of-the-art fire equipment. In spite of the plethora of fire incidents in Nigeria’s largest city, fire hoses spout water and the men respond in good time. That does not mean tragedies cannot happen. Fire does not wait for anyone. Like water, it is a good servant. But to quote a line from the Aesop Fables, it’s a “bad master.” Corporate firms are now asking the Lagos State government to help them in establishing fire-fighting systems.

    When fire of this sort happens, individual companies anywhere have inadequate facility to fight it. That is why anywhere in the world, fire stations are nearby. In the United States, every county has one. When it is a mega fire like the Nnewi case, they get help from other counties. That can happen in Lagos. But in a place like Anambra State, where one station can only limp, the situation calls for urgent attention.

    [news_box style=”2″ display=”category” link_target=”_blank” category=”24″ orderby=”popular” count=”8″ show_more=”on”]

  • FloodGate!

    FloodGate!

    While the controversy festers over Sambo Dasuki and our so-called security money, I ponder the lives of Boko Haram victims. Those who lost limbs. Those who lost sons and daughters. Families hived and harried. The raided and raped. In the different camps of the internally displaced persons, or IDPs, hordes huddle in misery.

    Last week, a news report had it that the IDPs are fertility clinics running rampant. Babies are bouncing out of wombs like ants out of hill. It may seem good news. Little miracles in the midst of misery. But it is the fruit of boredom, of lassitude and solitude.

    It is also the lassitude of latitude, the fecund indolence of freedom. As novelist Scott F. Fitzgerald wrote: “The rich get richer, the poor get children.” It is even more tragic when the rich are fattening at the expense of the poor.

    That’s DasukiGate. As I noted elsewhere, it is not DasukiGate, it is a floodgate. The roar and rush of the scandal are not discriminating. It carries the cargoes of big men. Big men in media, in politics, in business. It moves with a democratic quality of ferocity, treating no one with respect whether the arm of a tycoon or the belly of a former governor.

    But they were stealing and storing our resources while individuals toiled and died. While on a daily basis, we lamented Boko Haram scorch earth after earth. Fathers fell. Sons either died or joined them. Daughters fell prey to their distorted vision of the marital bed. If, that is, they did not lose their virginal pride instantly. The Chibok girls, the other schools turned into vast slaughter slabs from stabbings and beheadings, whole villages sacked, their theocratic flags hoisted haughtily.

    The scandal men fuelled the tragedy, so they could feather their nests. The horror brings to mind the work of Svetlana Alexievich who won this year’s Nobel Prize in literature. She dedicated her life’s career writing about how ordinary people suffer while leaders mint money and enjoy the luxury of high office. She is the first journalist to win the big prize, but her work is not mere journalism. Hers probe beneath the layer of reporting. She probes, in her books, the depth of angst, desolation and tortured alienation during disasters in the old Soviet Union. She writes about the Second World, the Soviet-Afghan War, the Chenobyl disaster. She is a raconteur of the emotional abyss of pain and loss. Which is no different from the story of the Boko Haram tragedy.

    So, while we spoke about billions, they might have averted the dismembered hand, the kidnapped belle, incinerated home, the disoriented family, the devout sublimity of the boy now recruited into the circle of an apocalyptic belief. There are many individual stories, a thing not well documented yet about the tragedy whose flames are happily on the ruin. Each story is a deep wound, and that was the project of Alexievich. “Each substance of a grief has twenty shadows,” said Bushy in Shakespeare’s Richard II, demonstrating that if many had griefs in northern Nigeria, we had a million shadows. Let’s go beyond the statistic into the emotion. “One million deaths is a statistic,” warned Josef Stalin who was never squeamish about a dying mother, “One death is a tragedy.”

    The FloodGate is indeed telling. What bothers is the place of due process. The military operated the way the politicians acted. In carting away the money, they respected no due process or decency. The same way the Chibok girls were taken away without due process or decency. We saw the barbarity of high office executed by the barbarians at the Chibok gate.

    In the NSA’s office, money came there via the Central Bank without respect to protocol. They took raw cash, bags of dollars crackled through the CBN portal. They came one after the other once it had settled at the ONSA vault. Dokpesi came. Bafarawa materialised. Obaigbena waltzed in. Etc. As they came in, our money flew out. It was a sleek and extravagant comedy. Enter with false dignity. Sign on a sheet of paper. The paper could say media embed, or energy or spiritual work, or whatever. Not arms or uniforms or food for the boys then awaiting court martial. Somebody heaves out and counts the stack of dollars, arranges them daintily in a bag. The dignitary receives in a flourish. Nods to the NSA. Smiles to the gate. Car takes him either to the hotel or Abuja palace or private jet when fleeing out of town.  Our police, in short supply to protect the vulnerable, are gun-happy beside them as they sashay away.

