COLUMN
Wike’s Nigeria Feeds Citizens’ Bodies To Pigs
Published
4 months agoon

By Festus Adedayo
Nigerians and indeed, the world, watched aghast last week as a South African grisly movie reel began to roll. Full of all the elements of a movie, it was however a real story. The cast was two black women who, on August 17, were shot and fed to pigs by a white farmer. The victims, Maria Makgato, 45 and Lucia Ndlovu, 34 were scavenging for edible food in consignments of recently expired or soon-to-be-expired produce on a farm located near Polokwane, a South African northern Limpopo province. The expired edible foods were meant for pigs. Before her gruesome murder, Makgato was mother of four sons of between 22 and five years ages. Farm owner, Zachariah Johannes Olivier, 60, had reportedly ordered his employees, Adrian de Wet, 19, and William Musora, 50, to kill the two women. Their bodies were then fed to pigs, in order to destroy evidence of their murder. Ms Ndlovu’s husband, Mabutho Ncube, who came to the farm with his wife, had been shot, too but crawled into safety with his gunshot wounds. Several days later, police found decomposing, horrific bodies of the women in the farm’s pigsty, partly eaten up by the swine.
In South Africa, farming communities are severally under attacks by white farmers, exacerbating an already high crime statistics in the country. This is especially rife in rural areas, despite the official cessation of the obnoxious racist system of apartheid 30 years ago. In same August, in the eastern province of Mpumalanga, two men – a farmer and his security guard – were arrested in Laersdrift, located beside a small South African town called Middleburg, for allegedly murdering two men on a farm. Accused of stealing sheep, the men were incinerated beyond recognition. The court had to subject their ashes to DNA analysis to be able to establish their identities. In the same vein, a 70-year old white farmer, Christoffel Stoman, of Lutzville, a Western Cape province, had allegedly driven over and broken the two legs of a 6-year old boy for picking a fallen orange on his farm. The boy’s mother, walking with him past Stoman’s farm, on their way to town to purchase groceries, was horrified as his son got mowed down by Stoman.
As they watch this grisly movie, like the rest of the world, Nigerians are entitled to their shock. However, literally and figuratively, on the social and political planes, our country can be said to be grappling with leaders of similar sadism as South Africa’s Oliviers. Almost on a daily basis, Nigerians’ bodies are figuratively fed to swine, simply because they pick expired pig foods from our collective farm.
Nigerian leadership in the last seventeen months, like Olivier, has figuratively thrown Nigerians’ bodies to the swine who now take turns to feast on our flesh for supper. Nigerians are writhing under excruciating poverty occasioned by wickedness in high places. They encounter limited vision and foresight of leaders who claimed it was their time to rule but who have no time to think through the people’s plights. Perhaps the greatest Olivier-like savagery inflicted on Nigerians is the gradual destruction and undermining of the foundation of democracy by the born-to-rule taskmasters. In almost 17 months, all the institutions of democracy, like the electoral system, free press/speech and impartial judicial system have been dealt mortal blows. They are all comatose today. This speaks to that eternal aphorism that democracies are not killed by guns but by wicked undermining of its foundation.
If Nigerians are so distressed about the misrule in their country today, unfortunately, they are in a Catch-24 situation. We are locked up in a paradoxical situation from which, except an intervention of providence, we may never escape. As Sule Lamido warned recently, if the Leviathan in Aso Rock didn’t control the Senate, the Nigerian Army, Nigerian police, DSS etc and yet won the 2023 election, it is wishful thinking that anyone can stop the reproduction of this misrule in 2027. The ones at the top today have worn upon them the classical head of the Medusa. In real terms, like the sobriquet of one of the friends of Ayinla Omowura, an Abeokuta musical warlord of the 1970s, they are reincarnates of Ab’esuj’obi – one who shares kolanut with the devil.
According to the playbook of democracy, opposition deepens democracy. In Nigeria, the Leviathan has effectively castrated opposition. And this is why we should all be bothered. It is a Lagos model given federal promotion. The Leviathan then dipped his hands into his wiles pouch. From there, he brought out a colony of termites, led by a choleric dictator who is seeking political vengeance in his home state. His main assignment was to gradually corrode virtually all the internal strength of the PDP. I will not be shocked if the Leviathan is also the sponsor of the crisis in the Labour Party as well. Like a colony of pests called termites, Aso Rock and Nyesom Wike have visited on our country, using Rivers State as model, one of the most debilitating democratic devastations ever in history. This means that, whatever tyranny and limited vision leadership which Nigerians complain of today has a longer expiry period than they may think. We should all buckle up for a marathon. It is a distressing reality.
What happened in Edo State last month, coupled with the lawlessness that has eaten up Rivers State today, are clear signals that the electoral, judicial and police institutions have been ambushed. In broad daylight, with the obvious abetment of the Villa, electoral process was cavalierly thrown to the swine. The animals in turn mauled it with maniacal relish. It was obvious that Mahmood Yakubu’s INEC didn’t have any qualm licking the pus-dripping wound of the Leviathan and his accomplices.
