By Lasisi Olagunju

The audience at the 1903 (third year) lecture of the Royal African Society in London listened with rapt attention as African nationalist, Dr. Edward Blyden, took them back to antiquity when “the most enlightened nations of Greece, Asia, and Egypt” held the opinion that “God revealed himself only in Africa.” Great men of that period, including Alexander the Great, rushed to the great oracle of Africa to drop offerings and “learn the will of God.” A few centuries after that epoch, Blyden lamented, Africa, the “first home of God” where He “buried His great truths” had travelled full circle and had come to be identified by the ‘civilised’ world of the 19th century as “the last home of the devil.”

“Now, things have so changed that it is the opinion of some that God is everywhere except in Africa,” Blyden agonized in the lecture which was on ‘West Africa before Europe.’ He went on to predict that “Africa’s turn will be sure to come again” when it would reclaim its place as the “refuge for seers who see and for prophets who prophesy.” Blyden said when that time would have come, an utterly materialized and exhausted Europe would go back to Africa to learn about God. The lecture is in the July 1903 edition of the Journal of the Royal African Society, Volume 2.

Just a hundred years after that lecture, the Blyden prophecy has come true. We’ve reclaimed our place as “the first home of God”. Nigeria, which houses the highest percentage of Africa’s population, qualifies to be celebrated as the global “refuge for seers who see and for prophets who prophesy.” Across faiths, we incubate and hatch men of God and gods of men – in their thousands. We speak and act for God here without counting the costs.

There is something cool about setting precedents. The immediate past Oyo State Governor, the late Abiola Ajimobi, won a second term election in 2015 and pronounced himself Koseleri (it-has-never-happened-before). Nigerians enjoyed an unprecedented three-day leave from work last week. In some places, the holiday lasted the whole of the week. The abstinence from work was the country’s way of celebrating Muslims’ 30 days of total abstinence from day-time meals – and from all sins. Allowing one abstinence to provoke another abstinence made all of us pious and sinless. It was surreal. The holiday should have endured till eternity.

While the holiday lasted, some friends shared their sallah experiences with me. They thought another koseleri was happening in Yorubaland: their pentecostal Christian neighbours refused to eat their food. “They said it was sin to share in our feast,” one of them said, sadly. “That was not who we are”, another added. I told them it is not really a new strain in Yoruba Christianity. I have RCCG and Deeper Life friends who celebrate and dine with me during Ileya. I also have RCCG and Deeper Life friends in whose mouths our good old eran Ileya (sallah ram meat) has lost its holiness. The twists started before the close of the last century when pentecostal Christianity came in costumes of fundamentalism.

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Can the Yoruba Christian really avoid sharing things Islamic? If you are a pentecostal Yoruba Christian and you will see it as a sin to celebrate the next Sallah with me, what you will need to throw away will be more than my food. You will stop praying entirely in Yoruba because almost all the key words in the established Christian payers are taken from Arabic/Islamic texts. You will stop calling prayer ‘adura’ because it is from the Muslim ‘Du’a’. You will stop using the word ‘aanu’ (mercy) because the word is rooted in an Arabic word. A new word has to be coined for alafia (peace, wellbeing) because its root is also Arabic. Sermon will stop being called ‘iwaasu’ because it is from the Arabic ‘wa’z’. You will, furthermore, need to change your wardrobe and come up with new designs beyond what you call Yoruba dresses.

British Africanist J.D.Y. Peel’s ‘Christianity, Islam and Orisa Religion’ published in 2016 addresses some of these on pages 162 and 163. It says the agbada dress which you proudly assert as yours is a donation from Islam, perhaps from persons more northerly than northern Nigerians. Anglican missionary, Henry Townsend, in 1847 saw agbada’s acceptance and growing popularity and wrote that the “Mohammedan costume is become very fashionable with the young and gay” and “is by no means put on as a religious peculiarity.” If you read David Heathcote’s ‘The Embroidery of Hausa Dress (1977), cited by R.O.R. Kalilu’ (1997), you will have a clue that the embroidery (jakan) on your agbada “developed from Mali (and) is associated with Quranic scholars and teachers.” You must have heard the saying: Ise agbada kii se Imale (poverty of lack of agbada does not afflict a Muslim). I heard that from the genius of Yoruba Sakara music, Yusuf Olatunji.

