By Lasisi Olagunju

Monday morning on the pulpit can be very surreal. Today’s lesson is from Camara Laye’s ‘A Dream of Africa’, a 1966 novel of prophecy, the black man and his future. A young man called Fatoman returns for a two-week vacation in Guinea after six years of exile in Paris. He returns to a country whose idea of mystery and power “are no longer to be found where they used to be”; a nation badly fissured by violent partisan politics.

Crestfallen, he goes to his goldsmith father who has lost his trade to wooden objects that lack spirits. Fatoman’s father gives him a sacred white ball of cowrie shells. Father tells son: “Put that inside your pillow-case tonight and ask God yourself to enlighten you about the future of our native land.”

Then he sleeps and in an all-night dream the young man finds himself in prison. He sees what eyes see but the mouth fears to utter. But no word is too big that a knife is needed to slice it. Fatoman wakes up the following morning and tells his father what he saw: “I saw a people in rags and tatters, a people starving to death, a people who lived in an immense courtyard surrounded by a high wall, a wall as high as the sky. In that prison, force was the only law; or rather I should say, there was no law at all. The people were punished and sentenced without trial. It was terrible, because those people were the people of Guinea, the people of Africa!”

Dreams are dangerous, especially when told to the winds. Camara Laye would later die in exile in 1980, another writer punished by history for seeing too much and saying too much. Writers have always been prophets; knowingly or unknowingly, their words often hit the bull’s eye beyond boundaries. The people in the dream are not merely Guineans. Looking at what democracy has done to us, I say they are Nigerians.

Everyone is in a cage built by democracy and democrats. The ruling party has cells for its various inmates. There is hardly any escaping the wall. The warders are the big boys; strong, scented soil men.

The ruling party and the opposition are a consortium of prisons where ambitions are either consummated or cremated. Watch the party primaries across all platforms that are permitted to live.

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Yet, the real war will be fought beyond party walls. Southern Nigeria is not prepared for a northern president so soon after Muhammadu Buhari’s eight years. This month and the next will test the tendons of this nation. The party called NDC fired the opening shot two days ago. At the weekend, it played the North-South game of thrones; it zoned the presidency to the South for four years only.

My Igbo friends spent the whole of the weekend celebrating the NDC decision. They thought and still think the NDC ticket is already Peter Obi’s. But the NDC belongs to an Ijaw man who acquired it for a purpose. Goodluck Jonathan is an Ijaw man. Watch him. He is consulting towards 2027. The NDC belongs to his brother, and all politics is local.

American journalist, Chris Matthews, wrote ‘All Politics Is Local’. He said he had the good fortune to be present in November 1989 as the Berlin Wall was being torn down. While there, he interviewed a young East German:

“What is freedom?” he asked the young man.

“Talking to you,” the East German said without pause. “Two weeks ago I couldn’t do it.”

To the ‘imprisoned’, talking to a journalist was the very definition of ‘freedom.’ But the same question was answered differently by several people the journalist interviewed.

So, because all politics is local, regime campaigners asked me to support President Bola Tinubu for re-election. I asked them to tell me why I should. They said it was because he was my brother. I asked them to ask my brother why his first term closed its eyes to the very bad roads to his brother’s state. They said bad roads were not enough to deny one’s daughter the blessing of bosomy beads. They invoked the idi bebere chant of waists and coral beads. They said they would not use my reason to decide where to cast their votes.

I told them that what I want from democracy is not necessarily what they want from it. That is why boys of the same mother do not contribute money to marry one wife.

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You cannot wax imperial and expect the street to hail you. Small matters matter as much as big things in politics. The one who attends to basic things about the people gets the basic attention from them. In the 1970s, one U.S. senator cultivated the image of being “every bit… solicitous…” For the sake of politics and power, with him, “no chore was too small… If you took out a pencil, he’d sharpen it.”

Tinubu started his presidency spending heavily on projects that pleased his friends’ fancy while neglecting the backyard of his poor relations. As road users groaned on broken federal roads in the South West, he committed unimaginably vast resources to his Coastal Road. I once called it a road from somewhere to nowhere. That is what the road means to people where I live and where I work. You cannot take all the money to the coast and expect applause from the hinterland. There is no monkey in Idanre again.

