Shorn of its classical flavour, this headline simply means the agony (or many agonies) of Magu.
But why might Ibrahim Magu, acting chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), be in agony?
Did he, like Diezani Alison-Madueke, former minister of Petroleum Resources, just forfeit US $153 million (N34 billion) to the Federal Government, which the presiding judge, Justice Muslim Hassan, ruled were proceeds of crime, allegedly laundered on her behalf?
Were Mrs. Alison-Madueke to be docked, does this verdict not become some support evidence for conviction, like the sword of Damocles, dangling over her?
Sword of Damocles? Many in the Diezani camp would love that, despite its eternal dread and harsh moral stricture, for the sword of Damocles never comes down!
Not so, the millions of the dispossessed baying for blood — and rightly so! That furious breed would wish the sword of Lady Justice, too slow for their liking, swished down with a zing, and chopped off every sticky finger!
Or is Magu facing the storm like Andrew Yakubu, former Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) managing director, who just got caught out “icing” US $ 9.8 million and 74, 000 Pounds Sterling, in an indifferent facility. One cheeky fellow, on facebook, promptly dubbed that dodgy facility the “Central Bank of Southern Kaduna”!
Or is he, for that matter, James Ibori, former Delta governor, who just left a British gaol house. Despite his conviction and punishment, Ibori faces a life-time exertion, yarning his odyssey was a British tale by the moonlight.
From his tumultuous welcome, his Delta people seem to believe him; even if that results more from wishful thinking, than from dutiful reason. From outside Delta? Ibori draws disdainful rebuff.
So, why is agony the lot of Magu, when he is no former convict like Ibori or lugging heavy but reasonable suspicion like Dr. Yakubu and Mrs. Alison-Madueke? Indeed, why — when his noble chore, to propel a corrupt-free society, is directly linked to the due exposure (and disgrace) of this trio?
Why is there more zest in some Deltans rationalizing Ibori’s guilt, than in Nigerians massing in Magu’s corner, in his titanic face-down with organized corruption, located in some otherwise sacred institutions of state, stained by profane characters — democratic institutions conceived for the people’s welfare but now programmed, it appears, to ensure their ruin?
That is the grand paradox of contemporary Nigeria, where, as in WB Yeats’s “The Second Coming”, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity”.
To the unwary, therefore, the forces behind this vile paradox are formidable, so much so that beside them, the all-mighty Nigerian state is not unlike puny Lilliputians beside the mighty Gulliver, in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
But to the perceptive, these all-mighty powers of evil are no more than a tussled and ruffled dog, barking away its panic. That cannot be strength. It is pitiable weakness. That about sums up the palpable panic, in the camp of the corrupt, towards the Magu Senate confirmation.
Perhaps a brief tie-back to the EFCC evolution is necessary, to properly situate the Magu fright, in the camp of the guilty, who in any case, are always afraid.
President Olusegun Obasanjo did well to inspire and establish the EFCC, as part of his zero tolerance for corruption agenda. The snag, however, was that while Obasanjo always piously piped his integrity, like the Wole Soyinka tiger proclaiming its “tigeritude”, not many could recognize that immaculate tiger if they saw one! What is the myth of the tiger, if it didn’t instil recognition by instant dread?
Besides, Vice President Abubakar Atiku was always a victim of unsavoury whispering campaigns, that always mumbled the worst. Perhaps by the occupational hazard of being a politician, the former veepee had not felt obliged to make a scapegoat of his many traducers and their evil sotto voce. That has not quite endeared his image in the emotive streets.
And, of course, Nuhu Ribadu, EFCC’s first chairman, was a diligent and zestful fellow. But he was too voluble, a dash too boastful, leading to too many barks that fell short of actual bites. Besides, despite his personal honesty and commitment, he laboured under a presidency that was all noise, but which hardly anybody, when the chips are down, could vouch for.
That has drastically changed. Perhaps for the first time ever, both President Muhammadu Buhari and Vice President Yemi Osinbajo would appear to ooze unchallenged integrity; and yet don’t crow about it.
As anti-sleaze czar, the president would appear to have chosen an alter ego in Ibrahim Magu. Though taciturn, Magu is very formidable by his personal conduct and fierce commitment to his cause.
Though he has inherited, from Ribadu, the media histrionics (by the way, a brilliant strategy to wrong-foot the brazen, thieving class, with their conspiring dreg of hustling lawyers and rotten judges), he appears a more formidable, if not implacable, foe who could not be subverted by throwing a rotten apple his way; or by penetrating a roguish and hypocritical Presidency.
There then lies the panic that has gripped Nigeria’s organized corruption; and shaped their desperate war cry: Stop Magu by all means necessary!
Only the obtuse and the dense would not see through the childish pranks of Bukola Saraki’s Senate, by purporting to have withheld confirmation for Magu, the media orchestration of such a tragic joke, and expect that would be the end of the matter.
And now, like the Yoruba “egbirin ote” (web of intrigues), where one checkmated plot is only the undying phoenix for yet another, in a frenetic relay of evil, there are talks of Nigerian governors blocking Magu’s nomination.
Despite all the empty cant, this confrontation has nothing to do with the public good, but their majesties’ alleged divine right to press financial opacity, with all the impatient fervour of the unquestionable monarch!
Ripples is not about committing the favourite media sin of, wholesome, tarring the two key democratic institutions of the Senate and the Governorship. Even as the Senate hobbles under the dark shadows of its leadership, some senators still do stellar work, and are excellent representation of their people’s hopes and aspirations.
The governors too, follow the same pattern. Hugely unpopular as a group, some governors continue to push noble claims as bright visionaries and passionate development agents.
But this reported Senate-governors’ gang-up against Magu’s confirmation, concerning a reported probe over the N552 billion Paris Club refund to states, can only further damage these key institutions, in the estimations of right-thinking people.
That is why senators and governors of goodwill must dissociate themselves from this reported plot; and align with this worthy crusade to rid Nigeria of graft, resultant underdevelopment and mass poverty.
Magu, by his focus and diligence, has done more than enough to earn an easy confirmation, for a job he has done so well. Let the Senate do the needful, and stop baiting the disgraceful.
The anti-sleaze czar should be toasted by all for patriotic duty, not roasted by unpatriotic elements, profaning the high temples of state.

The post Magu agonistes appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

Sometime in October 2016, a colleague on The Nation Editorial Board asked if Ripples would be available to review a book, soon billed for launch, on Nigerian contemporary politics and history.
The book’s title was provocative – how a people who never fought a war became the losers of that war.  It promised something, if the author could rigorously pull off his argument.
But it turned a damp squib – for the author just went on a fanciful binge of emotive bombast and ethnic slurring, though he was very careful, on the surface, to project formidable erudition.  Still, it was all to a skewed end.
On launch day, a captive and zestful audience was eager to hear what they wanted to hear.  But it was Ripples’ duty, based on facts from the book, to pronounce the exact opposite.
It ended civil enough, though it could easily have turned another “civil war”.  In fairness to the zesty author, he was just a soul brimming with ideas and eager to joust – but not shy of unabashed self-exhibition.  We parted shaking hands.
But why this long preface?  It is the umpteenth matter of the national question, among Nigeria’s many ethnics; which has become a cacophony, parallel to the nationwide hangover of hisses, grunts and moans, after decades of wild parties and wanton waste.
Indeed, while misery is democratized (for hunger boasts no ethnic monopoly, just as the mindless sleaze that resulted in this present meltdown was a pan-Nigeria rot), the parallel privation-driven dissonance, is leading many ethnics to re-examine, even more acutely, their place in the Nigerian common wealth.
Indeed, it echoes a grim paradox of the modern state, particularly the post-colonial states of Africa, as examined by Prof. Wale Adebanwi, in his new book, Nation as Grand Narrative: The Nigerian Press and the Politics of Meaning.
In that analysis, Adebanwi, citing sundry authorities, painted a classical state-nation dichotomy of African states.  Whereas the African state looks so real (“densely corporeal”, he dubbed it) in its physical might,  it is so ghostly and flighty, if its claim is nationhood, with any common core (“elusively spectral”, he called it).
That, of course, offers a robust intellectual foundation for Nigeria’s “re-structuring”: from a dysfunctional unitary state masquerading as federal, to a functional federation, where all of the ethnics are more sure-footed about what they pool into, and what they get from, the common wealth.
So, the issue is not if “re-structuring”, or “true federalism” or any of its much bandied variants is desirable.  After languishing in the jungle of military rule for eons, and moving round in circles, on the federal question, in almost 18 years of continuous civil rule, it is clear Nigeria’s eventual salvation is in a vibrant federal state.
But can the agitators measure up to the strict muster of the ideal?  That is doubtful, which is quite reminiscent of the author cited at the start of this piece, who promised, via his new book, much vigorous thinking but delivered instead flabby emotions!
First, it would help to start from the recent beginning, before moving to the very genesis.
The renewed clamour for a restructured Nigeria came immediately before the 2015 general election; and reached new hysteria after that election was lost and won.
The one fancied the fond hope to gain from the pre-election gaming of “restructuring”, which turned forlorn by decisive defeat.  The other was sheer hysteria to cope with — or more aptly, cunning escapism from — the shattering angst of electoral wallop.
That about captures the portrait of the newfound Salvation Army of “restructuring” from the South-South and South East, and their brash orchestra.
The curious irony, though, is that mainstream elements from these parts of Nigeria had been most comfy with the ancien regime from 1999 — and even before — and its arch-centralist ways.
What might have changed?  A Saul has turned to Paul, with the speed of light, even without the blinding lights on the way to Damascus?
Even more curiously, the South-South, under President Goodluck Jonathan, had an ample, if not golden, opportunity to push for restructuring.  But their elite-in-power manifested the same avid rapacity, for which they lampooned and excoriated the “Hausa-Fulani”. With frenzy, they gobbled up the national barn – bumper harvest with tender seedlings, restructuring be damned!
An extremist strain of the South East now puts its faith in “Biafra”.  The moderate mainstream now embraces “restructuring”, with the ardour of a neophyte clasping his new dogma.  Yet, more than any other, the South East elite had, pre-2015, been the most zestful collaborators in the Nigerian power racket, which suddenly has become a hateful gargoyle!
With talks of a putative Igbo presidency, would the restructuring ardour cool after, just as it did with the South-South, under Jonathan?  Time, as Jimmy Cliff, the reggae superstar crooned, will tell.
That returns the discourse to the South West battalion of the restructuring Salvation Army, in a patriotic blitz to save Nigeria!
On restructuring, not even the meanest or most cynical of foes could doubt the resolve and constancy of these war-hardened South West veterans.  From time immemorial, that had been their regional anthem.
But pause and ask: what drives the message of this contemporary army?
Yoruba nationalism?  That’s legitimate.  The Nigerian crisis of nationhood stems from the fact that each component ethnic projects its essence as the exemplar for a cobbled state, yearning for a winning formative ethos.
So, Yoruba nationalism cannot be bad, any more than Igbo, Hausa, Itsekiri or Tiv nationalism. In any case, Nigeria craves a sound federation because of its many proud but competing nationalities.
Yoruba irredentism?  That is bad.  Irredentism is a precursor to domination, for it projects a superiority complex that suggests domination is a divine duty, for which the dominated must be grateful. That was absent from the Yoruba pristine push for federal Nigeria, from the Obafemi Awolowo era.
But now? Many South West veterans, in this patriotic war, sound nativist, if not outright irredentist. That is to be decried — for irredentism cannot be bad for the Fulani, but good for the Yoruba.
Still, that might well be strains of frustration, borne out of phobia for a clear receding influence, on this polity of many pathologies. So striking a blow for federalism, and fighting off creeping irrelevance, might just be two sides of the same coin.
Which calls on the starry-eyed to be wary. Restructuring for a productive federation is the straight-and-narrow way to Nigeria’s salvation.
But beware: there also appears a parallel wide and merry way. It teems with gamers, for personal or group relevance; and leads the naive, bristling with innocent ardour on the federal question, straight to nowhere but perdition.

The post National question or just gaming for relevance? appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

Oluwarotimi Odunayo Akeredolu, SAN, as simply “Arakunrin” (Yoruba for generic male, connoting “commoner”), reminds one of Shakespeare’s tragic hero, Caius Marcius Coriolanus, in the play, Coriolanus.
In the most romantic accounts, Coriolanus was a boy-general, crucial to victories against the Volscians, fierce rival-neighbours of old Rome, though Coriolanus was hardly out of his teens.
But a more realistic account portrays Coriolanus as a young general, but veteran of many triumphs, so much so that Rome’s survival depended almost solely on his valour.
On the face value, there appears a gulf between Akeredolu and Coriolanus. The one is 60, well past mid-life, lugging enough life experience for his last stretch to old age. The other was young, just eyeing mid-life, as callow as they came.
Still, similarities abound. After conquering legal practice by taking the silk, Akeredolu has turned his attention to politics.
Coriolanus did not quite “conquer” warring, for that remained his first and abiding love. But after so much blood and gore, Volumnia, his influential mother, felt Rome must elect his son as consul, and promptly nudged the reluctant young man towards her wish.
And there-in lies the closest comparison: politics meant Coriolanus, proud as a cock, vain as a peacock, must wear humility like a gown; which nevertheless sat rather ill on him. Provoked during his campaign for consul, by the treacherous tribunes, he blew his tops and embraced avoidable tragedy.
Governance, it appears, is shunting Rotimi Akeredolu, SAN, the aristocratic lawyer, and Aketi, the colourful, if controversial politician, to Arakunrin, the commoner-governor.
Would this newfound humility hold, when the chips are down, and the heat of office sears? Or will the Aketi volcanic temper, like Coriolanus’s, blast everything into smithereens? That rests in the belly of time.
Still, in Ondo and environs, coining gubernatorial monikers, of the most theatrical hue, appears the fundament of branding a new government.
In his eight-year suzerainty, former Governor Olusegun Mimiko relished his Iroko byname, which projected solidity and strength; and harvested tumultuous roars in Ondo streets.
In the past seven years, Osun Governor, Rauf Aregbesola has milked his Ogbeni (simply Mr) moniker, which reinforces his projected image of the governor as the man next door — no frills, no thrills, just work.
Aketi, as governor, has gone even a step further, in projected gubernatorial humility — a commoner-governor at everyone’s beck and call, ready to serve, at the shortest of notices. That’s a sweet change from a rather cantankerous profile, with explosive newspaper interviews, ringing with venom!
A ready-to-serve governor, humble and focused, would register rather well with the long-suffering Ondo people, after the Mimiko years that promised so much, but delivered too little. That has left Ondo with quite some catch-up to do, at least when compared with its South West neighbours. Yet, with its oil wealth, Ondo is potentially the richest in all of the South West.
Yes, Lagos boasts more cash from the Federation Account; and raises much more as internally generated revenue. But divide the resources of Lagos with its 20 million-plus population, and Ondo’s with its less than four million people, and Lagos appears statistically poorer.
Still, it would be inordinate comparing or contrasting Lagos with Ondo. For one, Lagos, aside from a former federal capital, is one of the first-generation states, created in 1967. It is 50 this year. Besides, for the past 18 years since the birth of the 4th Republic, Lagos has built an awesome record in physical and social infrastructure, so much so that it is easily the national reference point.
Not so, comparing Ondo with its clusters of South West neighbours. Ondo is far younger than Lagos. Unlike Lagos, Ondo has not witnessed progressive continuation under the same party, or more accurately, movement, for that long stretch. But neither have states like Ekiti, Osun, Oyo and Ogun.
Ekiti, under Governor Kayode Fayemi, was a study in development policies, though a tragic shortfall in matching politics would lead to the premature electoral ouster of that government, after just four years. Yet, it is clear Ekiti was on its way to planned, deliberate and sustainable development, before the advent of the Ayo Fayose burlesque of stomach infrastructure.
Osun, much younger than Ondo (created in 1991, compared to Ondo’s 1976) has even fared much better since 1999, despite some indifferent governments. In the past seven years, in spite of its lean purse, the Aregbesola government has shown the greatest hunger for social and physical infrastructure in all of the South West, so much so that Osun is set to break out of its extant mode: a civil service state worth almost nothing outside the ultra-narrow economics of civil servants’ salaries.
Ogun and Oyo, second-generation states like Ondo, have made their strides too. Oyo was happy beneficiary as seat of the old Western Region. Even then, after a series of uninspiring governments since 1999, Oyo State, under Governor Biola Ajimobi, has essayed the heights Oyo should clear in sound infrastructure. But it’s work-in-progress yet.
Ogun, in the past 14 years, under Governors Gbenga Daniel and Ibikunle Amosun, though under different parties and differing gubernatorial tempers, has maximally leveraged its contiguity to Lagos to jack up internally generated revenue and rev up physical infrastructure; in modern roads and bridges. But again, there is much more to do.
Whither Ondo in all of these, particularly when compared with its immediate peers of Ogun and Oyo?
The late Governor Olusegun Agagu had great vision in infrastructure, for he authored many bridges to link up the riverine areas that produce the state’s oil wealth, with the mainland that harbours its agricultural wealth. But the governor’s lack of legitimacy, no thanks to two controversial elections, blighted his agenda, from turning into legacy.
In contrast, immediate past Governor, Dr. Mimiko, lugged fearsome legitimacy, and humongous street popularity, after retrieving a stolen mandate from the courts and winning the first second term in Ondo history. Many contend he tried his best. But many more also argue that he spent an inordinate time on political gaming, fired by cheap trickery, busy playing the end against the middle, that he failed flat to deliver on his stunning potentials.
It is, therefore, a state rich in potentials, but tragically short on actualization, in comparison with its peers, that new Governor Akeredolu has inherited. Nothing bad in following the Iroko tradition of telling political symbolism, starting with a winning gubernatorial branding.
But from Iroko to Arakunrin, what the Ondo people crave are unstinted service and veritable results, even if theatrical sobriquets and performance are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
That is why Akeredolu must hit the ground hard, shun the temptation to play the Leviathan of both party and government, and give petty distractions a wide, wide berth.
Besides, he should leverage, to the full, the South West economic integration protocol, being forged by the Development Agenda for Western Nigeria (DAWN) Commission.
Otherwise, he risks the Mimiko self-rout of, blinded by hubris, trading putative greatness for pathetic ordinariness.
That would be yet another hope-betrayed by a longsuffering people.

