Peter Obi as Nigeria's Rosa Parks. By Festus Adedayo

On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, a 42-year-old woman named Rosa Parks did what philosophers call against method. Paul Feyeraband, an Austrian philosopher, had in 1976 pioneered that thesis. In a racial American society of the time where blacks were inferior and were expected to leave their bus seats for whites, Parks refused to give up hers for a white male passenger. Her refusal sparked a boycott that changed the paradigm of racial relationships in America. It even shot the less-known Martin Luther King Jr. to world recognition. At the risk of sanctions for her impudence, Parks had reportedly told the Montgomery bus driver: “My feet are tired”.

In a Nigeria where the curriculum vitae of some presidential aspirants is as opaque as the sky, birth details shawled in a translucent towel, real name a subject of needless controversy, birth and parenthood a curious pouch fallen from space on an island nobody wants to touch, schooling history smelling like a miasma and wrapped up in a shroud, Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, was born Peter Gregory Obi on July 19, 1961, in Onitsha, Anambra State and attended Christ the King College, Onitsha, and later, the University of Nigeria, graduating with a B.A. (Hons) in Philosophy in 1984. Thereafter, he ventured into business, becoming the chairman of Fidelity Bank, among other concerns.

The most outstanding and worthy narrative about Obi is the records he left in public office. Obi is a refreshing breeze in the governance space, leaving an unbeatable governmental footpath of prudence, probity and empathetic governance towards the people he administered as governor from 2006 to 2014. He was not loved by Anambra political vermin who could not stand his accountable governance and obsession with prioritizing the welfare of the citizens of the state.

Obi disdains waste, whether at the personal or governmental level. Wealthy by any standard but, unlike the typical Nigerian politician who is enveloped in vanity, Obi lives a frugal life that shows that wealth is nothing except targeted at developing humanity. He abhors pretence and vain flaunting of wealth. When agents of the maggots-wriggling political order that has limited Nigeria’s growth for decades criticize Obi for allegedly flaunting inaccurate statistics, ask them when last did any of the senescent candidates they willingly offer themselves as their lackeys, ever attempted to bandy any figure, extempore?

Of all the characters who strut around like turtle doves, pregnant with illicit ambitions to enter the office of the Nigerian president, none demonstrates or possesses Obi’s piety, grasp and depth. When you scrutinize those aspiring to preside over the destiny of over 200 million Nigerians, they have no destiny of worth aside from their unaccountable wealth. On the moral scores above, it will be a crying shame that Nigeria ever allowed them to attempt to square up with Obi for an office that, if we get it right, can forever change our dialogue with poverty and underdevelopment.

In records of fidelity to the public space where they have all been at one point or the other, none of the duo of APC and PDP presidential candidates has Obi’s baffling records of abidance with the oath of governmental purity, virtue, goodness, decency, morality, decorum, modesty and wholesomeness. This is what public officers swear to uphold. Isn’t it a huge disappointment that the narrative of Obi’s investment of Anambra money is what engages these jobless political parasites and not the moral pedigree of those who totally filched investments in their care in office and who, God forbid, are poised to rule and ruin them?

When some Nigerians with ulterior motives now seek to justify the illusion of the Hobson’s choice before them by claiming that morality should play second fiddle in who becomes the Nigerian president in 2023, they must be saying this in their acute naivety of the cusp of Golgotha that immorality has taken Nigeria. For a country which ranked at an all-time low position of 154th out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index, we must not allow those who want to rule us in 2023 to wriggle out of making corruption an issue at the ballot.

Bloomberg, a media company headquartered in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, in a piece published on June 22, 2022, said the candidates dare not campaign that they want to eradicate corruption. Except for Obi. Due to the huge hole that corruption has bored into the fabrics of the Nigerian public and private life, the graft pedigree of the Nigerian public service has become a top campaign issue in Nigeria’s last two presidential elections. Remember the “if we don’t kill corruption, corruption will kill us” mantra? Bloomberg then wonders how the two main candidates who are seen as poster boys of corruption in public service and with a long “history of graft allegations surrounding” them, will raise corruption as a goblin they intend to battle if elected the Nigerian president.

According to this June 22 Bloomberg publication, just three decades ago, one of the presidential candidates “fought a lawsuit in which the US government accused him of laundering the proceeds of heroin trafficking and eventually reached a settlement”. Bloomberg also claimed that: “In July 1993, when (the candidate) briefly served as a Nigerian senator, the US government filed a forfeiture lawsuit in Chicago against bank accounts in his name, claiming there was ‘probable cause’ to believe they held the proceeds of heroin dealing. The case followed a probe by the Internal Revenue Service and other agencies into a trafficking network involving Nigerian suppliers”.

The PDP candidate, said Bloomberg, “brought tens of millions of dollars of ‘suspect funds’ into the US when he was Nigeria’s vice president in the 2000s, according to a US senate report, and was implicated in a bribery case that resulted in the imprisonment of an American congressman. Neither episode resulted in charges against the man who is now the PDP presidential candidate”. The report also said that a report published in 2010 by the US senate’s permanent subcommittee on investigations claimed that Jennifer, one of (his) wives, was complicit in helping her husband, who was then the VP, bring in over $40 million of ‘suspect funds’ into the US, ‘including at least $1.7 million in bribes paid by Siemens AG”. How can we be stuck with such rotten cabbages for breakfast? As we speak, none of the two candidates has put up a rebuttal of Bloomberg’s claims.

