Opinion

OPINION: A Service Chief For The Igbo

Published

2 years ago

June 26, 2023

By Lasisi Olagunju

There was a time in Nigeria’s media history when a certain Ebenezer Williams was arguably one of the country’s best newspaper columnists. But that popular name was a pseudonym, a fictitious identity. The masquerade donning that beautiful costume was Abiodun Aloba, colonial and post-colonial Nigeria media genius. He died in 2001. In the Daily Express of April 18, 1970, three months after the Nigerian civil war ended, and thirty-one years before the man died, he did a post-mortem of the Nigerian civil war and a character portrait of the Ibo (now called Igbo). Read him slowly, carefully: “They are too ebullient in victory, too sullen in defeat. They are too mechanical in a technology world …They are too bookish; they are too much of crowd, jumping just where the leader had jumped…”

Ebenezer Williams believed that if the Igbo had won the civil war, all, and that included their friends and foes, “would have all had it.” Three weeks after Ebenezer Williams wrote the above, the quote was deemed too instructive that it found its way into Tai Solarin’s Nigerian Tribune column of Monday, May 11, 1970. Solarin, whose piece carried the title, ‘I’ll speak for the Ibos’, declared that Ebenezer “was dead on” in his assessment of the Ibo and that thousands of non-Ibo Nigerians shared Ebenezer Williams’ belief of how the Ibo would have behaved if they had won the civil war. Solarin noted that when other non-Ibo Nigerians “do not have the courage of Ebenezer Williams to write it down, they sip their beer or palm wine over it as they rub their hands together prayerfully and in self-congratulation.”

Solarin was a friend of the Ibos; he wrote several articles on the Biafran war, its aftermath and the imperative of a proper re-integration of the Ibos if Nigeria would progress in peace. In February 1970, a month after the war officially ended, Solarin went to the then East Central State. He came back to his base in the West and wrote in his column in the Nigerian Tribune of March 2, 1970: “I saw a lot of things, but it seems I remember more the things I did not see. A single lizard, I did not see. A single rat, mouse, our bush rat, I did not see. I did not see a single snake. I did not see a single goat or sheep…” Where did they all go? A proverb should explain it: When what one eats is not available, one shifts to that which one does not eat. Solarin, however, saw many other things. He saw bicycles without tyres: “Half of the bicycles in the town of Owerri had no tyres on. When I saw a man pushing a heavily loaded bicycle that moved on the bare metal wheels, I was sure he would not go on top of it. I was wrong. He sprang on it as soon as the hill tapered off…” (see Nigerian Tribune, March 2, 1970, page 5). That was war. May we not see it again. But we should stop scratching our nose with the adder’s head. Those who think the Nigerian question must be answered with war should examine the ramifications of their project. History is there to guide every road taker.

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You would think that a people who went through all that experience of horror would learn. No. If the wise taunts you to a fight, respond with tact and wisdom and patience. If you don’t, he will send his fox to ensnare you. The Igbo believe that Nigeria regularly trims the stems of their Iroko. Why? Everyone suffered Buhari but the Igbo of Eastern Nigeria believe that it was not just Buhari but Nigeria itself that has not been fair to them. They call what they suffer from the rest of us marginalization. But I soon learnt that even among themselves, they discriminate; they marginalize. I had thought they were one until the news of the appointment of new service chiefs broke last week. Given what they suffered while Muhammadu Buhari was in power, the question on every sensible lip was whether an Igbo person made the list. The initial answer to that question was negative. From their names, it was not difficult to determine the ethnicity of the heads of the army, the air force, the police and the Chief of Defence Staff. The internet soon caught fire that there was no one from the South-East on the list. That was not good enough after eight years of Buhari’s exclusive government of northern Nigeria. But a certain Rear Admiral E.I. Ogalla was announced as the Chief of Naval Staff. Who is he? Where is he from? It turned out that he is Igbo, from Enugu State. His full name is Rear Admiral Emmanuel Ikechukwu Ogalla. But while Nigerians from other parts of the country rejoiced with the East, Igbos were loud on the social media; they said Ogalla is not an Igbo name. I told an Igbo man online to stop following the monkeys of that narrative to plunder the farm of reason. I told him that the man’s middle name is Ikechukwu. He politely told me to stay off the discussion. The appointee, he said, is from Enugu-Ezike, the northernmost part of Igboland, and therefore was not of the stock of his super race. I felt utterly disappointed. I called another Igbo friend who hails from that Enugu-Ezike but currently lives in Enugu town: “Jude, is it true you are not Igbo?” My friend answered in anger that I should not mind them. “We are more Igbo than them.” He told me he had been tackling the narrative and those pushing it “since the CNS appointment was announced.” A Tribune reporter from Ebonyi State told me that “even me, they say I am not Igbo enough. They call us Wawa.”

