Since he took over the reins of office in a very dramatic way that got the Amaechi group mourning their electoral loss to a hitherto underrated, perceived political minion, the exchanges have been steeped in bile. While Wike’s lines are celebratory like a generalissimo who conquered a huge kingdom, Amaechi’s are sulky attempts to put the governor down. Unfortunately for him, at each electoral contest thereafter, the gruff-voiced Wike had always trounced his ex-boss silly.
Of all their previous muscle-flexing, the latest is the most insensitive, albeit very suggestive of the quality of people who mount leadership positions in Nigeria. The other day in Kogi State, while Governor Yahaya Bello thundered that Dino Melaye lacked sufficient parental upbringing, the Ajekuniya exponent said Yahaya was lost in the mire of the low-quality drugs he allegedly consumes. To think that the same public office which the likes of Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Ahmadu Bello popularized with their panache and decorum is what charlatans today deface with infantile exchanges and low-quality statements, is the biggest blow that public office can get from its holders.
Wike had fired the first salvo. While Amaechi was governor, he alleged, councils in the state illicitly filtered N2 million to N3 million slush funds into the private account of Her Excellency Judith Amaechi. The minister had a riposte to this allegation. Momentarily borrowing the ferocious temperament of the Yoruba god of thunder, Amaechi had cautioned the “garrulous” governor who “speaks without facts” to mind his acidic spits or else, he would expose the wife of his ex-Chief of Staff whom he referred to as “accident of Goodluck Jonathan.” He had asked, “Do you believe that Wike is well? First, he doesn’t know how to speak English, he is poorly dressed, he is (a) thug and you bring me to focus to (sic) such a man?” My take is, why would Amaechi make an unwell man, a thug, poorly dressed person, who could barely speak English, his Chief of Staff? Or, are these infelicitous epithets recent? And, what does this say about Amaechi himself and the government he ran?
Granted that, as lawyers say, Wike is a tainted witness to the fact of what transpired in Amaechi’s government, this line is a pointer to a locus that very many Nigerians seldom look towards in their analyses of power. If an individual, like the wife of a governor, has such awesome hold on the levers of power, so sweeping that council chairs could filter monthly public money into her private purse, you would be mistaken not to factor such “office holder” into the overall equation of governance. Perhaps, our failure to reckon with “bottom power” – pardon the barroom lingo – has denied us a grasp of where our problem lies as a people.
The other day, it was the turn of Lagos. With his public presentation as a governor tirelessly hungry for development, you would have thought that Akinwumi Ambode was immune to the corrosively sweeping magic of bottom power. No. Her Almighty Excellency, piqued by the insolence and audacity of a gnat, the presiding Chaplain of the Chapel of Christ the Light, Alausa, who kept her waiting at a church service, had stormed out and subsequently got government to show the chaplain the gate of the vestry. Releases thereafter by the Governor’s Office stating that the periodic insubordination and thirst for attention by the man of God necessitated the Red Card given him failed to whittle the kernel of the fact that, in a Third World, bottom power is about the strongest of power equations.
Psycho-analyses of women generally say they desire to control their environments. But if the husband is weak and a “woman wrapper,” it worsens the take and gives the spouse an imperial power akin to that of mandarins. Right from Maryam Babangida, through Maryam Abacha, Stella Obasanjo, Turai Yar’Adua and Patience Jonathan, bottom power has had very strong hold on Aso Rock. Amaechi’s allusion to Jonathan is his wife, Patience’s singular effort of making Wike governor of her home state. Those who underrate bottom power get incinerated by its ferocious fire. In ancient mythologies and even biblical accounts of dynasties and empires, women held very powerful barometers which dictated the temperature of power. From Julius Caesar’s Calpurnia, King Ahazerus’ Queen Esther, to Herodias who asked her husband, Herod the Galilee Tetrarch of the Roman Empire, to behead John the Baptist, who had criticized him for divorcing his previous wife, Phasaelis, daughter of King Aretas of Nabataea and unlawfully marrying her, wife of his brother, Herod Philip 1, women are proven deadly users of power. The lesson of the exchanges between Nyesom Wike and Rotimi Amaechi is that, Nigeria should also look towards wives of powerful office holders for the causes of their vices in power. Worse misusages of power at the instance of wives of men in office than Wike recounted happen in Government Houses in Nigeria daily.
Kogi: Taming of the shrew
This is with huge respect to Shakespeare’s evergreen comedy, Taming of the Shrew, believed to have been written between 1590 and 1592. Kogi State and indeed Nigerians are being regaled of recent with the narrative of how gallant and public-spirited Governor Yahaya Bello has been spearheading the recall of Senator Dino Melaye from the national parliament.
The recall itself has divided Nigerians into two – optimists that this move may be the first of its kind in the history of taming the shrew of parliamentary rascality that is the in-thing in Nigeria, as well as pessimists who believe that at some point, the usual Nigerian factor will throw a hammer into the process. Kogi people and the tones of enemies accumulated by Melaye all over Nigeria, either through his infantile demonstration of auto avarice, leech-like cling to Bukola Saraki or his insensitive inability to put a rein on his tongue, have been flinging drums in the sky.