With wanton abuse of electoral rules by INEC, advocacy for the abrogation of state electoral commissions for being lapels of state governors will not make any sense. From what is going on in Rivers today, with INEC openly in bed with a federal minister whose Hippopotamus ego will not stop from his Samson complex, any INEC-conducted state election will automatically be a from-frying-pan-to-fire situation. We will obviously be substituting local state despots for Abuja despots. In all, INEC’s Edo sham election hasn’t shown that the commission is the solution to governors’ brazen perversion of democracy. Kayode Egbetokun stands smilingly on the fringe to offer autocracy and totalitarian rule a pillow for comfort and the judiciary a final seal.
The second prong from which to look at this pig-food relationship is ethnic relations in Nigeria. As it stands, in the last nine years or thereabout, ethnic tensions here have ratcheted up so frighteningly, just like among black and white people of South Africa. When you read posts on social media, especially from both Yoruba and Igbo, a tingling feeling of foreboding will creep up your nerves. Of a truth, there is a subsisting history of almost a quarter century-old hatred ramped up between the two ethnicities. However, between 2015 and now, a heavy salvo has been unleashed on the relations between the two ethnicities, so much that if there is any slight prick, the bubble will burst finally.
The most incalculable salvo, more devastating than the machine guns of the civil war, was smashed on ethnic relations in Nigeria by Muhammadu Buhari’s eight-year rule. In my piece of May 26, 2019 with the title, Who will be Nigeria’s last president?, I argued that, by the time Buhari exited Aso Rock, there might be no Nigeria as handed over to him. My hunch was based on Buhari’s ultra-ethnocentric rule. That playbook is being revamped today. All the cement and glue that made a united Nigeria have practically been deliberately peeled off or worn out. Ethnic tensions are at a frighteningly high level, reminding one of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Buhari, on national TV, once referred to the Igbo as a “tiny dot in a circle.” It was not different from the pre-fixing of the word “cockroach” by Hutus against the Tutsi. Both depicted a negligible, expendable ethnicity. While in Rwanda, it inflamed passion and expedited genocide, in Nigeria, it bred resistance. Buhari then prosecuted this hate agenda with clinical finish, so much that, by the time he left office, ethnic relations between the east and other ethnicities landed on the borderline.
Curiously and seemingly illogically, since this current government assumed office, Yoruba and Igbo, who were united by their mutual pummeling by Buhari, have squared up to themselves in a needless ethnic animosity similar to the escalation of war between Israel and Palestine. The Leviathan has done little or nothing to quell the inflamed passion and escalation of distrusts between them. The hatreds are bereft of logic, scarcely backed by history and are mere whimsical carry-overs of political antagonisms. Why would a people who have similar histories, struggles and challenges in the hands of their mutual oppressors, hate each other this much?
It is so bad that, if one of the two ethnic stocks, like Maria Makgato and Lucia Ndlovu did, goes rummaging for edible food in the other’s compound, just as Olivier’s maniacal identity profiling of South African blacks, one will feed the other’s flesh to their pigs. Sometimes when I read very acidic but senselessly divisive posts from both sides on the social media, not only do I shudder, I wonder whether the writers were same offspring of leaders like Michael Okpara and Mama HID Awolowo/Alhaji Dauda Soroye Adegbenro? In 1964, both camps, leaders of two erstwhile politically irreconcilable parties – the National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC) and Action Group (AG) – came together to form the United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA) and campaigned round Ibadan during Okpara’s visit. By then, Chief Obafemi Awolowo was locked up in the Calabar prisons by the Igbo/Yoruba common enemies.
In closing, the story of Hastings Kamuzu Banda’s government in Malawi will tell us not to take for granted the danger of a one-party state growing on the Nigerian soil. Banda’s was an extensive cult of personality. He ordered all business buildings to hang his official picture on walls. Today, a particular cap of specific branding is worn by all top officers in Nigeria today, including Villaswill Akpabio, a man who should ordinarily be at the head of checks on the excesses of the executive. Banda brooked no poster, clock or picture hung on the wall that was higher than his portrait. It was a criminal offence. Whenever any film was aired in Malawi, a video of Banda waving to the people must be mandatorily shown. Same happened whenever Malawian national anthem was played. If Banda paid visit to any Malawi city, a group of women were mandatorily expected to salute him at the airport and wag their buttocks erotically to prep up the leader’s voyeur instinct. The performances were also accompanied with special clothes that had Banda’s picture on them. He banned faiths like Jehovah’s Witnesses permanently from Malawi while other houses of worship were mandated to get his government’s approval before preaching.
One major blood-dripping hallmark of Banda’s one party state despotism happened in 1983. Three ministers in his government, Aaron Gadama, Dick Matenje, Twaibu Sangala and a Member of Parliament, David Chiwanga were suddenly found dead. At a meeting with Banda, they voiced their support for a migration from Banda’s one-party state to multi-partyism. They told him to his face that he should perish the thought of a life presidency. Not only did Banda dissolve cabinet immediately, he stripped all members of their status and ordered the three men to be rounded up. They were also tortured and bundled into a Peugeot 604 belonging to Matenje. An accident was then staged for them with their car overturned. It was later discovered that they had been murdered with tent pins which were hammered into their heads. During their burial, Banda ordered that their caskets must not be opened for public viewing. They were subsequently buried at night.