Chinua Achebe is the Igbo greatest of all time. His daughter, Nwando, did her doctoral work on the people of northern Igboland. She later published ‘The female king of colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe.’ That king was of Enugu-Ezike; she was not a man, she was a female but history speaks of her as king, not queen; Nwando Achebe describes her as a female man. Her recorded exploits enrich Igbo history and culture; scholars say materials written on Ahebi and her people have helped grow the field of Igbo studies. That is the community that produced the new naval chief whom the ethnic purists are rejecting. It is interesting.

When Bola Tinubu announced his security appointments, the first narrative was ‘he did not give us anything’, but when an Igbo was identified among the chosen, the tale became ‘the person he gave us is not one of us.’ No matter how good you are, you cannot satisfactorily sweep the home of the witch. The Igbo, in this instance, is that witch. Where I come from, dialectical differences do not put the knife in alájobí, our common Yoruba identity. Even circumstances of birth don’t. From the northernmost part of Yorubaland in Kogi State to the coasts of Lagos, there are variants of Yoruba language that I do not understand but that would not make the speakers of those dialects less Yoruba. What binds a family together should be enough armour against base divisive tendencies. We do what Toyin Falola described as “cooperation for integration” and I will add integration for strength and survival.

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When a man is more sinned against than sinning, let that man reexamine himself. First, the blame was colonialism. The Igbo man said he could no longer act like one because the white man has “put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart” (see Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, page 166). The same Achebe would, in later works, acknowledge what he described as his people’s “hubris, overweening pride and thoughtlessness which invite envy and hatred…” Yet, he would accuse other Nigerians of harbouring deep-seated hatred for his people and that they would “probably achieve consensus on no other matter than their common resentment of the Igbo,” because of Igbo’s “unquestioned advantage” over other Nigerians “in securing credentials for advancement in Nigerian colonial society.” Today, the Igbo accuse Nigeria of treating them as a peripheral group in national affairs but the greatest cause of their organ failure is the sepsis of the self-hate that defines their in-group interactions. Within their walls, they choose original and fake; the significant and the insignificant among the various clans. That is what we’ve just seen in the appointment of the new Chief of Naval Staff. They say the man’s Igbo is too close to the borders with the Igalla. It would appear that it didn’t start today. Indeed, 14 years ago, Achebe railed against it. As the guest lecturer at the 2009 edition of the annual Ahiajoku Lecture series, Achebe spoke forcefully against any form of division among his people. He spoke particularly against discrimination along the lines of tongue and dialect: “Igbo is Igbo,” Achebe cried out and added that “that is what unites the Igbo anywhere they are. We are not allowed to tell anybody who is speaking in a different dialect that they are not Igbo. Igbo people have spoken their languages for centuries and millennium without going to war. It is these languages, though the same meaning but different dialects, that keep the people together among the Igbo speaking people of Nigeria.” I do not think anyone listened to the giant from Ogidi. There was a disconnect between the hunter’s flute and the hunter’s dog.

It is true that there is no one who does not like soup with meat in it but a child of the house does not crave that soup at the expense of the family’s health. The senate presidency was zoned to the Igbo in 1999. That opportunity soon became a crabs-in-a-bucket struggle; a war of depletion. Occupiers of the post got changed in per-second soil like baby diapers. Fish must eat fish to get fat. That was the philosophy. The other parts of the country watched with interest and horror. A number of concepts come to mind here: Cultural anthropologists would say it is self-marginalization; social psychologists would say it is self-sabotage; they would also say it is self-denigration and self-destruction. You appreciate the appropriateness of these tags when you remember that for about two years now, the Igbo of Eastern Nigeria have been staying off work every Monday. You remember what the Wagner gunmen did in Russia at the weekend and the mayor of Moscow’s no-work-on-Monday declaration. Imagine that disruption as the permanent feature of a people’s life. That has been happening in Igbo land month after month and there is no end in sight. They call it sit-at-home; a ruinous daylight curfew imposed on them by their homegrown Wagner group. They are softly killing themselves while claiming that they are protesting the detention of their Mazi Nnamdi Kanu by the Nigerian state. I look at the situation and see that these people are addicted to being the victim of the self. Good people among them are helpless; even the governors and their governments are powerless in the face of the regional acquiescence to arrogant evil. The new governor of Enugu State, Peter Mba, recently took some steps to unlock their Mondays. The consequence was a reported fire attack on his petrol station last week.

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Fifty-three years after the civil war, the Igbo have remained what Ebenezer Williams said they were in 1970: “too ebullient in victory, too sullen in defeat.” Buhari ran a regime that saw and pronounced the Igbo an insignificant dot in a circle; a mere five percent. Then it set up and took off with a war cabinet. If we were not going to fight a war, why would the heads of the army, air force, police, SSS, NIA, Customs, Immigration, Prisons, etc and etc, and the NSA be chosen from the Commander-in-Chief’s backyard? That era has happily ended with the belligerent regime worsted. Tinubu’s appointment of security chiefs was fair enough. He is a Yoruba man. There is a Yoruba lineage with an oríkì that emphasizes equity and fairness in the sharing and distribution of communal goods and privileges: pín in re, làá a re; ìkan ò gbodò jù kan… (share it well; divide it equitably; one must not be bigger than the other).

