It is the season of restructuring.  So, we may as well start defining that elixir, in all of its possible ramifications, including ethnic federalism.

On July 29, exactly 50 years after his supreme heroism, the cream of the Yoruba gathered at Ibadan, their political capital, to extol Col. Adekunle Fajuyi.

Fajuyi, with his Supreme Commander and Nigeria’s first military Head of State, Gen. Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi, was felled during the July counter-coup of 1966.

But Prof. Niyi Osundare, guest lecturer and globally acclaimed poet, argued that despite Fajuyi’s acclaimed heroism, he has not morphed — and may never  morph — into a pan-Nigeria hero.

Reason? Nigeria’s hero chamber — no thanks to radically differing values — bubbles with anti-heroes!

“Tribal considerations,” the erudite scholar rued,   ”continue to trump national imperatives; and a dreadful vice on the national stage may be an enviable virtue at the tribal level.”

Indeed!  Obafemi Awolowo was clearly the greatest thinker and doer of his generation — if not, as yet, contemporary Nigeria.

Yet, outside the Southwest, where he is revered, next only to Oduduwa, the Yoruba progenitor, many regard him as an “arch-tribalist”.

Sani Abacha, in contrast, was perhaps the most venal Nigerian soldier that ever lived.  Yet, no less than two public institutions, in his area of the country, continue to be named after him, Abacha loot be damned!

Beside Awo and Abacha, Nigeria has a rather long chain of hero-villians (heroes within, villains outside): Sir Ahmadu Bello, former premier of Northern Region (revered in the North but reviled outside, as avatar of systematic northern domination), and Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu (Biafra rebel leader and unadulterated Igbo hero but sniggered at outside).  Somewhat,  Olusegun Obasanjo, achieves the opposite (scorned by his native Yoruba, but acclaimed by others, especially in the North).

Perhaps only Nnamdi Azikiwe kept some national affection outside his Igbo nativity.  But then, Zik sought to be a nationalist without a nation.

So, he may well have ended a plastic historic figure, for he appeared the least developmentally impactful, among the first three regional premiers — when compared with  Awo (West); and the Sardauna (North).

“The likes of Adekunle Fajuyi are not recognized as national heroes,” Prof. Osundare told his audience, “because there is yet no ‘nation’ to be a hero in or of.”

But could it have been otherwise? The Yoruba beatification of Fajuyi issues from their Omoluabi credo.  How can Nigeria fit into that, when their appears no pan-Nigeria Omoluabi equivalent?

But from contemporary history to contemporary present.  A lot of bile has been expended on President Muhammadu Buhari’s alleged “northernisation” of key appointments.  The president may well be guilty as charged.

Still, such skewing is hardly novel. When President Jonathan was there, the pendulum of favour swung to his native South-South, and catchment South East.  But Ripples can’t remember the beneficiaries back then scream and foam in the mouth  about “injustice” — the injustice that favoured them!

Under the brief Umaru Yar’ Adua Presidency, the locus of power was clearly northern.

Again, only Obasanjo ran against the grain.  But then, he appears the acclaimed master of shadow over substance. As perception-correct as his appointments were, that his presidency laid the foundation for the present mess shows how suspect the substance was.

Still, even under Obasanjo, the Yoruba jaunty cap assumed the symbolic moniker of “power shift”!  Even to the uppity Yoruba, vicarious power, even via a prodigal son, was not quite bitter!

Besides, before you hurry to smite Muhammadu Buhari as an irredeemable “northern tribalist”, do an ethnic analysis of the staff of the Vice President and the ministers. The result might just be revealing!  You can call it ethnic-driven. But the principals may well counter it is trust-driven!

This ethnic core captures Nigeria’s stark reality.  Though some plastic “nationalists” would scoff it is septic, coming up with a counter antiseptic would appear beyond the ken of their cosmetic laboratory!

With this clear ethnic-driven symbolism of power, therefore, it is unclear which trumps which: the sense of outrage over the “injustice” of appointments; or the sense of bitter envy from the howling — the howling that would rather be the happy beneficiaries, “injustice” be damned!

The ethnic locus of these bitter criticisms shows some sociological Freudian slip, of a country wilfully living in denial.  But that denial cannot wish away the ethnic compass.

Indeed, with hardly any consciousness of “Nigerianness” (except perhaps in sports, when the national team is winning, as the Dream Team VI, against all odds, did against Japan, in the ongoing Rio Olympics), the basis of thinking, appointment-making and protest, over felt injustices, would appear ethnic!

So, Nigeria’s continuing crisis of nationhood is simply the crisis of injustices, which the ethnics mete out to one another.

That would continue, so long as the tribe continues to drive federal power (no matter what the Constitution says) in a consumptive federalism, in which the capture of federal power could mean an ethnic capture, wholesale, of Nigeria’s resources.

But that can change, if the tribe — no evil sociological tag, ab initio —  becomes the driver of Nigeria’s productive federalism.  That means transferring Nigeria’s rich resources to the care of the locals.

Ay, the locals are eminently entitled to eat.  But before they do, they must drive their resources with a frenzy, ingraining the basic ethos that there is no easy money.  Isn’t that more refreshing than the present salivating after a central dole?

Besides, other things being equal, that should boost pan-Nigeria wealth in real terms.  Fierce but positive regional competition, as it was in the 1st Republic, would only increase that harvest.

Imagine!  Everyone leveraging on their native traits, using the local tongue to galvanize selves to stupendous productivity; and local mores, taboos and strictures to own public economic assets and banish graft and corruption, even with the all-too-demonized tribe acting as fulcrum!

Eldorado?  Not quite.  But it would be a new breath, of economic rebirth — and perhaps a tactical tribal retreat to launch a new national ethos of mutual respect, hard work and shared values in productive federalism!  No part of Nigeria is, after all, so useless it cannot take care of itself.

That again brings the matter right back to Fajuyi, and the crisis of Nigerian national heroes and anti-heroes.

The Yoruba Omoluabi credo (which Prof. Osundare coined as ‘Omoluabiism’) — selfless, considerate, honourable and heroic — made Fajuyi to opt for heroic death, instead of shameful life, while confronting the mutineers that killed his guest and supreme commander.

Still, the Yoruba have no monopoly of virtues.  So, every ethnic group in the Nigerian federation can boast of traits it could deploy for own development.  That is the exciting promise of ethnic federalism.

For too long, the tribe has been a key factor in Nigerian underdevelopment.  But the same tribe can be turned into a driver of progress and development.

Federalism, structured on ethnic groupings and cultural contiguity, may well be the elixir. That was what Awo pushed more than 50 years ago — and it would appear equally, if not more, valid today.

The post Fajuyi and case for ethnic federalism appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

No prize for guessing right: the credit for this headline goes to Thomas Hardy and his novel, Return of the Native.

But unlike the grim story of Clym Yeobright, the Paris, France-returnee to his native Edgon Heath in England, this is a gaily “annual convocation of Ilese-Ijebu people”, in the very words of the commemorative brochure, to mark the 12th Ilese Day celebration, which started on August 7 and climaxed on August 13.

Ilese is a community contiguous to Ijebu Ode, in Ogun State.  According to unofficial figures, the town boasts a population of some half-a-million people, a good chunk of which are youths, many of them students of the Ogun State College of Health Technology, sited in the town.

But that population excludes Ilese-Ijebu natives, living and driving their businesses outside the town.  As a tool of indigene mobilization, township development and sheer civic pride, the “Ilese-in-exile” would appear the ultimate target of Ilese Day.

It is, so to say, the communal end-and-of-year bash, and start of another; when indigines, many of them having made good outside, come back home to felicitate and party, crowing Kennedy-speak: ask not what your town can do for you; ask rather what you can do for your town!

That appears the message from the KK (formally, Otunba Kunle Kalejaye, SAN)-chaired Ilese Day Planning Committee; and Mr. Popoola Ojikutu, secretary, under the umbrella of the Ilese Development Council (IDC), chaired by Otunba Segun Demuren and Omo’oba Segun Adebanjo, secretary.

With the massive turnout by indigenes, and the festive and carnival-like atmosphere the town wore throughout proceedings, particularly in the last two days, that message appeared to have resonated well

Still, the Planning Committee put together a carefully calibrated programme of events, part-service (what your town can do for you); part-duty (what you can do for your town); and general business/financial education for personal use, viz: free medical check-up, free eye test, an Annual Enterprise Development Seminar for 2016, a grand finale quiz competition, football competition among youths, Woro traditional dance, a cooking competition for Ikokore, the Ijebu special cuisine, beauty pageant and music performance extravaganza, the Ilese Day Grand Finale carnival, which featured five groups and a band of stunt-pulling Okada riders, and a gala nite to round off the celebrations.

Among performers at the music and showbiz extravaganza, Terry G Plkin (real name, Michael Ogunyomi), a student of Tai Solarin University of Education, Ijebu Ode, stood out, with his unique stripping and teasing act.  He stripped off no less than 30 clothes, starting with an Aladura (white-farment church) soutane!

But the grand finale carnival garnished the celebrations with a pan-Nigeria mix.  Sappers Barracks, a military formation, is located in Ilese.  Though based in Ilese, members are from different parts of the country.  The Sappers performance, therefore, pushed a subtle lesson: every Nigerian domiciled in Ileseland was an integral part of that community.  To boot, the Sappers came with three Eyo masquerades!

Otunba Kalejaye made that telling point, when the Sappers, in their glorious maroon colours, made their grand entry: with the barracks community part and parcel of Ilese, there is little chance of any communal violence.  Other communities nationwide ought to take a huge lesson from that spirit of community amity and integration.

Ilese Day is necessarily youth-driven.  For one, the town is host to a tertiary school.  For another, the college has conferred on the town some élan, associated with youths flouting their educational status.

Yet, the Beauty pageant — and indeed, the youth funfair nite, where perhaps too many strutted, sang and danced to thrill the appreciative audience, in a town hall packed full with hollering youths — was a thoughtful mix of business and fun, laced with Ilese history and civics.  Miss Oluwafunmi Imoleayo Ayeni, a graduate of the local College of Health Technology, Ilese, emerged winner from a packed field of 14.

What most would see in that funfair nite was fun.  But behind that fun was business, hard core business.

For starters, to enter for the pageant you buy a N5, 000 form.  But the winner’s prize is a car.  That is no unattractive prospect!  But standing between application and winning is the rather hard part of mastering Ilese tradition, history and contemporary civics, to answer rather tricky questions at the quiz segment.

So, to triumph, the winner must invest in and study a book on Ilese, specifically rolled out to prepare the contestants.  But the beauty of that is the youth are motivated to learn about the local history and culture, with a glittering prize in view.

Then the carnival proper!  Imagine the costumes of some 600-strong youth: the design and tailoring, all offering boom times for the local guild of tailors and fashion designers!  That would appear a pocket-friendly — and fun-filled way — to re-flate and energise the local economy, get local enterprises productively busy and empower local entrepreneurs.

Then, the local food vendors!  The parade grounds, for the grand finale carnival, offered an excellent mart for all sort of players, small and medium, to sell their wares and offer their services.  Of course, alongside is the souvenir business: commemorative hats and other branded gifts.  All help to boost the local economy; and put money in the pocket of the enterprising.

So, when the guild of Ilese tailors was publicly toasted for sewing, free-of-charge, the giant banners dotting strategic parts of town, before announcing; and after thanking those who attended and calling for an encore in 2017, the gesture was an excellent show of community recognition.

Even then, the business part of it would appear not so hidden: the guild perhaps was so charitable because of the business boom the festival yearly offers it!  Talk of win-win!

But still talking of charity qua charity, the 2016 Ilese Day also offered excellent opportunity for local philanthropists to show compassion for the less privileged, with the launch of the Rufus Olukayode Odusanya Foundation, with a rather striking acronym of ROOF, with its self-set mandate of providing “bursary awards to students attending secondary schools established in Ilese” from 2016; and, by 2017, “provide bursary awards to students of underprivileged parents that gain admission into university”, harnessing funds from “interested community supporters and interested donors”.

Still, again, the business cum empowerment part of this charity is not far away.  The livewire for the charity is the Catland Microfinance Bank Limited, the community-owned microfinance bank.  “Catland”, by the way, is the English translation of Ilese, “Ile Ese” (Ijebu for “home of cats”).

Now, if the Ogun government is watching, it may not be a bad idea to structure the yearly  Ilese Day into a state-wide calendar of tourist destinations to be vigorously marketed, after the famous Ojude-Oba festival, which the neighbouring Ijebu Ode hosts every year, after the Muslim Ileya (literally in English: time to go home) festival.

Ojude Oba, Ilese Day and such festivals may well gift Ogun a belt of cultural tourism, from which the state can reap quite some cash, in these times of dwindling revenue.

The post Ilese: Return of the natives appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the English Romantic poet it was, who wrote, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, poetic tragedy of a sailor, assailed by the albatross of a past misdeed.

Were Nigeria to boast a contemporary equivalent of Coleridge’s mariner, it would sure be Justice Dahiru Saleh; for his infernal role in the voiding of the June 12, 1993 presidential election victory of Basorun MKO Abiola.

MKO would die five years later in the Abacha gulag; but under the watch of Gen.  Abdusalami Abubakar, self-decided stop-gap head of state, after Sani Abacha himself had sensationally expired, in rather strange circumstances, that many Nigerians happily hooted was “divine intervention”.

That crisis cost MKO his life.  But it also consigned most of the principal plotters as living dead.

Justice Saleh appeared dead in limbo — until he bobbed up, via some newspaper interview.  Still, he cut the sorry picture of the Coleridge ancient mariner, with the June 12 albatross hanging heavy on his neck!

The big difference though is that whereas Coleridge’s mariner got redeemed for his crime, after enduring the emptiness of the living dead, this unfortunate Nigerian version appears beyond redemption.  Even from his limbo, he grandstands in provocative vacuity!

He voided June 12, he claimed, out of the best of intentions, fired by a fair and forensic mind.  He can tell that to the marines!

Psychoanalysis, in basic psychology, dubs it ‘Freudian slip’.  But the scriptures insist such slips could either edify or mortify, warning however that what destroys you is not what you eat, but what you say.

His Lordship, the Mariner, therefore, tries himself so mercilessly in the court of his own words, even 23 years after the judicial crime.

You could feel the full sear of his juristic(?) mind: combustible power politics laced with ethnic animosity, to brew a subversive verdict that ignited a fire that almost consumed the polity.

“The Yorubas wanted Abiola to become president …” Justice Saleh claimed, sounding as if he had a problem with such a proposition. “But he couldn’t be,” he crowed — in triumph?

“While the political blame must be on President Babangida,” he admitted, “Babangida did nothing of the sort to stop him [Abiola], using my court.”  Maybe.  Maybe not.

But did a Yoruba legitimate yearning jar against Abiola’s lawful mandate, a resounding  pan-Nigeria one that cut across tribes and tongues, to necessitate a criminal annulment of the freest and fairest election ever in this country?

His Lordship would appear to think — and merrily brag so.  Hear him: “I have no regrets; none whatever. No regrets. I would repeat the same thing now.”

His Lordship clearly relishes playing the judicial Judas, despite the ruin his verdict brought upon his country.  Still, such unconscionable crowing, over glaring injustices, has been Nigeria’s bane.

But from His Lordship, the Mariner, to His Excellency, the General, another spinner of long-running marine tales: first naming himself “military president”; then ruining himself with the annulment; and now, in his winter years, warring in vain against himself, just to validate those marine fibs!

After all the power, and all the glory, and all the vanity, and all the vacuity, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, who Justice Saleh fondly hid behind a finger to cover his June 12 transgression, would appear a much subdued man.