The post From Iroko to Arakunrin: Ondo on the march again appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

The Soludo bomb, that the Buhari Presidency met a poor economy, but made it poorer still, is somewhat reminiscent of Fela (God bless his soul) in his African Shrine days.
When the irreverent Afrobeat king-priest got into his elements, and his doting votaries were taut with expectations, this breezy question-and-answer would ensue:
“Make I yab dem?” asked the self-named chief priest.
“Yab dem!” roared the doting adherents.
And Fela would begin his scathing excoriation of the then extant order. Enter “yabis”, into Nigeria’s urban lexicon.
So, when Chukwuma Charles Soludo, former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, viciously bombed Buhari on how he had further damaged a thoroughly damaged economy that he inherited, Ripples’ mind just darted to vintage Fela!
But the Presidency’s riposte couldn’t have been more apt, with civil language to boot.
Laolu Akande, senior special assistant to the Vice President, pointedly told Prof. Soludo he was directing his venom at the wrong quarters. Though he admitted Soludo’s democratic right to his opinion, he insisted Nigerians too had democratic right to facts.
And the facts? The economy tottered because of past wrong-headed policies and bad judgments; which had made an overhaul imperative. He then threw, at the former CBN boss, one or two paradoxes.
A past government, awash with petro-dollars, didn’t have any to invest in crucial infrastructure, physical or social.
Yet, a present order struggles with tight funding. But from that little, it is making strategic investments in roads and rail; aside from a school feeding programme, part of a social investment programme (SIP), targeted at the poorest Nigerians; as well as special interventions to engage unemployed graduates.
Akande’s clincher: “The Buhari administration is spending more on infrastructure at a time when resources are lean. When we had abundant revenues, what happened was profligacy and plunder.”
Besides, the old order made a fetish of liberalization and modernization, so much so that local refining was almost taboo. But the newly released Economic Recovery Plan (ERP) is already projecting export of refined petroleum by 2020, under its “sufficiency in energy” sub-head, food security that would give agriculture and agric-processing a boost, improved transportation infrastructure and (re)industrialization to further domesticate the economy; and save foreign exchange from needless imports.
Moral: as the Greek, Heraclitus the philosopher quipped, you cannot step in the same river twice (so rapid is the flux of change). So, the Buhari government and Soludo would appear talking about different economies.
While the present government works towards a restructured economy, with stress on local refining and heavy local manufacturing (though the electricity side of the equation still looks suspect), Soludo seems fixated on Breton Woods’ sanctified globalization: a sanctimonious artificial balance of books and triumphal declaration of “growth” sans development — total fidelity to an ideology propelled on western global ascendancy; but dooming other economies as perpetual laggards.
A pointer to this direction would appear Soludo’s clincher that he doubted the magic the Buhari government would do to bring the naira-dollar parity to the pre-May 2015 exchange rate. Naira parity —was that a Freudian slip symptomatic of a mind fixated on imports, so that watching the naira exchange yo-yo becomes some sick national pastime?
The Soludo-Buhari Presidency debate would appear a difference between two ideological paths, destined to lead to two different destinations. The snag though is that one of the sides assumes the self-evident superiority of its own view, that it practically stamps it as received economic wisdom. Such vanity!
Very early in the Buhari Presidency, Oby Ezekwesili, without any sense of irony, rebuked the president, who had balked at the devaluation of the naira, that excessive sticking to dogma would not fix the economy. It didn’t even occur to Madam Due Process, of the Obasanjo era, that even her comments were shaped by dogma!
That exactly had been the mindset all through the Obasanjo-Jonathan era, with the trio of Soludo (CBN governor), Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (Finance minister, and under Jonathan, coordinating minister of the Economy) and Ezekwesili (Due Process and later Education minister), playing star roles.
Soludo, as Obasanjo’s chief economic adviser, theorized to no end. He authored NEEDS (National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy), and its state and local government adjuncts of SEEDS and LEEDS; and as CBN czar, he floated the Strategic Agenda for the Naira, which soon landed him in hot soup with the new Yar’adua Presidency.
But note that NEEDS and its adjuncts were not built on any concept of federalizing the economy, but on the age-old over-centralization that has brought nothing but ruin.
Dr. Okonjo-Iweala, during the Obasanjo and Jonathan years, was a faithful votary of her metropolitan gods, merrily mouthing “growth”, wearing a smack over “healthy” foreign reserves, and reeling out fanciful “jobs” and stats. Yet, the real sector, of manufacturing and agriculture, were virtually dead. She even came up with “rebasing” that hauled a shell as the “largest in Africa”!
As for Dr. Ezekwesili, “due process”, as laudable as that was, became almost a fetish in itself, recording fulsome “savings”! Still, none of these “savings” propelled a policy of sound infrastructure, beyond the proverbial lip service. No wonder then, that under Jonathan, less than six years later, everything went up in smoke!
So, when Soludo claimed a bad economy was “further destroyed”, he referred to the self-promoted bubble his ideological clan pushed during their hey days. But that was no economy, despite all the arcane sound and fury. It was a mirage programmed for smoke.
The thing though is if you “damage” an already bad economy, on the way to re-tooling it, you you have followed a natural process to renewal. That is the logical way to go, even with initial pains.
That, Soludo and clan must appreciate. Their virtual economy model has led us nowhere but ruin. It’s time we tried another direction — of well and truly domesticating the economy.
When that happens, the naira would find its true parity, without damage to anyone.

The post That Soludo yabis appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

From his wild rants, Ayo Fayose, Ekiti governor, cuts the picture of a doomed dog, deaf to the hunter’s whistle.
His gruff request for a “refund”, of “his” N10 million, the then President Olusegun Obasanjo allegedly extorted for his presidential library, from sitting governors in 2005, could well be due comeuppance for brazen hypocrisy.  But it was no less graceless, coming at the zenith of celebrating the old man at 80.
Still, that was pure Karma at work!  As a younger man, Obasanjo himself, in Not My Will,  had poked rude jabs at seniors, professional and biological.
On account of the February 1976 coup, which claimed Gen. Murtala Muhammad, Obasanjo had summarily condemned Gen. Yakubu Gowon, his former commander-in-chief, thundering “Mr. Gowon” would face trial — and sure conviction and execution — should he set foot on Nigerian soil.
Well Gowon, his honour restored, is alive to see a coarser Fayose do to Obasanjo, what Obasanjo did to him!
On Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s failed presidential ambition, he mocked: what Awo craved all his illustrious life, he, a mere boy from the Egba backwaters, got on a platter of gold.
Why, he even slammed the great Zik of Africa as ending life as Owelle of Onitsha!
But even as Karma’s agent, Fayose just doomed himself to a similar fate!
It is this vigorous paradox of immaculate rot that makes the Obasanjo public persona puzzle at 80.
The Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library (OOPL) need not be the biblical whited sepulchre, glittering outside, rotten within.  But given its suspect moral provenance, it risks boiling down to just that, despite its huge historical potentials.  Talk of a rigged process to an immaculate end!
Since Gen. Obasanjo first hit on Nigeria, as Civil War hero, Federal Works commissioner under Gen. Gowon, Gen. Murtala Muhammad’s chief of staff, Supreme Headquarters, and later military Head of State, he had always projected public high-mindedness.
Under his tenure as military head of state, he changed the National Anthem, arguing that the new reflected Nigeria’s African essence more than the old.  He also conceived the National Pledge, an everyday awakening of the dormant patriotism in the citizenry.
Even as Lord of Manor at Dodan Barracks, Lagos, the Obasanjo regime pushed out official civic communications that compared the government to a dustbin, into which citizens rightly throw their garbage!  Moral?  Governments — even under juntas — must be humble and long-suffering, always putting citizen’s rights and welfare first.
As elected president, he founded the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), with the volcanic Nuhu Ribadu as first chairman, thus mainstreaming the War Against Corruption; as well as the ICPC, to lesser applause.  Still on anti-corruption infrastructure, he established the Due Process Office, under Oby Ezekwesili, to check the soulless padding of contracts.
Of course, under his economic “reforms”, away from the public sector-led ethos of his first coming, he crowned the local Breton Woods royals of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Charles (later Chukwuma) Soludo, Ezekwezili, and Nasir El-Rufai who, as first Bureau for Public Enterprises boss, birthed the first set of privatization of public companies; and liberalized the telecoms sector.
But Obasanjo’s flaw has always been failure to walk the talk of his own high-mindedness.  That has been responsible for the sweet-and-sour that has pork-marked his public persona, spanning some 47 years since 1970.
Even under the growl of Ribadu’s anti-corruption rhetoric, cynical extortion, that was the fund-raiser for the OOPL, strutted in full public glare, probity be damned!
Or how else would you call a sitting president, doubling as oil minister, suborning the cream of the Nigerian economy, to “donate” to a private cause, dressed in public garb?  But that was even on the narrow economic front.
On the far larger canvas of politics and constitutionalism,  Obasanjo’s, through Ribadu’s EFCC, was the ultimate paradox of an absolute corruption war corrupting absolutely!
Tornado Obasanjo, flush with cynical puritanism, blasted the Constitution and blighted the impeachment clause.  Enter then, the tragi-comic lingo of “simple minority”, for “impeaching” state governor-enemies of the presidential Leviathan!
The motif of the Leviathan-come-to-crush all was also all too apparent, in the fate of the hubris-stricken Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and its eventual destruction.
That, to be sure, was mutual opportunism gone awry: Obasanjo wanted power to crow about his “greatness”; a manipulative military cabal, with their civilian side-kicks, wanted a pawn, to sustain their hegemony.  But the pawn soon turned brazen manipulator, and the PDP goose was cooked.    Good riddance!
As usual, the Ebora Owu has claimed everything good and decent left the PDP when he did.  But that is a sweet, self-serving lie.  Fact: Obasanjo moulded the PDP from a neither-nor power machine, to a partisan monster, with a “do-or-die” electoral temper.
Poor, naive Goodluck Jonathan was the ultimate fall guy, for he got buried under its rubble, ironically to Obasanjo’s sanctimonious applause!
This paradox of immaculate case housing a rotten core, and its dire testimony to history, may have propelled Obasanjo’s manic essay at self-written history: My Command, Not My Will, Under My Watch — the narcissistic “My” would appear no accident! — and of course, the ultimate in self-erected shrines, the OOPL, first in Africa!
What drives all this racket of intellect, and thunder of integrity, positioning the former president as the model of honest and enlightened citizenry?
Perhaps Buhari and Awo.  President Muhammadu Buhari is as taciturn as Obasanjo is voluble.  But his unquestionable integrity quakes and vibrates, like when you roll a vessel filled to the brim — the telling opposite of the grating and scraping, of rolling an empty one!
Now that Buhari is also president, history has a choice, between tinsel and solid gold, in presidential integrity.
Chief Obafemi Awolowo (1909-1987) never attained federal power.  But in distilled public intellectualism, of plotting a way out of Nigeria’s morass, he is nonpareil so far.
Obasanjo, on the other hand, has authored a lot of narcissistic tomes, detailing his watch, at his many layers of responsibility, in an active engagement with contemporary Nigeria, climaxing with the presidency.
Again, between Awo and Obasanjo, history has its pick, if the subject is rigour and cutting-edge ideas.
One clear difference between Awo and Obasanjo, though: while an intellectually restless Awo craved a more workable Nigeria, bench-marking Jeremy Bentham’s greatest good of the greatest number, Obasanjo thoroughly understood — and still understands — his Nigeria, and for good and for ill, thoroughly milked it.
Perhaps Obasanjo’s greatest tribute?  That he was great. But only because Nigeria was puny, as Gulliver beside Lilliput!  If ever Nigeria hits its dizzying heights, he could well turn a dwarf.
Still, to the Ebora Owu, happy birthday  at 80!

The post At 80: Ebora Owu sweet and sour appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

Femi Fani-Kayode is strutting to Kigali.  Yet, the Yoruba nation — at least its media-savvy denizens — barge along, too angry, it appears, to remember their essence.

When did the cherished Omoluabi credo (in-born nobility, founded on honour, equity and justice) start endorsing criminality, simply because the alleged perpetrator is Yoruba?

Or what else do you call this rabid atavism over the Ile-Ife crisis, except giving tribal cover to heinous crime and brazen criminality?

