Category: Opinion

Those who believe in God know that there are times He uses the unworthy vessel to work wonders. One was Moses the stammerer, who considered himself unqualified but was nevertheless picked to lead the Israelites to the Promised Land. Another was Saul, the man who went about arresting believers of Jesus but then not only turned one himself but also spent his time seeking converts.

Please ignore the opening paragraph if you’re an atheist or your religious leaning isn’t Christianity. Here’s the summary: sometimes the wrong person preaches the right message. Sometimes, too, and without waiting to be called, the wrong person preaches the wrong message, but in a way that serves as an unintended wakeup call for the people — if they are smart enough — to seize the initiative and seek out the right.

As it happened last week, musical artistes Olamide and Lil Kesh propagated a message that just doesn’t stop at being wrong but calls for renewed national introspection. The duo — each popular among secular music lovers despite their notoriety for releasing songs low in content but high on lurid lyrics, obscene videos and danceable beats — combined to release what will go down as the most repulsive song of the year, titled ‘Logo Benz’. Without listening to the song, a mere look at the cover says it all: the round insignia of global automobile marque, Mercedes-Benz, strapped together on three ends by a G-string. The song preaches riches by hook or crook. “I pray to Jesus, I pray to Allah, to make money,” reads a loose Pidgin-English translation of the song. “But if money doesn’t come, I’ll do ‘blood money.’” In other parts, it urges ladies to let go of their pants to guys in need of them for Benz-buying rituals.

Expectedly, the public reaction has been largely critical. But why is anyone shocked about a song applauding the use of ladies’ pants for quick-money-making rituals? Olamide/Lil Kesh’s ‘Logo Benz’ is the story of our society — one so ‘dangerously’ lacking in values, depth, substance, conscience and perseverance.

Here in Nigeria, the biggest way to command respect is to have money, regardless of how you made it. Just open your mouth and speak gibberish; as long as you have money, there’s an audience waiting to clap you. While I do not think money should attract automatic condemnation, one basic qualifier for me is that it must be ‘honestly made’.

Not too many people care, though; dishonestly-made money is money all the same, and it rules. You’ll find young men who date ladies/women SOLELY because of money, and vice versa; people who take jobs SOLELY because of money; people whose choices of their life partners are SOLELY motivated by money; people who dispense respect ONLY according to the pocket of the next fellow; people who class themselves aside and wouldn’t mix with others simply because, as Wizkid said, ‘my money and your money no be mate’.

We can’t succeed as a nation if we do not rein in the extent to which people go to make money. The scale of greed pervading the public governance space is already well-documented, but the private sector — even though under considerably lesser scrutiny —¬ is not any holier. Too many CEOs and top executives have skeletons in their cupboards; we’ve seen this in the past with the supposed management staff who mismanaged Intercontinental Bank and Oceanic Bank. There are numerous anti-corruption and pro-accountability non-governmental and civil society organisations that are nothing more than money-making ventures — organisations calling for openness in the National Assembly and the oil and gas sector yet the heavens would fall were their CEOs or accountants or admin heads to be probed. This doesn’t mean honest men no longer exist; only the shining lights among us have been overcrowded by too many people around trying to outsmart the system as part of the maddening desperation to get rich.

We are largely a value-impoverished society, and this is first and foremost because the family is shirking its responsibilities as the first societal unit. To digress a bit, from time to time, I come across people with certain character flaws that are strictly down to deficient upbringing. Not that anyone, not least the writer, is perfect. But there are certain values that, if not picked up as part of family training, are hardly retrievable later in life. The unfortunate thing is that people with character flaws of this nature do not even realise they have a problem, that they need help.

There is a lot of work to be done if we must address the gaping value deficit afflicting us. The family is the first basis. Parents need to realise they’re raising not just their kids but the country’s ambassadors. We must address the ephemerality that has come to define marriages; if homes keep breaking up children will bear the brunt. Something is usually missing when a father or mother is absent in the formative years of a child, due to single parenthood or divorce. There usually are gaps with children raised by grandparents such as a retired teacher or an ‘old soldier’; it’s just not the same. Religious institutions must play their part. Enough of hero-worshipping moneybags; enough of presenting the church as dumping ground for ill-gotten wealth. Subjects that teach honesty, integrity and incorruptibility should be introduced to the curriculum, from primary school till tertiary level. And the National Orientation Agency (NOA) should get involved as well. This is a national emergency; if the depravity of now is left to continue growing at its current pace, it would be irreversible in probably a few decades — that is if it still is.