Unlike Justice Saleh who still appears unfazed by his judicial villainy, self-abnegation appears IBB’s 75th birthday wish, after the bluff and bluster of his earlier years, starting with his ‘Evil Genius’ moniker, much relished in those halcyon days of untrammeled authority, courtesy of not only being in government but also in power.

“I am not the evil genius that quite a lot of people consider me to be.” IBB deserves congratulations, for that glorious epiphany!

Still, given his self-crowed love to dominate his environment, as a master in the theory and praxis of violence, laced with his sheer Machiavellian tactics, not a few would be stunned by this disclaimer.

Nevertheless, IBB sounds positively downbeat, from known obscurity, in his commemorative interviews at 75.  Alas! Everyone knows IBB is still there.  But no one seems upbeat about him!

Yeah, his Maradona-speak appears intact — that bit about making legislation a part-time job: coming from a man whose government was clearly the most spendthrift, after President Goodluck Jonathan.

And, of course, the old fox’s last-minute essay at defiance: that bit about being misconstrued, but choosing not to worry.

Still, there is a certain yearning for reconciliation and understanding playing out in the new IBB persona.

Now, what is that?  An albatross of guilt over MKO, pretty much like the Coleridge mariner that wilfully killed the albatross that piloted him and his crew from a storm?

Or, an old man, after the follies and bombast of youth, finally readying himself to meet his maker, in his best possible conduct?

Only IBB knows!  However, it appears a classic case of public guilt weighing heavy on private conscience, in a milieu where apologies, even from flagrant wrongs, appears a sign of weakness.  That would explain Saleh’s shameless bragging.

That is why that judge, after a fleeting bobbing up from the limbo of the living dead,  promptly returned there.

Even while still living, he appears a complete reject of history, if good conscience, justice and fairness, which ought to come with the judicial territory, are the issues!

Well, if Saleh appears beyond redemption, given his posturing at his interview; is that what IBB also wishes?  That is doubtful, given his rather conciliatory posture at 75.

That is why he should shun needless pride and apologize to Nigerians that voted on June 12, for purporting to cancel their will, though criminally sustained.

Then, he should apologize to the MKO Abiola family, for the grave injustice his annulment did to their patriarch, MKO; and matriarch, Kudirat; who both died in the heat of the crisis.

MKO perhaps would stand as eternal witness against contemporary Nigeria, the military segment of which IBB dominated like no other.  Though he was no angel, all he did was show compassion to his compatriots, Christian, Muslim or traditional worshipper.  He made as many as possible happy.

Yet, all he got paid was death, in detention, after five years; for winning a free election.

But MKO’s memory left nothing but love and awe: for by his wealth and association, he was the least candidate for political heroism.  Besides, he has found peace with his maker.

Not so, the June 12 conspirators, living or dead!   By their terrible deed, they cloaked themselves in disgrace and disdain.  And each time the June 12 anniversary echoes, their villainy  ricochets anew in the polity.

IBB is the best known of this unenviable company.  But he can still mitigate the harsh verdict of history, by penitence followed by a public apology.

As for His Lordship, the Mariner, he was simply a happy pawn in villainy.  Just as well he is unrepentant.  He deserves his place of rot in history’s dustbin.

The post His Lordship, the mariner appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

There is a creeping contest in the land.  Whoever howls most, about the nation’s present woes, appears sure of some Nobel Prize in mass melancholy!

But isn’t Tiger Woe — whose devastating spring pushes pan-Nigerian wailing to a crescendo — obvious and gut-tearing enough?

Must folks fall over themselves to screech its cruel “tigeritude”, in the very words of our own WS, the very tiger of progressive populism himself?

O, you must have noticed!  This headline is straight from the mouth of our esteemed Nobel Laureate, the title of the second of his two novels, the first being The Interpreters.

In Season of Anomy (1973), Wole Soyinka painted the anomie of military rule, and the parasitic (un)civil class that, with the soldiers, conspired to rape and plunder their country.

Why, at that nadir, Anomy even creatively foretold the Sani Abacha horror, at the tail-end of military misrule.

Any citizen that stood against that stark dictator was doomed to slaughter!  That was the fictional Zaki Amuri, in Anomy, feudal lord of Cross-River!

Between Abacha and Amuri, can you spot a difference — or, for that matter, between feudalism and military rule in Nigeria?

But all those latter-day ruin had their roots in early-day politics-driven anarchy of 1st Republic Western Nigeria.

Back then, the vote-heisting Demo (formally named: Nigerian National Democratic Party, NNDP), of Samuel Ladoke Akintola and Remi Fani-Kayode, gloried in brazen political turpitude.

The ruling Northern People’s Congress, NPC’s decision to condone Demo’s electoral rascality, for short-term political gain, sparked the first coup d’état.

From WS, more facts on that troubling period of Nigerian history would come with autobiographical memoirs: Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years, and later, You Must Set Forth At Dawn.

That then, was the rotten foundation of the present mess.

Of course, the military’s wasted years — that useless god that left its votaries much worse than it met them — worsened the situation.

Add Olusegun Obasanjo’s empty but doomed swagger, in the first crucial eight years of this republic.  Add too, Goodluck Jonathan’s near-undertaking business, in the last six years of the ancien regime.

Now, even factor in the notorious Nigerian amnesia, natural or wilful, when the subject is institutional memory.  But could anybody have forgotten, so soon, the havoc of the swamp criminals, euphemistically called militants — walking their talk to sabotage and ground the economy, by bombing oil installations?

All these would appear doom — wilful doom — foretold!  Yet, for this countrywide wailing orchestra, sweet din blissfully swallows any foreground history of reason.

Their grouse? That  Muhammadu Buhari, struggling with his braves to fix the millennial mess, has no magic fixes!

Still, this anomie is especially devastating because the pocket hurts; and the stomach rumbles.  You don’t reason with the hungry, do you?

Even then, it is tanking to corrode the basic norms, fast becoming value-neuter:  the problem solvers are the new devils; while those that led us to perdition are newly consecrated saints, in a new national cathedral of unrestrained grief and explosive passion!

That, by the way, cuts through the sectors: ecclesiastical, political and even the media, now wearing plebeianism, as some unfazed badge of honour!

From the ecclesiastical front, the goodly Anthony Cardinal Olubunmi Okogie, retired Catholic Archbishop of Lagos, warns: Buhari, Nigerians are hungry, in much the same snappy voice as Oby Esekwezili and her BBOG crusaders, virtually holding a gun to the President’s head to, willy-nilly, produce the Chibok girls, or else!

Yet, beyond cheap populism, that inflames passion sans solving any problem, His Lordship owes the Catholic faithful that dot on his very words, the moral duty of preaching understanding in these delicate and perilous times.

The intervention, from the political front, would appear even worse, with the immaculate Shehu Sani, senator of the Federal Republic from the ruling APC, playing the ostrich; declaring all would have perished before Buhari finished his reforms!  Pray, should the president then fold his arms — and join the lamentation gang?

Yet, this senator is part and parcel of Bukola Saraki’s National Assembly, legislative children of perdition, that have shown little affinity with — or sensitivity to — the pains in the land.

On the other side of the aisle, the doomed PDP grandstands over the magical clearing of the debacle its 16 years of ruins piled up.  And to underscore this audacity, Her Audaciousness, Dame Patience Jonathan, just laid claim to some US $31 million in frozen cash deposits!

Need we forget — her husband, President Goodluck Jonathan, practically sold the last national family silver to feed the crave of the criminal ring, clamped round him in power?

But perhaps the most asinine intervention, so far, has got to come from the media.  A columnist, of some repute, put the rhetorical question: Buhari, the worst president ever?  That was enough signal for his votaries of hate and bigotry to do their thing, eye-blazing and mouth-foaming!

Another reduced the new “Change Starts with me” campaign to a personal tussle between the column — if not the columnist — and a minister, in a column codification of the market-folks’ whims and caprices!

Want to feel the scandalous lack of empathy with whatever the Buhari government is doing to fix the problems?  Just pick up the papers, with their sensational headlines, and hysterical columns!

The issue, mark you, is neither the democratic right to report; nor the people’s right to know.  It is rather  the Fourth Estate’s lack of emotional intelligence to push empathy, even while at its critical duty, in times of extreme national angst, as now.

So, the Nigerian media, after 157 years of practice, cannot still summon that?  Shame!

This media resort to culpable hysteria may well become veritable embarrassment, when these hard times are gone and done with!

Predictably, like a people blinded by too much of their own tears, the whimpering party can’t even see the early lights, now piercing the dank clouds.

In the North East, a joyful company drummed through the streets, announcing its homecoming, after years of Boko Haram sack.  But to the howling, cynical assembly, “nothing is happening”!

Progressively, if creeping, power is getting better, with many neighbourhoods in Lagos, reporting no less than 15 hours a day.  Even then, Babatunde Fashola, SAN, former high-flying Lagos governor, remains their “minister of darkness”!

On the food front, there are already talks about Kebbi rice, Anambra rice, Ebonyi rice, Dangote rice, etc, which, when they fully hit the market, may force prices down from N20, 000 a bag to N8, 000 — or even less!

But the moral here is not even the putative tumbling of rice prices, to tame the rumbling tummy.  It is weaning Nigerians from that grand folly  — that their palate is just too delicate for local rice!  That is the mind-restructuring only temporary adversity can force down.

To be sure, the Buhari government still has a lot to do, if it must deliver on its promise.  But given this dire historical juncture, the people should acknowledge little gains, while awaiting the big ones.

That would be far better than the present distracting bedlam.

The post Season of anomie appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

There is an eerie parallel between 14 February 2015 and 10 September 2016.

The presidential election was fixed for 14 February 2016, until Sambo Dasuki, then President Goodluck Jonathan’s National Security Adviser (NSA), went to Chatham House, London, to launch the plot that would climax in the postponement, till 30 March 2016, of the polls for alleged security reasons.

Now, the Edo gubernatorial polls were fixed for September 10.  All was set, until the Police and Directorate of Secret Services (DSS), clamoured for a postponement, for security reasons.  The new date is September 28, a Wednesday.

Not unlike in 2015, INEC first resisted.  Then, it capitulated.

But that has sent tongues wagging.  Just as it was alleged that Jonathan and co panicked, many are now swearing Oshiomhole and co are panicking, because of fear of defeat.

Still, for all you know, it could well be fib and counter-fib.    The PDP that pushes the panic theory could well be planting grand disinformation, and amplifying it among its own.

The APC that floats a counter-narrative, of alleged Nyesom Wike and Ifeanyi Okowa-aided PDP importation of a violent band to rig, could also be counter-fibbing.

Fair is foul and foul is fair in a fierce electoral contest!

Yet, the reason the security agencies gave this time would appear plausible: that on the virtual eve of Sallah, they could expose the general population to soft terror attack, by pulling out Police units outside Edo, to secure the Edo polls.

Given the history and profile of terror attacks, that would appear more plausible than Dasuki’s Chatham House reason: that the armed forces, hitherto snoozing before Boko Haram, just sprang awake to face down their nemesis, with putative electoral defeat facing the president!

Still, there are always grounds for doubts, plausible or cynical, simply because institutions of state are just not strong enough.  Why, the same security agencies merrily corralled into doing PDP’s alleged bidding only last year, are now being accused of doing APC’s bidding!

But beyond conspiracy theories and rather feeble state institutions, on what basis might PDP triumph in Edo polls, so much so that its formidability would cause so much panic, to suggest skewing, against it, the security infrastructure?

The party’s stellar records during the Lucky Igbinedion gubernatorial days?  Or, the superlative competence of the Jonathan presidential years?  Even to the most romantic of PDP fanatics, their inner voice would scream and screech: these eras were unmitigated disasters!

Then, the growing whispering campaign that neither Godwin Obaseki (GO) nor Osagie Ize-Iyamu (OII) is of any good?

Incidentally, that same neither-nor condescension crept up between Jonathan and Buhari last year; and, in the looming US presidential election, is creeping up between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

But look closely.  It would appear to emerge from elements that have closet issues with Oshiomhole but are not gutsy enough to root for Ize-Iyamu, with his terrible Edo PDP baggage.  So, the contrived hee-haw may just shadow that abject lack of moral conviction!

Indeed, by the sheer force of Oshimhole’s achievements, guilt-by-association ought to have condemned Ize-Iyamu to irredeemable electoral slaughter, while galvanizing  Obaseki to a soar-away win.

But the Comrade Governor’s alleged manipulation of the APC ticket, pulling all the stops to push protégée GO; and coupling him with alleged alter ego, Phillip Shaibu, now in the House of Representatives, virtually from his own clan, seem to have infuriated not a few, and gifted PDP a new lease.

Now, the new war cry, bawled with all musterable partisan roar: Shaibu means Oshiomhole quits, yet Oshiomhole retains power!

Now, that can be explosively emotive!  A people terribly injured, on the eve of a major election, could indeed engineer an electorally sobering result!

Still, must Edo, in the expression of unrestrained rage, cut its nose to spite its face?  Electorally, it can.

But then, its long-suffering people, not the flighty politicians, always on the lookout for the best of deals, will bear the scar.

The Ekiti experience, that propelled Ayo Fayose to power, for fury against Kayode Fayemi’s person, if not policy, is a living example, of rash electoral choices.

But more on that presently!

Meanwhile, not a few have also direly warned, hinting at some electoral Armageddon to come: Edo (and possibly Ondo) gubernatorial polls would be plebiscites on the Muhammadu Buhari presidency, by a baleful people, grappling with excruciating pains.

For the excitable, fiercely riveted on only the present, that would appear hot electoral scarecrow, before which the Oshiomhole camp must crouch and mutter their last prayers!  But for the more perspective, history and institutional memory dictate otherwise.

At the onset of Obafemi Awolowo’s Free Primary Education programme in the old Western Region, which the opposition National Council of Nigerians and the Cameroons (NCNC) sold as some blight set to wipe out the people’s agrarian wealth, the Action Group (AG) lost in the next round of polls.

But two years later, the electorate got wiser, by the sheer developmental beauty of that programme.  Though free education demanded some taxation — to which the opposition incited the people to growl — it assured the populace a better strategic deal.  That was 1955; and present-day Edo, where NCNC was very strong, was in the Midwest segment of that region.

The moral?  That the present bites hard does not preclude a golden future.  That was Awo’s compass to greatness; and that may well be replicated again, if the Buhari reforms succeed, even if Buhari is no philosopher king in the mould of Awo.

But he is as much an ascetic as Awo; and like Awo too,  he towers above his contemporaries with sheer moral authority, powered by unchallenged integrity.

Still, back to the Ekiti-Edo parallel.  In the course of the GO campaign, Lagos Governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, told the story of Lagos; and how everything it has achieved, as the most economically vibrant state in Nigeria, dated back to a solid foundation laid in 1999; and sustained ever since.

Edo, unfortunately, is a diametric opposite.  Under Lucky Igbinedion (1999-2007) there was no foundation.  Just ruthless, ceaseless, soulless looting — so much so that the former governor was tried and convicted for sleaze.  However, in the corrupt spirit of times, he only got a slap on the wrist.

So, if Igbinedion is rightly quoted — that the next Edo governor would emerge from his “political family”, then it is a monumental battery on Nigerians’ collective psyche.  But if Edo, on the eve of a major election, on account of some rage tolerates such tomfoolery, who are outsiders to cry more than the bereaved?

But suffice it to say: with such permissiveness, Edo would appear fated to the Ekiti model of ruin (no thanks to electoral folly); than the Lagos model of boom (thanks to electoral wisdom).  Whichever choice Edo makes would have clear-cut consequences.

Indeed, a politician like Fayemi, victim of bad electoral choices, only grieves for days, or months.  But the people, like the Ekiti, who wilfully bring such choices upon themselves, condemn a generation to avoidable doom.

