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:

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“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!

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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!

By Lasisi Olagunju

‘Teacher of Light’ is the title of a biography of Chinua Achebe written by Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Tijan Sallah. What does it mean to teach light? Or, rather, what is light? If you know what darkness does, you would know what light means and the value it holds.

“When the moon is shining, the cripple becomes hungry for a walk.” With that proverb and its moon metaphor, Chinua Achebe established himself as a true teacher of light. My muse pushed the proverb to my presence as I read through an invitation to me from the Obi of Onitsha asking that I be part of this year’s Ofala Festival. It occurred to me that moment that it is not only the moon that gives light; culture is an illuminator, it also gives light, especially to people like me who routinely forget how to dance to ancestral summons.

I had the very rare privilege of being honoured by the Nigerian Academy of Letters with its Honorary Fellowship in August this year. From the North to the South, only three Nigerians were so honoured: I was one; my brother, culture scholar and media icon, Jahman Anikulapo, was one; the deeply intellectual Obi of Onitsha, His Majesty Igwe Nnaemeka Alfred Ugochukwu Achebe (Agbogidi), was the third, the biggest of us. At that ceremony, the Obi, who said he had looked forward to meeting me, met me, held me and has kept me close as a son.

So, his invite to the Ofala Festival came. The festival holds this week. I wish I could be there as the king’s guest; but wishes are not horses. Because the mountain here is blocking the view of the mountain over there, I cannot honour the invitation. So I prayed for the success of the festival. The Obi answered with a thunderous ‘Amen’.

Ofala? I checked and found that the word “Ofala” is an enduring offspring of the Igbo words ọfọ (authority) and ala (land). Ofala is history retold in performance; it is also culture renewed. It relives the Obi’s authority over the land and its people.

Ofala is Obi’s return from sacred silence. The festival celebrates royalty’s reborn, and the Ndichie’s renewal of loyalty to the king. In Iru Ofala and Azu Ofala, the king returns from ancestral presence to repossess his warriors with their red caps.

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Etymologists say the word ‘festival’ derives from the Latin ‘festum’. Anthropologists have followed the word through centuries and civilisations as its meaning evolved across cultures and disciplines. Émile Durkheim and James George Frazer were influential figures in early anthropology. Scholars, in summaries, say that to Durkheim and Frazer, festivals are communal expressions of belief and solidarity. They say that with festivals, people renew their social and spiritual bonds. In Ofala, we see that they are right.

Leo Frobenius, German ethnologist and archaeologist, was in Africa on multiple occasions between 1904 and 1935. In the 1910s, Frobenius observed festivals in diverse places; he documented them and saw in them vital celebrations of familial, tribal, and religious life deeply rooted in ancestral history and beliefs.

The German observed right. Ofala and similar festivals bind communities; they celebrate social cohesion and keep sacred traditions alive. They fuse communal history with spiritual renewal and survival. In them, the rhythm of everyday life comes alive.

Ofala has grown to attract great brands. Its major sponsor is telecoms giant, Globacom, which has been there since 2011. I have very solid people in Globacom, which makes me an envoy of its greenery and deepens my interest in everything, particularly, festivals in which the company is involved.

The Yoruba tell their children: When you behold greatness, honour it with reverence. Tí o bá ri olá, pón olá lé. That is what I am doing here. It is what Globacom’s long partnership with the Obi and Ofala does; an act of reverence to the greatness of the culture that birthed them.

From Lisabi in Abeokuta to Ojude Oba in Ijebu-Ode, and from Ofala in Onitsha to other vibrant festivals across the land, Globacom’s partnerships reflect a philosophy rooted in understanding that just as a zebra is defined by its stripes, a people are defined by their culture. In other words, a person without culture is like a zebra without stripes. Sustaining culture is sustaining the people.

That is what corporate sponsorship does to cultural events. Obi’s people say in a proverb, “Nku di na mba na-eghere mba nri (The firewood of a community cooks for that community).” Globacom’s firewood has kept the flame of the festivals it supports alive, warming the hearts of millions who gather yearly to honour tradition.

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To sponsor a festival is one thing; but to nurture its essence and future is another. Through resources and resourcefulness, community engagement, and cultural reverence, Globacom has redefined what corporate responsibility can mean. That is what I gleened from the firm. I agree with those words. Shakespeare writes in Hamlet that “The purpose of playing… is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature.” The playwright suggests that the aim of acting and theater is to reflect reality, showing “virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure”.

By supporting these festivals, the company, Glo, holds up a mirror to our shared identity, allowing us to see ourselves, our beauty, our resilience, our history.

