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OPINION: For Sanwo-Olu’s Lagos Tenants And Landlords [Monday Lines (2)]

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By Lasisi Olagunju

Some 200 years ago, someone could whimsically deport someone from a part of this country to another. It happened to Madam Efunroye Tinubu in 1856. She was given 24 hours to leave Lagos for her hometown, Abeokuta. This is 2024.

You can’t have tasty mutton-mushroom sauce without all the necessary elements. Any cook worth his or her name knows the culinary fact of the juice of one sweetening the whole. What makes Lagos Lagos is the rainbow colours of its population and the allure of its complexity. That is what Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu saved when he stepped in last week and disowned an insidious campaign by some people ordering certain people to leave Lagos.

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Lagos is the Eden of the daring. It has always been. And if it is Eden, always know it won’t be short of snakes and temptations. That is why talks and threats of expulsion will always be in the air there. This particular expulsion is our local version of the far-right anti-immigrant rhetoric in the United Kingdom. The violence birthed by the extremists in that rainbow country has been wracking England and Northern Ireland since 30 July, 2024.

I know that no one keeps quiet when his farm is being turned into a footpath. Because of that, Lagos, since its beginning, has had this in-group/out-group issue. It assumed a dimension worse than bad during and after the 2023 elections. But it is an ill wind. The others-must-go campaigners forget that the alluvial richness of the Lagos dumpsite is because it takes all that come to it.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Yoruba’s Spirit Of Resistance [Monday Lines (1)]

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There are ethnic extremists everywhere we turn now. Because of that, I think I should also quietly shout a warning that no one should henceforth describe Lagos as a no-man’s land or behave as if there is no boundary between a father’s farm and that of his son.

The campaign and its timing I see as an enemy action. How could the city have combined the hardship protests of that week with an inter-ethnic chaos? An X (Twitter) post by someone who may themselves be an ‘alien’ triggered the panic. Governor Sanwo-Olu reacted by saying that he viewed the post as “not only reckless and divisive but an attempt to sow a seed of discord between the Yoruba in the Southwest and other tribes, especially those who have made Lagos their permanent place of abode.” It was timely water on a threatening blaze. There has been silence since.

I have read the other far-right saying Sanwo-Olu’s intervention came too little. They are wrong. Have they ever thought of checking the meaning of “many a little makes a mickle”? If such persons knew the history behind a-stich-in-time, they would appreciate the worth of half-words dropped in the nick of time. Besides here, in this clime, elders don’t say all they have to say. And, I don’t have to say it that a leader, no matter his age, is an elder.

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The rhetoric of ‘Others Must Go’ (within a country) is an elite trick to mobilise for politics. Even people who are Yoruba but of non-Lagos origin are routinely reminded of their own alien status by idle minds who strut that landscape of hardtackle politics. Ironically, the ancestors of some of those who discriminate today were also classed as aliens in that city-state less than 150 years ago.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Protesters Of The North [Monday Lines]

Kristin Mann in his ‘Marriage Choices among the Educated African Elite in Lagos Colony, 1880-1915’ published in 1981 says something about the composite that is called Lagos. After pouring through several records, Kristin writes: “In 1880 approximately 70 percent of the elite were Saro, but by 1915 the proportion had fallen to 60 percent. The remainder were (returnees) from Brazil, the West Indies, or North America; Yoruba from Lagos or the interior; or non-Yoruba from west or north of Yorubaland. Only four members of the educated elite belonged to families that had lived in Lagos more than three generations. The rest had migrated to the town or were the children or grandchildren of immigrants. The educated elite, then, did not belong to large, well-established Lagos lineages” (See page 205).

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Expulsion of aliens is not new across countries in West Africa. But such always comes back to haunt the chasers. Margaret Peil has a list of such expulsions in her ‘Ghana Aliens’ (1974): “Ghanaian fishermen have been deported from Guinea, Ivory Coast and Nigeria; Nigerian traders have had to leave Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Ghana and Zaire; Dahomean civil servants have been deported from Ivory Coast and Niger; Togolese farmers and workmen have been expelled from Ghana and Ivory Coast. The largest case of expulsion of aliens was the result of the ‘Compliance Order’ issued in Ghana on November 18, 1969, which gave all aliens without residence permits two weeks to obtain them or leave the country.” It was the turn of Ghana to taste its own medicine when ‘Ghana Must Go’ happened in Nigeria in 1983.

Peace should be everyone’s agenda. Let farm hands stop planting cash crops; let no farm owner claim to be God. If you chase your late father’s debtors too hard, you will soon land in the hands of his creditors.

 

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Insecurity: Army HQ Directs GOC Ibadan To Relocate To Kwara

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The Army Headquarters has directed the General Officer Commanding (GOC), 2 Division of the Nigerian Army in Ibadan, to immediately relocate to Kwara State to further coordinate and boost military response to the insecurity in parts of the state.

