By Festus Adedayo

Poor Goodluck Ebele Jonathan! Last Thursday, at the 70th birthday of his ex-Chief of Staff, Chief Mike Aiyegbeni Oghiadomhe, in Benin, Edo State, the former Nigerian president revealed the underbelly of Nigerian politics. At that event, Jonathan opened up a wound he had nursed since he lost the 2015 presidential election. It was his ordeals in the hands of political Askaris. “Politics in the Nigerian standard is about betrayals. I have witnessed a lot of betrayal during 2015 election,” he said.

Apart from politics, in liberation struggles, betrayers and betrayals are rife. During South Africa’s apartheid era, a number of former activists, or “comrades” who formed a bulwark of resistance against white minority rule, turned coat. A sedimentation of betrayals could be found in the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (APLA) and the African National Congress (ANC’s) military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). Either bought or forced through torture, “Comrades” of the struggle morphed into operatives for the Apartheid regime, squealing on their ex-comrades and acting as police agents. Many even participated in death squads against their former allies. They were then given the derogatory label of Askari. Initially a moniker for police in Swahili, ‘Askari’ stuck on Apartheid era turncoats.

My first opportunity of meeting Jonathan, the man who would be president of Nigeria, was in 2005 at Idah, (I guess) Kogi State. Ostensibly seeking ties to the apron strings of then PDP National Chairman, Dr. Ahmadu Ali, Jonathan had come to Idah for Ali’s child’s wedding ceremony. It was at the thick of the crisis of Diepreye Solomon Alamieyeseigha who was subsequently removed by the Bayelsa State House of Assembly.

The Jonathan I saw at Idah was as harmless and peaceful as the white pigeon, a mythical bird Yoruba call Adaba. The people even deified Adaba with an ancient tag which holds that if she perches on your rooftop, peace had made it its hibernation.

In Idah that day, Jonathan appeared to me as wearing the innocence of a child. He cut the visor of a man alien to the scorched-earth hearts of Nigerian politicians. Over the years however, I presumed Jonathan’s participation at the highest echelon of Nigerian politics had sufficiently scarred his heart. My assumption was predicated on an ancient saying of my people, to wit that, until you acquire the status of the elderly, you will constantly frolic with children who then stomp on you like one desecrating a sacred shrine, (B’á ò nínkàn àgbà, bí èwe l’àárí).

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Last week however, Jonathan seemed to have come of age. He wore the full plumage of Nigerian politics. The truth is that, in Nigerian politics today, at least since the First Republic, there has been a confetti of betrayals. It has got to an epidemic level, so much that trust, tired of abuse, developed wings and flew out of Nigerian politics. Politicians laugh at anyone who expresses surprise at serial betrayals among them. The situation today is that men and women of honour take a flight from it.

In the Yoruba society and in the people’s everyday life, trust and betrayal are very fundamental as well. Virtually all of their relationships are woven round trust, for cohesion, peace and societal stability. Because experience showed them that deviants exist who break the cord of trust, covenants called Ìmùlè, literally meaning ‘drinking (from) the water of the earth’ and Májèmú, whose literal translation is, ‘drinking from a calabash bowl’, are used to suborn agreements. In both agreements of Ìmùlè and Májèmú made between parties, the earth – which Yoruba Apala bard, Ayinla Omowura, in a deployment of a Hausa epithet, called, ‘gidan kowa’ – home of all – is invoked to witness and ensure abidance.

When either of the parties reneges from these covenants, the Yoruba say, Ó dalè. The one who wrongs the other is then the Òdàlè, or in translation, “betrayer of the earth”. The consequence of betrayal in Yorubaland isn’t benign. Either said during the agreement process or not, the phrase, “whosoever betrays the earth will disappear with the earth” (enit’óbá dalè, á báilè lo” is a poignant reminder that silent as the earth, the witness, may be during agreements (verbal or non-communicated) the earth is a dangerous mystical personality which reserves punishment for violation of agreements made while standing on it – “ilè ògéré af’okó ye’rí, alápò ìkà”.