What is this — some early-day hubris, of a people set to fall upon their proud heritage of uncompromising fairness, as a diminished Roman great would fall on his own sword?

Or a more sinister end-stage decadence, of a people that boast nothing now but once-upon-a-time fairness?

These are troubling questions.  But they demand rigorous answers, in the hysteria of the moment.

It started with Fani’s usually tendentious pieces (this one, a two-piece grenade) that gave the Ife crisis the stark colouration of ethnic saints and sinners.  Yet, the miscreants involved, Yoruba or Hausa-Fulani, are suspected criminals.

Why, good old Femo, flush with emotive lather, even branded himself the Hitler of the moment!  That ought to have exposed his sinister motive.

But no!  Other Yoruba leaders and pressure groups have jumped into the fray, each and everyone rippling with a rather explosive dose of Yoruba ultra-nationalism!

Without risking an ad hominem fallacy, you could see through the early launchers of this emotive war, fired from tribal missiles.

Femi Fani-Kayode has gained unfettered notoriety for cunning emotional claptrap, disguised as some reasoned real deal.  Though only the obtuse get hooked, that tribe boasts great numbers in today’s Nigeria.

Between the old Afenifere and the Buhari Presidency, there appears no love lost; since the grandees so spectacularly backed the wrong horse at the 2015 elections.

With disturbing Yoruba ultra-nationalism issuing from the Afenifere camp, “Hausa-Fulani”, to that frazzled assembly, sounds like throwing the red flag at a snorting bull.  Add downtown rage from the Odua People’s Congress (OPC) and allied clans, and you may well see, in full emotive gargoyle, howlers from 2015, seeking some rogue closure to their pain.

But the real surprise, in the trending Yoruba ultra-nationalism, using the Yoruba cradle as launch pad, would appear the Afenifere Renewal Group (ARG).  That is the real tragedy, for though ARG is proudly Yoruba — and correctly and unapologetically so — its reasoned mien, since it broke away, tended to shun the supremacist gait of its pristine elder cousin.  All that seemed melted with the ARG response to the Ife crisis.

The problem with ultra-nationalism, in a delicate federation, is  that it is good for no one.  Not a few believe “Hausa-Fulani” ultra-nationalism is expressed in the notorious “Fulani herdsmen”, that kill with murderous bravura and satanic flourish.  That has set the whole of the southern media in a tailspin of rage.

But that scalding rage, which belches visceral hatred across regional and ethnic lines, is counter-media terrorism, which erects an intriguing match-up between physical and psychological siege.

The Fulani herdsman slits the throat.  The hate-belching media rips the soul.  The situation is lose-lose, for the innocents, on both sides, are tarred and cooked.

The herdsman libels his race as free-wheeling, conscienceless killers.  The howling media damns a whole people as murderous monsters, beyond redemption; and those it defends as primeval bigots.

That can only point to the blood-soaked road to Kigali, on which hate-filled Rwandans killed first, reasoned later — when it was too late!  A shocked globe reclined from that horror!

The Fulani antipathy, which shaped much of the reaction to the Ife crisis, and the role of the state in it all, lead the discourse right back to the subject.

There is a strong case to be made against the alleged lop-sided arrests in the Ife communal dispute.  It takes two to tango; and apparent one-sided arrests are bound to set the alarm bells clanging for fairness.

The Police had better issue a convincing explanation, or they risk being charged with odious partisanship; and perceived as aiding  and abetting ethnic crimes, thus actively undermining the state.  That is tragic — and treasonable.

Frankly, President Muhammadu Buhari and his security apparatus have earned fair blame over the rampaging killer herdsmen.  These guys are felons, who the state should bring to heel and fast.  The more the Federal Government tarries over these heinous criminals, the more the president gets gravely de-marketed, along ethnic lines.

But it is sheer fallacy to hang, on the president’s neck, the crime of a few “Hausa-Fulani”; and go ahead to hint, as many of these media reports do, at culpable presidential enabling for this gory criminality.

For all the president’s faults, he is no devious fellow.  Besides, such supposition is illiterate and wilful.  No self-respecting media pushes such a line.

Unfortunately, that is the line Fani is wilfully pushing on the Ife crisis, with the other so-called Yoruba leaders in tow.  But really — Yoruba leaders?  Or just soulless dealers, in willy-nilly relevance, mortally scared of creeping but sure oblivion?

Let every felon — Hausa, Fulani or Yoruba — be arrested for their ignoble role, in the Ife fracas.  But let no one, pleading alleged lop-sided arrests, push to spring genuine criminals, under the cover of ethnic solidarity.  Failure to do justice to all leads to two fatal passes.

One junction leads to Kigali.  Perceived government cover for crimes, under ethnic sympathy, arouses the explosive ghost of Hutu-Tutsi antipathy, that brought Rwanda to its knees, after its security agencies had been thoroughly demarketed and devalued, incidentally, by its hurting media.  It is baiting avoidable anarchy.

The other, no less suicidal, is the road to Mogadishu.  That should be of riveting interest to the Yoruba nation.  Somalia fell upon itself, despite being of essentially one ethnic stock, because it harboured wilful criminality among its own.

After the Kiriji War of the 19th century, is the Yoruba breeding certified felons to plague its future, whether inside or outside Nigeria?

That is what you do when you rationalize criminality in the Yoruba cradle, simply because the victims are “other people”.

The post Fani leads ‘em to Kigali appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

For Asiwaju Bola Tinubu at 65, it is ode to brilliant ideas and deep compassion — and just as well; for no politician of his generation better epitomizes these two concepts.

But the remarkable thing about this year’s birthday: that Tinubu philosophy, of razor-sharp ideas founded on deep compassion, is seeping into the grassroots.

That was clear from the adoption, as part of the Tinubu 65th birthday, of 300 indigent pupils, from all of the 18 public primary schools, in Eredo Local Council Development Area (LCDA), in the Epe Local Government of Lagos State.

That charity’s punch-line could well have come straight from the celebrator himself: “No child will be left behind”.

Now, to some lexical arithmetic: if you graft compassion with ideas, what you get is compassionate ideas.

That would appear the fundament of the Social Contract, that theoretical basis for the pristine government, in which the people surrender parts of their rights, in exchange for welfare and protection, by the mutually empowered Leviathan.

Until neo-cons, under US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher (both late) seized the globe by the scruff, and left the world much poorer, hungrier and angrier, compassionate ideas, as government policy, was given.

Indeed, the democratic concept of the vote-for-sound-governance would appear a logical flow from that given, subject, of course, to voter renewal or rejection, at periodic elections.

But then the neo-cons came, changed state compassion to capital worship, and condemned the people to scrounging majority need from minority greed.  Governance has since never been the same!

So, when Asiwaju Tinubu, at the 9th Bola Tinubu Colloquium, with the theme, “Make it in Nigeria: use what we make and make what we use “, declared the political economy must work for the people, he was only reasserting an instinct that had endeared him to millions of Nigerians.

Tinubu, as grand symbol of compassionate ideas, as the cornerstone of governance, was apparent from the attendance mix at the May 28 colloquium in Lagos.

The policy geeks were there in numbers.  So were entrepreneurs, thriving or budding, eager to mix and mingle with the governmental royals,  on fresh ideas for national economic redemption — all under the grand mastermind of Vice President Yemi Osinbajo.

But so too were the political hoi polloi, beneficiaries of the legendary Tinubu empathy, no less eager to celebrate with their champion.

From the inaugural colloquium in 2008, Prof. Osinbajo had been the quiet but acute mind, bossing this yearly festival of ideas.

The inaugural theme, “Every vote must count” was a logical response to President Olusegun Obasanjo’s “do-or-die” election of 2007, that foisted the late Umaru Musa Yar’Adua as president, in what would prove the beginning of the end for the former ruling party.

But even poor Yar’Adua — goodly soul! — recoiled at that “election”.  He therefore set up the Justice Muhammadu Uwais Electoral Review Panel.  That inspired Tinubu’s own Coalition of Democrats for Electoral Reforms (CODER), which drove the theme for the first-ever Tinubu colloquium: Every vote must count.

So, from the harsh Siberia of opposition, when the PDP loomed, as if it would swing its threat of 60-year uninterrupted rule, Prof. Osinbajo had run the colloquium; to engage the polity on cutting ideas, in a political economy neither proud of its past nor clear about its future.

This year, the Tinubu colloquium has engaged the Buhari government, in which Osinbajo serves as vice-president; aside from other Nigerians.  Between Tinubu and Osinbajo then, it is as Chief Obafemi Awolowo, himself the most vigorous ideas man of his generation, quipped: only the deep can call to the deep.

Unlike the Shakespearean Ides of March that doomed Caesar, the Tinubu Colloquium is morphing into grand Ideas of March, that could well save a nation.

So is the novel Eredo Epe charity, saving the rural poor.  No less striking was its symbolism: an act of compassion, to toast Tinubu at 65, to kick-start the birthday celebrations, their unique Eredo way.

It is equally interesting how the Indigent Pupils Adoption Programme came about.  Shamsideen Adeniyi, former secretary to the Eredo LCDA, whose Ojo Ibukun Foundation is chief driver of the charity, recalled how he observed the acute discomfort of a bare-foot pupil, one hot afternoon, in the Eredo country.

As his boisterous mates barged on the tar, seemingly without a care, the poor child skipped, now on the hot tar, then in the adjoining bushes — all the “kokoma” dance just to relieve the searing afternoon heat, on his shoe-less sole!  Even then, his short was tattered.  So was his shirt. Of course, he logged a rude sack for a school bag, which was all the more remarkable for its full emptiness!

That set Adeniyi furiously thinking — with a mere N5, 000, this child could get two pairs of uniforms, a pair of school scandals, a doughty bag to carry his books and some dozen exercise books for school work.  The Indigent Pupils Adoption Programme was born — and in its first coming in 2016, it benefitted 100 pupils!

But then, Wasiu Odeyemi, aka Wastab, another big shot in the Eredo political universe, bought into the idea, adopting 120 of the 300 beneficiaries this year, under the ambit of his Hassmowun Foundation (after his late parents, Hassan and Omowunmi who, especially his mother, were great lovers of education).

Both foundations agreed to use the event, the second in the series, to celebrate Asiwaju Tinubu at 65; and in that, drew virtually every who-is-who in that community.

From 100 in 2016 to 300 in 2017, Adeniyi’s Ojo Ibukun Foundation, with collaborating partners, would continue expanding the scheme until it achieves its ultimate goal — No child will be left behind.

What is more?  Every beneficiary child would be yearly kitted throughout his or her primary school years. That is the term for adoption, and donors have bought into it.

Asiwaju Tinubu must feel doubly proud: his persona inspiring charity to the society’s most vulnerable; and his policy temper, spawning progressive thinkers, even at the grassroots.  For Lagos, that is good news.

In Achebe-speak, for Tinubu-esque compassionate ideas, it’s morning yet, on creation day!

The post Ode to ideas and compassion appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

You can’t step in the same river twice 
—Heraclitus, Greek philosopher

The excitement reached a head, as the party hit the November 27 interchange, that flies over Gbongan road, in Osogbo.
He was no yokel; but in his excitement, prancing and skipping, he yodelled like one.
“Ogbeni, the Awolowo of our time,” he chirped, “don’t forget the Bisi Akande trumpet!” — and, all zeal and fervency, he pointed towards Gbongon.
The Bisi Akande Trumpet Bridge was some 40 kilometers away, at the old Gbongan junction, with Ibadan-lfe expressway.  But this enthusiast couldn’t imagine Osun Governor, Rauf Aregbesola, letting go of his Guild of Editors guests, without showing off his architectural wonder.
It was March 18.  The Guild of Editors chose to hold its committee meeting at Osogbo.  The governor also seized the occasion to show the elite of the Nigerian media Osun’s developmental strides.  Though Ripples is no member of the Guild, he was invited to join the August visitors in March.
The bussed company, with the governor himself in-situ, set out, from the Oke Fia Government House, quietly enough.
But they lost their anonymity that moment, at the Olaiya junction of Alekuwodo,  in Osogbo’s commercial hub, someone sighted the  governor, and let go a yelp.
Before you knew it, an excited, beaming, dancing company was pumping fists and flashing “V” (for victory) signs, with their two fore-fingers, a sign original to Winston  Churchill, Britain’s World War 2 hero; but popularized in these climes by Chief Obafemi Awolowo, first premier of the old Western Region.
The governor, himself a study in boyish excitement, returned the “V” compliment;  and an impromptu carnival of love, mutual doting and appreciation ensued.  As the convoy rolled slowly by, on the newly named Workers Avenue, so did the excited people swell in their numbers.
But everything got to a head on the November 27 bridge, when the governor and his entourage disembarked, the accompanying officials explaining the work-in-progress; and the governor himself chipping in now and then, especially the engineering and technical details.
The first leg of the tour was on the Oba Adesoji Aderemi ring road, that ripples with history, old and contemporary.
Oba Aderemi (1889-1980), was Ooni of Ife (1930-1980); and was first indigenous governor of Western Region, during which time Chief Awolowo, as Premier, performed his social transformation wonders, that hauled the old West clear of the other regions, of North and East.
But, as Oba Aderemi offers today’s Osun a symbolic tieback to the Awolowo golden age, so does its 17.5-kilometre stretch project, to a future Osun, clear historical landmarks.
Those monuments capture its infrastructural remake, from a backwater “civil service” state that rose and fell by Abuja’s dole; to a land poised to harness its resources, in the finest tradition of the Yoruba Omoluabi.
It is a classic case of history meeting the historic-minded.
Those monuments?  Four bridges, really.
Five Judges, to commemorate the five Court of Appeal justices, whose verdict reclaimed the Aregbesola mandate, after almost a four-year struggle; November 26, the day that judgment was given; November 27, when the first Aregbesola administration birthed, and August 9, the day the governor won re-election, despite the hideous plots to skew the vote, by the Jonathan Presidency, flush with success in a similar gambit in Ekiti.
By design or by accident, November 27 and Bisi Akande Trumpet bridges appear the grandest of the signature road projects, wrapped in political symbols, that would in history, define the developmental temper of the Aregbesola years.
Bisi Akande immortalizes Osun’s very first attempt at serious governance (1999-2003), since its creation in 1991.  But that attempt was scuttled, during the Obasanjo South West electoral tsunami of 2003.  November 27, on the other hand provided a doughty root for August 9, that day in 2014 the Osun local forces trumped illicit “federal might” to renew Aregbesola’s mandate.
The rest of the project tour, the Osogbo Government High School, one of the 11 avant-grade public schools springing up in different locations of the state; and the Nelson Mandela Freedom Park, Osogbo, are no less impressive symbols of developmental governance.
But the Mandela Freedom Park offers something somewhat novel — an informal museum of leisurely history.  Mingling with park seats, on close-cropped lawns, is a special section bearing busts of Titans of the progressive politics of the West, from different ages: Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Chief Bola Ige, Chief Bisi Akande and Asiwaju Bola Tinubu.
Yet, another section of mini-galleries, boasts marble plaques, that encapsulate the tenure of every Osun governor, military or civilian, from Col. Leo Segun Aborisade, the first governor (military administrator) to Aregbesola himself.  So, as loungers relax, they can read up their history and civics.
Dominating the park landscape is the impressive Atewogbeja Fountain, a tribute to the Osun river and its trove of fresh-water fishes.  The fountain waters are electrically programmed, at night, to tumble down in a rainbow of colours.
Incidentally, the tour ended at Olaiya junction, with the unending tryst between an appreciative people and their governor!
From the tour revelations, Osun, of the Aregbesola years, would appear in a flux of rapid change; to justify the Heraclitean quip: you can’t step in the same river twice!   Indeed, Osogbo had come a long way from the old rural town,  to a growing modern city, gradually holding its own in serenity and winning infrastructure, drawing new businesses across different sectors.
So has Osun shrugged off its laggardness to, despite its puny resources, point the way in the schools feeding programme, which the Federal Government just adopted on a national scale.
Surely then, the Aregbe legacy is assured, came what may?  Not exactly.
Indeed, Osun is painfully poised at a critical juncture between the short-lived but enduring Western Renaissance under  Awo, before the SLA Akintola Demo forces blighted everything; and the  post-1999 Lagos of sound developmental governance and golden continuity, which has become a national reference.
You could feel palpable panic, the way some Osun conservatives, in concert with Yoruba irredentists, tried to mould themselves into emergency Yoruba warriors against phantom Hausa-Fulani threat, when the Ife disturbance was nothing but mutual criminality.
The Afenifere veterans that dived into bed with Femi Fani-Kayode’s subversive Yoruba nationalism would appear splashing in the Osun political river, panic-stricken that, after the Aregbe years, so much has changed you can’t step in the same river twice.
So is Iyiola Omisore, with his trademark spew of verbal rot, perhaps gripped with the fear that, with the balance of forces, he might just be graduating, from serial failure to veteran failure, in his quixotic gubernatorial quest.
Still, that would appear no done deal.  Even as Heraclitus declared nature was in a flux, Parminides, his Greek contemporary, countered nature was static and unchanging! That contradiction could give the conservatives some hope, no matter how tenuous.
So, Osun could well be changing; but maybe not rapidly enough to banish that 2003 electoral ghost, that traded solid gold for glittering tinsel.  For that, the state paid a stiff price in hideous stagnation, in the dreadful pre-Aregbe years.
However it goes, Aregbesola’s personal legacy, like Chief Awolowo’s before him, appears secure.
But not the Osun developmental fate, ironically again, like the old West, where Awo wrought wonders only for the Demo renegades to blight everything.
Osun’s best bet, therefore, is a post Aregbe-era of stellar developmental strides, anchored on present efforts.  That way, Osun may yet emerge the ultimate development wonder of the 4th Republic, just as the old West was the 1st Republic’s.
Ay, Lagos holds that honour now.  But even the most doting of Lagosians would admit the post-1999 Tinubu movement (which incidentally Aregbesola was part of) only re-engineered a decaying former federal capital.  Osun, under Aregbe, never had such a head start.
But the threat to Osun enjoying a Lagos-like golden continuation, and not enduring the old West’s reactionary roll-back, would appear to lie less with the Osun conservatives, no matter how desperate they may be, but with the governor’s own internal foes, craving pork but pretending all is cool.
That is the direction to address, if Aregbe must, like Tinubu in Lagos, get the successor(s) to further entrench Osun’s unfolding renaissance.