There was a government in Nigeria between 2010 and 2015, the Igbo elite enjoyed it. While the axe of that regime unjustly did injustice to the Yoruba tree, the victim did not spend eternity remembering, sulking and whining. If I were the Igbo, I would see the very exit of the Buhari regime and its tendency as my victory over disease and death. I would doff my gab of “hubris, overweening pride and thoughtlessness.” I would celebrate my elevated sons and daughters in today’s fresh air. I would then draw a line, get properly united as a people and reappraise my engagement with the Nigerian state in a decisively strategic way.

News

OPINION: Lest China seize our President

Published

1 year ago

August 20, 2024

Editor

By Suyi Ayodele

“President Bola Tinubu will embark on a trip to France on Monday, August 19, departing from Abuja, the nation’s capital. The President will return to the country after his brief work stay in France.” I read this terse statement by Chief Ajuri Ngelale, Special Adviser to the President (Media & Publicity), early Monday morning, and my heart skipped. Some people are bold! Why France of all places this time around?

Has the presidency forgotten that it was in France that a Chinese company seized our presidential jets? Are those who planned the president’s trip not aware that also owe China itself a huge sum of money? Is this Efun (bewitchment), Èdì (spell) or Àsàsì (enchantment)? Are there no Yoruba among the president’s aides who planned the trip? Do they not know that the deity that seizes the home and the stream is also capable of taking over the farmland (Òòsà tó gba’lé, gba odò ó lè gba oko lówó Eni)? What if those in the Chinese Finance Ministry swallowed the wrong frog and decided to approach a French court to seek to attach the President and his entourage as collateral? How can we owe, and the number one citizen is travelling in the type of luxury his creditors cannot afford?

From time immemorial, the Yoruba traditional setting devised three methods of recovering debts from chronic debtors. These methods are employed only when the debtor becomes recalcitrant, arrogant and ostentatious. Nothing angers a Yoruba creditor more than to see his debtor eating gizzard. This is why the elders of the land warn: A kìí je iwe lójú olówó eni (You don’t eat gizzard in the presence of your creditor). The Gizzard is the most precious part of the chicken. It is reserved for the rich or the head of the family. In a case of ritual, where a chicken is used as the sacrificial object, the one on whose behalf the ritual is performed is the one that is permitted to eat the gizzard. Yet another saying confirms this assertion thus: Eni a bá torí è pa adìye níí je iwe (It is he on whose behalf the chicken is sacrificed that eats the gizzard). When a debtor is caught eating gizzard, the creditor goes for the kill and employs any of the three methods to recover his money depending on the amount of money involved, the period of the indebtedness and the antecedents of the debtor.

The first of such traditional method is known as Òsómàáló, commonly used by the Ijesha people of the present-day Osun State. Òsómàáló involves the creditor coming to the debtor’s house in the wee hours of the morning before the debtor rises from his bed, to squat while asking for his money. While in that squatting position, the creditor does all manners of things. He can, for instance, begin to drink water continuously from the gourd of water he brought along, or he begins to eat wraps of corn meal (agidi or eko) from the basket he carried to the debtor’s house. The implication of these acts is that the creditor can suffer a health challenge or die in the process. Should any of these happen, it becomes a bigger problem for the debtor and his family. To prevent such an eventuality, the moment an Òsómàáló, which means: this is how I will squat till I collect my money, shows up, the debtor’s family members rally round to raise and pay off the debt. An Òsómàáló, must not suffer any untoward consequence in the house of the debtor!

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The second method is more nauseating. It is known as Ológo or Ológodò. This method entails sending an invalid person, or someone who has infectious diseases to the house of the debtor. Lepers, people with tuberculosis, or other highly communicable infections are engaged in this case. What they simply do is that they begin to live with the debtor, eat his food without permission, use his household items freely and sleep on his bed and those of members of the debtor’s family. Again, neither the debtor nor members of his family are permitted under Yoruba tradition to chase away the Ológo or Ológodò. In some extreme cases, Ológo or Ológodò can also go violent by destroying items in the house of the debtor. The debtor’s neighbours and family members are not spared. The aim is to get the family members to pay up the debt.

The third method is the Ìwòfà system in which a relation of the debtor is pawned off to the creditor till the debt owed is paid. The one so pawned works for the creditor, while the creditor feeds him and accommodates him. But it is beyond just working for the creditor. An Ìwòfà suffers a lot in the hands of the creditors. There is no moment of respite for him; he must work continuously under the rain and scorching sun. This is why it is said that Olówó kii gelete, kí Ìwòfà na gelete (The creditor will not sit comfortably, and the pawn also sits comfortably).

