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OPINION: ‘We Collected Money, And We Voted’

Published

11 months ago

November 18, 2024

Editor

By Lasisi Olagunju

Nigeria is a ring of iniquity. And, the iniquitous didn’t start with it today. For several years, I covered the activities of several military governors and administrators in Oyo State. Each of those well-trained minds came with their peculiarities. Colonel Ahmed Usman (God bless his soul) was particularly voluble. Whenever he spoke, it was as he felt; he had no euphemism for whatever came to his mind. Anytime he did that, his media handlers were left horrified, scrambling and begging reporters for a soft landing. At a point, whispers of unwholesome deals were disturbing his sleep and the man came out full blast at a public function: “Even if I took anything, you don’t know that oga dey front, oga dey back, and all these people you see around me, dem no dey collect? If I chop alone na for the throat here e go stay.” He was right that time. If he said the same today, he would be right with the present administration of our election. It is a bustling bazaar.

On Saturday, you heard the Igbotako, Ondo State, woman who said she and everyone around her collected money and voted. The woman was asked by a television reporter what she had to say on the governorship election that was under way. She got possessed by the spirit of violent truth, and she sang: “We have voted. Voting is going on peacefully; there is no wahala; no fight. We voted and we collected money. All of us; we collected money; money for our votes…” She was about to say more but the people around her said enough! She was hushed up. And you could hear inside of her the voice of Sutpen, William Faulkner’s innocent character in ‘Absalom, Absalom!’: “What did I do or misdo?” The woman is the definition of innocence. She must be in some trouble now with the merchants of votes.

Second Republic governor of Ogun State, Chief Olabisi Onabanjo, wrote a popular column, ‘Ayekooto’, for the Nigerian Tribune. That was an unusual name. Ayekooto, when literally translated, means “the world rejects truth.” There was a creature called Bird of Truth. It used to live with man, conversing freely with him. But the bird told man too many brutal truths leading to its deportation and banishment forever to the bush. Because there is no vacuum in nature, the place of the deportee at home was filled with the presence of Parrot. This one is, however, different. It only mimics man. It says only whatever man says. Parrot is then asked why it hides its truth in monotonous mimicry, its reply is one lone word: ‘Ayekooto’. It became its name till tomorrow.

Naïveté or childish ignorance is a connotation of innocence. Jacques Maritain who stresses this in his ‘Dantes Innocence and Luck’ adds the second connotation of innocence: “integrity or incorruption, untouched original purity.” I think the ‘simple’ woman of Ondo represents Maritain’s both senses. She put in plain words what people of the world say in tongues. There is no election here, what we do is buying and selling. Or, in more graphic words, the people have come to realize that it pays to do with their votes what street whores do in their dingy holes.

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The woman said there was “no wahala, no fight.” There couldn’t have been. Was it not a matter of cash? It is what the Yoruba call owó rèé, ojà rèé (money is here, what to purchase is here); it is in Hausa too: Ga kasuwa; ga kudi (see market, see money). Right buyers and right sellers always bond; they don’t fight unless there is a conman among them. But in this election business, all the thieves preserve their honour. They, therefore, do not fight. My people also say that in the Christian church, there is no reason for fisticuffs: you say your prayer, I say my Amen (Ìjà ò sí ní sóòsì; s’àdúà kí ns’àmí). At the polling booth, there is no more fear; everyone knows their place and their role. There is a vote to sell, who has come with the biggest cash? If today’s relationship between the voter and the voted is sustained, we won’t need policemen for elections again. Thugs will be useless, they will be out of job.

It is amazing how elections here have evolved; it is now big business.

Politicians have borrowed sense from slave merchants of 19th century West Africa who bought captured people from raiders. Today’s slave raiders are a multi-layered lot. ‘Stakeholders’ of influence negotiate with candidates and their sponsors; candidates mobilize ‘stakeholders’ who pay agents; agents round up the actual voters and sell them to the candidates. The paid voters are shepherded to the polling booth, they vote like the Ondo woman – but unlike her, the paid voter does not go on the rooftop revealing the secrets of the market. It is pay-and-go and clean yansh like the brisk business of the street slut.

The Ondo woman was not stupid. She was just plain innocent and down-to-earth. To be down-to-earth is to be unpretentious. We should thank her, even give her a national award. In her honesty, she gave us what we’ve been searching for concerning our democracy. What is the right definition of what we do that we call elections? She has defined our democracy in a way no political scientist could. And, if I could reconstruct her thought, I would write that what we call democracy here is a government of money by money and for money.

