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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.”

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

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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But why did the vice president veer off and go on that voyage? Will Tinubu being poor educate the uneducable and the uneducated? Will it give food to the hungry and make the sick well? And, how rich really is this Shettima to whom our wealthy Tinubu is a poor man, and who boasted that his far northern house is “better” than Bourdillon’s street-to-beach mansion in Lagos? Even the president’s gardener would laugh at that comparison. In the best of times, Buckingham Palace, if built in Shettima’s Maiduguri, won’t be worth half a plot in Tinubu’s Bourdillon Street.

Someone should just not provoke our president’s masquerade to dance out of the grove with all the majesty of his elegance. If the president has not read his deputy’s eulogy, I appeal to my brothers in charge of his media to cover it with palm fronds of forgetfulness. The president must not show the size of his weight, the height of his full length and the hues that are his colour. But, even if he reads the words, I am sure Tinubu is too seasoned to be provoked into wearing gold bars as wristwatches. He would not be president of Nigeria if he was just a wealthy pauper with a mansion in the richest part of Lagos. When a child is smart, our people say ‘o mo way’. Our president is president because he is rich in ways and in means.

Sir H. Rider Haggard KBE (1856-1925) was an English writer who authored many adventure fiction romance novels. He wrote ‘King Solomon’s Mines’ and its sequel, ‘Allan Quatermain’; he wrote ‘Morning Star’; he wrote ‘She’; he wrote ‘Queen Sheba’s Ring’; he wrote ‘Finished’ and fifty other novels. At a time, he told us to take things easy because ultimately “time eats up the works of man.” Sir Haggard’s adventure stories are as money-and-women-themed as the adventures of our big men here. His characters are as varied in character as the characters you find in our politics here. These include the urbane prince, Umbopa, and the ugly witchy hag, Gagool. I am interested in his Umslopogaas, king of the wolves – a man he describes as “full grown, fierce and keen”. The one who would be our president here and ride the waves would be that character who sees “by night as well as by day”. In Haggard’s voice, I say Bola Tinubu is president because, like Umslopogaas, he is “fleet of foot”, and of “valour unequalled”. Such men can’t be poor; their wealth is denominated in gold and diamond mines – not in bars, not in rings and wristwatches.

The man who is our president is our president because he is smart and generous with his money. People who are around him or who have been ‘fortunate’ to be in his presence say he does not know what tribal mark the circumciser put on naira and dollar bills. They say he has no patience to check the mien of all currencies of value before spending them. They say you don’t go into his den of dough sobbing and come out still teary. They say the man’s nimble needle sutures all tears. But, they add that he is not a stupid spender. They say he is strategic in spraying his gold coins and in throwing his diamond bars. They say he gives in measures that won’t make him lose the receiver and that won’t swat his own desires. Our late friend, Yinka Odumakin, once told a story: A man from ‘the other side’ sneaked into Bourdillon Road with a valuable piece of information. The man was well ‘appreciated’ but our friend said he felt the ‘appreciation’ was not big enough; he suggested a little more. “No”, the wise spender told his adviser, “if he gets more than that, he won’t come back.” Wisdom!

One more thing: I have read haters also making a fuss around the president’s new Airbus A330 and his latest wonder-on-wheels – a Cadillac Escalade. They are speculating on the costs. What is money? Money is nothing! Does it really matter that a woman we married in this season of famine is moulding bricks and blocks with pounded yam? (Ìyàwó tí a fé l’ósù agà t’ón f’iyán mo’lé). If the president of Nigeria does not spend Nigeria’s money, who else will? When a commission of inquiry in 1956 said Adegoke Adelabu spent money of IDC (Ibadan District Council), his appreciative people poured into the street with songs that endorsed whatever he did with their money: “Adegoke omo Adelabu / Máa k’ówó wa ná/ Ìgunnu l’ó ni Tápà/ Tápà l’ó nì’gunnu; Máa k’ówó wa ná (Adegoke, son of Adelabu/Spend our money/Igunnu owns Tapa; /Tapa belongs to Igunnu/Spend our money…).” It is not the fault of Tinubu’s haters. I blame the president for being too soft with everything, including our purse. An ancient oba who was that soft was rebuked by his courtiers with something that sounded like: “You are at fault/ You who married their wives and did not marry their mothers;/ You are to blame.” I blame the president. He should spend our money like a rich man that he is. He should not mind what haters and enemies say. Their anger is induced by envy; it is a fight that cannot be resolved by the passage of time (Ìjà ìlara ni, kò lè tán bòrò). Ultimately, all heads shall bow; all knees shall bend. At the end of this president’s two thousand seasons, we will thank him and praise him — and worship him.