So Edo, which would it be?

September 28 beckons!

The post Before Edo decides appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

there is an intriguing paradox in the control mix — of power, authority, legitimacy and influence.

Power barks and growls.  Yet, it is the most impotent, of all four, especially  when misapplied.  Influence, on the other hand, is muted.  But when deftly applied, it is the most potent.

Authority and legitimacy, mid-points in the continuum, belong to the realm of delegations.

Authority is the formal seal to wield power, which the ruled invest in the ruler.  Legitimacy is the “holding brief”, which the ruled retain, but are content to lend the ruler, until (s)he starts acting outside the agreed brief.

So, what’s this — some Tuesday morning voyage in power philosophy?

No.  Just clear though disturbing musing on emotive framing of media investigations, when the subject is safeguarding media power and influence.

The specific object of musing is “Recession: Governors lavish billions of Naira on bulletproof cars for selves, wives,” a story published in the Saturday Punch of September 24.

With all due respect to the conceiving and publishing editors, that was one story that could do with more clinical detachment, against base emotional outpouring.

The culprit, it is clear, is the editors’  failure to distinguish between the legitimate duty of the state to secure whoever is governor; and wayward governors that misapply public funds.

“Pouring editorial fire on crooked politicians”, may well be a laudable tradition with the crusading press, dating back to the evolution of the press, as a social cleanser, in the United States and Europe.  But such crusades are driven by facts — hardly on rumours and hearsay.

So, proceeding from a conceptual mix-up to build a sensational reportage on what, at best, even from the story’s offering, was glorified hearsay, borders on nothing but editorial terrorism.

Editorial terrorism abuses public and sacred trust to injure fellow citizens. It is bad for the polity.  It is bad for the media.  It is bad for everyone in the democratic space.

But why this seeming column excoriation of a rival newspaper?  Peer envy, aimed at de-marketing a competitor?  Certainly not.

Abuse of column space, just as Ripples claims the editors did of a sacred trust?  Neither!

The reason, however, is simple, even if the chore is unpleasant: to protect a polity and preserve a legacy.  More presently, on preserving a legacy.

Now, protecting a polity.  In February 1976, a certain Murtala Muhammad, then military head of state, was shot dead in cold blood, at Ikoyi, Lagos. Even with the instinct of a callow secondary school boy back then, Ripples scoffed at Murtala’s rashness as an impulsive messiah.  But many Nigerians roared their approval.

Forty years down the line, Ripples remains unconvinced — and with good hindsight too!  Indeed, even as Murtala’s tactical manoeuvres elicited roaring approval, they condemned vital institutions of state — especially the civil service — to strategic ruin, still plaguing the polity.

Still, Nigerians back then approved, in their thousands.  So, what then might have happened, had the Murtala government taken Gen. Muhammad’s personal security much more professionally?

Perhaps the brave soldier would not have fallen by Buka Sukar Dimka’s subversive bullets.  Perhaps the story of Nigeria would have been entirely different.  Perhaps the present ruins would have been averted.  Perhaps …

A thousand perhaps — and to safeguard only one life — whether in prosperity or adversity!

That single fact underscores the conceptual naivety, with all due respect to the editors, of this Saturday Punch story.  And the ringing illogic: because hunger rules the land, the state must shirk its duty to its high officials!

Besides, which loyal servant of state would disclose strategic information about its fleet of armoured vehicles?

And with scant any authoritative voice, do you now build your story on the soto voce — a story that clearly attempts to criminalize legitimate security spends, on the altar of cheap populism; and demonize governors, many of whom, even among the mentioned, may well be innocent of the charges?

Talking of gubernatorial demonization, the case of The Punch versus Osun Governor, Rauf Aregbesola, bobs up again!  For the umpteenth time, Aregbesola is leaping off the Punch black books!

Now, is the newspaper in earnest this time round? Or is this yet another example of a disturbing pastime of editorial terrorism, against Aregbesola and his government?

When Osun declared the Islamic New Year as work-free — a lawful and legitimate action by the 1999 Constitution — The Punch, in no time, dubbed the governor a gubernatorial mullah.  So did it when Christian-Muslim dispute arose over the hijab, as school uniform complement.

When it was time to demonize a few over the salary crisis — a mere symptom of a grave economic meltdown — the newspaper led the virtual Aregbesola lynch crowd.

Why, even Ben Murray-Bruce, the “common sense” senator from Bayelsa, drove himself into a falsetto, chirping merrily about donating part of his National Assembly bounties to feed starving Osun civil servants!

Now, it so happens: Murray-Bruce’s Bayelsa can’t pay its workers, but good old Benny has lost his sweet voice!  Are there no “starving” civil servants in Bayelsa, and shouldn’t charity begin at home?

Still, in the midst of the economic crisis, it is the much-lampooned Osun that sets the pace for others in social and physical infrastructure, a feat seemingly beyond the reach of even oil-rich Bayelsa!

Now, it is the gubernatorial armoured car campaign!  But given the story’s watery conception, with all due respect, would it be right to suppose it is yet another mega-garb, for the newspaper’s ready victims of editorial terror, among whom Aregbesola is prime candidate?

But why is even this a columnist’s headache, since Ripples is no spokesperson for any of the governors, even if he is, for the umpteenth time defending Aregbesola’s right to media fairness?

That returns the discourse to preserving a legacy.

Since 1859, the Nigerian press has earned a reputation for speaking out against any form of oppression, no matter the Leviathan from which it comes.

James Bright Davies, owner-editor of Nigerian Times (later Times of Nigeria) went to prison twice, for crusading against British colonial greed. That was in the 1910s.

Herbert Macaulay leveraged his Lagos News (later Lagos Daily News) as Lagos natives’ bulwark against colonial oppression, in land and water rate affairs, among many other agitations.  Its audacity soon earned the newspaper the unflattering elite moniker of “Lagos Daily Rag”!  That was in the 1920s.

Much closer, the military era stiff media challenge, against military feudalists, starred the likes of The News, Tell, The Guardian, The Punch itself and National Concord, among others.  All these were well acclaimed epochal feats, for which the Nigerian press earned due plaudits.

It is under this rubric of editorial crusading that The Punch may have positioned its armoured car story — no crime!

But to preserve this great legacy, the newspaper must strive at hard facts.  Otherwise, it risks chipping away at a reputation, built on patent good faith over 157 years, because of conceptual haziness.

Otherwise, the Nigerian press may well resign itself to thrusting raw power but losing real influence.

The post This way for editorial terror? appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

There appears a Samson in the People’s House, a people’s house with nary any people’s sympathy.

And indeed, his warning is dire: if — or more chilling, when — I go down, you all go down with me!  That reminds you of the Samson complex, doesn’t it?

The Biblical Samson, after fondly betraying himself to the sweet laps of Delilah, and got his locks — his power joker — cropped, requested of Jehovah to grant him a last burst of energy, with which he, with his Philistine traducers, would perish.

Jehovah granted his wish.  So, Samson paid for his uxorious folly, while treacherous Delilah and fellow Philistines paid for their perfidy.

Well, embattled Abdulmumin Jibrin was, on September 28, suspended as member of the House of Representatives. Before, as the Yoruba would say, melodious tunes turned subversive proverbs, he was chairman, House Appropriation Committee.  But now, in a testy atmosphere of legislative combat, he recalls that Samson misadventure.

And the legislator,  from Kiru/Bebeji federal constituency of Kano, doesn’t seem to particularly care if the House — which appears rather to stink — sinks with him: he that openly admits he is no moral paragon!

Talk of a neo-Samson of the House of Representatives power politics!

You still doubt?  Then, just listen to these rather damning allegations, against the House leadership, majority and minority — all have sinned, and fallen short of the glory of God fashion!  It had to do with alleged “running costs”.

If Jibrin’s allegations are true, it would appear a rather sickening bazaar out there, in the people’s house — even as the people themselves pine.

It would appear a legislative equivalent of a fattening pastor tending a wilting flock of congregants!

The allegations, with ‘Samson’ Jibrin first admitting his own folly.  As chair, House Appropriation Committee, he admitted collecting N650 million as “running costs”.  His committee is accused of orchestrating the alleged padding of the 2015 federal budget, by the House of Representatives.

On that, however, Jibrin would appear in vile but unfazed company, given the running costs attached to the offices of the principal officers.

The specific allegations, on alleged “running cost” payouts, are the following:  the Speaker (N1.5 billion), Deputy Speaker (N800 million), House Majority Leader (N1.2 billion), Deputy House Majority Leader (N1.2 billion), House Whip (N1.2 billion), Deputy House Whip (N700 million), House Minority Leader (N800 million), House Minority Whip (N700 million) and Deputy Minority Whip (N700 million).

But as the mind tries to fend off the shock, as too surreal to be true, Jubril enters a most chilling sign-off: “I have documents to back up all these”!

Now, could these allegations be true?  The investigating authorities have to find out.

But even at this preliminary stage, Ripples cannot escape that disturbing feeling of a schizophrenic administration: a disciplined and earnest-sounding presidency that wants to make things right; but a wayward and greedy legislature, that won’t lose its sleep, it appears, even if things go awry.

Throw in a neither-nor judiciary, of which some key members, even by National Judicial Council (NJC) findings, are nothing but abominable soldiers of fortune bivouacked on the Bench.  What you get is a most unflattering situation of contemporary Nigeria!

Yet, it would be fatal to just fold hands and continue lamenting in despair.  Something urgent — and tough — must be done to stop these alleged misconducts.

That brings the discourse to the House of Representatives’ reaction to the Jubrin allegations.

It is rich indeed, that a House, which risks ripping, almost beyond repair,  whatever remains of its corporate image, if Jibrin’s allegations are true, has reacted with a fist of mail.

That would appear an institutional equivalent of one person shouting the other down and threatening to destroy him, simply because he risks losing a well-marshalled argument.

Indeed, suspending the crusading member,  would not banish the damaging allegations.  It would only give them a life of their own, as too many Nigerians — poor folks —are just too ready to believe the worst about their own government.

So, the mail-fisted approach would only lionize Jubrin but demonize the House as an entity.  And if the allegations are empty?  That would be double jeopardy!  People would ask, and not without reason, why was the House cracking down, if it had nothing to hide on those allegations?

Why, by moving fast to lock up Jubrin’s office, someone, somewhere had a satanic sense of humour — for the abiding image appears barring the doors, when the damning facts had escaped!

You could, of course, say the House suspended Jubrin after due process, the member having shunned the Ethics and Privileges Committee, set up look into his alleged conduct.

But even that would appear to smack of cover-up, since the Committee’s terms of reference was clearly Jubrin’s audacity to accuse the House of wrong-doings, not looking into the alleged misconducts, from a neutral and dispassionate point of view.  But all that is sub-judice now, since the member has sued.

Still, another matter ought to be tested in the courts, the bit of suspending erring House members, with all due respect to  rights and privileges of members.

Where does the House’s privileges end, as against the right of an erring member to represent his or her constituents?  And which of these two chain of rights is more basic — the one, an institutional convention; the other, a constitutional mandate?

In other words, can a legislature legally and legitimately banish constituency representation in parliament, simply because it found a member guilty of some affront against the House?  Can it do this without breaching the grund norm, on which itself is hinged?

In this specific case of Abudlmumin Jibrin.  The man was elected to represent the  Kiru/Bebeji federal constituency of Kano.  Now, for alleged slight against the House, he has been suspended for 180 legislative days — a whole legislative year.

For allegedly breaching “the practices and precedents of the House of Representatives”, he is even sentenced to apologizing to the House — failure of which could mean another extension of the ban?

So, for Jibrin’s alleged offences, a House which is essentially a chamber of equals, can deny Jibrin’s constituents their Constitution-guaranteed representation, while preserving the rights of other constituents nationwide?

Where indeed does the right of the House stop and where do citizen’s right to be represented in parliament, as stipulated by the Constitution, begin?  And again, which of these two rights is more basic?

This polity sure needs a legal interpretation on this matter.

Meanwhile, the Samson shake-down in the House of Representatives is not necessarily bad for the polity.  Indeed, for a jurisdiction struggling to regain its moral compass, it is good.

So, Ripples would not be fazed, were Jubrin to politically perish with Speaker Yakubu Dogara, and others mentioned in the alleged insensitive scam.  If the National Assembly had bred itself on wrong political socialization, of unconscionably gulping the people’s money, this collapse is as good as any to wean it to the straight-and-narrow path, of national salvation.

That is why the Jubrin suspension grandstanding would just not do.  What to do is thoroughly investigate the charges and punish the guilty.”

The post Samson in the House appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

It doesn’t get more chastening — does it? — the portrait of a justice of the law as an alleged rogue!

That jars on the very fundament of cultured society.

And it doesn’t get more damning for civil society architecture — herding justices of the courts (including the Supreme Court) into detention, with alleged smoking guns, after a sting operation, by the secret police.

Neither does it get more troubling: a governor — and a lawyer to boot! — dramatically speaking, hopping off the bed to block the arrest of a judge, alleged to have soiled his hands; and judge and governor allegedly conspiring to trot away vital evidence!

His Excellency and His Lordship at a conspiracy?

Besides, what is the nexus between the two — the one, enjoying legal immunity because his high office is supposed to be above board; the other, enjoying other constitutional privileges, because he is deemed an immaculate priest in the temple of justice?

Did one illicitly aid the other, the past favour the beneficiary now returns, in his benefactor’s day of woe?

So, if both shirk their responsibilities, can they, in all good conscience, hold on to the privileges, despite extant laws?

The extant laws!  Yes, for that is where a party, in the emerging macabre drama, could be accused of resorting to self-help.  In arresting the judges,  DSS has been accused of “Gestapo tactics”.

On this score, the gubernatorial case is clear-cut.  So long as he is in office, a governor enjoys immunity against criminal prosecution.  But does that allow him the laxity to indulge in alleged criminal behaviour?

The judge’s?  Less so.  True, there are stated procedures to discipline an erring judge; and in fairness, the National Judicial Council (NJC) has latterly gone on the offensive to discipline some of such judges.

Still, is there anything in the law that expressly forbids arresting and docking a judge, beyond the constitutional refinements of channelling grievances through the NJC, the Areopagus of judicial cleansing?

Experts must provide specific answers to these questions to guide the polity, in these very unusual times!

Jesus, the Christ, famously rued: my father’s house of worship has become a den of thieves!

With this alleged governor-judge conspiracy, therefore, has Nigeria’s shrine of government become captive to a concert of executive and judicial rogues?

And why a sting operation?  Is the Nigerian judiciary so much beyond redemption, in its alleged gobbling of sleaze, that even constitutional provisions to punish judges are so effete and ineffectual, hence this shock therapy?

Shock therapy!  Will it achieve the desired purpose, teach the right lessons and send errant rats scampering into the hole?

Or will it develop a life of its own, like some earthquake that could swallow the society, as we know it today?

Questions, questions, questions!

But instead of clear and dispassionate answers, it is the tragedy of contemporary Nigeria that everyone is diving into this troubling pool of high scandal; and pressing their constitutional right to an emotional splash.

For starters, the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) is flexing what its president calls a “judicial emergency”.

There are also threats.  Thundered Abubakar Mahmud, SAN, NBA president, backed by a “war council” of four former NBA presidents, Wole Olanipekun, SAN, Olisa Agbakoba, SAN, J.B. Daudu, SAN and Augustine Alegeh, SAN: “I’ll be meeting with the CJN later tonight or tomorrow. There will be consequences,” he warned, “if these demands are not met.”

The NBA stance is understandable, given the Bar-Bench esprit de corps.  However, whether it should be less combative and more calculative boils down to tactics and strategies it has decided to apply.