But two weeks ago, politics appeared to have given the strong man a change of heart. He presided over a meeting of his cabinet and awarded road contracts that may give the face of his regime a well-done political makeup. He remembered home.

Consider the geography of the approvals. Dualisation of the Ibadan–Ijebu-Ode Road, stretching 56 kilometres at a cost of N295 billion; the Osogbo–Akoda–Gbongan Road, 59.2 kilometres for N101 billion; and the Osogbo–Iwo–Ibadan Road. All in the South West. Other zones, East and North, got theirs. Like Thomas O’Neill, the 47th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Tinubu is translating a national contest “to the local, retail level.”

Presidents do not need roads; they fly. Which is why we must thank the eagle for remembering creations without wings. We thank those around him who reminded him that those roads exist. We only plead that these awards do not end as weightless paper roads designed as vote-catchers. They will indeed be weightless if they are not done before the elections, or they are started and abandoned after the elections.

An epochal governorship election will hold in Osun State in August this year. The incumbent, Ademola Adeleke, is recontesting and remains deeply rooted on the ground. It will take more than federal might to uproot him. In Oyo State, the incumbent governor, Seyi Makinde, has the state firmly in his grip; he is reportedly eyeing the president’s seat. Both governors are widely celebrated as high performers who belong to opposition parties. For the president’s party to make real impact here, therefore, it must have real positive things to show the people. It is not too late to do so.

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Which is why the contracts came at the right time. So, on paper, Tinubu’s contract approvals are infrastructure decisions—big, bold and long overdue. But in substance, they form a carefully plotted map of political warfare. When a government suddenly remembers roads that years of power ignored, it is not governance speaking; it is politics, with timing as its loudest voice. It is the language of a second-term conversation, spoken in concrete and kilometres. Yet, we say thank you. But please, do the work beyond the announcement.

This moment will be read beyond asphalt and contracts. Would these last-minute contracts have been awarded if everyone had migrated into the president’s lair? Politicians often take for granted those they consider their property. Like dogs, they would sleep themselves into death were it not for the fleas of defeat that keep buzzing, threatening to bite.

So, we must keep flashing our voter cards as potential red cards. Sometimes, it works.

In December 1927, Catherine Mitchell Taliaferro asked, “To vote or not to vote?” She ended her piece with a warning that still resonates: “No one ever cleaned a house by deserting it to insects and vermin.”

Taliaferro’s warning was simple: democracies decay when citizens surrender the public space to predators. Nigeria now enters a season in which power will test institutions, friendships and even nerves. From now till January next year, the dreams in Nigeria’s nights will be of wars and rumours of wars.

But is it all gloom without hope of redemption? I go back to Camara Laye’s Fatoman who tells his father: “I also dreamed of a Lion, a great Black Lion, who saved us, who brought back prosperity to us, and who made all peoples his friends.”

By Lasisi Olagunju

An old firm of architects with a rich history of project design and delivery sent a letter to the Sierra Leonean government on September 15, 1960. In that letter, the firm listed some of the projects it was handling in Nigeria. The multi-storey building called Cocoa House in Ibadan was on that list.

But the story of Cocoa House began long before that letter was written. The 26-storey structure did not emerge as an idle elephant on Ibadan’s skyline. It was Obafemi Awolowo’s answer to the need for a total-package commercial edifice. The architects described it as a multipurpose venture “aimed at providing office space as well as leisure facilities through a nightclub, swimming pool and cinema complex.”

That perhaps explains why the skyscraper came with a roof garden and has in its shadows, what the Transnational Architecture Group describes as “a circular building clad in mosaic, topped with a dome,” complete with “a splayed cantilevered entrance leading to a swimming pool with beautiful concrete diving boards and viewing gallery.”

For a government that had worked hard at providing free education for all, putting affordable healthcare and food security as priorities, with “life more abundant” as its central mantra, a space for work and leisure was simply the icing on the cake, the crown on a kingdom of values.