There is no escaping the oneness of the world. Do the anti-Muslim pentecostal realize that Bible chapters and verses are numbered in Arabic numerals 1,2,3 etc. The word, ‘Algebra’ is from the Arabic al-jabr. Indeed, the whole “method of equation solving” in Mathematics is from Arabic.

When we speak about what Lord Lugard did with Southern and Northern Nigeria in 1914, we use the word ‘amalgamation.’ Scholars have agreed that ‘amalgamate’ descends from the Arabic al-malghama which means what ‘amalgam’ means.

In your everyday lives, you can’t escape words that have Arabic ancestors. The ‘sugar’ in your tea is from the Arabic word ‘sukkar’; cotton is from ‘qutum’, your overcoat got its ‘jumper’ name from the Arab’s ‘juppa.’ We can go on and on and conclude that it is pointless and fruitless for my Yoruba pentecostal friends to seek to run away from dining with Muslims and their Islam.

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Now, the insular Christian has ideological bedmates in Yoruba Islam. There is this Imam in Ogbomoso shown online last week emitting fire and pronouncing everyone outside Islam as hell-bound. His voice was divisively loud and his penal tongue baleful. I listened to him and wondered where he was coming from. I once discussed clerics like this with the late Alaafin of Oyo, Oba Lamidi Adeyemi. “Taa lo ko won ni kewu (who taught them Quran/Arabic?)” was the oba’s rhetorical response to our worries. True, we should ask questions of competence when we hear such papal pronouncement from supposedly learned people. What he said was not what my Mallam taught me in Madrasha. If God had willed, He would have made all of humanity to belong to one nation (see Quran 5:48; see Quran 42:8); and one religious community (Quran 16:93). But, in His wisdom, God didn’t; instead, “to every people”, he sent “an apostle” (Quran 10:47). The Yoruba forbid saying or hearing what that Imam said about other religions. It is unYoruba to speak the language of perdition – they say man is not God.

It is in the character of the Yoruba to celebrate persons who speak with decorum. The highly regarded, thoughtful Chief Imam of Offa, Alhaji Muhyiddin Husayn, was at a Laylatul Qadr event in Ogbomoso a few days to last week’s sallah. His sermon at the programme was a tour de force on how to have a calm sea of peace. I heard him warn against unguarded utterances. He told the Chief Imam of Ogbomoso to win acceptability with character and close his running tap of hot words: “It is when you stop uttering words that words will stop uttering themselves,” he told the Imam. He added that bad words can’t win wars: “if you’ve seen war before, you will fear war” and “war knows no friend.” He cited examples with his own ascendancy experience. “The years I spent warding off attacks were enough as a man’s full tenure,” he said. But, he added, you would win if your tongue is bridled, if you do right and respect elders and pay hate with love. “One can gain an office with force”, he counseled, “but it takes patience and wisdom to sit there in peace.” Words, they say, draw kola nut from the pocket and can also draw sword from the pouch. The consequence of not listening to reason is having one’s milk spilt and the mug broken.

Ask master-potters if refiring can make whole again a broken pot. It is there in the experience of our fathers that a pot once broken, cannot be mended. There are several lethal pronouncements in Yoruba history with the pot metaphor at the centre. That is why we emphasize peace and unity in all our affairs.

The story of Islam and the Yoruba is the story of how leaf becomes soap. Scholars from the earliest of times have always marveled at how the Yoruba seamlessly combine opposition and accommodation when it comes to religion and religious matters. Fundamentalist Christianity and radical Islam have neither comfortable bed nor cushion seat to relax and flourish in Yorubaland. And they won’t tomorrow. There is no family without both Muslim and Christian wings. In books and arts, we encounter moderation and cross-religious handshakes that emphasize the Yoruba moderation in matters of faith.