In all that has been written against Obi, none has been able to link him with dubiety in public service. A few put up are so laughable and effete efforts at placing him side by side with his disreputable allies in the race. Indeed, Nigeria needs a capable leadership that can tackle insecurity, restore public confidence in leadership, bring Nigeria from its consumerist to production economy, lift up the people’s sagging morale and all that, but the mere realisation that an ‘Ali Baba and the 40 thieves’ president inhabits Aso Rock will do incalculable harm to the image of Nigeria, thereby pushing the issue of resolution of the Nigerian graft conundrum far down the abyss. That is why corruption should be more urgent in resolution than, I dare say, restoring Nigeria’s economy to its shape. Western countries which have profiled the APC and PDP candidates as robbers of the public till will most likely hold back in entrusting international funds in their care.

Attempts by vultures of the social media to demonize Peter Obi can be likened to a pithy saying in Yoruba which is expressed as a short anecdote of a sick man who apparently wishes those who tender him on the sick bed to be sick like him. When asked what he would have for dinner, the sick man demanded a green snake-made pepper soup and amala. Who does not know that killing a green snake is fraught with danger? This is expressed as; “da bi mo se da baba olokunrun, to ni omi tooro abirusoro lo wu ohun je oka”. The gambit is that Obi must be brought to their inveterate level by all means. He must also have his own Alpha Beta where he collects 10% from the Anambra state government. His total existence must symptomize fakery. Some of these vultures even go to the absurd level of abusing him for leaving money behind in Anambra coffers, saying he was not elected to save money, unlike their own god who was apparently elected to plunge his state into eternal debts.

To be fair to those fascinated by, in the words of Oscar Wilde, the gutters and everything that is in it, an Obi presidency has the potential of signalling a nunc dimittis to public corruption in Nigeria. Going the other route with the progenies of corruption can only lead to infamy. In Obi is a leader whose life will be a mirror that the led will pattern their lives towards and there will be sanity in public service. Recruits of #OperationPullPeterDown don’t just get it or are too naïve to connect with it. While no one is saying Peter Obi is a saint, the two candidates of APC and PDP are moral midgets beside an integrity colossus like Peter. Rebuilding Nigeria is an imperative but not a rebuilding on quicksand which handing Nigeria into the hands of an amoral leadership epitomizes.

On the superficial, voting for Obi looks like a waste of franchise. How can someone profess a disruptive leadership that will wipe clean wastage, corruption and elite gang-up hope to win a Nigerian presidency that is teleguided by people who Dele Momodu classically referred to as “owners of Nigeria” and who are maggots that only thrive in sewage? However, it is in the interest of the Nigerian political class to redeem themselves by, for once, stepping down from queuing behind the same rotten characters who have kept Nigeria down and with whom there is no hope of redemption for the country.

Unfortunately, the so-called owners of Nigeria, the power daemons, must favour one of these characters to be on the ballot. This is the time that the international community must openly support a quest for a better Nigeria which Obi personifies. On a personal note, my frustration about Nigeria being, head or tail, in a cul-de-sac of a Robinhood-led presidency almost pushed me into despondency. It was the reason why, last week, I had to seek consolation in the APC and PDP candidates’ probable redemptive presidency.

However, the infectious awareness and mobilization campaigns of the Nigerian youth, most of whose future has been rendered opaque by these same characters who collaboratively destroyed their tomorrow since 1999, have lifted my spirit. These same youths spoke in October 2020 at the Lekki Toll Gate and in many parts of Nigeria where they were mowed down by agents of selfsame persons now asking for their votes. With a movement being coordinated by youths like Debo Adedayo (Mr Macaroni); Folarin Falana (Falz), and others, optimism was born in me anew. Whether Obi wins or not isn’t an issue. What is at issue is our collective antagonism against a decadent order. In any case, who says the ancient Latin maxim, Vox Populi, Vox Dei has lost its savour?

The attacks against Peter Obi are ostensibly from rabid supporters of both the PDP and APC presidential candidates. Bloomberg called these candidates “the two wealthy septuagenarians”. There doesn’t seem to be anyone who does not know that the two political principalities however transcend the baggage of their ages into exampling a rotten order of Nigerian politics.

If you listen to narratives by hunters who go into the heart of the forest in search of dangerous animals for venison, you will have a window into an explanation of our world. Hunters tell us, for instance, that when you hear the chirping noise of a squirrel, a snake is loitering by. Squirrels’ chirps are alarm signals given both to warn off a predator and to warn other squirrels of danger. When squirrels give out this noise repeatedly, the hunter’s gun must be at the ready. A viper, boa constrictor or rattlesnake is poised for a strike.

The forest is a huge resource for the explanation of the human world. It is why hunters claim to have access to three worlds – the animal world, the spirit world and the world of the forest. For those who think this peculiar world ends with humanity, those scary stories show us clearly that this cosmos is one huge world where human beings act as one leg of a tripod of a dramatic space relationship.

