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OPINION: ‘Those Who Are About To Die Salute You’ [Monday Lines]

By Lasisi Olagunju
From William Bascom, American folklorist and anthropologist, I got a Yoruba story. It is here retold, substantially in my own words, in some areas using his words: A certain Chief Lowa was careless with his tongue. Every priest has a priest; Lowa’s own warned him to be careful so that his mouth would not disgrace him. Chief said he had grown taller than disgrace; he was too surefooted to be put to shame. Because he had money and medicine in super abundance, he thought there was nothing he said or did that would have repercussions. His secrets he made subjects of boasts at palm wine joints. He would say anything on impulse and credit it to spasms from unseen spirits.
Then it happened that an unknown tale bearer had gone to inform the king that Lowa had a goat that talked like a human being. The king sent for the chief and the chief appeared before the king. “Is it true that your goat speaks like you and I?” Lowa said it was true. The palace responded with gasps of disbelief. Are you sure? He said he was sure and swore in the name of the town’s ancestors that what he said was the truth and the whole truth. “Well then. Bring your goat before the throne in four days’ time.” The king ordered him and vowed that if, indeed, the goat talked, he would give Lowa half of his possessions, but if it did not, Lowa would be given the goat treatment – barbecued. Chief Lowa smiled and shrugged. He was sure of his goat and its human vocal chords.
Lowa in four days’ time brought his goat before the king. The palace grounds hosted the noble and the not so noble. Every ear wanted to hear the unnatural; every eye was desirous to behold the goat that was human. Lowa rose and spoke to his goat; the goat kept mute. He talked to his goat more frantically, Lowa’s goat ignored Lowa; it refused to answer its owner. It was clear to all that Lowa’s truth was an empty boast; they said he had fooled the king and the ancestors. The people said what he did no one had ever done and gone back home in one piece. Palace guards seized Chief, got him bound, hands and feet, while a huge fire was prepared in fulfillment of the king’s vow.
Chief was stripped naked and his body passed slowly back and forth across the huge fire. On the third pass, the goat opened its mouth and asked, “Why are you trying to kill my owner?” There was a commotion in the palace. “The goat talks!” The people shouted. Lowa was saved and taken off the fire while the king ordered that half of all his possessions be given to him. He was richer but sober. Bascom said as Lowa was taking his goat home, he asked the animal, “Why did you let them pass me over the fire three times?” The goat replied, “Should I have answered the very first time and let you get all this wealth without any suffering? If one becomes rich through trade, do we not see its scars on one’s body?” May our mouth not set us up for trial.
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The president spoke to Nigerians before he left China a few days ago. He spoke about his “very bold and unprecedented decisions” at home; he linked his audacious boldness with the unprecedented hike in “fuel prices” and then asked: “can we help it?” No one there could tell him we could – if we searched well and in the right places and using the right persons. Is it not true that the market owes its access not to just one road? While the president was sawing our spine abroad, NNPC was sinking its teeth into our neck at home. It said petrol price in Nigeria would be “determined by global market forces.” And you wanted to ask what that meant. Dangote Refinery is active too, painting ambiguous portraits of oily prices on canvas. Everyone is tugging at the wounded entrails of the helpless.
Writing for ‘The Reading Teacher’ in March 2004, Salli Forbes said “to err is human, to self-correct is to learn.” She was correct. A leader may have the courage to make a mistake but he must not lack the wisdom to know that an error has occurred. And, it is not enough to spot the mistake; the leader must have the competence to correct himself, to repair the damage and stitch up the error. Buying petrol now is like paying for the last supper – dining, then dying. And it is all because someone spoke the wrong words on a wrong day last year. That person has not agreed that his error threw the nation under the bus; he is instead doubling down, praising his priest of pain.
Ben Sira’s wisdom of the ancient counsels whoever must speak to “say much in few words.” Eugene MacNamee, author of ‘The Government of the Tongue’, has a more extreme maxim: “Whatever you say, say nothing.” MacNamee warns that “saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, or even saying the most banal of things in the wrong place with the wrong accent could lead not only to offence but to death…” You would agree with MacNamee if you agree with South African researcher, Khona Dlamini, who thinks “the tongue is fire.” And with Douglas Ewart who insists that “the tongue is mightier than the sword.” Richard Turnbull says “by the tongue, men are led into error through false doctrine.” The wise men who founded Ile Ife had a million gods. But they said one deity worthy of their worship is the mouth. What they offer the mouth till tomorrow is a mouthful of carefulness; they gave it a tongue-twister name, olubobotiribo. Its cognomen is ‘baba ebo’ (father of offerings). May our mouth not disgrace and defeat us.
