Category: Opinion

Celebrating Wole Soyinka’s Anger, By Sonala Olumhense

Posted on by The Elites

img_3831When I first heard of Wole Soyinka’s intention to destroy his Green Card in response to the American election of Donald Trump, I wished I had the opportunity to foretell his future to him.

The Nobel laureate has since then been driven to such depths of anger he has not only fulfilled his promise ahead of time, but also threatened to pull out of Nigeria, literally or figuratively.

And of January 20, 2017, the day Mr. Trump will become the 45th president of the US, Soyinka promised last week: “I’m going to hold a private wake…to mourn the death of Nigeria common sense.”

Professor Soyinka is known for the many fights he has been in and the many mountains he has conquered, personally and professionally. Celebrated around the world for his writing and scholarship, it has also turned out during the current crisis that he had his Green Card handed to him by Jimmy Carter.

In other words, his was never the humiliating visa application lines at the American embassy in Nigeria, or the tortuous US Immigration & Naturalization Service processes. The first experience, for those who know of it, makes a Nigerian’s possession of an American visa an intensely humbling one. The second is probably a bigger triumph than earning a string of higher degrees: not only is it the real door into America, it is also the key to keeping that door shut, for those Nigerians who so wish.

The point is, Nigerians do not take the acquisition of the US Green Card lightly, and in cases such as Mr. Soyinka’s after he announced his intention, far too many were unwilling to believe he would really choose to disown his. They asked him to do it, to do it now…and eventually, to provide video evidence.

Surprisingly, he – the hero of so many stories spanning Time, legend, geography and philosophy – paid attention. Ironically, the reason may well be that he had not been paying enough attention elsewhere.

Remember: many of today’s top teachers were taught by Mr. Soyinka, or by people taught by him. In those days, every student was required to justify himself in school and in the community. A student did not graduate from the university because he had been found worthy intellectually; he also had to have been found worthy of character.

Speaking (or writing) in class or in an examination, and indeed outside of it, was based on strict and clear standards. In those days, our cultures and communities were clear as to what constituted good behaviour: that is, as to who was a good child.

A good child said “Good morning” and “Sir” or “Madam” to older people. In public, he addressed as “Uncle” or “Auntie” people whom he had never met before. And even if he knew that the first name of the man sitting across the church pew from his family’s was “Godwin,” he addressed the man as “Uncle Godwin.”

Training consisted broadly of interrogation. You learned to read books, and more books. You asked questions of your teachers, parents, your superior peers.

It is to the transition from that reality that I say Mr. Soyinka may have paid insufficient attention. Because that was in the ancient era of the dial tone. Oyingbo market.

But Oyingbo has given way to Amazon. Google, or perhaps sadly Wikipedia, is the new library.

Dial tone? That, my child, was the scarce sound you had to hear before you punched a number into a phone. Its closest equivalent is probably the phone credit. No dial tone, no phone call.

Yes, a student still enrolls in a class, but the authority figure to impress today is hardly the teacher. And where both the teacher and the student might have once thought little of the lowly typist, today’s principal tool of defence, but more importantly of offense, is the keyboard.

That is why it is the computer keyboard, which is also in use on mobile phones and tablets, that is responsible for Mr. Soyinka’s current distress.

Add it to the temptations of the Internet, and the complications can result in an international icon threatening to rip up his national roots and to hold a ceremony to bury “common sense.”

I hold the new technologies in high respect; there are lives and careers and communities owed to the cell phone, the Internet and social media. I have known people who used these technologies to carve out previously unimaginable pathways.

In similar ways, unfortunately, lives and communities and careers are being hurt daily by people for whom sleaze is a way of life. The problem with Nigeria is that much of what is smuggled into social media arises, and thrives on, malice, ignorance and opportunism.

It has become a cottage industry in Nigeria to register multiple screen names on the Internet for mischief. The professor has choice terms for them, including slugs, millipedes, imbeciles, barbarians, and blabbermouths.

As one who for over three decades enjoyed the opportunity to express his views regularly, I have seen some of the baboons grow. Some are known to be paid to sharpen their scalpels and to dig into your back with no provocation, and then to follow up with their alternative screen names to provide the semblance of legitimacy and support for their views, but there are others who need no prompting. They need only that keyboard.

When there is an issue on which he is interested, the baboon pulls that keyboard and those screen names closer. When you have a keyboard to speak for you, you do not need to think.

If you have never been the victim of an anonymous assault or campaign on the Internet, all may appear to be fair and joyous with the world. But it is scandalous to see so many instances in which someone who is being so unfairly attacked is left to suffer by those who know the truth.

This has an everyday correlation: very often, people needing help in public incidents, including road crashes, accidents or fights, are ignored by Nigerians who simply want to take pictures and shoot videos for their social media enjoyments.

How did we get here? When I was young, editors did not even look at your letter unless it was signed with your full name and your address.

That was in recognition of the point that a point of view is meaningless unless there is identifiable ownership. The tragedy is that today’s ownership is the keyboard.

It is why I advise Mr. Soyinka to reconsider the anger to relocate his foundation out of Nigeria. To do so is to grant those baboons a victory they had not dared imagine.

The menace to which he responds cannot be eliminated, but it can be ameliorated. That is why I ask Mr. Soyinka to find a few Nigerians he trusts enough to teach to farm and to fish without fear. For we are speaking about the audacity of hope, in terms of keeping it alive until dawn. A birth, not a burial.

I tell my four children, them of the Internet age, to feel free when they praise, to use fictitious names because praise needs no signature. But when they criticize, and should they ever abuse, I insist they must identify themselves.

For cowardice invalidates the argument – if any – and cheapens our common humanity. In the end, it is cowardice which makes the baboon.

• sonala.olumhense@gmail.com

• Twitter: @SonalaOlumhense

 

President Yahya Jammeh: Exile, Jail, Death or Concession

Posted on by The Elites

By Mahmud Jega

img_3571More than was the case with President Goodluck Jonathan last year, all Africa was surprised when President Yahya Jammeh conceded to his opponent Adama Barrow in last week’s Gambian presidential election. Some Nigerians were quick to say that it was “the Goodluck Effect,” a replay of Jonathan’s concession even before results were officially declared in Nigeria’s 2015 presidential elections. Jammeh’s concession was doubly surprising because it bucked an emerging world trend. Most pundits think that if Donald Trump had lost last month’s US presidential election, he would have upturned his country’s two centuries-old tradition by refusing to concede. Trump said he will accept the results only if he wins. He must have borrowed that maxim from African rulers.

African witchdoctors and prophets are hard pressed to explain why Africa’s top marabout ruler lost an election. In conceding, Jammeh was thinking not only of Nigeria but of similar events in neighbouring Senegal. In 2012 President Abdoulaye Wade conceded an election to the current president Macky Sall. Wade himself sold it as he bought it, to use a local adage; President Abdou Diof conceded to him in 2000AD after Wade, like Muhammadu Buhari, contested and lost three presidential elections before he won on his fourth try.

