Are the gods angry with Ndigbo?


Enter the Oba of Lagos…


I signed off this column last week with a pledge to dedicate today's piece to x-raying the task before president-elect, Gen. Muhammadu Buhari. But it would seem the reverberations from penultimate week's presidential elections just won't go away in a hurry – what with the governorship and state assembly elections scheduled for this weekend and the Oba of Lagos, for instance, threatening fire and brimstone.

But before I get into all that, let me make one thing clear: Despite all the rabble about how the South-east has shot itself in the foot by blindly going with Jonathan and losing out, I am one of those who do not feel the zone made any mistake, let alone owe anybody any apologies for voting the way it did.

For me, this is the first time in my adult life that Ndigbo, who have never really been in charge at the centre, would not be in some alliance with the party at the centre. Even when they voted for Zik's NPP in the Second Republic, they still cobbled out an alliance with the NPN at the centre. For the last 16 years, they have hobnobbed with the PDP at the centre, even when there were times they went with either APGA or PPA in a few states.

In all these, the lot of the zone had essentially remained the same; neglected. So, now that they have, more by default, elected to be in the opposition, why wouldn't we let them be?

They say the Igbo have missed Senate presidency by not voting APC. Pray, where was this agreement reached before the election? Or is it just an after-thought?

Which of President, Vice President, Senate President, Deputy Senate President, Speaker or Deputy Speaker did the South- west hold in the last four years? Was the zone shut out of government? Is there any empirical proof to show that South-east, which had Deputy Senate President and Deputy Speaker benefitted more from the last four years of Jonathan than the South-west?

I buy the idea that it's not good to put all your eggs in one basket, but if your eggs are very few, would it not make sense to concentrate everything in one basket and make an impact, rather than spreading yourself too thin across several baskets.

The South-east contributed less than three million of Jonathan's over-12 million votes, why is it the Igbo votes that is suddenly of interest to everybody. The same bloc votes the South-east and South-south gave to Jonathan is what the North-west and North-east reproduced for Buhari, why is nobody worried about that? Or is it because Buhari has won? When he swept the core northern states in 2011 but failed to win the presidency, did anybody shut those states out of the centre?

Election is a gamble. The South-east lost its wager and has to live with it. But that does not make the zone brainless. Or that would mean that the over 12 million Nigerians, who voted for Jonathan are brainless and that only the about 15 million who went with Buhari have any brains. Well, that might be true, but it would also mean that over 40 per cent of Nigerians are senseless. Even if that were to be true, it would still be most apolitical for the other politically correct 5 per cent to dismiss these other foolish ones. That is the beginning of arrogance, a first step to political suicide. If you doubt me, ask PDP.

When did being in the opposition begin to translate to political foolishness? Has opposition not been the hallmark of South-west politics all these years? Did it mean that the South-west, even under Awolowo, UPN, etc. has been politically naive all these many years?

Yes, Jonathan was a popular choice with the South-east, but, as the days go bye and the election petition tribunals resume sitting, the reality of how the South-east really voted in the National Assembly election would unravel. For sure, it was not a PDP-all-the-way thing. But even if the results are upheld, it still does not demand that Ndigbo tender apology for not hopping on the APC train. That is definitely no reason for the gods (of politics) to be angry with Ndigbo – so angry that they now threaten to drown their kinsmen in Lagos.

Enter the Oba of Lagos…

One big tragedy of our country today is the depth of the gorges that have been carved into our body polity by money, religion and ethnicity. And from my standpoint, it seems nobody bears the brunt of this as much as columnists and public affairs commentators. Nothing they say or write is ever viewed from the point of the merit and demerit of the argument. It is either he/she is supporting his tribesman, fellow faithful of his faith or worse still, has been paid to push the view.

How do I mean? I followed everything my MD, Femi Adesina, had to say about Gen. Muhammadu Buhari in the build-up to the presidential election – and disagreed with quite a few of them. But I never for once thought he was not writing from the position of conviction. But ask a few other people, and you'd hear how he was defending the interest of his Yoruba people. That one accusation just had to stick because they could not accuse Femi, a deacon of the Four Square Church, of trying to Islamise Nigeria.