    That was the due process. Not your business BPE, or Senate. Contempt for open bidding. No respect for such things as certificate of incorporation, tax papers. That is suffocating protocol. Speak to the president, get his approval, walk to Dasuki, pick your loot and flee. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Go and enjoy yourself.

    But the military operated no differently. Recently the report had it that over a hundred soldiers were buried in a mass grave. The army denied it. I ask, when was the last time they reported any dead Nigerian hero? In the United States, once a soldier dies, he is buried in dignified ceremony. His family is notified in a special visit. In the killings in Paris, all the victims of the recent tragedy were not only noted, they had their families notified. Later, they announced to the public with pictures and biographies. It is a ritual of respect, a homage to patriotism.

    It is when we lack this protocol of dignity that our army runs the gauntlet of accusations of human rights abuse. No such deference for order. Hence many soldiers were paraded for court martial. Femi Falana, SAN, led the agitation for respect of those who fought for us. Barely a year ago, I wrote a column on Citizen Fahat Fahat, who enthused into battlefield and posted many gung-ho Facebook messages about his desire to despatch Boko Haram goons.

    Yet many felt sorry when he posted he was being court-martialled for not fighting when no one stocked him with military hardware. I hope he is one of those set free by the military court. Alexievich laments this nightmarish paradox of service attracting punishment in her moving book, Zinky Boys, about soldiers brought home in zinc coffins.

    The media fell prey to the same lack of due process. The newspaper proprietors collected drafts. No one asked for the cheques from the federal government. No one asked, why drafts and not NPAN cheques? No one asked for any official memo from the federal government on the agreement. No due process.

    The newspaper proprietors were guilty of naivety, especially in an ambience of financial putrefaction. It is an excuse not of nobility, but of inexcusable innocence. Yet, they were robed in. Their hands were not soiled but boiled, but they were numb hands. They did not know how hot the water was.

    So, they story was messy. No due process in government. No due process with Boko Haram. It was an epidemic of impunity from the tony majesty of Aso Rock to the scalding heat Sambisa Forest. Boko Haram and the Jonathan government had two things in common: impunity, oppressing the average citizen. The Boko Haram leaders also lived large, with money, women and barbarian glamour. So did the Jonathan’s men.

    [news_box style=”3″ display=”category” link_target=”_blank” category=”24″ count=”6″ show_more=”on” show_more_type=”link”]

  • Don’t bribe God

    Don’t bribe God

    The story had it that Attahiru Bafarawa clucked with N4.6 billion for spiritual purposes. Quite a hefty sum for God, I thought. But it may have made sense if Jonathan won the election. Bafawara could have aped his Christian friends and yelled, To Allah be the glory. But the electoral loss means we could have spent the money well.

    Look, for instance, at Lagos. Governor Akinwunmi Ambode spent N4.7 billion to protect 16 million Nigerians. He invested it in a series of helicopters, gunboats, fleet of cars and motorbikes as well as communication gadgets. We are feeling the impact in Lagos now. The devout will say Ambode spent his money on mammon while Bafarawa and Jonathan spent on God.

    Mammon seems well now that their project has failed with Jonathan’s loss. The 16 million Lagosians will appreciate the money more than marabouts and other places where the money might have gone. Lesson: don’t’ bribe God. When the people rejoice, N4.6 billion as offering meets brick wall of heaven.

  • To spoil a poll

    To spoil a poll

    The Bayelsa State guber poll conjured the image of the red-blooded male. He is not distinguished by height or girth, although it helps. His distinction lies in the journey of his muscles. When shirtless, his torso is a work of art, as well as his abdominal region. For the well-fed and well-exercised, the red-blooded male presents a picture of primitive warior. Regions of his skin line up like boxes that some call six packs. Each pack tics, throbs and crackles.

    Above that vista of masculine ardour stands an unpredictable visage. It might look coy, retiring, menacing. The eyes may blaze or look fazed. The muscular message below tells the onlooker that the face may be deceptive and, like Shakespeare noted, “there is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.” Some have faces that explode with violence and the muscles act it. Some have satiny looks but hoist blood and death, and you do not know such men until they are in charge of things.

    Unlike the puny case of Kogi State, you had to be a man in the electoral trenches of Bayelsa. But muscles were not enough. Guns. Bombs. Boats. They fed the red blood.

    They may be cocks, well feathered, cawing in primal rhythms and glowing with machismo. But without weapons, such men are effeminate in the electoral wars of the “Glory of all Lands.”

    When APC candidate Timipre Sylva gave a press briefing last week over the cancelled poll in Southern Ijaw Local Government Area, he gave a hint of the boil in the Bayelsa waters. He said on a number of times, he had to place calls to the security forces to counter the goons ferrying ballot papers and unleashing mayhem. Waxing poetic, he said some of his calls died “like a candle in the wind.” His claim has not been denied. In Ekeremor, the Minister of State for Agriculture, Heineken Lokpobri, had to be rescued by security forces when thugs, apparently for the opposing PDP, barreled into his compound with guns and bombs.