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I read Gbadebo Gbadamosi’s ‘Odu Imale: Islam in Ifa Divination and the Case of Predestined Muslims’ published in the Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, June 1977. In it, I encountered discussions on Ifa verses which tell us of Yoruba Muslim clerics, “their dress, travels, and the patronage which they enjoy from the people.” Ifa speaks of “Babamale ‘Bewu gereje/ti yio fi gbogbo aye se ofe je (the Muslim man/ who wears voluminous garment/ who will have the whole world as free bounty).” I read Razaq Kalilu’s ‘Bearded Figure with Leather Sandals: Islam, Historical Cognition And the Visual Arts of The Yoruba’ ((1997). Here, the author asks the reader to note earlier works which suggest that Sango, the third Alaafin of Oyo, was “favorably disposed to Muslims” to the extent that he got an oriki: “Ogbori odo s’aluwala ‘male (He that sits on a mortar to perform ablution like the Muslim.”

Whether Christian, Muslim or nothing, humanity is one – or supposed to be one. One hundred and fifty nine years ago, Harvard-trained American scientist, Pliny Earle Chase (1820-1886), sought to use similar words and word-sounds found in Yoruba and other ‘world’ languages to prove what he called the “universal brotherhood” of man. In a 39-page seminal article published in an 1865 edition of the ‘Transactions of the American Philosophical Society,’ Chase did a painstaking comparison of some Yoruba words and word sounds with some others found in Arabic, Latin, Greek, English, Hebrew, Chinese, German, Coptic, Gothic, French, Dutch, Egyptian, Italian, Finnish, etc languages. He examined similarities in sound and meaning of prefixes, suffixes and midfixes found common across Yoruba and those other languages. He, in particular, draws our attention to what he calls “the marvelous grammatical affinity that exists between the Yoruba, Egyptian, and Coptic Languages.” Copiously using T.J. Bowen’s ‘Grammar and Dictionary of the Yoruba Language’, he argues that it could not have been mere fortuitous occurrence of coincidences that “auro” (owuro)- morning/dawn in Yoruba is “aurora” (dawn) in Latin, just as “awari” (search) in Yoruba shares sound and meaning with the English word “aware”. He writes that there is “oro” (wealth) in Yoruba just as its Latin sound-mate, “aurum”, means gold. Chase notes with considerable interest that the word ‘duro’ means “to stay” (or stand firm) in Yoruba, and ‘duro’ in Latin means hard, harden, toughen, become stern. Incidentally, I also found that there is a similar Hebrew word, ‘dura’ which, among others, means ‘endurance.’ Chase’s conclusion is that humanity is one vindicating the Biblical assertion that “God hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth” (Acts, 17:26).

The world lounges under a fatal canopy. You should be following the escalated bloodshed in the Middle East. The standards and the double standard. It may still get worse. Just as it is in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, carrion birds are hooting at noon; ravens, crows and kites are flying above the “sickly” world. But, what we need is love to defeat war. And, we will have this if we are able to take care of the devil in race and religion. It is difficult. Daniel Defoe, in his ‘The True-Born Englishman’ (1701) writes that “Whenever God erects a house of prayer,/ The Devil always builds a chapel there; /And ’twill be found, upon examination (that) / The latter has the largest congregation.”

By Suyi Ayodele

Nigeria’s most celebrated social deviant, Idris Olanrewaju Okunneye, also known as Bobrisky, has been in the news in the last two weeks. Apart from the controversial contest the 33-year-old man from Ogun State, won recently, when he was adjudged as the “Best Dressed Female”, he had a date with the law last week. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) had picked him up in his Lagos home and arraigned him on charges bordering on abuse of the Naira and others. EFCC, in its testimony before Justice Abimbola Awogboro of the Federal High Court, Ikoyi, Lagos, accused the cross-dresser of “spraying” various sums of money ranging fromN400,000 to N50,000 at various social events within Lagos. The Commission’s witness, one ASE Bolaji Temitope Aje, told the court how the Commission “Based on the intelligence, the EFCC set up the Special Operations Team to observe and monitor activities of individuals, who are involved in the habit of mutilating the Naira.” The team, Aje added, came across videos of where Bobrisky was “spraying” money and was arrested. He added that the cross-dresser, when confronted with the videos, admitted that he was the one in them. Bobrisky did not deny the charges and was summarily convicted by the court and remanded in EFCC custody pending his sentencing today, Tuesday, April 9, 2024. Unfortunately for him, today is a public holiday!