If we think the above is impossible in Nigeria, we should just keep an eye on what is going on in Rivers State. Hours to the state council election, the situation escalated into an embarrassing exchange of allegations between Egbetokun and Governor Similayi Fubara. That is democracy under the Leviathan. We must know that autocracy creeps in harmlessly, just the way music furtively slides into its listener’s consciousness. Of this, Bob Marley once sang, “one good thing about music – when it hits, you feel no pain.” There is a progressive shrinking of the civic space and its replacement with democratic stifling. Wike has suddenly become so powerful that every democratic institution – INEC, judiciary or police – is hidden under his Isiagu clothes. He arrogantly boasts, in inebriated gutturals, that he is the custodian of fire and he can set ablaze any state at his whim. The Leviathan is not bothered. Nigerians laughed at this grisly humour from a totalitarian.
Wike’s boast and the political calculation of the Leviathan who is playing games with the “head” of Nigerians, preparatory to a one-party state, remind me of the Chewa. A Bantu ethnic group of Malawi, the Chewa tribe can also be found in Zambia, Zimbabwe and a sprinkle in Mozambique. They are a very metaphysical people, renowned for witchcraftcy and secret societies called Nyau. Researches conducted by Reverend H. Debrunner, leading to the book Witchcraft in Ghana (1961) says witches play games, including football, at night like ordinary people. In order to do this, they ”’cut off a person’s head and play ball with it.” He corroborated this with another research work by Marwick (1965) who said that similar practice was prevalent among the Akan witches of Ghana who “engage in… harmless pleasures such as dancing and playing football where they are said to use a human skull.” Incidentally, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, who personified witches’ cruelty in his presidency of Malawi, was Chewa. If, like the two black South African women, shot and fed to pigs by a white farmer, Nigerians continue to be daily fed to the swine on social and political planes by the Leviathan and his appendages, we can only chorus, “Long live Hastings Kamuzu Banda.”
Things are tumbling down fast in Rivers, with morbid signals of owls – birds of bad luck omen – crowing in the air. In many African cultures, owls are representative of bad luck or omen of death. They are feared and avoided. Wike and his Villa minders may be kneading together a script which will result in a Dr. Moses Majekodunmi being a gubernatorial placeholder in Rivers. When a State of Emergency was imposed on a chaotic Western Region in June 1962, leading to the Premier’s exit from power, that singular action spelled the death-knell of the Republic. Rivers is the economic livewire of Nigeria. Its peace is the peace of Nigeria. Any tampering with the lucid-hour sanity of that Ijaw state could signal a rupture of Nigeria. It was easy for Olusegun Obasanjo to foist it on an agrarian Ekiti State. It could spell national disaster in Rivers. Hope the Leviathan and his cantankerous sidekick are listening?
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By Wole Olujobi
When Dr John Kayode Fayemi (JKF) and I spoke on phone sometime in May 2005 on the need to rescue Ekiti State from the unedifying trend that the state had been forced to endure under the leadership of a government in power at the time, the innocence, candour, fervour and clarity of his mission in the course of our short conversation were unmistakable and the content of his vision resoundingly compelling.
Prior to soldiering for Ekiti sanity and liberty, former Governor Kayode Fayemi’s pro-democracy activities had been loud both in national and international media, as he was one of the top activists who led a coterie of other determined pro-democracy combatants in the struggle to wean Nigeria off the equally determined military officers who appointed themselves as rulers without the consent of Nigerians but who nevertheless ruled with horsewhips and bayonets, leaving in their trail a tell-tale anguish of economic and political misfortunes in the nation in chains.
As a scholar in War Studies with bias for security, civil relations and development, Fayemi, who is a political ideologue of the left with a welfarist communal etho as both his creed and bond, had no patience with the squalor and misery into which a potentially prosperous Nigeria was sunk.
Loud in a deep, penetrating echo of a freedom fighter’s tactics on Radio Kudirat International, Fayemi, deploying the grandeur of his scholarship and borderless networks, yet looming very large in the shadows, became the nemesis of the military rulers, whose geniuses could be located within the worst rank of evils, as scary looting and runaway political mass murders debuted in Nigeria. Chief MKO Abiola, Kudirat Abiola, Dele Giwa, Alfred Rewane, Alhaja Suliat Adedeji and Ken Saro-Wiwa, among several others, today, in their graves, are my witnesses, as they suffered the deadly fate of those dark hours when Nigerian soldiers hunted pro-democracy activists like antelopes and condemned their beautiful and golden souls to dusty deaths.
The bullets regime of the hell kites hawking at and feasting on the entrails of prominent pro-democracy elements under which the courageous Fayemi operated was succeeded by the terror of the more audacious vicious wolves in partisan garbs (all from the same roots) that seized the killing field called their Nigeria. For them, life in office (though a brief candle) was an eternity for the guns to rule over the affairs of men.
As thick as hail, flew bullets upon bullets, as guns boomed in the homes of pro-democracy figures. The roll-call of skulls of human games that adorned the battlements of the marksmen in the game of death included those of Chief Bola Ige, who was killed on December 23, 2001; Chief Victor Nwakwo (August 29, 2001); Isiaka Mohammed, September 24, 2002; Theodore Egwuatu February 2003; Marshall Harry was killed on March 5, 2003; Anthony Nwudo, March 21, 2003; Chief Ajibola Olanipekun, June 20, 2003; Aminosoari Dikibo, February 6, 2004; while Chief Phillips Olorunnipa was murdered on March 7, 2004.
