Osinbajo, Saraki, Magu and other sickening stories

If you have ever read Chigozie Obioma’s debut novel The Fishermen which, in an oral storytelling tradition, dramatizes the internal contradictions which suddenly come out of a family founded on hope and expectations of a great tomorrow and how these were consumed by the Aristotelian concept of tragedy, the ongoing grisly drama in Nigeria’s seat of power will flash to your mind. Mr. Agwu, breadwinner of a family of six children and wife, had dreamt greatness for his children, although with a tinge of hubris. A struggle against fate which ended in what Nigerian novelist, Helon Habila, called “an elegy to lost promise… a golden age squandered” however began.

It would seem as though Obioma and Habila actually had in mind the current destructive brawls and power struggle between power mongers in Abuja which is capable of bringing down remnants of hope of a better Nigeria. The way it is primed, even Karl Marx, who said that a clash of thesis and antithesis would lead to a synthesis, may be far front being right. The clash between a presidential stand-in, Osinbajo and a Bukola Saraki, whose aristocratic mien hides a rapacious crave for power, may yet unravel in a destruction of all that has the potential to be bright and beautiful.

The first thing to be noted is that Osinbajo and Saraki are surrogates and symbols of group interests at the highest echelon of power. You, me and everyone else are merely ancillary to their power calculus. While Osinbajo is a stand-in of a Bola Tinubu quest for a sizeable chunk of power at the centre for which he devoted energy and awesome cash in the 2015 elections, Saraki represents a mesh of the formidable power of the Northern oligarchy and a bid to erect stumbling blocks in Aso Rock so that some ambitious “Yoruba usurpers” do not hijack power at the centre. Policeman Ibrahim Magu who strolls into the equation is totally inconsequential in the power mongers’ estimation but merely a narrative to be used, an anvil with which the two symbols of power struggle to demonstrate the raw brunt of their bravado.

Osinbajo’s pastoral pedigree surely cannot stand the maniacal power wield that is at issue. Failing to wheel Muhammadu Buhari back from the UK as it did earlier when, to its chagrin, Osinbajo had suddenly captured the hearts of Nigerians through an electrifying demonstration that administering a country is not rocket science, the oligarchs and Saraki are fighting a battle of their lives.

Apart from the exhibition of raw brunt in the internal mechanics of day-to-day power relations, the Senate, it seems, is a major lever and theatre of power where the symbols of presidential power can be gruffly traded. As such, the theatrics we have been witnessing in the parliament. But, don’t the legislators know that Nigerians think lowly of them?

If there is an institution that courts the greatest bile, anger, disdain and disaffection of the Nigerian people, it is the legislature, federal or state. Armchair theorists have attributed the disrespect of the people for the parliament to the fact that in the 57 years of Nigeria’s existence, it was always the first casualty of “I, Major General…” No. Progressively, the Nigerian parliament has become our own Hammer House of Horror with the mindless way it appropriates and misappropriates illicit cash to itself, its apparent indolence and zombie tendencies.

Granted that the executive hasn’t fared better in governance character, the grandstanding of the federal legislature rankles in its assumption that the “people’s representative” mantra which framers of the constitution attributes to it is an apt mirror of what it represents and does. This is sickening and symptomises laziness of perception. It must have been this wrong perception of itself that necessitated the Senate to, peremptorily, last week, dismiss with a wave of its corruption-encrusted hand, the move by the Kogi West people to recall a son of its constantly disgracing it in the parliament. The senate knows that the moment the Melaye recall works, a rusty chain of perception of the unworkability of the power to sanction recidivists in the parliament would be permanently broken.

When people try to kill themselves over Magu, using corruption as a variable of analysis in the Senate’s rejection and Osinbajo’s insistence on him, such thought baffles me. Both power groups represent a very decadent and sewage-smelling system for which corruption is a constant. None of them really cares about the cop who is a mere footnote in the calculus of power. The police officer is just a token symbol of power struggle and a moniker for a survival-of-the-fittest battle between men who are merely fighting to gain enough power that will benefit their long clientele. In this bid for power, recruitment is easily done for an ease of their ascendance. Journalists, strategic office holders, senators, are hoisted up the equation once their functional usefulness is determined. Itse Sagay, Femi Falana and many others are part of the group troupes.

The acceptance or rejection of Magu is our own local muscle-flexing reminiscent of what is happening between America and North Korea. While Osinbajo test-runs the Magu missiles, the Senate unleashes its Alsatian dogs who bait blood on the floor of the Senate. The reportedly worsening health of President Buhari has been factored into the equation by the groups who are probably looking beyond the Katsina-born General for a situation of their power bases at a comfortable point.

Make no mistake about it: like Magu, the ethnicity of these power barons is just a very thin veneer of consideration, if ever. It is just hoped that this nihilist struggle for power will not be for Nigeria, in the words of Habila, “an elegy to lost promise, to a golden age squandered.”
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Fashola and Senate

The ongoing exchanges between the Minister of Works, Power and Housing, Mr. Babatunde Fashola and the Nigerian Senate have lingered for too long and embarrassingly too. Fashola had cried foul that the Senate deliberately spiked the works budget and that such would grossly affect the plan of his ministry to deliver infrastructure promises to the people. The Senate on its part resorted to very petty name-calling and infantile attempts to discredit the minister.