Since it has first-hand information about the matter, at least much more than the general public whose sympathy it is trying to rally, it is only reasonable to respect its stance.

Still, that bit on later meeting with the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), and threatening “consequences”, should the government not accede to its demands, border on the reckless, with all due respect.

For starters, that puts the CJN on the spot.  However the NBA wants to engage the CJN, it should have kept to its chest; and not blabbed to the public.

The NBA is, of course, entitled to its formalistic and legalistic view, which from its tone, presumes the arrests were to “intimidate the judiciary”.  But shouldn’t it have been a bit more nuanced about it all?

What if DSS’s claims are proven, that the arrested judges were caught with some humongous cash in varied currencies, after a sting operation possibly after a tip-off, would the NBA not draw the CJN into unfair controversy, about using his office to shield corrupt elements in the judiciary?

Would that not eventually weaken the CJN’s position, in the delicate balance of state power?

The late Sabo Bakin Zuwo was a 2nd Republic Kano governor, accused of criminally warehousing public funds.  The press, ever so mischievous, dubbed him “Banking Zuwo”, after a devastating pun of his name.

So, with alleged “Banking Zuwo” judges, can the NBA, or the CJN for that matter, beyond obdurate legalism, defend the conduct of judges allegedly warehousing huge cash at home, when they are not some illiterate Idumota traders mortally scared of the banking system?  What, by the way, might their motive be?

Bakin Zuwo, of course, echoes a parallel in 1984, after the Buhari military regime had overthrown the Shehu Shagari 2nd Republic presidency (1979-1983).  It clamped most of the politicians in detention, and set up special tribunals to try the “corrupt” politicians.

Just like now back then, NBA kicked — and to be fair, there were genuine fears those tribunals would not dispense justice.  Even then, the late Gani Fawehinmi broke ranks.

Now, Femi Falana, SAN, is breaking ranks (claiming NBA, by its stand, risks protecting “corrupt judges”) — and, truth be told, the NBA would appear on more slippery grounds than it was in 1984.

With all of these, can the NBA really afford to go toe-to-toe with the state, without risking its own integrity?  That is why NBA should show more wisdom than bellicosity.

Of course, the human rights army has also weighed in with the ogre of looming dictatorship, claiming humiliating judges was tantamount to endangering democracy.

That might well be.  But what if the judges first humiliated the law, by betraying their sacred oath?  Besides, “humiliating the judiciary”, on account of a few indicted judges, is hot but empty  gas.

A few illicit judges cannot seek licit cover under the decent majority.  Indeed, keeping those bad judges humiliates the good ones.

However, even the  Buhari Presidency must admit the sting operation, against the  judges, was nothing short of revolutionary.  So, DSS had better possess the evidences it claims it possesses.  Otherwise, it just might be the government’s last-ever romance with civil society.

However the case pans out, the roiling notion of his Lordship, the Judge, as a thief should churn the tummy of everyone.

So, whatever the posturing and counter-posturing, as both sides bluff and bluster, such a decadent judiciary should worry everyone.

This is why Nigerians should navigate this sorry pass with more sobriety, and less grandstanding.

The post His Lordship, the rogue? appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

Just as well Edo has spurned a return to Eygpt, typified by the Lucky Igbinedion rot years (1999-2007); for a promise of Jerusalem, founded on the Adam Oshimhole years (2008-2016).

That is what it ought to be — for the electorate, if they were not to embrace self-ruin, must exercise the vote with reason.

The Edo electorate, by voting Godwin Obaseki, the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate, over Osagie Ize-Iyamu, of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), seemed to have done just that.

But that is not always given, with the Ekiti experience.

Ekiti purportedly — purportedly because, latter information suggests that  poll was manipulated by the then extant powers — jettisoned the noble exertion of the Kayode Fayemi years, for a journey to nowhere, which Ayodele Fayose’s present government-by-impulse suggests.

Indeed, between Adams Oshimhole and Kayode Fayemi, there are many parallels — beyond the fact that the one was pushing a protégée to succeed him after his constitutional limit of eight years; the other was seeking reelection after a first four-year term of hard and noble work.

Like Fayemi, Oshiomhole was adjudged, at least going by disinterested verdicts, to have done stellar work, after previous years of uninterrupted ruin — good work that presaged exciting new promises.

But like Fayemi too, Oshiomhole had an Achilles’ heel.

In Fayemi, it was a distant, elitist persona that, though taciturn, hardly suffered fools gladly.  With razor-sharp intellect, he was Plato’s philosophical king looming over his commune of bemused country yokels.

On the eve of a crucial election, therefore, he got a millstone of “arrogance” hung on his neck.  He was fated to sink in the electoral stream — and he did.

In Oshiomhole, it was a razor-sharp tongue and devastating wit that took no prisoners.  Though puny of frame, not a few perceive him as the human equivalent of the belching battle tank, firing from all cylinders; and mowing down whoever is on its way.

And you can’t even bet which is more lethal: his prowess-at-war; or the ultra-painful sting of his post-war whoops!

To the Tony Anenihs and Igbinedions — father and son — of this world, the post-victory whoop was ringing and clear: we have tamed, slain and buried the godfathers!

To Osagie Ize-Iyamu, a former protégée turned opponent, a most provocative challenge: hurry to court so I can prove your purported vote tally is a grand farce.  You’re just incapable of harvesting such number of votes!

The outgoing Comrade-Governor is a great talker, to whom piercing wit and searing gloating are game. But while people in his camp lustfully roar as he lands his verbal bazookas, those at the receiving end resent him to the death; and are sworn to unhorsing him as spectacularly as he had verbally bombarded them.

That was the grim danger in the Edo election.  At a point, like Fayemi in Ekiti, Oshiomhole’s great strides (in stark contrast to the near-paralysis of the Igbinedion years) was counting for near-nothing on the explosively emotive street.

That suited the Edo PDP fine — anything that would divert attention from their own ruinous rule, when state resources were the exclusive pleasure of godfathers and their cronies.

Like Ekiti too, Edo was almost condemned to a wilful embrace of its political nemesis, so much so that, at a point, Lucky Igbinedion, convicted for sleaze, was even bragging the next governor (read Mr.Ize-Iyamu) would emerge from his political family!

If that had happened, that would have replicated Ekiti, where the people, at least by the result of that controversial election, merrily re-embraced Ayodele Fayose, a past ruin come to plague the present, and poison the future.

You doubt that claim?  Just review Fayose’s infantile stunts since his second coming, the latest of which is his no-brainer that the 21 Chibok girls, just released from Boko Haram captivity, werePresident Buhari’s perfect ploy to deflect attention from the pains in the land!

But Edo didn’t choose the Ekiti option.  By voting Godwin Obaseki, they chose the Lagos option of sustained development, that could only lead to prosperity.

The Lagos experience started in 1999, under Governor Bola Tinubu. Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, built on that foundation.  Now, Akinwunmi Ambode is doing so.

So, 17 years down the line — and still counting — the Lagos experience has become a national showcase.

That could be the fate of Edo, but only if Mr. Obaseki stays focused on a strict and rigorous developmental agenda.

For the first time in Edo history, a “progressive” agenda would power the state for at least 12 years, and if Mr. Obaseki wins reelection, 16 years.  That has never happened.

In 1963, when the then Midwestern Region (now Edo and Delta states) was carved from the old West, the progressive Action Group gave way to the centrist National Convention of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC).  That was a development stall, for the new NCNC government could not match the old AGgovernment’s huge investment on social and physical infrastructure.

In 1983, the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) electorally torpedoed the Ambrose Alli Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) governorship (1979-1983).

And in the aborted 3rd Republic, Social Democratic Party (SDP) Governor John Odigie-Oyegun (now APC national chairman) left office in November 1993, after the Babangida transition programme collapsed, under the weight the June 12, 1993 presidential annulment crisis.  That was just 22 months, out of a 48-month tenure, barring reelection.

Indeed, before the Oshiomhole years, conservative or centrist-leaning parties (witness NCNC, NPN, National Republican Convention and PDP) had cumulatively exercised power longer than progressive-leaning parties (AG, UPN, SDP, Action Congress of Nigeria and APC), with PDP’s Igbinedion enjoying the longest stretch of eight straight years; plus 17 months of illicit rule before the election tribunals voided Prof. Oserheimen Osunbor’s election in November 2008, to make way for Governor Oshiomhole.

Contrast that to Lagos’ near-uninterrupted progressive rule: AG, UPN, SDP, Alliance for Democracy, Action Congress, ACN and APC and it could be validly argued that Lagos has gained far more from its progressive-leaning parties than Edo, with its centrist-conservative-progressive mishmash.

Indeed, Asiwaju Tinubu’s reengineering of the Lagos government, with all its proven developmental wonder, was built on the earlier foundation of the Lateef Jakande years, and the AG thinking that weaned Lagos from NCNC dominance, in the Lagos Town (later City) Council politics.

It could be validly argued that Nigeria is evolving into an ideological-neuter zone, with little definitive difference between political parties.

That might well be. But that is strictly from an ideologue’s point of view. From a pragmatist’s perspective, progressive-leaning parties (cant and all) would appear more development-savvy than their conservative and centrist-leaning cousins.

That is the legacy Mr. Obaseki is buying into.  That is why he must, in policy, be even morerigorous and focused than Mr. Oshiomhole; but in politics, much less controversial.

Lest again, in the next season of elections, his opponents try to beam more on his perceived personal failings, in the cynical hope that would eclipse his stellar work as governor.

He owes Edo that much, if he performs well in his gubernatorial tour of duty.

The post Between Edo and Ekiti appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

From an initial thunder of “judicial emergency”, the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) is softening its war cry.  It now wants judges, accused of corrupt practices, to recuse themselves, until they clear their names.

That is tribute to common sense.

But not so from the National Judicial Council (NJC) war room.  That body seems fated, with all due respect, to that cynical old quip: those the gods would destroy, they first confound!

In that rarefied NJC chamber, scoffing down from the clouds at the unlearned hoi polloi on the dusty streets, stubborn procedure must trump common sense.

That fixation with technicality is clear hubris, which may yet prove fatal for the  NJC brand integrity.

That was clear from its stonewalling — not entirely unreasonable — of the Department of State Services, DSS’s rather cheeky call on NJC to “suspend” judges it is accusing of sleaze.

NJC was right to bristle: if DSS could go solo, and with satanic gusto, jettisoning constitutionally stipulated procedures on disciplining errant judges, why doesn’t it complete its solo demolition run?

The DSS Leviathan doesn’t need NJC’s puny powers to suspend anyone, does it?  Perfect sarcasm!

Still, it would be extremely reckless, with all due respect, for NJC to spurn the NBA-offered soft-landing.

For one, the NBA suggestion gives the judiciary the opportunity to regain a moral high ground.  What is more?  NJC would suspend nobody; and would continue to hold DSS in high judicial contempt its hurt soul now needs for mental balance.

Yet, the accused judges would graciously stay off, pending their days in court, as they would in any civil community.  The onus would now be on DSS to prove its allegations, thus defanging the so-called trial by the media.

For another, the initiative would have been the judiciary’s.  That would send the message that though it would resist — to the death, if necessary — the DSS’s alleged jungle methods, it would not condone any judicial corruption.

But by its response to the NBA pitch, it would appear clear the NJC would rather, parodying English Poet, John Milton in Paradise Lost, rule by its stubborn procedure in hell, rather serve with it in heaven!

If you think the heaven-hell comparison is extreme, just take a glimpse at the judicial netherworld NJC, by its stubborn insistence on procedure, is pushing.

It would not suspend judges, because DSS usurped procedure by its sensational arrests.  Neither would it hearken NBA’s plea that the accused judges recuse themselves.

So, blimey!  His Lordship, accused of graft, arrogantly sits in judgment over others, in a sensational case of an alleged felon trying another alleged felon!

If that is not the eminent judicial disgrace — and ruin — NJC is fleeing from, it is hard to contemplate a worse equivalent!

Adegoke Adelabu, had he lived in these troubling times, would simply have snorted:  a judicial peculiar mess! To which his doting Ibadan country yokels would have roared, “judisia pen-kele-meeesssssiiiiiiiiii!”, with a few even attempting a yodel, in the hilarious hubbub of the moment!

It is that peculiar mess of history that the contemporary judiciary (perhaps without fully realizing it) is grappling with.

If the NJC must be fair to themselves, they must ask when the Nigerian Judiciary cascaded from the Mount Olympus of honour, to the Hades of disgrace, to borrow an illustration from Greek mythology.

A proud national institution that earned near-universal acclaim with the likes of Taslim Elias, Chukwudifu Oputa, aka Socrates, Kayode Esho, Daddy Onyeama, Udo Udoma and Akinola Aguda (all of blessed memories) now diminuted to the grim conclave of what Justice Esho called “billionaire judges”, allegedly trading Justice — or more correctly, injustice — to the highest bidder!

Remember that biblical racket, that riled the meek Christ Jesus to ire?  My father’s house of worship has become a den of thieves!

Just replace, with the NJC, Pharisees and Sadducees and the colluding high priests feeding fat from that holy racket, and contemporary Nigerian judiciary may well find itself in that holy company of the Jews of yore!

Yet, let no one, in romanticizing the past, be deceived that the judiciary had always been perceived spotless — at least by those in the unlearned streets, that neither knew law nor procedure.

CJN Adetokunbo Ademola virtually made the law an ass for the ruling establishment to spur as they wished.   So,  when in 1967, he championed a National Conciliation Committee to fend off war — a noble enterprise — voices across the Nigeria-Biafra divide rejected him as a credible voice for mediation.

Forty-nine years later, his grandson is one of the judges in the eye of the DSS storm.  If the allegations are proved, would it be from alleged personal failings? Or the case of the Biblical fathers eating sour grapes but setting their children’s teeth on edge?

Justice Elias was razor-sharp, both as lawyer and CJN.  But as Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa’s attorney-general and Justice minister, he midwifed, on 29 November 1960 in the House of Representatives,  the parliamentary canonization of the legal voodoo that in 1962 supplanted the West, under the guise of a dubious emergency.  That proved the beginning of the end for the 1st Republic.

Ironically, the “Elias solution” — searching for CJN, outside the Supreme Court’s present hierarchy, hangs like a sword of Damocles.

The “weight of evidence” himself, the irreplaceable FRA Williams, SAN, would at dawn take a brief from Satan but balance it out at dusk with a brief from Christ and claim, in all honesty and integrity, he was bound by the lawyer’s creed!

His opponents, particularly the equally irrepressible Gani Fawehinmi, SAN, SAM, did not like it.  But almost everyone agreed his motives were anything but robust fidelity to the law, even it became a bully crushing morality.

That was the law yesterday, warts and all.  Still, the public perception of it was a great national enterprise which though imperfect, held humanly promises — profound promises founded on robust erudition and near-celestial integrity.

The law today would appear the diametrical opposite.  Despite stellar though quiet work by probably a majority of Nigerian justices and lawyers, the overwhelming public perception is the Bench is yet another conclave of hustlers.  And that the Bar is not exactly aghast at that unholy racket.

Help, the ghosts of Esho’s “billionaire judges” are haunting the hallowed chamber, and are fast turning it a hollow shell!

That is the heavy burden of history the present generation NJC and NBA carry.  You don’t discharge that by instinctively raising a flag of solidarity, and stonewalling grave allegations with “defending the judiciary”.

Corrupt judges are a scourge to justice, much more than any arbitrary DSS action, no matter how brazen.  And if justice departs from the judiciary, what is left?

If that thinking necessitated NBA’s softening rhetoric, it is hugely welcome — but much more to the judiciary themselves.

But when would the NJC wake up and, as the Americans would say, smell the coffee?

