In the laws of power, however, this is an unpardonable infraction. Outshine the master at your peril. Hope is fast replacing the hopelessness of the last two years. The Naira’s speedy tumble, deafening groans and hunger in the land are abating gradually. These find parallel in the biblical narrative of Elisha the Prophet who prophesied that in 24 hours, two measures of barley would be sold at the gate of a famine-struck Samaria for a shekel.
What is gaining currency are talks on the streets that Osinbajo’s manipulation of the levers of power is more results-oriented than his boss’. So, the Buhari group needed to pollute this poisonous narrative. First was an ostensibly sponsored piece detailing Osinbajo’s nepotism, his understanding of Nigeria only from the narrow prism of the Redeemed Church where he was pastor and his Yoruba constituency. The mistake of this narrative is that, if an Igbo’s name had been appended to it, it would have had stronger bite. With a northerner’s byline, a region whose Buhari’s understanding of political appointments begins with Daura and ends in the North, it was a missile that failed to fly.
Again, a press release from Garba Shehu stating that Buhari had given Osinbajo go-ahead to sign the 2017 budget sprung up like a malevolent viper. If it was programmed to feed the narrative that a Buhari whom no one had set eyes on in the last one month or so, was feeling fine in his UK convalescent home and could kick the leather of football across poles without a whimper, it fell flat on its face. It shows that the Buhari minders are naïve about the structure of government, at least on its face value. A president who transmits power to his vice ceases for that period to be president. He has no governmental powers ipso facto and is as ordinary as the maisuya hawking roast beef by the sidewalks. His signature lacks authority and bite. So in what capacity did Buhari give Osinbajo the go-ahead to sign the budget?
Osinbajo too has not helped matters by his pusillanimous disposition to power. Why have the ministers nominated not been sworn in? Why did he delay in appending his signature to the budget? Why would a man appointed as an eagle, in the words of Yoruba proverbial wisdom, effeminately shy away from deploying its talons to pick stray chickens for supper?
The Elisha model worked for Osinbajo until the irreverence and gruff of Daniel Kanu, leader of the self-styled Independent People of Biafra, (IPOB) and the subsequent garrulous ultimatum issued by fifteen groups of youths from the North, conspired to rubbish his presidency-by-diplomatic-shuttles. Transposing his long years of pastoral calling, with its modus operandi of “making peace with all men” to presidential rapprochement, after meeting with both Igbo and Northern elders during the week, Osinbajo swore never to stomach hate speeches. Hate has been the narrative since Tuesday, June 6, 2017 when the youths detonated an apparently remote-controlled bomb which blew up Nigeria’s delicate ethnic relations.
After decreeing unity to a factitious Nigeria like Elisha did, Pastor Osinbajo apparently retired to his Akinola Aguda closet to shout hallelujah. No, sir! Merely talking tough or reciting the sweet rhymes of Mark Anthony the orator to sway plural people who have different histories, cultures, religions, convictions and worldviews, with the hope of forcefully decreeing peace to turmoil, will end in a sure fiasco.
Osinbajo had earlier committed the grand crime of announcing – to the chagrin of patriots – that the restructuring of Nigeria was no longer necessary. Chief the Honourable Minister Lai Mohammed, who was at the forefront of calls for same during the Goodluck Jonathan administration, also recently said that restructuring Nigeria was no longer part of the Buhari government’s agenda. Curious indeed is the way of government lackeys.
Granted, Nigeria stands to benefit immensely from its togetherness, but the moment a collective commodity becomes the inheritance of a group, then it is time to tear the national apron into individual bequeathals, so that everyone can go to their mothers’ hovels with their shared pieces. Only those benefiting from this iniquitous and incestuous togetherness can forcefully wish that the marriage should subsist without adequate discussion of our individual places in Nigeria. Rather than invite Leaders of Thoughts to the Villa for a lesson in togetherness, let Osinbajo do the needful: begin the process of restructuring Nigeria forthwith. Else, those hate speeches and separatist agitations just found an encore.
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How to kill Evans quickly
On Saturday, June 10, 2017, notorious kidnapper, 36-year old Chukwudi Dumeme Onuamadike, a.k.a Evans, was caught by men of the Nigeria Police Force. His terrifying tale of superstardom in the den of nefarious men has become one of the most viral of recent. The stupendous wealth he accumulated from kidnapping, his love for multi-million naira worth real estate, how he ferried his wife and five children to the safety of Canada (away from kidnappers!) and most instructively, how his terror survived for seven years, sound like fairy tales. And the police have celebrated this find like a scientist who just discovered a new planet.