There were many more edifical monuments in brick and policy from that government. But because time kills witnesses to history, counter-historians are, today, on the prowl, poisoning public memory with insidious distortions. To what end, we can only speculate.

Late American sociologist and professor, C. Wright Mills describes “the present as history and the future as responsibility.” Because revisionists continue to undermine the past, poison the present, and threaten the future with deliberate inversions of truth, I put a date to what I started with and insert dates into what comes next.

The Nigerian government established a commission in April 1959 to project the country’s tertiary education requirements for the following 20 years. At the head of that commission was a British botanist and educator, Sir Eric Ashby. The commission did its work and submitted its report. But the report ignored the educational aspirations of the Western Region.

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Professor J. F. Ade Ajayi wrote in 1975 that the majority report of the Ashby Commission recommended that the jointly owned University College, Ibadan, was sufficient to serve the educational needs of the Western Region while other regions could have brand-new universities. The commission, Ajayi said, failed to grasp the urgency with which the West viewed universities as instruments of regional development.

The response of the Western Region under Chief Obafemi Awolowo was swift. The West immediately assembled its own team to work on its own university. The result was the establishment of the University of Ife, today known as Obafemi Awolowo University. Significantly, the solid policy foundation for that university had already been firmly laid before Awolowo left office as Premier of the Western Region on December 12, 1959.

The story of the University of Ife best explains Awolowo’s philosophy of education and development. Education, to Awolowo, was central to human and societal progress. He valued it, mobilised his people around it and funded it robustly throughout his years as Premier. Western Nigeria still preens like a peacock today because, at its foundation, it had a leadership that understood the meaning of knowledge and the place of education in the making of a valuable future. Those who lacked that grace are today a problem to everyone. As philosopher Alfred North Whitehead warned: “In the conditions of modern life, the rule is absolute: the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed.”

A remembrance service holds every May 9 in honour of Awolowo and in celebration of his good deeds. This year’s was held last Saturday with the Bishop of Remo and Archbishop of the Lagos Ecclesiastical Province of the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion), the Most Reverend Michael Olusina Fape, saying in fewer words, and in a more elegant way what I have struggled to say above: remembrance in all cultures comes either as honour or infamy. “Nobody will want Judas to come again. Only the righteous are remembered fondly for their deeds.”

“There’s something special about Chief Obafemi Awolowo,” the bishop continued. “He was a man of faith who believed in God wholeheartedly, and this reflected in his leadership, which impacted positively on the people. His name has continued to re-echo in all spheres of human endeavour — education, agriculture, health and many others.”

Preaching on the theme, “What Will You Be Remembered For?” the cleric, with a heavy heart, expressed disappointment with politicians who parade themselves as progressives and disciples of Awolowo without reflecting his values in governance. According to him, many who wear the progressive label today are, in reality, retrogressive because they make life harder for the people they govern.

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‘Progressive,’ like ‘democracy,’ has become a debased and abused word in Nigeria — loudly proclaimed, but rarely reflected in governance or in the condition of the people. I recommend ‘The So-Called Progressive Movement: Its Real Nature, Causes and Significance’ by Charles M. Hollingsworth to anyone watching today’s powers loudly parade themselves as progressives. Hollingsworth argued that the progressive movement was not always truly progressive in the historical sense, but often quite the opposite. Nor was it genuinely democratic or constitutional in spirit; rather, it was essentially a class movement aimed at the arbitrary control of other classes.

The heart of progressivism is selfless service; otherwise, the badge becomes a mask for masquerades plundering the sacred grove. No one becomes good suddenly. Goodness is rooted either in nature, in nurturing, or in both – upbringing and legacy.

As we remember Awolowo almost four decades after his transition, we should look at the tree from which came the beneficial fruit.