Maybe when, to parody Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the hurly-burly is done, when the battle is lost and won!

The post NBA, NJC and the burden of history appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

It has been unceasing bedlam from the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) — unceasing bedlam that suggests unceasing dissonance.

A grave dissonance that paints two armies, locked under the same command, but sworn to a fight-to-finish, from which no soul might survive.

But that ode to unbridled anger automatically shutters the grand significance of the electoral breakthrough of 28 March 2015, starting from the North Vs West no-retreat-no-surrender temper of the Obafemi Awolowo era; to the hideous stalemate of the June 12, 1993 presidential election annulment.

That annulment consumed both MKO Abiola (the winner) and Sani Abacha (the usurper); but relegated Ibrahim Babangida (the “annular”) into something of the living dead, in Nigeria’s hurly-burly politics of endless conspiracies.

Such muddying up of waters is fine by the heinous characters, plotting and scheming to ship-wreck the state for personal fortune.

But it would be plain catastrophe for those in the opposite camp, clearing the perpetual mess, a camp which incidentally both President Muhammadu Buhari and Asiwaju Bola Tinubu belong.

So, if the APC work themselves into an explosive emotional lather, that suggests intra-party reasoning has imploded.  That is bad news; which sketches a party on a merry voyage to self-ruin.

But make no mistake.  Were Ripples to weigh in, on any side of the reported principal disputants of Buhari and Tinubu, his sympathies would be with Tinubu.

The reason is simple.  Given the stupendous powers of the Nigerian presidency, Tinubu is the clear underdog.  Besides, a detached interpretation of the emerging facts, about the dispute, shows Tinubu as the wronged party.

Worse: most of the wrongs would appear to stem from the sheer ingratitude to deny and undermine Tinubu his true place in the APC triumph, and the subsequent sharing of political spoils.

Yet, Ripples’ thinking would be much more strategic than raw anger, to willy-nilly tear down the 2015 alliance. Neither Buhari nor Tinubu would benefit from that.

Of course, when unflagging emotion rules, mischief and sheer folly leap in.  That perhaps explains why a Bukola Saraki lobby would, in a piece written by Abdulwahab Oba, chief press secretary to Kwara Governor, Abdulfattah Ahmed (‘Many troubles of the ruling party’,  The Nation,  October 27), would equate Saraki’s perfidy against his party for personal gain, with Tinubu’s intra-APC odyssey.

An enemy of my enemy is my friend may well be an unfazed Machiavellian quip.  But the Oba piece was amity-in-grudges pushed too far.

While the Saraki misadventure draws odium to itself by its sheer perfidy, the Tinubu challenge draws sympathy by the essential fairness of its claim.  Let no one mix up the two.

The emotive opportunism from the Saraki camp also draws attention to the rather revealing profile of Tinubu’s latter-day supporters in this new campaign: the Afenifere old guard, the Femi twain of Fani-Kayode and Aribisala, a pair that guns for raw emotions, doubly sure their victims are unthinking robots, if not outright zombies; and of course, the unfazed champion of gubernatorial push-and-shove, Ekiti’s Ayodele Fayose, who with every second, continues to blight the high office of governor.

Of these latter-day Tinubu friends, perhaps only the Afenifere old guard could claim something of a Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, who committed himself to slaying Caesar not because he hated his bosom friend, but because he loved Rome!

Even then, Afenifere would appear driven by the same philosophy as the so-called Buhari cabal: primordial distrust, ogling ethnic nationalism, bordering on ethnic irredentism. That is bad for all.

The others in the assemblage?  Equal-opportunity mischief merchants, that thrive only in confusion.  Throw in the vitriol the Fani-Kayodes, the Aribisalas and the Fayoses hauled at the enterprise of 28 March 2015, and you probably would figure out their base motives, by this new-found solidarity.

Which is why the Buhari and Tinubu camps must pause, eschew whatever bitterness plaguing their hearts and constructively engage each other.  This battle is theirs to lose — and lose they will, if they don’t immediately wear their cap of vigorous thinking.

That brings the subject back to the Awo and Tinubu era in Nigerian politics, using June 12 as mid-point.

To start with, June 12 demonstrated — and conclusively too — the utter futility of any segment of Nigeria essaying a domination agenda. Yes, Babangida pulled off his annulment crime. MKO — and wife, Kudi — died without consummating his presidency.  And Abacha perished in sleaze.

But what did that yield those rascals that hid behind the ‘North’ to perpetuate that evil?  A capitulation six years after in 1999, that returned Olusegun Obasanjo, defeating another Yoruba son, Olu Falae, just to appease the MKO injustice.

That should be serious food-for-thought for the so-called cabal allegedly hiding behind Buhari to clip Tinubu’s wings; and erecting malicious blocks between the two, for personal and ethnic gains.

By the way, that experiment from 1999, no matter how imperfect, has not only birthed Nigeria’s first minority President, Goodluck Jonathan, whose presidential ruin is best forgotten; it has also delivered the defeat of a federal ruling party, in the landmark election of 2015, despite the unconscionable dollar-rain and sundry subterfuge, by the then extant powers.

However, the alliance lined up behind Tinubu, eager to smash the progress he and Buhari have chalked, also needs some historical checks.

Sir Ahmadu Bello, the late Sardauna of Sokoto and premier of the 1st Republic Northern Region, was quoted to have sworn to dip the Koran into the Nigerian southern sea.  Even if that quote was apocryphal, conquest was perhaps the only world the Sardauna knew, being the scion of the Usman Dan Fodio Islamic conquest of the much of Nigeria’s North.

But he was historically matched by Chief Obafemi Awolowo, whose counter-world was freedom, since bar slave trade and British colonization, his  Ijebu people were never captives to any other peoples.

That shaped the Awo no-retreat-no-surrender temper of the 1st Republic.  The tragic push to alter that balance, by a parliamentary forgery that created a phoney Western emergency, led to the crash of the 1st Republic.

Now, that collapse offers two valid lessons.  First, the Tinubu protégées in Abuja, and top APC hierarchs, friends turned alleged foes, would do well to remember the tragic fate of Chief SLA Akintola.

The Yoruba world may have changed drastically between 1962 and 2016. But little has changed in the Yoruba psyche’s zero tolerance for perfidy, particularly when the victim is perceived right and just.

That canonized Awo.  It may yet canonize Tinubu.  But the Yoruba can do without new age SLAs, for aside from his rankling political memory, SLA was among the brightest and best of his era.

Then, the Afenifere foes-turned-friends.  They were so bitter about Tinubu’s bold entente that made APC a reality, and landed Buhari the presidency.  However, they now are near-rabid in their Tinubu support.

Still, they must admit some fixation with the past, which Tinubu broke to achieve the 2015 breakthrough — an entente that, other things being equal, promised some pan-Nigeria rapprochement.

Buhari and Tinubu must lock themselves up somewhere and talk.

Lest the ongoing conspiracies, of subversive love and base motives across the aisle, smash what they have worked extra-hard to build.

The post From Awo to Tinubu appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

The November 26 poll in Ondo State is just another ritual, in the cycle of gubernatorial elections.

But its build-up is cresting in some high-octane action cinema sans the celluloid, with no less than three riveting plots rolled into one.

Part of the sub-plots is history repeating itself without exploding in a farce.  But already, one historical parallel has popped up in smoke.

The fate of the other is left in the womb of time.  Delivery date?  Latest November 26.

Governor Segun Mimiko, undisputed master of political gaming for ultra-selfish ends, was the first to tempt fate.  He wanted history to repeat itself, in a classical study of the gambit as political grandstanding.

No sooner had the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) replaced Eyitayo Jegede, SAN, with Jimoh Ibrahim, as the Ondo Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) governorship candidate, than, open sesame, Ondo “burnt”!   At least, that was the media cliché, reporting the Akure dawn excitement of burnt tyres and ruptured transit.

That was enough motivation for Mimiko, doting and patriotic governor, to scurry off on a presidential mission to save Ondo State: Muhammadu Buhari, the commander-in-chief, must ensure Ondo didn’t burn.

Mimiko’s sinister reference was the 1983 gubernatorial-robbery-gone-awry gambit of the late Akin Omoboriowo and his National Party of Nigeria (NPN) doomed apostles of federal might. That set the old Ondo State (now Ondo and Ekiti states) ablaze, and eventually torched the 2nd Republic (1979-1983) to hell.

Perhaps the dramatic gamer in Mimiko was even posturing with the classics of Nigerian electoral mayhem, the 1964/1965 “Operation Wetie”, in the “wild, wild West”.   That checkmated the Demo (Nigerian National Democratic Party) electoral robbers. But it also took down the 1st Republic (1960-1966) with it.

But alas!  It all ended a damp squib — tinder that never was.  Somewhat, the intelligence agencies busted the blaze; and claimed it was allegedly contrived, by the same patriots frantically calling the fire service!

History just repeated itself as farce!

Incidentally, Mimiko is also embedded in the second essay at history repeat, this time by Olusola Oke, ex-PDP, ex-APC but now proud Alliance for Democracy (AD) candidate.

When in 2007, the 2003 Mimiko-Agagu sweet song of political treachery turned hideous proverbs, Mimiko annexed the Labour Party (LP) as electoral platform.

With that, he sacked the late Segun Agagu from the Alagbaka State House, despite a hideous rigging, even if that victory came only after months of fierce legal battles.

Now, with Oke dumping the All Progressives Congress (APC) and birthing in AD — no thanks to a disputed primary where Oke came third behind winner, Rotimi Akeredolu, SAN, and runner-up, Segun Abraham — Oke is somewhat hopeful of replicating the Mimiko 2007 formula, of mounting a Lilliputian platform, to trounce mighty Gullivers, just to make the point treachery-induced doom is no respecter of party might.

You could even add: AD, Oke’s pick, is at best a sleeping volcano, much potentially stronger, in the Yoruba South West, than an LP would ever be.  Everything: Action Congress, Action Congress of Nigeria and APC, started here from AD.

So, might Oke be playing the AD card, as alpha-and-omega, to thrash Jegede, Mimiko’s protégée and Akeredolu, the scion of the federal ruling APC?

An Oke triumph comes with rich symbolism.  For starters, an AD victory would eternally mock Mimiko’s perfidy against the late Adebayo Adefarati, the Ondo AD governor (1999-2003), who had Mimiko in his cabinet as Health commissioner.

Mimiko broke ranks to cut a better deal for self, by defecting to Agagu’s PDP, to become Agagu’s secretary to Ondo State Government.  But by 2007, that sweetheart deal had turned ashen, replicating Mimiko’s umpteenth betrayal of former collaborators for personal gains.

Again, an Oke triumph would push the narrative that even Abuja bows, when there is a South West resolve.  The AD symbolism, in it, would be especially sweet for South West ultra-nationalists.

They would crow that the tactical AD routing of 2003 (no thanks to Olusegun Obasanjo’s well reported electoral double-cross of the then AD South West governors) is, in 2016, resulting in a strategic triumph, with the Ondo AD vanquishing both APC and PDP — one, the current federal ruling party, the other, the former one.

In Oke, is Mimiko’s history about to repeat itself against Mimiko?  Wait until November 26 to be sure it’s no farce!

That brings the discourse to the last of the triple plots in this engaging gubernatorial drama: Akeredolu, the APC candidate.  Even in this third leg of the plot, the Iroko is rooted!

The last time round, Akeredolu aka Aketi, was the chief beneficiary of a process at which he now rails and howls — that little matter of intra-party candidate imposition, by which he clinched the  2012 Ondo ACN ticket.

Back then, this same Mimiko proved his nemesis by playing the primordial card, of some fictive foreign marauders coming to corner the Ondo treasury, should Akeredolu win.  But with the Iroko’s terrible devaluation in street value four years later, what happened?  Did Ondo native marauders clean out the Ondo exchequer?

The Ondo APC crisis, you must recall, started with Bola Tinubu’s reported “endorsement” of Segun Abraham (hardly a crime, but clearly impolitic).

Aketi screamed “imposition”, which it was not, though the Abraham campaign received a clear boost, and the Akeredolu camp felt disadvantaged.  Then came insane threats and juvenile boasts, from the Aketi camp, that would almost always win the war but never secure the peace.

Then the Aketi primary election triumph, which soon turned ashen, no thanks to allegations of delegate fiddling — allegations strong enough to warrant a reported 3-2 split decision, by the APC appeal body, to order a fresh re-run, which the APC National Working Committee (NWC) vetoed.

That made Oke to scurry to AD.  Although Robert Borrofice, another top primary contender has reconciled with Aketi, Abraham maintains a no-retreat-no-surrender posture.  That can hurt no one but his APC.

And horror of horrors!  The Ondo imbroglio triggered the Tinubu riot act — sack John Odigie-Oyegun, APC national chairman, or else!  But that threat Abuja seems to have rebuffed, leaving the ruling APC in a present limbo of what it was against what it would be.

Meanwhile, Akeredolu has an election to win.  And he would appear well and truly fortified by his coalition.

Snag is, with the Jimoh Ibrahim aka Atiba threat to the Jegede PDP candidacy, a desperate Iroko is back to his default setting of cutting a deal with just anyone, including Lucifer!

Meanwhile, the ideological-neuter Oke goes on a grand blitz of milking AD’s primordial “progressive” value, in concert with his own reportedly rather high street presence.

So, to win, can the Aketi coalition hold — or will they melt, when the chips are down, not unlike the three witches of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, whose solid-seeming assurances went up in pure smoke, as Birnam Wood “moved” to Dunsinane; and Macduff, not “born of woman”, eventually emerged to slay Macbeth?

Ripples is back at the observatory, watching this gripping movie.  Game on, folks!  Absolute silence and no disturbance, please!

The post Ondo and the tinder that wasn’t appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

Just as well Himself the Osoko, Ayodele Fayose, has mouthed his usual “plebeian-nity” on the Donald Trump upset in the American presidential election of November 8.

“It is … a turning point for Nigeria and Nigerians, particularly those controlling the federal government that must change their ways as their allies who imposed them on us just lost out,” he gloated.  “Most importantly, President Barrack Obama got what he did to Dr. Goodluck Jonathan.”

As apt as a butcher jiving on the latest high-tech surgery, isn’t it?

And pray, what did Obama do to Jonathan?  Voted with Nigerians to throw out that un-presidential disaster?   Or conspired to “rig the polls” against Jonathan,  as Trump, Third World gift to America, would have mouthed?

Only in Fayoseland of vile demagoguery and mischief, powered by sweet ignorance!

Besides, the Fayose triumphalism — over nothing, really — is not unexpected.  What did Awo say?  Only the deep can call to the deep!  But flip that:  only the shallow can call to the shallow!

So, if the  Ekiti governor foams in the mouth, in his infantile triumph, it is because in President-elect Donald Trump, he has found a kindred spirit, across the Atlantic, in uppity America, in political buffoonery!

Eight years after Bush the Son, and his presidential contagion on the globe over eight calamitous years, if the global bastion of presidential democracy still elects a Donald Trump, it just shows the direction they want to take their country.  That is perfectly legitimate and democratic.

Still, Trump’s election is perhaps the first in American modern history to face angry protests, ala the Third World, with many, in rage, reportedly calling him “not my president”.  But again, Americans’ funeral!

At the end of the day, whoever the Americans elect is their business — to enjoy or to endure.

Ripples’ business — and that ought to be every thinking Nigerian’s — is what lessons Nigeria can learn from the American choice.

Over the ages, there has been a roaring debate over the core of man: good or evil.

The Scot, T. M. Ballantyne, in The Coral Island (1858), voted for the innate goodness of man, with the excellent and civilizing conduct of three British school boys, survivors marooned, after a ship-wreck, on a coral island, off the Pacific Ocean.