If you possess the inner, third eye of the hunter and his alertness and you see the desperation and multiplicity of attacks on the social media against the person of Obi, it will make you recall that squirrel narrative. It will seem to indicate that, in Obi, for the Nigerian politician who is acquiesced to ruining the lives of the people in every election cycle, danger lurks in the neighbourhood. Yoruba hunters eventually wove this squirrel narrative into an aphorism. They say’, “he who will live old enough to bury their parents is never found where there is a chirp of squirrels” – “eni ti y’o sin’ya ati baba re ki duro ni’bi okere ba ti nse”. Like the squirrel narrative above, blessed with clairvoyance deep enough to see danger and threat to a long-established graft empire far off, Obi’s emergence typifies an acute danger to this decadent order. And thus, the chirps.

On the road leading to the 2023 election, Peter Obi seems to have cloned Rosa Parks. Like Parks who refused to accept the intimidation of the white establishment and accept racial evil as fait accompli, Obi is biting the bullet for us and our children yet unborn. He is daring these daemons and maggots of power.

Our children in universities are five months at home, idling their future away. Diesel is almost N1,000 while the Nigerian currency is flat on its belly, grovelling before other currencies of worth. Nigerians are foraging through debris containers for daily bread. Terrorists rip off our bellies at their whims. Our country has become alien to us. The almost eight years of leadership tragedy that Muhammadu Buhari presides over is comatose while he is busy drinking cold fura and nunu.

Peter Obi, on our behalf, is saying that our feet are tired. Nigerians should refuse to give up their votes to those who took us down this dungeon of hopelessness, damn the consequences by voting for who will reshape our lives.

WHY SDP COULDN'T ACCEPT ADELABU AND HIS TEAM. - HON OJASOPE

The Social Democratic Party in Oyo State has clarified why discussions with Chief Adebayo Adelabu and his team of co-aspirants couldn't work out for the 2023 elections.

According to the Press statement by the state Publicity Secretary; we were not surprised at the announcement of their arrival at Accord Party because we were aware of the negotiations by their advance team in Abuja. SDP in Oyo State is not a mushroom party and as much as we love to welcome others in our fold, we would never jettison our core value of give and take in negotiating. The attitude of coming to the table with the premeditation of weeping off all the positions is not acceptable to us and it's a compromise that suggests desperation.

"We conceded Governorship, two senatorial seats, many House of Representatives and some State House of Assembly seats but their insistent on having the 3 senatorial seats suggests they don't have good intentions for our leaders and their followers too. We consider it very unfair for men to propose to withdraw ticket from the only woman in the senatorial race and give it to another man just because she's a woman or any other baseless sentiment. The woman in question happens to be the leader of our party, Rt Hon Mulikat Akande Adeola, the former majority leader of the House of Representatives.

We wish them the best in their new abode but it is pertinent to let the public know what transpired, particularly because we still had about 3 different meetings, till Tuesday 14th June, three weeks after news published "Adelabu abandoned SDP for Accord". Social Democratic Party in Oyo State is here to stay and we would stick to our core values of social welfare, good governance, equity and fairness in all we do. 

Signed

Rotimi Johnson -Ojasope

State Publicity Secretary

The Muslim-Muslim Ticket, The Prostitute And Her Qu'ran. By Festus Adedayo

Separating the Nigerian from his politics and religion is almost like a man trying to forcefully pull off a strand of hair from his moustache. It is akin to trying to prise off the glue that wedges Siamese twins together. Yoruba social worldview also offers an explanation of this difficulty. At a bandstand gig for Alhaji Danjuma, Kano-born wealthy entrepreneur of the 1970s, owner of the defunct Agege Cinema and a man known in the Lagos social circuit as Yaro Maikudi, late Apala music exponent, Ayinla Omowura, had explained  why he showered panegyrics on fans who decorated his forehead with crisp Naira notes. For Ayinla, spenders who forcefully retrieve themselves from this adhesive wedge relationship between money and its spender deserve appreciation. “Irun’mu l’owo o, ko sai han s’anybody pe ko ma se fa tu, eni na mi l’owo, ma s’aponle won,” he had explained.

Politics and religion in Nigeria share that incestuous relationship between the owner of a moustache and his strands of hair. They are barely separable. For politics and religion, the intimacy may be due to the many points of convergence that they share, as well as the complex relationship between them. What most fittingly explains that adhesive wedge relationship is a queer news item which came up last week. Three suspects were charged to court in Lagos for their role in the killing of a sex worker, Hannah Saliu in a Lagos suburb known as Alaba Rago, and setting her corpse ablaze thereafter. Her crime: She had the temerity to keep the Holy Quran in her room where she engaged in the illicit trade of prostitution. One of the suspects, who was her customer, had raised the alarm after an allegation of stealing which resulted in the search of Saliu’s room and the discovery of the holy book underneath her pillow.

Since the primaries of the two leading political parties in Nigeria, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressives Congress (APC) were concluded, resulting in the victory of a Northern and Southern Muslim as flag-bearers of the parties respectively, the issue of who would be their running mates has been on the front burner. While the PDP dilemma in this regard was more zonal than religious, it was easier for the party to pick a Christian candidate than it is for the APC. As we speak, passions have been inflamed, hats thrown into the ring in argument for each of the divides. Emotions are running at the highest Fahrenheit as well on why the APC flag-bearer must not commit the self immolation of picking a Muslim as his vice presidential candidate.

The Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) then upped this dilemma. It warned the two presidential candidates against picking running mates of their own religious persuasion, stating that doing so would amount to a disruption of and threat to Nigeria’s fragile peace.

“Any party that tries same religion ticket will fail. This is not 1993. Even when we have a joint Muslim/Christian ticket, the church still goes through hell. Only God knows the number of Christians that have been killed in the last seven years with no one apprehended or prosecuted. Imagine how bad it will be if we have two Muslims in power? The extant Nigerian Constitution promotes religious balance. So, if any political party wants to try Muslim/Muslim ticket, it’s at its own peril. CAN is only forewarning but will make a categorical statement in the event our warning is not heeded,” said Joseph Daramola, CAN National Secretary.

Political pundits have however literally said that CAN was merely ranting. If an APC Southern Muslim candidate would stand a chance of defeating a northern candidate who, by reason of hailing from the north, has huge voter demographics in his kitty, this APC Southern Muslim candidate would be committing political suicide if he picks a Northern Christian as running mate, they say. The equation for this Southern APC candidate gets even worse amid rumours of a suspected gang-up by top northern political barons in the innermost recess of his own party. Their plan, says this rumour, is to allow the north continue in office by subterfuge. With all these as reference points, pundits then submit that the issue at stake is not moralism of the pulpit, not the ecclesiastical realism that CAN is shouting about, nor is it even the Nigerian constitution which requires ethnic and religious balancing. It is political realism.

In his seven years of being in office, President Muhammadu Buhari has promoted the bigotry of religion and region, so much that in an earlier piece I did, I predicted that he would be the last Nigerian president; the last president from whom would be expected a pan-Nigerian mindset, that is. My thought is that, it would be very difficult for Buhari’s successor in office, especially if the person hails from the southern part of Nigeria, not to be cozened into administering Nigeria along ethnic and religious fault lines as Buhari did. The current APC dilemma on the religious colouration of its vice presidential candidate is a direct outflow from the war Buhari waged in his years of being in power against what is right and acceptable for a plural society like Nigeria. Otherwise, a well-run Nigeria with a leadership that is sensitive to the issue of region and religion would have easily got away with its choice, not minding its deviation from what is right.

There is no doubting the fact that, because Nigeria is not a nation, it is sharply divided along fault lines. Two of such lines are religion and ethnicity. What we have is a meaningless but stiff competition between Islam and Christianity which threatens the co-existence and stability of Nigeria. If we want to get politics to evoke similar emotion as and become the kind of unifier that soccer is, we will be looking for a white falcon. Religion has become one of the most divisive tools of politics.

In Nigeria, religion is the most inconsistent and inaccurate of all the indices that can be used to measure plural reality. Ethnicity, culture and language are better units of measurement. They can successfully rally groups together while religion does not possess such power. This is why, till today, northern Muslims do not consider their Southern counterparts as representing the true expectations from a “pure” Muslim. They can never see the APC presidential candidate as a true representation of their Islamic religion. This situation is however better in Christianity. Even at that, a Northern Christian does not evoke total Body-of-Christ feeling from counterparts in the South, as much as ethnicity or language does. Having said this however, the reality is that religion is still a potent force that should not be discountenanced.

Ordinarily, religion should not be a determinant factor in the consideration of who administers a country like Nigeria. While the two dominant religions shouldn’t determine who we are, taking into consideration their foreign origin, Nigerian religious leaders haven’t done better. They have quashed all the goodwill they attracted two centuries earlier. They have also proved to be grossly self-centered, bothering less about the souls of their congregants and fascinated mainly about the material wealth that they are able to make for themselves out of the grief of the people.

Nigerian religionists have been as hypocritical as the man who patronized the sex worker and who killed her because she was found with a Quran. This is because it will be difficult to divorce clerics and Imams from the festering crises of nationhood in Nigeria. It is the same way that the man who patronized the prostitute could not divorce himself and is indeed contributive to the fact of her prostitution.

Religion and its hypocritical jealousies are one of the ills plaguing Nigeria today. Petty jealousies among competing religions have ruled the airwave. It is why politicians don’t regard religious leaders because they both play dirty politics. The church and mosque have stopped performing their traditional democratic utilitarian functions in society. These functions are: promoting democratic values and norm; helping to critique the conduct of governments in power on the pulpit and in mosques; encouraging political participation; articulating and aggregating the interests of the people in sermons and serving as avenues for the development of leadership skills.

Having said all the above, while the decision to choose a running mate from same religious faith as its flag-bearer’s may not signal rejection at the polls for the Southern APC presidential candidate, his atimasebo for his Southern Nigerian people and specifically to his Yoruba race will come to play. In this instance, it is questionable and will weigh against him. In weight, this will count more than the fact of his affront on the religious sensibility of his people by choosing a northern Muslim. Atimasebo is a very deep Yoruba word whose metonym is precedence. Apart from empowering individuals which some people have reasoned was targeted towards achieving his lifelong ambition which he has now achieved, what institutional support has the candidate given to the south, such that he expects people of opposing religion from his to appreciate and then discountenance the power of their religious affiliation?