Other victims included Sunny Atte, whose life was snuffed out on February 5, 2005; Alhaji Alabi Olajokun was trailed after a political meeting and killed at Gbongan junction in Osun State on May 15, 2005; and Chief Layi Balogun, who was murdered on December 7, 2006, among several other victims that paid with their lives over political partisanship.
One of the few exceptions was the foremost erudite and eminent lawyer, philanthropist and renowned education investor, Aare Afe Babalola, who had a rare luck to survive after receiving a barrage of death threats on his phone. But Dr Ayo Daramola was not that lucky, as he paid the supreme price on August 14, 2006. The lucky ones that cheated the bullets trusted their heels and escaped into exile.
Indeed, it was a period that the clamour for representative governance was more dangerous among the lovers of freedom than the business of kidnapping, courtesy of the hangover from the era of military-inspired regimental democracy of “five fingers of the same leprous hand” (UNCP, GDM, CNC, DPN and NCPN) and their autistic twin brothers, SDP and NRC, that died and interred at infancy.
Fayemi nearly paid with his life while lending hands to the efforts to peacefully send the military back to the barracks to enable Nigerians enjoy unfettered democratic governance. God and fate saved his flight that would have become his store-house to the eternity, with the Radio Kudirat transmitters tucked inside his pant. Operating in the murderous anonymity of the Nigeria’s tempestuous political waters, JKF braved the storm and sailed to safety unscathed!
Out of the shadows, Fayemi threw his hat into the political ring. Combining brilliance with the powerful contents of his conviction, resilience, devotion, courage, vision, verity and determination; these sterling credentials earned Fayemi the governorship ticket of his party, the Alliance For Democracy (AD), in the 2007 governorship poll in Ekiti State, which he won but which the Nigerian State led by the same devout power merchants and their devious potentates counterparts, would not allow for three and half years.
But the Nigerian Constitution triumphed in Fayemi’s case. The nation’s laws spoke loudly in courts, climaxing in JKF’s victory on October 15, 2010 at the Ilorin Appeal Court, which marked somewhat of a doomsday blues for the usurpers, but a triumph of ideal for Ekiti people, as the tenacious Fayemi held the trophy to a new dawn of sanity and development in Ekiti State.
Adept at a life of service complemented by his humanist wife and author, Erelu Bisi Fayemi, JKF in government, for eight years, (first between 2010 and 2014 and later between 2018 and 2022), recorded many firsts in Ekiti State’s political and development history. As the Minister of Solid Minerals Development, he also put Nigeria on the minerals development map of the world.
His scorecards: It is on record that Fayemi, a legacy governor and visionary of the progressive hue, changed the narrative of abandoned projects in Ekiti State by completing the uncompleted and abandoned projects by his predecessors. Fayemi’s introduction of community-based public participation in budget planning yielded unprecedented increase in road construction, water projects, electricity projects, enhanced health management system, opening of new schools for increased enrolments, record upsurge in hospitality and other small-scale businesses, encouragement of foreign businesses and revamping moribund state’s industrial assets, such as Ikogosi Resorts. Fountain Hotel and ROMACO; Ekiti Airport project, and a premier Knowledge Zone, among other life-lifting schemes, to create jobs, including strengthening bureaucracy to enhance efficiency, effectiveness, openness and transparency in public service.
For the first time. Fayemi bought the first batch of over 70,000 computer sets for distribution among secondary school students, which gave Ekiti students an advantage in computer-based public examinations, and renovated 183 secondary schools and 835 primary schools. During his first term alone, he commissioned five mini-water treatment plants while also erecting 167 water fetching points across the state such that for the first time in the state, moved water supply capacity to 52 percent as against 25 percent on assumption of office.
He also introduced social security for the elderly; the first in the West Africa subregion, and built legacy projects, such as the new Oke Ayoba Government House, stadium-sized Ekitiparapo Pavilion, Ekiti Cargo International Airport and Obafemi Awolowo Civic and Convention Centre, among other monuments that served as flowery mementos to the memory and legacy of credible performance, while some communities that had existed for more than a century without light were connected to the national grid.
Commercial farming in the Youths in Commercial Agricultural Development (YCAD) scheme was introduced by Fayemi, which took Ekiti State to lead Nigeria in cassava cultivation, also for the first time.
Fayemi facilitated the State Accountability and Voice Initiative (SAVI) of the British Department for International Development (DFID) to organise a training programme on Executive-Legislature partnership towards a sustainable collaboration for service delivery in June 2012 at the Royal Park Hotel in Iloko-Ijesa. DFID took cabinet and House of Assembly members through the rudiments of budgeting processes and tracking while also dissecting contemporary issues in Ekiti State.
Fayemi’s administration also sponsored the Ekiti State House of Assembly to the Gauteng Provincial Parliament in South Africa where the two parliaments signed agreements on various exchange programmes that were mutually beneficial to the two parliaments and governments for collegial cooperative relationship. Shortly afterwards, the Gauteng Parliament established Public Participation Unit in Ekiti State House of Assembly and provided books and other journals that could aid development initiatives in Ekiti State while another South Africa’s firm took over the management of the decrepit Ikogosi Warm Spring Resort and developed the facility to a world-class tourists’ delight.
Also in South Africa, Ekiti Assembly members were introduced to the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), a novel and innovative instrument for advancing good governance and people-centred socio-economic development.