    When the results of Ekeremor Local Government were announced, an APC member rose to protest on live television. The INEC officer motioned him to sit. At the same time the PDP representative also made a counter-claim of violence. The INEC man noted on live television that there was another forum for complaint.

    So, why did the INEC cancel the Southern Ijaw poll, and not Ekeremor, or Nembe or Sagbama? The law of course says an election can be cancelled in cases of violence and over-voting. If the election was cancelled on violence ground in Southern Ijaw, it was unfair to violence to respect it in one place and disrespect it in another. In the law, all violence is created equal, and should be punished accordingly. The law did not prescribe scale of violence.

    The poll also provided a clear irony. The PDP – and Seriake Dickson – was ahead in six of the seven local government results, but he manifested not only anxiety but lawlessness. The snag was that Southern Ijaw could wipe out his lead and give the victory to his opponent, Sylva. He committed two wrongs that, in a normal society, he should have stepped out of the race or/ and be disqualified from the contest.

    One, he visited Southern Ijaw’s capital and also the INEC office. The army, in its press briefing on Saturday, alluded to it, and claimed that his presence ratcheted up the violence in Southern Ijaw. The governor had no problem with the elections holding in his strongholds. When it got to Southern Ijaw, he quilted and turned into a lawless man in government house. He became a retailer of violence.

    Two, the governor also went live on Bayelsa Radio to incite the people of the state against the Federal Government. If Nnamdi Kanu can be called a subversive for invoking Biafra, Seriake Dickson with his imperial swagger and walking stick, was Kanu’s counterpart in government. He provoked tribe, calling the Ijaw nation to rise against the plot by the centre to disenfranchise them. Indeed some people responded and came to the street, especially some women in the colour of mourning clothes. The police had to caution him and remind the people of the state that such a rally contravened the electoral law.

    If Dickson were charged to court today, he would not escape the law. What he did was criminal and in contempt of the tranquil principle of society and the dictates of the Nigerian constitution. He acted the alpha male, the red-blooded goon in official toga. He exhibited the Neanderthal spirit of the ruffian in office. He was a governor as caveman.

    Southern Ijaw, according to the APC, was their stronghold. Sylva claims he has won the election because he believes the votes from that densely populated area could wipe out about 30,000 votes that Dickson had over him in other local governments. In the United States, anytime a Democrat wins a presidential election, he often lags until the California numbers come in. That state can wipe out aggregate votes from the south. That was the scenario APC thought was emerging with Southern Ijaw. Why did the Resident Electoral Officer announce the cancellation instead of the returning officer? The returning officer was not reported sick, captured or fired.

    The new INEC boss must avoid the image incompetent and bumbling umpire with inconclusive elections.

    Elections are not supposed to be deathbeds of innocence or the celebration of red-blooded males. It does no glory to Bayelsa nor to Nigeria that in the 20th century, it’s not the vote of the hand but the hand of violence that determines the victor. It is even worse when the umpire presents itself without evenhandedness. Democracy is not for Thomas Hobbes’ state of nature, or for Nietzsche’s superman. It is for John Locke’s spirit of equity.

    The red-blooded men are good when they guard us and foster our virtues with their strength. “Only the weak are cruel,” noted Leo  Buscaglia, also know as Dr. Love. “Gentleness can only be expected from the strong.” They are not strong when they bully. Playwright Aristophanes moaned the Peloponnesian War and wrote a play in which the women withdrew sexual favours from their men in order to force them to stop violence. The play known as Lysistrata is not only good for Bayelsa but for Nigeria. To rein in the red-blooded male, take away his libido. It worked in Aristophanes in triggering negotiations about war. When a man needs weapons rather than words, he admits he has lost the argument.

    In Bound to Violence, Yambo Ouologuem laments in his novel Africa’s fascination with waste and spoils. In his play, A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams turns red-blooded Stanley into a mutant soul and rapist. We don’t want that in our election. But fair is fair. If INEC cancels the polls in one place, it has to do same elsewhere. If it tolerates it in one place as it has done in Yenagoa, Nembe and Ekeremor, its conscience should allow it accept the polls raked in at Southern Ijaw. Democracy fails when it is not fair.

    [news_box style=”2″ display=”category” link_target=”_blank” category=”24″ count=”8″ show_more=”on” show_more_type=”link”]

  • Audu’s ghost

    Audu’s ghost

    Abubakar Audu is dead. Scratch that. Abubakar Audu is not dead. The fellow with an aristocratic bearing sits astride in Kogi. He is not buried. He is not quiet. His spirit, like that of Shakespeare’s Banquo or Hamlet, is walking the night of Kogi politics.

