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OPINION: Ooni, Alaafin And Yoruba’s Endless War

Published

2 months ago

September 1, 2025

By Lasisi Olagunju

A race of giants. The Yoruba had been producing monumental men and women long before Nigeria became a country. Professor Adelola Adeloye’s ‘African Pioneers of Modern Medicine’ (1985) has a list of eleven Nigerians who qualified as medical doctors between the 19th century and 1901. Ten out of the eleven were Yoruba. Check out their names and the dates they qualified: William Davies (1858), Nathaniel King (1874), Obadiah Johnson (1884), John Randle (1888), Orisadipe Obasa (1891), Leigh-Sodipe (1892), Oguntola Sapara (1895), R. Akinwande Savage (1900), C. C. Adeniyi-Jones (1901) and W. Cole (1901). Those are the Yoruba ten.

Chief Obafemi Awolowo, in his autobiography, described the Yoruba as “a fastidious, critical and discerning people.” As trailblazers, their enviable record of being pioneers goes beyond medicine; it is in every field. Again, look at these lines distilled from A. G. Hopkins’ ‘A Report on The Yoruba, 1910′ published in 1969: Henry Carr, born in Lagos in 1863, was the son of a freed slave with Egba provenance; he got a B.A. in 1885 with honours in mathematics and the physical sciences and played pivotal roles in early Lagos’ political life. Obadiah Johnson was the son of a liberated slave from Oyo who was born in Sierra Leone in 1849, took a B.A. in 1879, went back to school in England, qualified as a doctor in 1884 and returned to Lagos in 1886 to play great roles in the history of medical practice in Nigeria and in the cultural history of the Yoruba. Christopher Sapara-Williams, son of an Ijesha man with strong Egba connections, was born in Freetown in 1855. He was called to the English Bar in 1879 becoming the first Nigerian to become a lawyer. “He settled in Lagos in 1888, established a thriving legal practice, and became prominent in the political and social life of the town.” E. H. Oke was a senior official in the Legal Department of the Lagos government of the early 20th century. He authored ‘A Short History of the United Native African Church: Part 1, 1891 to 1903’ published in 1918. Adegboyega Edun (1860-1930) “was a Methodist minister and schoolmaster who became Principal of the Wesleyan Boys High School in Lagos from 1893 to 1902, when he was appointed Secretary to the Egba United Government. W. T. G. Lawson was the son of a (Yoruba) government interpreter in Sierra Leone. He qualified as a civil engineer and was Assistant Colonial Surveyor in Lagos from 1879 to 1886, when he retired from government service.” Of course, you and I know that Yoruba’s legacy of firsts was carried over into the 20th century; we are in the 21st and the facts are still here, notorious.

A people with this pedigree should normally be above petty squabbling. But that is not so with the Yoruba; they drop the elephant and go after crickets. You would want to ask what their problem is. My friend and Punch columnist, Abimbola Adelakun, told me yesterday that it was “the curse of enlightenment”; the afflicted knowing enough to paralyse themselves. They have the dubious blessing of what my teacher, Professor Adebayo Williams, recently described as a “squabbling and dissolute elite.” They routinely fight themselves over nothing.

On Monday, August 18, 2025, a needless statement was dispatched from Oyo to Ile Ife over a chieftaincy title given to an Ibadan man by the Ooni of Ife. Just as it happened in c1793 in Apomu market, the statement from Oyo has turned out the spark needed by those angling to rekindle the blaze that burnt the past.

The Yoruba are supposed to be the well-clothed moin moin, but they behave more like akara, naked and caked. They are daily exposed to the elements by their knack for division, friction and discord. They get bent and broken by what Vera Schwarcz calls the “accumulated weight of outworn habits.” It means very little that they are well-taught and knowledgeable with more than two centuries of advantage over their neighbours. They rarely collectively profit from their endowments. It is a curse.

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I am an Oyo-Yoruba. I have watched in horror as some Yoruba persons, self-interested actors, use the opportunity to say what had always been unsaid, and should be unsaid. You would think this house is another Tower of Babel, or the very abode of Eris, the Greek goddess of strife and chaos. Nothing that binds the family together has been left unquestioned. Some have even extended the war to the Yoruba language and its dialects. They sweat to define what is standard and substandard; what is superior and what is inferior and the implications for the users.