The lessons learnt from the programmes, particularly the Iloko-Ijesa parley, produced the first Ekiti State Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF), which led to the establishment of the Special Projects Unit, project monitoring framework, procurement process reform and realignment of the existing MDAs work plan to reflect new budget amendments, among others, which greatly helped to break administrative bottlenecks that hamper quick service delivery. That initiative created a momentum for accelerated development in Ekiti State. Most of these efforts by Fayemi later served as models for other governments in Nigeria in their governance and development strategies.
According to the Human Development Report (2012), Ekiti State under Fayemi was described as the most conducive environment to live, for long and healthy living with a life expectancy average of 55 years more than the National Life expectancy average of 50 years, including the lowest infant and maternal mortality rate and the lowest HIV/AIDS infection rate in Nigeria.
The United Nations acknowledged Fayemi’s innovative governance in September 2013 when the world body invited him to its session in New York on the basis that his state met many of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) agenda, even as Fayemi at home received the prestigious media award of “Best Governor of the Year” from some national newspapers, including Abuja-based Leadership Newspaper.
At his ministerial nomination screening session on October 13, 2015, at the Nigerian Senate in Abuja, that often features sentimental assessments, Fayemi, a debonair speaker, broke the ice, exuding the deep and vast brilliance of his scholarship.
Not for him the colourless and lifeless language of a political tramp that hangs loose for “just anything”! As usual, he had his day to draw plaudits from Nigerians.
Reeling out facts and figures in the charm, flair and eloquence of Cicero in his prodigious use of the Queen’s English in response to the questions posed to him on the floor of the Senate, the Senators hooted, as the urbane Fayemi held the Senate Gallery spellbound, while Nigerians at home stayed glued to the live broadcast of the session to see Fayemi’s first class erudition on display.
In my little hole in exile in my own country where I took cover to escape the bullets over my media activities in aid of my state and party, I suddenly found my voice, lept in rapturous delight, and lost my vocal cord to the ecstasy that greeted the sterling performance by a great boss.
The ministerial nominee, in the radiance of a Vatican cleric, shone like the Northern star to the applause of the nation. No wonder, shortly after he won his second term governorship election, he was unanimously elected Chairman by a multi-partisan Nigerian Governors Forum; the position he held dispassionately among his colleagues to advance the cause of democracy as a driver of development.
As the Nigerian Governors’ captain as well as the governor of Ekiti State, while his genius was hailed by his colleagues as exemplary, he remained a legend to Ekiti people who witnessed his magic firsthand in his development strategies.
For instance, for the first time in Ekiti State electoral contest, Fayemi broke the state’s succession bogey and opened the history doors for the first back-to-back victory for one political party to succeed itself in the Ekiti State governorship election. The magic was the continuity mantra of his party propelled by the milestones he recorded and as endorsed by Ekiti people, which ensured Governor Biodun Abayomi Oyebanji’s succeess at polls in 2022 governorship election, to post the first historic and historical same party victory in succession election in Ekiti State. As it turned out, Governor Oyebanji has proven himself as a worthy successor, judging from his pro–people stance in every action he has taken so far in government.
As former Governor Fayemi attains the Diamond Age of 60, history has placed him as an icon of his time in personal accomplishments and an epochal star in Nigeria’s political firmament.
In his class profiling thesis, the impossible Italian philosopher, scientist and astronomer, Galileo Galilei, had quipped; “Independent spirits spread like a foul disease, so men must keep their places; some up, some down.”
But the same Galileo also found relevance in the deeply ignorant people to complete his work and world. He had said: “I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him”, just like Fayemi is also at home with the grassroots people and their sentiments in planning their development strategies and he achieved sterling results.
As for Fayemi, he has kept his place high among the profound in philosophical thoughts to drive development agenda for the mass of the people; the philosophy that drives and shapes his vision and world view to lead a successful life.
Three scores in the life of a living legend is a short space within which to record a book of life. By merciful powers, the dawn of Fayemi’s new chapter of life opens tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow, creeping in this petty pace from day to day, to record the last syllable of evergreen long years of service to humanity.
Cymbals and tambourines for the birthday boy on the Diamond threshold of the aged.
* Olujobi, a journalist and former spokesman of Kayode Fayemi Campaign Organisation, writes from Ado-Ekiti

By Festus Adedayo
Irish poet and playwright, Oscar Wilde, in his lowest moment in prison, drew a comparison of how he sank from being one of the greatest writers of the late 20th century, into a bisexual pedophile. Son of Anglo-Irish intellectuals, Wilde was a writer with lacerating wit. He equally dressed flamboyantly and garnished his writings in flamboyant imagery. He was however bisexual, a precursor to the creed Trump detests today. Wilde’s ordeal began when he issued a civil writ against 9th Marques of Queensberry, John Sholto Douglas, for criminal libel. John was the father of Wilde’s homo liaison, Sir Alfred Douglas. Though he won the suit, evidence from the trial made Wilde eligible for trial for gross indecency in homosexual acts. It became one of the first celebrity trials of the century. Overwhelming evidence confirmed that the writer of the famous The Picture of Dorian Gray indeed seduced teens into homosexual activities. At age 39, the court held that Wilde seduced Alphonse Conway, a boy of 16. Another teenager of same age, Walter Grainger, claimed Wilde threatened him with “very serious trouble” if he revealed their homo dalliance.