A winner has emerged in the Ondo contest. The man won not necessarily because he was the best of the pack. He won because he was the one whose pocket best aligned with the demands of the electors. Politicians have stopped making promises of good governance. You don’t get pressed and go to the one-night stand and proceed into needless toasting. It is foolishness or inexperience. Pay the right price; if there is a competition, outbid them and get the prize. Fasting is for the foolish; the wise never get famished.

PDP clears Zamfara LG polls; APC sweeps Ogun LG election; Ondo governorship poll: It is 18 over 18 for APC. Those are current headlines. What do they tell about our democracy?

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Last week, I quoted the title of a 1965 editorial of the Nigerian Tribune: ‘White elephant elections.’ I wonder what the writer of that piece would scribble if he were alive today and witnessed what we call elections. We pour bastard money into elections even when what we do is elect without elections. There were pretences in the past. These days, we think pretence is for the faint-hearted. We simply tell the people to come and be bedded if they would eat and their children would not starve. And they come well-behaved like captured slaves on a straight line – or like the guiltless volunteers on the firing line of Baltasar Engonga, popular sex-star (tsar) of Equatorial Guinea.

As I write this, I take a pause, and then a rush to Ayi Kwei Armah’s ‘Two Thousand Seasons’. Its prologue keeps reading like an epilogue to what I call my country: “People headed after the setting sun, in that direction, even the possibility of regeneration is dead. There, the devotees of death take life, consume it, and exhaust every living thing. Then they move on, forever seeking newer boundaries. Wherever there are living remnants undestroyed, there lies more work for them. Whatever would direct itself after the setting sun, an ashen death lies in wait for it. Whichever people make the falling fire their aim, a pale of extinction awaits them among the destroyers…”

Nigeria’s journey towards the setting sun did not start today. With its democracy, it is a train that is plainly headed towards ashen waste, the falling sun. It is choking, killing and very expensive and we are all paying, even the rich are crying. Businesses are bleeding but those who should care do not care. Their gaze is fixed on the next election and the next.

The Japanese have a proverb which will be hated if said here: “If you get on the wrong train, get off at the next station – the longer you stay, the more expensive the return trip will be.” Indians have a counter proverb: “Sometimes, the wrong train takes you to the right station.” Do not listen to the Indians. It worked for India because the Indians dropped off their wrong coaches very early in their lives. Here, we are in a wrong train, pulling deathly coaches, facing the wrong direction. This democracy. There is no right station where it is headed. Unfortunately, cheap or expensive, we are not even thinking of any return trip. We all pretend that all is well. We sing Alleluia to the operators who packed sheep with humans and shut the door. All na passenger (wón k’éran m’éro). The interior blurs all lines between what is third-class and what is first. The experience is the same.

‘The Morning Train to Ibadan’ is the title of a foreigner’s experience of Nigeria sixty-two years ago. One morning in 1962, John Henrik Clarke, an American journalist, took a train from Lagos to Ibadan. The train left the Lagos Terminus at exactly eight o’clock in the morning and arrived Ibadan at 2.20pm. Between the time the journey started and the time it ended, enough of Nigeria happened for the newsman from America to write about.

And he wrote: A beggar strolled into the train, “pleading for the price of his morning meal.” The man thought he deserved some pity. The train got to Yaba, passed through that part of Lagos and had its first stop at Ebute Metta. The American noticed that the beggar left the train here “and three more got on.” The newsman added that at Agece (Agege), another beggar boarded the train “carrying a sign saying he was deaf and dumb.” The train continued its journey to Ibadan. The passenger noticed the train panting. At another time, it “started jerkily.” Things weren’t exactly right. Was it with the train or with the driver? It made several stops and starts in the middle of nowhere. And while it did this, the American said he noticed that no one, except himself “seemed to care why the train had stopped in the first place.” Some were busy eating, many just chatted away in the overcrowded third class cabin while the journalist sat taking mental note of the fainting train and its carefree passengers.

The train got to another station and stopped. Our American guest noticed that one of the deaf and dumb beggars ended his tour here. If all the man wrote is a drama, this is where I cite as the denouement. What happened? The journalist saw the beggar shedding his deaf-and-dumb costume like a snake does its skin. Snake keepers call it molting or ecdysis. The beggar got down and “was met by friends. He took off his sign and stood by the tracks, laughing and talking as other friends came up to greet him.” Now, to be dumb, is it not to lack the capacity to speak? The deaf is the one who has ears but hears nothing. But this deaf-and-dumb dude laughed and spoke heartily with friends! Nigeria must be a country of the impossible; our American guest was utterly disappointed. “Hereafter,” he wrote, “it is going to be difficult for me to believe that anybody in Nigeria is really deaf and dumb.”