For 100 years (1793 to 1893), the Yoruba fought the Yoruba, neighbour plundered neighbour, brother sold brother into slavery. It took a superior power from outside, the British, to impose peace on that race of discord. If Nigeria disintegrates today and each ethnic group goes its way, the Yoruba will most likely resume their internecine wars almost immediately. That is my conclusion after weeks of watching and monitoring reactions to the unfortunate simmering supremacy spat between people who claim to support the palace of the Ooni of Ife and that of the Alaafin of Oyo, and their tributaries.

What I have seen and heard in the last three weeks evokes unsettling echoes of the Yoruba civil wars of the late 18th and the 19th centuries when obas, princes and generals turned their energies inward and left the nation vulnerable to external forces. You hear and read some comments and gasp. Even where you thought you would meet wisdom, you got there and saw its opposite sitting regal, holding court. You would think the resolution of a supremacy war between the Alaafin of Oyo and the Ooni of Ife is the elixir that would cure today’s security-sick Yoruba, fix their terribly bad roads and feed their hungry. They excitably keep the ember of war glowing. Wisdom has not whispered to those doing the fanning that when brothers waste their strength and dissipate energies fighting each other, strangers seize the inheritance. It happened in the 19th century. Then, as now, the struggle was less about destiny and deliverance; it was more about pride and prejudice with devastating consequences for the collective.

The Yoruba energy and intellect fascinated the white man right from the first contact. Gary Lynn Comstock of the University of Chicago Divinity School, USA, wrote in ‘The Yoruba and Religious Change’ (1979) that “of all the societies in sub-Saharan Africa, the Yoruba of south-western Nigeria are one of the most extensively studied native group.” Toyin Falola and Ann Genova in ‘Yorùbá Identity and Power Politics’ (2006) call our attention to the fact that as far back as “1897, Samuel Johnson wrote in the preface to his pioneer work, ‘The History of the Yorubas,’ (that) educated natives of Yorùbá are well acquainted with the history of England and with that of Rome and Greece…”

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They have all these, yet, they fight dirty in the mud like pigs. Their distant ancestors preached moderation even in ennobling pursuits. They told their young to “never stay too long on the farm like hopeless slaves (and) never stay too long at home like the miserably lazy.” But in matters of power and politics, they are extremists. Today as in the past, they fight civil wars and ignore the glaring reality of their present dire situation. More than it was 122 years ago, today’s Yoruba country is hemmed in by far graver existential challenges: economic, political, security, and a generational crisis of values. Yet, what excites their political and traditional elite is which antiquated throne is senior to, or more ‘imperial’ than others. Wisdom has not told the feuding race that to stoke embers of rivalry between two thrones that should embody unity and wisdom is to indulge in a needless diversion from the urgent work of survival and renewal.

Their fathers said “if we don’t forget the bickering of yesterday, we will have no playmate.” Yet, the Yoruba (groups) remain captive of their history of wars and bloody bickering. They worship the past and pour libations to exaggerated stories and histories. But we’ve been told that “all history is tendentious, and if it were not tendentious, nobody would write it. History is therefore never history, but history-for.” Hidemi Suganami, Professor of the Philosophy of International Relations, opens his ‘Stories of War Origins: A narrativist theory of the causes of war’ with that two-sentence quote. He credits the first sentence to R. G. Collingwood’s ‘The Idea of History’ (1994) and the second to C. Levi-Strauss’ ‘The Savage Mind (La Pensee sauvage)’, published in 1972. Both lines remind the reader of Robert Cox’s much-quoted statement: ‘Theory is always for someone and for some purpose.” And it leads me here to ask why the Yoruba people tell or write (or rewrite) their histories.

The Yoruba forget nothing and remember everything. Professor Toyin Falola, in his ‘A Research Agenda on the Yoruba in the Nineteenth Century’ (1988) notes this fact. He writes that “the twentieth century inherited some of the unresolved issues of the nineteenth century, notably problems of intergroup conflicts; competition for power among individuals and lineages; redefinition of functions and criteria for chieftaincy titles, etc.” He adds that “communities with turbulent experiences have continued to remember these in their relations with others.” What we’ve seen since the latest Oyo vs Ife ‘war’ of words has its root in those “unresolved issues of the nineteenth century.”