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Ace crooner, Stella Monye, needs N20 million (US $50, 000) to save her only child, Ibrahim. But why should anyone listen to her cries?
Ever read Michael Echeruo’s Victorian Lagos?
The magic of that book, of late 19th century Lagos Island, was its charming sketch of cultural symbols, that shaped the temper of that era.
The returnee Saro, were mainly ethnic Yoruba. So were the returnee artisans from Brazil.
But Western education gave them an edge, over the aborigines of Isale-Eko, to shape the new Lagos culture.
Richard Beale Blaize (in 1880, founded Lagos Times and Gold Coast Colony Advertiser, a local newspaper); Mojola Agbebi (led the campaign to make the Baptist Church more African-friendly); John Otonba Payne (first native registrar of Lagos courts); James Johnson, “Holy Johnson”, (whose keen sensitivity helped to stabilize the Anglican Church of his day); Henry Carr (famed educationist) and the young Herbert Macaulay (soon to turn the chief British nemesis of Colonial Lagos), just to mention a few.
Indeed, as Prof. Echeruo wrote of Victorian Lagos, Stella would most probably make the cut, of folks to be portrayed, should anyone embark on sketching the cultural Lagos, of Stella’s musical generation, of fourth-quarter 20th century.
O, what an exciting time!
“You don’t have to be a good neighbour,” Soni Irabor would croon, in-between radio programmes, “but you can, at least, be neighbourly”. That was from Radio Nigeria 2 FM, then on Martins Street, in the commercial hub of Lagos.
In the evening, when TV ran from 4pm till 12 midnight, Patrick Oke, he of the deep baritone, would mesmerize viewers, hooked to his hugely popular youth-music programme.
Stella’s boss and mentor, the late Sunny Okosuns, bossed the musical charts, outside the Juju music duo of Ebenezer Obey and Sunny Ade, and of course, the Abami Eda himself, Fela.
Sunny may have burned up the charts. But that era’s clear musical philosopher-in-chief was Bongos Ikwue.
Apart from Still Searching, Bongos’ hit album, his soundtrack for NTA’s agric-boosting tele-drama series, Cockcrow at Dawn, courtesy of UBA sponsorship, was a class act.
Throw in the Lady of Songs, the late Christy Essien-Igbokwe, and you’d just appreciate a milieu of cultural giants, from all ethnic groups, that shaped cosmopolitan Lagos, in the 20th century’s final quarter.
Stella Monye belonged to this stellar assemblage.
When 11-year old Ibrahim happened on the freak accident, that would turn his life into a consistent dash in and out of hospitals, Stella was out serving her country: part of a musical ensemble, cooking the Nigeria ’99 theme song, en route to hosting the FIFA U-21 World Cup.
By 1999, she was no greenhorn, still under Sunny Okosuns’ huge shadows. With hits like Oko mi ye (1984) — from the album, Mr. Wright — she had made a name for herself.
So by Nigeria 99, she had become an exciting and enchanting brand in the Lagos landscape.
Somewhat, Stella Monye’s musical odyssey echoes the late South African, Dennis Brutus’s poem, “A troubadour, I traverse…”.
That poem talks of a troubadour (the poet) traversing the whole of apartheid-riven South Africa. Despite all the evil, all the killings, all the injustice, the troubadour still loved his lady, and would rather be at her service.
In Stella, that troubadour would appear a lady doting on her country, warts and all.
In a moving interview with Saturday Sun (April 15), she told of how the phone call, about her son’s accident, came when she and her colleagues were presenting the Nigeria ’99 theme song to Head of State, Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar.
Still she went on tour, to promote that theme song, thinking the accident was minor; and that routine medical attention would take care of it.
It didn’t — for Ibrahim’s butt had landed pat on spikes, as he fell from a raised water tank, piercing vital organs, and tragically altering his young life into a relay of heart-rending medical emergencies.
And failed surgeries, over the years, particularly the 2014 one in India, for which Stella, with other artistes like K1, Daddy Showkey, Orits Wiliki, Onyeka Onwenu, Lagbaja! and Pasuma, had to mount a roadshow to appeal for funds, had further damaged more internal organs of the 28-year old Ibrahim: the left kidney, the bladder and the uretha.
But like Dennis Brutus, Stella’s dire personal challenges wouldn’t vitiate her love for country. She spoke of other tours — part of Team Nigeria to the 1996 Yamoussoukro-Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa University Games. There, she sang the Nigerian national anthem.
Then, an extensive tour of Germany, when she played Oya, Sango’s wife, courtesy of a Nigeria-Germany cultural exchange — Berlin, Sabrieakan, Hanover, Bonn, Bremen, Geneva (Switzerland) and Amsterdam (Holland), a proud troubadour, showcasing the artistic trove of her country.
But the 1998 tour of Guyana, to mark the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slave trade, would mark the grandest of Stella’s patriotic travels, given the calibre of Nigerians, on that entourage.
Gen. Yakubu Gowon, former Nigerian Head of State (1966-1975), his wife, Victoria, Prince Tony Momoh, Chris Anyanwu, ace broadcaster and former senator and Col. Tunde Akogun, then Nigeria’s highest ranking culture official.
But that was only half of the story. Stella was lead vocalist, of a band comprising seasoned Nigerian acts: Bisade Ologunde (Lagbaja!), Zeal Onyia, Highlife ace and he of the piercing trumpet, Peter King, Nigeria’s jazz supremo and Remi Kabaka — true royals in Nigeria’s musical cosmos! The Guyana local media dubbed her the “Nigerian bomb”.
This then is the woman who has given her all for her country; but needs her country to give something back: help save her most prized earthly possession — only child, Ibrahim.
“When I grow old and infirm,” she told Ripples, “how can Ibrahim take care of me, when he has lived most of his life, moving from one hospital to another?” Moving cry, of a doting mother!
According to the Urology Centre, in Indiana USA, where Dr. Ayo Gomih is medical director, Ibrahim would need US $50, 000 for a life-saving surgery — and time is running out!
Stella has done a lot for her country. Pray what, in her hour of grave need, can her country do for her?
Lagos is 50, bravo! But as part of the celebration goodwill, let Lagos rally round a culture icon that, with others, has helped to shape her into today’s success story.
Let Delta, Stella’s nativity, also stand by a distinguished daughter.
Finally, let golden hearted Nigerians prove their worth. Stella Monye and son need everyone.
For more information, you can reach Stella on +2348037305052. Her account details are: Stella Monye, First Bank account number 2021451638.

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Nigeria’s elite children of perdition easily forget:  Goodluck Jonathan’s electoral rout of 2015 was a rejection of a feckless fellow, as it was an elite gambit at class preservation.
Yeah, a bumbling Jonathan had to go; for his scandalous humbug was fast demystifying the elite, and the hoi polloi were rumbling — just as a reckless military provoked the Fela famous quip: uniform na khaki, na tailor dey sew am!
So, that defeat was nothing but a fiery pyre, with crackling dry wood of elite panic: they must bury Jonathan first, before he buried them with him.
But why did Jonathan unravel so fast, despite so much initial goodwill?  Free-wheeling sleaze.
Yes, that probably had been the norm.  But its brazen projection under Jonathan earned a furious, mass censure, akin to the Achebe quip, in A Man of the People:  folks just stole too much for the owner not to notice!
Candidate Muhammadu Buhari, hardly a revolutionary in spite of his ascetic contempt for graft, struck the right message; the people keyed into it; and Jonathan, with his hubris-stricken Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), became shameful history!
Back then, no elite symbol, of the old venal class, could save their beleaguered class.  Everyone, lovers and haters, just scrambled onto the coat tail of the severe General from Daura!
Which is what now makes that picture — of the trio of IBB, Bukola Saraki and Dino Melaye — which went viral, all the more amusing.  The picture was taken after Saraki’s and Melaye’s visit to IBB’s Minna hilltop mansion.
Now, to their doting families, charmed friends and acquaintances, these three are excellent private citizens.  But public perception — right or wrong – may well differ.
IBB, General Ibrahim Babangida, Nigeria’s first (and last) military president, is fairly adjudged the very quintessence of military rot.
True, the late Sani Abacha was unfazed champion of military venality; and, from the exciting tales from Vindication of a General, Ishaya Bamaiyi’s new memoirs, as Abacha’s chief of army staff, the military plutocrats back then just might have buried Abacha, before Abacha would bury them, with him.
Still, the IBB regime clearly owned that devil-may-care rapacious temper, that drove Abacha to new greed. IBB not only crowned corruption as the cornerstone of state policy, he annulled the sanest election in Nigerian history.
Saraki,  as Senate president, projects himself as a doughty cohabitant of state power.  But while President Buhari tries to clear Nigeria’s towering mountain of sleaze, Saraki pushes his democratic right, with the Senate he heads in tow, as the very antithesis, of this noble historic duty.
That much was clear from the Senate’s carping, climaxing in Ibrahim Magu’s non-confirmation as EFCC chair.
But that has provoked a counter executive sleight of hand — even if very noble in the circumstance — that purports the Constitution does not require Magu’s confirmation, even if the EFCC Act says so.  Is it not trite, argues the Presidency, that any law inconsistent with the Constitution is void, to the extent of that inconsistency?
Talk of a de-jure key democratic institution, tragically pushing itself into de-facto irrelevance, because of the hubris of a few of its members!
As for Dino Melaye, Saraki’s unfazed sidekick, in Magu and allied senatorial wars, the beam on his university degrees, real or phantom, clearly shows he is no more, as his adopted name suggests, than grating din.  It’s tough luck that the highest legislature in the land is his echoing chamber!
Still, IBB and friends have a democratic right to free association; and to pictorially toast themselves, schmoozing in great camaraderie, as long-lost lovers.
But should acute Nigerians interpret that, given IBB’s past record and Saraki/Melaye’s current labours, as worrying symbol of the ethically challenged ancien regime, rousing itself, after two years of searing heat, to gamely confront its nemesis?  Only the good Lord knows!
Still, the problem is less with individuals, no matter how powerful they fancy themselves; but more with the broad spectrum of the Nigerian elite.  They, like Emperor Nero of old Rome, fiddle over puffery, while their kingdom is on fire.
Take the Judiciary.  First, the new Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Walter Onnoghen, plays the Pontius Pilate, washing his charges clean, of any perceived glitch, in the anti-corruption war.
But did that performance, by the original Pilate, erase the grave piracy of justice, of nailing the Christ, on trumped up charges, even if, by the Christian doctrine, that was spiritually pre-ordained?
Can the CJN, in all good conscience, say the Judiciary under his watch is less corrupt, than under his predecessors?  O, the judicial throne is safe but the estate is sinking!
And the lawyers!  In truth, many senior lawyers have bought into the anti-sleaze war.  A good many others too decry the alleged technical shallowness of those charged with prosecuting high profile graft cases, and call for drastic changes.
But it is also true that many a silk picks no bones about defending the decadent order that had pumped them, to near-bursting point, with sweet rot.
Many hitherto too busy eating to talk, from the rot of yore, now lash out as fiery, crusading angels of corruption, though they hide behind legal cant.
Well, here is great news, for this judicial Sodom and Gomorrah!  The awe of the courts is less in the impressive gown and foreboding wig, which nevertheless contribute to their grim dignity.  It is more with the societal acquiescence to polite adjudication.
The moment irate citizens go the Fela way: court na house, nay mason dey build am, the game might just be up!
And that’s not as difficult as it seems, does it?  Even as Ekiti governor-elect, Ayo Fayose tried it, and the response was the easy bedlam of fleeing gowns and tumbling wigs!
Just imagine the society butting into that outlawry, just because the courts are perceived the biblical house of worship turned a den of thieves?
If polite society collapses, the judiciary gets buried without trace.  So, its flowers had better quit posturing, and roast the few corrupt elements, before these corrupt few roast, with themselves, the upright majority.
Still, you could excuse judicial nervousness at any change.  Not so the media, perhaps the most vibrant trigger of change, in all human history.
The grandmasters of the early Nigerian press, John Payne Jackson and son, Horatio (Lagos Weekly Record), George Alfred Williams (Lagos Standard) and John Bright Davies (Times of Nigeria), among others, set the tone, of doughty social activism, that served the newspaper press so well, in its titanic clash against military despots.
Herbert Macaulay (Lagos Daily News), Ernest Ikoli (later of Daily Service) and Nnamdi Azikiwe (West African Pilot), among others, built on the robust legacy of the early colonial era, in their own independence struggle age.
Though critics accuse many of these greats of striking a happy marriage between public good and private bliss, history is clearly kind to them, by the way they have shaped the temper of the Nigerian newspaper press.
But pray, what would history say of the Nigerian press today?  Strangers from Mars playing the ostrich, in culpable finger-pointing, while the soul of their country blaze in filth?   Analysts-turned-pundits, obliged to live or die by rogue punditry, when naked facts point to a more redemptive lane?
Purveyors of pure fiction, faith and tribal champions, driven by explosive bigotry, when the times call for for the exact opposite — universal ethos that lifts all?
At a critical pass, when corruption either kills Nigeria or Nigeria kills it, vital segments of the media, the judiciary and an errant parliament are marooned in Distraction-land.
Nigerian elite children of perdition play Emperor Nero while their estate goes up in moral smoke!