No one is really deaf and dumb in Nigeria. No one has ever been. Our country is a nation of drama and jokes. Nothing shocks anyone; no experience mocks anybody. Only foreigners like that American journalist get worked up and take us seriously. Did you notice how the beggars came on and off the train? For them, the train ride was not a journey, it was business. Everything was transactional, their presence, their cries for pity, even their innocence.

The American’s train experience happened in 1962 – two years after independence. Sixty-two years after that journey, tell me if the train of Nigeria has stopped fainting, stopping and jerking without explanations. And whether Nigerians have started getting bothered by anything beyond their eating and chatting, saying nothing. Sixty two years after ‘The morning Train to Ibadan’, tell me if beggars have stopped faking blindness. Or that the deaf of the last century has not given birth to newer generations of the deaf and dumb. Tell me what has changed and if something will change. Nothing will change because nothing is real. Not election. Not democracy. Not politicians. Not even the country.

And the future of where we are? I will tell what I know: Again, I quote Ayi Kwei Armah, but this time, from his ‘The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born’: “When you can see the end of things even in their beginnings, there’s no more hope, unless you want to pretend, or forget, or get drunk or something.” There is no country. What is Nigeria is void; pitch dark darkness.

News

Edo Assembly Commission Questions Clerk Over Alleged Age Falsification

Published

30 minutes ago

October 14, 2025

Editor

Edo State House of Service Commission has invited the Clerk of the Assembly, Audu Omogbai, for questioning over alleged age falsification.

The invitation of the Clerk followed a petition by some Concerned Staff of the Assembly.

The petitioners alleged that Omogbai, falsified his age to remain in service.

They alleged that the Clerk’s initial appointment dated back to 1993 and that he has exceeded the mandatory 30 years of service.

The petitioners also alleged that the Clerk has surpassed the mandatory retirement age of 60 as well as obstructing investigation.

The petition reads partly, “The Clerk has allegedly withheld official file records, hindering investigations into these matters.

“We humbly request your intervention to investigate these allegations and take appropriate actions to maintain integrity and adherence to regulations within the Edo State House of Assembly.”

It was gathered that Omogbai has been invited for questioning.

He was invited in a letter signed by Chairman of the Assembly Commission, Sir Ezehi Igbas.

Omogbai was asked to appear before a three-Man Ad-hoc Committee for an interview session.

The Assembly Clerk could not be reached for comments.

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Abductors Demand ₦5m As Teenager Is Kidnapped In Edo

Published

2 hours ago

October 14, 2025

Editor

A 12-year-old girl has been kidnapped in Ayogwiri community, Etsako West Local Government Area of Edo State.

The abductors, suspected to be Fulani herdsmen attacked some women on their way from the farm and in the process kidnapped the teenager, and injured some of the women.

This incident was said to have created fear and panic in the community.

It was gathered that the kidnappers of the teenager are asking for N5 million ransom.

‎The community in a statement issued by Engr Vincent Ozemoya, the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the community, condemned the incident.

“The BoT calls on all relevant security agencies in the area to rise up and rid our Farms and forest of evil elements, be they herdsmen or kidnappers,” the statement reads

The Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO), Moses Yamu could not be reached as at the time of this report.

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OPINION: Sprit Pardons Kindred Spirits

Published

3 hours ago

October 14, 2025

Editor

By Suyi Ayodele

The elders of my place caution that the sacrificial àkàrà should not be given to an emèrè to share. When you ask why, they respond that she will merely make her kindred spirits the sole beneficiaries. And when that happens, the elders further caution, the tragedy (ultimate death), which the sacrifice is designed to avert will eventually happen.

Having shared this traditional caution, I would like to turn to my own childhood experiences. Growing up in the hinterland can be fun. In my part of Yorubaland, we have special children called Emèrè. They are mostly females. Emèrè are not Àbíkú which the Igbo call Ogbanje. The difference here is that while a typical abiku dies and returns to the same parents as many times as he or she can muster before he or she is ‘overpowered’, an emèrè remains a pain in the neck of her parents through frequent and indeterminable illnesses. The illnesses don’t kill her but merely drain the resources of her parents. Powerful children, Yoruba metaphysics says that emèrè are husbands of witches (emèrè ni oko àjé) because they are stronger and more ‘wicked’!

Emèrè children are treated specially, most times, with utmost attention. They are fragile in looks and conduct. Thay are also particularly spoilt in the real sense of the Yoruba concept of àkébàjé. Parents offer sacrifices to appease them to stay here on earth. Our belief is that emèrè children have their kindred spirits waiting for them by the gates of heaven. If an emèrè eventually dies, it is believed that a replacement might not come easily. Everything is therefore done to prevent such a tragic end.

