By Festus Adedayo
As Achebe said, Ribadu began well as our own Ness. He threw soldier ants into the pants of Nigerian politically exposed persons. His fear was the beginning of wisdom. After Obasanjo humiliated police chief, Tafa Balogun, summoning him to Aso Rock and shouting on him, “Tafa, thief! Tafa, thief!,” Ribadu took over his humiliation.
This season, President Bola Tinubu is harvesting big pods of cocoa from his plantation. His co-farmers are looking at him with concentrated envy. And jealousy. Exhilaration is in the air. In the last two weeks, he has shown tremendous energy to change the status-quo. His sack of Nigeria’s CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele, is exciting the Nigerian economy. That Agbor, Delta State-born banker’s exit marked an end to one of the most turbulent eras in the CBN. Getting rid of him has signaled a very strong, positive impact on the capital and foreign exchange markets. When the CBN announced an end to Emefiele’s multiple exchange rates, like a fetus in the womb, the comatose Nigerian economy slightly wriggled, excited. Even the World Bank is giving him thumbs-up.
Packed with lewd imageries, Baba Yusuf Olatunji, an evergreen Yoruba Sakara musician who died in 1978, had a word for people like us who exhibit such unrestrained optimism about things that we see. Olatunji sermonized onhow doubtful the structure of beliefs could be. He warned the commune of adulterous men to be mindful of a sudden turn-around, even when there is no threatening danger visible to the eyes. They must never let down their guards at moments of extreme sexual giddiness. When an adulterous man is seeing off his liaison, Olatunji counseled, he should be watchful like the pheasant and apprehend oncoming deceits like sparrow. Could the woman’s husband be hiding somewhere, poised to inflict harm on him? Olatunji expressed this in the song thus, “O ye ka ni fura, t’a ba nsin ale eni lo (2ce)… t’e ba sin ale titi, t’e ba de koro, e fura… A kii f’oko han ale, a kii f’ale eni han oko…” He ended the track with a warning to couples on honeymoon that the matrimony of trust may, sooner than later, burst, putting asunder and ruining investment of trusts: “Oju sewo sewo yio jaa, oju yan ale-yan ale, yio jaa…b’ojo o ro, bi’gbado o gbo, oju t’ako t’abo ohun ni o jaa…”
In Tinubu, an end seems to have been put to the purdah presidency of the Buhari era. The visibility of the Nigerian president is gaining traction as Nigerians see their president more frequently. As if to ram home the point of a restlessly on-the-move presidency, the Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Abdulrasheed Bawa, also got hammered. Tongues had started wagging over Bawa, who many believe was a product of the nepotism and cronyism that became the buzzword of the immediate past administration. Bawa hailed from Jega, while Abubakar Malami, ex-Attorney General of the Federation, (AGF) who was believed to have waggled him into the helm of the anti-graft agency, hailed from Birnin-Kebbi, both in Kebbi State. Then, as it happened to his predecessors, Bawa became swamped in the puddle of allegations of theft and illegal conversion of seized properties. The last straw was the allegation from the immediate past governor of Zamfara State that Bawa was witch-hunting him for his refusal to give in to his $2m bribe demand, which he alleged the ex-EFCC chair made to virtually all exiting governors.
When a government policy, with a draconian colour as the sudden stoppage of petroleum subsidy by the Tinubu administration, elicits few or no public disavowals as this has done, then be sure that that government has the buy-in of the people, regardless of their pain. This is a rare accomplishment by the Tinubu government. Nigerians are silently bearing the brunt of the policy, apologies to Fela Kuti’s suffering and smiling. Then the pilgrimage of the high and mighty to Aso Rock began. Abdulsalami Abubakar, Lamido Sanusi and many others have undergone the Villa shuttle. As exciting as this optics is, it is silted by that of James Ibori, Asari Dokubo and others. Have you ever imagined an American president receiving in the White House stained people? As a rule, POTUS don’t receive guests who are under investigation or convicts who haven’t been pardoned. White House does background checks on every of such guests. It keeps a log of visitors to the White House and that log is public document.