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Darkness has a heart. If you like, call it ‘Heart of Darkness’ with all the pun Joseph Conrad’s novel of that title evokes. Nigerians entered last year and suffered the stroke of escalating petrol prices – one of Buhari’s parting gunshots. Today’s president, as that president’s reluctant candidate, campaigned vigorously against the pains of that era. On his campaign rostra, Bola Tinubu told the distraught to trust him with their votes: “E lo f’okàn ba’lè (be calm), we will bring down the price of petrol.” The candidate on heat got what he wanted and, in his very first speech as president, the conquistador pulled the plug on the livelihood of hope: “subsidy is gone.” He fired that shot into the darkness of our market and nothing has remained the same for all since. He said in China that he could not help it. When he made the be-calm promise before the election, did he know that what he said was a lie? In every context (and contestation) of lies, at least one side is not deceived. And that is the liar. Lies can kill, and they kill. The lie teller may keep his body while victims of his untruth lose theirs. But he loses his essence. “Lying is dying…There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies”. For the source of that line, check Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’.
While the petrol price tragedy drags on forever, people are dropping dead farm and stream. Nothing walks the land at this moment except poverty and pain. But the president said in China that our eyes needed to see what we are seeing for Nigeria to be sturdy and stable. It is in Orwell’s dystopian ‘1984’ that you read that a stable society is “only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.” Listen to Orwell: “For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves…” (page 198). No one, not even regime backers, are free from this pain. For I have seen some very committed Emilokan people writhe in pain, wetting their withering plants with tears. Why are they not excused from what we suffer? “It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges…” (Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four; page 199).
The city burns but Nero has just finished playing tambourine in Chinese cafes. The end of the world is having the street empty. It is having ghostly trekkers casting no shadows everywhere. It is Nigeria becoming Malcolm Cowley’s “empty streets of air.” How many will live to tell the end of these hard times, only God knows. Bill Gates said in Abuja last Tuesday that “the actual tax collection in Nigeria is actually low.” Our president echoed him in China on Friday that the petrol we buy must be this costly for the country to stand. There are ‘rumours’ that VAT may move from 7.5 percent to 10 percent. Wahala! Eleven years ago, a barrage of austerity measures was wracking the people of Greece. Just as Nigeria has its own husbands feeding it doses of poison as elixir, Greece had Germany as its guardian angel, its doctor which prescribed for it poisonous doses of magical wellness. Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schauble, paid a visit to Greece on Thursday, July 18, 2013. To welcome that visitor, a troublesome Greek newspaper exclaimed: “Hail Schaube, those who are about to die salute you.”
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The Greek newspaper got the about-to-die salutation from Ancient Rome. In ancient Rome, captive gladiators are routinely driven to death in a horrid game supervised by the emperor. They called it a gladiatorial match. The fights had large, loud crowds watching and applauding as men hacked men to death. It was an event that saw fighters die after fighters until the last man standing dropped dead. In AD 52, Emperor Claudius reviewed an edition of that ‘game’, then he heard those fated to die let out a cry: “Hail, Emperor, those who are about to die salute you (Ave Imperator, morituri te salutant).” And the emperor responded in practical terms demanding that they died.
Malcolm Cowley’s poet persona hears a scratching at his door, “the noise of some one fingering the latch once.” He opens “and found the night empty of sound, empty.” A long time ago, Emeritus Professor Ladipo Akinkugbe’s uncles heard their own “scratch at the door.” They also found “night” but it was not “empty”. He writes: “Asleep in their little mud hut, they were suddenly roused by some knock at the door in the middle of the night. His elder brother bade him open the door as he had assumed that this was a neighbour seeking assistance. He refused and soon the knocking ceased and the caller’s footsteps faded into the darkness. Peeping through a small hole in the mud wall, they discovered to their horror that it was a leopard. Had that door been opened, they both would never have lived to tell the story.”
My muse told me we’ve finally opened our door to the leopard of Big Brother. It was the muse’s summation of the many things that happened at the same time last week. Reports of trials and tribulations, of protesters in police courts, and of traumatized paupers at petrol pumps. Petrol, for the first time since 1914, sells for more than a thousand naira per litre. If you can buy, buy it quietly and drive home; if you are too poor to buy, trek home silently in peace. Whichever you choose, BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. Those words in capital letters you find in George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’. They make up the caption beneath a huge poster that displays “…an enormous face, more than a metre wide”. It is not enough that the face is enormous, you find, to your horror and dread, that the eyes in the poster “follow you about when you move.”