Nor was that the first African change of guard through elections. In 1991 Zambia’s redoubtable President Kenneth Kaunda, who had ruled his country since 1964, conceded the election to former trade union leader Frederick Chiluba. Three years later President Hastings Kamuzu Banda of Malawi was defeated in an election and he shocked all Africans by moving out of the State House. Let me rephrase that: he was moved out of the State House. Observers at the time said Banda, who was 96, did not even know that an election had taken place or that he lost it. He had no wife but he had an Official Hostess, Cecilia Kadzamira, who did the packing after 30 years’ stay in power.

Banda wasn’t the first African ruler to leave power without knowing it. In 1987 when Zin Abdine Ibn Ali toppled Tunisia’s equally redoubtable President Habib Bourguiba, the 84 year old Bourguiba did not even know it. He had been in power for 31 years and he used to sleep for 15 hours a day. Even Nigeria’s celebrated concession case only borrowed a leaf from our neighbour, Benin’s Mathieu Kerekou. In the wake of the wind of change that swept Francophone Africa in 1991, Kerekou lost an election and conceded to Nicephore Soglo. Kerekou bounced back through an election five years later, allegedly with financial help from General Sani Abacha.

Many Nigerian youngsters were rubbing their eyes in disbelief when they read that Jammeh has ruled Gambia for 22 years. To my generation, that is but a short stay. When Lt. Yahaya Jammeh seized power in 1994, a Nigerian military contingent led by Lt Col Lawan Gwadabe was based in Gambia. Some people accused it of aiding Jammeh to remove President Dauda Jawara, which was uncharitable because Jawara was an old friend of Nigeria’s First Republic leaders. I was listening to a BBC radio phone-in program in 1996 when ECOWAS was demanding the return to power of Sierra Leone’s toppled President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah. One anti-Kabbah listener phoned to ask why ECOWAS was not demanding the return of Jawara. Kabbah’s Ambassador to the UN, who was on the program, said, “You see, Jawara was in power for 33 years. It is difficult for anyone to ask for his return.”

Without being defeated in elections, there were some African leaders who left power peacefully, though they were few. The best example was Nelson Mandela, who pledged when he was elected as South Africa’s first post-Apartheid president in 1994 to serve only one term. The saintly man did not contest again in 1999. Mandela’s world acclaimed example tended to overshadow one from an earlier era. In 1983 Mwalimu Julius Nyerere served his ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi party with a two year notice that he will retire from the Tanzanian presidency in 1985. The entire CCM Central Committee led by his deputy Ali Hassan Mwinyi went to Mwalimu’s house and pleaded with him not to retire. Nyerere drove them away and ordered them to nominate a successor. They then chose Ali Hassan Mwinyi. Tanzania is still reaping stability from that saintly example.

In our neighbour Cameroon, there was also a semi-voluntary retirement, though things quickly went sour. In 1982 President Ahmadou Ahidjo, who had ruled for 22 years, stepped down on health grounds. He handed over to his prime minister Paul Biya who promptly turned around, passed a death sentence on Ahidjo and has been ruling Cameroon ever since. Biya’s 34 years in power could be Africa’s longest after Muammar Gaddafi’s 42 years. The sorry Ahidjo-Biya case reversed an early positive trend in African politics and made other African rulers wary of handing over, even to their trusted confidants.

The norm in Africa since independence is for a ruler to go on ruling until he meets a sticky end. The luckiest were those that fled into exile. In 1979 Uganda’s Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada fled to Libya and later Saudi Arabia just ahead of a rebel army. Uganda’s President Milton Obote fled twice, in 1972 and in 1985, ahead of coupists. Sudan’s President Gafar El-Numeiry fled to Egypt in 1985 when General Swar al Dahab’s men struck. Ethiopia’s Mengistu Haile Mariam fled to Zimbabwe when rebels swept down on Addis Ababa in 1991. Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko fled to Morocco [Sssh! The Moroccan King is here!] and later to the French Riviera in 1997 when rebels marched into Kinshasa. Of three of our Chadian neighbours, General Felix Malloum fled to Lagos in 1978; Goukouni Weddeye ran to Libya in 1981 while Hissene Habre fled to Senegal in 1991.

Other African rulers were not so lucky. Many were captured by rebels, tortured and imprisoned. One was Nigeria’s dear friend President Diori Hammani of Niger Republic, who was imprisoned by Lt Col Seyni Kountche from 1974 almost until his death in 1989. Another was David Dacko of Central African Republic, who was deposed twice in 1966 and 1981. In Egypt, former President Hosni Mubarak and the man who briefly succeeded him, Mohammed Morsi, are both in jail right now.

Exile and imprisonment may sound sticky but things could get even worse. Many African rulers were killed in the process of overthrow, among them Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa in January 1966, Major General J.T.U. Aguiyi-Ironsi in July 1966 and General Murtala Mohammed in February 1976. Also killed in coups or soon after were Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of Congo in 1961; President Sylvanus Olympio of Togo in 1963; President Ngarta Tombalbaye of Chad in 1975; Congo Republic’s Marien Ngouabi in 1977; Comoro’s President Ali Soilih in 1978 and Niger Republic’s President Mainasara Ba’are in 1999. This is just a sample.

Three bloody overthrows stand out in recent African history. Even though Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Sellassie was captured and detained when the Dergue toppled him in 1974, sixty of his ministers and Army Generals were executed on the night of the coup. Another one was in Ghana in 1979 when Flight Lt Jerry Rawlings had three former rulers, General Akwasi Afrifa, General Ignatius Kutu Acheampong and General Fred Akuffo tied to stakes on Accra beach and executed. The third ignoble case was in Monrovia, Liberia in 1980. After soldiers led by Master Sergeant Samuel Doe killed President William Tolbert, they lined up his ministers on the beach and shot them. Doe’s own execution by Yormie Johnson in 1990 was no less brutal.

Congratulations, Malam Yahya Jammeh. Hillary Clinton said recently that conceding an election is “painful.” Compared to exile, jail or execution however, it is very sweet.

 

Flora Nwapa: Why Celebrate Efuru At 50?

Posted on by The Elites

img_3557The German playwright, Bertolt Brecht, notably declared: “Unhappy the land in need of heroes.” And too much emphasis cannot be laid on the role of heroes in shaping the destiny of nations. Like Aeneas, whom Virgil credits with founding the Roman nation, The Aeneid and Christopher Columbus credited with the discovery of America, and José Marti regarded as a founding father of the Cuban nation, and Kemal Ataturk recognised as the father of modern Turkey, heroes, in history and legend, have been known to play critical roles in establishing, shaping and reshaping nations, and infusing their peoples with pride as the offspring or descendants of remarkable ancestors or living men – and women. And any land without them should truly feel improvised, as Brecht suggests.

Heroes, incidentally, are not only those who impact nations and history in the political sphere and as founders of nations. Their impact can be felt in virtually all facets of life, generally as courageous pacesetters who produce ground-breaking work or lead in the radical modification or improvement of already existing work.

Copernicus’s risky declaration that the earth was round, against the position of the inquisitorial church that it was flat, was an act of heroism, demonstrating the courage of the liberal, scientific mind. It was also heroic that Chinua Achebe, then a man in his twenties, dared to write Things Fall Apart, a novel which essentially challenges the ill-motivated characterisation of Africa by European writers as a dark and chaotic continent, and which, to both quote and paraphrase, Achebe in Home and Exile, seeks to champion the establishment of “a balance of stories between Africa and the West.”

