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OPINION: Wike And Abuja’s Corn Sellers

Published

2 years ago

August 28, 2023

By Lasisi Olagunju

The only reason the poor have not started eating the rich in Nigeria is, perhaps, because this is the season of corn. And, I believe I am right. Check your neighbourhood. Except you are in this government, you would know that things are bad, very bad for every home. Every staple food is priced beyond the pocket of the poor. With famine wrecking the urban working class and the toiling village yokel, corn –roasted and boiled – has come as a life-saver. But dealing in corn has been pronounced an act of ‘terrorism’ by Nigeria’s new Federal Capital Territory (FCT) minister, Mr Nyesom Wike. He announced in Abuja some days ago that he would sack corn sellers from the streets of the Federal Capital because they were criminals acting as informants to criminals. He said: “People selling corn will drop their waste indiscriminately and these are the things that cause insecurity. Criminals come to buy (corn) and use the opportunity to spy and give information to criminals. It is imperative we clear street hawkers.” It was a sweeping statement, very unfair, reckless, and even rash and incautious.

The same corn sellers that were the toast of politicians during street campaigns just a few months ago are Wike’s new felons in town. My people would gasp at what this minister said and say poor melon gave them delicious ẹ̀gúsí soup with which they ate their pounded yam, its peelings (eepo ẹ̀gúsí) have now become a taboo forbidden to be seen early in the morning (A fi ẹ̀gúsí jẹ iyán tán, èpo rẹ̀ wá di oun àìjí rí). When Wike said “it is imperative we clear street hawkers”, he didn’t apply his mind to the fact that what he wanted to “clear” are not just Marullus’s “blocks…stones…worse than senseless things.” They are human beings, the broken of all generations, many with dead dreams. The street trader we see daily also desire life in its better form but life happened to them. The sun rises and sets on their heads; the rains start and end on their brows. It is worse for the roasters of corn; their season is the rainy season and, yet, their embers must be protected from being quenched by the rains. Just as the scarred palm trees of Ijaiye forever tell tales of Ogunmola’s war, the charred fingers and palms of these unfortunate Nigerians sing the elegy of their unending wear and tear on the streets of life. Yet, we threaten them with eviction without giving them alternatives to where they are.

Was it not condition that made crayfish bend? If the street traders had options, Wike wouldn’t find them on the Abuja street. There is nothing cheery in being on the roadside or on the road, running up and down like the unwell. The next time you see hordes of hawkers running after your bulletproof Lexus, look into their eyes. If your eyes still see clearly, you should see sadness in its raw form in those sockets. When they sell to you, they smile and thank you. But the smile is always cold and rancid (erín kí korò). They work very hard but earn very little. Some get knocked down, maimed or killed. Yet, there is no end to their toil and struggle. The state has long left them behind in their struggle against want. We think their existence dents the beauty of our cities; we say investors won’t come if we don’t lock up the poor. A friend looked at everything happening around us and wondered why the state loved to rub salt into the injury of the people. I told him that salt complements injury in Nigeria. It is, in fact, the state’s preferred palliative for the injured.

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Instead of Wike criminalising the poverty of Abuja’s street traders, his focus should be on what to do to get them sufficiently empowered to trade in safer places. Democracy is preferred because it promises life in its better form. It is not preferred because it allows people to perfunctorily vote periodically. That is why leaders in a democracy are counseled to treat people with respect and seek their welfare at all times. The Kikuyu of Kenya say that “to lead is not to run roughshod over people.” Leaders should not be the archetypal Shakespearean “hard hearts, … cruel men of Rome” who think they have crossed the river of life and should be disdainful of the people downstream. We have them in Nigeria. They do and say what pumped their ego. They even triumphantly rebuke their old mates on the other side of life. There are consequences. When everything failed in 1793 France, including the people’s revolution, and leaders became covetous and rude and poverty was perpetuated, renowned political philosopher and one of the leaders of the French Revolution, Jean Jacques Rousseau, made a fiery speech in which he warned that “when the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.” A commentator said “the rich” that Rousseau was referring to was anyone in power. US’ John F. Kennedy had a similar warning for big men who appropriate democracy and its dividends to themselves and their cronies and ditch the people: “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”