El-Rufai and Tinubu’s kernel
Convicted and sentenced to two years maximum penalty, Wilde was in jail from May 25, 1895 to May 18, 1897. He spent the term in Newgate Prison in London, Pentonville and Wandsworth Prisons and then to Londonto Reading Gaol. While, as prisoner, he was being moved from Wandsworth to Reading, he faced the lowest point of his life when a crowd which spotted him on the train’s platform jeered at and spat at him. In his De Profundis, also known as Letter to Sir Alfred Douglas, which he wrote in his last year in prison and published posthumously, Wilde had written: “She (his mom) and father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honored, not merely in literature, art, archeology and science, but in the public history of my own country, in its evolution as a nation. I had disgraced that name eternally. I had made it a low byword among low people. I had dragged it through the very mire. I had given it to brutes that they might make it brutal, and to fools that they might turn it into synonym for folly.”
I told the tale of Wilde’s unraveling above to illustrate how human beings and nations unravel. In the last two weeks, the world saw America unravel, its dirty entrails revealed to the world. Before now, the narrative was that, it was African and Third World despots and leaders who shared animal features with our ape ancestors. They reacted according to the stimuli of their whims and intrinsic human wickedness. They were emotive and made no effort to shroud their human passions and desires. Many African leaders have, over the century, been profiled as despots because they couldn’t tame their passions and emotions. They came across as wicked and self-centered, sometimes acting out as narcissists. No doubt a product of close to a century of colonialism, it was believed that some of these beastly leaderships the Third World produced could not be found in America. On the contrary, “God’s Own Country” was the manifestation of human purity and America epitomized the height of the purest of human character.
When a situation makes everyone equal in action, the Yoruba have allegories with which they justify it. One way they do this is to invoke the imagery of an African chickens’ pen. As a way of reducing costs of daily sustenance, most African homes maintained pens. They are enclosures within compounds where livestock or pets are kept. They serve as immediate relief from the rigour of dashing to the market for protein. At dusk, these animals, especially the local livestock, are lured from roaming round compounds into the various pens/cages, lest they become preys to reptiles. Because this practice is replicated in virtually every home, when it is time to equalize human action, it is invoked as an allegory. It illustrates a sense of similarity; that, what is done beyond the shores of individual localities is the same, irrespective of any allusion to sophistication. This is found in the aphorism, “everywhere, without exception, at dusk, hens are packed inside the pen” (ibi gbogbo l’a tií ńk’ádìye alé).
This aphorism has served as excuse for failure. It has also served as justification for horrendous human actions. It is a weak line explored to say that corruption or evil is innate in every man, no matter the clime or skin colour. Despots have invoked it to claim that their actions were normal human reactions. More importantly, the aphorism has served to legitimize and sustain that theory which says that, there is a beast in every man, apologies to Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s musical line, “…this uprising will bring out the beast in us”.
Many analysts who got sucked into the theory of American leaders’ ‘righteousness’ and Third World leaders’ beastliness, find another aphorism as justification. With it, they explain racial leadership character differences. So, they ask if it wasn’t the same rain that fell on and nurtured the bitter-leaf tree into its repulsive bitterness that also fell on the sugarcane which in turn comforts man with its sweetness (Òjò tó rọ̀ sí ewúro náà ló rọ̀ sí ìrèké). The bitter-leaf, in this case, was African leaders who were demonized for almost a century as wicked and selfish. The sugarcane is American leaders whose perceived purity lifted their countries to the zenith of positive global reckoning. This subsisted until about two weeks ago when America’s self-imposed righteousness unraveled.
Mobutu Sese Seko illustrates this bitter-leaf leadership thesis. Born Joseph-Dèsirè, he was President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1965 to 1997. Then came Robert Mugabe, who served as the president of the Republic of Zimbabwe from 1987. And Francisco Macìas Nguema, first president of Equatorial Guinea from October 12, 1968, till 1979 when he was overthrown. So also was Ahmed Sèkou Tourè, the first President of Guinea. From 1958 when he came into this position, he was there till 1984. The continent also had the likes of Abacha, Charles Taylor, Siad Barre of Somalia, Omar Al-Bashir of Sudan, Hissene Habre of Chad, Idi Amin Dada of Uganda and many more. America and the west constructed a cemetery for all of them and cast them in boulders of infamy. It must be said that virtually all these African despots claimed they did all they did to make their countries great. Like Donald Trump.
But, how were we to know that America itself was the proverbial ‘physician, heal thyself’? The last two American presidents, especially Trump, deconstructed America so badly in the eyes of the world, making them not different from Third World countries.