The leopard-at-the-door story above is a paragraph in Akinkugbe’s autobiography, ‘Footprints & Footnotes’. The book is a personal story which provides some ghastly details about this country, the demons in its forest and why it may never work well. A leopard at the door cannot be a friend or a totem of good fortune. Not all who knock at doors seek help or seek to help. Beware of those you open your heart or stall to, especially when it is dark. You may be sorry if every rap on your door unbolts the access. Nigerians did this – many times during their election cycles. They are always sorry after the act. They did it yesterday, – and today, they are very sorry. But, they will do it again.
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Retired DIG Parry Osayande is dead

Retired Deputy Inspector General of Police, Parry Osayande is dead!
Osayende died on Sunday in Benin City, a day to his 89th birth anniversary.
His death was confirmed in a condolence statement released by the president of the Immaculate Conception College Old Boys’ Association (ICCOBA), Engr. Ighodalo Edetanlen.
The announcement, made on behalf of the association’s National Executive Committee, described Osayande as an “exemplary old boy” of the college, located in Benin City, the Edo State capital.
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The statement, titled ‘CONDOLENCE: DIG. PARRY OSAYANDE (Rtd),’ reads: “The President, ICCOBA Worldwide, Engr. Ighodalo Edetanlen, on behalf of the National Executive Committee and the entire Old Boys of Immaculate Conception College, Benin City announce, with total submission to the will of God, the peaceful repose of an exemplary old boy, DIG Parry Benjamin Osemwegie Osayande (Rtd) earlier today at the age of 88 years.”
Born on September 29, 1936, Osayande would have turned 89 on Monday.
His decades-long service to the Nigeria Police Force included high-level postings as Commissioner of Police in Benue and Cross River States. He also served as Chairman of the Police Service Commission, playing a vital role in the country’s law enforcement and administrative reform.
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The association expressed deep sorrow over his passing and called for prayers for the bereaved family.
“While we mourn, let us also uphold the family he left behind in prayers in this moment of grief,” the statement added.
“Details regarding funeral arrangements are expected to be announced in due course.
“May God grant him and all the faithful departed eternal rest in Jesus Name, Amen,” the statement concluded,
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OPINION: The Madman Sermon On Mapo Hill

By Festus Adedayo
Ibadan, Oyo State, the city of warriors, quaked last Friday. The rumbling vibrations of the historic coronation of Ex-Governor Rashidi Ladoja as Olubadan sent valleys into a seismic shake. Ibadan’s ancient event center, Mapo Hall, was nearly submerged with excited feet. Children of Oluyole were at the zenith of their excitement. Expensive automobiles, resplendent attires and infectious joy lit the faces of a people who christened self as cunning. That Friday, however, Ibadan wasn’t ready to listen to the rhythm of its famous Láyípo christening. It was rather ready to receive the world.
Suddenly, a huge blot appeared on the landscape. In the eyes of the world, àjàò, the animal called sloth, suddenly crept up the hill of Mapo. When àjàò creeps up an event like this, it is a moment of anomaly, anomie or dystopia. Yoruba then speak in dispraise of this unusually created amoebic-shaped animal. They say, Kinní kan ba àjàò jé̩, apá rẹ gùn ju itan lọ – the only blot in àjàò’s creation is that its arms are disproportionately longer than the legs.
Many have questioned àjàò’s mis-taxonomy, especially one that equated it with the sloth. To them, àjàò is not a sloth but a flying squirrel. In terms of features, both sloth and flying squirrel strike a resemblance with the Yoruba àjàò, in that they possess disproportionate arms and legs. Apart from these features, the sloth is also the world’s slowest mammal. Flying squirrel, however, is a gliding mammal which is more of a squirrel than any other mammal. Unless àjàò is today extinct, both equivalents it shares features with – sloth and flying squirrel – do not belong to the African habitat. While the sloth’s habitat is the tropical rainforest of Central and South America, the flying squirrel lives in North America, Northern Eurasia, and the temperate, tropical forests of India and Asia. Features-wise, àjàò however slants more towards the sloth.
Sorry, I digressed. On Friday, àjàò appeared in Mapo. It came in the form of the official musician of the coronation event, Taiye Akande Adebisi, famously known as Taiye Currency. Many felt that, even if the need was to Ibadan-ise the Olubadan coronation, for a city which parades A-list musical wizards like Saheed Osupa, Currency was not apropos for an event of that high-octane magnitude. They felt justified when, perhaps seized by an unknown muse of Apollo, Greek mythology’s central deity and embodiment of the spirit of music, Taiye Currency suddenly and seemingly veered off-theme and sang, “Wèrè l’a fi ńwo wèrè…” – madness is the curative medicine for insanity.