The authors of the Nigerian national anthem obviously had the importance of celebrating heroes and preserving their legacy in mind when they wrote: “The labours of our heroes past shall never be in vain.” However, the facts of today, emerging especially from the political sphere, would make some of us wonder if that lofty declaration was not mere wishful thinking.

That said, the literary labours of our heroes past and present still offer hope for perpetual fruitfulness, proving sometimes to be a quarry for inspiration when deservingly celebrated like Efuru in this fiftieth year of its publication.

Incidentally, it is reductionist to confine Efuru to the description of a feminist novel. Undoubtedly, there are strands of feminism in its thematic fabric, woven quite recognisably into the character of its heroine – a self-possessed, independent-minded, yet marriage- and family-oriented woman who finds meaning in complementing her husband. Yet, the liberalism that forms the foundation of her marriage and actuates her actions is a human value and not a feminist value. The feminism in the novel is subsumed in this liberalism, its leitmotif, for which it recommends itself not just as a feminist work and transcends the gender barrier.

Feminism, if we think critically of it, is a franchise of humanism devoted to the empowerment of women for the improvement of the human race. Efuru is a self-driven symbol of this empowerment, who first seeks to free herself from such restrictions as social and cultural expectations that make the payment of bride price a condition for marriage.

A beautiful woman, she steps beyond the confines of such expectations to marry a man below her family status in a transaction dictated by affection, in which the non-payment of her pride price does not matter to her; and she respects and supports her husband with a sacrificial love.

Efuru is a metaphor of the strong lioness. As the narrative voice remarks in the novel: “Adizua” (her husband) “was not good at trading. It was Efuru who was the brain behind the business.” Though the sustenance of the pride depends more on her exertions, compared to the lion – with her having to bring in the most kill – yet she willingly submits herself to him and does not engage in a struggle for equality, let alone dominance, with him in the name of “feminism”. She is proof that one can be feminist and yet humble in a way that does not undermine one’s dignity or offend good sense.

Whereas her contributions to the family could have triggered pride and recalcitrance in some women, she makes herself a model of conjugal cooperation through her sacrificial support of her husband.

“What bothers me now is a maid. I want a maid to help me look after Ogonim while I trade with my husband… I want to help my husband. We have been losing much money,” she reveals to a confidant, underscoring her understanding of the need to balance two necessities: care for her child with Adizua and the growth of the family fortune through her contributions. Though her sacrifice can be said not to have paid the expected dividend, given that Adizua turns out to behave badly towards her, it does not detract from the fact that she has various positive character traits that are worthy of our independent reckoning.

In celebrating Efuru at 50 we identify with such positive values it obliquely canvasses: independence, liberality, love, the cultivation of family, etc. We also hold them up as behavioural beacons to our younger generation in the dark, in desperate need of a reliable compass of positive values in a nation rather adrift in tempestuous waters.

The celebration is, therefore, a mission of remembrance and inspiration – remembrance of the remarkable labour of one of our female heroes past as a springboard of inspiration for the living, especially the young. And I feel immensely privileged to have been inducted as a member of the National Organising Committee of the historic event by its chairman, Dr. Wale Okediran, and Mr. Uzoma Nwakuche, Flora Nwapa’s son, whose train will traverse five major Nigerian cities – Lagos, Maiduguri, Abuja, Enugu and Owerri, drawing a glittering coach filled with literary events.

Also, Nwapa’s publication of Efuru in 1966 as the first novel by a female black African writer has historical significance, a notable venture in pacesetting.

We hope this fact is also a cause for celebration besides the fact of the novel having become critically acclaimed and influential, will inspire others, especially the younger generation, to set the ploughs of their creativity to new fields, breaking new grounds like Nwapa, producing work that would equally be deserving of celebration by theirs or future generations.

Oke, a public analyst, can be reached at: ikeogu.oke@gmail.com

 

On Fidel and Fidelity To History (The Death of A World-historic Leader), By Tatalo Alamu