I have read it several times that life is not always fair – but it has really never been fair. The poor cannot pull themselves out of poverty; they need the state. But the state does not think so. That is why some crazy English language users coined phrases that mock the poor. One of them would challenge the unfortunate to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” when it is practically impossible to do so. Try doing it – hold the strap of your boot and pull yourself up. I wish you luck. The poor in Nigeria has become, in the words of Sembene Ousmane, “a leftover from a vanished time, slowly being forgotten.” No one thinks the poor deserves to live. That is why the government of small-big men could not fight the big thieves but are training their guns at street hawkers. If you’ve ever watched corn sellers at their ‘job’ literally getting their fingers burnt for peanuts, you won’t call them by names their parents did not give them. It is a ‘work’ no one would do happily. Their sunken life is in the sadness of their sad eyes. One hundred percent of persons hawking on the street are victims of life and its contradictions. It is not like they prayed to be beaten ceaselessly day and night by weather and its inclemency. But it is said that what the world has inflicted you with is what they deploy in mocking you. A vicious band of locusts has siezed Nigeria in the name of democracy. The powerful have been flip-flopping in power for years to the sorrow of all; they’ve serially changed their masqueraders with tougher whips of many fingers. They have upped the ante in implementing policies that are ruinous to homes and damning to dreams. They now mock their victims.

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Women in hijab recently protested against hunger in Rigasa, Kaduna State. I was told the powers-that-be in the locality invited them and they were warned to stop saying they were hungry. Nigeria is not a democracy. It is an odious blend of heartless oligarchy and the worst form of plutocracy. An oligarchy is a small group of people having control of a country; plutocracy is government by the wealthy. The operators of the Nigerian system are overfed men who wantonly misapply Cicero’s “hunger is the best sauce” quote in their engagements with the poor. They have desertified the nation’s loam. Yet, they insist they have done well and deserve to be thanked. These are very delicate times; the people are hungry and restless. Government officials should carefully weigh their words and actions in relating with the poor. Not every Nigerian will emulate the epicurean patience of the country farmer, Ofellus, in Horace’s Satire. The character’s farm, his only source of sustenance, is taken away from him by the rich but he is seen celebrating the retention of what he calls the source of his happiness. Street trading is a reaction to lack of opportunity for better ways to earn decent living. Clearing street traders from Abuja cannot therefore be the solution to street trading. It will not even succeed. Wike’s predecessors serially sent them away, confiscated their wares and threw them into misery. But they came back because Nigeria has no place for them outside the streets. Their coming back is not pig-headed stubbornness or resistance. It is the resilience you find in every black man where suffering is everyday experience and the options are limited.

Across Africa, the people are hungry but their governments offer them threats and insults as pain killers. It didn’t start today but how it will end is what worries me. Mark G. Wentling is the author of ‘Africa Memoir: 50 Years, 54 Countries, One American Life.’ His engagement with Africa started in 1970 helping where he could in finding solutions to the continent’s existential issues. His bio says he is still involved in interrogating why Africans suffer and smile as the years roll by. Writing for ‘American Diplomacy’ in March 2014, Wentling recalled his experience of The Great Sahelian drought of the early 1970s and described Africans as “experts at buying time.” And that precisely is who we are. The article entitled ‘Africa’s Hunger’ contains a heart-wrenching account of the author’s encounter with a group of starving women and children at “a vast barren zone 200 kilometers north of Niamey, Niger Republic.” Wentling recalled that these people’s animals had died and “they had expended all their few assets. All the men in their clan had long ago migrated south to the coast or to Nigeria in search of work. Many of their children had already died from malnutrition and exposure, and more were likely to die in the days to come. All their old people had already died. They were the survivors, living on the edge of survival in a desolate place where all their usual drought-coping mechanisms had been exhausted and death was a likely prospect.” He offered to help move them farther south where their chances of survival were much better; where they could join other drought-affected people who were being assisted by aid agencies. Wentling said they refused, defiantly saying: “We prefer to die here in the place of our ancestors. At least, if our husbands, brothers and sons return, they will know where to find our bodies.”

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When will suffering end in Africa? The American ended his ‘Africa’s Hunger’ piece asking the same question but answering it with words of frustration: “After over four decades of working in every hungry corner of Africa, I should have some answers, but I don’t. Quite the contrary, I have more questions than when I first set foot on the continent in 1970. Way back then, I expected hunger in Africa to be a thing of the past by now, but clearly that is far from the case. At this late stage in my life, I am at a loss and feel deeply the failure to feed Africans, particularly the children. My conscience suffers because so many children (40% in some countries) are permanently impaired by stunting. I believe the conscience of the world should also suffer. I am worn out and feeling like a casualty of Africa’s ‘hunger wars.’ I am not sure of what needs to be done to end hunger in Africa…”

It is not only the American that is frustrated and unsure; we who live in the crisis are far more confused. The people have no clues; their governments are clueless.