Until we fix the family especially and the general values upon which our lives are woven, musical artistes of the ilk of Olamide and Lil Kesh will continue to occasionally propagate evil in the name of money-making. I hope someone sings it loud into Olamide’s ears: money is good; very important, in fact. But it is NOT the most important thing in life. For everyone who comes to us with a Benz, we must not celebrate until we have first asked: “What is the logo of your Benz?” Pants, blood, corruption, crime? Or sweat, hard work, ingenuity, creativity? And ill-gotten wealth should NEVER be celebrated — because the dishonestly wealthy man is poorer at heart than the poorest but honest man alive.

Soyombo, former Editor of the TheCable and the International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR), tweets @fisayosoyombo

A Love Letter By Churchill Okonkwo

 

Dear Peter Obi, on February 23rd, 1927, physicist Werner Heisenberg first described his Uncertainty Principle which states that the more precisely we can determine a particle’s momentum, the less information we have about its position, and vice versa. On December 8th, 2018, the PDP stated precisely that your account was frozen by the EFCC to slow down your momentum. Days after EFCC denied freezing your account; no one knows anything about your position. Virgin Peter, I understand that you are in labor in the PDP’s maternity ward, but I will still ask, did EFCC freeze your account?

Because you, Peter allowed the familiar PDP lies on account freezing to live, you went to the Vice-Presidential debate and ended up distorting facts; presenting alternative facts and lying with a straight face. Lies matter, Peter. Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it is equally outraged by silence. This is because all truths that are kept silent become poisonous. So, for the very last time, virgin Peter, tell Nigerians, did EFCC freeze your account?

Peter, Albert Einstein told us that one who is out to describe the truth should leave elegance to the tailor. Leaving elegance to the tailor, permit me, Peter, to state that contrary to the false impression economic transformation of Anambra state that you presented at the debate, your administration in Anambra was anchored around yourself (alone) and the churches (church-schism). You, virgin Peter Obi, re-engineered the churches to lay down the cross and pick up the sword and fight for money from the government. Is that what you will with the churches and mosques in Abuja?

Nwanne m Peter, you are like that dog that said he should be praised for having good teeth because he does not use a chewing-stick. You want Nigerians to give you credit for not corruptly enriching the political class in APGA, but you dangerously corrupted the Catholic and Anglican priests in Anambra State. You see, virgin Peter, virginity is the poetry, not the reality, of life. The reality of life is that the stench from your fart in Anambra is still fresh.

You, Peter, have been playing selfishly in your political career that everything has turned against you. When President Goodluck Jonathan wanted to make you a minister, the southeast PDP ganged up in opposition and presented Osita Chidoka. When the PDP gave you, Peter Obi, the mandate to select their governorship candidate in the last Anambra election, all the PDP stalwarts in Anambra and Southeast abandoned you and your hand-picked candidate finished a distant third.

It was not thus surprising to those of us following your checkered political life that your VP candidacy was also stiffly opposed by PDP leaders in the east. Their reason is simple; if they are to send a representative to dine with the wolves, Atiku and Saraki in Abuja, it should not be someone that is selfish and “stingy” (credit to Fr. Mbaka).

What the stakeholders of PDP are saying to you is that security is like virginity: you’re either a virgin or you’re not. They are telling you, Peter, that it is superstitions for you to have imagined that virginity while pregnant could be a virtue in PDP’s maternity ward with Atiku as the Chief Gynecologist ably assisted by Dr. Saraki. If a deceitful person buries himself, one of his arms will stick out. The PDP stakeholders in southeast know that one of your arms is sticking out and that it is a terrible disservice to Ndigbo to send you to Abuja.

You, Obi, is the only pregnant political virgin with a history of abortions and attempted abortions. You betrayed Ikemba Nnewi on whose back he rode to power in the first place; aborted the stillborn APGA; attempted to abort governor Obiano and attempted to abort Senator Victor Umeh. Since then, the perception of Ndi Anambra about your virginity changed.

I have heard that to set fire to a church is not so bad as to speak ill of a virgin. But I will rather speak evil to a fake virgin in PDP’s maternity ward than set fire to the church. One of the smartest covert political operations in Nigeria was executed by you, Peter, when you, through corrupt enrichment bought over the Anglican and Catholic churches. Thus, the churches in Anambra State that are meant to manifest the kingdom of the cross are now manifesting the kingdom of the sword. For destroying the heart and soul of the church, you, Peter has thus, lost your virginity.

Per Albert Einstein, any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves. While the crooks in PDP lied using your name, you lied with sincerity in the debate to hype your performance as the governor of Anambra. The reality is that there is no safe driving for you, Saint Peter Obi through the murky political waters in Nigeria while seriously kissing the crooks in the PDP’s maternity ward.

