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OPINION: Tell Your Papa As Spirit Of Rwanda’s Simon Bikindi

Published

7 months ago

April 13, 2025

By Festus Adedayo

In July, 2006, John Street, Emeritus Professor in the School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies at the United States’ University of East Anglia, received a call from Wilfred Ngunjiri Nderitu, Chairman of the Kenyan International Commission of Jurists (ICJ). Nderitu wanted Street to be an expert witness in a trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Simon Bikindi, a Rwandan musician, accused of inciting genocide via his songs during the 1994 Hutu-Tutsi war, was on trial. Bikindi, a Hutu from Gisenyi, same region where assassinated Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana, whose airplane was downed shortly before the genocide, was prominent in Rwanda in the 1980s and 1990s. By the time of the genocide, Bikindi had a renown of composing and singing popular music songs, a mixture of rap and folk songs. He was described as having “elliptical lyrics and catchy tunes” and sang them in English, French and native Kinyarwanda. Bikindi was alleged to have sang songs played on Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines which incited genocide. He was also alleged to have associated with the extremist Hutu paramilitary militia Interahamwe which butchered Tutsis in their thousands.

At the end of the prolonged trial, though convicted, Bikindi could not be indicted on account of his songs with the title, “Nanga Abahutu,” – “I hate these Hutus”. Thus, on charge of “conspiracy to commit genocide,” having “composed, sang, recorded or distributed musical works extolling Hutu solidarity and accusing Tutsis of enslaving Hutus,” he was acquitted. He was however convicted for complicity to commit genocide, the court having confirmed that, prior to the genocide, Bikindi “consulted President Habyarimana” and, “during the 100 days of genocide from 7 April to 14 July 1994, Bikindi participated personally in the killings, both in Kigali and Gisenyi prefecture, and helped to recruit and organize Interahamwe militias.” While sentencing Bikindi to 15 years imprisonment in December 2008, though proved beyond reasonable doubt that he participated in the killings, the court dismissed the charge that his songs had an inciting character. Corroborating this, Professor John Street, as well as the court, held that the charge of an inciting song was problematic “because of the troubling possibility of an artist being arbitrarily prosecuted for his work, art being open to a variety of interpretations.”

In his Music and politics, (2012) Prof Street says the divide between music and politics is very thin. Though this was not its first, the recent ban slammed by the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) on Eedris Abdulkareem’s newly released song, ‘Seyi, Tell Your Papa’ has roused Nigerians to look out through the window to see the unholy dalliance between the Nigerian state and a defunct USSR organisation similar to the NBC called Gosteleradio. In a letter to all radio stations in Nigeria, the NBC banned airing of the song on all Nigerian airwaves, according to it, for violation of the tenets of its regulatory code.

When a protest song like Abdulkareem’s is censored by political power, or criminalized as was done in the Bikindi song’s trial, it reveals the paranoia of states and political regimes. Music does not just provide power of political expression, says Street, music is that expression. Unlike the hen and egg causal mystery, it is bad governance, governmental deception and authoritarianism that give birth to protest songs and not vice versa. It reminds me of three traditional chiefs, the Jagùnnà, Àró and the Odofin. When flies bit the Jagùnnà, the two other chiefs pretended they did not hear but when the time comes and the Jagùnnà began to barbecue the flies, both Àró and Ọ̀dọ̀fin cry blue murder. So, why are Villa’s Àró and Ọ̀dọ̀fin scared now when the people’s plights find expression in the lyrics of their bards?