News

I’ll Support Trump To Fight Terrorism In Nigeria If… – Wike

Published

6 hours ago

November 3, 2025

Editor

The Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Nyesom Wike, has said that he would support US President Donald Trump if he provides technology to combat terrorism in Nigeria.

Wike stated this on Monday while responding to questions in an interview on Politics Today, a programme on Channels Television monitored by DAILY POST.

His comment comes in the wake of the Christian genocide allegation in Nigeria made by Trump.

It will be recalled that Trump recently designated Nigeria as a “Country of Particular Concern” over the same allegation.

The US President also said that he had asked the Defence Department to prepare for possible military action in Nigeria if the Nigerian government “continues to allow the killing of Christians”.

Responding, Wike said, “It is not enough for me to capitalise that people are dying in Plateau, Benue and other places.

“I have said that I will support Trump in providing and supporting Nigeria with technology in the fight against terrorism. I will also support any country that wants to proffer solutions in tackling terrorism in Nigeria.”

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OPINION: Trump’s Wrath Of Oedipus

Published

8 hours ago

November 3, 2025

Editor

By Lasisi Olagunju

Mr Donald Trump and his Generals are buckling their armour to wipe out terrorists who kill Christians in Nigeria. “I am hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for possible action. If we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet…” the American president tweeted yesterday. Nigerians who heard Trump probably wondered where he is going to start from. People abducting people, people killing people are everywhere in Nigeria: North-East, North-West, North-Central, the South – everywhere. The forests are deeply infested; the cities have them thick behind seedy walls. How do you kill terrorists in a terror territory without killing everyone?

I risk this question: Who is the real killer here?

What is killing Nigerian Christians, indeed, what is killing Nigerians of all faiths, is not just religion or religionists. The true assassin is the Nigerian structure; an abnormality sculpted with the cold chisel of Mr. Trump’s America and its complicit allies. As Tacitus once wrote of Rome, “They make a desert and call it peace.” Nigeria is a malformed republic calcified by those who pretend to defend it. The Nigerian structure empowers extremism and fetters the law. It enjoys the backing of the West.

Now, Trump says he is coming. Some saviours come to compound calamities. In Ola Rotimi’s ‘The Gods Are Not to Blame’, the Nigerian adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Odewale is the celebrated liberator who becomes king. There is Baba Fakunle, the old, blind diviner of Kutuje. When the king, Odewale (the Oedipus figure), summons the seer to help identify the cause of the kingdom’s troubles, Baba Fakunle immediately sees the king himself as the source of the curse afflicting the land: “You are the murderer you seek”, the blind tells the king. He proceeds to even call him “bed sharer.” But the hot-tempered king thinks the prophet subversive, a coupist.

Tiresias in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, like Ola Rotimi’s Baba, is the blind who perceives what the sighted king cannot see. The blind reveals that the sickness of the city flows from King Oedipus himself. He is the murderer. Oedipus, who vows to cleanse Thebes, is the source of the plague and “pollution” of Thebes. Today’s world has Oedipuses; it has no Tiresias. The truth bearer exists neither in America and its allies nor in their viceroys, defenders of peace who switch off rights in search of freedom.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR:OPINION: Saluting Our Permanent Patriarchs

Donald Trump described Nigeria as “a disgraced country.” It is surprising that Nigeria has had no word to reply to that insult. His threats are directed at the bad children in the forests of the north. There is not a whimper from the ACF and the Northern Elders Forum. Where is their usual courage? Where is the Federal Government? If I would be cynical, I wouid ask: Why not invoke our efficient Cybercrime Act to deal with this? In case the government missed the assault, it is there in Trump’s tweet on Truth Social:

“If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the U.S.A. will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,’ to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities. I am hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for possible action. If we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our CHERISHED Christians! WARNING: THE NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT BETTER MOVE FAST!”