So, to keep them alive with their suffering parents, sacrifices, known in the local dialect as òsè, are offered. The sacrificial items, mostly small edibles ranging from groundnuts to sugarcane; èkuru (white moi moi) to àkàrà, are prepared and offered to children who are in the same age bracket as the emèrè. After the preliminary prayers, the emèrè is asked to share the items to the ever-joyous children who sing traditional praise chants for her.

But there is a strange practice in the sharing of the sacrificial edibles. While all the other items are given to the ‘celebrant’ to share, the akara is never given to her. The explanation for this exception is illustrated in the saying that nobody gives the sacrificial àkàrà for the emèrè to share; otherwise, she will simply give it to her kindred spirits to pave the way for her journey to the great beyond (A kìí fún emèrè ní àkàrà òsè pín kí ò má baà pin fun egbé è láti pa ònà òrun mô).

In our elementary Government classes from Form Three to Form Five of those days, the then Miss Folake Afolabi, and Messrs Abayomi Oduntan and Vice Principal Ojo, repeatedly, listed what they called “The Presidential Powers of an Executive President.” We were taught that an Executive President is both the Head of State and Head of Government, a fountain of honour; he declares state of emergency; assents to and vetoes bills; declares wars and signs treaties and has the prerogative of mercy, among almost twenty of such powers.

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On the Prerogative of Mercy, we were told that an Executive President has the right to pardon a convict on the death row. And once pardoned, such a beneficiary can no longer be held in relation to the offence(s) that led to his or her conviction.

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu exercised his Prerogative of Mercy power last week and set free 147 ex-convicts. The controversy that greeted that act is one that will not abate in a hurry. In all the comments for and against the action by the President, everyone, including the President’s ‘political enemies’, agreed that Tinubu’s action was, and is, within the ambit of the law. The constitution allows him to extend pardon to any manner of convicts, and his action cannot be subjected to any judicial review. Good enough.

However, the grey area in the review of the President’s exercise of his prerogative of mercy has to do with the morality that informed the choices of some of the ex-convicts President Tinubu set free. Majority of the people who frowned at the list of the beneficiaries of the President’s ‘kindness’ argued, and very correctly too, that the huge percentage the president allocated to convicts of drug-related offences, speaks volumes of the President’s disposition to the fight against narcotics in the nation.

The argument here is that of the 147 convicts President Tinubu pardoned, 60 of them are those who were convicted and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment for dealing in hard drugs. A simple arithmetic puts that figure at 40.8 percent of the total number of 147 beneficiaries! Many, justifiably, concluded that if not for anything, Mr. President should have exercised discretion in freeing those drug lords.

Reviewing the arguments for and against this latest action of President Tinubu, I drew inspiration from the words of wisdom by our elders as quoted above that one should not give the sacrificial àkàrà òsè to an emèrè to share. Of the “Executive Powers of an Executive President” those good teachers of yore taught us, the one that looks more like an àkàrà òsè (sacrificial àkàrà) is the prerogative of mercy. In the hands of an emèrè president, who causes the people pain and agony, draining their meagre resources by the minute, that power can be easily abused. The morality of 60 drug offenders benefiting from the list of 147 pardoned ex-convicts flies in the face of decency!

Colleen Shogan, a former Senior Executive at the Library of Congress, US Senate, on December 2, 2022, wrote: “The History of the Pardon Power: Executive Unilateralism in the Constitution.” In the article, which was published by The White House Historical Association under the Rubenstein Center Scholarship, said that when the exercise of the clemency power is not used discretionally, the one who wields the power suffers public opprobrium. Hear her:

“Gerald Ford’s 1974 pardon of Richard Nixon was arguably the most famous exercise of executive clemency in American history. After Ford’s pardon of Nixon, his approval rating fell over twenty points in the ensuing days. Many political analysts conclude that Ford never recovered from the pardon, thus severely damaging his chances to win election to the White House in 1976.” She added that Ford’s explanation “that he granted the pardon as an act of mercy to Nixon and for the broader purpose of restoring domestic tranquillity in the nation after Watergate”, could not salvage the situation.

Imo Udofa, Professor of Law, University of Uyo, reinforces Shogan’s arguments. In his “The Abuse of Presidential Power of Pardon and the Need for Restraints”, published in the Beijing Law Review, Vol 19, No 2, June 2018, Udofa argues that “The power of pardon is virtually unfettered and unchecked by formal constraints in most jurisdictions, thereby rendering it susceptible to abuse.”