At the twilight of his administration, President Joe Biden shocked the world when he issued an official pardon for his son, Hunter. As at that time, Hunter was facing sentencing for two criminal cases. In September, he pleaded guilty to tax charges and was found guilty of illegal drug use and possession of a gun. He became the first American sitting president’s child to become a convict. In 2001, Bill Clinton equally pardoned Roger Clinton, his younger half-brother, who had been convicted in a 1985 cocaine-related offence. During the first coming of President Trump, in 2020, he equally pardoned Charles Kushner, father-in-law of his daughter, Ivanka. He has also recently announced that this same Kushner will be America’s ambassador to France. On his first day in office, in the confetti of Executive Orders he signed, Trump also pardoned more than 1500 of his supporters who were serving prison sentences for their participation in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The attack was said to be the final denouement of a seven-part plot by Trump to overturn the election. In 36 hrs, five persons died, one of whom was shot by the police. A police officer also died a day after being assaulted. Scores were injured, including 174 police officers and damage caused to the US exceeded $2.7m. While it was riot in America, if it occurred in one of those Third World countries, it was a coup. And whether successful or otherwise, the mastermind were coup plotters, susceptible to America’s usual paternalistic rhetoric. The prisoners were Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) fanatics protesting his presidential election loss. Trump was sentenced in over 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, in efforts to illegally influence the 2016 presidential election. These convictions signal that in Trump, America now has its first and only criminal elected to its presidency. Such self-serving actions and criminality were hitherto ascribed to nepotist dictators for which African leadership had incontestable patent.
Today, you would see Mobutu Sese Seko, Robert Mugabe, Francisco Macìas Nguema, Ahmed Sèkou Tourè, Abacha, Charles Taylor, Siad Barre, Omar Al-Bashir, Hissene Habre, Idi Amin Dada, all wrapped into one in Trump. He is as conceited as the typical African despot, arrogant in his self-righteousness as all of them rolled into one, and persuaded, like them, in his own vain conceit. President Trump recently hinted he would walk through the same ignoble track of a third term in office, though the US constitution forbids it. It was a low for which Olusegun Obasanjo suffers the worst unpleasant appraisals till today and for which all the despots above are reserved a place in the hell of global estimation. Trump, in a recent parley with House Republicans, said, “I’ve raised a lot of money for the next race that I assume I can’t use for myself, but I’m not 100 percent sure”. He continued, “I think I’m not allowed to run again;” and asked rhetorically, in a prodding of Mike Johnson, the House Speaker, “Am I allowed to run again?” He said further, “Mike, I better not get you involved in that”. All he got from Johnson, an ex-constitutional lawyer, was a chuckle, with other lawmakers sharing an infectious guffaw at this American Wonder.
Trump had previously dismissed insinuations of a third term when he said, “I suspect I won’t be running again, unless you do something…Unless you say, ‘he’s so good, we have to just figure it out.’” That same week, Andy Ogles, a Republican House member, had introduced a bill which sought allowance for Trump to run for a third term. Ogles’ alibi, bowing to Trump’s prodding of ‘he’s so good, we have to just figure it out,’ was that Trump “has proven himself to be the only figure in modern history” capable of “restoring America to greatness”. If the world knows Trump enough, it will know that America would soon receive its first genetic transplant of an African sit-tight leadership. Trump is provoking trade war, withdrawing America from globally-beneficial institutions like WHO, threatening to harness territories like Greenland, all in the name of his MAGA.
Donald Trump’s son, Trump Jr., recently hallmarked his father’s Greenland harnessing when he made a surprise appearance there. Immediately, Nigerian maga on social media asked what stops President Bola Tinubu from cloning the same nepotist hubris and weave his son, Seyi, round Aso Rock. Trump should be made to know that, at the end of all these, yes, America will be lush once again for Americans. However, that country would have forever lost the savour of respect and dread for which the world stands in awe of it. By the time Trump ends his Adolf Hitler-like preferencing of his Aryan race as the most superior in the world, America would wake up lost and naked.
As Trump is busy affirming the “everywhere, without exception, at dusk, hens are packed inside the pen” to the world, in Nigeria, former Rivers and Kaduna state governors, Rotimi Amaechi and Nasir El-Rufai, are struggling to deconstruct the thesis. At an “Impact of democracy on the national economy” in Abuja last week, both acted from the playbook of a typical adulterous woman sent packing from her erstwhile home. Underlining their “dogo turenchi” is the theme that, while the present government, from which they are estranged, is performing horribly, if they had played prominent roles therein, it would not have been otherwise. That submission attempted to deconstruct the “ibi gbogbo l’a ti nk’adiye ale” thesis.
Quite frankly, Amaechi and El-Rufai were dead right. Nigerians are too docile and possess incredibly short-spanned memory. It is these two limitations that Nigerian politicians capitalize upon to catapult themselves into power. When you add the infectious poverty that afflicts the Nigerian to the mix, you have at your finger tips zombies. Evergreen Anikulapo-Kuti got it right. “My people sef, dem fear too much…” he lamented. While many attribute this to the sparse blood spillage in our fight for independence, some say our docility is a product of our comfort. You cannot also fault El-Rufai’s claim that there is no internal democracy in the ruling APC. But, if I may ask, which party in Nigeria observes internal democracy? The former Kaduna governor had equally lamented that, “You cannot afford to have illiterates, semi-illiterates, and cunning people as your leaders. This is why we end up with the poor leadership we have today.”
My take is that indeed, Nigeria, America and many parts of the world are today facing an Autumn in good leadership. Global leadership is fast decoupling from the people who constitute its foundation. If Amaechi and El-Rufai had been in plum offices today under the APC, there would be nil or marginal differences in the people’s sorrow. Nor any complaints from them. Their comments above are the usual initial traps politicians set to seduce electorates penultimate lunching new parties or entering into alliances. Both Amaechi and El-Rufai were in office when the Muhammadu Buhari government dealt incalculable blows on good governance. It was the most opaque, naive and directionless in Nigeria’s history. Yet, we didn’t hear any hoopla from the duo.