Globacom became a major sponsor of the Ofala Festival in 2011 and has sustained the sponsorship yearly since then. Fourteen years on, like the Ekwe and the Udu, two Igbo drums beating the same rhythm, the company’s unwavering support has demonstrated that corporate success and cultural preservation can walk (and work) together. I read this out and my friend, the Igbo man, chipped in: “Egbe bere, ugo bere” (let the kite perch and let the eagle perch). When business and tradition walk together, culture gains.

The Yoruba routinely remind us that it is when we walk in the rain that we know who truly walks with us. Companies get involved in arts and culture for various reasons. Some, like leeches, place their names beside great traditions so as to benefit from the greatness. But what I see with Glo here is much more than profit in cash and kind. I see a telecoms giant, wholly indigenous, that has chosen to walk tall with the ancestors, deploying its enormous muscle to connect the past and their history to the world of the modern. One word defines this; it is renewal.

The rich who spend on their people’s historical and cultural essence are not frivolous; neither are they stupid. It is patriotism; if you like, call it cultural nationalism. The wealth of culture, like all wealth, grows when shared.

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Cultural promotion yields dividends that confound account books. It stitches the torn fabric of community; it keeps the hearth of local enterprise burning, and rekindles pride in who we are and where we come from. It renews pride in our shared heritage. It makes us all richer.

If you do well the society notes and records all you do for posterity. The Alake and paramount ruler of Egbaland, Oba Adedotun Gbadebo said in 2017 that “Glo is number one in culture and support for the people. The company pioneered per second billing and others followed.” The Alake wrote that admirable testimonial eight years ago. The flag of patriotism is still there on the mountain top, flying.

In Ofala, the king dances the dance of joy of a fresh start. In the drumbeats and dance steps, the king delights that yam is harvested as proof of life, not of death. The beats retell a people’s story as told by the ancestors. A people are as strong as the stories they tell of themselves.

This weekend (Friday and Saturday), Onitsha will be draped in Globacom’s green, the colour of growth and renewal. Colour green in French is vert, the Italian call it verde, the Spanish, in Castilian voice, say it is verde. They all draw their source from the Latin word for green which is viridis, a word that denotes freshness and vitality. History is an endless rope. English words, verdant and viridian, have this same Roman ancestry. To viridis again belongs “a large family of other words that evoke vigor, growth, and life: virere (to be green, to be vigorous), vis (strength), vir (man, masculine singular), ver (spring), virga (stem, rod), perhaps even virtus (courage, virtue).” For those insights, check French professor of medieval history, Michel Pastoureau’s ‘Green: The History of a Color’ as translated by Jody Gladding.

Whenever I meet Globacom chairman, Dr Mike Adenuga Jr, I intend to ask him the specific reason he chose colour green for his giant.

I congratulate the Obi and Glo as the moon glows on Ofala. In the dance of that festival, drums speak, colours sing, and heritage dances. In perfect rhythm, the people breathe, act and rejoice as tradition bathes in innovation. With the moon shining brighter, Obi’s land is renewed this weekend. Congratulations, Agbogidi.

By Lasisi Olagunju

You know where the latest anti-government journalists are in Lagos? Kirikiri. On a day that Nigerians were celebrating an additional spur of 100 kilometres to the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Road, the killjoys of Kirikiri struck. They took a happy, joyous people of 200 million on a gruelling, bumpy ride across the country. They ran painful stories of craters and potholes and headlined them: ‘Federal Highways of Horror.’

It is a miracle that our Minister of Works, Dave Umahi, has not pummeled the Lagos newspaper called Vanguard. It ran the bad stories. It is still unclear why the minister has not rebuked its owner and spanked its journalists for publishing what they were not supposed to publish. Not once, but twice, last week they allowed the devil to use them to tell stories of collapsed federal roads from the north to the south. Their stories portrayed hardworking Umahi as a failure in monumental proportions.

Those journalists, injected with an overdose of impudence, said they did an investigation. They painted a grim picture of federal highways across multiple Nigerian states suffering severe neglect. They said the neglect has made travel dangerous, expensive, and time-consuming. They wrote as if they were sent to pull down a house built by God.

In the South, they came up with a long list of bad roads. They said northern states shared the same story of pain. They described some roads as crater-filled horror scenes; some as barely passable, others as sites long abandoned by contractors. On the few ones harbouring contractors, the signs they displayed showed slow men at work.