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Ekiti maverick, Ayodele Fayose and IPOB’s Nnamdi Kanu, are a peculiar pair.
The one is twice a blight on his Ekiti generation.  The other, a heady presage to avoidable catastrophe: again, for the second time, in a generation.
They made quite a sensational pair at an Abuja court on April 25 with Fayose, all infantile jabber, declaring himself and his Ekiti Kete, self-annexed Biafrans.
But beyond the drama of optics, they made a more telling metaphor — sweet disasters baiting their people.  Nevertheless, the people appear too roused to resist their own doom.
In Fayose’s first coming (2003-2006) — Fayose o, Yes oooooooooooooooo! — he exited in a blaze of odium.
But that wasn’t his ultimate humiliation.  At his fall, he was accused of all sort of heinous crimes — poultry racketeering, a killer squad to bump off political enemies, real or phantom, and gubernatorial fascism Ekiti never knew; and again unlikely to know.
This second coming (2014 till date), he is a worrying study in noisy emptiness — yakking before thinking, and sundry empty street drama, to press his democratic folksiness.
Vintage Fayose street shows?  The governor as executive fire-fighter; as merry glutton, wolfing at the buka next door; as ladder-clambering member of a work gang, monitoring work on a bridge — in fact, as unabashed hustler for attention, with a spider’s web line between the sane and the insane!
So, when Fayose happened on his Biafra jabber, he provoked additional comedy to Ola Rotimi’s comic play, Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again.  Tweak that a bit, with Fayose’s melodrama? Maybe, Their Osoko Has Gone Mad Again!
So long for Fayose’s unending ribaldry! Nnamdi Kanu’s is made of a more tragic hue.
Now, wherever the Igbo want to be, in or outside Nigeria, is entirely their business.  But if they go about that with hateful demagoguery, then it becomes everybody’s business. That is Ripples’ only problem with Kanu and his Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB).
Besides, there is something eerie about Biafra’s one-sided narrative, powered by a saint-versus-sinner passion.
It was, in the build-up to the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970).  It was in its post-mortem, by Prof. Chinua Achebe, in his swan song, There Was A Country.  It is in Kanu’s current turbo-charged IPOB gambit.
That appears the most sensational attempt at rigging history, even when some of the participant-observers still live, if aging.
Since Nnamdi Azikiwe’s West African Pilot started amplifying Igbo achievements and toning down others’, hype appears to come with the Eastern territory.
To be sure, hype is no crime.  Every people always project something to burnish collective pride.  But it becomes dysfunctional, when instinctive and compulsive.
Take the land hunger that has sent many Igbo scuttling outside homeland for economic nourishment; and see how it fits into the Biafra agenda.
Land hunger is nothing new — or bad.  In antiquity, fierce land hunger in Crete and surrounding islands, triggered the founding of Greek colonies, a cluster of voluntary diasporas, angling for economic survival.
These settlements would mature into city states, which not only birthed pristine democracy, but also gifted the West its grand thinking — art and literature, philosophy, science, technology and IT.
Just imagine the evolution of Greece — and Western critical thinking — without these pristine settlements!
But tweak that a bit: can you imagine Igbo evolution in Nigeria, without these far-flung internal economic diasporas?  Yet, not a few, even among the most asset-vulnerable, would recklessly endanger all of that, in a moment of unthinking hype!
The Biafra gambit — now, more than then — appears to fit pat into that explosive mindset, without much thought about the Igbo land hunger question.
If the Biafra fiasco (1967-1970) didn’t curb land hunger, by making the East retain its best within its homeland, what guarantees a future Biafra gambit — success or failure — would?
Despite the sharp contrast between Emeka Ojukwu’s Oxford elitism and Nnamdi Kanu’s explosive street populism, Biafra now, like Biafra then, runs on breathless emotions. In such campaigns, sobering facts are killed and buried.
There is a sweet claim — that the Civil War was a northern ploy to subjugate the East; and that the West, under Chief Obafemi Awolowo, merrily played Judas.
But Nigeria, at independence, opened with a North-East conspiracy to subjugate the West (see Hansard of the parliamentary debate of 29 November 1960, as quoted in Awolowo’s book, The Travail of Democracy and the rule of Law).
At that session, Northern People’s Congress (NPC), with National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroon (NCNC) partisans pushed for a federal take-over of the West, under the ruling Action Group (AG). That would crystallize in the 1962 emergency.
Besides, how do you justify the 1963 creation of Midwestern Region from the West, without a corresponding carving, for minority elements, in the North and the East?  Because the two formed a coalition federal government?
So, when did two ganging up against one become a crime — since the East became a victim?
In recounting the horrors of old Biafra, perhaps to justify a new one, emotive words like massacre, genocide, et al are freely deployed.  But seriously, can there be “genocide” in a shooting war, where you either kill or be killed?
And guess the pre-war sabre-rattlers? Ojukwu accused Awolowo of “platitudes” in a May 1967 Enugu rally to avert war.  He further bragged: “I am no longer speaking as an underdog, I am speaking from the position of power.”. It turned out a costly bluff that consumed thousands of lives.
Compare Ojukwu’s sabre-rattling back in 1967 with Kanu’s impassioned hate today, against the non-Igbo in what he dubbed the “Nigerian zoo”, and you would perhaps realize how little a once-bitten people have changed over a 50 year-period!
But why go into these notorious though harsh historical facts?  Simple: the demagoguery of Fayose and Kanu creates catastrophes from small problems. Yet, it claims to gun for a solution!
Ekiti would feel Fayose’s rascality, maybe in another 25 years, when his blind flight to Stone Age would have matured.
Kanu’s sweet demagoguery may well inspire a future fresh and sweet South East mono-tales. But then, it’s a democracy, and choice is free!
Still, between Fayose and Kanu is an emotional plane. It leads nowhere but avoidable perdition.

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The president is sick, with not a few fixated with morbid tales and ghoulish fancies.

But what is clear here, even in every mortal’s helpless surrender to the uncertain certainty of death, is the death and burial of empathy.  That is a roaring shame.

In formal creative prose, you were taught — at least Mr. Pius Omole taught his University of Ibadan students, among whom was Ripples — that you knew the true character of a man, when the man was in crisis.

Nigerians — the entire Nigerians or just the over-exposed ultra-minority that ride the media crest? — are in a crisis of empathy.  The picture is a flint-hearted, contemptible, and graceless rabble, with nary an iota of human compassion.  Sad.

Now, rigorous presidential health comes with the presidential territory.  That is why a section of the 1999 Constitution talks of the possible incapacitation of the president; and how such emergencies could be resolved.

And yes: the ghost of the Umaru Musa Yar’Adua presidential debacle (God rest and bless his gentle soul!) still hovers over the polity, where some players, back then, tried to hide the state of health of the president, for their own selfish ends.

Many say that experience has made not a few hyperactive in their quest for the latest news on President Muhammadu Buhari’s state of health.  Once bitten, after all, twice shy!

But like anything Nigerian, where even routine things pass through grotesque ethnic lens, a quest for accurate information about presidential health soon peters down into savage nastiness, with even the cream of the media swooning in its orgy!

Yet, things need not be that way.

In neighbouring Ghana, President John Evans Atta Mills died in office, just as Yar’Adua died here.  Before then, he was ill, though the illness was so well managed that the president never faced any harangue as Buhari faces now.  Yet, the Ghana opposition could be as cantankerous as any, particularly during its early evening radio talk show belts.

What then was so insensate?

When the president passed away, the whole nation collapsed in genuine grief — and not just the cant and hypocrisy of the politically correct.  Had the president survived, he would have been nursed back to full wellness by the enduring love of his people.

The enduring picture of Ghanaians, during this trying period?  A noble, caring and compassionate people, soaring high even in their low grief, on their common humanity.  Just wished someone could say that of Nigerians, with the present hysteria over Buhari’s health!

Still, those who insist President Buhari and his handlers should come clean with his health status have a point.  If anything, that would follow the constitutional dictates over possible incapacitation.

But a demand to conform with the constitution is one thing.  Crass insensitivity by mocking, heckling and gloating, en route to that demand, is another.

Besides, there is a crucial sociological angle, which many appear to happily ignore.

The law is clear on full disclosure of presidential (and gubernatorial) health.  Yet, the sociology of the polity jumps at secrecy, in such delicate matters.  Even standard medical convention preaches tact and caution, when it comes to the individual’s health.  Hence, the confidentiality dictate.

So, even in the case of the president as complete public property, where does the law end and where does sociology begin?  Even with that, does the medical code of strict confidentiality have any role to play, in going public with the president’s health?

In the hullabaloo that accompanied President Buhari’s medical tourism to Britain, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo made a point: Buhari himself would tell Nigerians about his health.

The president did when he came back: how he had never been that sick all his life; and counselling Nigerians to shun self-medication.  No previous Nigerian president ever went that public with his health.

So, those who claim to be unaware of the president’s health only speak the half-truth.  What is not public knowledge is exactly what is wrong with him.  The onus is on his medical team to divulge, with requisite tact and decency, according to the laws of the land, and the dictates of their profession.

But public office and public property aside, President Buhari is only human like the rest of us.  He cannot give life. Neither can he take life.  At this juncture, only common humanity rules — not the pauper, not the rich, just the human.

So, to those who play God pontificating over another person’s health, with such brutal zeal, just remember: Buhari is your president.  But he is also another person’s husband, father, uncle, cousin and even neighbour, all bound by intense family ties.

Pray how do you sound to these fellow humans — some brute?

Just think about that!

Gory harvest

First, the comet of DAWN.

The Omoluabi, of iconic portraits,

even mien and temperate heart;

Cohabiting a furious temper

To develop his native West.

Did he figure death would dawn so fast,

Conflicting another’s birthday:

Birthday bliss, death-day blues,

Leaving the celebrator winded —

to laugh or to cry?

Then, an Iroko of the native theatre,

Hardly de-leafed, yet reaped,

Neither the ripest fruit condemned to saddest,

as our bard WS decreed;

Nor the hard and sour, turned happiest.

Just brazen victims,

of the Reaper’s grim illogic.

Then, outrage of outrage,

On the Sabbath:

Serubawon, serubawoned!•

Now, all life at Iwo, a sparkling, gurgling eternal spring;

Then, dead as mutton, in his native Ede!

Death finally clamps the heart of one,

who put others’ hearts quaking with fear!

Death, be not proud,

Once cautioned John Donne,

He, of metaphysical poesy.

But today, death is done with  Donne,

metaphysics and all!

Death rips, reaps, barges, smacks and roars!

He, who would dare him, is not born.

Yet, sweet memories, are death to death!

As calm water, in easy quiet, swallows a roaring fire,

So do sweet memories, with abiding pleasure,

kill the pangs of death!

To you fallen trio, be consoled.

Death brags, with nothing, but your empty scalp.

Rest well.

Always, in our hearts, you live!

• Serubawon, Adeleke’s political street moniker (Literally, Yoruba for “freeze them with fear”).

Olakunle Abimbola,

For Dipo Famakinwa (50), Olumide Bakare (64) and Senator Isiaka Adeleke (62), eminent Yoruba sons, who died within a three-day interval.

The post Death of empathy appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

Generals Olusegun Obasanjo, Ibrahim Babangida and Abdulsalami Abubakar, all former military heads of state, rouse themselves at the scent of presidential ill health.  Rendezvous point: IBB’s Minna hill top mansion.

Is that exemplary statesmanship for a nation in dire straits?  Or just an umpteenth season of cold power gaming?

Even if the motive were clean, can a brilliant future lie in a rotten past, where this triad were commanding shapers?

Of the three, the most tolerable is Gen. Abubakar; and that, strictly on account of his taciturnity.

Whatever his faults during his brief shot at power (June 1998-May 1999), he has saved the polity insensitive and vacuous prattling that grate.

Still, that hardly puts him in the clear; for MKO Abiola died under his charge, in the most curious of dramatic circumstances.

Some claim MKO’s death was an alleged “final solution” that would clear the deck of June 12 malcontents, and re-start the country on a clean slate.

What a costly illusion, proved grand delusion, snaring the taciturn general as among Nigeria’s troublers of Israel!

Pray, if there had been an MKO presidency, would there have been a compensatory Yoruba presidency that drafted Obasanjo; and created the solid foundation for this present mess, despite the Ebora Owu’s huffing-and-puffing, over eight costly years, and ever after?

With all due respect, until Abubakar comes clean on Abiola’s death, he loses any right to pose as part of any solution to Nigeria’s problems.

That takes the tale back to the root of the debacle: IBB’s reckless annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election results.

A colleague on Friday wondered why, despite the havoc IBB had inflicted on Nigerians, there was still an elite stampede at the wedding of his last daughter, Halima, at Minna, Niger State, on May 12.

What would that be — endorsement or forgiveness? — he snapped, somewhat seething with revulsion; suggesting that IBB, by his past power rascalities, should have earned the fair status of a pariah.

Still, IBB’s public troubles must not foreclose his private right to intensely sweet family rituals, of which marrying off a darling daughter is key.

Besides, IBB is IBB; and his children are his children.  Though the deeds of the father often robs off on the children and vice-versa, visiting the sin of the father on the child is rather queasy, even if the Bible gave a divine stamp to that dire fatalism.

Then, the question of bonhomie!  Indeed, with the possible exception of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Nigeria’s first and last ceremonial president, perhaps no Nigerian leader, living or dead, boasts the IBB charm!  The self-named evil genius is such a charmer!

Still, as all the waters of the Atlantic could not wash regicide off the vile hands of Lady Macbeth, in Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth, all of IBB’s charm could not blot out the guilt of his rash annulment of June 12, which eventually pushed a citizen to early grave, for winning a clean election, and earning the first truly pan-Nigeria mandate.

That is where IBB’s intense family bliss, contrasts the intense collective angst, for victims of his annulment; which is pretty much all Nigerians that voted on June 12, whose sacred mandate he crushed.

Besides, as IBB made merry  on May 12 with friends and family, MKO and wife Kudirat lay stone-cold in the grave, their five offspring complete orphans, for having the temerity to fight IBB’s reckless annulment!

So, what was IBB thinking, embarking on that essence suicide?  The June 12 blunder may well haunt him to his grave — and just as well!