In social or political relations, some deviants have however had a history of undermining the concept of trust by attempting to put a lie to land’s mystical personality. On many occasions when they did that, they have been recipients of catastrophic comeuppances. While there are so many examples in individual social relations, political examples will aptly illustrate the trust deficit which Goodluck Jonathan said was as rare as the teeth of a hen in Nigerian politics.

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Take for instance the experience of Chief Obafemi Awolowo. While the political successes of this Yoruba people’s recent ancestor have remained legendary till today, seldom is a dig done into the betrayals that dogged his political career. When he chose to vacate Western Nigeria to contest to be Nigeria’s Prime Minister, unable to secure the needed votes, one of his associates said this of him, as recorded by Awolowo himself: “I warned him when he was going to contest the Federal Elections – ‘Do not go to the Federal House, sit down like the Sardauna of Sokoto in the Northern Region, sit down like Dr. Azikiwe in the East.’ He would not listen, he wanted to become the Prime Minister. Now he has failed and since his failure the man has become insane. Since his failure, the man has become sick. So I appeal to the Prime Minister to put him in an asylum.” The man was one Chief E. O. Okunowo, representing Ijebu Central of the Western Region, at the First Republic Federal House of Representatives. You will find it on page 167 in Awolowo’s The travails of democracy and the rule of law (1987).

Awo’s closest political allies plotted his political ruin and death. They sent him to jail and gloated about the loss of his first son. Their plan was for him not to return from the Calabar prison. During the second republic, the stench of betrayal did not abate. Some of his closest allies had even begun angling to run for presidency in the proposed 1987 election.

Chief Ayo Rosiji, Awolowo’s main lieutenant and one of the founders of the Action Group, also gave him the Julius Caesar’s Brutus stab. This brilliant engineer and lawyer resigned his position as Publicity Secretary of the Action Group and ported to the opposition party. Rosijiit was who told his biographer, Australia-born historian, Dr. Nina Mba, in the biography, Man With Vision, of another betrayal that could have assumed Nigeria-wide shock. According to Mba, Rosiji told her that sometime in late 1958, Nigeria’s Prime Minister, Tafawa Balewa, was about to betray his political godfather, Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto. Writes Mba, “According to Rosiji,… Balewa confided in him that he was fed up with being prime minister and of being harassed by the Sardauna, and that he was thinking of resigning.” Rosiji said he then attempted to convince Balewa to, rather than dump Bello and return to his teaching job as he threatened, join Awolowo’s Action Group. While Balewa thought that was an outlandish suggestion, Rosiji asked him to “think about it.”

S. L.Akintola is another. Till today, the reason for the schism between him and Awolowo remains mythic. While Chief Bola Ige, in his People, politics and politicians of Nigeria (1995) said the reason was trust deficit as Awolowo “(left) in charge of his base a deputy and Premier whom he did not quite trust and who was not his choice,” some scholars like Bill Dudley and EghosaOsaghae said it was ideological differences.

In Jonathan’s lamentation of betrayal in Nigerian politics, there is however the need to draw a line between the wickedness of godfatherism and self-liberation of godsons cloaked as betrayals. As I wrote in the piece, “His Excellency the godfather” (June 24, 2018) what is termed political betrayal in 4th Republic Nigerian politics is actually godfatherism gone sour. In 2003 Anambra State for instance, Chris Uba, the barely literate but stupendously wealthy businessman, exposed the destructive phenomenon. He had financed the election of Chris Ngige to be governor, pulling him by the nape of his trousers to the Okija shrine to swear by an oath of abidance. When it was time to start drawing from his “investment,” Ngige reneged, details of which became a global embarrassment to Nigerian politics.

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After the 2007 handover to lackeys by the 1999 governors set, the cookies began to crumble. Some of the cookies were immediate while many took longer time. In Lagos’ Bola Tinubu and the trio of Raji Fashola, AkinwumiAmbode and JideSanwo-Olu, what many earlier saw was a matrimony worthy of an example. Tinubu continued to reap the dividends of his ‘investments’ in his handpicked successors. He determines the political barometer of Lagos politics and holds the lids of its finance. Not until the re-election campaign of Fashola and Ambode and Sanwo-Olu’s alleged cash gift to Tinubu’s political enemies did the cracks begin to be noticeable. Tinubu himself is said to parade a graveyard of those who betrayed him.