This was contained in a statement by the Chief Press Secretary (CPS) to the Kwara State Governor, Rafiu Ajakaye, on Sunday.

It was gathered that the directive of the Army Headquarters followed the killing of no fewer than five forest guards and local hunters by suspected bandits early Sunday morning in Oke, Ifelodun Local Government Area.

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It was also learnt that members of the local vigilance team neutralised an unspecified number of the bandits in the early morning attack.

READ ALSO:JUST IN: Bandits Abduct Kwara APC Chairman’s Wife, Daughter

Meanwhile, Governor Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq of Kwara State, who mourned the deaths of the hunters, “urged our brave residents to remain calm and avoid the temptation to turn on ourselves,” saying, “We will forever be grateful to all of them as our heroes.”

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The Governor also called for increased security deployments to the state to rout the criminals involved in attacks in parts of the state.

In a statement following the attack on the positions of the forest guards and the surrounding areas of Oke Ode, the Governor said the state requires more military deployments to roll back the activities of criminals in parts of the Kwara South and Kwara North senatorial districts.

He regretted the loss of innocent civilians and the forest guards who, he said, mounted a spirited resistance to the assailants in the early morning incident out of patriotism and love for their communities.

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READ ALSO:Three Killed As Suspected Bandits Ambush Motorists In Kwara

My heartfelt condolences go to the families. No word can adequately capture the depth of my sadness and nothing can compensate the bereaved families for these incidents, in spite of our efforts and the investments in enlisting and training the forest guards to bolster the conventional forces.

“Our people are understandably concerned about the situation, and I wholeheartedly share in this grief,” the Governor said in the statement on Sunday.

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“While we appreciate the efforts and unquantifiable sacrifices of the security forces as well as the successes so far, we definitely need to do a lot more until we are completely out of the woods.”

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Retired DIG Parry Osayande is dead

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Retired Deputy Inspector General of Police, Parry Osayande is dead!

Osayende died on Sunday in Benin City, a day to his 89th birth anniversary.

His death was confirmed in a condolence statement released by the president of the Immaculate Conception College Old Boys’ Association (ICCOBA), Engr. Ighodalo Edetanlen.

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The announcement, made on behalf of the association’s National Executive Committee, described Osayande as an “exemplary old boy” of the college, located in Benin City, the Edo State capital.

READ ALSO:Soldier Sentenced To Death For Murder, Armed Robbery In Akwa Ibom

The statement, titled ‘CONDOLENCE: DIG. PARRY OSAYANDE (Rtd),’ reads: “The President, ICCOBA Worldwide, Engr. Ighodalo Edetanlen, on behalf of the National Executive Committee and the entire Old Boys of Immaculate Conception College, Benin City announce, with total submission to the will of God, the peaceful repose of an exemplary old boy, DIG Parry Benjamin Osemwegie Osayande (Rtd) earlier today at the age of 88 years.”

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Born on September 29, 1936, Osayande would have turned 89 on Monday.

His decades-long service to the Nigeria Police Force included high-level postings as Commissioner of Police in Benue and Cross River States. He also served as Chairman of the Police Service Commission, playing a vital role in the country’s law enforcement and administrative reform.

READ ALSO:Four Miners Feared Dead, Others Trapped As Illegal Mining Site Collapses In Plateau

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The association expressed deep sorrow over his passing and called for prayers for the bereaved family.

“While we mourn, let us also uphold the family he left behind in prayers in this moment of grief,” the statement added.

“Details regarding funeral arrangements are expected to be announced in due course.

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“May God grant him and all the faithful departed eternal rest in Jesus Name, Amen,” the statement concluded,

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OPINION: The Madman Sermon On Mapo Hill

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By Festus Adedayo

Ibadan, Oyo State, the city of warriors, quaked last Friday. The rumbling vibrations of the historic coronation of Ex-Governor Rashidi Ladoja as Olubadan sent valleys into a seismic shake. Ibadan’s ancient event center, Mapo Hall, was nearly submerged with excited feet. Children of Oluyole were at the zenith of their excitement. Expensive automobiles, resplendent attires and infectious joy lit the faces of a people who christened self as cunning. That Friday, however, Ibadan wasn’t ready to listen to the rhythm of its famous Láyípo christening. It was rather ready to receive the world.

Suddenly, a huge blot appeared on the landscape. In the eyes of the world, àjàò, the animal called sloth, suddenly crept up the hill of Mapo. When àjàò creeps up an event like this, it is a moment of anomaly, anomie or dystopia. Yoruba then speak in dispraise of this unusually created amoebic-shaped animal. They say, Kinní kan ba àjàò jé̩, apá rẹ gùn ju itan lọ – the only blot in àjàò’s creation is that its arms are disproportionately longer than the legs.