America’s Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, with a “Yes sir” replied Trump with ‘automatic alacrity’. He said his boots were “preparing for action” on the soil of Nigeria. He posted on X:

“Yes sir. The killing of innocent Christians in Nigeria — and anywhere — must end immediately. The Department of War is preparing for action. Either the Nigerian Government protects Christians, or we will kill the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities.”

Greek historian and Athenian General, Thucydides, underlined the causes of war: power, fear, and ambition. He warned that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Secretary Pete Hegseth’s words are a salute, and a promise of death wrapped in benevolence. He and his boss spoke as relievers of the besieged of Nigeria. We thank them for their interest. But where are they going to start from?

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR:OPINION: ‘Federal Highways of Horror’

“They can start from anywhere,” a voice replied me.

“Where is anywhere?”

It is cool to read Trump’s promise of reprieve; we’ve seen too much not to embrace any messiah who comes around. Too many have died with their blood calling for vengeance. But this Trump rain, if it ever falls, won’t fall on one roof. Oedipus comes into Thebes, kills their terror and for that is made king. Years later, the saviour’s coming becomes bad, mass death.

I read online many who are happy that Bola Tinubu’s government is facing fire from America. Some of these are even from the Muslim North. Ancient Romans would see this and intone: “Amicus meus, inimicus inimici mei” (my friend, the enemy of my enemy). Mathematical sociologists would dust up Frank Harary’s formalisation of the Balance Theory; they would trace their signed graphs, and point to Fritz Heider’s insight that a pair of friends with a common enemy forms a balanced triangle: A friend of my friend is my friend (+ × + × + = +). A friend of my enemy is my enemy (+ × – × – = +). An enemy of my enemy is my friend (– × – × + = +). Politics!

It is strange that a government that has conquered everyone is now being conquered from a strange angle. “History shows that there are no invincible armies and never have been” (Josef Stalin).

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I would have joined in the celebrations to welcome Trump but for the fact that history shows me the strong disguising ambition with the language of virtue; I hear the powerful invoking justice and faith while pursuing dominance. If I asked the Greek to use human history and experience to analyse Mr. Trump’s threat of a war to end all terrorist wars in Nigeria, Thucydides would likely have viewed Trump’s threat with cold, unsentimental realism. To him, the tough-talk would not be an act of moral outrage but a performance of power. He would see in Trump’s posture not compassion for the Nigerian victim of terror; the historian would see the timeless logic of empire: using other people’s tragedy to affirm strength and moral superiority.

As Thucydides might have put it, “War is not so much a matter of right as of necessity.” From history to literature, we find that those who claim to fight for justice are often merely fighting for influence. In the eyes of experience, America’s preparation “for action” would be less about saving faith, limbs and lives; it will be more about staging yet another play in the endless drama of power.

So, I ask: Is the noise from the US truly targetted at the Nigerian Wall of Jericho? We wait to see.

We are a complicated country with complex problems. If Trump kills all today’s terrorists tomorrow, how about the next generation of killers that will come out the day after? The hatchery is not tired of making them.

So, where is the way? Donald Trump’s message of war? It cannot be the way. One thing is certain, this crisis and the response to it echo a tragic pattern: leaders are chasing false targets; messiahs will end up as wrathful Oedipuses whose presence will poison the land. These healers, they will spread plague.