Writing under the pen name, John West, in the Daily Service of March 8, 1959, Alhaji Lateef Jakande gave remarkable insight into the making of the man called Awolowo:
“To understand Obafemi Awolowo, one must know his father. For he is a chip of the old block if anybody ever was. Those who knew him say David Shopolu Awolowo was one of the first Christian converts in Ikenne. He was converted in 1896. His industry was proverbial: he was honest, truthful, hated hypocrisy and never minced his words. A successful farmer and sawyer, Awolowo was also a capable organiser and was the president of about five thrift societies.

“David was not a politician. But his own father was; the latter having acquired a taste for public life from his grandfather. David’s father was head of the Iwarefa, the Executive Council of the Oshugbos who were the rulers of the town in those days. And in this office, he left a record of strict impartiality and firmness in the administration of justice. His own grandfather was also an astute politician. He was the Oluwo of Ikenne, next in rank to the Alakenne and head of the Oshugbos — and wielded great power and influence in the public life of his day.

“And so we have all the ingredients that go to make up the Awolowo we know. It is given to few to combine so well all the sterling qualities of his noble ancestors.”

That heritage produced a leader who understood both the psychology of colonial domination and the tragedy of post-colonial failure. In ‘Path to Nigerian Freedom’, published in 1947, Awolowo wrote with painful foresight: “Given a choice from among white officials, chiefs, and educated Nigerians, as the principal rulers of the country, the illiterate man, today, would exercise his preference for the three in the order in which they are named. He is convinced, and has good reason to be, that he can always get better treatment from the white man than he could hope to get from the chiefs and the educated elements.”

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How hauntingly relevant does that sound today? Across the country, 66 years after independence, swelling numbers of disappointed Nigerians now openly romanticise colonial order — not because colonialism was good, but because post-colonial leadership has failed to justify independence in the eyes of ordinary citizens. Some even sadly ask Donald Trump to come and rescue them from Nigeria the way Moses rescued the Israelites from Egypt.

George Grant (1918–1988) did a reading of Socrates and concluded that the price of goodness is the heavy burden borne by those who choose to stand for truth and morality in societies ruled by injustice. To be good in a bad world, Grant argued, often demands sacrifice, suffering and, sometimes, personal ruin. Awolowo did well and, because he did well in a perverse world, he had to endure severe emotional torture and physical restriction. He was falsely accused; witnesses were called against him before a commission of inquiry, yet he was denied the opportunity to cross-examine them. He suffered, but survived it all.

Where did he get the strength?

John West’s 1959 piece provides a window into that defining trait of Awolowo. According to him, Chief Awolowo had been taught by his father “the Shakespearean injunction, to beware of entering into a fight but once in, never to disengage himself from it until he has beaten his opponent or he himself has been worsted in the encounter.” John West added that anyone who had Awolowo as an opponent knew “to his cost that that lesson was not taught in vain.”

In one moment of deep emotional reflection, William Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar that, “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” Yet, in the case of Awolowo, the reverse is very true. Thirty-nine years after his transition, the good he did continues to define standards of leadership, governance and public morality in Nigeria.

Perhaps that is the ultimate meaning of legacy. It is someone’s deep thought that long after power fades, after wealth disappears and after noise quietens, what survives is character, vision and sacrifice. Awolowo understood this truth early. That is why, decades after his passing, Nigeria still invokes his name whenever leadership fails, whenever governance loses direction and whenever the people search for standards against which to measure those who govern them today.

A yet-to-be-identified student of the University of Benin was on Sunday evening shot dead by masked gunmen at the Ugbowo campus of the institution.

According to eyewitness accounts, the student was shot at close range inside his GLK Mercedes Benz, while two persons who were with him in the car sustained injuries. The masked gunmen fled the scene after carrying out the dastardly act.

The two other victims were said to have been rushed to the University of Benin Health Care center.

The victim had reportedly finished his exams in the Political Science department about an hour earlier before he met his tragic end.

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One student said, “They shot him at close range and there was no way he could have survived the attack. Two others who were in the vehicles were also injured and rushed school’s health care center.”

Operatives from the Ugbowo Divisional Police Headquarters were at the scene evacuating the remains of the victim.

The DPO of the Divisional Police Headquarters SP Emmanuel said it was still too sketchy and are yet to issue an official statement