By the way, readers will bear me out that I have never hidden my belief that the choices which the APC and PDP have provided are choicelessness. However, in this midst of this hopelessness, I am beginning to develop a very optimistic horizon. Peradventure, in the midst of the seeming hopeless candidature of the leading flag-bearers of the two leading political parties, can we keep hope of redemption alive?

The optimism has two faces. One is that, being in their 70s and aware that this may well be Providence’s last bus-stop for them, perchance either of the two candidates becomes the Nigerian President, can’t he be persuaded to be redemptive in his governance attitude and prove pundits of failure like me wrong? Coming into office with one of the most pessimistic estimations ever, due to their very unpleasant past, anyone of the two candidates who becomes the Nigerian president may see the presidential office as an opportunity to redeem himself and secure eternity in the hearts of Nigerians; become an Obafemi Awolowo who is still seen as the governmental ideal, 63 years after leaving office.

The case of Moshood Kasimawo Abiola may convince either of the highly tar-brushed incoming president on this. An ultra-conservative who was grossly disdained for his role in ITT, alleged takeovers of government in Africa and attacks against Yoruba leaders, 1993 was a redemptive moment and U-turn juncture for MKO Abiola. He seized the moment, thereby securing an after-life at death in the hearts of the people. Wouldn’t the man who may become president of Nigeria among the two candidates of APC and PDP want such redemption for himself?

Second, being ultra-capitalists who know that they can only succeed in feathering their acquisitive nest only if there is development in Nigeria, either of the candidates who becomes the Nigerian president may be persuaded to fix the contentious infrastructural deficit that has plagued Nigeria and make the country better. It is in his capitalist interest. Whichever one becomes president is very likely going to be different from an Islamicist-minded, pseudo-socialist president like Buhari whose major advertised acquisition in life is a herd of cows that hasn’t increased in years of owning them. Is this possible?

OYO STATE SDP CONDOLES HON MULIKAT ADEOLA FOR THE DEATH OF HER GRANDMOTHER AT 116 YEARS

The Oyo State Chapter of the Social Democratic Party condoles Hon Mulikat Adeola, the former majority leader at the Federal House of Representatives, the Oyo North senatorial candidate of SDP for the 2023 general elections and the leader of the party in the state for the loss of her beloved grandmother at the ripe old age of 116yrs.

According to the press release by the state Publicity Secretary; "we came back from a hugely successful but hectic national convention at Abuja late yesterday to receive the news of Mama Safuratu Abdulsalam passing on to glory this morning. Mama was very amiable, wise and caring and we know how much she meant to our leader because she was both mother and grandmother to Hon Mulikat Adeola who lost her mother at the very tender age of 2yrs. We know how emotionally attached Mama and our leader were and describing this as a great loss is an understatement."

On behalf of the State executives under the leadership of Hon Michael Okunlade, the leaders of the party; Engr Femi Babalola (Jogor), Barr Michael Lana, Hon Afees Jimoh, the 33 local government Chairmen, all the candidates and the entire members, we pray almighty Allah grants you the fortitude to bear this great loss and comfort the entire in every way possible.

Mama Safuratu Abdulsalam of Agbeyangi compound, Ojaigbo in Ogbomoso has been laid to rest according to the Muslim rites today and the third day fidaus shall hold on Sunday 12th June 2022 at Ogbomoso in Oyo State.

Signed.

Rotimi Johnson -Ojasope ANIPR, FPD-CR

State Publicity Secretary (SPS)

OJASOPE POLITICAL ANALYSIS: NORTH AND THE CRYPTO-PRESIDENCY AGENDA:

I couldn't come up with the Oyo South senatorial district analysis as promised because of the crisis sorrounding the conduct of the district primaries as at last Monday. I apologize for that but political parties find it difficult to adhere strictly to timetables because of crisis and other human challenges. So today, I want to delve into the hidden agenda of the northern political elites and the Presidential candidates. 

I have stated it unequivocally on many radio programs that I don't see Buhari handing over to a Southern President but people read partisan meanings to it; the body language of Mr President, all the appointments and decisions have shown beyond reasonable doubts that President Buhari is the northern President of Nigeria. The northern elites have shown consistently that the welfare and political relevance of the zone is superior to any Nigeria Dream or agenda. Retaining power in the North unites these people irrespective of partisan divides. The military and security agencies have bought fully into this agenda because about 90% of the security architectures are headed by northerners. Likewise, most of the parastals and agencies of the Federal government are also headed by northerners and these are appointments with terms for offices and consequently no new President can just resume office and terminate the appointments without big resistance from the region. 

I have always knew both APC and PDP leaders from the Northern extraction have same agenda and that is to retain Presidency in the North but unfortunately, our southern leaders in both parties are too selfish to read between the lines. The cryto-presidential-agenda is to pitch a strong northern candidate against a weak southern candidate in both parties; in essence, the voting strength and the unity of the North will always play out favourably at the polls. Though the Southern aspirants in APC are now trying to arrive at a concensus but it is belated because if their PDP counterparts have pulled out of the race when the zoning was cancelled, it would have given a strong signals.