That makes audacious and rankling, his hosting of the Minna meeting, over presidential health.  With all due respect and absolutely no intention of being nasty, it conjures, in arresting technicolor, the image of the vulture rousing to the thick smell of carrion!

IBB is the fundament of a seedy past.  He cannot be part of a sane future.

That brings the discourse to former President Obasanjo, but before then a military head of state, like IBB and Abubakar.

First, despite his professed holiness, the reflex of rushing to Minna to meet with IBB, over Buhari’s health, reflects the rather low ethics of Obasanjo’s politics.  Yet, the Ebora Owu never tires of telling everyone, in words and in deeds, that he is the best ethical champion that ever happened on Nigeria!

But from the philosophical to the bare basics: Obasanjo is directly responsible for the present mess President Buhari is trying to clear, even at the risk of his life.

Like Nigerian federal leaders at independence, who took all the wrong steps to crash an otherwise promising polity, Obasanjo took all the wrong steps to stifle hope in the crucial first eight years of the 4th Republic (1999-2007).

First, he went on a binge of megalomania which, truth be told, linked some decent economic reforms to his personal indispensability.  But while he pranced and preened over those “reforms”, to flatter himself as the “father of modern Nigeria”, the infrastructure stock collapsed, signalling the economic collapse now causing mass anguish.

On the political front, he embarked on a deliberate and systematic destruction of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the special purpose vehicle (SPV) that actualized the Army Arrangement (apologies to Fela) that gifted him presidential power.  By militarizing the PDP, he drove away almost all the decent elements, leaving behind only the mere chaff and yes (wo)men, nevertheless crippled by hubris!

The failure of his third term gambit gave rise to new desperation.  First, the presidential enthronement of a decent but fatally ill gentleman, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua.  His death, in office, put the North in a power bind.

It has also made that region ultra-sensitive over Buhari’s health, and the disturbing spectre of deja vu, not helped by an ultra-insensitive media fixation, driven by ghoulish thinking.

Then, the beginning of the end, for the Obasanjo political dynasty: the rise of the presidential vacuum that was Goodluck Jonathan, under whom everything just collapsed!  That made the second coming of Muhammadu Buhari an imperative for national salvation.

So, with these parlous records, how can the triad of Obasanjo, Babangida and Abubakar self-rouse as ultimate do-gooders to fix a media-driven hysteria over presidential ill-health?

They are the bastion of the seedy past.  So, they cannot be part of a newly minted future, after the harsh crucible of the present.

The post The troika self-rouses appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

In Benin City, there is a sweet whiff of Lagos.

In Lagos,  Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, like the Biblical David, came and fought all the battles, state and federal, to soundly establish the Lagos neo-political economy.

Two “Solomons” after, in Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN (2007-2015) and Akinwunmi Ambode (2015-date), that “kingdom” is so solidly anchored.

At 50, Lagos is the toast of everyone nationwide, taking public service delivery to dizzying heights, despite Nigeria’s stifling unitary-federalism.

Everyone loves a winner, don’t they?

In Edo, Governor Adams Oshiomhole (2008-2016) came, in his own biting though apt words, to “slay the Edo godfathers”.

Those self-made “gods” not only shared and gobbled the common patrimony, they also beggared the metropole of the old Mid-West (created in 1963) to near-destitution.

The comrade-governor was a political cross-breed: between a nation-famous Labour agitator (the street “rofo-rofo” skills of which he put to telling use, in his many Edo political battles); and the conventional, street-wise politician (with the abiding trust-deficit).

But new governor, Godwin Obaseki, dawns with neither asset — nor liability — that comes with a political mix-breed.

He is the quintessential “technocrat”, that set not a few drooling, with great expectations of immaculate policy; away from empty politicking.  That builds trust.

But “technocrat”, in contemporary Nigeria, could also connote soulless opportunism.  The conventional politician must take all the electioneering heat, so the so-called technocrat could push his divine right, to play god in the government’s policy chambers!

So, after the street-buzzing charisma of Oshiomhole, how does Obaseki ease into the fray, even after a gruelling electioneering for governor?  In other words, would Oshiomhole play the politics for Obaseki, just as Tinubu did for Fashola in Lagos?

Not exactly, though there appears a clear parallel of continuity, ala Lagos,  of which Oshiomhole is the spiritual head.

For starters, the new governor enjoys the buffer of consummate politicians: Deputy Governor, Comrade Philip Shaibu, ex-House of Representatives;  Secretary to the State Government (SSG),  Osarodion Ogie; lawyer-politician and Edo APC chairman,  Anslem Ojezua, as well as the robust political mobilization machinery of the Oshiomhole years.

But behind that fount is a new politics-friendly nest, carefully woven to properly position the governor.

Yes, Obaseki would retain his core as a policy wonk; but not the distant and cold type.  Rather, it’s the policy wonk that glows in Edo streets, bolstered with as much political buy-in as possible, factored into government policies, no matter how sweeping.

According to Prof. Julius Ihonvbere, interacting with a select group of visiting top editors and columnists, this elaborate arrangement, anchored on the “Oshiomhole foundation, but in a different way and perspective”, comprises the governor’s personal representative, in every ward in the state.

These ward gubernatorial special assistants transmit policy in the lingo the grassroots understand; and obtain prompt feedback to the governor.

In the loop, of this political communication buzz, are the traditional party channels as ward, zonal and state chairs and their executives, special interest groups as the women caucuses, the party’s parliamentary caucuses, traditional rulers, local guilds, Labour unions, and religious lobbies.

As a result, there is extensive party consultation at every policy baking session, closer party-government fusion for appointments, especially of would-be commissioners, and a robust strategic dialogue with the people, across party lines.

That about sums up the elaborate political infrastructure, for a policy-wonk governor, to mainstream his policies and make them glow with popular appeal.

Still, would-be commissioners, more than six months after taking office?  Whatever happened to the popular cliche of hitting the ground running?

Well, going by inputs from top government and party hierarchs, the Obaseki government had indeed “hit the ground running” — but not by barging in on the public, but by rigorous thinking to conceive and re-tool, as prelude to sure-footed service delivery.

Everyone that interacted with the visiting journalists made this point: Mr. Ogie, current SSG; Prof. Ihonvbere, ex-SSG; Mrs. Gladys Idaho, Head of Service; Mr. Ojezua, Edo APC chairman; Joseph Eboigbe, Obaseki’s deputy in the Oshiomhole policy think-tank and now policy shaft in the new government; Edo Works Ministry’s Ferguson Enabulele, a key driver of the new government’s road policy, with its stress on the concrete technology and 100 per cent local inputs; and Dennis Oloriegbe, ex-LASTMA and Edo’s new traffic czar, as head of the new Edo State Traffic Management Authority (EDSTMA), among others.

Indeed, since the November 2016 swearing-in of the new governor, Edo has morphed into a caravan of workshops, importing experts in different fields, from all parts of the country, to help forge a comprehensive policy roadmap for the new government.

That strategic dialogue has not only shaped the new administration’s vision, but also envisioned the profile of the putative cabinet, and, in the new spirit of government-party close collaboration, given the party wards enough notice to shop for sharp minds, with stellar character, to fill the incoming cabinet.

That charter, however, comes with clear-cut short, medium and long-terms goals, which a cabinet member must meet, or resign — or be fired.

The policy thrust, according to these hierarchs, targets mass job creation through massive investment in large-scale agriculture, without sacrificing the interest of traditional small-scale farmers; a land-banking system, complete with data on soil texture, which matches crop cultivation with suitable land; enhanced security; gas-powered electricity; massive waterworks; affordable housing, massive road construction (“no economy without roads”, one of them quipped); and a vibrant traffic management system, complete with modern bus stops and termini, and well-trained traffic marshals.

But the most exciting part of the Edo policy roadmap has got to be the new stress on technical education to raise a corps of skilled artisans — electricians, plumbers, carpenters, masons, auto-mechanics, and skilled road construction gangs — courtesy of a re-tooled Edo Technical College, complete with an industrial park that, the Obaseki government figures, would seamlessly absorb its products.

Still on technical and artisanal competence, remember Sandra Aguebor, she of the famous Lady Mechanic Initiative (LMI) fame?  She has set up shop, with her girls, adjunct to Government House, the czarina of the garage that fixes vehicles in the Edo Government’s fleet!

Surely, some Edo Renaissance is afoot?

Maybe.  But that is if the Obaseki government walks the talk of its elaborate planning, in pin-point service delivery.

Still, watch it, Lagos!  If its plan works out,  Edo is gunning for Number 1!

That can’t be bad for pre-restructured Nigeria, can it?

The post Edo: Renaissance afoot? appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

Correct the mistake of 2015. Vote out the corrupt legislators

Today, exactly 50 years ago on 30 May 1967, the Republic of Biafra was born.
“Now Therefore I, Lieutenant-Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, Military Governor of Eastern Nigeria, by virtue of the authority, and pursuant to the principles recited above,” he announced in a broadcast, which thereafter triggered wild jubilations in the streets, “do hereby solemnly proclaim that the territory and region known as and called Eastern Nigeria, together with her continental shelf and territorial waters, shall henceforth be an independent sovereign state of the name and title of Biafra.”
That set off a horrific civil war (1967-1970), in which millions, from both sides, perished, though Biafra, which eventually conceded defeat, was more hard done by.
After, all appeared quiet on the Biafra front — until 2012, when the late Chinua Achebe released his swan song, There was a Country, a long tale of one-sided victimhood and suppressed bitterness, which would appear to have triggered the present neo-Biafra ferment. The loss of President Goodluck Jonathan in the 2015 election, who the South East solidly backed, provided the final push, sending the present advocates of neo-Biafra into a tizzy.
But after everything, war is grim business.  Col. Azubike Nass, a retired officer of the Nigerian Army, who saw war as a member of the Boys Brigade, before later going on to train at the Nigerian Defence Academy, writes on Baifra’s 50th anniversary. Ripples dubs it, “From old Biafran to new: war is nasty business”.

The write-up titled, “The case for Biafra”, credited to an American former government official, Bruce Fein, is most probably written by a young Igbo guy who never experienced the civil war and never read Nigerian pre-Independence history.  It is as if all he knows is limited to the current pro-Biafran propaganda on Radio Biafra and the trending, mostly anonymous, online propaganda messages.

It contains a lot of emotional fabrications and demagogic falsehood.  The social media space is littered with a lot of junks and, in many cases, the persons mentioned as the authors have vehemently dissociated themselves from the writings.

Just a few examples, in italics:

1. “Britain asserted authority over Biafra, based on tyrannical doctrine”.  I ask: which Biafra existed in pre-independence Nigeria, and what areas did it cover?
2. “Ongoing ethnic-inspired killings and persecution of Biafrans by Nigerian elected military dictator from the North touting Sharia law, President Buhari.” Rubbish.  Who are those the writer refers to as ‘Biafrans’?”  I am of Igbo ethnic origin and such talk is rubbish to me.
3. “Prior to British colonization in 1906” and”1913, came the amalgamation of Nigeria into three administrative bloc areas.”  I don’t know where the writer got that piece of wrong history [amalgamation was 1914, not 1913]
4.  The “British failed to offer Biafrans the right to self-determination,” and “Biafrians were never provided [with the chance] to vote for their independence, according to their freely expressed will and desire; and were never consulted on the project when Nigeria became independent in 1960”.  That is kindergarten rubbish!  Nigerian leaders, across ethnic lines, took part in the talks and negotiations (in Nigeria and in London).
5. “After independence, Biafrans were left to the tender mercies of the Hausa-Fulani of the North and the Yoruba of the South in a unitary state.”  This type of fallacy borders on mental sickness.  It is a fact of history that Igbos (then commonly called Ibos, including Zik — Dr. Nnmandi Azikiwe, Nigeria’s first ceremonial president) dominated the Nigerian civil service, the military and the police in the post-independence years before the first military coup and the crisis it caused.

There are more junk details in that nonsensical write-up but I stop so far.

One common feature of the misguided pro-Biafran agitation is to present a cocktail of doom-mongering, as if it were a recipe for realizing a false dream.  I witnessed the Civil War (1967-1970) first-hand.  I vividly remember the hunger and starvation, the picture of “kwashiorkor”, and the refuge camps.

I remember how Biafra public enlightenment service on radio and other channels was encouraging people to seek out and kill lizards, rats, toads and frogs, as substitute for meat.

Meanwhile, the very few well-placed senior officials and senior military officers and their families lived in relative comfort and smartly cornered the best of the best of stock fish (okpoloko) and conmeal donated by the international charities (the most prominent of which was the Catholic charity, Caritas).

I remember that some clergymen entrusted with distributing available relief to the hungry and dying masses turned the whole thing into a heartless game of greed and fraud, with some of them hiding the relief foodstuff in dry wells and deny having them.

I remember that by 1969, most of the senior leaders of Biafra had moved their families overseas while continuing to tell the masses that even the grass would fight for Biafra, and that victory was assured.

I know of a few of Biafran military and civilian leaders who started acquiring property and building houses just some two years after the war, when most Igbos could still not feed twice a day — and more.

I want to warn the misguided war-mongering youths and their supporting dubious elders that when they spark their dream war, they will get more internal factional warfare than they ever imagine.  It may be such that would require “foreign” peacekeepers to try  to bring some sanity.

Not all of us can be cowed  into the false dream of Biafra.

I experienced that civil war at first hand.  I was in primary five when it started and some of us, who were in the Boys Brigade, eagerly joined; and were made to be assisting soldiers on errands.

I was initially among the most fanatical youths itching to fight and die for Biafra.  I was heavily swayed by the war propaganda; and my parents were struggling to keep me at home.

But as I mixed with adult soldiers, and heard some muffled reports, my proving mind started doubting many talks we were fed with.

After the war and after my earning my secondary school certificate, I set my eyes on the Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA), and succeeded in the second attempt.

As an army officer, I was addicted to war history in general.  My contemporaries recognize me for that.  I am not a lover of raw sentiments and emotions.  I am known for that — even if my mother or father is involved.

I have spent decades in the study of wars, ancient and modern, my starting point being the Nigerian Civil War.  I devote my life to the acquisition of knowledge in vast fields of human endeavour, unlike many, who may have rather spent their active years chasing contracts and money.  So, that explains my attitude towards this neo-Biafra campaign.

Besides, having vigorously campaigned for a presidential candidate that shielded corruption and treasury looting, and that candidate having lost to an anti-corruption candidate in the democratic election of 2015, many appear unable to recover from the electoral loss.  The result is frustration and the release is the new “struggle” for Biafra!

Therefore, reselling twisted civil narratives seem to have become the only consoling subversive daily occupation, as if that provides escape from reality.

As a long standing seeker of knowledge in vast fields, and also as a soldier who had committed time to study wars and had tough combat experience in foreign wars, I don’t belong to the present Biafra mindset — a sort of escapist daily vocation.  I have more studies doing with my valuable time.

The post From old Biafran to new: war is nasty business appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

It’s a season of supremacists; and Biafra, Oodua and allied acolytes preen, strut, caper and crow!

It is not unlike that Yoruba proverb: at the fall of Ajanaku, the mighty elephant, knives and daggers of different hues go ga-ga!

Is the Nigerian Ajanaku, sired since 1914 by Lord Frederick Lugard, about to buckle — and all the buzz, dire signs of the free-wheeling knives to come?  Maybe.  Maybe not.