But two World Wars later, Englishman and Nobel Prize for Literature winner, William Golding, pushed a counter and darker narrative, in Lord of the Flies (1954): that the core of man was evil, given the way some British school boys, despite their elite education, descended into savages.  They too were trapped on another island, following a crash-landing.

This ultra-dark side of the American psyche, it would appear, the Trump phenomenon has tapped and awakened: racism, bigotry, dictatorship, xenophobia, misogyny and nativism — all Trumpian monsters that threaten to turn America’s vaunted utopia into a stark dystopia.

From the noise and fury in American streets, spanning 25 cities as at the last count, is it then morning yet on the Trump debacle day?

Still, something dire always awakens the human monster, so conventionally hidden.

In the fictive Lord of the Flies, a grim locale shred the conventional veneer of civility, to expose a rotten core of sheer savagery.

But in real-life Trump’s America, it is globalization (euphemism for investor greed), savagely gobbling its own.

Down the ages, Western thinkers always came up with a deodorizing philosophy, to veil the extant evil playing out.

During colonization, it was Christianization, and its sacred imperative for missionary trips.  But that only hid Europe’s criminal greed; and its abhorrent culturicide against non-European peoples.

Perhaps it was sweet coincidence that slave trade, in the British Empire, exited in 1846, after the Industrial Revolution’s triumphal entry, between 1760 and 1840.

But it should take no especial acuity to figure that slave trade only exited because labour’s primacy in the production chain was dwindling.  Yet, some smart Western minds insisted its abolition was due to their high minds, and not the low profit — if any at all — trading in slaves was posting.

“Globalization” is the latest of those buzzwords, intended to hide the cruel greed of “capital” (euphemism for ultra-greedy investors).  However, this time round, this was a  Western coup against the West; a coup by an infinitesimal few, against the bulk of their people.

It is this elite greed that would make America toss its factories to Mexico and China, and assume it is chic; and crow its people are cool about a so-called post-industrial age.   Trump clearly shows they are not.

With that new dogma, America must “import” what it could produce, simply because its capitalists are scouring the globe for “cheap” labour, and less exacting environmental laws, to maximize profit!

That irrational philosophy birthed the irrational rage that birthed Donald Trump and consumed Hillary Clinton, and her otherwise golden history as Uncle Sam’s first female president, after Barrack Obama, its first Black president.

But the real tragedy here is not America settling for chaff instead of solid gold: for Mrs Clinton would appear the most prepared, if not the most qualified for that job, in American contemporary history.

It is rather the Nigerian elite that parrot, without thinking, the so-called “globalization”, as some canticle of merry self-destruction, by pathetic house negroes, desperate to be counted in metropolitan economic orthodoxy!

You could see it in an Okonjo-Iweala counting the beans and cooking the books, while the real economy went comatose.  You could see it in a Soludo theorizing and be damned on NEEDS and SEEDS. You could see it in the glum orthodoxy of the Olusegun Obasanjo years.  Merry destination?  This present reality of economic death!

Their victorious, if tragic, whoop?  Firm out this, out-source that!  Even despite producing crude oil, you must shun refining but import processed fuel.  With massive land, you must also import your food since you have cash to sell yourself short.

Your universities?  They are infra-dig for your scions.  Send them to American universities.  Send your wives — and girlfriends — to deliver in American maternities, and come back with Baby American Citizen to crow, in high but empty conceit, about how you — and your baby — are American!

Well, it’s Trump country now and the game is up!  America may well decline by voting Caveman Trump.

But maybe that shock therapy would force the Nigerian elite to know you don’t solve your problems by fleeing from them.

If only that singular lesson is learnt, maybe the Clinton loss and whatever it forebodes for America may well be good for Nigeria.

Perhaps after all, there is something good in globalization trumping its own; and Trump’s America receding into its nativist, racist (and maybe fascist), misogynist and xenophobic mode!

The post Trump: Globalization gobbles self appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

In vogue: hustling and bustling Prof. Wole Soyinka, our own WS, to make good his threat — to shred his American green card, should Donald Trump win the US presidency.
Well, Donald has won, goes the sharp taunt. So what is WS still doing in Trump Country?
Reminds you — doesn’t it? — of Satan taking the Christ Jesus to the pinnacle of the mount; and daring him to jump down, just to prove he was the Divine Son?
But what makes Satan think, at least according to Christian theology, that Jesus needed Satan’s validation that the Christ was the Son of the Most High?
What makes Satan even think, at least according to Christian fatalism, he could drag Jesus anywhere, to prove anything, if the Divine Father had not sanctioned that satanic rascality, divined to end in nothing but divine glory, for the Divine Son?
Of course, with his traducers, WS is far less formidable.  He is no godhead.  Nor is he backed by any theology or fatalism, Christian or otherwise.  Nor is he, for that matter, divine by any shred of imagination.
So, you could understand the leering and the jeering and the gloating and the scoffing — in fact, the satanic triumphalism — of the rabble on cyberspace, plus their no less virulent terra firma cousins, including a female television presenter, waxing poetic and lyrical, on her Silverbird TV show: “Uncle Wole, tear it, tear it; Uncle Wole, tear it …”, she piped, in irreverent mockery, in smug foolery!
Still, what does this empty-sounding child of TV artificiality know?
As Jesus needed no Satan to prove his divine essence, WS needs no rabble to validate his essence.  A lifetime work has done that — and, with WS at 82,  it is still work-in-progress!
That, more or less, was the purpose of WS’s telling riposte: “Red card, green card: notes towards the management of hysteria”.
Fitting response, by the way.  You can trust WS to fight his own war, in his own way, on his own terms and with his own class!
Still, were terrestrial divinity a possibility, and the criteria were a lifetime of uncompromising commitment to justice, human dignity and basic fairness, WS would be only one of the few earthly divines; and among the fewer still, among his own compatriots.
But many Nigerians appear to have made their peace with abuse, forced or wilful, they probably would marvel and rail at a WS, who still takes — and has always taken — his humanity seriously.
That would explain the virulent reaction over the Trump affair.
Why, they must have told themselves, would anyone bluff the all-mighty Uncle Sam, — he, of the famed gravy-land, anyone would do anything to access?
Bluff!  Why would WS, the WS we know, bluff anyone?  But that is the point: the WS we know!
What of the WS they don’t know — even if it is an open book?  Enter then, the delicious territory of sweet ignorance!
Still, Ripples must admit some lead, over some of the younger folks, in this WS business.
Growing up in the 1970s, he saw live, the trio that virtually swore that, under their charge, Nigeria would never go to seeds, no matter how it tried.
The oldest of this trio was Obafemi Awolowo.  In the 1970s, though Awo still lived, his legend was fully formed.  He had, in the 1950s, pulled off the greatest social revolution in Nigerian history, with his free primary education programme, in the old West.
By the 1970s, however, he was playing the constant Jeremiah, as his name indeed was, warning the terrible breed, military or civilian, resolved to undo their country.  Nobody listened; and the result is today’s dystopia, where Nigerians merrily flee Nigeria.
The second, was the irreplaceable Tai Solarin — he of the revolutionary new year’s wish: “May your road be rough!”, while others throated “Happy new year!”
A maverick on the side of anything decent, he was an iconoclast of toady conventions.  He set up his famous Mayflower School, Ikenne, Ogun State, to push his vision of education as self-reliance.  He died, virtually on active duty, on the march against  Sani Abacha’s fascism, on a Lagos street, where he was tear-gassed.
WS was the youngest of this trio.  Every book he wrote, every play he staged, every speech he gave, everything he did, and every gesture he made, he was resolved on one thing: banish all cant and deliver on your basic humanity — or you had him to contend with.
His play, A Dance in the Forest, presented at Nigeria’s independence in 1960, spoilt Nigeria’s independence party, by its iconoclastic truth: Nigeria’s flag independence was a joke, if the elite didn’t change their ruinous ways!  The joke today is on the elite back then, who scowled at WS’s audacity.
His Jero Plays “prophesied” the locust of Nigerian desk generals — coup making parasites, who would promote themselves generals without seeing battle, or even enduring martial discomfort.  “After all,” a self-deprecating Brother Jero signed off in Jero’s Metamorphosis, “it is the fashion these days to be a desk general!”
In Death and the King’s Horseman, it was fatal comeuppance for those who crave privilege without responsibility, for it took the Elesin’s western-trained medic son’s honourable suicide to force, on his traditional father, a shameful death. Yet, the Elesin was the traditional gentry man that lapped up the palace gravy but tried to dodge the fatal duty that went with the bargain!
In Unlimited Liability Company, a special purpose musical collabo, with Tunji Oyelana and the Benders, a political satire was never so mirthful! Indeed, a happy dirge for the thieving politicians of President Shehu Shagari’s 2nd Republic: elegy for the fallen politicians but sweet parody, in the ears of the people, their powerless victims.
In Ibadan: Penkelemes Years, you saw the protagonist as citizen-combatant against putative fascism in 1st Republic Western Region; and in You Must Set Forth at Dawn, you saw a sole citizen’s audacious stand against a moving train, mustering a Third Force, to stop approaching war!
That soon landed him in gaol, an experience that birthed The Man Died, WS’s Nigerian Civil War prison memoirs.
This then was the man a generation, proudly ignorant of their own history, mock over his threatened Wolexit from Trump’s America.
But even if they didn’t have Ripples’ youthful “ringside seat”, of seeing the trio of Awo, Solarin and WS strive hard to save Nigeria from itself, couldn’t they have read about the man before so recklessly letting fly their ignorance?
If WS threatens America with Wolexit, it is probably because America needs WS more than WS needs America. That should be a lesson to Nigeria: if we fix our country, shouldn’t others need us more than we need them? But that might even be vanity fair.
The basic reason for Wolexit is clear. With Trump’s entry, the American space becomes toxic for any self-respecting human.
That is the alarm of Wolexit.

The post With WS on Wolexit appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

CAll it “Panorama Nigeriana”, and you are quite right: all of the laughs, all of the cries, and the full range in-between, of a people condemned to high drama, wholesome or toxic!
That is the story of Nigeria this collection of newspaper cartoons shows, with masterful strokes.
But is it an accident that this book has no title: this compilation, by Azeez Ozi Sanni, The Nation ace cartoonist, of his cartoons published in the newspaper, between 2007 and 2010?
Bar the cartoonist’s name, and his bragging right as “Cartoonist of the Year …” , for some three hegemonic years, etched with a golden foil and, of course, The Nation logo, there is no title capturing the book’s theme.
But there is a collage, in full colour, encased in the troubled Nigerian space: of a lawless soldier doing a bla-la show — but was that a soldier, or a felon disguised as one? Of a policeman — wetin you carry? — extorting his favourite N5; of a rogue politician toasting his rare fortune, over his latest “Ghana must go” acquisition; of awesomely-armed robbers holding up a bank, of a Press whose “lips” are firmly padlocked — a hyperbole, to be sure; of high blues in a prison cell, of …”
Perfectly Nigerian, isn’t it?
Still, why no title?  A mere happenstance?  Or a cartoonist’s symbolic decision to,  picturesquely, cut to the chase, and shunning verbiage?
O, there is yet another query: on how the cartoons are arranged, over some 162 pages. Is this too deliberate; or just another accident?
The collection opens with a tribute to MKO Abiola, the martyr of June 12, with “votaries” toasting to his ultimate sacrifice and golden memory: “To justice, wisdom and freedom …” — big sounding cant, to usher in — “Happy democracy in Nigeria.”
But it ends — well, almost — with President Goodluck Jonathan, pledging of the 2011 election — of which he was the principal beneficiary — to make all votes count.
The MKO-Jonathan contrast couldn’t be more dramatic, in peculiar Nigeria: MKO won an election and did everything to retrieve his annulled mandate.
But his death in detention only left Nigerians with the sense of what might have been.
Jonathan, on the other hand, accessed power relatively easily, perhaps  because MKO’s martyrdom had taught the Nigerian power cowboys some grim lessons.
Yet, Jonathan ended up the ultimate presidential misfit, though Muhammadu Buhari appears the ultimate fall guy, of Jonathan’s ultimate misdeeds.
But that telling contrast only prepared the mind for the parting shot, loud and hard: a cauldron of luckless Nigerians, sizzling in brothy  “hot soup”!
The hissing fuel belching the cooking fire, like some harmattan-dry firewood? Sectarian religious riots.  Economic stagnation. Fuel palaver. Corruption. Epileptic power supply!
Welcome to the Nigerian hell!
Yet, Nigerians kid themselves, at least by the cartoonist’s punch line: “We are Nigerians … good people, great nation!  Was that Dora Akunyili beaming from beyond?
But for the living: hell to some.  But surely, peculiar paradise to others?  How would Fela have put it — s(h)uffering and s(h)miling?
Again, was this — a sort of plot — just happenstance?  Or a deliberate and crafty arrangement by the cartoonist to hit home his message, with a devastating climax?
If deliberate, then Sanni would appear some dramatic philosopher, teasing his compatriots out of their stupor!
Indeed, the sweeping leitmotif for this work would appear that searing maverick-conscience of society,  often located, in Igbo Nollywood movies, in some lowly drunkard, or even a lunatic — a societal nobody, that nevertheless exposes, with relish, the folly of the high-and-mighty!
Or the free communal “yabis”, to put it in Fela-speak, of the Ado Ekiti, Ekiti State, Udi Iroko yearly festival of yore, in which not even the Ewi, the town’s paramount ruler himself, escaped the all-seeing eyes, and free-lashing tongue, against any secret peccadilloes!
So, in this Sanni observatory of cartoons, there are no off-limits.  The patrician and the plebeian; the president and the pauper, hobnob in an irreverent republic, where everyone is taken through the same strictures.
Welcome to the Sanni Republic of Laughter — but for only those not at the receiving end of his sharp and searing strokes!
You’ve got to pity Olusegun Obasanjo, former president of the Federal Republic, in this collection.  An icon of a debased order, who nevertheless loves to play the holy pope, his portraiture is a bit unsparing — yet not unfair!
In one of the most hilarious of the cartoons, Obasanjo beams down from a marble-like BABA throne, as high and mighty as Olumo Rock!  Sprawled before him is a breed of fancifully dressed but self-debased humanity.
“Congratulations, godfather of all the godfathers!” roared a section of this patrician-rabble.  “Your Highness,” another section bawled, “Any other Baba is simply a counterfeit.  Long live your Imperial Majesty!”
In the cartoonist’s irreverent cosmos, it is the BABA Palace of Democratic Feudalism!
When Gani Fawehinmi, SAN, SAM, the fiery anti-establishment rod, passed away, Sanni emerged with three “crocodiles”: 1. Baba crocodile. 2. Evil Genius.  3. Unnamed.
Verdict?  The pillars of Nigeria’s rotten establishment shed crocodile tears at Gani’s death.  Might they then be happy — or more aptly, be relieved — in private?  Your guess!
This grim life in contemporary Nigeria the cartoonist also captured with the progressive decline in Nigerians’ welfare, in their country’s first 49 years.  Pre-independence: the colonial master pleaded — “manage that … we are growing”.  The citizen took his share — not much, but still not unreasonable.
Twenty-five years later, the same plea, but a smaller portion, even if the pot of “government goodies” was bigger. The citizen? More ragged.
On the virtual eve of 50 years — 49 years after independence — all hell broke loose!  The pot had grown bigger still but the citizen grew tinier, scrawnier and even more ragged.
And wonders of wonders!  As the “leader” mumbled “manage that … we are growing”, there was virtually nothing in the citizen’s plate. Yet, the rogue government gorged itself in full view!
Still, there is some grim humor lightening up the jeremiads — as in the boy that teases his father, proposing to take him out for ice cream on May Day.  But wait for it — on the “change” in the father’s lean pocket.  The old man did not find it funny!
This is a compendium of life in this country, ably captured with devastating strokes, as the daily drama unfolds.
Ever want to laugh at yourself, as catharsis in these times of biting economic hardship?  The Sanni collection of cartoons could well be a fitting therapy!
It’s a Nigerian panorama.  You just might need the humor to navigate your balance!