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Instantly, the musician courted huge flak of his audience for this perceived off-key musical line. The crowd felt nostalgia for Awurebe exponent, Alhaji Dauda Akanni Adeeyo, popularly known as Epo Akara. Epo’s evergreen tributes to Oba Daniel Adebiyi and Gbadamosi Akanbi Adebimpe, the latter being the 35th Olubadan of Ibadan, who reigned briefly from February 1976 until his death in July 1977, are still considered classics. A typical song sang at political rallies where call for the Mosaic an-eye-for-an-eye is often rife, “Wèrè l’a fi ńwo wèrè…” was seen as an anti-climax among Ibadan people who, for once, forgot political schisms and were united in celebrating their new king.
Unbeknown to the crowd, Taiye Currency was indeed right and deserves our praises. While madness is of a truth cure for madness, on the converse, on that Friday, could the musician have been lost in the mire of the literary device of dramatic irony? In dramatic irony, though the character in the story is oblivious of the situation he plays a vital role in, the audience is aware of it. It then leads to a gap or contrast between what the audience knows and what the character understands. While all of us as audience saw contradictory meanings in Currency’s “Wèrè l’a fi ńwo wèrè…” and the theme of the coronation event, the musician might be communicating a deeper sense of humour and existential tragedy.
Talking specifics now, could Taiye Currency, by that song at Mapo, be espousing the Madman Theory?
Indigenous psychiatrists who specialise in treatment of lunatics and allied mental ailments pioneered this “Wèrè l’a fi ńwo wèrè…” phrase. The earliest theories on madness believed it was a spiritual affliction. The assumption was that its victims had their minds possessed by an alien deity. While many also believed madness was hereditary, others believed it was a punishment from the gods, resulting from a gross disregard of the gods’ warning. Then came Hippocrates (460–377 B.C.) and the theories of madness shifted to the belief that most bodily illnesses were as a result of various imbalances in the body. Even with this, madness, abnormalities of behaviour and epilepsy were still generally believed to be the workings of the gods.
It is generally believed that, since insanity is a hardcore ailment, its treatment is also hardcore. I witnessed this in the early 1980s when I followed my late father to hire farmhands from the indigenous sanatorium of Baba Aladokun of Ikirun, now Osun State. I saw mentally challenged men and women wickedly shellacked with whips.
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In Yoruba’s main translation of the word, “madness” or “madman” is synonymous with wèrè. The logic of the Madman theory in national leadership was first articulated by Daniel Ellsberg in 1959, followed by Thomas Schelling, in 1960. It is a political theory usually attributed to American President Richard Nixon’s foreign policy. It is derived from Niccolo Machiavelli’s 1517 book, Discourses on Livy and its argument that sometimes, it is “a very wise thing to simulate madness”. Similarly, in his 1962 book, Thinking About the Unthinkable, Herman Kahn, the futurist, argued that to “look a little crazy” could be an effective way of making an adversary stand down from their attack plans.
It worked for Nixon because leaders of hostile communist bloc countries, having assimilated this tendency of the American president as irrational and volatile, avoided provoking the U.S., their fear being of an unpredictable response from Nixon. Another believer in the Madman Theory is President Donald Trump, whose irrationality has attracted renewed interest in the Madman Theory among scholars, lay scholars and the public. Other leaders in recent history associated with the madman theory reputation included Kim Jong-un, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Vladimir Putin, Muammar Ghadaffi and Saddam Hussein.
Last Friday in Ibadan, Oba Ladoja received one of the greatest honour of his coronation as President Bola Tinubu graced the historic occasion. When it was time to address the audience, the president gave an inkling of what would be his address to Nigerians on Wednesday, the anniversary of Nigeria’s 65th. In an admixture of felicitations to the new monarch and a message of hope to the Nigerian populace, Tinubu declared that the country’s economic suffering was now back-flung, just the same way a masquerade flings his loose regalia. “Today, I am honoured and feel very proud to give you the cheering news that the economy has turned a corner. There is a bright light at the end of the tunnel. Your suffering has been as painful to us as a painful surgery. But the economy has now returned to a moment of growth and prosperity. Thank you for your perseverance, and thank you for your endurance,” he sermonized.
Here we go again. My first reading of the above claim of the president is that he has been so extensively hypnotised by his voodoo economists that he has crossed the Rubicon of reality. Or, that he has mouthed this economic recovery shibboleth for too long that the phrase sounds more like an ad-lib motivational speech that must be repeated like a musical refrain. Other than in the Utopia minds of his minders and in the renteer perception of regime fawners, there is no economic recovery in Nigeria, nor has the economy of the average Nigerian turned any corner. It is still in a long sprint.