One thing is clear, though: in the excitement of the moment, the mirage of instant desire swallows cold reality.  It is excellent wine for the trending feast of wild passion.  But the sure hangover would be no less telling — and galling!

Which brings the matter to  e-maps, springing up on the social media, pronouncing emotive, post-Nigeria republics.

The problem, however, is less the emotion.  It is more the crass presumption.

Neo-Biafra, despite the fiasco of 1967-1970, the pre-defeat rollback at the Midwest and the post-defeat Igbo “abandoned property” of Rivers, is still mapped as the Igbo homeland; plus all of the Niger Delta, east and south; and, to the west, the eastern fringe of the present Delta State.

Why, the most virulent of that delusion even annexed part of Idoma country, in the North’s Middle Belt, as part of neo-Biafra!

As for “Oodua Republic”, it is the Yoruba homeland of the political South West; plus Edo,  Ishan and Auchi lands (the present Edo State), the Itsekiri country of the present Delta, and, of course, the Yoruba “diaspora” in the political “North” of Kwara and Kogi, up to Lokoja and Idah!

At the height of this fantasy, romantics, Biafra and Oodua, were already swooning about some “South” — after IPOB’s Nnamdi Kanu’s reported threat of no election in the South East, until IPOB secured its Biafra secession referendum; and former Senator Femi Okurounmu’s call for a united southern phalanx against the “Hausa-Fulani” he seems to viscerally hate.

How these romantics secured the consent of the non-Igbo and the non-Yoruba, mapped into “Biafra” and “Oodua Republic”, is not clear.  But pray, how is that different from the Lugard cobbling of Nigeria?

In fairness to Senator Okurounmu he, with his Afenifere, are not new converts to restructuring.  Neither is Ripples.

As he correctly noted in his two interviews with The Punch and Nigerian Tribune, restructuring has been the war cry of the South West, since Ibrahim Babangida’s rash annulment of the 12 June 1993 presidential election, which the late MKO Abiola won.  That argument holds today as it held then — restructuring could well be the elixir to save Nigeria.

Still, pushing for restructuring is one.  Launching into hate, by passionately dubbing a whole people the “Yoruba enemy”, as Dr. Okurounmu did in his interview, is another.  That crosses the line from a civil campaign to crass demagoguery.  That was unfortunate, with all due respect to the Yoruba elder.

Of course, the former senator got mixed up with pushing the legitimacy of his cause and marketing the Goodluck Jonathan National Conference, with its sop of pre-poll bribery and sundry baggage, that went awfully wrong for Jonathan’s re-election.

That was fatal to his message.  To the acute, the medium simply slaughtered the message.  He clearly appeared to speak from the bitterness of backing a wrong horse in 2015, and, for political redemption, desperately clinging to the “restructuring” buzz.

As it is true of Senator Okurounmu and his group, so it is of the avid new converts, of the South East/South-South, to “restructuring”.   Their campaign would appear fired more by an election loss than any intrinsic belief in their new crusade.

Why?  Well, President Jonathan, with his vociferous South East backers, had ample time to “restructure”.  But why didn’t he do it, until his election-eve poisoned chalice, which lured the likes of Afenifere which, with the balance of political forces, had little or no electoral value, anyway.

But you must congratulate Nnamdi Kanu for his newly demonstrated street value, among the Eastern rabble.

Still, the “Biafra” sit-at-home order is nothing new.  After June 12, it became a yearly ritual in the South West, to force back the unjust annulment, while the rest of the country, particularly much of the South East, didn’t see what  the fuss was all about.  What goes around, as they say, comes around!

Just imagine if everyone had squared against that heinous crime back then?  Perhaps the search for justice would have been swifter and easier; and the national question, maybe resolved by productive federalism, wrought from hard compromise.  But alas!

How far can IPOB stay the course of yearly sit-at-home strikes?  Despite all the emotional huff over Biafra, it is a grand design to scuttle the Buhari mandate, lost and won.  June 12 was to revalidate the MKO mandate, fairly won.  Yet, it petered out as the years went by.

Still, for this latest rash of southern supremacists, arrogantly crooning their own homelands would thrive should Nigeria buckle, the political North has itself to blame.

The story of Nigeria is a torrent of injustices, arising from a skewed political geography that created a Northern sheriff, over and above the original two Southern regions of East and West.

By playing the end against the middle, pre- and post-Civil War, the North headed a concert of powers, with the South East/South South in tow, against Western Nigeria, in perpetual opposition.

But no thanks to Babangida’s recklessness, the North crossed the fatal line over the June 12 annulment.

No evidence, perhaps, that Babangida acted on behalf of anyone to annul a pan-Nigeria mandate, freely given. From his self-perpetuation scheming, he seemed to have more than enough self-motivation.

But there is more than enough evidence that the North’s power elite aided and abetted that crime, with the fond wish that the North’s political supremacy would stem the tide.

Well, it didn’t.  And from that spot, the North lost its power invincibility; and started a sure and steady decline in power and influence.

Still, if supremacy is bad for the North, it can’t be good for the South — and that is the point the Biafra and Oodua supremacists miss, busy flexing muscles about making it alone; while betting the North would be left in the lurch.

If Nigeria must be saved — and it is imperative it is, for a united but workable Nigeria is far better than its balkanized parts — everyone must eschew hatred and bigotry.

Rather, we should embrace good, old justice, which need we re-stress, by quoting Prof. Woke Soyinka’s eternal words, is the first condition of human dignity, nay existence.

Besides, if Nigeria were to be restructured and saved, partisans across the divide must start talking with themselves.  But with all these ethnic cacophony, they only talk at themselves.

That is a great pity, for Nigeria is at a crucial pass, which could make or mar it.

The post Biafra, Oodua and allied acolytes appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

Stained judges, preening from the Bench, are akin to barbarians sacking the Rome of Justice.

Yet, that’s the path of self-ruin the National Judicial Council (NJC) is treading.

Vandals at the gate of Rome — that echoes the Goth siege to Rome, preceding the 410 AD sacking of the city.

By 476 AD came final eclipse: the Barbarian Flavius Odovacer, of Germanic descent, sacked Romanus Augustulus, the last emperor of Western Roman Empire; and named himself king of Italy.

Why did the Rome, of Julius Caesar, Mark Anthony and Augustus Caesar, it of the famously proud citizen-army, wilt so badly?

Once lean and vigorous, Rome became soft and soggy.  Its citizens, pumped full of empire gravy, became too soft to fight.

So Barbarians (non-citizens), soon peopled its army, as fighting serfs.  In due course, the conqueror became the conquered — thus ended classical Rome, after 500 years; though its Middle Ages variant would not expire until 1453, when the Ottomans killed Constantine XI Palaiologo in battle.

The Judiciary, under the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Walter Onnoghen, appears merrily baiting a Rome-like ruin.

Like Ancient Rome, the Nigerian judiciary of Taslim Elias, Chukwudifu Oputa, Kayode Esho and other greats, hitherto a glittering star among peers, is getting so flabby it doesn’t even recognize its core of straight-and-narrow.

In a throwback to the classical tragedy, severe gift from Greece and Rome, the judiciary, suffused with sleaze and rumours of sleaze, is about committing institutional suicide. For that, however, polite society would pay a hefty price.

Proof?  Look no farther than the June 1 National Judicial Commission (NJC) order, that indicted judges return to their courts.

Emerging from its 82nd meeting, the NJC, with CJN Onnoghen presiding, had ordered heads of courts to recall judges, indicted for alleged sleaze but yet to be formally charged, six months after the media brouhaha over a “sting” operation by DSS.

That looks more like a grudge call against DSS and the judges’ pre-trial media-roasting; than a wise decision to preserve the sanctity and integrity of the judiciary.

The beneficiary judges: Justice John Inyang Okoro (Supreme Court), Justice Uwani Abba Aji (Court of Appeal), Justice Hydiazira A. Nganjiwa and Justice Adeniyi Ademola (Federal High Court) and Justice Agbadu James Fishim (National Industrial Court).  The high court has discharged and acquitted Justice Ademola, though the prosecution has signified it would appeal the verdict.

With no prejudice to the innocence or guilt of the affected judges, that they sit in almost every cadre of courts is a piquant symbol of how much the judiciary has fallen in public perception, as some rarefied house of graft.

Which makes it all the more surprising — NJC pushing all that aside, and assuming an arch-legalistic view, on a matter that has scaled the narrow precincts of the courts into a burning moral matter, in the public space.

All the judges may well be innocent.  Indeed, the Nigerian court system presumes they are, until duly convicted by a competent court.

But the courts themselves are no fiat from space.  They are a creation of society: a set of legal Leviathans created by law, to adjudicate disputes and punish crime. Remove that societal moral cover, and all the courts, with their arcane procedures and scholarship, become hollow jokes.

If that would affect judges and lawyers alone, it would be fair comeuppance for NJC’s rashness.  As the Yoruba would say, you don’t counsel a wilful child against growing crooked fore-teeth.  The paralyzingly ugliness would impress him soon enough!

Rather, it is the sad case of a wayward child, whose rascality soon entraps his community in avoidable ruin.

The moment the docked — many of them hardened criminals — start a tragic huff, taking His Lordship on a biting tutorial in moral rectitude and integrity, polite society would have lost it!  Sad!

Still, it is amazing how NJC actions, since the era of CJN Alloysius Katsina-Alu, continue to reinforce the good old aphorism that a fish rots right from the head.

Under CJN Katsina-Alu, NJC was the illicit special duty vehicle (SPV), used to hound a straight-and-narrow jurist, Justice Ayo Salami, from his Court of Appeal presidency.

His crime?  His court’s audacity to return stolen governorships from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) vote-heisting machine, to which the normally feckless Goodluck Jonathan presidency took terrible exception, and for which an innocent and dutiful man must pay with his career.

Under CJN Onnoghen, the NJC appears being forged into another SPV to give judges, facing allegations of graft, some judicial bolster, under crass legalism.

It’s way down the nadir, from those lofty heights of 2007, when former CJN, Muhammadu Lawal Uwais, beatified the NJC with that singular honour of recommending the electoral chief, a power his Electoral Review Panel wanted taken from the president.  What forlorn hope, given NJC’s later actions!

Their Lordships, with the equally misguided Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), which pushed, and has been trumpeting support for this outrage, probably fancy themselves hoisting their own brand of judicial dictatorship, over long-suffering and long-abused Nigerians.  What hubris!

The Buhari presidency do should everything lawful to redress this outrage.  Neither should the rest of society rest, until these judges are kept from court, pending the time they are cleared by the judicial system.

That is the due process they swore to.  That is the due process they must abide by.  Any other way is not only unwise, it is a fast track to anarchy.

Biafra, Oodua and allied acolytes (6 June 2017)

Reader: Good morning.  I’ve been reading your pieces in The Nation for long; and in fact came to the conclusion that you’re the only one of its columnists, who is not a hatchet writer.  But today’s piece shattered that assumption.  You also crossed the line by simply being disrespectful of Okurounmu’s age, even if he was a demagogue.  It’s obvious you took sides with Tinubu in this issue of 2014 national conference.  This is sad and not to your credit. You could still canvass your opinion on the old man’s interview without insulting him.  Cheers — Olakunle Tajudeen

Ripples: Thank you for your remarks.  But you know, the issue is in the public space.  Elders should be wise and not say stuff that would endanger their people, even when they themselves feel they are secure.  Yoruba youths live everywhere, not the least in the North.  When an elder dubs a whole people “Yoruba enemy”, then some counter voice of reason should prevail.  I didn’t insult the old man.  I only faithfully described what he did.  If he was innocent, that shouldn’t rankle anyone.  As for supporting or opposing Tinubu, that’s no crime the last time I checked.  But if you have been reading my pieces as you said, you should have known I’m a person of conviction, and names, to me, don’t really matter.  Only logic does.  Still, thanks for your comment.

The post Vandals at the court gate appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

“The civil war was a disaster, the failure of reason and the triumph of egoism and narrow-mindedness” — Sam Amadi, in a 4 September 2002 piece published in This Day, headlined “Nigeria: enter the Third Force”

The first casualty of the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970) was reason.  But mutual hurt sharpened the knife for that grand slaughter.

The Igbo pogroms all over the North followed the 15 January 1966 coup.  That coup overthrew the North-led civil order. But it enthroned Major-Gen. Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi, after the so-called “Igbo coup”.  The pogroms badly hurt the Igbo — as it would any other people.

But the pogroms too were a result of reported taunting, by some Igbo in the North, of the northern locals.  The taunts were over the northern leaders, felled during the first coup.  That hurt the North — as it would any other people.

The counter-coup of 29 July 1966 gorily settled scores — a Northern coup cancelled out an Eastern one, with all the grisly killings.  But it only roasted the collective Nigerian psyche.

No surprise, the counter-coup only signalled the final descent into political Hades — the Civil War, which followed Eastern Region Governor, Lt-Col. Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu’s 30 May 1967 declaration of the ill-fated Republic of Biafra.

Before that tragic denouement, however, the drums of war beat with deafening intensity. Ojukwu was canonizing his Biafra Army as so formidable “no force in Africa” could vanquish it — a tragic bluff.

Yakubu Gowon, also then a lieutenant-colonel though also head of state and supreme commander of the Nigerian Armed Forces (before the Aburi Accords in Ghana pared that title down to commander-in-chief), was also positioning the coming slaughter as a “police action”, to rein in the break-away rebels of the East — a sinister threat.

Less than three years later, tragic bluff had sized up sinister threat — and no less than two million, victims on both sides, lay dead!

Even as that tragedy was brewing, only Wole Soyinka, then 33, of all the intelligentsia then, was unimpressed by the war-mongering.  He would try to prevent war at all cost.  Hence, he called for a Third Force, neither for Nigeria nor Biafra but against avoidable carnage.

His reward?  Detention without trial, almost all through the war, by the Gowon Federal Military Government.

But his contemporary writers?  Ken Saro-Wiwa, of the Ogoni South-South minority, opted for Nigeria.  Indeed, after the liberation of Port Harcourt from the Biafra forces, he was administrator of that city.  But the country he opted for later consumed him under Sani Abacha, a young military commander when Saro-Wiwa was PH administrator.

Chris Okigbo sided with his Igbo folks, though using his poetry to lament the blood and gore.  He was consumed by the war.

Chinua Achebe, Soyinka’s most famous contemporary, also sided with his Igbo folks; and was soon drafted as Biafra’s war-time envoy.  He survived the war and even joined Aminu Kano’s People’s Redemption Party (PRP), during the 2nd Republic (1979-1983).

But his unrelieved Civil War bitterness would come in There Was A Country, his 2012 “Personal History of Biafra,” a classic example of the swan song as ogre.  That book is believed, by not a few, to power the philosophical push for the present neo-Biafra campaign.

That ogre may yet consume the naive.  But the old man is safe in his grave.

The Achebe angle neatly ties the present to the past, with its avoidable tragedies. History is threatening to repeat itself.  But it may well be a costly farce.

Already, there are eerie parallels: check out Ojukwu of 1967 with Nnamdi Kanu of 2015.  The one bluffed and blustered out of plain hurt.  The other does, out of free-wheeling bigotry and hatred — as the  callow youth, in that Yoruba proverb, that mistakes potent herbs for a delicious vegetable soup.   But both are  hardly the epitome of sober introspection.