When it comes to elections and Presidency, the northern elites unite on the interest of the region and the dominant religion which is Islam. Tinubu who is the unquestionably the strongest aspirant can't defeat Atiku because the northern elites won't see him as true Muslim and that's why he is proposing a northern Muslim as Vice. Even at that, the Atiku emergence has raised the hope of northern Presidency already and who the APC feeds doesn't matter again. The noise about zoning the presidency to the South is a scam which time is confirming already. 

Whether Lawan/Amaechi or Osinbajo ticket can not deliver victory in the next general elections to APC because they can't match the strength of Atiku. Tinubu that could give a stiff challenge has the religion challenge and threat of becoming too powerful for the North to control. Remember the last time a Southern Muslim won a presidential election, it was annulled. Atiku has always been liberal in challenging or condemning the incumbent government and that suggests hidden understanding because the present administration also doesn't have occasions to antagonize Alhaji Atiku Abubakar the way one would expect from a foremost opposition figure. 

The southern leaders must have a bigger picture, an agenda beyond Amotekun security network; we must learn to bury our differences at a point for the sake of posterity and in the overall interest of the region. We have gotten to a point of Southern unity Forum and vision to ensure tactical power play in the faces of our many diversities. 

QUOTE: Never miss an opportunity to see the bigger picture.  - Gift Gugu Mona

Rotimi Johnson -Ojasope. ANIPR, FD-CRM

Has Tinubu read the story of S. L. Akintola’s last days? By Festus Adedayo

The war of the First Republic had reached a feverish height. Those it consumed were wheeled to the sepulchre by the day. Blood of political party faithful painted the sky crimson. According to Femi Kehinde, a former member of the house of representatives and biographer of the last premier of the Western Region, Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola, in the book, ‘S.L. Akintola In The Eyes of History’, (2017), Akintola knew that his standing up to the octopodal political machine in the Action Group was akin to suicide. Death bestrode the firmament like an ominous cloud. The premier could see it. He however felt that he had long crossed the Rubicon to bother about death as a karmic comeuppance of his action.

In the words of the biographer, as the twilight of his life approached, with a fusillade of missiles from both parties spurting out scary, gold-coloured fire, Akintola’s hands became shaky, so much that he couldn’t append his signature to documents on a straight line. He was just 56 years old. When his driver, then Prince Adewale Kazeem, suggested to him that he should resign his post as premier, the polyglot and highly talented Yoruba language user, retorted to Kazeem that the die was cast as only death lay at the end of the tunnel for him. No one demonstrated such temerity by disrupting the status quo without recompense. Akintola expressed this soberly in Yoruba thus: “Adewale, o ti bo; iku lo ma gb’eyin eleyi!”

In the unguarded, broken cistern-like outpour of the leader of the All Progressives Congress, (APC) and the party’s presidential aspirant, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, in Abeokuta, Ogun state, last week, all that I could see was Chief Akintola. Tinubu demonstrated all these in his bid to woo delegates to vote for him in the scheduled Monday presidential primary. It was held at the Presidential Lodge. The outpour naturally provoked questions which were: “Was Tinubu shot off this realm by some very potently delirious substances? Did he speak from the depth of acute frustration? Was he intentionally bellicose, combative? Was he naturally suicidal, nihilist, diffident or was he momentarily consumed by that selfsame anger that destroyed Alaafin Sango of the ancient Oyo Empire?”

Why I asked those questions, particularly the suicidal bent, was that, as he stood before that podium addressing Ogun state APC delegates, I saw a flash of him that patented the last days of Late S.L. Akintola in power as premier of the Western Region. What Tinubu wore at that Olumo Rock tirade session, unbeknown to all, wasn’t strictly a sash of arrogance, boastfulness or bellicosity, but a garment always worn by those who see an end time cloud and who are ready to diffidently slash into its fog with their bare hand.

It is why the fictive and feeble attempt by Tinubu’s Media Office to reconstruct and repair the massive damage done by their principal last week ended up doing far much more damage to him. To attempt to reconfigure a video that virtually all Nigerians watched with their senses intact, as opposed to the main cast of the opera, ended up worsening the messy purport of the Tinubu vituperations. A deft political calculator endowed with a mastery of how to weave events like a tapestry, Tinubu knew what he was about while spitting out the fire of a dragon on his adversaries in Abeokuta. He knew the implications as well; he just couldn’t care. Like Akintola, he was prepared to bite the bullet and he knew the consequences. The die was cast.

In the video of his engagement with the Ogun delegates which went viral, Tinubu appeared highly plussed, agitated and unstable. I will not go into even a farthing bet with anyone that the landlord of Lagos was unaided by any substance, imagined or mis-imagined, in this unconscionable outpour of venom.

Then, he went into a session of tirades which he seemed to have measured with the traditional Yoruba foodstuff measuring plastic called kongo, apportioning a deft ounce to each of the victims of his venom. He went into a short history of how the vice presidency was offered to him by Major General Muhammadu Buhari (rtd) but didn’t volunteer why Buhari beat a retreat and got to the juncture of asking him for a VP nominee instead. Then he went into a binge of self-entitlement, about why it had to be him running for the 2023 presidency and no one else. At that juncture, he cut a very pitiable sight. It reminds me of Antjie Krogg, author of ‘Country of My Skull’ and her quip that, when a man is consumed (by ambition), he wakes up lost.