Tell Wike to hold his peace with the street traders. Even before he chases the corn sellers away from Abuja, they will soon disappear from where they are. Their survival is seasonal; the last harvest of what they sell is what they are selling. The farms are drying up. The worries are really very little for the trader. It is the government that should be scared of what is coming. What will the people eat after this corn season? The immediate preoccupation of any government person today in Nigeria should be how to tackle the ravages of poverty and starvation. It is careless bourgeois talk to boast of sweeping the poor off the streets. The people are powerless, hungry and deprived but the government offers threats instead of hope. What will the people eat going forward? Brooklyn, United States-based writer, Talia Lavin, warned in November 2019 that “revolution is usually born of an authentic powerlessness and privation.” It was her summation of this age that Rousseau’s “eat the rich” is becoming a literal consideration for the poor. We should be worried — and scared.

This article written by Dr. Lasisi Olagunju, Saturday Editor, Nigerian Tribune was first published by the same newspaper. It is published by INFO DAILY with the permission from the author.

News

OPINION: APC’s Slave-raiding Expeditions

Published

14 hours ago

October 20, 2025

Editor

By Lasisi Olagunju

In mid-19th-century Ibadan, military expeditions under Balogun Ibikunle were so successful in slave-catching that by 1859, the city was gripped in the apprehension that it had harvested more slaves than it could control. Professor Bolanle Awe, citing missionary Hinderer’s Half-Yearly Report of Ibadan Station for that year, wrote that the oracle of Oke Badan had to intervene with a decree that Ibadan should desist from going to war for some time because there were “too many strange people in the town.”

People choke on their own success. If you doubt this, read Awe’s ‘Ajele System: A Study of Ibadan Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century’, published in December 1964. Power that eats with ten fingers, that feeds on endless acquisition will, sooner or later, find itself choking on its own gluttony.

At about the same period Ibadan trembled over the spectre of a slave insurrection, similar fears were roiling the American South. In May, 1939, distinguished professor of history, Harvey Wish (4 September, 1909 – 7 March, 1968), published his ‘The Slave Insurrection Panic of 1856’. In 1856, according to Wish, Stewart and Montgomery counties in Tennessee were gripped by panic. The combined slave population in those places stood at about 12,000 against 19,000 whites, but in many localities, the enslaved outnumbered their masters. In the iron districts along the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers, eight to ten thousand slaves laboured in mines and furnaces under a handful of overseers. A house stuffed with captives soon loses peace especially when the enslaved start demanding rights. The fear that the captives in those American communities might rise became as real as the chains that bound them.

The twin anxieties of Ibadan and Tennessee of the 1850s should speak to today’s All Progressives Congress (APC), which seems to have embarked on its own form of political slave-raiding expeditions, capturing opposition governors, lawmakers, and chieftains in a frenzy of conquest. History teaches that those who live by conquest often reel in pains of indigestion. Ask Afonja of Ilorin. The slaves he encouraged to defect into his army proved his nemesis.

There is that Nigerian comedian who combs his bald head. He is there online feasting on APC’s defection binge. The jester’s conclusion is that by 2027, Nigeria’s epic contest will be between APC and APC, a scenario he says will burst the belly of the overfed. There is a limit to how much the human stomach can hold before it rebels against its own greed. All manner of gluttony, including the political, have their limits and dangers. What Tennessee feared in 1856 did, indeed, happen in some places. Read Harvey Wish.

The Yoruba have sweet street slangs. You’ve heard of curing madness with madness (“wèrè l’a fi nwo wèrè”). You’ve not heard of “ko were, ko were.” Packing all sorts into all sorts; orísirísi. The Yoruba word ‘were’ means madness or the mad themselves. In some contexts ‘were’ also means idiocy/idiot; stupid/stupidity. “Ko were, ko were” is what my village friends call men who go for anything in a skirt. It is also what the rapacious do with their molue: Forty-nine sitting, ninety-nine standing. The bus is “fully full”, yet, the driver and conductor still yell to the street to hop in: “Wolé! Enter! No change!” It is never enough until some cranial vessels yield to bursting.

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Shakespeare’s Angelo says in ‘Measure for Measure’ that “we must not make a scarecrow of the law, setting it up to fear the birds of prey…” We do that here. All our laws are scared and afraid of power. People break the law and dare the law to say something.