    Like novelist Mark Twain noted, stories of his death have been greatly exaggerated. It has roared out of the decision of INEC to call the election inconclusive. It snorts in the APC’s order to foist Yahaya Bello on the ticket. In the fulmination of Audu’s ethnic loyalists. In Abiodun Faleke’s rage at being wronged. In the fiery pros and cons of lawyers.

    “Oh dead who have always refused to die,” lamented Leopold Senghor in one of his poems on his ancestors. Audu will not sleep. He will howl and rage until justice is done in Kogi State.

    It all began when the umpire missed its step. It declared the election inconclusive based on the voter’s register of 49,000 persons. This must be an INEC without memory. In their last round of elections, did we base the process on registered voters or PVC voters? The resident electoral officer knew the PVCs were far fewer than registered voters. The difference between Audu/Faleke ticket and Governor Wada was about 40,000 votes.

    On the average across the country, the PVCs were far less than 70 per cent of the registered voters. INEC has not denied reports that the 91 remaining units account for about 25,000 PVCs. That makes the election conclusive and a victory to Audu/Faleke ticket. And on account of Audu’s death, we should have shed tears for Audu and shed the state of crisis. Faleke would be governor-elect, and we will be looking forward to Bayelsa State where the imperial, baton-wielding policeman Governor Seriake Dickson is sweating over the bulala of defeat that awaits him December 5.

    So, why did he declare the election inconclusive without disclosing the PVC facts? The returning officer was no illiterate but a professor and vice chancellor? What kind of vice chancellor would show such a lag in logic and imbecility on the public space? The whole hoopla in town now would have been averted if he just did a scintilla of research.

    The word quagmire has haunted the process. INEC did not ease tension by asking the APC to substitute Audu and fixing December 5 for a supplementary election. It has bad legal advisers, so did the APC brass. INEC wanted to quickly get out of the morass. No law tells us how to substitute when more than 80 per cent of the election has happened. If the party is to substitute, the party must conform to the law. And the law says that a 21-day notice must go to INEC before primary. But the election will hold only December 5. Even at that, it applies only to elections that have not taken place. Here, only 91 units are left. The election has been concluded. INEC has no power to cancel it because the constitution gives only two conditions to cancel an election. That is, when there is violence and over-voting. None of these conditions apply.

    If the APC makes Bello its candidate, it will fall into the hands of the PDP because Bello did not abide by the rules of 21-day notice. They will invalidate his victory. He might have been second in the primary, but he was not part of the election. The APC is overthrowing the principle of justice by bypassing Faleke. Audu chose him as deputy. The principle of the constitution allows the deputy to take over in case the governor candidate cannot continue either by reason of death or any other kind of incapacity before the election, as governor-elect and governor. The unlegislated period was about 24 to 48 hours before the declaration of result. That lapse in concentration by the law drafters precipitated the crisis.

    Otherwise, the deputy is successor. The law always asks the deputy to take over to affirm the unity of the ticket. If Audu won the primary, the law empowered him to pick a successor. And if the law asks him to pick his deputy before and after the election, it means the constitution has moved the ticket beyond the primary. Once one leaves, the next fills in. It is a simple principle of justice. That explains why the deputy campaigns with the governor candidate as a joint proprietor. But the law omitted the election time. Hence Edmund Burke quipped that “bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.” And Henry Thoreau said, “the law never made anyone a whit more just.”

    When the law fails, we call for justice. But lawyers often forget that the law was made for justice and not for egos. Hence they play strict constructionist, when convenient, by seeking the letter of the law and not the spirit. They forget the intention of justice rather than the vanity of the written text.

    If the party ought to pick the candidate, the party must abide by law and justice. If Faleke was a part of the elections so far, some have argued that it does not matter because the law recognises not candidate but parties. The law here contradicts itself. It cannot give rights and roles for candidates and subsume them conveniently under the party banner. The law that asks deputies to succeed the leader cannot wipe out the candidate. The contradiction can only be resolved when the candidates negotiate with the party towards a resolution. While it still poses a conundrum, the constitution clearly shows that the candidate matters. The Amaechi example is sometimes interpreted out of context.

    But the matter will eventually be resolved in court. It will decide that the election was conclusive and Faleke should have been declared governor.

    Part of the problem lies in the Jonathan syndrome. Faleke comes from what they call the Okun in Kogi as against the Igala. Jonathan’s succession to Yar-adua was resisted because he was no Hausa-Fulani. The Otueke shoeless man gained nationwide sympathy and hence he became president. We have a miniature play of that politics in Kogi. Justice is the victim. But just as Bob Enyart noted, “It is not a justice system. It is just a system.”

    [news_box style=”2″ display=”category” link_target=”_blank” category=”24″ orderby=”random” count=”8″ show_more=”on” show_more_type=”link” header_background=”#ad8a00″]