Posted on by The Elites

He had grown so old that for a moment you thought he had also triumphed against the grim reaper. It was no longer possible to speak about him in ordinary human terms. Even in death, something simply does not add up. A man who defied death so many times and dared the powerful living was not supposed to die peacefully at home. He ought to expire in the field of battle. Last week, Fidel kept faith with death just as he kept fidelity with history and heroic action. His life had become a brilliant film. He was a box office attraction, the major star in his own epic.
With the death of the modern day Spartacus in Havana last week end, the world has lost one of its most iconic figures. In a sense, the passing of the great Cuban leader signals the end of an era of revolutionary titans, men of exceptional courage and unrivalled heroism who seized history by the scruff of the neck and by so doing altered the course of history and the story of their society.
Fidel Castro was without any doubt one of these giants of history and they include world-historic personages such as Vladimir Lenin, the father of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky, his fabled lieutenant, Joseph Stalin their nemesis, Mao Tse Tung, the architect of the Chinese Revolution, Chou En Lai, the warrior-diplomat, Marshal JosefTito of the defunct Yugoslavia, Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam and ErnestoChe Guevara of Argentina. It is impossible to write the story of what has been called the short twentieth century without mentioning their superhuman stirring at the behest of their respective societies.
Like all true revolutionaries, Fidel Castro operated at the summit of human consciousness, the rarefied zone where ideological clarity combines with intellectual rigour to dispel the fog of illusion, superstition, supernatural idiocies and human complicity in their own wretched existence. Revolutions have no historical timeframe. There will always be revolutions whenever and wherever the conditions are ripe for revolutions. To the extent that revolting injustice remains part of the human condition, people will always revolt against injustice.
This open defiance of an unjust order, the collective rebellion against official brutality, has always been part of the human condition. But since no two revolutions are ever alike, every revolution is a unique leap of radical faith. Revolutions are not a drab repeat of the past or its mere encore. They can only borrow tropes from past events. They must find own unique strengths and internal energies in the powerful furies that drive their resentments as well as in the vitality and charisma of their leadership.
It is this superlative heroism and boundless vitality that link Fidel Castro to all the great figures of popular revolt against inhuman authority, beginning with Spartacus, the Thracian born leader of the slave revolt in Rome, El Cid, a fabled hero of the Iberian revolt against the Berbers and of course Jesus Christ the spiritual father of them all who is arguably the greatest revolutionary of all times. In all these men, moral imagination leads to a penetrating insight into the plight of the poor while emotional intelligence at its most proactive leads to an identification with the needy in alltheir emotional distress and psychic disorientation.
Although born into considerable wealth and privilege as the son of a nouveau riche sugar plantation owner, Fidel Castro never wavered once he had identified the underprivileged as his soul mates and kindred spirits. Like a passionate lover he spent his time serenading them from the prison and from the presidential bunker. And while marching towards Havana from the hills and the forests, he kept faith and fidelity to their cause. For Fidel Castro, nothing else mattered but the Cuban people. This is leadership at its most sublime and inspiring. It does not matter that it came with a lust for power and freak control.
Before Castro, Cuba was a backyard luxury slum for American playboys and superrich to indulge in their fantasies. There was cheap rum, cheaper hand-rolled cigars and sex at its most volatile and cheapest. The Americans were determined to keep their toy and so was the local tyranny. The military campaign against the FulgencioBatista dictatorship was a ferocious slog with neither side taking hostage. Summary execution was the norm. The brutality and cruelty on both sides was to affect the colour and complexion of Cuba’s history.
Those who were cheering and weeping profusely in Cuba last week were the relics of the revolution and their descendants who feel eternally grateful to Castro for delivering them and their country from modern slavery. But on the other side, particularly among the hordes of Cuban refugees and immigrants, were those who felt undone by the revolution and who had nothing but harsh words for the leader. Donald Trump, the US president-elect, dismissed him as a brutal dictator.
Revolutions are a sharply polarizing and bitterly divisive affair. They are not, and cannot, be driven by normal consensus. While those who lost their old privileges are bound to rue and regret for eternity, those who have discovered new privileges are bound to be grateful forever. But the gold standard test of every step taken by government must remainwhether it is in the greatest interest of the greatest majority of the populace.
In one generation, Fidel Castro has wiped out illiteracy from Cuba. He has also extended free medical facilities to about ninety eight per cent of the Cuban populace. Nothing in the dismal and desultory history of Cuba and its unending parade of crackpot tyrants could have prepared the much-abused island for this revolutionary leap into modernity and within so short a timeline. The transformation was so sudden and irruptive that it led to immense dislocation on the social and class ladder. From a rural and backward Third World country, Cuba has leapfrogged into First World reckoning at least in service delivery to the citizens.
In another stupendous feat of social engineering, Fidel Castro virtually eliminated corruption from Cuba’s social life by force of example and a zero personal tolerance for the cankerworm. In 1989, many thought that Fidel Castro would wilt under the strain and stress when his childhood friend, revolutionary crony and hero of Angolan wars in Africa, General ArnaldoOchoa Sanchez, was docked for racketeering, drug-cartelling and corrupt self-enrichment. But once the much decorated warlord was found guilty, Castro swiftly assented to his summary execution.
Perhaps Cuba’s greatest achievement under Castro was its unswerving and unwavering commitment to the international brotherhood of humanity in the finest socialist tradition. At a point when the greatest beneficiaries of globalization are shrinking from its ultimate logic, this is a point worth mulling over. Wherever there was injustice or an infringement of socialist ideals anywhere in the world, you could be sure to find Cuban troops in the thick of the fighting and in the hottest sector of the engagement. In Congo, in Angola, in Grenada, in the forests and mountainous ranges of Latin America, Cuba troops fought with uncommon bravery and valour and a desperate heroism stemming from the noblest of human ideals.
It all seems like yesterday but it is almost sixty years when Castro and his ragtag band of starry-eyed idealists descended on Havana in a classic military decapitation of the rump of a corrupt and dissolute order, Batista having fled with 300milion dollars pilfered from the country’s coffers. Castro’s greatest legacy to social engineering is that the revolution has held despite the gravest odds which include countless assassination attempts, actual invasion, threats of nuclear annihilation and economic blockade by the US. The more they threw at the cigar-chomping maverick, the more he seemed capable of absorbing.
On the obverse side of this tale of stirring heroism are reports of vicious suppression of individual rights, state terrorism at its most cynical and a stringent curtailment of free association and freedom of expression. Socialism has not brought great prosperity to Cuba. The brutal suppression of greed and the human lust for material prosperity leads to a drastic curtailment of the urge for innovation and the capacity for invention. With its smoke-belching ancient vehicles and colonial promenades, Havana is a city frozen in time.
Yet when these drawbacks are weighed against the socialist reengineering of the Cuban society in the last sixty years, the odds seem to favour the drastic intervention despite the loss in modernizing edge and political freedom. If the post-Castro phase were to witness a liberalization of politics and a gradual loosening of state grip on economic matters, the irony of it all may well be that the socialist phase might have made it easier for Cuba to force its way into the capitalist orbit of human development at a higher level and on its own terms.
In the final analysis, the point is not whether a society should have a revolution or not; or whether revolutions are desirable. History is not a schoolboy’s debate. In any human society where the possibility of redemption appears remote and where injustice has become a permanent way of life, revolution will always remain on the card as the last gesture of heroic desperation. In that respect, Fidel Castro was not a villain but a hero responding to the historic yearning of a society in need of salvation. He will be sorely missed as the founding father of modern Cuba. Adieu Fidel.

 

Sir Olaniwun Ajayi and Afenifere

Posted on by The Elites

By Opeyemi Agbaje

I use “Afenifere ” in this tribute in multiple meanings. In its literal meaning, “Afenifere” may mean those who wish good things (blessings, good fortune, goodness or more broadly prosperity) on others as they wish themselves. In this sense, Afenifere virtually approximates to the Biblical injunction of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ to do unto others as you would have them do to you (Matthew 7: 12). The opposites of “Afenifere” are “Kenimani” (those who may have prospered, but want no one else to experience prosperity!)

“Afenifere” also refers to a specific political movement rooted in Western Nigeria, founded by the great Chief Obafemi Awolowo in his lifetime which took formal manifestation as Action Group (AG) and Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) in the first and second republics respectively, and the Yoruba socio-political organisation named “Afenifere” which sought to sustain the heritage of Awolowo’s politics and ideology in Nigeria, and especially within Awolowo’s Western Nigeria base. There may also be a sense in which “Afenifere” refers to all true-born Yoruba persons in line with the traditions of community and honour, in which all proper sons of Oduduwa are “Omoluabi” who uphold the values and interests of their shared community. What however is clear is that whichever context or meaning we speak of, the great Yoruba and Nigerian Icon, Chief (Sir) Olaniwun Ajayi was troubled about the fate and direction of Afenifere as he departed this world.

There are multiple accounts and evidences of just departed Baba Olaniwun’s concerns, especially as his exit from the worldly stage became imminent-the refrain that I have heard most commonly is “what will I tell Chief Awolowo?” Papa Awolowo, of course rests in the great beyond since his passage in 1986 exactly thirty years, before his loyal and committed disciple. Chief Ajayi’s concerns were well-founded – Afenifere, the organisation is hobbled and divided, reduced to a rump of elders in their 70s and 80s, with a few itinerant younger men; Afenifere the ethnic group is seemingly rudderless and in disarray, disunited and receding even in terms of quality education, governance, prosperity and development, in which it led to the rest of Nigeria and Africa six decades ago; and “Afenifere” the value system is eroded-Yorubaland fast losing its values of integrity, dignity, honour, community and diligence and being progressively (actually retrogressively!!!) replaced by “Nigerian” values-corruption, prebendal politics, dysfunctional education and an “alright Sir!” ethos!!! The biggest good that can and will come from Baba Olaniwun Ajayi’s passage is a new “Afenifere” awakening and the re-invigoration and renewal of our cherished values.