A tributary is a smaller river or stream that flows into a larger river or lake. River Oba is a tributary of the Osun River; it flows into it. The law says you can divorce River Oba, if you like, but you cannot give Oba’s child to Osun, your new husband. The powerful can snatch the wife of the weak, but he cannot snatch the child of the weak. Our constitution expressly forbids lawmakers from hopping from bed to bed, party to party, doing what common prostitutes do. Section 68(1)(g) of the constitution bars senators and Reps from contracting the syphilis of defection. Section 109(1)(g) prescribes the same taboo for lawmakers at the state level. Those two sections say if you insist on courting leprosy, you must be prepared to live in a leper colony, alone.

Our constitution says that a legislator who strays from the banner that bore him to victory must surrender his seat.

That law is dead here even when the exception to the rule is not present. The exception, the law says, is that defection is allowed only when there is a division within the legislator’s party or the party has merged with another. There is no division, there is no merger, yet lawmakers after lawmakers have changed parties like pants without consequences.

When is a democracy dead? It is dead when opposition sells itself to power. It is dead when law is dead, or whenever it is helpless; when rule of men replaces the rule of law; when government of men overthrows government of laws. Rule of men is a personal rule; it is what sits on the throne in an unaccountable society; a society in the mouth of dogs.

Aristotle wrote that “It is more proper that law should govern than any one of the citizens.” American professor of Law, Paul Gowder, in the winter of 2018 wrote ‘Resisting the Rule of Men’. Gowder contrasts “the rule of men” to “the rule of law.” He says “I will say that we have ‘the rule of men’ or ‘personal rule’ when those who wield the power of the state are not obliged to give reasons to those over whom that power is being wielded—from the standpoint of the ruled, the rulers may simply act on their brute desires.” Is that not what politicians do when, with impunity, they cross the road and dash their husbands’ children to their more powerful, wealthy lover across the street? Yet, they say this is a democracy.

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“Democracy—What Is It?” Theodore M. Hart in a 1948 edition of The Georgia Review asked as he threw the question at a class of veterans. He got 32 answers. The last of the answers, he says, is the “farthest thing from a definition that could well be imagined.” This is it: “The right to defy a ruler, the right to believe in the right, the right to read the truth, the right to speak the truth, the sky free of destruction, the water free of danger, the trees, the earth, the house I live in, my friends and relatives, the school I go to, the church I attend – that’s Democracy.” It is a mouthful. Before that definition, there have been shorter ones that we won’t like to teach our kids here. One of them says ‘Democracy’ is “that no man should have more power than another.” Another says it is “a government in which the source of authority (political) must be and remain in the people and not in the ruler.” The opposite holds sway here. Ruling party politicians are the law; it is into their maximum ocean that all rivers must empty their waters.

Politicians, governors and lawmakers of all tendencies are massing into one party, the ruling party, like the forces of Julius Caesar whose feet are already in the Rubicon. There is also the perception that the judiciary is collapsing (or has collapsed) its structures into the ruling party.

It is futile as it is dangerous, self-destructive and self-destructing to seek to have a Kabiyesi presidency, a democracy without opposition. French philosopher, Montesquieu, in his Esprit des Lois, published in I748, wrote: “There would be an end of everything if one man or one body, whether of princes, nobles, or people exercised these three powers: that of making the laws, of executing the public resolutions, and of judging the cases of individuals.”

William Shakespeare in ‘Measure for Measure’ warns that possessing great power tempts one toward tyranny.

Shakespeare’s character, Isabella, tells power-drunk Angelo, deputy to the Duke of Vienna:

“O! it is excellent

To have a giant’s strength; but it is tyrannous

To use it like a giant.”

Now, what is the value and essence of a presidential power that cannot crush, enslave or imprison governors? Where is the value?

In George Orwell’s novel, ‘1984’ we are shown that the party’s omnipotence is not freedom but imprisonment. The story teller asks humanity to accept that the pursuit of total power, total control over thought, over history, and reality, traps power and the power wielder in perpetual manipulation.

But power is powerful; it never listens to reason. Ikem Osodi, Chinua Achebe’s radical character says in ‘Anthills of the Savannah’ that “The prime failure of rulers is to forget that they are human.” Are rulers really human? In Yoruba history and belief, they are ‘alase’ (executive) deputy of the gods. Before Achebe there was Lord Acton who famously said that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” Someone said power, when unrestrained, imprisons its possessor in illusion.

It is not the fault of power that it extends and distends and stretches itself thin. It is because the world seductively craves the king’s dominance. So, let us not blame power; we should blame the people as they query the worth of freedom that bears no food. Because literature is life, it is there in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s ‘The Brothers Karamazov’. There, we read in The Grand Inquisitor’s monologue, a story within a story: “For who can rule men if not he who holds their conscience and their bread in his hands?” The Inquisitor informs the Lord that humanity had “taken the sword of Caesar, and in taking it, of course, have rejected Thee and followed him.” They will always follow Caesar because he alone has bread to distribute from north to south.