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OPINION: Saluting Our Permanent Patriarchs

Published

8 hours ago

November 3, 2025

Editor

By Lasisi Olagunju

Respect old age. A “strictly by invitation” conclave of Yoruba cardinals sat for two days last week, not in the traditional capital, Ibadan, but in aged Akure, Ondo State. They took the masquerade to the eastern ancestral grove and had it costumed there. If your masquerade was not there, it is because your buttocks were deemed too small for the gilded stools there. And by not being there, you just missed balls of àkàrà made specially in frying pans of honey. The cardinals sat and chose for the whole race and decreed that “we must speak with one voice.” Their Holinesses danced to African pop singer, Angélique Kidjo’s ‘Agolo’ in their own sacred way and ordered that the waist-beads of their Olajumoke must remain where it is. Who are we to say the mouth of the elder stinks? That is the judgment of age, the decree from the ancestors’ gavel. Coourt!

It is an African thing. Of what use is age if you can’t use it to dominate the youth? Àgbà kò níí tán l’órí ilè is a daily prayer in Yoruba land. It simply means “may elders not be extinct in our land.” What the Akure papacy wants is already being done in other parts of Africa. The results have been phenomenal. I am moving from Cameroon to Côte d’Ivoire, then Tanzania, and, then other places where age is prized far higher than rubies.

They say wisdom comes with age. If that is true, no matter how “disgraced” Donald Trump says we are, East and West, Nigeria has pearls of ancestral wisdom. To our immediate East, we have Paul Biya of Cameroon; a little far west, there is Alassane Ouattara of Côte d’Ivoire. They are the current champions. Our immediate western neighbour, Benin Republic, has just banned the main opposition candidate and his party from the next presidential poll. These and many more enjoy the nod of the lords who created these countries.

I have ‘data’ people, young persons around me. They flirt into my fort and speak grammar and literature. First, they talk “gerontocracy”; then I hear “heart-cutting paradox” of Africa being the world’s youngest continent by median age, “yet it is being governed by some of the oldest leaders on earth.” Talk is cheap. What do they know? What an elder sees while seated, a child in space can’t see.

Indeed, Africa, this moment, has the wisest gathering of aged priests of power ever assembled.

In the North, there sits Abdelmadjid Tebboune of Algeria (80), Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt (71), and Kais Saied of Tunisia (67 — just under seventy, but invested with self-made powers broad enough to last him till eternity).

In West Africa, the procession of patriarchs includes Bola Ahmed Tinubu of Nigeria (73), Joseph Boakai of Liberia (80), and Alassane Ouattara of Côte d’Ivoire (83). Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo of Ghana, now 81, bowed out, leaving the stage in January 2025 for his old rival, John Dramani Mahama, 66, to steer the ship once again.

In Central Africa, Mother Africa is still blessed with the grandest of elders: Paul Biya of Cameroon (92), Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea (83), and Denis Sassou-Nguesso of the Republic of the Congo (81).

In Eastern and Southern Africa, the grey reign continues: Yoweri Museveni of Uganda (81), Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea (79), Emmerson Mnangagwa of Zimbabwe (83), and Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa (73). Hage Geingob of Namibia passed away on 4 February 2024 at the age of 82. He was succeeded by 84-year-old Nangolo Mbumba, who served until the March 2025 election that brought Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, 73, to power — the country’s first female president.

Farther east, Djibouti’s parliament has just erased the age barrier that once capped presidential ambition, clearing the path for 77-year-old Ismaïl Omar Guelleh to seek a sixth term in 2026. And on the Ethiopian plateau, President Taye Atske Selassie will turn 70 next year.

We respect and value age; that is why Africa remains forever at the top. We are the continent where wisdom and endurance sit enthroned in power.

President Alassane Ouattara of Côte d’Ivoire is 83. He has just clinched a fourth term with the ease of a man ordering breakfast. Cast your gaze eastward to Cameroon, 92-year-old Paul Biya is there. BBC last week described him as “the leader who never loses.” He has kindly agreed to remain in office after only 43 years of national service – or should I simply call his reign ‘uninterrupted power supply’? Forty-three years in some democracies would be called eternity; here in Africa, from the Mediterranean to the Cape of Good Hope, it is continuity.