There is no one among these three methods that is palatable. The best option is for one to stay out of debt. And if it is inevitable that one must owe, the debtor should refrain from eating gizzard, especially, where his creditor can easily see him. This piece of traditional advice does not hold any value in today’s Nigeria. Nigeria owes many foreign creditors, yet the country’s leader displays uncommon affluence to the chagrin of the nation’s creditors!

The last one week has not been good enough for our dear country. The international embarrassment the nation suffered at the hands of a Chinese investment company, Zhongshan Fucheng Industrial Investment Co. Ltd, leading to the seizure of three of our presidential aircraft is something that should give us all concern. In all honesty, if there is any time President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has my faint sympathy, it is over this international embarrassment. I said faintly because I have read a lot by some people who believed that the Tinubu team stage-managed the ‘seizures’ so that Mr. President could bring home his N150 billion newly acquired luxury Airbus A330. As much as one is tempted not to believe that storyline in the face of the embarrassing situation we found ourselves, the fact that the new aircraft is the one the Chinese firm graciously released to President Tinubu to travel to France, speaks volume. I cannot, indeed, beat my chest for Tinubu’s presidency over this, especially when his government has turned out to be like the Àjàntálá child that is full of mischief. We may come to this later if space permits.

The issue of Zhongshan Fucheng Industrial Investment and the seizure of our presidential fleet should not have happened at all but for the dearth of good leadership in the country. I have read all the explanations given by the Federal Government, the Ogun State Government, and former Governor Ibikunle Amosun of Ogun state over the matter. The only message I got is that there is an acute absence of sincere leadership, especially on the part of the Ogun State Government. The contract, whatever it was or is, between the Chinese firm and the Ogun State Government, went bad 14 years ago! If it has taken the state government 14 solid years to prepare for madness, may we ask them in Ogun State when exactly would enter the market in full-blown madness? Everything that has happened in this matter is part of the lethargic system we run where no one is made accountable for anything. It is a collective shame that an ordinary company could get our sovereign assets seized just because a contractual agreement between it and a state government went bad! This is so when there is no evidence to show that those seized items were used as collateral for the agreement! But this does not exonerate the Federal Government completely.

Elementary Government teaches us that the Federal Government enters into agreements or treaties with foreign countries. It is after the Federal Government might have established a contact (bilateral) with another country that the states can begin to draw from the goodwill. This then confers the responsibility of close monitoring of any agreement by any state in the Federation with any foreign company or country, on the one entity who signed the initial bilateral agreement. So, at what point did our Federal Government get to know about the dispute? What did it do to ensure that the nation was not subjected to this kind of international ridicule? But we are in Nigeria. The responses from Abuja have always been too much grammar. Nobody will be punished. We have had Ministers of Trades and Industries in the last 14 years; nobody will ask them what they did or did not do. In a matter of days, especially now that President Tinubu has his new jet to use, this matter will be forgotten like others before it. We may not come to it until something bigger happens. And I see that happening. If a firm could seize our presidential jets over a trade dispute, China may be emboldened by that to seize our president! Alarmed?

I believe that China can seize President Tinubu as a collateral for our indebtedness to the Chinese Government because of the lifestyle of our leaders. Nigeria is behaving like the proverbial chronic debtor who eats gizzard in the presence of his creditor. The records by the Debt Management Office (DMO) showed that Nigeria owes China $5.04 billion as of March 31, 2024. That is well over N6 trillion! The same country that owes so much is the one that could afford to buy a N150 billion aircraft for the use of the president. In addition, the President now rides a Cadillac Escalade SUV that is almost N1 billion. How do we convince our numerous creditors that we are a poor country? In the face of all this profligacy by the one-wristwatch-wearing President, how do we justify our continuous borrowing like the chronic debtor-wife of Oshin?

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Have we forgotten that as far back as 2020, there has been the rumour that Nigeria has been ‘colonised’ by China due to the nation’s indebtedness to Beijing? The rumour then was that Nigeria pledged its assets as collateral for the loans it took from China, such that China can come at any time to take over those assets. Rotimi Amaechi, who was the Minister of Transport, said in August 2020 that Nigeria had waived immunity on one of the loans. The simple implication is that with that waiver, China might not have to go to arbitration before the take-over. Amaechi, while dismissing the rumour, however said: “We must learn to pay our debts and we are paying, and once you are paying, nobody will come and take any of your assets.” How much have we paid back? How much do we still owe? If China were to take over our assets today, which asset is the biggest in Nigeria? We should also not forget that we took loans from France, Japan, India and Germany.

Despite all these loans, President Tinubu still, presumptuously, went ahead to purchase a N150 billion aircraft using the ignoble Service Wide Vote, a euphemism for spending without the permission of the National Assembly! How cruel can our leaders be? How unfeeling can those lording over us be? For his personal comfort alone in 15 months, President Tinubu has expended over N160 billion! Yet, his government is asking Nigerians to keep hope alive and to continue to bear with the government. From a N5 billion Presidential Yacht to the state-of-the art Cadillac Escalade SUV and now the N150 billion jet, Tinubu lives larger than life amid poverty, hunger and inflation ravaging the country. It is this same man that his deputy, Kashim Shettima, wants us to believe is modest and poor, using only one wristwatch almost his entire life!