The post Panorama appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

Making the Amalu matriarch’s funeral, at Enugu, was going to be difficult.
She, of the other room, was livid.
“You’re very stubborn — you know that?” she snapped, with supreme anger, in her supreme headquarters.  “Must you make this trip?”
“I must,” was the quiet answer.
That swallowed her ire, like water consuming a raging fire. But you could still feel, in the dark room, the cold ash of impotent rage.
It was end of year, complete with baleful superstitions about travels.  And there, on those cratered roads, were more than a fair share of mad drivers.
Missus didn’t hate the mission.  She only loved her husband.
The journey itself — all 14 hours of it — couldn’t be more uncomfortable. With massive Yuletide East-bound travel home from Lagos, the traveller was strung virtually on the wheels, on one of the ill-reclined back seats, in the Libra minibus.
The first, out of many for the day, left its Okota, Lagos terminal, at around 6:30 am. But the passenger didn’t disembark until around 8:35 pm, at Mopol, Umunba, near 9th mile, in the Enugu country.
The driver, a cheerful rogue with a gravel voice, jived incessantly in Igbo, spiced with the occasional English, and condemned the bus to roaring laughter.
But his Achilles heels were his tyres. At Ajebandele, near Ore, he stopped to replace tyres. At Asaba, he did same.  That consumed valuable time.
Indeed, at Asaba, the tyre-fixing ritual took no less than two hours.  The passengers, worried and anxious, watched the Onitsha-bound heavy traffic slowly roll, in a sluggish jam, towards the Niger bridge.
Once gaining the bridge, however, the traffic was clear.  And the bus skipped, like an excited deer, on a pleasurable dash — until caught up again, in the Onitsha evening traffic, on the massive Onitsha-Awka-Enugu expressway.
Onitsha, that early evening, magically winked at you, with its incandescent Christmas lightings. To a traveller from Lagos, that evoked the lost paradise of the Fashola years, when Lagos streets, at Yuletide, preened with buntings during the day, and, at night, were a blaze of colours.  Not anymore!
Awka was no less enthralling, posing like some village beauty, showing off her glittering new dresses, complete with her three iconic flyovers, not entirely completed but which nevertheless sparkled, again echoing the Fashola cable bridge, in Ikoyi-Lekki, Lagos.
But then came the blues of Awka-Enugu cratered — sorry, express — way!  From the blaze of Christmas incandescence, came oil lamps, burning naked on barriers at checkpoints, as brave policemen flashed down buses, to ensure travellers’ security.
Not less than four of those checkpoints were on that stretch, that night of 20 December 2016.  That area, the traveller was told, was notorious for armed robberies and allied crimes, with the Oji River sector reportedly the most notorious.
But all the blues vanished the moment the traveller disembarked at Umunba.  Just some 15 metres away, a vehicle was parked.
“Amalu?” posed Uche Eze, the gentleman Gabriel Sunny Amalu, the lawyer and colleague on The Nation Editorial Board burying his mother, had detailed as chaperon, with assistants, Nnabuike and Emeka in tow.
“Yes,” the traveller returned.
“Welcome!”
He grabbed the light luggage, threw it on the backseat of the parked salon car, and off went the party to the nearby Amofia, in the Ogwofia-Owa Kingdom.
Amofia!  Every grain of its red earth, as plentiful as beach sand, reminds you of Chinua Achebe’s fictive Umuofia, where Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond.
Amofia’s Okonkwo would appear Joseph Amalu, Gabriel’s illustrious uncle, who  was said to have started it all — not only for his Amofia clan, but pretty much for Ogwofia-Owa and environs, as recorded by the documentary, Daybreak at Udi, which in 1950 won the Oscar, at the Academy Awards.
Like Okonkwo, Amalu (Eze in the documentary) rallied for his culture, against intrusive progress the Oyibo decreed was development.  But unlike Okonkwo, he eventually made his peace with that “modernity”.
Joseph Amalu’s was a classic grass-to-grace story.  With nothing but his sterling character, he went to Lagos. Though illiterate in English, the colonizing Europeans soon discovered his heart of gold, and adopted him as one of theirs.
He not only signalled  his siblings, to come eat of this new-found town’s munificence, he himself would later return home, to become a traditional ruler, jurist and modernizer per excellence, though he spoke no English.
Indeed, the Amalu Amofia compound is as much an echo of the Okonkwo Umuofia’s, with its many obi (huts), as it is architecture as vintage tell-tale of the Amalu family history.
Aside from the one-storey building to the left as you gained the wall-less compound, which Gabriel always told you belonged to the “big Chief Amalu in Lagos”, the rest is an array of bungalows.  You could tell the age, the era, and the history of each, just by its design.
The Joseph Amalu bungalow occupies an artistic centre, from where others seem to fan out.
To the right is Ezinne Uzodumma Amalu’s (1930-2016), the matriarch everyone had come to bid farewell. And just at its back, like a chick, under the protective wings of its mother, is Gabriel’s own bungalow, with its more contemporary design.
And talking vintage: Gabriel’s late father, Michael Amalu’s Peugeot 403 salon car, nestles under a tree, just in front of Ezinne’s obi, a museum piece for present and coming Amalus. The senior Amalu retired as chief superintendent of prisons in 1964.  He died in 1991.
Between mother and son’s obi, Ezinne would find her final resting place.
The toast of the December 20 wake, the funeral mass at St. Patrick Catholic Church, Nwankwo Ogwofia-Owa, and sumptuous post-funeral reception (both on December 21), with its exquisite Igbo cultural extravaganza,  were Bolade Opaleye, Esq., barrister-at-law and Ripples — two Yoruba folks.
Patrick Okafor, the Amalu in-law and fizzy MC, never tired of telling everyone, how the non-natives had braved all to come give the Ezinne a befitting farewell.
And Gabriel’s “big Chief Amalu in Lagos”, Chief Godwin Chuma Amalu, turned out a winsome gentleman, and charming epitome of poise, civility and modesty, who instantly invited the duo to his Lagos home!
Thank you, Amofia, for golden memories!
But the celebration was now ended (in the poet, Gabriel Okara’s words); and Bolade and I were back in the hands of the ever true Uche Eze — Bolade to Enugu Airport and, Ripples, to the Libra park at Enugu.
Uche splendidly delivered — and the December 22 rush back to Lagos, for Christmas: the one by air, the other, by road, resumed.
The return journey was much more comfy, though the Enugu country roads were no less cratered, Awka still preened with its new flyovers, and Onitsha — why does that concrete jungle, of multi-storey houses, bawl at you: that housing is nothing but a billion-naira hustle?
Around 6:15 pm, at Berger, Lagos, came this text from Bolade: “Just landed 20 minutes ago.  We left Enugu 3:45 pm.  You should be nearer Lagos now.  I am now going through the hectic traffic from Ikeja to Lekki.  What a life!”.   His flight was billed for take-off at 9 am!
Here, the rich also howl!
Do have a happy new year

The post Three days in Wawa country appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

How about these two for comic comparison: Sheik Prof. Alhaji Dr. Yahya Abdul-Aziz Awal Jemus  Junkung Naasiru Deen Jammeh Babili Mansa and Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga?
Babili Mansa, Wa Za Banga – some bathetic end-rimes?
And all that “pleasure”, after a dig at some fictive comic names? Dead wrong!
Rather, it is a living nightmare of comic power plays, bordering on a recurring ancestral curse, plaguing political Africa.
Needless to say, those comic plays have tragic consequences – and it is no comfort that they seem rooted in the African power gene!
Mobutu Sese Seko (1930-1997), was the Zairean dictator who roasted his country and seared his people on the cruel altar of un-sated personal greed.  He belonged to the Cold War era.
Though he lived for just 67 years (he ruled Zaire, now Democratic Republic of Congo, for 32 of those years), he was a millennial contagion.
DR Congo still wilts from that contagion, passing, as power toy, from “Papa Doc” Laurent Kabila (1997-2001) to “Baby Doc” Joseph Kabila (2001 till date, even if his legal term has expired).
Mobutu is dead. But Mobutu’s power spirit is alive and well.  Long live the Mobutu pestilence!
Born simply Joseph-Desire Mobutu, at the zenith of his power lunacy, Mobutu had flared into Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga!
His Cold War era tragic co-comics included Jean Bedel Bokassa (Central African Republic, who, at the nadir of his power debauchery, renamed CAR Central African Empire, and crowned himself “emperor”); and Alhaji (Dr.) Idi Amin Dada, Conqueror of the British Empire (CBE), the  Ugandan power psychopath and savage.
You would have thought all that tragic comedy had been interred with the Cold War (1947-1991), with its insane capitalist-communist ideological posturing, until Jammeh, the Gambian tragic mimic, bobbed up.
Like Mobutu, he happened on the scene, as a pathetic soldier.
The scrawny, dark-goggled Lt. Yahya Jammeh, when he ousted the long ruling President Dauda Jawara in 1994, was the perfect portrait of the angry and hungry African soldier – angry at his parlous state but hungry for insane political power.
By 1996, the scrawny soldier, of two years ago, had begun his pseudo-democratic rebranding.  As he rebranded on the “democratic front”, so did he rebrand on the wardrobe flank.
His Spartan military fatigue gave way to over-sized white agbada, complete with a bogus “tesbir” (the Muslim chaplet) and a comic sword.
The Babili Mansa (Mandika for “Bridge Builder” or “Conqueror of the River”, whichever one you find more exotic!) must project his pristine Africanness, with his devout Islamic faith!
A power dummy never got more effectively sold!  Jammeh, the hungry soldier of 1994, had become Jammeh the Munificent in 2017; so cocky he could first concede an election with consummate grace, then change his mind at the ease with which you bat an eyelid, and finally tempt ultimate disgrace by essaying the election’s outright annulment, ala Nigeria’s Ibrahim Babangida of 1993!
Despite his puny country, and even punier defence forces, he was deluded enough to think there won’t be consequences!  All thanks to ECOWAS, the African Union (AU) and the United Nations, however, he got rudely woken from his costly reverie!
By the evening of January 20, His Excellency, Sheik Prof. Alhaji Dr. Yahya Abdul-Aziz Awal Jemus Junkung Naasiru Deen Jammeh Babili Mansa had joined Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, in the African hall of power infamy, where they both nestle (Mobutu dead, Jammeh alive) in the dustbin of history!
It’s unclear, though, how long Jammeh would survive his arid post-power years.  It took Mobutu only three months to expire, though he was 67 and had a running battle with prostate cancer.
Jammeh is 51, rippling with robust health.  He might yet endure decades of exile, languishing in his self-imposed wilderness!
Neither is it clear how much, after 22 years in power, of the Jammeh contagion is left in the Gambian body politics.
But before anyone gets drunk on anti-Jammeh triumphalism, and in the chest-thumping swagger of the moment, forgets the flow of history, let it be made clear: Jammeh’s electoral crime is no worse than Gen. Babangida’s, against the 12 June 1993 presidential mandate of Basorun Moshood Abiola (God bless his soul!).
The ECOWAS that now flexed fearsome muscles, and barked bone-chilling orders at poor, deluded Jammeh, was as gentle as a lamb.
Even at a stage, when Babangida had long been consumed by his own plot, and Sani Abacha was ogling self-transmutation to “elected president” to sustain the criminal annulment, Bill Clinton, the US president and leader of the so-called free world, thought aloud that might not be a bad idea!
So, what has changed now?  Was it a function of no precedence (as indeed, the Jammeh peaceful ouster is yet another one, after the Laurent Gbagbo misadventure in Cote d’Ivoire)?  Or Nigeria was just a misbehaving giant, not ECOWAS, not AU, not UN could touch?
Still, Jammeh’s resolute ouster, to press the inviolability of democratic mandates, cannot be a bad thing, despite Nigeria’s criminal behaviour of 1993.
But whoever is involved in this laudable Gambia intervention should have the presence of mind to know they just doomed any power looney that might want to play the Jammeh card in the future.  Better to buy into a noble convention than fret at the fate of putative power rogues!
Nevertheless, history has a way of pulling a fast one, with the most dramatic of ironies!
Exactly the same day, almost to the hour, one comic was being prised off the tiny Gambia, another comic was being installed over the mighty United States.
Between Yahya Jammeh and Donald Trump, there is little to choose, if the subject is democratic ideals.  The one refused to concede an election in which he had been thoroughly licked.  The other thundered he wouldn’t accept any result that didn’t declare him winner!
So, despite Uncle Sam’s much-vaunted power and glory, Americans’ bragging right as leaders of the “free world”,  The Gambia as a laggard among countries on the globe and Gambians as (un?)willing victims of Jammeh’s power megalomania, Trump and Jammeh are pretty much democracy heretics.
The big difference is Trump won his bluff; and Jammeh lost his.
But that is just as well, and it might be cold comfort.  But it appears Africa just lost its monopoly of churning out power clowns – and new US President Trump is glittering evidence!

The post Sheikh Prof. Alhaji Dr. Tragic Mimic appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