In pleading for leniency, Bobrisky asked the court to show him mercy and give him a second chance. “I am a social media influencer, with five million followers; and in all honesty, I was not aware of the law. I wish I can be given a second chance to use my platform to educate my followers against the abuse of the Naira. I will do a video on my page and educate people on that. I will not repeat the offence again. I regret my action.” He pleaded. Ever since his conviction, a lot of people have reacted to the Bobrisky-EFCC drama. Many believed that the cross-dresser is being punished more for his deviant behaviour than the crime of Naira abuse for which he was convicted. A prominent Nigerian, Dr. Chidi Odinkalu, former Chairman of the National Human Rights Commission, hit the EFCC hard by describing the Commission’s evidence against Bobrisky as “idleness or an abuse of power.” The EFCC fired back at Odinkalu and asked him to exercise “decorum and responsibility”, as it warned that: “The Commission would not hesitate to take appropriate legal actions against such uncouth commentaries against its lawful mandate by anyone. Odinkalu is warned and advised to ventilate his rascally opinions more responsibly in future situations.”

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I find the EFCC outburst against Dr. Odinkalu as most unnecessary because I believe in his assertion that the EFCC’s evidence against Bobrisky is not just borne out of “idleness and abuse of power”, it is equally lazy and most discriminatory. I have no doubt about the provision of Section 21(1) of Central Bank Act, 2007, and the penalties spelt out therein. The question to ask the EFCC in this matter is: did Bobrisky commit the crime of naira abuse alone? In the various videos the Commission said it showed to the cross-dresser and to which he admitted, was he alone? Did Bobrisky, in “spraying” the naira notes not have an accomplice? Was he not “spraying” the notes on someone, the musician? Should the one who received the ‘abused naira’ be spared while only the one who ‘abused’ it is made to face the music? Leaving that aside, can we ask where the EFCC was when the Olu of Owode-Egba in Ogun State, Oba Kolawole Sowemimo, abused the same naira early this year. While Bobrisky in the EFCC videos was caught “spraying” the naira, Oba Sowemimo sewed the naira notes and was decorating a Fuji musician, Wasiu Ayinde Marshal, who is also called KWAM 1, with the currency notes. Is the EFCC saying that it did not see the video, or are the two traditional rulers involved, KWAM 1 himself being the head of princes of Ijebuland, too big to be arrested and arraigned? So, what is the crime of Odinkalu in calling EFCC idle? If the Commission can close its eyes against a similar action by the two Ogun State traditional title holders, is it not an “abuse of power” if the Commission chose to go after Bobrisky alone? Isn’t that discriminatory and selective?

This takes us back to the argument that in arraigning and getting Bobrisky convicted, with a possibility of a jail term, the cross-dresser is being punished more for his deviant behaviour than the crime of abuse of the naira. For me, this argument is valid. I also hold that it is morally on the negative side. But funny enough, I don’t find it offensive. I think I love it; it is a welcome development! My argument. The Bobrisky menace is an epidemic that anything done to arrest it is good enough for me. The boy told the court that as “a social media influencer”, he had “five million followers.” That is a huge number if you ask me. How many of the number are children whose sexual orientations have changed as a result of Bobrisky’s influence? Our statutes do not recognise such deviant behaviour. This is why I feel very strongly that the government and the law enforcement agencies should come in and arrest this drift. Many parents are in pain today as a result of Bobrisky’s activities. And true to his appellation, his conducts are “risky’ to proper upbringing of our children. I have seen parents whose children are sexually deviant, agonising that they would have been more at home if those beautiful children of theirs are sexually promiscuous than going for the same sex partners! When a parent is on such an extreme edge, we ought to ask the laws to go after the Bobriskys of our era.