"It is my turn. When an axe was wielded on Atiku (in the PDP), he ran to me and I gave him the ticket; they wielded the same axe against Nuhu Ribadu and I shielded him by bringing him out (to contest). It has been over 25 years now that I began serving them,” he said.

Then Tinubu brought out the same axe of hate, and self-righteousness and wielded it against Governor Dapo Abiodun of Ogun state, his host who sat next to him on the high table before he headed for the podium. “Eleyi –This one – sitting behind me, Dapo, can he say he can on his own become governor without me? Weren’t we together at the MKO Abiola Stadium? All his posters were torn. Even the party’s flag was denied him. Go and watch the video. I was the one who handed it over to him. He will live long but if he wants to meet God at the right place, he must know that without God and me, he would not have become governor,” he said.

Sensing that he had crossed the Rubicon and landed at a point of no return, Tinubu then declared fearlessly that the die was cast (o to ge!). O to ge is a biblical Samson song that is sung by those who behold total destruction ahead of them and are ready to pull down the house with themselves in it. It is nihilism personified.

Tinubu then stomped beyond biting the bullet to actually pulling the gun’s trigger against himself and his Yoruba race. It revealed that he was not unaware of the ongoing narrative of Yoruba being the architect of their own dissembling. This is a narrative that is illustrated by the tiff between Chief Obafemi Awolowo and his erstwhile friend and disciple, Akintola. At this juncture in his speech, Tinubu waffled aimlessly like a junkie needing a fix. His words then came out disjointed and almost without synchrony: “The die is cast now!” he began. “This is not time for the narrative of (Hubert) Ogunde’s song… Yoruba has become a ball for the world, hitting right, left and centre”. Here, you would pity Tinubu. He was almost blabbering, with the words going off tangent.

While Awolowo and Akintola, as well as their supporters, engaged in a disruptive intra-party schism with its reverberations all over the country, virtually all institutions in the old Western Region took sides in the fight. Politicians and the media were factionalized along these fissures and art also got its share of the division. Ososa, Ijebu-Ode-born Ogunde, father of Nigerian theatre, a Nigerian folk opera pioneer who deployed drama in such a way that music and dancing played significant roles in this ensemble; a playwright, actor, theatre manager, and musician rolled into one, performed the famous play, ‘Yoruba Ronu’ – Yoruba, Think! – which Tinubu alluded to, in 1964. Incensed by the innuendos and satiric criticism of his government that were dominant motifs in the play, Akintola banned Ogunde’s theatre company.

This rash move by the Premier became the first post-independence Nigerian literary censorship undertaken by the government. The ban had to be lifted by the military in 1966, necessitating a sequel to the play Ogunde entitled, ‘Otito Koro’ – Truth is Bitter, also a satirization of the Western Region political events of 1963. As Ogunde sang in defence of Awolowo, Odolaye Aremu, Ilorin Dadakwada music exponent, sang panegyrics for Akintola and when the latter died, Odolaye did a grief-stricken elegy in his tribute and in the same vein, for Adelabu Adegoke, Awolowo’s political enemy, killed in a car crash in 1958.

That mis-rendition of Ogunde by Tinubu is a laughable farce. Rendered correctly, Ogunde sang, inter alia: “Mo wo ile aye o, aye sa malamala//Mo ma b’oju w’orun okunkun lo su bo’le//Mo ni eri eyi o, kini sele si Yoruba omo Alade? Kini sele si Yoruba omo Odua…Yoruba so’ra won di boolu f’araye gba//T’on ba gba won s’oke, won a tun gba’won s’isale o…” Translated, it means: “I look down upon the earth and it looks faded and jaded//I look up to the skies and see darkness descending//Oh! What a great pity!//What has become of the Yoruba?//What has befallen the children of Odua?//…The Yoruba have turned themselves into a football for the world to kick about//They are lobbed up into the sky and trapped down to the earth…”

His mis-rendering the song of no implication to him, Tinubu then thundered, “It is not about song! It is about right! It is time to snatch it. This power is not for the north alone. But for me standing at the front of the war and saying that Buhari should let us go on, Buhari would never have been president. He did the first, ‘o lu’le’; he did the second, ‘o lu’le’; he did the third, ‘o lu’le’. He even cried bitterly on the television and I went and met him and said, you will run again, this is not a matter of crying. I will stand by you and you will be president… and since he got there, I never asked him for minister, contract; I didn’t beg for soup, garri or fura nor did I borrow there but I said this time around, it is Yoruba’s turn and when we sieve out the Yoruba, it is me, it is my turn”.

As he waffled, Tinubu’s doggerel was hailed by his oraisas – cheerleaders – imported into the event.

It is on record that since 2015 when Buhari became president, this was the first time Tinubu would be fierce against the north. Before now, he helped to carry the region’s spittle can. The same Yoruba for whom he had just become its emergency advocate lost many of its children to the siege of Fulani herders in 2020, 2021 and mum was the word from Tinubu. Disasters struck Yorubaland aplenty within this period while their advocate was busy genuflecting before the cow so that he could eat from its hide. Now that the hide is about to be taken from him, he is rousing his herd for a fight.