Nigeria has so much to learn especially from Cameroon where grey hair rules completely and totally. Cameroon has a council of elders whose word is law. I searched the World Wide Web, asking the oracle for the secret of that country’s success. It is the bent gait of the leaders and the age of their ideas. It is difficult to believe, but it is true, the elders list is real: To President Biya’s right is the President of the Constitutional Council, Clément Atangana; he is 84 years old. Atangana it was who oversaw the recent election and announced the results that are being celebrated with stones and bullets in the streets of the country. There is also René Claude Meka, the 86-year-old Chief of Defence Staff. He guards the guards in the name of democracy. The president of the senate is Marcel Niat Njifenji, 91 years old. With Cavayé Yéguié Djibril, the 85-year-old Speaker of the National Assembly, Njifenji sees that laws are made for the good governance of the republic. They make laws, and when they finish minting the laws, they pass them to 83-year-old Laurent Esso, the indefatigable Minister of Justice. He executes the law and its convicts. The job of this council of elders is to keep the grandfather in power and tell the young to wait for their time.

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We have done well with democracy in Africa. It is no longer about freedom and welfare, and good living and life more abundant. It is about endurance – like dull, painful sex.

Latecomer Nigeria does not (yet) have its own official elders council as Cameroon. It should quietly be taking notes; that is what the wise do. We should envy Cameroon; Cameroon deserves our envy.

In Bénin, the constitutional court on 27 October, 2025, ruled to exclude the principal opposition party, Les Démocrates, from participating in the upcoming 2026 presidential election. The coast is clear for democracy in that country and for the incumbent. In East Africa, Tanzania’s presidential election was held on Wednesday last week. But the gods of polls had cracked the palm kernel of victory for the incumbent before the election day. President Samia Suluhu Hassan stood (and stands) on terra firma. She won before winning. Her opponents, candidates of the two primary opposition parties, were removed from the ballot by the gods of democracy. Their supporters are outside, burning tyres and getting buried.

Nigeria will do better than Benin and Tanzania. If those ones had appreciated better intelligence, they would not run into the quicksand of protests harrying their hills. Instead of shutting the gate against opponents and running against themselves, how about those opposition candidates simply defecting into the ruling party? If you check the physics of politics, you will understand why politicians are ferromagnetic beings; they respond to the magnet of money and power. In Nigeria, nobody will be disqualified in the next elections. The magnet in the ruling party sucks them into the vortex of power, and that ends it. Never mind what an Abuja court said on defection last Friday. The defected should forfeit their seats. Who does that? The higher courts will correct the abnormal orders.

Yoruba ancestors are great scientists. There is this Yoruba spell that pulls whoever it wants into its bossom:

Gerere,

Àwọ̀n maa wo won bo,

Gerere…

(Swiftly/ Net, drag them here/ Swiftly).

People of depth who massed in Akure last week know how this magnetic net is woven. It works in Yoruba’s Lagos – it is working in Nigeria. The Tanzanian lady should have come to learn here.

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I read online about children of protest dreaming of Tanzania in Nigeria. No. It won’t happen. Where is the main opposition party, the PDP? By the time we reach 2027, no opposition contraption will be well enough to stagger out of the ICU. After that feat, we will move to the next. What is next? Third term?

‘Third term’ is scandalous; we don’t want that chain for the neck of our Olajumoke. The respectable career goal is to be so good as to be begged to become king.

Let the children of anger keep punching their tired tabs and overused phones. Someone told me that when they finally look up from those chinko phones and ask, “Who’s that old man on the ballot again?” the answer will definitely be: “The same man you voted for when you were in primary school.”

Africa is proof that democracy is tired of term limits. The British blessed us with permanent secretaries; why not bless ourselves with permanent councils of elders complete with a permanent presidency. Imagine the elegance in that alliteration: “permanent presidency.” Pulsating.