I’ve read three books written by Sir Olaniwun Ajayi-“Isara Afotamodi: My Jerusalem”, “This House of Oduduwa Must Not Fall” and “Nigeria: Political Power Imbalance-The Bane and Chain Down of Nigeria’s Progress and Development”. Together they give the reader a vivid sense of his passion and commitment to his beloved Isara in Remo, Ogun State; his family, the Methodist Church, Yoruba land, Afenifere and Nigeria.

Baba Olaniwun Ajayi in “Isara Afotamodi” describes his home town as a “a town fenced and fortified by rocks ; a fortress impenetrable to enemies by invasion” and speaks of the pride of Isara indigenes and descendants in the cognomen “Afotamodi”. He compares Isara to Jerusalem (“just as mountains surround Jerusalem, all entry points into my town are hilly, and the points of ascendance are either rivers or streams”) and declares, “I am eternally grateful to my Maker that it is from this town that I take root”. Throughout the book his Christian and specifically Methodist education and heritage shines forth despite its location within a previously idolatrous context.

In “This House of Oduduwa Must Not Fall”, Sir Ajayi’s pre-occupation as the title suggests was with the “travails of the Yoruba in Nigerian politics” from British colonial administration, through the first republic (when the Mid-West was excised from Western Nigeria, a state of emergency declared, the AG split with external support and Chief Awolowo jailed for treason), through to the annulment of the June 12, 1993 election of MKO Abiola to contemporary times. In chapter 6 “The political chaos in Yorubaland and the unlearned lessons” Chief Ajayi reflected on the AG crisis and the mis-steps of Chief S.L Akintola and spoke of contemporary developments: “In the recent past, young ones in Afenifere and the Alliance for Democracy took it upon themselves to insult, abuse, denigrate and degrade the elders.” Yet in the last days of his life, Baba reached out to and visited those who had offended him and his colleagues in a last, valiant effort to unite his people before he left.

Sir Olaniwun Ajayi’s concern with the unresolved “national question” was also in focus in the same book as well as in his last publication, “Nigeria: Political Power Imbalance-The Bane and Chain Down of Nigeria’s Progress and Development”. Whatever imbalances he wrote about when the book was published just last year in 2015, things have gotten much worse perhaps prompting the urgency and near despair with which he urged his younger compatriots to act. In a fourth book, his memoirs, “Lest We Forget”, Baba tells his entire life story-his birth in Isara to Benjamin Awoyemi Ajayi and Marian Efundolamu Ajayi; his love and marriage to his beloved late Adunola who Ajayi describes as “saint…rock-ribbed partner…affectionate friend”; his Wesleyan education and Methodist heritage; his career as a teacher, qualification as a corporate lawyer and then legal practice; the stormy days in the politics of the West and Nigeria; and the NADECO days under Abacha.

Chief Olaniwun Ajayi was born on Wednesday April 8, 1925 in his father’s “parlour” in a small, thatch roof, wood house at Gbasemo Compound, Itun Abe, Isara, Remo. He died a giant, in far more auspicious circumstances, on November 4 2016. He was a great leader of Isara, a proud son of Remo, a committed Methodist and Christian, an eternal Afenifere and staunch son of Oduduwa, and a distinguished Nigerian. He was a very successful lawyer and founded the leading law firm of Olaniwun Ajayi LLP. As a tribute to Baba Olaniwun Ajayi, Afenifere will rise again.

Fidel Castro: Man, Model, and Legend, By Olatunji Dare

Posted on by The Elites

On October 1983, President Ronald Reagan launched a U.S. military invasion of the small Caribbean island of Grenada, with token forces from some client states in the region.

The immediate provocation, it seemed, was a military coup that installed a Marxist as prime minister. There was also this lingering provocation: the ongoing construction of a large airport on the island to boost tourism, the mainstay of the country’s economy.

The Reagan administration claimed the airport was designed to serve as a Communist beachhead into the region and to the Americas. It did not matter that the airport was designed by Canadians, and funded in part by Libya, Algeria, and the UK.

The presence of dozens of Cuban construction crews on the project site was conclusive evidence, Reagan said, of a Soviet- Cuban military build-up that the United States could not countenance. The island’s Marxist government, Reagan further claimed, posed a threat to an estimated 1,ooo Americans on the island, most of them students at a medical school.

It was of no consequences that no such threat was ever established.

The invasion ran its desultory course within a week, leaving some 64 Cuban construction workers stranded. The Reagan administration dangled before them every blandishment if only they would denounce Cuban President Fidel Castro and defect to the United States.

Their families and dependents would be spirited out of Cuba to join them in the United States in a life of comfort beyond their wildest imagining. All they needed to do was to denounce Castro and defect. Uncle Sam would take care of the rest.

Not one among the 64 fell for the offer.

This incident contrasted sharply with images of all sorts and conditions of men, women and children fleeing from the horrors of life in Cuba in dinghies and all manner of contraptions and risking everything in quest of freedom and a better life 93 treacherous miles across from the Florida Straits – images that had become a staple of television news.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, perished in the quest. And yet the exodus continued.

Back in Granada, the Cuban construction workers, all 64 of them, had spurned an offer that hundreds of thousands of their compatriots would have accepted on the threshold. What was going on?

It may well be that accepting Reagan’s offer carried much greater risk than setting out from Cuba on the treacherous passage to Florida. Still, I found it intriguing that not one among the Cuban workers stranded in Grenada accepted it.

The occasion for these reminiscences is the death last Friday of Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz, architect and leader of the Cuban revolution, From the moment he entered Havana in January 1959 at the head of a column of his comrades-in-arms to finish off the corrupt dictator Fulgencio Battista and his regime, cheered on by thousands of admirers, until he transferred power to his brother Rául on account of his failing health in 2006, he dominated Cuba by the sheer force of his personality and by his symbolism.

His enjoyed a global stature that seemed improbable for the leader of a Third World nation with a population of just 11 million

That stature stemmed from many factors: His personal charisma, emblematised by his military bearing, his regulation combat fatigues, and the lush beard and sideburns that framed his strong, masculine visage.

Among my generation, Castro conferred revolutionary credentials of sorts on beards. Full disclosure: I myself kept one for more than a decade. I shaved it off on the eve of my nuptial in 1975. Everyone said I looked much better without it, and I could not muster the confidence to re-grow it, except for the six months in 1996 that I was homeless. But I digress.

Castro’s global stature also stemmed from surviving not a few attempts by the CIA to assassinate him, from taking personal charge to rout, at the Bay of Pigs, an army of Cuban exiles and volunteers trained and equipped by the United States, to overrun Cuba and oust him.

It derived from his defying and outliving nine American presidents and weathering the blockade they instituted or tightened against Cuba, with the aim of grounding its economy and thereby stirring up a mass revolt against the island’s communist government ,

It has to be said that it also derived from his simple lifestyle, devoid of ostentation and vainglory. He was never tainted by allegations of corruption.

In the face of the blockade and other hostile acts directed at Cuba chiefly by the United States, Cuba under Fidel Castro’s leadership, sought to build a new society to supplant the one that always had to reckon with the economic calculations of the United Fruit Company even as the country catered to the fancies and fantasies of American playboys.