When his Media Office, in its attempt to make their corpse walk, began to rewrite an event we watched with our korokoro eyes – apologies to that street lingo – by claiming that Tinubu had always reverenced Buhari and was not disparaging him in any way through the Olumo Rock vituperations, the office apparently assumed that cows and their dung make up our brains. Conduct a morphological dissection of Tinubu’s particular reference to Buhari while he addressed those delegates and you will see hatred, disdain and resentment lacing every of his spit.

First, ‘O lu’le’, the refrain which Tinubu relishingly appended to Buhari’s failure in his earlier bids for the presidency, isn’t equitable to ‘O subu’ or ‘ko yege,’ both of which are its synonyms. ‘O lu’le’ carries with it a sense of bile and gloat. Tinubu then carved out a pediatric minder’s role for himself after this ‘O lu’le’ fall of Buhari and he became the one to console the weeping child. In this equation, Buhari was the sulking, weeping egbere – a gnome – who he alone could console. In the same vein, his choice of fura as one of the significations of life-sustaining objects that he allegedly didn’t demand from Buhari was aimed at bringing the blow home, fura being Buhari’s native delicacy.

Tinubu’s rant at Governor Abiodun went beyond an attempt to play God. Its fitting synonym can, again, be found in the Yoruba traditional masquerade festival called Odun Egungun. It is a truism in traditional Africa that even if a child is decked in a masquerade costume, the moment this happens, that child transmutes his age into becoming an ancestor. At that stage, any impudent elder he flogs, he flogs without consequences, even if it was the costumier who wore the costume on him. Any attempt to hit back at the masquerade while he adorns the ago – masquerade costume – will boomerang and amounts to whipping your forefathers. This is not without consequences.

A constituted government is a masquerade invested with constitutional sacredness which must never be profaned by the arrogance of an entitled, title-seeking costumier. By denigrating Abiodun that impudently, Tinubu didn’t put down Abiodun in person but flogged his ancestors in office – Bisi Onabanjo, Segun Osoba, Ibikunle Amosun, Gbenga Daniel and the alale ile of Ogun state. Consequences must surely follow it. To underscore the fact that Tinubu knew the dangerous purport of what he did after his venomous spit hit its target, he standoffishly adjusted his fluffing agbada by its right and left flaps with a magisterial deliberacy that was full, yet silent of self-adulation.

Again, I remember the story of one of the greatest military generals in world antiquities, statesman and Carthaginian military tactician, Hannibal. He enfolded unto his military prowess a pedigree of war prosecution inherited from his father, Hamilcar Barca. Hamilcar was a leading Carthaginian general in the First Punic War. Hannibal’s brothers, Mago and Hasdrubal, commanders of the armies of Carthage, were also renowned for their historic prowess at the war front. As brilliant in the art of war as Hannibal was and the long chain of his familial mastery of the art of war, one day, Publius Africanus, also a Roman general and statesman, was notorious for having scripted and prosecuted the victory of Rome against Carthage in what came to be known as the Second Punic War, once asked Hannibal who the greatest general in the war was. Nonplussed, Hannibal had told him, “either Alexander or Pyrrhus”. The takeaway from that Hannibal’s response can be found in an aphorism of the Yoruba people which posits that greatness is only great when tucked in the scabbard. The moment it is unboweled and its nakedness bared for the world to see, greatness loses its prowess, and savour and becomes mere villainy.

No one can justify an apparent betrayal of Tinubu and the south that Buhari, like Judas Iscariot, is about to plunge into and the tribal calamity that all indications point to him foisting on Nigeria between Monday and Tuesday this week. Instead of lifting the shrouds from corpses of long-buried secrets as he did in Abeokuta and appending self-heroism on himself, Tinubu should have acted like Hannibal when General Africanus encountered him. Tinubu was a hero, the general of the war of Buhari’s presidential emergence, no doubt. However, the moment he self-appropriated and self-approximated it in Abeokuta, he became worse than a villain.

All said and done, Buhari should be reminded that nations that mushroomed into tinder and got consumed began their regress this harmlessly. This they did through the diffidence and the I-don’t-care attitudes of their rulers. The probability that Buhari will commit the hara-kiri of ensuring that the north takes over from the north and that he will be an accessory to the fact of a Fulani succeeding a Fulani, and indeed the architect of the Satanic ploy, in a country with about 250 ethnicities, is very rife. The die is indeed cast.

COURT RULES AGAINST PURPORTED SDP FACTION

The High court sitting in Ibadan has ruled against the extension of the interim injunction filed against the Michael Okunlade led SDP in Oyo State.

In the suit filed for interim injunction and objected to by the lawyer of SDP, Barr Michael Lana who was also an Attorney General in Oyo State; the interim injunction expired on the 25th of May and attempt to extend was objected and the Judge ruled in the favor of he objection.

Yinka Folahan continues in the spate of failures in attempt to be spanner in the wheels of progress of SDP in Oyo State. We know their master and we are not ignorant of their motives but the truth shall always prevail and we refuse to be distracted by their numerous shenanigans.

We know they are benefiting from the rotten systems in Nigeria to make financial gains but we shall not relent in standing tall against such agents of enemies of the Nigerian people. 

Signed. 

State Publicity Secretary (SPS). 

SDP Oyo State Chapter.