Peter, I wrote this love letter to remind you that the greatest enemy of truth per John F. Kennedy is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. At the VP debate, you Peter Obi, the acclaimed professor of economic presented a myth, imagined (in your head) of the transformation of Nigeria like China and Indonesia. But as the governor of Anambra State, it was all about you and the corruption of the church.

Virgin Peter, your eight years of governance was never about job creation; it was not about human capital development; it was not about re-engineering government institutions; it was not about the state economy or improving revenue generation; it was not even about restructuring through local government autonomy you and your boss Atiku are promising; it was not about transparency as you were the alpha and omega that indiscriminately awarded contracts without bids.

How will run the federal government Economic Management Team? Through the bishops and imams? Poor Atiku picked you, a virgin, to heal his aching heart and cover his corrupt acts. Unfortunately, he never knew you were politically pregnant. Peter, your claim to “get Nigeria working again” with Atiku and Saraki is analogous to movement without acceleration.

Finally, I have heard that the police and your girlfriend are the only two people in your life that you should tell a lie. So, Peter, stop lying to Nigerians.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year in advance, Peter.

From Churchill, with Love.

 

Weird, unusual and a clear contradiction of the mannerisms of the class she belongs, events are fast proving that the persona of Nigeria’s First Lady, Aishat Buhari and the driving force of her clear departure from the norm, certainly need looking into. Weird, no doubt, Aishat isn’t the first queer First Lady in the world. Is she a destructive female, bent on destroying her husband, what the French call the femme fatale? The femme fatale is an archetype of literature and art referring to a mysterious and seductive woman whose charms and deploying of her feminine wiles ensnare the collective in dangerous and deadly situations, all geared towards achieving hidden purposes. The femme fatale may also be a victim who is trapped in a deadly situation that is beyond her, example being the 1947 film entitled The Lady from Shanghai.

Mrs. Buhari’s weirdness finds fitting similarity in Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of American lawyer and politician who later became the 16th President of the United States of America, in 1861, until his assassination in April 1865. Todd was what is called a proto-feminist and religious radical. Her views were weird, even for America of her age, curried with a manifest protest politics stance which smelled of deep scents of occultism.

Her acts as First Lady made very seismic impact on the American nation.

A few months after arriving the White House in March, 1861 as President and First Lady, the Lincolns’ first nightmare which many mid-century parents equally encountered, became the lot of the First Family. Willie, their 11-year-old son, had become afflicted by a serious fever. Willie was on record to be very sensitive and “precociously religious” and was the couple’s favourite. Not minding the weeks of vigils and trauma of the family, Willie gave up the ghost one afternoon in February, 1862. Todd as a person was acutely traumatised. This made her, like the troubled biblical King Saul, to turn to the spiritualism of trance mediums which she began to frequent, desperately believing that they could help her set up spiritual contact with her child. True to her expectation, one day, according to her biographer, Carl Sandburg, Todd rushed to the room of her half-sister and exclaimed, “He lives, Emilie! He comes to me every night and stands at the foot of my bed, with the same sweet, adorable smile he always had.”

Todd’s spiritual consultation of mediums became so embarrassing that in 1875, her only surviving son, Robert, got her locked up in a sanitarium. Three years earlier, and exactly seven years after Lincoln, her husband, was assassinated, specifically in February 1872, both the New York Times and the Boston Herald subjected her to intense incendiary articles which claimed that this widow obliquely sought services of Margaret Fox, an American notorious medium and was squandering her inherited estate on the spiritualist. On July 16, 1882, the earthly toil ended for Todd Lincoln. She died dejected by the betrayal of an American nation which killed her husband, a son who committed her to a psychiatric hospital and an American press which labeled her as deranged.

Neither could Aisha be weirder than Dolly Madison, wife of James Madison, President of the United States between 1809 and 1817. Dolly turned the White House to shindigs every week, inviting everyone: celebrities, politicians and shoemakers on the streets. She also capped this up by dressing provocatively. She was recorded to have made a departure from the norm by inviting her husband’s political rivals to these shindigs, thereby uniting the political parties.

Two statements underneath, one from a fictitious character in a book of literature and the other made by Aishat herself, share some similarities in the advocacies behind their outbursts. They should provoke an in-depth study of the reasoning behind them. The statements both query the masculinity of the male gender and the potency of his manhood in righting wrongs. The first was, “Lord, you call yourselves men, you poltroons! You let a small ruffian insult you. Fancy, he grabs at a girl in front of you – might be your daughter – this thing with the manner of a pig! If there were real men here, they’d pull his pants off and give him such a leathering he’d never sit down for a week. But, no, you let him do this here; tonight you’ll let him do it in your homes. And all you do is whimper.” The second was, “Where are the men of Nigeria? Where are the Nigerian men? What are you doing? Instead of them to come together and fight them, they kept visiting them one after the other, licking their shoes. I am sorry to use that word.”