Within one generation, Cuba wiped out illiteracy. Today, it has one of the highest literacy rates in the world. It built a health care infrastructure that makes up in efficiency and effectiveness what it lacks in sophistication. Education and health care, regarded as fundamental rights, are provided free.

While many countries grapple with an acute shortage of doctors, Cuba produces far more doctors than it needs, and sends the rest to needy countries. It is instructive that throughout his long illness, Castro never sought medical treatment abroad. Some doctors were brought in from Spain to examine him, and that was that.

He established a sports programme that produced and continues to produce world-class athletes.

But for the decisive intervention of the Cuban military, in Cutie Cuanavale, and in Cunene Province to the south, apartheid South Africa’s forces would have overrun Angola. Namibia’s march to independence would have been halted, and apartheid in all its debauchery would have lived on much longer.

A large segment of the Cuban population took great pride in the gains of the revolution. Was it these gains, then, and the pride that flowed from them that made the 64 Cuban military engineers trapped in Grenada spurn Reagan’s invitation to denounce Castro and defect to the United States, there to enjoy life on a scale Cuba could never provide? Were they in effect saying that there is much more to life than material comforts?

Let no one romanticise the Cuban revolution, however. It led to crippling deprivations. It upended, as all revolutions do, careers and projects and ambitions. It led to an abridgement of fundamental rights. It brought in its wake a massive flight of capital and talent. It created a fundamental leveling, above which there is scant opportunity to rise.

But it taught the world the meaning of self-reliance. Even in the midst of deprivations, even after subsidies vanished with the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was no mass starvation in Cuba, no begging in the streets, no prostitution, no epidemics.

Amidst the decrepit buildings and on the streets that make Havana look like a junkyard for American automobiles from the 1950s, life goes on at a rhythm that says to the over-curious visitor: If you are looking for the unhappiest place on earth, go elsewhere.

In death as in life, Castro remains a polarising figure. Millions of Cubans and across the world venerated him almost to the point of deification. Millions in Cuba and less so across the world loathed him to the point of execration.

I am reminded of the latter phenomenon by this headline from the 1970s, spread across the front page of one of the Miami newspapers:

Too, Too, Too, Too, Too, Too, Too Bad. Castro Narrowly Escapes Drowning.

But there is no denying that Castro was a singular personage, and that history will count him among the greatest figures of the 20th century.

 

Aregbesola’s 6th Year: To Make The Sun Shine On Our Land

Posted on by The Elites

By Semiu Okanlawon

“I have travelled the world and traversed the length and breath of Nigeria, first as a businessman and then as a politician. Endowed with that exposure, I have studied the state of our state and have seen the roots of our problem.
“I have seriously tried to identify the ills that have stood between us and our progress all these while. I have identified the dark shadows preventing the sun to shine fully on Osun State and these I will offer to you…”
In 2011, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, the Governor of Osun State, penned the lines above in a 133-paged book titled: “Rauf Aregbesola and the Future of Osun: Inspiring the Youths for a Better Tomorrow.”
On Sunday, November 27, 2016, it would be six years exactly into the two term administration and second years of his second term.
About the time he wrote those words some six years ago, it was at the beginning of, in reality, confronting the multi-dimensional, hydra-headed problems which could only have necessitated the need for a Messiah in Osun in the first place?
In education, this was the time he contemplated shutting down the entire school system for a total reconstruction because of the parlous state of the schools. This was the time the threatening population of the Osun youths who had nothing whatsoever to do stared him in the face and threatened the peace of the society. This was the time when, despite being completely an agrarian state, food security had yielded to hunger owing to no clear cut policy on agriculture. It was the time criminals assumed there was a haven for them in Osun. It was the time what Osun boasted as cities, even at the state capital, no more than rickety human settlements hallmarked by failing and falling walls and scattered roofings. It was a time that yearned urgently for urban renewal.
It was not only that Osun lacked the resources to bring it back to life. It was also a victim of lack of courage to embark on risky ventures out of which the fortune of the state could have been altered for good. A state with N300million monthly internally generated revenue would need some other ‘miracles’ to witness development. Nothing ventured, they say, nothing gained!
The six years of venturing have gained for the state, a phenomenal development template that clearly gives an insight into what the future holds, especially for the younger generation in Osun. Though the state recently marked its 25 years of creation, the totality of the growth witnessed in six years makes those of the first 19 years pale into total insignificance going by all indices.
Buoyed by an ideological bend which places people at the centre of every development initiative, the Aregbesola years have instituted a new governance culture never known in the history of the state but which has ignited a new passion for inclusion. There is a huge sense of participation by the people, seeing that there is something in everything for everyone. With a carefully woven six-point action plan serving as the guidelines for every policy, there is an astounding correlation which makes one dovetails into another in the growth agenda.
Aregbesola combines the ideologies of legends who had gone down in history as proponents who not only brought developments to their people but liberated them from manacles of mental and material poverties.
In order words, it is not only that this six-year old administration is building mega-schools to permanently change schools orientations; putting in place physical infrastructure to last for decades to come; creating a new generation of citizenry alive to their duties to the society, the administration comes across as one with a mission to free the minds of the people and set them on a path to personal fulfillment and realizations.
More than five decades ago, the late political icon, Chief Obafemi Awolowo wrote in his autobiography that “the duty we owe to the present generation of young people would have been amply discharged if we were able to provide for them school buildings which would last 50 years.” The massive educational infrastructure the Aregbesola administration is reputed for today in Osun reminds those who care to note of the ideals and the good of the people which the late sage preached. The Awolowo recipe for good governance appears in all the sectors that the administration touches.
With education reforms that include new learning environments, technology-driven teaching especially at the High School level, restructured curricula and re-orientated personnel, there is a renewed hope for emergence of a new generation of Osun citizens growing up equiped with the means to be relevant in any knowledge-driven society.
Since Aregbesola had written in his book earlier mentioned that “Osun is blessed with younger people with the power to astonish the world with greatness,” it then follows that his programs in all sectors are tailored towards motivating these younger people who have been endowed with the power to stun the world.
From restoring hopes to the despondent, to opening new windows, youths have found in the Aregbesola era a new vista of opportunities in technology, agri-business, volunteer services and functional education with which they can face the future. Gradually therefore, the Osun youth has come to the realization that rather than wait for the government, he only needs to tap the opportunities provided to be an active participant in the emerging egalitarian society.
In these past six years, the six-point action plan -banishing hunger, unemployment, poverty, functional education, healthy living, promotion of communal peace- have combined to achieve one thing which is George Washington’s “aggregate happiness of the society which is best promoted by the practice of a virtuous policy.” That, Washington had said, “ought to be the end of all governments.”

* Okanlawon, Director, Bureau of Communication & Strategy, Office of the Governor, writes in commemoration of the sixth anniversary of the Aregbesola administration.

P

Before Everything Falls Apart, By Dele Momodu

Posted on by The Elites

Fellow Nigerians, something big is about to happen in our dear beloved country. I wish I could foretell a pleasant development. I truly wish. But what I see is total confusion. I refuse to see mayhem out of faith and not by conviction. I’m praying, fasting and hoping that our benevolent God would avert yet another dangerous crisis hovering over our great country. Nigeria has suffered too much since attaining Independence in the year of our Lord 1960. We have tried all sorts of permutations and configurations but nothing has work to our collective benefit. Each time we thought we were close to Eldorado, something came from the blues to dash our hopes and put us all into absolute disarray.