For a moment, let us refrain from mediating in the squabble and look at ancillary matters. In the area of intervening in public matters and discharging national/state assignments given, none of the motley crowd in the National Assembly has Fashola’s credentials. Apology to Police AIG Nuhu Alihu, Nigerians know that, added to the recent convergence of former governors who acquitted themselves properly in the dismantling of their states, the chambers is peopled by recidivists. If you ask Nigerians to recount what they find very arresting about the Senate, they will mention their humongous salaries, constituency projects (a metaphor for graft and illicit squandering of national wealth) and budget padding. Nigerians know that Fashola came into public office with a pedigree of service and development.

With that as a background, of the two camps, Fashola’s tale seems more believable to Nigerians. Even deploying logic, it sounds illogical and an affront on reason that senators will hanker after constituency projects far above the completion of the Kano-Maiduguri road which connects five states, the Lagos-Ibadan road which is at the heart of the South West and the Niger Bridge which is the soul of the South East.

Unfortunately for them, Fashola is too cerebral and meticulous for the redundancy that has been substantiated for quality polemics in the parliament. When characters like Dino Melaye and Danjuma Goje become signposts of Nigeria’s parliament, no one should wonder why the vultures hover in the Nigerian sky.
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Still on Badoo Boys

First, let me apologize for the wrong headlining of last week’s piece which appeared as The war of Yahoo Boys, instead of The war of Badoo Boys. The error is regretted. By now, it should be getting clearer to the Lagos State government, the police and indeed, the federal government itself, that the moment they let go of their responsibility to protect the people whom they swore to protect, they turn their people to those little boys in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, who suddenly found themselves marooned on an island and turned into maniacal creatures not different from beasts of the forests.

In the last one week or thereabout, lynching of innocent people, which is a feature of pre-historic human society and a symbol of acute under-development, has become rife in Ikorodu in the search for the notorious bloodthirsty cult called Badoo Boys. This cult has killed scores of people in the last two months of its dastardly attacks on people of the community. If government and the police were doing anything to forestall this state of anomie, the people of Ikorodu see it as ineffective. Now, they have resorted to self help and this is revealing our immature state of mind as a people to the world at large.

As I said earlier, the thing the Inspector general of Police, the Police Commissioner and even Governor Akinwunmi Ambode, should do is to relocate to Ikorodu. The federal government should also not take this brand of savagery with levity. This was how Mohammed Yusuff began Boko Haram in Borno, with the tacit support and lukewarm connivance of then Governor Ali Modu Sheriff; it was how Emmanuel Kanu began his acidic preachments that were allowed to fester, while Tompolo, General Mosquito also began this innocuously. If we don’t tame Badoo on time, we may spend scarce national resource in the future employing sledge hammer to kill a gnat that we can easily eliminate with a mere slap of the palm.
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Maitama Sule: Lest we forget

Elder statesman, Alhaji Maitama Sule, the Danmasanin Kano, died in Egypt during the week. He was buried in Kano amid Babel of eulogies. Sule was a gifted orator who had depth and verve. When the North is pilloried for always sending dregs to the fore of national discourses, Sule destroyed that perception. He represented the intelligence and dogged spirit of service that are absent in many of today’s politicians. He was a northern intelligentsia who theorized for his people the need to maintain their domination in the scheme of things.

In one of his exhibition of oratory and analytic prowess, the Danmasanin Kano had rankled the South when he propounded his natural attribution theory akin to that of Greek philosophers who used same to justify slavery. Homer, for example, said that even if a person wasn’t inferior at the time of becoming a slave, when enslaved, he changed in such a way as to make the person a natural slave. The great Greek philosopher, Aristotle, was also on the groove. To him, slavery was natural and human beings are born in two types – slaves and non-slaves and thus, the latter should rule and former be ruled as this is expedient from the hour of their birth. Greek philosopher, Plato also shared similar thought, stating that the ‘better’ should rule over the ‘inferior’.

Sule had gone the way of these objectionable theories when he submitted that the North was born to rule. Using Plato and his Greek philosopher ilk to justify northern domination, Sule had also said: “The Northerners are endowed by God with leadership qualities. The Yoruba man knows how to earn a living and has diplomatic qualities. The Igbo man is gifted in trade, commerce, and technological innovation. God so created us equally with purpose and different gifts.”

Since he made that statement, the South had attempted to puncture it. Unfortunately, many northerners who ruled Nigeria have demonstrated patent lack of ability and understanding of the skills of governance, whether they were civilian or military. Tafawa Balewa, Shehu Shagari, Sani Abacha and many more perforated this thesis by their lack of governance skills. It thus shows Maitama Sule’s analysis as self-centred and inept.

Regrettably, the Dan Mansanin theory is at the core of northern oligarchy’s scramble to colonise power at the centre today and their rejection of a proper practice of federalism. If the federal is made less fascinating and the component units are imbued with enough autonomy, let the Hausa man who, according to Sule, is born to rule, administer his enclave well and let Igbo and Yoruba do same. The Western Nigeria was doing so well in the First Republic that it, according to historian and lawyer, Hon. Femi Kehinde, had a Representative Office in London. Chief Obafemi Awolowo, on the 13th of May, 1957 opened the Western Region agent General Office and the Agent General’s residence was also located at 15, Kensington Gardens, which was later known as 15A, on Elite South, on Kensington, popularly called Millionaires Row. M.E.R Okorodudu was the Region’s Ambassador Extraordinaire & Plenipotentiary and was succeeded by Chief Toye Coker. That Western Nigerian government paid its workers higher wages than federal civil servants.

While we bury Maitama Sule, the Dan Masanin Kano, in furs and shroud of epithets, let us reserve scurrilous regards for such selfish theorists as we bury them. Why evil has metastases like cancer in Africa is that its doers believe that the evil they leave behind would be interred with them and no one will speak about their illicit paths on earth as Africans don’t speak ill of the dead.