In many other states subsequently, the matrimony became a bedlam almost immediately. In Enugu, for instance, Sullivan Chime was still a governor-elect when he started to undo all that his mentor and godfather did. Orji Kalu suffered same fate in Abia, where his erstwhile Chief of Staff, T. A. Orji eventually emerged governor. Orji spent his years in government firing ballistic missiles at Kalu who had spent billions of state funds to skew the process in his favour. This ‘betrayal’ has since then been replicated in virtually all the states, with anointed godsons, having mutated to become godfathers themselves, attempting to foist their own godsons too as successors. In Anambra, Peter Obi, while shopping for a godson, walked into the supposedly sane banking hall as he searched for an urbane, corporate world executive. He got Willie Obiano, a mirthless character. Less than a year after, the strange, somber-looking Obiano transmuted from the gentleman who couldn’t hurt a fly into a stone-hearted political pall-bearer who strenuously attempted to preside over Obi’s political funeral. It was same story in Kano State where Umar Ganduje, erstwhile Rabiu Kwankwaso’s lickspittle, became a hydra who sought to swallow his ex-boss.

The list is endless. The most recent is the stench of the Nyesom Wike-SiminalayiFubara ‘betrayal’ claim in Rivers State. In all these however, a few have remained true to their predecessors, like the Kogi State governor. This is regardless of the predecessor’s betrayal of the people of his state.

The chestnut I’m pulling out of the fire today is that, from the Goodluck Jonathan betrayal story of last Thursday, you cannot get a morality tale in which the lines between heroes and villains are clearly drawn. Jonathan himself betrayed some political appendages when he went into bed with Tinubu in the 2015 elections. Tinubu the godfather also betrayed his party’s presidential candidate, Nuhu Ribadu, for Jonathan. Ribadu, as a result, won only Osun state for his ACN party. The morality of judging who is the betrayer between a godfather and godson becomes even dud when you ask whether the money used to finance those elections that birthed “the betrayers” were not stolen wealth of the people. In which case, the people’s prayer is that, like the “eni” – the dew that hangs on leaves by bush-part sidewalks in the morning – the amity of the godfather and godson must never last beyond sunrise.

The dilemma of this surfeit of betrayals is however that, unless Nigerian politics becomes an engagement of honesty, trust, truth and fidelity, decent people will continue to flee from it. In all the betrayals, the grand betrayal I see is the one against the Nigerian people whose lives have backtracked in 26 years of the 4th Republic.

The National Leadership of the Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria (IPMAN) on Sunday distanced itself from a strike called by the Western Zone of the association.

The Western Zone had said it was backing the Petroleum Tanker Drivers’ opposition to Dangote acquiring trucks to transport its products to users.

The Western Zone in a press statement signed by its Chairman and Acting Secretary, Basorun Joseph Akanni and Mr. Adeleke Adeoye, said Dangote’s intention contravenes the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA), and urged its members to begin a strike on Monday.

But a statement by the National Ex-Officio, Douglas Iyike on behalf of the National Executive Council (NEC) of IPMAN, urged its members to disregard the strike.

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He added that what Dangote plans to do would free the drivers from multiple and choking levies they are forced to pay by petroleum tanker drivers.

He also said that the action of Dangote was supported by the PIA.

Iyike said: “I am refuting this story as the Former chairman of IPMAN Benin Depot and presently the National Ex-Officio of IPMAN.

“That IPMAN National Executive Council NEC under the leadership of Alahji Maigandi Shittima is not aware of such action preconceived by the IPMAN Western Zone to make such a pronouncement of IPMAN Western Zone going on strike by Monday.

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“And as you would know the PIA bill has given the room for any individual to own a refinery in the country and have your own trucks to distribute your products and even build petrol stations if you choose to where your products can be dispense to the general public , so Dangote has not done any harm but good to we marketers and to the general public.