The furore, over an Auchi, Edo State, priest’s latest fatwa on Fulani herdsmen, appears the latest excitement in a tense polity.
Apostle Johnson Suleiman, in a video gone viral on cyberspace, had told his cheering Omega Fire Ministries Worldwide audience to “kill” any Fulani herdsmen they found lurking around his church premises.
He claimed the new fatwa was contingent on a telephone intelligence that some “Fulani herdsmen” were after his life, based on his principled stance on the southern Kaduna crisis.
Now, southern Kaduna is a tale of blood and gore, of hideous mayhem, all pressed in the alleged mass massacre of local Christians, by an alleged Muslim cabal, allegedly supported by the powers-that-be.
Though there appears no “smoking guns” regarding official complicity, a vibrant rumour mill, projecting ancient but mutual animosities, magnified by equally bitter media allies, has given the allegation an ugly life of its own.
That manoeuvre has created two opposing armies of fearsome hate, arrayed in ethnic, religious and regional battalions, sworn to dooming each other in fierce verbal combat — or much worse! Pray, in matters of faith and perceived ethnic slur, who indeed keeps his head?
Not the good apostle, he of the incendiary pulpit! Apostle Suleiman would appear the classical neophyte, ready to risk all in defence of his adopted faith.
After sentencing poor Kaduna Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, to a “divine” death sentence, for the temerity to attempt controlling religious fanaticism, Muslim or Christian, in his state, the crusading Apostle and fiery Holy Michael of besieged Christendom Nigeria, also feels obliged to christen El-Rufai “the short man devil that calls himself governor”, in the final flurry en route to proclaiming his latest Fulani fatwa!
Why? Perhaps because the good Lord still gives the governor life, while the angry man of God had proclaimed him dead!
Still, let it not be supposed that the opposing Muslim partisans, for whom the much hated “Fulani herdsmen” are nothing but scary faces of gargoyle, are angels, meek and innocent. Far from it.
For too long, Islam has, in the North, been projected as the swashbuckling faith of power, before which other adherents must bow and cow. That has, over the years, come with soulless impunity, which has chiselled away at citizens’ most fundamental of rights — the right to life.
By commission or omission, you could routinely get away with murder, only if you killed in the name of Allah — never mind that that was convenient screen for base bigotry against citizens of other faiths; or even sundry criminality. That has resulted, in the victims’ camp, in bitterness and dissonance.
But, in the great theatres of this war, like southern Kaduna, with its chequered history, the battle would appear on two fronts. While the victims count their losses in lives and limbs, the aggressor class are savaged with wholesale demonization, by the media, sympathetic to the victims.
That, with time, becomes received wisdom — or, more accurately, received folly — as every Fulani is no devil any more than others are saints.
That is the sentiment of explosive resent that super-sympathizers, like Apostle Suleiman, tap into — perfectly understandable, given the extant atmosphere of mutual and vibrant hate.
Still, crusading for the cheated is one thing. Goading congregants to free murder, under whatever guise, is another.
That was the point, it would appear, the man of God entered the Department of State Services (DSS) radar.
But even before dealing with state intervention in the matter, on what plank, secular or divine, might Apostle Suleiman stand, on charging his church members to kill other citizens?
On his Christian creed? Even at the point of arrest and subsequent crucifixion, the last miracle of Jesus, the Christ, did was restoring a cropped ear — a big blow for non-violence, no matter the provocation.
If you plead the Mosaic law of “an ear for an ear”, could the Apostle then be practising Judaism in Christian garb? Or is it that Christ was too divine, to be relevant in this era of cocky impunity by the hateful Fulani?
In the secular world, is the Citizen Apostle simply rooting for self-help, despite the apparent danger to himself and his flock? If he was, what sort of citizen might he be?
Of course, the reported DSS attempt to arrest Suleiman added even a more grotesque twist to the ridiculous drama, of a man of God baying for blood.
Enter, Ekiti’s Peter Ayodele Fayose, the perfect example of a gubernatorial burlesque, if ever there was one.
Somewhat, the much hated “Fulani herdsmen” are drawing Christian clerics, spanning the good, the bad and the ugly, to the Fayose burlesque.
At Yuletide 2016, Fayose drew fulsome, if impolitic, praise from The Redeemed Church of God’s Pastor Enoch Adeboye, provoking a raft of reactions, for or against.
Fayose’s unscripted citation, on that grand occasion, was his heroics against killer “Fulani herdsmen” — admittedly one of the few good policies the excitable governor can boast, applying due process to a clear and present danger.
Less than a month after, again relating to “Fulani herdsmen”, Fayose was rushing to save an apostolic loose cannon from DSS arrest!
Again, on what plank might the governor stand, embarking on such outlawry?
That, a governor, sworn to keeping the law, can foil other organs of state, doing their work? Or that the creed of a governor installed by law, on due process, is to push for self-help, over and above due process, using his exalted office as abused collateral?
And just imagine, the putative collateral damage in Nigeria’s pseudo-federalism, when the governor, though chief security officer, doesn’t have any of the state security arms under his control? And just suppose, a crazy trooper, just tired at a governor standing on his official dignity, each time they try to do their work, and cocks a gun — or worse!
Bedlam in the human rights chamber, now as quiet as the grave yard?
Let neither the outlaw priest nor the outlaw governor test the will of the law. Both are assured of nothing but doom, whatever fancies colourful emotions conjure.

Emmanuel Olaniran Oladesu, PhD

A prophet is not without honour, states the Bible, except in his own country, among his own people. Not here! Ripples today celebrates Dr. Emmanuel Oladesu, the humble and unassuming Political Editor of The Nation, who just earned a PhD in Psychology of Education, from the University of Lagos.

Kudos to the newly certified man of learning and character who, by the way, nearly missed secondary education for lack of means. It’s the stuff inspiring tales are made. Welcome, the latest scholar in Nigeria’s newsroom!

The post The priest, the governor and the state appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

You are right – this headline is a parody of Death and the King’s Horseman, the Wole Soyinka classic, specially cited in his Nobel Prize for Literature win.

If you link this parody to yet another WS play, Madmen and Specialists, you might just chafe at the madness that has seized the Nigerian populace, in the rash orchestration of the “death” of a man alive but taciturn; by the voluble that claim life but, by their spiteful conduct, are dead and rotten.

Just as you ask in that ultra-dark play, Madmen, who is the madman and who is the specialist, you begin to wonder, in this morbid fever: who is the dead and who is the living!

Indeed, another WS great, The Man Died, his Civil War prison memoirs, holds the clincher: the man dies in them, that cannot arrest their beastly id!

The Buhari death wish is, therefore, the philosophical death of those who somewhat wish their nemesis would vanish — some Greek classical drama-like deus-ex-machina, come to spring them from the dire comeuppance of their past crimes!

Well, long may they endure their well-earned anguish! No matter the dark plots of anyone, only God, the Almighty, gives life; and only he, can decree when one’s time is up. And he is not, it appears, about to serve as their deus!

But pray, what is the hubbub over the purported death of a 74-year old? That his sun is setting at noon, though he lives into young old age, given the Biblical term of three-score-and-ten?

That he is one of the irredeemably corrupt, selfish and venal he is sacrificing his old age to battle, so that younger Nigerians would have a future?

Or that he has made his peace with corruption, like the Nigerian client priests of sleaze, who now bait catastrophe by goading their congregation to free murder, to trigger faith and ethnic chaos, a potent but satanic device to divert attention from a dire ethical crisis, and retain the old corrupt order?

Only in Nigeria — where the most vulnerable, are also the most gullible, and therefore, the most voluble, in pushing their own destruction!

Which explains why the madness is less with the vicious few, mainly ultra-corrupt elements, that have a serious axe to grind with President Muhammadu Buhari and his government.

Acute and strategic lots, those! Indeed, life for Buhari is sure death for their nefariousness, outside of which they have no life! So, these vile elements would cook up just anything, no matter how absurd, to survive.

You can, therefore, understand the grand folly of the virulent robots that amplify the evil agenda of the well-oiled corrupt machine, even if yelping from temporary pains, from a rotten order being put right. But whoever gains without pains?

How did we get to this terrible pass, which merrily canonizes the vile as saints but demonizes the righteous as devils?

Col. Azubike Nass, an Enugu-based retired army officer, offers an apt Biblical parallel. That dream in Biblical Egypt, in which seven lean cows swallowed seven fat ones. That decoded, translated to seven years of boom, preceding seven years of bust.

However, unlike Pharaoh that deliberately stored grains during the bumper years, for the lean and agonizing years, Nigeria blew everything as if there wouldn’t be tomorrow. Despite his huffing and puffing, the profligacy started under President Olusegun Obasanjo. By the time Goodluck Jonathan happened on the presidency, the last of the family silver was up for pawn!

But just as there was a manic seller in President Jonathan and his crowd, there were no less crazed buyers in unconscionable Nigerians, spanning the religious (dis)order, the media, the traditional institutions, the judiciary and other equal-opportunity hustlers, that always think actions have no consequences.

That explains the 2015 election-time bazaar, by a president more than desperate for re-election, and was cocky he had enough cash to splash.

But even with this open secret, of an old order sacking the collective till, just to sate the insatiable greed of its partisans, why is there so much uproar in the street, so much so that not a few romanticize sheer anarchy, just because there is no quick fix?
It is tough, you must admit, when the pocket hurts. Reason scampers before irrational rage. A hungry man, after all, is an angry man.

Still, at the expense of a more secure and less corrupt future?

That echoes another Biblical parallel: in the post-Red Sea wilderness, between Egypt and Canaan, the Promised Land, the stiff-necked Israelites barked at Jehovah to either divine instant el-dorado, or pronto, return them to old slavery in Egypt!

So, what is the present rumble aimed at? To return Nigeria to post-2015 era, where the common wealth, as could be seen from the many ongoing cases of alleged sleaze, was conquered treasure of a few? And then after, what?

Turn the clock back to 1984, the first coming of this same Muhammadu Buhari, as military ruler. To be sure, that government was high on impunity (more than any military government before it); and had a quaint idea of mechanical “discipline”, in the whip-coerced queues its War Against Indiscipline (WAI) programme decreed.

But what came after it? The Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha era. The one liberalized corruption and democratized poverty. The other was epitome of the head of state as an irredeemable thief!

The cumulative destruction of that era, birthed Obasanjo’s delusion of grandeur, Umaru Yar’Adua’s tragic power captivity and Jonathan, as Nigeria’s unsympathetic undertaker, led to the meltdown that made the Buhari second coming inevitable.
Pray, is Nigeria fated to moving round in futile circles?

Still, the Buhari Presidency must accept fulsome blame for its own self-crucifixion. How can a government, ranged against virulent enemies, wilfully refuse to beam what it is doing, in a time of excruciating pains, which calls for citizen understanding, empathy and support?

This bizarre stand has handed its enemies the knife to slaughter it at will, and the tar to demonize it, to their heart’s content.

Make no mistake: a casual foray into the social media shows a sizeable number of genuinely disillusioned citizens. But very many too would appear paid hacks, hired to cook fake news, fan hideous hate, float silly rumours and give the most innocuous of policies the most bizarre of slants.

Viciously turning the social media into an anti-social tool appears a well-funded billion-naira business! As for the traditional media, the most hysterical may well be those refusing to admit the era of free money is gone!

That racket may be a journey to nowhere. But it won’t abate, unless the government mounts a vigorous and well-funded counter-campaign: hope against its enemies’ agenda of hopelessness, love against virulent hate, facts against diabolic rumours, and a systematic and deliberate projection of its accomplishments, to silence the nay orchestra, now making hay.

That is Buhari’s only way out of the present self-crucifixion.

Meanwhile, those who killed themselves, by the hate of wishing others dead, had better wake up from the dead!
It is a national emergency. Every life is needed for salvage.

The post Death and the sick countrymen appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

But Rehoboam rejected their [elders’] advice and consulted the young advisers who served him, with whom he grew up.” — 1 Kings, 12:8, The Bible, New English Translation (NET) version
By inspiring but abandoning the February 6 protests, Reuben Abati suggested popular artiste, 2Face Idibia, was a duplicitous two-face Janus.
That is pure gas, especially coming from Abati — and that is no ad-hominem fallacy.
2Face has far more honour, if the matter is Nigeria’s wellness, than Abati and other over-certificated folks, complicit but unfazed, in the Goodluck Jonathan debacle, from which this polity still hobbles.
To be part of that historic disgrace, and yet piously prattle, as disinterested “public commentator”, and even plant some low-life conspiracy theories in people’s mind,  is the height of unconscionable duplicity.  Talk of the real two-faced Janus!
Still, for 2Face, honour is one thing.  Culpable lack of understanding, before plunking, both legs into issues, is another.
Courtesy of the opening biblical quote, how did Rehoboam, son of the wisest man in history, lose his kingdom; perhaps crowning himself the most foolish man in history?
He took the advice of the youth, who spoke his own sentiments; and shunned the elders, who understood the issues.
“With a dozen rash words,” theologian, Russel Dilday, entered his dire judgment, “Rehoboam, the bungling dictator, opened the door for four hundred years of strife, weakness, and, eventually, the destruction of the entire nation.”
No. The idea here is not to disparage the youth. Didn’t the wise poet, William Wordsworth, say the child is father of the man? A wise and wizened elder today was, after all, yesterday’s rash and callow youth!
But young or old, understanding issues, before acting, is key. Just imagine if Rehoboam had taken the right call?
Perhaps the kingdom of David would have held. Maybe there would have been no conquest and dispersal. No Jewish Diaspora to feed Adolf Hitler’s holocaust machines. No frantic re-founding of the State of Israel in 1948. And probably, no Israeli-Palestinian mutually assured destruction!
But pray, what has the ruin of ancient Israel, and woes of its modern cousin, got to do with staging democratic protests, in contemporary Nigeria?
For starters, the issue is not romanticizing democratic dissents, as many seem to do. Or insisting on the people’s right to protest. Those are trite and settled.
Rather, rationale behind the protest is the issue. What is it intended to achieve? And after the feel-good bawling, and irreverent screaming, what next? When is a protest functional? When is it just a distraction?
You won’t get the right answers, unless you clinically grasp the issues.
No doubt, there is pain and anguish in the land. But what caused the pain — wayward policies of the present? Or, execrable choices from the past?
If the past has so blighted the present, that present pains are inevitable to save the future, why protest then, even if it were a democratic right, and the land were a babble of anguish?
For rogue comfort, abort the future — the same misjudgment that landed us in this cul-de-sac? Or heckle the present government to abandon its straight-and-narrow path (that is indeed difficult), for the wide-and-merry way, that leads to perdition?
Stop whining, often thunders the received wisdom — more of received folly, really — from bristling critics, fix the problem! Fine. But did anyone think righting wilful wrongs, including the free and frenzied stealing under President Jonathan, wouldn’t break more than a sweat? Strange!
Still, it is amazing how mere coincidences often trigger past wisdom, which eternally rebuke present unthinking.
Moremi Ojudu, daughter of Femi Ojudu, political adviser to the president, led a wing of the February 6 protests, which reached for the Ikoyi, Lagos, residence of Asiwaju Bola Tinubu. Now was that contrived friendly fire to spin some positives from the protests? Or the All Progressives Congress (APC) revolution consuming its own children?
Whatever it was, the Tinubu angle enriches the narrative. Now, the Lagos State that Governor Tinubu met in 1999, unlike the situation at Abuja, was relatively well run.
Indeed, aside from the possible exception of Sir Michael Otedola (God bless his soul) and Col. (as he then was) Olagunsoye Oyinlola, all Lagos governors had always been above the national average. Indeed, just as Tinubu was reference point during his era, the iconic Alhaji Lateef Jakande was the gubernatorial golden boy of the 2nd Republic (1979-1983).
Yet, the first two years of Governor Tinubu, particularly from emotive critics that didn’t understand, talk less of sharing his strategic vision, was sheer hell on earth.
Who, indeed, would forget the whispering (but hugely popular) campaign on the “Bola oracle” at Alausa, busy guzzling civil servants’ salary (when the government was leveraging the ORACLE software to sanitize the Lagos wage bill)?
Or the heroics of Labour Leader, Ayodele Akele who, just as the 2Face protest of February 6 tried to do, led an impassioned campaign against Governor Tinubu, on the explosive planks of pain and hunger!
But without those early but painful reforms, would Lagos be the roaring exemplar it is today? Back then, painful reforms took no less than two years!
Now, with the serial rape of Abuja, what quick therapy or painless magic is available, and for a harried government that isn’t even two years old? That about sums up the naiveté behind the 2Face protests!
Still, just shuffle the times, between 2001 and now. You probably would locate a constant: a nihilistic but loud minority, averse to any strategic pains, no matter how inevitable; and prone to happy manipulation by naive, or worse: subversive lobbies, under the aegis of some public good.
But by far, the greatest letdown has been the media. Even if the people are too stressed to think hard, is the press, with its much vaunted brain power, also incapable of some introspection?
And the colourful, post-protest headlines! “Protests rock …”! “Labour paralyses Lagos”! And in all of these, a crowd no more than 500, in a city of 20 million? Some rocking paralysis! That sure must be the Nigerian media’s contribution to modern journalism lexis, if not outright fiction — and all these in times of extreme national angst!
And to think that these same papers were busy romanticizing criminality, when some Niger Delta elements were blowing up oil facilities, just to make the silly point it is chic to cut your nose to spite your face! By the way, does anyone remember the boast to make Nigeria ungovernable, just because an election was lost and won?
It is all adding up in national hunger — and anger!
No one can take away anyone’s right to protest. But like Rehoboam’s fatal gaffe, 2Face and friends blundered on this one without much thinking.
That it went largely shunned, despite a laughable media hype to the contrary, shows the quiet majority understand the issues far better than the noisy, bristling minority. But it doesn’t mean they feel less pain.
It is crunch time. We must atone for past licentiousness, or embrace sure future ruin. Let nobody give democratic dissent a bad name.

The post 2Face and friends appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.