The most embarrassing aspect of this Chinese company’s saga is the fact that President Tinubu chose to travel in the new Airbus A330 aircraft that Zhongshan Fucheng Industrial Investment Co. Ltd said it released to the president on “goodwill.” If the president must travel, couldn’t he have used another means? How will the president convince us that the whole seizure saga is indeed not an arrangee for him to bring the luxurious Airbus A330 aircraft home? How coincidental is the arrival of the new presidential jet on Sunday evening and the president jetting out in it on Monday? My major concern is that none of our foreign creditors will get the funny idea of taking human collateral for our various debts! Festus Adedayo in his Sunday, August 18, 2024, Flickers column published by the Sunday Tribune under the headline, “Nigeria as shock-horror skits”, concludes by saying: “Nigeria is a joke!” We are indeed a theatre of comedy!

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OPINION: In Defence Of Our President [Monday Lines]

Published

1 year ago

August 19, 2024

Editor

By Lasisi Olagunju

How rich is Vice President Kashim Shettima? I ask because twice last week, the big man from Borno described President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Lion of Bourdillon, Jagaban Borgu, Asiwaju of Lagos, as “this poor man.” To prove that the president is poor, Shettima said since he knew him “he has been using only one wristwatch” and living in a house without swimming pools. And, as a wrap-up of his definition of “poor”, he described himself as a better dresser than Tinubu. “He has overcome all those odds to dress well,” he said of the president. May God save us from the spirit of ostentatious poverty.

In case you missed it, a recap: “The vice president spoke in Abuja last Thursday at the launch of a book. The event and the book itself were on universal education and what is needed to make it work. I didn’t read or hear the vice president speak on that topic. Instead of words on education, which his country needs desperately, it was the size of the president’s house and his table manner that tickled Nigeria’s number two. First, in defence of the government and the ravages of these lean times, he said the president once drank garri and munched groundnut –a perfect marker of poverty. “At the formative stage of the APC, we held a meeting in his house. They served us a variety of meals but he opted to take garri with groundnut for àaaaaàaàaaa.” Tinubu’s deputy said those words. He was sure that “posterity will be very kind to this poor man.” I wonder what members of his audience were thinking. There was no one bold enough there to tell him that garri had stopped being poor man’s food; and that groundnut was no longer selling for peanuts.

Vice President Shettima is a lover of books, an aficionado of the written word. But Albert Einstein warned us against the evil of reading too many books. First century CE Roman philosopher, Epictetus, spoke about reading right and thinking better. There are others with similar cautions. If you read too much, you will likely start seeing what ordinary eyes do not see. Photographs of the vice president in bookshops home and abroad dot the Internet’s landscape. The man reads; what he reads, I do not know. He sees also. We say Ení we’jú l’èru nbà – the clairvoyant sees stuffs and gets scared. But this man sees and enjoys his seeing the unusual. The vice president may not be like Shakespeare’s Cassius who “has a lean and hungry look”, but like Cassius, “he reads much…and looks through the deeds of men.” Unlike you and me, blind bats, Senator Shettima sees the inner man. He declared that he had “seen the soul of Bola Tinubu” and it is “a good soul.” Unlike the Roman senator who trusts not Caesar, our own senator-VP passionately begged us to invest our trust in his boss, Tinubu, and “rally around this poor man” – the president.

At a time in the 1980s, a very prominent oba described Chief M.K.O. Abiola as a man who needed prayers to be truly rich. And that was at the peak of Abiola’s glory as a billionaire. The oba was someone everyone knew had a deep pocket, an old money, and so, no one could say he talked rubbish. That is what I remembered when Shettima uttered those words about Tinubu being “poor”. He went further: “He (Tinubu) means well for the nation. He wants to live in a place of glory. He is not in power to engage in primitive capital accumulation. He is in power to leave landmarks in the sands of time. He is the most demonised politician in Nigeria. The first time I went to his house at Bourdillon, I was looking forward to seeing a mansion comparable to Buckingham Palace, with gardens, and swimming pools, but there was nothing special about that house. My house in Maiduguri is better than the house in Bourdillon.”

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Where is our good old writer, Nkem Nwankwo, author of ‘My Mercedes is Bigger than Yours’? It is in that novel we encounter clansmen and women extolling “the luck of the clan” for having a son who has come home with a “mythical car.” It is in that story that one of them, Herdsman, is heard saying with much pride: “From today, we are the greatest. Any clan which claims they are equal with us, let them come out.” The author says “the speech received applause” (check page 41 of that novel). Death is wicked – and wasteful. If death hadn’t taken Nwankwo, the storyteller, perhaps Shettima would have inspired him to give us another bestseller- ‘My Manson is Mightier than Yours.’ This is a good time to be alive.