Check out too the Igbo-Hausa/Fulani ethnic baiting and counter-baiting, culminating in the sensational diktat, by the so-called “Northern youths”, for the Igbo to quit the North before October 1 — or else!  That, in response to IPOB’s gospel of hate and threat — lunacy and counter-lunacy!

As in a theory in basic creative prose, you know the true character of a person when under crisis.  In the crisis of the moment, about every ethnic group is betraying its own maladies.

Some elements in the Niger Delta have given their own counter-order: not only should northerners quit their enclave, those that have oil well interests should also scram.

Even in Yorubaland, some atavistic elements are celebrating the sweet prospects of their great utopia: the immaculate Oodua Republic where, open sesame, Ibadan domination would vanish in Oyo State; the Ijebu-Remo rivalry, in Ogun, would disappear; and the “Lagos-for-Lagosians” lobby in Lagos would, Saul to Paul-like, morph into happy-go-merry pan-Yoruba nationalists, with zero condescension towards the ”ara-oke”, the Yoruba upcountry denizens!

It’s an emotive season of anomie, which shows how little the Nigerian mule, warts and all, is appreciated by these ultra-nationalists!  Indeed, as crooned Don Williams, the American country music ace, some folks don’t know what they’ve got until it’s gone!

Kudos to Acting President Yemi Osinbajo for his systematic way of diffusing the tension by his ongoing meeting with leaders of the different ethnic groups.

But one point must be made, if you must come to equity with clean hands: you can’t blame the northern reaction to torrential threats and insults without first condemning, in the most vigorous of terms, the South East source of that torrential hate.

Still, to forestall tragic history from repeating itself, a third force against reckless ethnic ultra-nationalism is imperative.

Despite all the ethnic bellowing and muscle-flexing, it is reassuring that a parallel counter-voice, from all ethnic divides, is challenging this emotional foray into Golgotha.  Those voices — Igbo, Hausa-Fulani, Yoruba, Ijaw, Idoma, Tiv, Kanuri, et al — should coalesce and face down these divisive voices.  More of such sane voices should speak up.

In 1967,  Wole Soyinka went solo, when the rest of Nigerians were going mad on ethnic hate.  Their eyes did not clear until two million people lay dead.

In 2017 — 50 years later — surely we have learnt enough from our tragic past to avert yet another?

That is why the Soyinka spirit of 1967 must inspire a determined pan-Nigeria Third Force to defeat this ethnic madness.

If Nigeria is sick – and indeed, it is — fix it!  Restructure, if you must.  Ensure justice, equity and fair play reign.

But sure, balkanization cannot be the solution?  That would create new problems for the illusory el-dorados to follow.

Poetic Extra

June 12

June 12!

And a culprit is long dead.
But his memory 
is a septic tank of sleaze,
memory worse than no memory!

Another lives,
perfumed by the high
and the mighty.
But what oozes from his chamber
is the rot
of the living dead!

But MKO, their victim
lives, though long dead!
Each year, this day,
he comes alive:
pleasure to the righteous,
pain to the hideous,
but a deep gash,
on the soul 
of a nation
that kills its best!

June 12!

Lagos, 13 June 2017

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An Osun, it is a birth pang of sorts.  An old order is dying — and frankly, no sane mind would mourn its passage.

But a new order is struggling to be born.  Again, until it is delivered, safe, healthy and strong, no sane mind can afford to be sanguine.

It’s a dramatic juncture of two extreme possibilities: either to consolidate the emerging era of conscious safety nets, by a compassionate state, to shield the most vulnerable; or take a tragic roll-back into the prebendal past, where state resources were captive to the few fat cats in government — and their cronies.

All that is playing out in the make-good senatorial election, billed for July 8.  It is to replace the late Senator Isiaka Adeleke, aka Serubawon, the first elected governor of Osun and two-time senator of the Federal Republic.

Interestingly, in the rumpus to fill that void — and elections here are always a rumpus, simply because barren folks often hide behind empty bluff and bluster — is an Adeleke brood, Ademola Adeleke, literarily sworn to, willy-nilly, succeeding his elder brother.

To face him is Mudashir Hussain, a Tekobo (Lagos arriviste) by defensive but bitter local political gossip, but a legislative veteran in his own right.

Hussain represented Oshodi-Isolo, Lagos, as Alliance for Democracy (AD) member in the House of Representatives (1999-2007), before he joined the Aregbesola-led long trek to salvage Osun, back in 2007.

After losing to the elder Adeleke in the controversial election of 2007  —  an election not a few insist could be the worst in Nigerian history, in which Rauf Aregbesola himself got his governorship mandate stolen —he defeated the same Adeleke, as sitting senator, to became an All Progressives Congress (APC) Osun West senator in 2011.

But Senator Hussain would yield his place to the same Serubawon, an election-eve trade-off to the defector from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), after Serubawon’s sinister confrontation with the Omisore group.

By Serubawon’s own words, the Omisore group threatened to kill him, with Jelili Adesiyan, then President Goodluck Jonathan’s minister of Police Affairs, allegedly raining stiff blows on Adeleke, at the PDP state secretariat at Osogbo, to underscore that threat.  That sent hurtling the mighty Serubawon.  For once, the fearsome one that sent folks scuttling, himself dived for cover!

It’s an irony of the no-holds-barred clawing for power, in these climes, that the younger Adeleke is back in bed with the same noxious forces that nearly politically gassed his brother.

In “The politics of death and the triumph of truth”, Niyi Akinnoso, The Punch columnist, did full justice to the soulless manoeuvres  of the younger Adeleke: the dirty politics of poison over a sudden family tragedy, the media amplification of that theory, the attempt to sully the waters over the coroner’s probe, the politics of intra-APC disqualification and re-qualification, and the eventual Ademola Adeleke scurry to the Osun PDP, the same party and people his late brother fled from for dear life.

In that piece, Prof. Akinnaso did a clinical, if furious, putdown of Otunba Adeleke, for his desperate tactics.  To be sure, that was well earned, with all facts available.

But lo!  Politics is often a utility business, with morality as the least consideration. Remember the Machiavellian quip about the end justifying the means?  The only catch though, is that a politician would forever live with how he defines himself.

Take Iyiola Omisore, furiously remaking his image and rebranding his political essence on Facebook, and other social media channels.  Not bad — after all, Saul, the ultimate anti-Christ turned Paul, the Christian neophyte-without-equal!

But would that, open sesame, wipe off Omisore’s past, any more than all the waters of the Atlantic would blot out the blood in the hands of the evil Lady Macbeth, in Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth?

With his first steps in politics, the younger Adeleke has defined himself.  It is a democratic right he would float or sink with.

That, however, is not the problem.  The problem is what Adeleke and his new company epitomize: the right to pushing emptiness, as a democratic alternative to substance.

That is almost beyond pardon, especially in a state experiencing seven straight years of developmental governance, after nearly eight years of ruin and stagnation.

But because an old order is dying and a new one is not fully born, these poster boys of democratic barrenness jerk awake at each electoral cycle, to rattle-dazzle the gullible, with a rich lather of empty emotions.

In the past seven years, despite a deliberate orchestration of the contrary by the Osun opposition and their media confederates, the news coming from Osun has been decidedly developmental.

Only from June 15 to 17, UNICEF midwifed a study tour by 16 states, to understudy Osun’s social safety nets, for possible implementation in these other states.  The states: Sokoto, Kebbi, Zamfara, Benue, Katsina, Delta, Lagos, Ondo, Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Enugu, Adamawa, Kano, Bauchi and Rivers.

Lagos is to Nigeria what California, the “Golden State”, is to the United States — the biggest economy around.  Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Delta, Rivers and Ondo are oil royals, far more endowed than Osun.  Kano is the northern commercial nerve.

Yet, all these states went, under UNICEF’s proud banners, to take a tutorial on what mighty developmental strides puny Osun had attained, with its meager resources, to protect its most vulnerable!

Apart from safety net programmes like OMEAL (the school feeding programme, which the Federal Government is adopting), OYES (youth volunteer and retraining programme, to tackle unemployment) and O-REHAB (focused on care for the destitute and the mental health-challenged), the whole state is a huge work-in-progress, in solid roads and futuristic schools, on a scale never witnessed before.

That is the new Osun, struggling to consolidate.

The old Osun?  A daily plague of ruin: run-down schools; cratered roads; dysfunctional polity, where thugs were lords of the manor;  a relay of contrived crimes to trap political opponents; and, of course, unfazed haven of institutionalized ignorance, and cavalier global capital of destructive rumours!

Indeed, the grim modern equivalent of Hobbes’s state of nature: an Osun where life was nasty, brutish and short.

So, the July 8 election is between Hussain and Adeleke, for the Osun West senatorial seat?  Only on the surface.

The real battle is progressive and reactionary forces gunning for the soul of Osun, as prelude to the 2018 gubernatorial elections: either to further deepen the developmental strides of the past seven years (which would be wise); or slip back into the ruin of the past (which would be tragic).

Talk of the delicate tendrils of a new order, of hope and promise; tangling with the dry stubs of a dying order, of ruin and stagnation.

That, then, is the stark choice before Osun West voters — and one false step, it just might be back to the past of ruin, from the emerging future of hope.

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It’s a “restructuring” buzz out there.  But it’s not unlike blind folks feeling different parts of an elephant.

Is “restructuring” like this elephant — a simple case of different perspectives?

Or a deliberate, sinister couching of differing motives, under a reigning political buzz word?

To be fair, restructuring “franchise holders”, the Afenifere segment of the Yoruba political mainstream, have been consistent; since the very beginning.

It started with a Benin Republic-like Sovereign National Conference (SNC), of the pre-June 12, 1993 annulment era; when Gen. Ibrahim Babangida’s political transition programme was transiting nowhere, beyond a deliberate cul-de-sac.  Remember the late Alao Aka-Basorun and his braves?

After Babangida’s rash annulment of June 12, that clamour flared into an impassioned crusade over the “national question”, all through the  no-war-no-peace era of Gen. Sani Abacha.

Even after the return to democracy in 1999, with (apologies to Fela) the Army Arrangement that thrust Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo into the presidential chair, the Afenifere — indeed, all of the Yoruba political mainstream — still pushed for SNC (if they wanted to be politically irritating) or “restructuring” (if they wanted to be nuanced or coded).

If indeed restructuring is “a national appeal whose time has come”, according to IBB, an arch-opponent now turned swooning proponent, then the Afenifere grandees are entitled to their prize.

But while pristine “restructuring” was clear — at least to the Afenifere camp: remaking Nigeria along ethnic lines to form some cultural federalism, the latest strain, even within the camp, is not so clear. “True federalism”? Confederation? Or only the last station before a final push towards Oduduwa Republic?

Given the sabre-rattling among some Yoruba ultra-nationalists, the atavistic romanticization of Yoruba mores and ethos and the impassioned ethnic hate from a section still very bitter at the election loss of 2015, it is not easy to say.

One thing is clear though: the South West’s strain of “restructuring” would appear the most thought-out — not because the people there are smarter than the rest, but because they had been in the “true federalism” trenches, longer than any other.

South East’s “restructuring” is even hazier, when placed side by side, with the neo-Biafra campaign.

Until the northern counter-expulsion threat, neo-Biafra had assumed outright secession — a rather grim encore of the 1967-1970 Civil War debacle, with nevertheless a hoped-for different result.

IPOB and MASSOB may well be romantics, whose street ardour could be far-removed from reality.  But to borrow Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, they would appear the Ndigbo id — that raw, unrestrained and untamed innermost craving, about a people’s political bitterness, against Nigeria as constituted.

But the IPOB wild caper was morphing into a reckless tempo, prompting an irritated “northern youths” to issue a no less irritating fatwa.  Thus, Ohanaeze Ndigbo, the South East civil face, had to step in.

The political schizophrenia, in the South East’s “restructuring” was clear from the latest statement of John Nwodo, the Ohanaeze president.  He admitted a section of Ndigbo wanted secession; another section wanted a restructured Nigeria.

The trouble is: Ohanaeze and IPOB/MASSOB epitomize the split in the Igbo political persona.

The elite Ohanaeze represents the political aristocrats, who had been part and parcel of the gravy since 1960; and after the Civil War — faithful collaborators with the Northern power elite, which IPOB now lampoons.

This Igbo elite had contributed their own fair share to the Nigerian debacle.  The music only changed after the loss of 2015 — the first time the Igbo elite would back a wrong horse, and the appointments and other gravy dried up.

IPOB/MASSOB, on the other hand, belong to the bitter and angry rabble, who nevertheless see their nemesis not in their own ethnic collaborators with the soulless pan-Nigeria power machine, but in some hated Hausa-Fulani and Yoruba.

Until the dissonance between these two Igbo faces are harmonized, South East’s “restructuring” would be hazy indeed.

Beyond the threat to “make Nigeria ungovernable” should Goodluck Jonathan lose, and the vicious walking-the-talk with the Avengers’ creek bombing campaigns, the South-South has been largely quiet in articulating its own “restructuring.”

O, Ann Kio Briggs, the Ijaw rights stormy petrel of the creeks, was reported to have declared Nigeria should break; and every part should go its way.  But her fiery voice lacks the scalding credibility of old.  If it was muted all through the Jonathan misrule, it can’t gather any plausible ring when her Niger Delta kin is out, beyond the democratic right to be bellicose.

Like the Niger Delta, the North’s Middle Belt has been largely quiet too, beyond repudiating presumptive “capture”, in the neo-Biafra map.  It would be nice to hear from these denizens, who often prided themselves the glue that kept Nigeria together, even at great human costs.

But about the most sensational new converts to “restructuring” are two political survivalists: IBB and former Vice President Atiku Abubakar.  The one would wish his past humongous contribution to ruining Nigeria would fade away.  The other would declare himself open to any cause that could keep burning his presidential lamp.

Surprisingly, IBB appears very radical in his “restructuring”: a Federal Government with powers over just foreign policy, defence, and the economy, eerily close to the confederal arrangement the Emeka Ojukwu-led Eastern Region called for in 1967.

Atiku too appears more radical, at least in the context of the normal present-structure-or-nothing stance of the core North, pushing for present states arranged as provinces under new federating units: the present six geo-political zones, even while the core North, as a group, keeps its official thinking very close to its chest.

The big question, however: when the chips are down, can this duo hold firm, with their public perception of being as slippery as an eel?

At the end, restructuring would appear an economic issue, couched  in politics.  Indeed, it would make no sense if the present sharing of the central but poisoned pork, didn’t give way to regions baking own wholesome meals, and feeding the centre.  Any other way would appear hot air.

Still, one final but uncomfortable truth: what has climaxed as present “restructuring”, started as wilful refusal to accept the result of a democratic election, by political blocs that lost.  That was the trigger in the South East, South-South and in the Afenifere camp of the South West.

What started as wilful distraction is ending up as the ultimate political blackmail.  That explains the toting of the Jonathan National Conference, by the lobby that attended it, as the wonder elixir to totally cure Nigeria of its political pathologies.  Some Trojan horse!

But if you gang up against an “Hausa-Fulani” president, would you need another round of “restructuring” crusades to prevent the Hausa-Fulani too from ganging up against you, when you yourself become president?

Just think about that!

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