“Howbeit, I want to state unequivocally that the IPMAN western zone has no impetus to call for any strike has it lack the constitutional powers to do so as it is only the National Executive Council of IPMAN that has the reserved right to do so and not the zone or any Depot and the western zone should also by this statement take into cognizance that they are not on their they are under the NEC of IPMAN according to the IPMAN constitution of 2009 as amended and as such cannot take any decision of any kind of strike or demonstration regarding the interest of marketers without the approval of the National Executive Council of IPMAN.

“We advise esteemed marketers to go with their normal day to day business.”

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Iyike said that the Dangote Refinery is a good development for creation of jobs to the citizens of this country and also a good development to the marketers who could no longer afford to buy petroleum products in their various stations outlets.

He said the development would make marketers get products on credit bases and pay the balance after sales “which will help marketers to bounce back to business.”

“IPMAN nationwide is solidly behind Dangote Refinery and we will not allow few individuals to truncate this development in the downstream industry and the level of enormous levies on marketers before getting their products to their stations outlet will be a thing of the past.”

Russia fired its biggest-ever aerial barrage at Ukraine early Sunday, killing two people and setting the seat of the Ukrainian government in Kyiv ablaze in an attack President Volodymyr Zelensky warned would prolong the war.

An AFP reporter saw the roof of Ukraine’s cabinet of ministers in flames and smoke billowing over the capital.

Drone strikes also damaged several high-rise buildings in Kyiv, according to emergency services.

Russia has shown no sign of halting its three-and-a-half-year invasion of Ukraine, pushing hardline demands for ending the war despite efforts by the United States to broker a peace deal.

Residents in Kyiv spoke of their frustration following the strikes.

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“This is already routine for us, unfortunately,” Olga, a 30-year-old resident of a damaged building, told AFP.

The Russians first “grab they Shaheds (Iranian-designed drones), then the rockets come,” she said.

The attack on Sunday was the first to hit Ukraine’s cabinet of ministers, a sprawling government complex at the heart of Kyiv.

An AFP reporter saw helicopters dropping what appeared to be buckets of water over its roof, as emergency services rushed to the scene.

“Ukraine’s military-industrial complex and transport infrastructure” in the attack, without mentioning the government building.

Police cordoned off the area surrounding the building, the roof and upper floors of which sustained damage.

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“We will restore the buildings. But we cannot bring back lost lives. The enemy terrorises and kills our people every day throughout the country,” Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said.

Russia fired at least 810 drones and 13 missiles at Ukraine between late Saturday and early Sunday, in a new record, according to the Ukrainian air force.

Zelensky said emergency services were working across the country.

“Such killings now, when real diplomacy could have already begun long ago, are a deliberate crime and a prolongation of the war,” he said on Facebook.

The attack drew condemnation from European leaders, including Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and EU chief Ursula von der Leyen.

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“Once again, the Kremlin is mocking diplomacy,” von der Leyen wrote on X.

Strike kills six

AFP reporters heard explosions over the capital early Sunday.

A strike on a nine-story residential building in the west of Kyiv killed at least two people, a mother and her two-month-old son, prosecutors said.

More than a dozen others were wounded in Kyiv, according to the emergency service.

Among them was a 24-year-old pregnant woman, who delivered a premature baby shortly after the attack, and doctors were fighting for her life and that of her baby, state TV Suspilne reported.

Four more died, and dozens of others were wounded in overnight strikes across the country’s east and southeast, authorities said.

The attack also killed seven horses at an equestrian club in Kyiv’s suburbs, according to Ukraine’s foreign ministry.

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“The world cannot stand aside while a terrorist state takes lives—human or animal—every single day,” it wrote on X.

The barrage came after more than two dozen European countries pledged to patrol any agreement to end the war, some of whom said they were willing to deploy troops on the ground.

Kyiv insists on Western-backed security guarantees to prevent future Russian attacks, but President Vladimir Putin warns that any Western troops in Ukraine would be unacceptable and legitimate targets.

Efforts in recent weeks by US President Donald Trump to end the war have so far yielded little progress.

Meantime, on the front line in the east, Moscow continued to claim territory in costly grinding battles, capturing another village in the Dnipropetrovsk region. Russia occupies around 20 per cent of the country in total.

Tens of thousands have been killed in three-and-a-half years of fighting, which has forced millions from their homes and destroyed much of eastern and southern Ukraine in Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II.

AFP