A child’s name is his star; his culmination (orúko omo níí ro’mo). ‘Tinubu’ should not have occurred in the same sentence with ‘poor’. Indeed, the vice president and all who do not know should know today that the name ‘Tinubu’ is the shortened form of “Òsun-ti-inú-ibu-wá (Osun goddess has come from the depths of the seas)”. That is not my invention; it is the very original truth as documented in history books. The deity who birthed that name is never associated with poverty and a lack of any good thing of life. In fact, it is to the bosom of that goddess of fecundity that people in need of help go for succour. And they get their hearts’ desire. So, let no one again describe this Tinubu as poor. The gods will be angry.

The president is my brother, he shall not want. We won’t allow anyone, including the vice president, to point at him a finger that suggests poverty. Where we come from, being poor is being cursed; we pray fervently against wretchedness; we bind the spirit of poverty. A war that is won shall never raise its head again. Poverty is an affliction which our man defeated a long time ago. Even if our brother is not picking our calls, we his people won’t ever wish him evil. Never.

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OPINION: The Python And Tinubu-North’s Matrimony

Published

1 year ago

August 11, 2024

Editor

Festus Adedayo

Undoubtedly, the political matrimony between President Bola Tinubu and Northern Nigeria is at Talaq stage. Talaq is the Islamic unilateral repudiation of a marital union. There are no sobs, no wails. No dabbing of the face with a handkerchief. But, the dusts provoked by the matrimonial dislocation hang notoriously in the sky. Even bystanders miles away can see them. The marriage is only 15 months old but the couple’s patience for each other is rope-thin. As our elders say, right in the presence of the kolanut seller, irreverent worms slide inside his pods. A matrimony celebrated with pomp and ceremony is now a chaotic market row. The gluttonous cat has eaten the poisonous meat of a toad. A post on X late last week even claimed that “Northerners have (begun) Al-Qunut prayers against Tinubu…Al-Qunut prayers (are) done…to eliminate evil.” There is a litany of allegations hung on the neck of the seismic marriage. It ranges from prostitution, abandonment, betrayal to battery. While the world sees the palm fronds, (mariwo) the egungun of the matrimony would seem to have been long gone.

Well, as the saying goes, a household of misbehaving children is a reflection that it is devoid of elders with wisdom – (T’ómodé ilé bá ńse réderède, àgbà ibè ni ò ní làákàyè). Elders then summoned the couple and demanded the reason for their tiff. Flaunting patriarchal righteousness, the husband has kept mum, dragging smoke off his burning cigarette intermittently. The Northern wife however did the narration, tears coursing down her cheeks. On her knees, she tells the story of Lagere, the cripple and Python, a huge heavy-bodied reptile which kills its prey by constriction. Lagere was a prince crippled from birth. At his turn to succeed his father, Kingmakers bucked, citing an existing tradition forbidding disabled on traditional stools. Downcast, Lagere hopped down river road to commit suicide. As he folded his deformed leg to jump into the river, a huge python emerged from nowhere and demanded why he contemplated suicide. Moved, Python promised to help him. The snake jumped up, wrapped himself round Lagere and constricted him. Upon unwrapping self from the cripple, the deformed leg received strength. Overexcited, Lagere swore to show gratitude to Python.

Before he was crowned king, continued the Northern Wife, the Ifa Oracle summoned to divine Lagere’s reign muttered a saying, the purport of which was cryptic to all at the time. The Oracle said, “Oore tán, asiwèrè gbàgbé” meaning, at the fullness of time, the foolish will forget a kindness of the past. Lagere then ordered that a groove be earmarked in the palace for the worship of the mysterious reptile. He indeed worshipped Python for months. One day, however, having smoked alien weeds, the king’s head exploded with pride. Lagere reasoned that His Imperial Majesty shouldn’t be seen groveling before an ordinary reptile. He then ordered that the animal be brought to the palace to be sacrificed to him. On seeing what King Lagere was about to do with him, Python cried passionately and asked for mercy. Lagere would not listen. But as he was being dragged down for propitiation, Python suddenly pounced on Lagere, twined self round him. Instantly, he returned to his old cripple state. The town then dethroned Lagere. “That, elders of the land, is my story,” narrated the Northerner wife.

Being a student of Nigeria’s political history and one right inside its vortex, from its beginning, it should have occurred to Tinubu and his Northern bride that their matrimony would be short-lived. As the one who holds an umbrella all-day long would find out only later at sunset that they carry a heavy object, only at dusk would an Oko Ìyàwó Elépòn Búlúù (a vulgar Yoruba folksy appellation for a newly-wedded groom) realize that wedlock is the least of matrimonial rituals. Meeting responsibilities of matrimony is the toughest nut to crack. So long as there is a colony of lice on clothe, the fingernail cannot be devoid of blood. While narrating her ordeals and betrayal of trust from Lagere, the Northerner wife had lapsed into a Yoruba proverb which says that if a monkey is uncertain about the danger upon a tree, it should not be found climbing it (Bi oju alakedun o da igi, kii gun) to which the elders nodded in unison.