I suffered a similar fate. Some readers would call me up and instead of addressing the issue raised in any piece, would rather come from the fact that your name makes you a Christian (not knowing when last I went to any church) or an irredentist Igbo (without knowing jack about my background). They would say my ethnic and religious biases were the only reasons I felt that Jonathan was better than Buhari.

Of course, it is also for this same reason that so many readers have been calling me from the South-east, imploring me to use my column to call the Oba of Lagos to order over his threat to the Igbo in Lagos ahead of this weekend's governorship election in the state.

Well, I am sorry to disappoint you. I'm not qualified to call any Oba, let alone the Oba of Lagos, to order. That would amount to arrogating too much relevance to myself. Of course, my reluctance is not not just because I'm married to a wife whom the monarch can recall from my house whenever he so wishes, but that I have drunk enough Yoruba water to know that a king is the next thing to God. In fact, the term 'Igba keji oosa' literally translates to 'deputy God'. The Yoruba don't play ping-pong with their kings. Most of the kings in Yoruba land are not creations of recent autonomous-community contraptions. Their stools go back centuries. They're not always open to just every moneybag.


So, I beg to be excused from this errand to the king.


The best I can do is deliver, like a freeborn, this slave errand, which has been thrust upon me. And it goes like this…

For clearly selfish reasons, I have, at least, on two occasions, written in this column that while I was rooting for President Goodluck Jonathan in the presidential election, my vote in the Lagos governorship (if I had one) would go to Akinwunmi Ambode of the All Progressives Congress (APC). And I gave my reasons, which included that the last two administrations in the state had literally put its development on autopilot, and I did not want any PDP coming to rock the boat. I also said I was not comfortable with the characters around the party in Lagos. But then, I never failed to register the fact that I felt Jimi Agbaje comes across as more intelligent (and had a better delivery) than Ambode. I still feel Agbaje is a right man in a wrong party.

However, I am now reluctant to reinforce my support for the APC candidate, for no other reason than that people would misinterpret my position as having been informed by the threat issued at the weekend by the Olowo Eko, Oba Rilwan Akiolu, a man I have always admired for his frankness. He calls a spade by its name and carries himself with all the royal swag that goes with his throne. He refuses to be addressed as Kabiyesi, insisting that that title be reserved for God Almighty. He would make do with "Olowo Eko".

But I'm sad that His Highness has thrown his very heavy weight into the political fray. Now, we his subjects are reluctant to talk as we wish or throw our small weights in whatever direction that catches our fancy. I'd wished His Majesty would operate from behind the scene, having made the first high-profile endorsement of Ambode nearly a year ago.

Now, I can't imagine what would happen if, by any chance, Ambode fails to win. Mind you, I'm not worried about the lagoon bit. Let's even assume that, true to the monarch's threat (or is it curse?), all Igbo are drowned after voting Agbaje, that would still not nullify the mandate, and Oba Akiolu would still have to live with the prospect of a Gov. Agbaje. How then would they relate with each other?

Luckily, that's still in the realm of fecund imagination.

Thankfully too, all the vassal Igbo monarchs in Lagos, who received the insult direct from source, were thoroughly cowed and left the venue with their tails literally tucked between their hind legs, but not before apologising (on behalf of Igbo in Lagos?) that the 'mistake of March 28' (voting for Jonathan instead of Buhari) would never repeat itself again.

But both the threat and the apology that followed can only mean one thing: That it was only the Igbo who voted for PDP in Lagos penultimate week. Bode George, Ogunlewe, Obanikoro, Agbaje and all the other Yoruba leaders and members of Lagos PDP all voted for Buhari. It was only the Igbo (stubborn he-goats, all of them) who voted for PDP and Jonathan. That is why they need to be reined in before they cause a bigger collateral damage this weekend. Yet, we live in a democracy. We're preaching freedom of choice and change from the era of impunity. It reminds me of what Idi Amin was reported to have once said, when he was calling the shots in Uganda; that he could guarantee everybody freedom of speech, but that what he could not guarantee was freedom after speech.

So, dear Ndigbo Lagos, you are free to vote for any governorship candidate, as long as you're voting Ambode. And, in case you're still in the dark, the Lagos House of Assembly also has seats for APC butts only.