In some way, Olatunji’s O ye ka ni’fura track espouses the Cartesian doubt principle. Its proponent, Rene Descartes, canvasses that we should doubt all previous beliefs, demolish every prior thought completely and begin to think about them afresh. It was upon that uncritical cusp that totalitarians were erected. Like Adolf Hitler. Adolf was a very meek boy growing up in Braunau am Inn, in Austria-Hungary and even when he became leader of the Nazi Party and Chancellor in 1933. With a critical thought, you couldbuild an entire new belief system situated on a solid ground.
The delirium we have acquired about Tinubu’s first two weeks in office is infectious. In a piece I did for the Politics Special page of the Nigerian Tribune on June 2, 1999 with the title, Shagari’s fall colours this new dawn, I equally celebrated Olusegun Obasanjo. He had just been sworn in three days earlier. Juxtaposing the excitement in the air on October 1, 1979 and May 29, 1999, in that piece, I forecast that Nigeria was on the path of recovery. My indices were unassailable. Obasanjo had been to the two extreme ends of the stick – the zenith and nadir. Condemned to death by the sadistic Sani Abacha, as the Yoruba euphemized death, eleko orun np’olowo – the Hereafter’s hawker of porridge corn meal had begun to hawk his ware with loud voice of invitation to the Egba-born military general. Sources even said he had written a couple of his trusted soldier colleagues on how to take care of his family when Sani Abacha executed him. It would thus be anti-logic to assume that that same man wouldn’t administer Nigeria with the fear of God; or, wouldn’t it? The rest is history, as they say.
Obasanjo indeed ruled Nigeria with a humane mind, as epitomized by his ordering of the invasion of Zaki-Biam; or, doesn’t it? The invasion led to a massacre code-named Operation No Living Thing. It was a surreptitious mass execution of hundreds of unarmed Tiv civilians by men of the Nigerian Army between October 20 and 24, 2001. Their aim was to avenge the killing of their 19 soldier colleagues. Is the cure for headache beheading of the whole of that throbbing head? Anyway, the 19 soldiers had been killed by a God-knows-who and their mutilated bodies littered the streets. The Obasanjo-led government and the Nigerian army denied involvement in the massacre. However, on November 6, 2007, then Chief of Army Staff, Lt. Gen Luka Yusuf, was quoted to have publicly apologized to the people of Benue State. President Umaru Yar’Adua also offered his apology. Ultimately, no one got punished; none appeared in a military court-martial, and no one went to jail. Obasanjo himself is still waxing sanctimonious all over the world and Nigeria has lived happily ever after.
Same thing happened in what is now known as the Odi massacre. The people of thisIjaw town in Bayelsa state had stepped on a poisonous Federal Government serpent. On November 4, 1999, six months after Obasanjo became president, twelve Nigerian policemen were reportedly murdered by a gang near Odi. Seven others got killed in the days following. So, enraged by this insolence, on November 20, 1999, men of the Nigerian Army moved into Odi village. Tension soared. The civilian population received the scalding anger of Fela Anikulapo’s friends who, about three decades earlier, allegedly on the orders of the same Obasanjo, had burnt the musician’s Lagos house and threw his mom down the stairs. By the time the soldiers’ angers subsided, all that was left of Odi was smoking soothes, a bank building, a church and health centre. Every other thing was burned to the hilt. Nnimmo Bassey, Executive Director of Environmental Rights Action, claimed that about 2500 civilians were killed. Government initially claimed the figure was 43, including eight soldiers. It was only in February, 2013, that the Federal High Court handed Odi a reprieve. Justice Lambi Akanbi ordered government to pay Odi the sum of N37.6 billion as compensation. N15b eventually got paid by the Goodluck Jonathan government. I drew out all these examples to fix our minds on the danger of incautious optimism and ultimate abetment of a budding totalitarianism.
Festus Adedayo is a Public Policy Analyst.