Before the End Bad Governance protests which began on August 1, the depth of the matrimonial discord between Tinubu and the North was, at best, at the level of guesswork. For instance, we knew that it is almost an impossibility that tantrums won’t follow a stubborn child given a knock on the head. When the Tinubu government thus disgraced Nasir el-Rufai last year, tantrums were expected. So when the Tinubu government, for which he pulled critical chestnuts off the fire, rewarded him with a non-ministerial clearance by the Senate, many could swear by their mothers’ graves that the northern Eliri, the minutest of all rats, will become one of the rebellious faggots that will upset the fire. And that, whenever the North was reorganizing for an Araba, Eliri would play a prominent role. Araba should remind any student of Nigerian history of the historical Northern Nigerian cry of disaffection with the Nigerian state of affairs immediately Aguiyi Ironsi promulgated the highly objectionable Decree 34 which rendered Nigeria’s federalism unitarist. The North had earlier visited midless pogrom on eastern Nigeria. I got a whiff of the heartlessness of the bloodletting from a live play of Yoruba Apala music lord, Ayinla Omowura, recently. He sang, “wón ńpa yíbò bí eni p’eran alápatà…” – they butchered Igbo people as though killing cows in a meat shop.

In June, Northern politicians began coalescing around Muhammadu Buhari. They advertised this in a visit which anyone familiar with the colour, tone and tenor of historical serpentine regrouping of the north would know was the beginning of a call to put spanner in the works. Former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar and Aminu Tambuwal, Sokoto state’s ex-governor, kicked off the visit. It was to Buhari in his Daura hometown. Within 24 hours, el-Rufai followed suit. Photograph of the former governor’s legendary stoops to shake hands, similar to Iscariot’s kiss of Jesus, a notorious signature tune heralding betrayal, was amply advertised. Packaged as “Sallah homage,” political watchers claim the visits were the beginning of a packaged northern tempest against the Yarbawa who the north was wedded to in a matrimony that has now gone sour. Shehu Sani, Afro-haired ex-senator said this much in a release and attributed it to an attempt to build a strong northern alliance using Buhari as a rallying point to challenge and evict Tinubu in 2027. On the comedic scene, a Bello Galandachi satirizes the rot in the Tinubu government almost weekly.

The End Bad Governance protest was the strongest alibi for Northern Nigeria to ventilate its 15-month accumulated angst. It has been said that the protest, which kicked off on August 1, was a reflection of the geographical and ethnic politics that Nigeria had practiced from pre-colonial times. While the southeast, in a bid to stamp its disavowal with its typecast as a bellicose race, signed off from the protest, the southwest, which goes on protests, whether it is convenient for it or otherwise, marched out, while the north, often pacifist in matters that doesn’t personally concern it, was at the height of its hostility. The social reality of protest against the status quo in Nigeria is that, outside of university campuses, protests are a rarity on the streets of the Muslim North. For the eight years of Buhari’s non-governance, the north was as constantly docile as the northern star. But in this protest against bad governance, not only did northern protesters go to the Hobbesian state of nature, inflicting nasty, brutish jabs on sanity, some protesters even waved Russian flags, shouting “Putin!”

There is no denying the fact that the current Tinubu government has made life very excruciating for the people of Nigeria. Perhaps, like no other government in recent history. The pain is such that, as the elders will say, it is only a child who has not beheld the sight of a lion’s devoured carcass in the forest who will pray to be killed by a leopard (Bí omodé ò rí àjekù kìnìhún nínú igbó, á ní kí eran bí ekùn ó pa òhun).The truth is also that, the government has democratized sufferings across board in Nigeria. Tinubu dishes out pains, death, escalating food inflation and hopelessness to Nigerians without any ethnic, religious or social discrimination. As the poor of Kaura-Namoda feels the cluelessness of Aso Rock, the poor of Nchatancha and Telemu equally feel it. But the way the North has taken the lead in escalating the protest this murderously, the question that begs for answer is, what exactly is that region beefing Tinubu about? Hunger? Certainly not. Since we have agreed that no part of Nigeria is spared Tinubu’s merciless, slavish Bretton Woods economic policies, why then is the north crying so vociferously as if it is the only bereaved?