The issues Abdulkareem dwelt on in that song litter the Nigerian street. He sang: “Seyi, how far? I swear your papa, no try—there are too many empty promises. On behalf of Nigerians, take our message to him. Kidnappers dey kill Nigerians. Try to travel by road without your security makes you feel the pains of fellow Nigerians. You dey fly private jets, insecurity no be your problem”. The song centres on mis-governance, hopelessness, deception, despair, failure and tyrannical power. Abdulkareem merely implored Tinubu’s spoilt brat child, Seyi, who he berated for embarking on an infantile combing of Nigerian northern states in gleaming automobiles, to dispatch his message to his father. It is a bold and courageous deployment of music as a tool and weapon of political commentary. By the way, I am curious at why Seyi’s crowd-sourcing is centered in the north and not the south? Was it because he needed the Rankadede genuflection which he can get in the north but can never have in the south where such groveling before father and son is an anathema?

This takes me to Uganda. In Africa’s world of the 1970s, awash with military despotism, Uganda stood out. The famous unwritten cliche about Africa was, “look towards Uganda.” It was a country of hyperbole, metaphor, symbolism and oxymoron. In Uganda, you had the grotesque, the weird and the outright bizarre rolled into a single ball. It was a theatre of the surreal. Like the mountainous size of its despot, Idi Amin Dada, Uganda was huge on the laughable. For instance, to demonstrate his male power dominance, Dada sent love letters to Queen Elizabeth II of England, asking for her hand in marriage so that he could become the King of Scotland. He indeed conferred himself with the title, “Conqueror of the British Empire”. To demonstrate this, he physically rode his elephantine weight on the backs of British workers in Kampala. At the peak of his squabble with Tanzanian leader, Julius Nyerere, Amin sent a love letter telegram to Nyerere. In it, he described the man famously known as Walimu as such a good and sultry fellow, so much that if was a woman, he would give serious consideration to marrying him, regardless of his grizzled head.

Nigeria is today wearing the shoes of Idi Amin Dada’s Uganda. All manner of the laughable and grotesque ooze out from Nigeria’s imperial palace. The global tariff war, borne out of Donald Trump’s implacable narcissism, is raging like a typhoon. The world is scampering to escape the wrath of its Achilles’ hill, a man labeled reincarnate of Adolf Hitler, whose own Aryan race – superior specimen of mankind – slogan is, Make America Great Again. Country leaders are dousing tensions, physically addressing their citizens and assuring them of home-grown ways out of the projected global economic tribulation. Ours is trapped in the beautiful city of Paris, hiding behind a finger of a claim that he is on “working visit”. But, why is Paris the beautiful bride of African leaders’ excitement? Decades ago, Mobutu Desire-Sese Seko, the Congolese tyrant, also made Paris his nesting comfort, spending Congo’s national patrimony on extravagant shopping trips in Paris and flying supersonic Concorde aircraft. Someday when we calculate Nigeria’s wealth squandered on this Paris hospice fancy, it may rival Mobutu’s.

When you look at the Abdulkareem song ban in its totality, you will realize that a tragic paradox is slowly building today in Nigeria. It is an electoral route to authoritarianism which comes through an off-the-cuff rise of institutions that make themselves the “Aj’itọ Ọba” of imperial power. In old Oyo empire, with a system of infallibility and God-ordained status of the monarch, the Aj’itọ Ọba confirmed the All-mightiness and deity attribution of the king. He is entrusted with the role of licking the king’s spittle. He cleaned the monarch’s mess and dared not exhibit any form of revulsion to it. Today, what a smart despot does is to make state institutions lend themselves as executioners of democracy. This reminds me of Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s submission in their How democracies die that those who assassinate democracy use its very institutions to gradually, subtly and even legally, kill it.

Freedom of expression, of course, with its caveats, is a major kernel of democracy. When autocrats set out on a path of strangulating democracy, the first thing they do is to muffle free speech. During the rules of Amins, Sani Abachas, Francisco Macìas Nguemas, et al, their terror against freedom of expression was overt. Now, with the world being a global village, institutional tyrannies have been on the upswing. They are buoyed by Italian philosopher, Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony which teaches tyrants that, in the bid to put a leash on voices of dissents, cultural institutions and ideas, rather than just raw brute and force, hold the key. Institutions are gradually replacing the Aj’itọ Ọba, becoming the new lickspittle of imperial power.