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Many have questioned àjàò’s mis-taxonomy, especially one that equated it with the sloth. To them, àjàò is not a sloth but a flying squirrel. In terms of features, both sloth and flying squirrel strike a resemblance with the Yoruba àjàò, in that they possess disproportionate arms and legs. Apart from these features, the sloth is also the world’s slowest mammal. Flying squirrel, however, is a gliding mammal which is more of a squirrel than any other mammal. Unless àjàò is today extinct, both equivalents it shares features with – sloth and flying squirrel – do not belong to the African habitat. While the sloth’s habitat is the tropical rainforest of Central and South America, the flying squirrel lives in North America, Northern Eurasia, and the temperate, tropical forests of India and Asia. Features-wise, àjàò however slants more towards the sloth.

Sorry, I digressed. On Friday, àjàò appeared in Mapo. It came in the form of the official musician of the coronation event, Taiye Akande Adebisi, famously known as Taiye Currency. Many felt that, even if the need was to Ibadan-ise the Olubadan coronation, for a city which parades A-list musical wizards like Saheed Osupa, Currency was not apropos for an event of that high-octane magnitude. They felt justified when, perhaps seized by an unknown muse of Apollo, Greek mythology’s central deity and embodiment of the spirit of music, Taiye Currency suddenly and seemingly veered off-theme and sang, “Wèrè l’a fi ńwo wèrè…” – madness is the curative medicine for insanity.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR:OPINION: Fubara And The Witches

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Instantly, the musician courted huge flak of his audience for this perceived off-key musical line. The crowd felt nostalgia for Awurebe exponent, Alhaji Dauda Akanni Adeeyo, popularly known as Epo Akara. Epo’s evergreen tributes to Oba Daniel Adebiyi and Gbadamosi Akanbi Adebimpe, the latter being the 35th Olubadan of Ibadan, who reigned briefly from February 1976 until his death in July 1977, are still considered classics. A typical song sang at political rallies where call for the Mosaic an-eye-for-an-eye is often rife, “Wèrè l’a fi ńwo wèrè…” was seen as an anti-climax among Ibadan people who, for once, forgot political schisms and were united in celebrating their new king.

Unbeknown to the crowd, Taiye Currency was indeed right and deserves our praises. While madness is of a truth cure for madness, on the converse, on that Friday, could the musician have been lost in the mire of the literary device of dramatic irony? In dramatic irony, though the character in the story is oblivious of the situation he plays a vital role in, the audience is aware of it. It then leads to a gap or contrast between what the audience knows and what the character understands. While all of us as audience saw contradictory meanings in Currency’s “Wèrè l’a fi ńwo wèrè…” and the theme of the coronation event, the musician might be communicating a deeper sense of humour and existential tragedy.

Talking specifics now, could Taiye Currency, by that song at Mapo, be espousing the Madman Theory?

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Indigenous psychiatrists who specialise in treatment of lunatics and allied mental ailments pioneered this “Wèrè l’a fi ńwo wèrè…” phrase. The earliest theories on madness believed it was a spiritual affliction. The assumption was that its victims had their minds possessed by an alien deity. While many also believed madness was hereditary, others believed it was a punishment from the gods, resulting from a gross disregard of the gods’ warning. Then came Hippocrates (460–377 B.C.) and the theories of madness shifted to the belief that most bodily illnesses were as a result of various imbalances in the body. Even with this, madness, abnormalities of behaviour and epilepsy were still generally believed to be the workings of the gods.

It is generally believed that, since insanity is a hardcore ailment, its treatment is also hardcore. I witnessed this in the early 1980s when I followed my late father to hire farmhands from the indigenous sanatorium of Baba Aladokun of Ikirun, now Osun State. I saw mentally challenged men and women wickedly shellacked with whips.

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In Yoruba’s main translation of the word, “madness” or “madman” is synonymous with wèrè. The logic of the Madman theory in national leadership was first articulated by Daniel Ellsberg in 1959, followed by Thomas Schelling, in 1960. It is a political theory usually attributed to American President Richard Nixon’s foreign policy. It is derived from Niccolo Machiavelli’s 1517 book, Discourses on Livy and its argument that sometimes, it is “a very wise thing to simulate madness”. Similarly, in his 1962 book, Thinking About the Unthinkable, Herman Kahn, the futurist, argued that to “look a little crazy” could be an effective way of making an adversary stand down from their attack plans.

It worked for Nixon because leaders of hostile communist bloc countries, having assimilated this tendency of the American president as irrational and volatile, avoided provoking the U.S., their fear being of an unpredictable response from Nixon. Another believer in the Madman Theory is President Donald Trump, whose irrationality has attracted renewed interest in the Madman Theory among scholars, lay scholars and the public. Other leaders in recent history associated with the madman theory reputation included Kim Jong-un, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Vladimir Putin, Muammar Ghadaffi and Saddam Hussein.