Let us all however tarry a while and remember this: there are worse scoundrels in the federal and state parliaments than Melaye who even daily feast inside the sewage. Second, owners of the so-called 52 per cent signatures against Melaye are not in this equation on their own volition but must have been induced by cash from the Lugard House. Ultimately, the fight is not about the people of Kogi whom Bello owes over a year salary, nor their pensioners who cannot remember the last time they received alerts on their phones from government house. It is an elite wrangling which they could sort out, apology to May Ellen Ezekiel, over cognac.
Religion in curriculum
Until a clarification came from the Nigerian government a few days back, Nigeria was on the verge of being set alight. Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) even took this national rumour to the hallowed office of the Nigerian acting president. CAN’s submission to the pastor it loaned to the Villa for a short while was to go ad hominien – his religion was being assailed by the holders of Nigeria’s fiefdom who always try to actualize Uthman Dan Fodio’s religious vow to conscript the rest of Nigeria under a particular religious umbrella.
An abnormality was playing out in the curriculum of schools today, CAN alleged. It is a plan to phase out Christian Religious Study or at best, make it an appendage to Islamic Religious Knowledge. This is always the ad hominien narrative always used by Christian and Moslem leaders since post-colonial Nigeria, in their drive to have hegemonic hold on the polity. The clarification from government put in abeyance the several plans of religious militants on the social media and on the streets who had vowed to resist this religious hegemony.
The truth, however, is that over the years, religion has shown itself incapable of positively structuring the minds of our children nor has it proven useful for the task of moulding upright Nigerians. At best, the study of religion in school has merely imbued children with historical anecdotes of the Roman republic, the Middle East, as well as the exploits of their valiant men and women.
A proper study of National Values, alleged to be the substitute for religion in the curriculum, as well as history, would have been the best for the children. Therein, they would learn the leadership exploits of the Awolowos, Azikiwes and Bellos. Those are more positively mind-structuring and their recency in time, very persuasive. If we add this to the acute need for every parent to teach their children the long-lost values of honour, valour, promise-keeping, valuing the humanity in the other person, etc, we would be creating a better Nigeria for the youths of tomorrow.
Maggots of LAUTECH
Like maggots which wriggle out of rots, those vermin swam out of the Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, (LAUTECH) Ogbomoso, recently. And the public was aghast. Once again, the maggots, in their public parade, confirm that all things bright and beautiful, our governments destroy them all. To have a university, established by military men, now brought to its knees as this under civilian rule, shows that governmental skills neither necessarily reside in governors’ flowing agbada nor in the epaulettes of colonels, but in the mind. Don’t forget that same military men had been thoroughly demonized as lacking an understanding of governance.
LAUTECH has suffered serious fits in its recent history. From the tiff between its two Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) parent governors, Alao Akala and Olagunsoye Oyinlola, who saw the school as prizes to be won in a do-or-die contest, to its two recent owner-governors who treat it as a governmental tissue paper fit only for the restroom, the school pines away from academic roll of honour. This same school consecutively received plaques as the best university of technology from the Nigerian University Commission (NUC) three consecutive times. Deprivation and degradation have since replaced the plaques.
The greatest tragedy of LAUTECH is that, if its owner-states care about its survival, the converse is communicated to the world. While Osun regularly throws its hands apart fitfully like one in surrender, claiming that it has no money, in response to the backlog of unpaid salaries that has kept the locks on the school’s entrance, same you-can-go-jump-inside-the-Asejire-River disposition is seen from Agodi Government House’s body language. Yet, children, our children, who sign to spend statutory four/five years in the school spend almost three times of those years, as a result of governmental neglect.
Stakeholders of the university recently embarked on a campaign to gather N1 billion to rescue the sinking university, which this writer thinks is a move in the right direction and a vote of no confidence on governmental handling of its matter. As usual, this move is being steeped in the mire of politics. While it may not be unlikely that former governor Rashidi Ladoja was playing deft politics with symbols as he and his Accord Party donated about N6 million to the drive to sustain LAUTECH, the lesson is for all hands to be on deck to rescue the sinking institution, putting politics aside. The question to ask those trying to play politics with the fate of the school is, if their children were part of the hapless LAUTECH lot that has stayed ramrod on a spot for years, or if their family members were part of the unpaid staff who have literally become beggars and nuisances on the streets, how would they feel?
Methinks until a clause is inserted into the rules of public office stating that anyone who climbs that stool must demonstrate fiduciary responsibility to it, which will ensure that a governor, for instance, must send his children to public schools under his watch, this governmental I-don’t-care will continue. Let us imagine that all public officers in Osun and Oyo states have their children in LAUTECH; would they allow it slide shamelessly like this?
and then