I sometimes wonder who we have offended as a people and a country. Why are we so jinxed? A gracious God actually provided us with everything we needed to make our lives as comfortable as we wanted or desired. God did not just provide us with what was necessary for existence HE lavished upon us goodies that many nations crave for but have never seen. However, for some unbeknown reason we chose to be a country of excruciating pain and debilitating agony.
We have tried scholars, mediocres and even stark illiterates in government, none has taken us far. What exactly is the matter with us? This is a question begging for answer. The resolution may well be our salvation.

I have gone through this preamble for one major reason. Say what you will about former President Olusegun Matthew Okikiolakan Aremu Obasanjo, he is one man who knows Nigeria inside out. If you like, call him tempestuous, egocentric, cantankerous, or what have you, but you cannot remove the word patriotism from his qualifiers. He is a one-man riot squad. He is a true General who is not afraid of battles, never mind wars. When he talks, the world listens, no matter what he says, or how he says it.

The trick he used to acquire such respectability was simple. As our military Head of State, General Obasanjo voluntarily handed over power to a civilian government at a time it wasn’t fashionable to do such. If he wanted, he could have engaged in a merry-go-round transition programme but he was very smart by presenting the image of a lover of democracy to the world. Everyone, especially, the Western powers, applauded him for that singular action. He has reaped the reward many times over and indeed is still enjoying the accolade and plaudits that are a consequence of his rare feat.

Also, General Obasanjo earnestly attracted and surrounded himself with some of our greatest names in academia and started his regular summits in Ota farm where he promptly established a humongous poultry farm. This was how he began his own personal intellectualisation process as well. He was thus able to transfigure from a rambunctious dictator to a world statesman. In fact, he was close to becoming the United Nations Secretary General. He travelled the globe several times over. At a time, he was trailing only The Madiba, Nelson Mandela, in popularity. He became the voice of our continent and was invited to chair many international occasions and bodies.

Obasanjo seized every opportunity presented to him with both hands. He catapulted himself very skilfully to the pinnacle of leadership in his home country, Nigeria, and became almost indispensable in matters of governance. Obasanjo’s ability to speak up boldly and vociferously completed his transformation into the consciousness and conscience of our complex and complicated country. He criticised every government that came after him but met his nemesis in General Sani Abacha who brooked no rascality from any quarter. Before one could say Jack Robinson, Abacha had roped Obasanjo into some phantom plot to unseat him and pronto Obasanjo landed in an unfriendly archipelago of a prison where he languished forlornly before he was mysteriously freed several years later. His former deputy, General Shehu Musa Yar’Adua wasn’t that lucky. He died in prison under strange circumstances. No one ever expected such an ugly fate to befall these highly esteemed and gargantuan leaders but this is Nigeria, a country of all possibilities.

As fate would have it, Obasanjo’s excruciating stint in prison was compensated by the Nigerian Mafia after a short while following the demise of both General Sani Abacha and the man who had won the fairest election in Nigeria, Bashorun Moshood Kashimawo Abiola. It is interesting that Obasanjo inherited all the goodwill and sacrifices of Abiola, his kinsman, but yet never expressed gratitude or appreciation to his saviour and benefactor. That is a story for another time.

Obasanjo was unceremoniously freed from imprisonment and recalled from retirement to lead the People’s Democratic Party. By then, Obasanjo had become dressed in the robe of invincibility. In a jiffy, he won the election against a very cerebral economist, Chief Oluyemisi Falae and instantly became one of Africa’s most powerful leaders and secured another fist of being a former military dictator turned civilian autocrat.

For eight blistering years, whilst Obasanjo was at the helm of affairs of this country, he swiftly moved to stamp his authority not just on our nation but also on world affairs. He assembled a very formidable team. His economic blueprint was awesome. He was somehow able to pay off our debts, although the jury is still out on the practical effect of the debt forgiveness deal that went hand in glove with this. He embarked on aggressive infrastructure development. Everything was going well for his government. His vast knowledge of Nigeria and the world came in handy for him. He looked poised to truly create a new and greater Nigeria. But there was a snag.

Obasanjo and his Vice President, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, who incidentally turned 70 just yesterday (I congratulate and rejoice with him), engaged in a debilitating war of attrition that exposed their government to incredible perils as things fell apart. We all watched incredulously as things spiralled out of control. Obasanjo unleashed terror against known and imaginary enemies. His most effective weapon then was the war against corruption. A war that now seems to have come full circle! Two powerful agencies, EFCC and ICPC, helped to pursue the sinners and saints alike with the agility of a thoroughbred warhorse and the savageness of a wounded lion. No one dared challenge that government.

Time flew at the speed of light. Before long, it was obvious that a third term agenda was being laid and hatched from the innermost recesses of Aso Rock to the hallowed chambers of the National Assembly. Many legislators were being coaxed or coerced into assenting to a bill to change the Nigerian Constitution and set the stage for the possibility of a third or more terms in power for the President. Somehow, this ambitious plan was torpedoed and Obasanjo and his acolytes abandoned the ship of third term and started singing a new song.

It remains a mystery how Obasanjo arrived at his decision to force Alhaji Umaru Musa Yar’Adua and Dr Goodluck Ebele Jonathan on Nigeria as President and Vice President respectively. A party that paraded Governor Donald Duke, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iwealla, Governor Bukola Saraki, Mrs Oby Ezekwesili, Mallam Nasir El Rufai, Governor Rabiu Kwankwaso, Governor Rotimi Amaechi, Governor Olusegun Mimiko, Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, and many others threw up this less than sparkling combination. Though Yar’Adua appeared to be a good leader, his ill-health would soon prove fatal and he couldn’t do more than his weak strength could carry. The mantle of power fell on the laps of Dr Goodluck Jonathan, a University scholar who was expected to push his team hard in some key sectors. That dream also evaporated.

The ubiquitous godfather, General Obasanjo, would soon emerge from the grove he had retreated into and shred Jonathan, his cohorts and his party into smithereens. It is difficult to decipher what truly went awry between them but one thing led to another and the falcon could no longer hear the falconer. And that was the beginning of the end. Had Jonathan known, maybe he should have done everything under the sun to offer Obasanjo whatever pacifier was needed and necessary. Obasanjo soon assembled a group of strange bedfellows in his bid to get rid of Jonathan, by fire by force. The strangest face at his Hilltop mansion, in Abeokuta, was that of his former sworn enemy, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Somehow, they were able to brew the concoction that finally killed the ruling party and usher in another former enemy, General Muhammadu Buhari. Many of us provided the media platforms for this conspiracy forged in Hades out of our deep frustration with the manner Jonathan ran the affairs of our nation.

Anyway, Buhari took power and many things have happened. Nigeria has eventually and ostensibly entered an unprecedented recession. No one has a clue of how long it would take before we are out of the woods. The voodoo economists have been busy cooking up cocktails upon cocktails of economic experiments but none has resolved the intractable crisis.