While the first was an unnamed woman in a South African train incensed by a tout attempting to assault a young girl and by so doing, debasing her “womanity”, the second was made by Mrs. Buhari last week at a national leadership summit for women organised by a political group, Project 4+4 for Buhari & Osinbajo 2019. The two outbursts are however united by an uncommon activism that is geared towards righting wrongs. While the unnamed woman, cited in a South African book of short stories, like a typical African woman, was riled by contemporary disregard by a male-dominated society for the person of the female gender, Mrs. Buhari was provoked by what she perceives as an unfair power equation which has tilted power away from the people of Nigeria.

There is however a deeper need for an examination of the persona of the character called Aishat, wife of the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Since arriving Aso Villa with her husband the President, Mrs. Buhari has carved a renown for herself for her fiery public rebukes of her husband’s government. At the most recent event, she had said that although over 15 million Nigerians voted for Buhari in 2015, two persons have taken over the reins of that government. “Our votes were over 15 million in the last election, and after that, only for us to be dominated by two people. That hinders collective team work that we started, which is totally unacceptable,” she had said, and continuing, exploded: “If 15.4 million people can bring in a government, and only for the government to be dominated by two people; where are the men of Nigeria?” She also critiqued the slow start of the government, pillorying achievements of the Buhari government at this last minute of the administration.

On Monday, October 9, 2017, Mrs. Buhari had tongue-lashed the presidency for its sparse commitment to the healthcare of the people, basing this on the management of Aso Rock clinic. The clinic, she had said, lacked facilities to treat patients and claimed that, after she found that the clinic’s x-ray machine was not working, she had to resort to the services of a private clinic.

Barely two years after the life of the administration, the First Lady again shocked Nigerians when she announced on the BBC Hausa Service that she might not support her husband’s reelection bid unless some characters in his government were relieved of their posts. Apparently a rejoinder to these vociferous critiques, in faraway Germany, while standing beside the most powerful woman in Europe, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Buhari had committed the faux pas of saying, “I don’t know which party my wife belongs to, but she belongs to my kitchen and my living room and the other room,” a statement which must have disgusted and lowly rate Buhari in the presence of Merkel and feminists throughout the world. Also recently, Mrs. Buhari had taken the Chairman of the APC to the cleaners for what she described as acts capable of destroying the party.

So what makes Aishat Buhari tick? What is the reason for these polemics in the Villa? Is she merely a flippant and unguarded woman who likes to hear her own voice, an activist whose advocacies for the common man is not bound by the locales of power, a frustrated woman who feels that “strangers” are usurping her roles as First Lady or a bemused woman who suddenly finds a strange and effeminate man in her bedroom different from the man she married?

There is no doubting the fact that Aishat Buhari’s hue is alien to the Nigerian First Lady commune, even from the time of Victoria Aguiyi-Ironsi, Nigeria’s first publicly advertised First Lady. Born to the renowned family of Ribadu and descendants of the Ankali family, a renowned farmers family. Her grandfather was Alhaji Muhammadu Ribadu, Nigeria’s first Minister of Defence, while her father was a civil engineer. Nigerian First Ladies have followed in tow, from Victoria Gowon, Ajoke Mohammed, Stella Obasanjo, Maryam Babangida, Maryam Abacha, Fati Lami Abdulsalam, Turai Yar’Adua and Patience Jonathan, but none has been as evocatively against-method as Aishat.

Questions have been asked on the appropriateness of Aishat’s public critiques of her husband’s government. Are they a mirror of estrangement of the First Family? This question becomes needful because, if both husband and wife sleep under same roof or see each other like normal spouses do, public ventilation of personal grouses would have been unnecessary. Are they symptoms of a familial decay that the world is not yet privy to? Are they a confirmation of the touted cynicism of her husband, which manifests in claims of a body double? Specifically, are they manifestations of Aishat’s public disavowal with a strange man she cannot understand and possibly cannot penetrate in her bedroom? This last interrogation may not be true because, even before her husband’s illness, she had taken to the microphone to announce her displeasure with the political maltreatment of Bola Ahmed Tinubu by a cabal in government in the early period of the government, claiming that Tinubu was the one her family saw at the nocturnes of their political odyssey, pre-presidency. Or are those manifestations simply in synchrony with the persona of a firebrand, no-holds-barred woman who is displeased with a sliding system? This is a challenge to writers, journalists and biographers to fish out the correct reading of the weird amazon at the Aso Rock Villa.