Even in America where we copied this democracy nonsense, they are already building a throne for their king and sewing very regal royal robes. They have a king.

I read Thomas E. Cronin’s ‘On the Origins and Invention of the Presidency’ and laughed at the folly in the wisdom of the past. Cronin, by “presidency” meant American presidency.” He wrote: “In 1787 fifty-five of America’s best educated and most experienced men assembled in Philadelphia. Their average age was 42, most were lawyers or businessmen. Two-thirds had served in the Congress at one time or another; nearly twenty had served in the Continental army. Seven had been governors in their states. It was a convention of the well-bred, well-fed, well-read and well-wed.” These were the people, the 55 wise men who invented America’s presidential democracy, the one we copied like that poor student who Rank-xeroxed his mate’s exam script, name, matric number, all.

The mandate of the American wise men, according to Cronin, was “to devise an executive office that would also be effective and safe; strong enough to command respect, to help maintain order, to help conduct effective diplomatic affairs, to provide for more efficient administration, yet not so strong as to threaten civil liberties, or in any way aggrandize power contrary to the welfare of the general public.” They did what they had to do and for 229 years, they thought they got it right. They were wrong. Trump, holding Muhammadu Buhari’s toothpick, is at this moment, laughing at their wisdom.

A permanent presidency – a king – is being considered by those around America’s Trump. Or where were you last week when former White House chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, told The Economist that President Donald Trump would serve a third term? Stephen Bannon described a third term for Trump as essential to the nation’s future, a “vehicle of divine providence”, an “instrument of divine will” and “the will of the American people.” We were very unfair to President Olusegun Obasanjo, a successful third term for him would have been a valuable part of contemporary America’s literature review.

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This is the age of the aged. We should tell William Shakespeare that he lied; that the poet lied in his claim that “All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,…”

Shakespeare says the drama of life always comes to an end for actors and for spectators. It is not so in Africa. Go to Togo, don’t they have Faure Gnassingbé there after Gnassingbé Eyadéma? Gnassingbé served as the president of Togo from 1967 until his death in 2005. Gnassingbé Eyadéma’s son, Faure, filled what would have been a gap immediately and has led Togo since then. What else is the meaning of immortality?

Nigeria can improve on this. One man can be president; his son governor; his brother minister; his grandchildren commissioners.

The president can even combine all those posts and positions if he wants. It will be answered prayers.

This is a satire, but sometimes words fail the satirist and his satire. Satire itself is a dangerous thing because sometimes it stops being seen for what it is. But on this, I double down and hiss on reason and good judgment. This is the age of wisdom, I cling to the tail of the elephant of the aged, he alone can take us up the mountain before us.

In ‘As You Like It’, Shakespeare’s Jaques delivers the locus classicus on the seven ages of man. Life, Shakespeare’s character says, unfolds in seven acts; he calls them “ages”. First comes the helpless infant, “mewling and puking” and crying in a nurse’s arms; then the reluctant schoolboy, weeping and creeping to class with a shining face. Next, the lover, scribbling and sighing over verses, love poems, to his beloved; followed by the fiery soldier, proud, quick to quarrel, chasing fleeting glory: “A soldier, / Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, / Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, / Seeking the bubble reputation /Even in the cannon’s mouth.” Then appears the wise judge, full of proverbs and dignity, his form rounded by comfort. Then age steals in, turning him into a thin, slippered old man, his once-bold voice now trembling and shrill. At last, the curtain falls on all, a return to infancy, “second childishness” and forgetfulness, bereft of sight, sound, taste, and self:

“Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion;

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

For all enemies of age, I render, in modern English, the last stage in the passage above, Act II, Scene VII:

“The final stage of life

that ends this strange and eventful journey

is a return to childishness and complete forgetfulness;

without teeth, without eyes, without taste, without anything at all.”

The Shakespearean last stage is the age of nothing and nothingness. That is the age of our leaders. In nothing, nothing is bad. We love our own old age, we want it as long as it is Idi Bebere, the voluptuous, supple waist of Olajumoke.