When this government came in 2023, its demeanour was equal to the biblical “My father (Buhari) scourged you with whips; I will scourge you with scorpions”. At that time, some Nigerians thought, queerly, that though the Madman theory was a concept in international relations, the Nigerian government wanted to suborn obedience by creating economic fear in the minds of the people. With this ad-lib mouthing of the refrain of economic recovery on paper by the president and his team, when in actual fact, reality counters this claim, it seems to occur to Nigerians that government is simply telling them to go jump inside Kudeti River if they do not believe it. Or that a pure Madman theory is at work.
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I just finished reading late Nigeria’s foremost professor of history, Festus Ade-Ajayi’s keynote at the first convocation of the Nigerian Academy of Letters (1999). It was aptly titled, “Development is about the people”. The problem with Nigerian leaders, this current ensemble not excluded, Ade-Ajayi said, is that they are selfish in their prescriptions. While building all their economic and social models, seldom do they enquire what the wishes of the people are. Wherever there is the mouthing of the word ‘development’ and there is no ample recourse to improved quality of people’s life, what we have is regression.
The statistical indicators which the Tinubu team claimed show it that Nigerians are enjoying better times are meaningless if the woman in Oyingbo market cannot agree with them. Same thing with the collapsing inflation rates which they hoist like a scientist who just discovered a fallen object from mass. Those statistics are meaningless if we go to the pharmacy and drugs are still sold at cut-throat prices as they are and our purchasing power is still this lean. Only the Madman theory can explain why leaders would taunt their people with the existence of a surplus when indeed, there is what looks like a famine.
What the president obviously confuses for the general well-being of the people is the flamboyance and the personal economies of his ministers. Indeed, these have “turned a corner”. The talk out there is that his ministers are literally buying up Uranus and Mars with illicit, ill-gotten wealth that will shame Sambo Dasuki’s arms money-gate and Diezani Allison-Madueke’s alleged petrol-dollar sleaze. Yet, there is calm on the home-front. Rather than live by personal example of belt-tightening as he urged his people, the president himself lives the lush life of an Oil Sheik, literally breakfasting in Lisbon, lunch in Paris and dinner in Alaska, at the people’s patrimony’s expense. The Tinubu pain-before-prosperity mantra is appearing as a huge scam. At the UNGA, it was said that 60 presidential aides were ship-loaded to the US, with their big fat estacode (Establishment Code). These are the ones whose economies are turning the corner. The endure-now-to-enjoy-later mantra reminds one of a father who tells his children to endure hard times but lives in unimaginable splendour.
So, the president knew that Nigerians’ suffering “has been…as a painful surgery”? Interesting. This analogy even makes the situation worse. Surgical procedures are preceded by anaesthesia and followed with analgesics to reduce pain. They are then accompanied with a post-procedure process of recovery and care. None of these did the government administer before yanking us open with its wicked scalpel in May 2023. Nor even thereafter. Many of our compatriots have died needless deaths and many are still dying.
So, when Taiye Currency sang about “Wèrè l’a fi ńwo wèrè…”, flesh and blood obviously didn’t reveal it to him. Either intended or a dramatic irony, what the musician was communicating was that there is no sanity anywhere in this country. We are in one huge sanatorium. The musician thus deserves commendation and not scorn. This government is curing the madness of hunger and lack with the madness of propaganda of a better life, “growth and prosperity”. And a dark cunning of “a bright light at the end of the tunnel”. Shikena!
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Edo To Immortalise Late IGP Solomon Arase

The Edo State Government is set to immortalise the late Inspector General of Police, Solomon Arase, who is an indigene of the state.
Governor of the state, Monday Okpebhole, disclosed this on Saturday while receiving the body of the late Arase at the Benin Airport.
Represented by his Chief of Staff, Gani Audu, Okpebholo described late Arase as “one of the finesse police officers and lawyers we have in Edo State,’ adding that “losing him at this time that the Nigeria Police Force and the country in general need him is not good for us”.
“As a State Government, we will work with the family to see how we can Immortalize him. He was a great son of Edo State.
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“It is very painful to the government and people of Edo State but we are consoled with the good life he lived”.
Okpebholo described Arase as a team player and a man that was always willing to help.
“It is painful that we lost somebody who always listens to every complaint and tries as much as possible to solve them”.
He, however, prayed to God to give the family the fortitude to bear the loss, assuring that the government will do all that it can to support his family.
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