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Incidentally, Bobrisky did not start this culturally ‘risky’ behaviour. Before him was Uzoma Odimira, alias Area Scatter, who reigned in the early 70s, shortly after the civil war. Area Scatter, who dominated the entertainment scene in the Imo area of the South-East, was noted for his braided hair, heavy makeup and high-heeled shoes. His argument then was that being a cross-dresser, he wanted “to create awareness and promote tolerance for gender diversity.” Before he finally disappeared, Odimira was seen as a ‘complete woman’ on the claims that the gods gave him supernatural powers. The Nigerian nation tolerated him and he had quite a huge number of ‘followers’. In the Bobrisky’s era, we have the likes of Jay Boogie, who was born Daniel Anthony Nsikan; Fola Francis; WF James Brown, whose baptismal name is James Chukwueze Obialor, Miss Sahhara who was raised in the north and Noni Salma; and many others. We are moving gradually to a point that parents would be watching the evening news in their sitting rooms and their children would come in with persons of the same sex to be introduced to them as their fiancés or fiancées. And before we say the religious cliché, “God forbid”, we need to first forbid it as Bobrisky’s father did in June 2020, when he forbade the deviant from attending his (father’s) birthday party dressed as a woman. Guess what: the boy complied!

I have heard arguments that Bobrisky and his gang of socially disoriented children have the right to be who they want to be. I asked one of the advocates of Bobrisky fundamental human rights if he would allow Bobrisky to enter the same female toilet with his wife because Bobrisky dresses like a woman and has female features. His answer was an emphatic no! This is where we should start from. Let our women; our wives raise the alarm anytime a Bobrisky wants to enter the female convenience with them at our airports and other public places. If Bobrisky attempts to answer the call of nature using the gents, let the men around resist him because they cannot afford a woman to look at their genitals while doing the big or the small. I am not against her fundamental human rights. But his rights should not infringe on other people’s rights to decency and secrecy of their genitals. The EFCC was in a dilemma while deciding the facility to detain this ‘risky’ element. The Commission could neither lock him up in a female or male cell; Bobrisky was locked up in a ‘lone cell’. Of course, the Commission doesn’t have a gender-neutral cell. If Bobrisky is locked up in a female cell because s/he is a woman, there are associated risks for the genuine female inmates of the cell. If s/he is locked up in a male cell, the EFCC will be violating his/her fundamental human rights. And if the Commission decides to keep him in the open, it will be standing in contempt of the court order. Whichever way, it is confusing just as the cross-dresser has a confused sexual personality.

The Black man’s sexual orientation is in two folds. A child is either a male or a female; boy or girl and man or woman. There is no issue of cross-gender or gender neutrality. And the Black race is a civilised race. Our current challenges are as a result of how we abandoned everything that makes us unique as a people and go after practices that are alien to our enviable values. When a woman gives birth in Yorubaland, we congratulate her for surviving the dangers of childbirth. Thereafter, the question we ask next is: Ako abi Abo (is it a male or a female child)? I believe this is so with other tribes in Nigeria. I cannot say I am old enough, but in the few years I have spent on Mother Earth, I am yet to come across where a child is born and the people rejoice because it is of mixed sex – half male, or half female. I don’t dispute that there are some medical conditions that can result in a child having two sexual organs. I was only taught the concept of hermaphroditism in my Biology classes in secondary school. We were told then that it is a medical abnormality. I have not seen one, though. And when such a rare case occurs, I take a bet that the parents would be dead worried. I am talking about real African parents and not the ‘civilised’ parents of the Western world. The Holy Books (Bible and Quran) approve only male and female sexes. Genesis 1:27 says: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” The Quran recognises Adam and Hawwa. The Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him) explicitly condemned imitating the appearance of the opposite gender. How those who brought ‘civilisation’ to us now recognise lesbians, gays, transgenders and bisexuals as normal beats my imagination. How they took polygamy from us and replaced it with homosexuality and bestiality remains a mystery! That is not our culture; and more importantly, that is not how God ordained it. Unless we frontally confront the menace of Bobriskyism, we stand the chance of having many H/She offsprings. God FORBID!