It does not rain; it pours. Amid narratives of millions of bad federal roads, Umahi made himself professor last week. “I am a professor of Engineering,” he announced on national television. Professor Umahi? I pray he is not asked to name the king who blessed him with that chieftaincy title. Some Arise News television journalists, whose eyes lack lashes, forced him to make himself professor. They habitually tug at the hem of Umahi’s professorial gown. They pelt him with questions that should never be asked. They remind our working Minister of Works that a river that is not dirty does not hide its depth. Last week, they demanded the cost of federal roads per kilometre. Who does that? And, I am happy, Minister Umahi gave it back to them. He said they are illiterates. Yeah. Don’t they know that for our federal government, spirits decide the total costs of projects? If they were truly not illiterates, they would know that this government is a wholesale seller and buyer; it is too rich to do retail business measured with short tape rules and elementary school rulers.

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Oyo State governor, Seyi Makinde, thought because he was governor and engineer he could join the talk and say that calculating the average cost per kilometre was possible in road construction. He was similarly told by our minister to shut up or he would be summoned to a debate on the very difficult mathematics of road construction. Umahi said he is Makinde’s senior in engineering. Senior Prefect Umahi described electrical electronics engineers as ‘technicians’ who must not speak on project costs.

Now, what we are told to hold as knowledge from Professor Umahi is that it is impossible to know how much a kilometre of road costs in Nigeria until such projects are completed. God is great. The World Bank must have missed that wisdom back in 1999 when it created the Road Costs Knowledge System (ROCKS), a database that calmly lists what it costs to build or fix a kilometre of road from Umahi’s village in Ebonyi to Makinde’s Ajia in Ibadan. A key feature of the World Bank’s ROCKS is its record of actual and estimated road work costs, clearly defined per kilometre and per square metre. Apparently, only in Nigeria do roads and their costs defy mathematics and logic.

In utter helplessness, we watch the roads and their costs stretch and shrink like chewing gum depending on whose fingers are working the calculator. While other countries classify their roads by type and cost per kilometre, we prefer a more spiritual approach – if you are an enemy, call it faith-based budgeting.

Clarity is the father of all openness. Why is it missing here? Again, that is not a question or a proverb that we must hear again from anyone, especially professional troublemakers called journalists. What is the problem of Nigerian journalists? Because their eyes have no skin, they query power. Where a cup is half-full, what our journalists see all their lives is a half-empty cup. They didn’t start today. They are historically insolent. What they do to this government, they did to even our ancestor, Lord Lugard, in 1913, one full year before Amalgamation. On 8 March, 1913, one rude journalist working with a newspaper called Lagos Weekly Record wrote that Lugard was a wicked, ruthless character, “a man whose walking stick is a pistol and whose thoughts by day and dreams at night are punitive expeditions and military patrols.”

And what was Lugard’s reaction to such attacks? He fought them with laws and knocks. At a point, he documented their impudence with a letter to his wife, Flora. In the letter, he bunched the journalist with all the other “educated native” who deserved no sympathy. He wrote about the native enemy of the state: “His loud and arrogant conceit are distasteful to me, his lack of natural dignity and of courtesy antagonise me.” Lugard’s biographer, Margery Perham, graciously remembered to put this in the book: ‘Lugard: The Years of Authority’ on page 585. If you can’t get Perham but are fortunate to get Jonathan Derrick’s ‘Africa, Empire and Fleet Street’, check the details there. They are on page 115.

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So, as Lugard, the creator of Nigeria rightly wrote, the Nigerian journalist is arrogant and lacks courtesy. Such are called alárífín in Yoruba. In the days of old, the crime of àrífín carried capital punishment. Aróbafín l’oba npa. But today’s journalists are lucky that they are in a republican democracy. Even then, someone should pay for their bad behaviour. The slap they get from ministers like Umahi is the first tranche of the cost of their bad manners.

What should the state do to the conceited who won’t let expressway contracts be awarded expressly in peace? I have a solution to their problem: Like the Vanguard, they should all be relocated to Kirikiri; all of them, from Lagos to Ibadan; from Ibadan to Lagos. And, if I had my way, I would tip off Umahi and all his harangued hardworking colleagues to award contracts this week for more cells for enemies of the president’s coastal elephant and other projects of renewal. Their new accommodation should enjoy maximum security. They deserve Kirikiri, Kirikiri deserves them.

What comes fast cannot be delayed again. It happened to cricket. Cricket set his wedding day and simultaneously asked his doctor to start preparing for child delivery. The contracts for a safe house for Nigerian journalists can be awarded today, or, latest tomorrow. There is no need for formalities. Exactly like the Coastal Road contract, this is another no for competitive bidding. We already know contractors with proven track records of expertise in casting beams and building cells. We select and hit the site digging. We can fix the contract cost after the job is done.