Collectively, Evans should provoke shame in us all. Someone retold the story of how Evans kidnapped a man in 2006 and collected $1m ransom and how the man traced him to an Nnewi church where he had thrown a lavish thanksgiving service. According to him, he didn’t need any other alarm than the cordon of policemen woven round Evans in the church to know that he had kissed justice goodbye. So the Inspector General of Police should spare us this saturnalia he has been having on account of this find. Elsewhere, the Sheriff would resign at this open advertisement of his superintending over a band of crime accomplices for whom the jailhouse should be thrown open forthwith.
Our society is also complicit in the Evans triangle. Did Evans spring from Jupiter? Does he have family members? Which clergy has offered him spiritual shield in years? We have lost the interrogative essence for which our communities got their renown. How did the jobless man next door suddenly come about the latest automobile and their recently accumulated lifestyle of an Arabian oil Sheikh?
Ultimately, a government that makes life this grueling for its people cannot demand a moral code from them. Thousands graduate yearly from schools without job and Evans seems the only sensible route to screw body and soul together.
While there are still thousands Evans still walking the streets and many more being groomed by the system, the way to kill the Evans seeds we fertilize in our homes daily is to go back to the family. Once the family goes backwards to its pre-colonial and immediate post-colonial values, moving forward, Evans would die a natural death.
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Osun: When Obinde came to town
Those who claim that Nigerian politicians’ hearts are coated with generous laterites and raw steel got stronger empirical example in Osun State in the last couple of weeks. Whatever was his human failing, first civilian governor of the state and Senator, Isiaka Adeleke, who suddenly slumped and died in mysterious circumstances recently, as well as former Governor Olagunsoye Oyinlola, saved Governor Rauf Aregbesola from an impending electoral shame in 2012. Adeleke single-handedly delivered his senatorial zone in the contest. He was a major force which got the labour unions which had hitherto sworn to bring Aregbesola down, to support him. In that election, Osun showcased a rare model of three former governors queuing behind an incumbent.
At the last rally before the election in Osogbo, (which this writer attended) Oyinlola had waxed lyrical in an admixture of folk wisdom and deep anecdote endowments of the Yoruba people. He told the famous Obinde story. It is the story of a woman who lost her beloved husband and was also sadly the one used as collateral for loans taken to bury the dead. Obinde is the tale of injustice to the living and a fouling of the memory of the dead. As he danced and enjoyed the Oyinlola Obinde tale, little did Adeleke know that the injustice storyline therein would be an apt description of his posthumous stab by Aregbesola. Adeleke electrified the crowd at that rally from the rostrum with his larger-than-life political size. After the rally, even the blind knew that Iyiola Omisore, Aregbesola’s closest rival, had kissed the political canvass.
And now, this folk hero of the Ede people died midstream. Adeleke family’s hoopla over his sudden exit, this writer compares to the naivety about the suddenness of death. Same naivety had driven Dadakwada crooner, Odolaye Aremu, to his vinyl entitled Aye. He had sung of how the famous Ibadan transporter of pre and post-independence, Suara Sobo, had suddenly died, six days after he hosted a great feast where guests had “eaten the fattest of the entrails of rams and swallowed sumptuously roasted meat of turkey and pounded yam.” Odolaye had attributed Suara’s death to a remote-controlled murder.
Now Adeleke, Aregbesola’s political benefactor, is dead and his memory is made to suffer theObinde kind of injustice. Values of allegiance to mutual benefits which were taught us in ancient African philosophy (which Yoruba songstress, Waka Queen Salawa Abeni, reduced to Naira and Kobo by saying ‘I have benefitted from your money, I won’t be part of those abusing you’), to which we are told to return if we want our society to know peace and justice, dictate that the governor should not only show appreciation during the lifetime of Serubawon, but even at his death. Egba-born Ayinla Omowura, waxing strong in Yoruba cosmology, had said that he who shows love to us in our very before cannot be said to be an Omoluabi as the one who does same at our exit. Rather than Adeleke’s sibling, whom his constituents feel is their widow’s mite repayment for his political kindness, a quantity said to be a legislative square-peg while on his first journey in the federal parliament, is Aregbesola’s own way of punishing Adeleke’s Obinde. Supporting this popular call would have been a better way to convince the people that he didn’t have a hand in Adeleke’s death, more than the money-guzzling, apparently choreographed government inquest earlier undertaken. Curious indeed is the way of the Nigerian politician.
and then