By Lasisi Olagunju

In May, 1891, James Richard Jewett of Brown University, Providence, United States, presented a paper on ‘Arabic Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases’ to the American Oriental Society. The paper was eventually published as an article in that society’s journal in 1893. One striking line I picked in that paper last week is the author’s entry of what he calls Jiha’s Cow. He writes: “Jiha slaughtered his cow, sold the meat, and received his pay. After a while, he again demanded pay from each purchaser and received it. He kept doing this till he died.” What Jiha did would not be strange to you if you were a Nigerian. We pay many times and forever for a paradise long lost.

Nigeria is a low wall mounted by every goat. I see Jiha in how the regime we have treats us. Trending now is electricity apartheid that stratifies the haves and the have-nots. They call it electricity subsidy removal. They band and disband cities; they grade and degrade streets. They distribute darkness and allocate fanciful power hours. The favoured are queued up as Band A; the disfavored are petty men packed into other bands ending empty-handed with letter E. Families sob, businesses weep. Indeed, the regime’s Julius Caesar “doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus.” They reduce all to the emperor’s “underlings, …petty men (who) walk under his huge legs”. In response to our cries, they bid us to do what Shakespeare’s Romans do: “peep about to find for ourselves dishonorable graves.”

A gluttonous government eats with both hands and ten fingers while asking us to skip meals, and fast and pray for John Milton’s paradise regained. Rupert Russel, author of ‘Price War$’ would look at them and say they are ‘prophets’ and we are their scammed ‘followers.’ He would explain our situation with his “cargo cult” metaphor of visionary prophets and stupid, expectant followers. Phil Murray explains him: “The prophets share a vision that God will deliver ‘cargo’ in the form of goods but the followers must first offer some sacrifice in exchange. The prophets take the sacrificial food or money, but the cargo never appears.”

I know there are partisan optimists who still wait at the port for the illusory cargo and at the harbour for the crab of this regime to wink. But for me, it is enough on this domestic darkness and the banditry in our forest of demons.
I shift my gaze to the enemy outside.

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If you canter, trot or amble like a horse, the world will saddle you up. I see Jiha and his cow meat in how Nigeria and Nigerian businesses are treated by competition from outside. The outside is never tired of demanding payment for goods it never sold to us – and we keep paying. They did and do it in telecoms – the Globacom experience. The trending act is in aviation. Air Peace, a Nigerian airline, recently started operating the Lagos-London route. I read of hell being unleashed by the world’s lords of the sky.

I thought we were told that the sky has enough space for all birds to fly without clashing. It is no longer so. Or, it has never been so in the business of air travel. One Jide Iyaniwura, a passenger on Air Peace’s recent inaugural flight from Gatwick to Lagos, in a social media post, alleged that from what he saw on the day of the inaugural flight, the British government was intent on frustrating Air Peace out of the London route. He said: “British Airways and Virgin were the only airlines doing direct flight from Lagos to London before Air Peace joined. The British government will do everything within their power to truncate the effort of any Nigerian carrier trying to break into that market.” He provided clues and cited acts that suggested his conclusion. “It is a government-to-government fight. It is a British government versus the Nigerian government fight,” the passenger said while warning our leaders not to see it as a war between businesses.

Other observers say a war is on already from some established foreign airlines. Said to be leading the pack is expensive, elite British Airways. That should not be a surprise. The lion’s den is never free from bones. A behemoth company with imperialism as its foundational philosophy and ethos cannot be seen brooding any act of impudence from an upstart airline from Africa, its country’s inheritance. The lords on that route take the route as their bequest. Their mindset is rooted in history.