From this point, we see long shadows over the country; there is no clarity about important things government do. But, one day soon, like sun rays, clarity will force its way in; it is the father of openness.

Now, beyond the scaffold of satire, I wish I could just tear the mask and tell Minister Umahi that what we have today under his watch is road transportation without roads. And he is Minister of Works in charge of roads. It is a shame.

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In May this year (2025), I wrote ‘The shame of Ibadan-Ife-Ilesa road.’ The first two paragraphs of the piece read:

“Mr Dele Alake represents Ekiti State in the Federal Executive Council. Alhaji Gboyega Oyetola represents Osun State in the Federal Executive Council. Mr Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo represents Ondo State in the Federal Executive Council. All three of them are the president’s core men. Each time the council sits and approves federal roads for reconstruction in states other than theirs, what goes on in their minds? They are very powerful ministers but all federal roads that lead to their states are decrepit and abandoned. And they know. So, what is the problem?

“The Ibadan-Ife-Ilesa road that links these ministers’ states to Lagos and to the North is the worst in Nigeria. Senate leader, Opeyemi Bamidele, is from Ekiti State. He belongs to the president’s inner caucus. Tough-talking PDP Senator Francis Fadahunsi represents Ife-Ijesa senatorial district. There are seven other senators and several Reps of APC and PDP from those three states. Has anyone heard them say or do anything to make that road well again? Do these people go home and how do they get home whenever they go home? Nigerians of all states lose lives and limbs on that road daily. Death by installments on the road is harrowing and it is a daily experience. It is a fitting tribute to the attention we pay to our people’s welfare.”

That was on May 12, 2025 (five months ago). If the road was “going, going” when I wrote that piece, it is gone now. Gone. An ex-senator told a columnist in May this year that N20 billion had been “released for repairs” of that road. In August 2025, Umahi announced the release of 30 percent of the contract sum. How much is the contract sum? Don’t even go there. If you go there, the minister will be angry. He will remind you that you are not a road professor. If you must ask any question at all, ask what has happened to what Umahi said was released, his 30 percent. Ask, because, nothing that is worth one kobo has happened on that road this year.

But the total collapse of the road did not come to me as a surprise. By the noon of May 12, 2025 when I published the article, one of the senators I called out in the piece called me.

“They have just read to me what you wrote.” He told me. Big men don’t read newspapers; newspapers are read to big men. Senator said he laughed at my naivety. He wondered why I was disturbing myself writing rubbish about a contract that may never be executed.

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“Do you think Nigeria can ever be better than it is? (Sé ìwo rò wípé Nigeria lè dára jù báyìí lo ni?)” He asked and proceeded to shame me with names, facts and figures all of which answered his question with a no. He said I should record and publish all he said. I laughed at the audacity of his directive. An orphan like me will never dare court a wound on the back.

Besides, I was taught early in life to make my eyes flexible enough for them to see the nose. That was the wisdom that eluded Partridge who claimed to know it all, and because he made that claim, he blocked his own opportunity to learn Ifá from the pigeon. ‘Mo m’Obàrà, mo m’Ofún,’ tí kò j e kí ẹyẹlé k’ àparò n’Ífá (I know Obàrà, I know Ofún’ made the pigeon not to teach Ifá to the partridge).

So, my pigeon listened attentively to the incantation from the hawk. This senator ended his long, windy speech with a submission that the Ibadan-Ife-Ilesa road, and other federal roads in the South-West were decrepit and abandoned because the Works Minister “does not like hearing South-West at all.” I heard him and sighed.

When the outspoken gentleman spoke with me five months ago, he was a PDP senator. He has since moved to Dave Umahi’s party. Now, I wonder if he will still say what he said now that he is in APC.

Author and literary critic, Robert M. Wren (1928-1989), in 1982 wrote “The Last Bridge on ‘The Road’: Soyinka’s Rage and Compassion.” He tells us that in 1962, Wole Soyinka, in a Lagos Daily Express essay entitled ‘Bad Roads, Bad Users, Bad Deaths’ captured Nigeria’s enduring road crisis. Writing with outrage and in satire, Soyinka lamented the deadly state of the highways. He agonised over the state of the Lagos–Ibadan road (Mile 34); there was what he called “the death-trap at Ife”, and “the last bridge on Ikorodu Road.” Soyinka recalled and deplored a senator’s refusal to carry a crash victim with a spinal cord injury to Ibadan. More than six decades later, the roads are still bad, very bad; they still kill; senators are still cold-blooded; they still wonder why anyone bothers to care that the roads are bad.