After his announcement as winner of the 2023 presidential election, one of the victorious thoughts that must have crossed Tinubu’s mind was that the ground Chief Obafemi Awolowo wobbled while treading, he gallantly stomped on it. Awolowo’s famous 1959 election campaign round the north, which roused Ahmadu Bello from his slumber, culminating in a Sardauna embarking on a political campaign which got his royal face caked with dusts in the process, opened Awolowo’s eyes to the myth of a monolithic north. Awolowo then came to the conclusion that an alliance of Southern Nigeria with the Middle Belt and Christian North holds the key to a southerner’s presidency of Nigeria. An alliance of his AG with NCNC to form UPGA had Michael Okpara, Eastern Premier, campaigning on the streets of Ibadan. This model still didn’t work during the Second Republic. Citing S. L. Akintola in his book, House of War (2003) Dare Babarinsa said Akintola, Western Nigeria Premier, rationalized his romance with the feudal north in that, the economic, educational and commercial aggressiveness of the Igbo was a greater danger to the Yoruba than the political hegemony of the Hausa/Fulani. An alliance with the NPC, he believed, was the surest way of rescuing the Yoruba from political annihilation. MKO Abiola lapped up the Akintola power model. From his alliance with Muhammadu Buhari in 2014, Tinubu also dusted the Akintola and Abiola handbook hook, line and sinker. On a superficial level, the trio of Akintola, Abiola and Tinubu would seem to be right and Awolowo wrong, right?

The above, however, cannot elicit a QED (quod erat demonstrandum) answer. The northern establishment’s political pedigree hoists it as a typical African witch. Of the many symbols and attributes of the witch, she holds tightly to her ferocious mystic power, using it as bait. She is also reputed with the upside-down symbolism. Among the Akan tribe of Ghana, the witch is literally “inverted.” Hans Werner Debrunner, in his Witchcraft in Ghana: A Study on the Belief in Destructive Witches and Its Effect on the Akan Tribes (1961) said of witches, “Before they leave the body, they turn themselves upside… They walk with their feet in the air, that is, with the head down, and have their eyes at the back of the ankle joints.” The Ewe in same Ghana also believe that witches walk backwards and, in walking upright, have their feet turned backwards. The witch is represented by such animals like snakes, owls, hyenas, and leopards, characteristically nocturnal animals.

As it romances political power like the witch, the Northern establishment has an inverted thinking as well. Awolowo’s welfarist philosophy futuristically foretold that a feudal north not weaned of its weaponization of the large population of its Talakawa and roam-about Almajiri children would pose huge danger to the rest of Nigeria. That prophecy has made him a Nostradamus today. In a 1978 presidential speech, Awolowo had said, “For the North, I have three things, Education, Education and Education.” He also maintained that, “The children of the poor you failed to train will never let your children have peace”. The bulk of Nigeria’s social malaises today – insecurity, bloated population, renteer system of overdependence on the lean purse of the federal – come from the north. This has bred multidimensional poverty, misery and anger in the region. Governor Uba Sani recently said the region has over 70% out-of-school children and same number living in grueling poverty. You cannot solely blame Tinubu for all these as the north’s vulture has been suffering the merciless trouncing of rainfall strokes for more than a century. From Yakubu Gowon, Murtala Mohammed, Shehu Shagari, Muhammadu Buhari, Ibrahim Babangida, Sani Abacha, Abdulsalami Abubakar to Musa Yar’Adua, as well as their northern accomplices, successive northern leaders share huge slices of the hopelessness that the north is today. Not minding the multidimensional poverty, the northern establishment still frantically shuts the door against education of this crop of persons, lest they be liberated from its chokehold.

At the turn of Lagere to narrate the root cause of the tiff, the elders were aghast. Rather than him being an ingrate, the python is almost the equivalent of Omolokun, he said. Omolokun is a Yoruba Ifa deity scholar and practitioner, Araba Ifáyẹmi Ọ̀ṣúndàgbonù Elebuibon’s drama series that ran on western Nigerian television in the 1980s. A couple, suffering decades of bareness, besought a deity for a child it named Omolokun. A spoilt brat who demanded the impossible at every point, when Omolokun one day demanded a human being to be propitiated to him, it dawned on the couple that it had a misbegotten ghormid in its household. Lagere reminded the elders that but for him, their son, Buhari, could not have won the presidency. Like Omolokun’s parents, the Lagere in Aso Rock has bent over backwards to please his Python, allocating consequential federal ministries to the North and in many cases, devoting junior and senior ministries to it. Recently, Lagere even established a Federal Ministry of Maalu as sacrifice to Omolokun. Yet, the northern establishment is steeped in roiling anger and cannot be pacified.

Lagere compared the excesses of his Northern wife to an excessive liquour that intoxicates; excessive sun that runs a child mad; excessive stronghold that begets madness and a spinach vegetable which, if it grows in excess by the stream, is rendered a common weed (Bí otí bá kúnnú, otí á p’omo; bí òòrùn bá pò l’ápòjù, á s’omo di wèrè; bí a bá l’óba l’ánìíjù, á sínni n’íwin; bí tètè ègún bá pò á di òleri). Lagere concluded that he had reverenced the cow enough and even went overboard to call it “Brother.”

The target of the Northern Witch is to stop Lagere’s reign. By now, Tinubu must have realized that the Awolowo who divined education and welfare as antidote to the tyranny of the Northern Witch was no fool. The Witch cannot be appeased. It is insatiable. Like Omolokun, this Witch will demand flesh and blood. Suffusing Nigeria with plenty and Northern Talakawa with education is the only route to rescue Lagere from the chokehold of his Python captor.