On the whole, Trump is teaching leaders of the world that indeed, “everywhere, without exception, at dusk, hens are packed inside the pen”. As Trump’s Third term ambition grows, it will trigger a wave of African leaders also nurturing perfect alibi for sit-tightism. This brings me to an intersection to disagree with El-Rufai’s claim that the present APC leadership is illiterate. I agree more with ex-Youth and Sports Minister, Solomon Dalung, who recently said that the combine that surrounds power today is educated but lethal. Cunning and sadistic, yes, they are. It is why I am of the opinion that it will be difficult to dislodge Tinubu from power
Rather than sounding sanctimonious, El-Rufai, Amaechi and the Nigerian opposition will need to abandon rhetoric. I am sure that what God deployed to drive Satan away from Heaven wasn’t mere demagogic narratives. What the Nigerian opposition needs to do to drive away the Morning Star is to recreate an American Donald Trump as an aspirant for Nigeria’s No 1 office. A Trump clone will dislodge the current ruling establishment. In Trump is a symbolism of leadership madness, unconventionality, criminality and unorthodoxy. Don’t our people say it is only a meek face that gets riven with pimples (Ojú tó rọ ni rore nsọ)? Yoruba reckon with this when they say, you must deploy madness to cure madness. While campaigning for votes, Tinubu himself said you cannot snatch the kernel from the palm-nut with rhetoric. What Nigeria’s opposition needs to dislodge the kernel from the hard palm-nut is a stone on the floor and another stone to smash it at the top.

By Festus Adedayo
All over the world, musicians are reputed to have patented argots, slang and jargon that signposted global conversations. In the tiny Island of Jamaica, the unkempt, locked-hair, weed-smoking, reggae music singer, Peter Tosh pioneered the word ‘Rasta’ as prefix for devotees of a new religion that began to reign in the West Indies. That religion believed that His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, formerly Abyssinia, and the last Emperor of the Empire, was “King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah and Elect of God”. In a musical track titled “Rasta Shook Dem Up” released in 1966, Tosh patented the usage of the word for worshipers of Selassie named “Rastafari.” It was derived from Selassie’s pre-monarch name, “Ras Tafari Makonnen,” “Ras” having come from an Ethiopian Semitic word meaning “Duke” or “Prince”.
In the early 1980s, when Yoruba Awurebe music icon, Alhaji Dauda Adeeyo, alias Epo Akara, was accused of couriering Indian hemp to Abidjan, Cote d’voire, his traducers had an upper hand in spreading the news. He had to denounce it in a track he called O wa l’Abidjan. In it, he sang that he was engaged in legitimate sale of Ankara clothes which was a major trade in the French-speaking country. A new kind of cloth style became known as L’Abidjan in the Southwest of Nigeria then.
About two weeks ago, Yoruba Fuji icon, Wasiu Ayinde, unwittingly added to the lexicography of the Southwest. His mother, Animotu Sadia, had passed and among a beehive of people who flooded his Ijebu-Ode, Ogun State home for the burial were Islamic clerics. In Yorubaland, clerics at such occasions, whether Christian or Muslim, have come to be synonyms with scavenging for perks and food. Islamic clerics are the most notorious. I remember that while growing up, a very unflattering but predominant phrase that was bandied about was, “If an Alfa goes to an occasion, how to know that the event was fruitful and he ate to his fill was that the Alfa’s elbow would be soaked in oil” (Bí Aafa ba lọ òde, bí òde bà dun, igbunwo l’a tí mọ, torí yíò mú epo dẹdẹ ni!).
An apparently clandestinely recorded video had Ayinde complaining that the flood of clerics to his house in the guise of condolences, was stomach-driven. This was not the novelty Ayinde pioneered. The lexicographic enrichment came from the musician’s usage of a barroom, society’s lowlife slang to describe the scavenging. He said the clerics had chosen his house, rather than his father’s house at Fidipote area of Ijebu-Ode, to “Ganusi.” Ganusi can be used either as a noun or verb and has literally shut down the social media in the various mutations it has suffered.
Many people have done a syntactic and lexical examination of “Ganusi” since then, many times without fruition. It is most probably a weave of two words “Ga enu” (prized open like a trap) and “si” (to) to arrive at a word which conveys the meaning of a deliberate ploy to fill the tummy. Such act of prizing open the mouth is deliberate, purposive and tendentious, while not being real as it is concealed. Ayinde was obviously communicating a tendency that is getting worse in society where everyone has become a scavenger of the other person.
Though uttered at the height of frustration with nectar-sucking propensity of virtually everyone in Nigeria today, an Islamic cleric who angrily replied the musician reminded him that Ayinde, being a beggar (alagbe) – as musicians are known from time immemorial – was equally a scavenger.
“Ganusi” has become a social commentary on how virtually everyone in Nigeria is scavenging for survival, either legitimately or illegitimately. Whether Ganusi is done by designer suites-wearing contractors in Abuja, babanriga, Isiagu or agbada, or by touts at motor-parks who demand to be given a piece of the pie who rudely demand, “Big man, let me also Ganusi your wealth” (Baba Alaye, e je ki n ganusi.)
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