Last Friday in Ibadan, Oba Ladoja received one of the greatest honour of his coronation as President Bola Tinubu graced the historic occasion. When it was time to address the audience, the president gave an inkling of what would be his address to Nigerians on Wednesday, the anniversary of Nigeria’s 65th. In an admixture of felicitations to the new monarch and a message of hope to the Nigerian populace, Tinubu declared that the country’s economic suffering was now back-flung, just the same way a masquerade flings his loose regalia. “Today, I am honoured and feel very proud to give you the cheering news that the economy has turned a corner. There is a bright light at the end of the tunnel. Your suffering has been as painful to us as a painful surgery. But the economy has now returned to a moment of growth and prosperity. Thank you for your perseverance, and thank you for your endurance,” he sermonized.

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Here we go again. My first reading of the above claim of the president is that he has been so extensively hypnotised by his voodoo economists that he has crossed the Rubicon of reality. Or, that he has mouthed this economic recovery shibboleth for too long that the phrase sounds more like an ad-lib motivational speech that must be repeated like a musical refrain. Other than in the Utopia minds of his minders and in the renteer perception of regime fawners, there is no economic recovery in Nigeria, nor has the economy of the average Nigerian turned any corner. It is still in a long sprint.

When this government came in 2023, its demeanour was equal to the biblical “My father (Buhari) scourged you with whips; I will scourge you with scorpions”. At that time, some Nigerians thought, queerly, that though the Madman theory was a concept in international relations, the Nigerian government wanted to suborn obedience by creating economic fear in the minds of the people. With this ad-lib mouthing of the refrain of economic recovery on paper by the president and his team, when in actual fact, reality counters this claim, it seems to occur to Nigerians that government is simply telling them to go jump inside Kudeti River if they do not believe it. Or that a pure Madman theory is at work.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR:OPINION: Jonathan’s Betrayal And Askaris In Nigerian Politics

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I just finished reading late Nigeria’s foremost professor of history, Festus Ade-Ajayi’s keynote at the first convocation of the Nigerian Academy of Letters (1999). It was aptly titled, “Development is about the people”. The problem with Nigerian leaders, this current ensemble not excluded, Ade-Ajayi said, is that they are selfish in their prescriptions. While building all their economic and social models, seldom do they enquire what the wishes of the people are. Wherever there is the mouthing of the word ‘development’ and there is no ample recourse to improved quality of people’s life, what we have is regression.

The statistical indicators which the Tinubu team claimed show it that Nigerians are enjoying better times are meaningless if the woman in Oyingbo market cannot agree with them. Same thing with the collapsing inflation rates which they hoist like a scientist who just discovered a fallen object from mass. Those statistics are meaningless if we go to the pharmacy and drugs are still sold at cut-throat prices as they are and our purchasing power is still this lean. Only the Madman theory can explain why leaders would taunt their people with the existence of a surplus when indeed, there is what looks like a famine.

What the president obviously confuses for the general well-being of the people is the flamboyance and the personal economies of his ministers. Indeed, these have “turned a corner”. The talk out there is that his ministers are literally buying up Uranus and Mars with illicit, ill-gotten wealth that will shame Sambo Dasuki’s arms money-gate and Diezani Allison-Madueke’s alleged petrol-dollar sleaze. Yet, there is calm on the home-front. Rather than live by personal example of belt-tightening as he urged his people, the president himself lives the lush life of an Oil Sheik, literally breakfasting in Lisbon, lunch in Paris and dinner in Alaska, at the people’s patrimony’s expense. The Tinubu pain-before-prosperity mantra is appearing as a huge scam. At the UNGA, it was said that 60 presidential aides were ship-loaded to the US, with their big fat estacode (Establishment Code). These are the ones whose economies are turning the corner. The endure-now-to-enjoy-later mantra reminds one of a father who tells his children to endure hard times but lives in unimaginable splendour.

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So, the president knew that Nigerians’ suffering “has been…as a painful surgery”? Interesting. This analogy even makes the situation worse. Surgical procedures are preceded by anaesthesia and followed with analgesics to reduce pain. They are then accompanied with a post-procedure process of recovery and care. None of these did the government administer before yanking us open with its wicked scalpel in May 2023. Nor even thereafter. Many of our compatriots have died needless deaths and many are still dying.

So, when Taiye Currency sang about “Wèrè l’a fi ńwo wèrè…”, flesh and blood obviously didn’t reveal it to him. Either intended or a dramatic irony, what the musician was communicating was that there is no sanity anywhere in this country. We are in one huge sanatorium. The musician thus deserves commendation and not scorn. This government is curing the madness of hunger and lack with the madness of propaganda of a better life, “growth and prosperity”. And a dark cunning of “a bright light at the end of the tunnel”. Shikena!

 

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