I had predicted that the romance between Buhari and Obasanjo would soon evaporate and many of my friends doubted. I’m sure they did not know Obasanjo and his uncommon antecedents well. Put a gun to his throat, Obasanjo would still gasp like a stricken chicken but muster enough stamina to spit out and regurgitate whatever he had in mind to say.

Now the chicken has come home to roost and it seems the same man that invented the pencil can also quite easily manufacture the eraser. Obasanjo has started talking in sinister overtones. Tinubu has gone quiet and cleverly eased himself out of circulation. I don’t know who is deadlier, a voluble Obasanjo or a taciturn Tinubu.

I can see some of Buhari’s guys trying to take on both men. I read an article credited to Dr Kayode Fayemi on a certain platform and I prayed it was pure fabrication and not an interview he actually granted. It is gratifying to note that my friend has since come out to deny authorship of this Satanic Verses!

It is too early in the tenure of this government to begin the hocus-pocus of re-election. Nigeria is dangerously haemorrhaging to death on all fronts and what we need is urgent rescue not electoral rhetoric. All this in-fighting won’t do us any good. The political pugilists should please save Nigeria from this fiendish war of egos. No matter what happens, Buhari should cool temper and manage his benefactors. Even if the leper cannot squeeze out milk from a cow, he can spill out the ones already produced.

No one is above the law but Nigeria deserves some respite after a long period of higgledy-piggledy. All men and women of good conscience should beg our powerful forces to allow President Buhari and his Vice President, Prof Yemi Osinbajo SAN to run their full course of four years out of which two are almost gone.

As for me and my house, I’m willing to exercise some patience hoping that a miracle can still happen in the life of this government. If nothing tangible occurs by the end of next year, then let Nigerians start working on how to assemble a new team and strive to attract our best materials from every part of the world. It can be done and it should be done. I have seen examples of the giant strides being made by young African leaders in Rwanda, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Botswana, Tanzania and Senegal. Ours should not be too different, after all we remain the Giant of Africa!

The Gutter Is Proving To Be Too Clean Fani-Kayode and Jimoh Ibrahim

Posted on by The Elites

By Pius Adesanmi

That FFK can multi-task sha. Only last week, he was busy coronating a new hero for the Igbo. He said he met Nnamdi Kanu in prison and became convinced that Nnamdi Kanu was Nnamdi Azikiwe and Odumegwu Ojukwu combined. I looked at that statement with the corner of one eye and muttered to myself: “the Igbo have truly suffered o. So, it is now within the remit of a Yoruba drug addict to name heroes for them?”
I also grinned and thought it was poetic justice for some of my Igbo friends who ganged up with many Yoruba human derelicts to rubbish Wole Soyinka at the time. Poetic justice because if you pile gratuitously on the best that a neighbouring ethnic nationality has to offer humanity (Soyinka), the very worst that the same ethnic nationality has to offer humanity (FFK) may be the one sending his mouth on useless and unsolicited errands to anoint heroes for you.
Now, after having ordained who is greater than Zik and Ojukwu in Igboland, FFK is back in the gutter with Jimoh Ibrahim. That fight is messy, very messy. They are accusing each other of the things common to Nigerian politicians. They are telling us who is a pig, who dances and eats jollof rice when paid, who is sleeping with dead bodies, who is into sodomy, etc.
Warning to the impressionable millennials who fight for politicians and tear at each other for the sake of the oppressor. Should the calculus of 2019 require them to kiss and make up, these two agbayas will unite to eat jollof rice together, sleep ritualistically with dead bodies together, while you are on social media ruining your lives in support of one against the other…

Collective Suicide, By Pius Adesanmi.

Posted on by The Elites

In Guyana, they did it swiftly under the supervision of Reverend Jones.
In Nigeria, we are doing it slowly, painfully, and in installments by gradually surrendering our right to transcendental thought and imagination beyond personalities.
Never lose or surrender the ability to imagine your country beyond the immediate predilections and preferments of the political juggernauts of the moment.
Trump, Clinton, Romney, Sanders, are doing the calibrations, recalibrations, alignments, and realignments of the present. People are following and discussing these things as they should but if you are an investor in the spaces of American public intellection, you would have noticed that nobody has surrendered transcendental thought to the daily shenanigans of these politicians.
There is a much higher level of discourse in which people are imagining the march and future of America in the context of the great themes of the future – nationalism, national choices, globalization, American exceptionalism. Issues are being vigorously engaged beyond these dramatis personae of the moment. In fact, in the context of these conversations about the future and direction of America, personalities matter little, ideas, paths, and choices matter far more.
I’ve been very despondent about Nigeria lately. There’s been a colossal surrender of the public sphere to the peccadilloes of transient politicians and other political actors.
The right and responsibility to think and discourse Nigeria into big ideas, big issues and pathways to the future have completely been surrendered to daily droning about the need to wait for Buhari to make up his mind about 2019, the need to wait for Atiku to make up his mind about 2019 or visit the US.
The southwest has been particularly hard hit by this wilful submission of the self to the inertia of thought. It is has almost become taboo to engage in transcendental thought beyond personalities. How can you imagine the future when Tinubu has not made up his mind about this and that? When Buhari and Tinubu have not either parted ways permanently or made up quietly?
If Asiwaju has not decided, who are you to be dreaming about the future? Transcendental thought about issues and the future is thus surrendered completely or made inferior to the choices, preferments, and moves of one man. Whether he will consolidate his legacy or lose out is elevated to and equated with the survival of a race or a geopolitical region. This is as perplexing as it is unacceptable to me.
It used to be that Kwara was the model for this sort of self immolation. No Kwaran was allowed to think until Oloye had decided. And Oloye would keep them in suspense: “I am still praying to Allah to reveal who the next Governor will be to me” or “I am still praying to Allah to reveal Kwara’s next political options to me.”
And Kwarans would wait while the only public intellection that was allowed was daily speculation about what Oloye’s choices would ultimately be or monotonous punditry urging Oloye to make this or that choice. There usually was no space in Kwara to exercise the imagination in transcendent ways beyond the persona, choices, and preferments of Oloye.
Now, the southwest says she cannot think until Asiwaju decides.
Now, Nigeria says there is no room for thought until Buhari and Atiku decide.
There are social dynamics tied to our very existence as a people waiting and begging for transcendental thought and application. These are bigger, much bigger than personalities.
Suspending your ability to imagine the big picture until mortals like you have made personal decisions and choices is the equivalent of self-annulment.
Somebody from the southwest wrote yesterday to ask me why I have not commented on the Asiwaju issue. My response to him: apart from the fact that I do not care about Asiwaju and do not follow his politics, I’m at a level of reflection on the Nigerian project which privileges grander visions about nation and people above the minuscule shenanigans of political personalities.
I then gave him an assignment: personalities and eras will change, but certain issues will remain. They are bigger than personalities. They affect your life and can shape your future.
Identify one such issue.
Assert your right to think about it.
Tell yourself that you have a responsibility to imagine that issue into the future, your future.
Tell yourself that it is irresponsible to wait till Asiwaju, Buhari, Atiku, etc, have decided before you can dream and imagine…
Tell yourself.