The devil is not a liar; if he is a liar, he won’t say the truth. And what is the truth? It is in the Inquisitor’s mouth, it is that seeing freedom and bread walking together is inconceivable; that no science will give the people bread “so long as they remain free.” Governors, senators, Reps – all have surrendered to the bread and butter of power. Automatic tickets, automatic victory at the polls, cheap victory over the people. What power is saying in silence is said loudly by Dostoevsky’s Inquisitor: “In the end, they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, ‘Make us your slaves, but feed us.’”

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JUST IN: NLC Gives FG Four Weeks To Resolve ASUU Crisis

Published

17 hours ago

October 20, 2025

Editor

The Nigeria Labour Congress has resolved to issue a four-week ultimatum to the Federal Government should it fail to conclude negotiations with all tertiary institutions-based unions.

The NLC also condemned the no-work-no-pay policy introduced by the government as a form of sanction to members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities for daring to embark on a nationwide strike.

The president of the NLC, Joe Ajaero made this known in an ongoing interactive session with labour correspondents in Abuja.

The interactive session followed the meeting between the NLC and leaders of tertiary institutions’ based unions at the NLC headquarters in Abuja.

“We have decided to give the federal government four weeks to conclude all negotiations in this sector. They have started talks with ASUU but the problem in this sector goes beyond ASUU.

“That is why we are extending this to four weeks. If after four weeks this negotiation is not concluded, the organs of the NEC will meet and take a nationwide action that all workers in the country, all unions in the country will be involved so that we get to the root of all this.

“ The era of signing agreements, negotiations and threatening the unions involved, that era has come to an end.

“The policy, the so-called policy of no work, no pay, will henceforth be no pay, no work. You can’t benefit from an action you instigated. We have discovered that most, 90% of strike actions in this country are caused by failure to obey agreements,” Ajaero said.

The Nigerian higher education system has been faced with chronic instability, the latest leading to the closure of universities nationwide due to the ongoing strike by ASUU.

Recall that ASUU National President Professor Chris Piwuna announced the strike at a press briefing at the University of Abuja on Sunday, following the expiry of a 14-day ultimatum issued to the government on September 28. The union cited unresolved issues relating to staff welfare, infrastructure, salary arrears, and the implementation of the 2009 ASUU-FGN agreement.

Negotiations in recent weeks failed to avert industrial action. Education Minister Tunji Alausa said two weeks ago that talks had reached a final phase, noting the government had released N50bn for earned academic allowances and allocated N150bn in the 2025 budget for a needs assessment to be disbursed in three instalments. However, ASUU rejected these measures as insufficient.

The union is demanding full implementation of the 2009 agreement, release of three-and-a-half months of withheld salaries, sustainable funding for universities, protection against victimisation, payment of outstanding promotion and salary arrears, and release of withheld deductions for cooperatives and union contributions.

The NLC emphasised its full solidarity with ASUU and other tertiary education unions, calling for robust participation from all union leaders.

It also highlighted the principle of a converse stance, “No Pay, No Work”, urging the government to honour collective agreements and respect the rights of workers.

The emergency meeting is expected to chart the next steps for industrial action and explore strategies to safeguard the welfare of university staff, as well as the quality and continuity of public tertiary education in Nigeria.

News

JUST IN: NLC Begins Meeting With ASUU, Other Unions Over Strike

Published

17 hours ago

October 20, 2025

Editor

The Nigeria Labour Congress has commenced a meeting with the leadership of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities, Colleges of Education Academic Staff Union, Academic Staff Union of Polytechnics, Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Polytechnics among others over the ongoing strike in universities and other concerns raised by workers in tertiary institutions nationwide.

The meeting is currently holding at the NLC national headquarters in Abuja.

Recall that the NLC in a letter invited all union leaders across various tertiary institutions of learning nationwide to a meeting to find lasting solutions to issues stemmed from failed negotiations with the Federal Government.

Nigerian higher education system has been faced with chronic instability, the latest leading to closure of universities nationwide due to the ongoing strike by ASUU.

The NLC emphasised its full solidarity with ASUU and other tertiary education unions, calling for robust participation from all union leaders. It also highlighted the principle of a converse stance, “No Pay, No Work”, urging the government to honour collective agreements and respect the rights of workers.