Sir Samuel Hoare was the British Secretary of State for Air from 1922 to 1929. He wrote in his Empire of the Air (1957:90) that he “saw in the creation of air routes the chance of uniting the scattered countries of the (British) Empire and the Commonwealth.” To him (and his country), air travel and route allocations were carefully etched and aimed at making sure that Great Britain did not “surrender in the air a paramountcy won on the ground by a generation before.” In other words, as elegantly couched by Hoare, the official British air travel policy was (and should still be) undergirded by the national desire to “make closer and more constant the unity of imperial thought, imperial intercourse and imperial ideals.”

Direct territorial acquisition of land that is not yours is colonialism. Garnish it with political and economic control from an outside power and you have the textbook definition of imperialism.

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Imperial Airways, the grandfather of British Airways, was set up as the “chosen instrument” to achieve England’s imperial agenda. Indeed, The Times of London of December 28, 1923 noted and emphasized that in the choice of name for that airline, ‘Imperial’ and not ‘National’ had been used as its label. For these details and more, I suggest you read (as I did) Robert McCormack’s ‘Airlines and Empires: Great Britain and the Scramble for Africa, 1919-1932 published by the Canadian Journal of African Studies in 1976. You will read in that piece how the first scheduled flight of Imperial Airways on its trunk route to Cape Town on January 20, 1932 was celebrated by a British newspaper as “an imperial event of outstanding importance.”

Ninety years ago (18 October, 1934) at the Chatham House, London, Lt. Colonel H. Burchall, General Manager of Imperial Airways, spoke on ‘The Politics of International Air Routes’. He warned that “any country which maintains regular air services over routes crossing foreign countries has to encounter many difficulties.” He added that of those difficulties, “none is greater than those presented by international politics for these are based upon the uncertain and shifting foundations of national prejudices and aspirations.” You would probably understand Burchall’s words better if you advert your mind to the fact that on that London route used to be Nigeria’s Arik, Medview and Bellview. The gods of the skies swat them; they closed shop.

There is a gush of ground calls for support for Air Peace in this war. They say it is patriotism to do so. Before the coming of Air Peace on the London route, flying became food only for the gods of cash. Virgin Atlantic increased its price for economy class to N2,353,200; its business class was N5,345,700. Turkish airlines’ economy class ticket for the Lagos-Istanbul -London route rose to N874,661 while the business class ticket jumped to N1,980,876. Nigerian travellers experienced same with British Airways, Delta, Lufthansa, KLM/Air France, Air Maroc and Ethiopian Airlines. Nigerians cried, wailed and waited for succour, none came. Air Peace’s entry and cheaper fares have now forced the gods to reconsider their judgement. Reports say the flying spirits have not only reduced their fares, they are weaponising them against the upstart from Lagos. They are charging fares lower than Air Peace’s. That is war, price war.

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Every war, including a price war, has an objective. A petrol station manager in the United States tells Strategic Pricing Solutions his own experience: “During the price war my company fought, consumers got some of the lowest gas prices in Dallas, but those low prices could not last. The end result for the consumer in that neighborhood was two of three gas stations on one corner going out of business, and as soon as they closed their doors, the remaining company raised prices higher than ever before.” That is what the dominant birds seek to do to the cattle egret. Their lowered prices are clippers for the wings of the competitor. The news will be very bad if Nigerians buy their guile. The Nigerian flyer will pay if the aliens win.

Those leading this war seek to prevent importation of aviation into their country from Nigeria while exporting theirs to Nigeria. It happened in other sectors, particularly in telecoms. It is still happening. What kind of trade and economic relations opens my door for your goods and closes yours to mine? American economist, William D. Grampp (1914-2019), in his ‘The Third Century of Mercantilism’ (published in the Southern Economic Journal in April 1944) argues that the prohibition of imports should be seen also as a prohibition of exports. This, he argues, is “not only because such protective devices lead to retaliatory measures but because exports must pay for imports and imports must pay for exports.” The greedy does not think so. They do to us here what they won’t accept in their home.