Udofa further states that “The recent exercise of presidential power of pardon by the current American President, Donald Trump, by granting pardon to Joe Arpaio (a former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, who was found guilty in July 2017 of criminal contempt for defying a judge’s order against prolonging traffic patrols targeting immigrants) has rekindled the discussion on the uses and abuses of the pardon power…. It has been argued that Arpaio should have been allowed to serve his punishment, and the presidential pardon amounted to a presidential endorsement of the criminal contempt for which Arpaio was punished.”

In Nigeria, the teacher of law says the case of President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan’s “pardon of Chief D.S.P. Alamieyesigha, former Governor of Bayelsa State, convicted of several corruption charges, remains the most controversial exercise of presidential pardon power in the country.”

He posits further that while “The power to grant pardon is of ancient origin and recognised today in almost every nation…. However, in recent times, the pardon power has been abused as political and other extraneous factors tend to determine its application. It has also been seen as capricious and inaccessible by ordinary people. The usefulness of the power has seriously been dented by lack of control and checks in most jurisdictions, including Nigeria.”

“Sacred” as prerogative of mercy is, Udofa says its application should be alongside “checks and guiding principles.” I add here: with utmost discretion!

The US for instance, punishes tax evasion and drug-related offences severely. On drugs, the US would go to any length to get the culprit to book. That was why, against international conventions, the administration of President George H.W. Bush ordered the invasion of Panama in an operation codenamed “Operation Just Cause” and had President Manuel Antonio Noriega Moreno (February 11, 1934 – May 29, 2017), simply Noreiga, ‘kidnapped’ on January 3, 1990, on the accusation of dealing in hard drugs. In that operation, the US used over 200,000 US troops to effect Noriega’s arrest. His eventual trial in 1991, tagged “trial of the century” by the US Drug Enforcement Administration, earned the Panamanian president 40 years in jail!

Noreiga’s travails, suspect as they were, are lessons in how a nation that wants to grow treats felons. After his jail term was reduced to 17 for “good behavior” in the US, Noriega was extradited to France in 2010, where he was convicted and sentenced to seven years of imprisonment for money laundering. By 2011, France extradited him to Panama, where he was imprisoned having been tried in absentia in the 1990s for the crimes he committed while his dictatorship in Panama lasted. He carried that ignominy to his grave!

Political theorists and analysts believe that Noriega was punished not necessarily for being a drug baron, but for his audacity to stop spying for Big Brother, the US! This side of the Noriega’s coin notwithstanding, the former dictator of Panama was punished home and abroad for every crime he committed against the State. That is how society moves from bad to good. A system that places politics above the wellbeing of the people and asks felons to walk freely irrespective of the irreparable damage they have caused, cannot move forward.

This is what President Tinubu did, when he set free drug offenders in his latest half-thought presidential clemency. In case the president does not realise it, by making drug barons 40.8 percent of his clemency list, Mr. President has sent the wrong signal that here, in Nigeria, crime pays. Why nobody in Tinubu’s Presidency considered the collateral damages those ex-drug convicts have done to the public shows how reflective this government could be. That nobody considered the number of children in various rehab centres because of the activities of the freed drug peddlers interrogates the depth of advice the President gets!

But more importantly, and most troubling is the lead President Tinubu has given to those who believe till the second coming of the Messiah, that the President’s past was tainted. They can now go to town with the did-we-not-say-so cliche. Our elders say when a man is accused of having a long intestine, he has the responsibility to curtail his gastronomic tendencies (tí a bá pe ènìyàn ní abífun ràdàràdà, ó ye kí ó pa ìfun rè mó).

Again, they submit that a man accused of being a petty thief should not be seen playing with a goat’s kid in a dark corner of the village (a kìí pe ènìyàn l’ólè kó máa fi omo ewúré seré l’ókùnkùn). How the wisdom in these sayings of our ages got lost on President Tinubu when the committee he was said to have constituted for the purpose presented the list of those to benefit from his presidential pardon such that almost half of the list are drug convicts, beats one’s imagination. One is heavily tempted to believe that this is a case of paddy paddy, ala someone helping someone!

Nothing brings home the caution that we should not allow an emèrè to share the àkàrà òsè so that she will not give it to her kindred spirits more than the pardon of the 60 drug offenders by President Tinubu. How his ‘political opponents’ will not draw a correlation between the perceived reputation of the President in the social world, and the pardon of 60 drug lords would be the eighth wonder of this age.

By that indiscretion, 60 notorious drug dealers are out on the streets without any encumbrance! What are the implications? Your guess is as good as mine! How the President would explain that he did not free those drug felons to pave way for their return journeys to the underworld of drug trafficking is a herculean task. And I take a bet: Presido go explain tire, but we no go understand!