As the ‘mass’ in the mass media is being gradually corroded over the decades, chief among its reasons being economic meltdown, the radio and the social media have conveniently become the media outlets with the ‘mass’ of the 21st century. Their audiences are spontaneous, massive and equal the audience of newspaper press of the 20th and early 21sr centuries. It is why the attention of modern totalitarian governments is focused on them. They find them easy objects to tweak in the service of personal rule. The NBC, the regulatory body for broadcasting in Nigeria, has become a formidable lickspittle of presidential power. From the days of Muhammadu Buhari, the NBC has helped gag free speech. It capitalizes on its role as an industry regulator, entrusted with the business of regulating and controlling the levers of broadcasting industry in Nigeria to do this.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: When Bandits Took Over Ondo State

NBC was patterned after the “Gosteleradio”. An abbreviation for the Russian “State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting of the Soviet Union” which was in existence from 1931, until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Joseph Stalin used it to stave off dissent against his infernal rule. The NBC has acted same way. Gosteleradio was the primary state body responsible for overseeing all television and radio broadcasting in the Soviet Union. A powerful organization which exerted significant control over all broadcasts within the defunct USSR, Gosteleradio served as the central authority for decision-making related to broadcasting content, forcefully maintaining a stranglehold on broadcast content’s alignment with the state’s ideology and political goals.

Thus, like the Gosteleradio, Nigerian broadcasters narrate their agonizing ordeals under the NBC as akin to Third Reich’s. NBC is an Omnipotent power with millions of ears like a sieve (ab’etilukara bi ajere). Like a Gestapo, it snouts round for infractions. Aware of the power of financial emasculation to broadcast stations, every word spoken against presidential power on radio is tantamount to treason. Fines, like gags on the mouths of captives in the trans-Atlantic slave trade era, are slammed on stations which dare broadcast criticisms of imperial power.

It is not as if the folks at the NBC are not equally recipients of the mis-governance that has become ten a dime in the polity. It is not that their lives have not witnessed phenomenal regression since 2023. NBC’s readiness to lend itself as platform for criminalization of free speech is a pattern noticeable at the outset of authoritarianism. Some weeks ago, the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) did same when it forced a youth corps member to apologize for voicing her frustration with the Nigerian economy.

The folks at the NBC are not unaware that banning Abdulkareem’s song will increase its listening audience. Like the Aj’itọ Ọba, the name of the game is grovelling by an authoritarian power inclined towards stomping on dissent. Banning of songs by artists by dictatorial governments has never worked. It makes it available to a wider spectrum of inquisitive audience whose minds cohere with the message in the banned songs.

As it is happening today with Abdulkareem’s song, in June 1976, as response to victimization by Jamaican police of smokers of cannabis and as a political push for its legalization due to its medical use, Jamaican reggae musician, Peter Tosh, released his debut studio album named Legalize It. He even predicted in an interview in 1978 that “Herb will become like cigarettes”. The Jamaican government immediately banned the album from being aired on radio or television. After its release in 1976 in America, the album appeared on the Billboard 200 album chart for two weeks and peaked at No 199. Twenty three years after, it was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America, having sold more than one million copies. It was also included in the 2005 book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

For a government that wants the people to continually say Rankadede to those who purvey hunger and despondency, we need more of Eedris Abdulkareem. The letters of the acquittal of Simon Bikindi (not his actual involvement in the Rwandan genocide) show that protest music is not criminal. It is soothing to the souls of suffering people.

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

Published

2 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

4 hours ago

November 3, 2025

Editor

By Lasisi Olagunju

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

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

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

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

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

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR:OPINION: Saluting Our Permanent Patriarchs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where is anywhere?”

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

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

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

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR:OPINION: Ofala: Glo And An Invite From Agbogidi

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

4 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.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR:OPINION: Escaping From Nigeria

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.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR:OPINION Generals, Marabouts And Boko Haram

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.

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

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.