H. G. Wells wrote ‘The War That Will End War’ (1914). The title of that book was immediately applied to the First World War as “the war to end all wars.” But the Second World War started eleven short years after the first. The Yoruba started a civil war in 1878 and for the next 16 years killed and maimed one another. They boasted that the 16-year-war was the war to end all wars. They were wrong. The war has not ended, it is still on in 2025; you have it being fought in inter-communal skirmishes; in sub-ethnic and obaship supremacy contests.

I read R. C. C. Law’s ‘Yorubaland and its History’ and the reviews therein of ‘Yoruba Warfare in the Nineteenth Century’ by J. F. Ade Ajayi and Robert Smith; ‘Owu in Yoruba History’ by Akin Mabogunje and J. D. Omer-Cooper; ‘Revolution and Power Politics in Yorubaland 1840-1893; Ibadan expansion and the rise of Ekitiparapo’ by S. A. Akintoye; ‘The Political Development of Yoruba Kingdoms in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’ by Peter C. Lloyd; and ‘Yoruba Towns and Cities: an enquiry into the nature of urban social phenomena’ by Eva Krapf-Askari. R. C.C. Law reviewed those works and zeroed in on Akintoye’s submission that the successful revolt of the north-eastern Yoruba (the Ekiti, the Ijesa, and the Igbomina) against the rule of Ibadan in 1878-93 determined “that no one Yoruba state would (again) attain the position of primacy earlier enjoyed by Oyo.” The present pushing and shoving should be read as an attempt to assert or put a lie to that determination.

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If you are implicated in this crisis that started three weeks ago, I urge that you calm down, reflect deeply and ask what benefits will accrue from this dog-eat-dog war of histories. In the present controversy as in all previous ones, I see manipulation and exploitation of history. I see attempts being “made to take political decisions which did not recognize the nineteenth-century changes.” I see history, particularly of the 19th century, being put to different uses by the disparate peoples and interests in Yorubaland. This insight is not mine; it belongs to Professor Falola who notes in the 1988 piece cited above, that “the ‘new Oyo empire’ of the twentieth century benefited from the achievements of the Old Oyo empire before the nineteenth century; (that) Ibadan suffered political decline because of the interpretation that it was a satellite of Oyo with rulers whose appointments were sanctioned by the Alaafin; (that) Ile-Ife ignored its military defeats and humiliation in the nineteenth century and quickly resorted to the Oduduwa myth to attain political prominence and (that) those who had no claim to previous glories, whether on the basis of pre-1800 power or myth, (have) adopted several other innovative strategies.

I am not done with the historian, Falola. He reminds us that in the last century, “traditions played a dominant role” in Yoruba politics, but often not in their purest sense. Rather, what different subgroups stressed were those aspects of history that could best serve their “sectarian and political advantages.” Thus, Ibadan, seeking legitimacy for the Olubadan title and later a crown, popularized the myth of Lagelu, an alleged Ife prince and founder of the city, even though, in Falola’s words, Ìbàdàn’s early settlers were “Oyo-Yoruba refugees.” Oyo itself, after relocating under Atiba to Ago Oja, downplayed the new order while clinging to the grandeur of the old. It still does. The Ijesa, for their part, highlighted their imperial past to assert superiority “over their neighbours (including Ife),” conveniently ignoring myths that would place them in a subordinate lineage to Ile-Ife. Ile-Ife,
as stated earlier, “ignored its military defeats and humiliation in the nineteenth century and quickly resorted to the Oduduwa myth to attain political prominence.” Across Yorubaland, even communities of relatively recent origin have invented traditions to trace their roots to Oduduwa, all in a bid to “derive certain political advantages.” Falola’s conclusion is that such “deliberate distortions of history and traditions” were strategies of survival in the turbulent eras of the past.

If 2025 feels like 1825 in crises and controversies, it would mean that two hundred years of Yoruba education and civilisation are a waste. Unprofitable exertions and meaningless supremacy contests between revered thrones repeat a dangerous cycle. The Yoruba elite should reflect and ask themselves if fetishising history and myths is the solution to insecurity and poverty that wrack their people’s present and imperil their survival. The wise does not fight himself. Enough should be enough.

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

Published

5 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

7 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.

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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?

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“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

7 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.