At the beginning of the GSM/mobile telephony story in Nigeria, the two foreign companies licensed to operate here gave everyone pills that were as bitter as their ineffectual properties. Ebenezer Obadare, a professor and researcher, puts it succinctly in his ‘Playing Politics with Mobile Phone in Nigeria’ published in March 2006. Obadare writes that in the first two years of mobile telephony in Nigeria, Nigerians suffered and complained of “exorbitant tariffs, poor reception, frequent and unfavourable changes in contract terms, and arbitrary reduction of credits.” I experienced it.

FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Abuja And The Two Nigerias

In 2001, our national minimum wage was N5,500 but they sold their SIM cards for N30,000. I could not afford it – my salary was N21,000. They fixed their call tariff at N50 per. There was no saviour if your one-minute call strayed into 61 seconds -your credit would be down by two minutes and no tear shed would argue your case. A second’s call was a minute’s call and you must pay even if the call dropped. It was so bad that at a point, protesters redefined GSM as an acronym for “Grand Swindling Machine.”

Who were the edá rats behind that odious treatment? Foreigners who thought we deserved no more than slave treatment on our own soil. Obadare’s words are very apposite here. He writes that the foreign telecoms companies’ excuse “had been that it was impossible to offer customers per second billing until they attained ‘reasonable maturity’ or at least three years after the commencement of operations.” He continues: “However, following…. the introduction of Mike Adenuga’s Globacom, which gave its customers the per billing option on 29 August, 2003 (its first day of operation), Econet and MTN had no choice but to follow suit. Yet, they did not do this without attempting to claw something back- subscribers who opted to be billed on the per-second platform were made to pay a switchover fee of N300 each.” Obadare adds that one of the foreign operators offered its customers “100 free texts, many of which, ironically, did not reach their destinations.” Twenty one years after Nigerians defeated them through Globacom’s patriotic intervention, the outsiders have refused to forget. They still work and fight dirty.

They fleece Nigeria and escape sanctions. Their immunity is sourced from Nigeria’s peculiar self-hate and self-neglect. The forex crisis that today ravages Nigerians and Nigerian entities makes no sense to them. They make forex and ship them home to their owners. At a point in the decade before the last, the Central Bank of Nigeria complained loudly that the foreign companies did not allow their cash to stay for more than a few weeks in Nigeria “before they were converted to foreign exchange for one purchase or the other.” Since that decade up till now, their foot has remained slammed on the throttle; they do not think what is wrong is bad.

Do not blame them. Blame Nigeria that does not clothe its own from the ravages of dry winds from outside. If our government would not create heaven for us and for entities that belong to Nigerians, they should at least lead us away from the hell of hostile aliens. In the complex tapestry of adultery and concubinage, the Yoruba say the husband (the child’s father) is the one who runs round to wean his child from death. The man outside – the àlè – does not care if the child dies. The ‘enemy’ are not of here, their love is for where their umbilical cords lie buried. Nigeria is the cow tethered (by us) for them to milk. We think our charity should forever begin from outside. The Arabs say that a borrowed garment will not warm, and if it warms, it will not last.

Does international relations still have reciprocity as a reward for acceptable behaviours and as a check on aberrance? If you scratch my back I should scratch yours. If you take an eye, I take an eye. Why not have Nigerian enterprises in South Africa making what MTN and MutiChoice make here? Why should it be fatal for a Nigerian airline to operate in London when British Airways and Virgin come in here and go out with billions in their pocket? It can’t be sweet if one side picks the bill all the time. It is like subsidy withdrawal by this government of highly subsidized people.
They wring us out in the sink. We are where they put us – spread out in the sun to dry. Their parrot speaks only of received benefits. It does not give.
Contemporary Egyptian-American poet and artist, Suzi Kassem, in her ‘The Unforgiven’ writes on people “who take and don’t give. The kind to whom you give and give, and they keep asking. The kind to whom you give and give and they say you gave nothing. The kind who have never offered anything but act like they’re the ones providing EVERYTHING. The rat that never gives back yet is so quick to attack – because they think the word TAKING seriously means GIVING.”