Now, if you were ever in doubt that the APC actually fears it might lose this weekend's governorship election in Lagos State, then look no further than the reactions that have followed the outcome of the presidential election in the state. Yes, the party carried the day, but it appeared it had to sweat for every vote.

So, it's either it was not only Igbo that voted PDP or there is a grand deceit about Lagos' demographics that has gone on for too long, or both.

But, beyond all the posturing, name-calling and search for scapegoats elsewhere, the APC might have to look inwards if it genuinely desires to check the leakage that nearly cost it the presidential election in Lagos. For the Yoruba have a saying that the pest which ultimately destroys the leaf often dwells inside the leaf.

I know a Lagos local government, for instance, where nearly all the members of the immediate past council government (only one of them is not Yoruba, by the way) campaigned for the PDP, in protest against their chairman and the imposition of unpopular candidates on them by the APC leadership. I also know another local government where both the local police chief, the leadership of the local wing of the Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC) and the leadership of the residents association (all Yoruba) swore to teach the APC a lesson. Again, their grouse was the way the party leadership condoned the excesses of the council chairman it imposed on them, and turned a deaf ear to all their pleas for fair/humane treatment.

Rather than pick on non-Yoruba like myself, many of whom, by the way, never got their PVCs, the APC leadership might need to use the next two or three days to do a soul searching and also reach out to genuine Yoruba (and even Eguns), who are genuinely pissed off with the carryings-on in the party. APC, ronu!

All the same, I don't think this royal gaffe should discourage Igbo, who want to vote Ambode from doing so.

As for me, any dispassionate person, who saw the foundation laid by Tinubu, and the structures Fashola has erected on that solid foundation, would definitely want to see the Lagos mega city project taken to the next level. That is what the Ambode candidacy is all about. I'm definitely on board with Ambode. And I don't think this last-minute slip from the throne should make us, out of anger and ego, take a wrong decision this Saturday.



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Re: Abia North Senatorial election


Last week, I got a call from someone who refused to introduce himself, but who went on the offensive as soon as I picked the call. He had read my take on "Presidential election: A postmortem" and had singled out the bit I said about Abia and the shenanigan that was going on over the result of the senatorial election there. His warped argument was that if I was commending President Jonathan for conceding defeat and accepting the result of the presidential election, why couldn't I ask my 'master' (read that to mean Dr. Orji Uzor Kalu, former governor of Abia State, who contested the said senatorial election on the platform of the PPA) to also accept the result from Abia North and congratulate the winner?

Which winner? Which result? I asked. But he would go on rambling about how Kalu was bent on keeping Abia in his pocket and on and on. I immediately knew where he was coming from. And because he had his mind made up, he never bothered to find out that the election result had not even been released nor a winner declared.

Till now, nearly two weeks after, that result has still not been released. Although a result written from Umuahia has been published, the INEC Returning Officer, Dr. Chigoziem Ihekweaba, whose responsibility it is to declare the result, has distanced himself from it. He said it was altered and did not reflect the actual result. In fact, he deposed to an affidavit to that effect.

Now, knowing Kalu, if he had lost that election fairly, he would be the first to congratulate the winner. For him, winning is not do-or-die, especially when Kalu was literally drafted into the race by the PPA and other supporters across party divide in the senatorial zone, who bought and submitted his form to INEC. He only went ahead because his name was already on the ballot and it was pointless pulling out.

Kalu would cease to be the political change agent he has turned out to be if he would simply sit back and watch an unpopular candidate write result and declare same as the authentic result of an election he participated in, without recourse to the actual vote tally. If the PDP did that all over the South-East, somebody had to stand up to the impunity, and Kalu has elected to do just that. to put a lie to the claim that the zone blindly voted for PDP across board.

He's not desperate to be in the senate, he just wants the right thing to be done. He does not like being dictated to because he does not dictate to those he has power over.

On several occasions, in the build-up to the last presidential election, Kalu would read me and call to mock me that I was non-aligned, unlike Femi (Adesina). I would insist that I would pick Jonathan over Buhari, but that this did not stop me from pointing out the failings of the Jonathan administration. We would drag the matter back and forth until he would give in and say, "well, it's your column, but read me (his Leadership Series) on Saturday". And we would leave it at that. I would later learn that he occasionally engaged other writers on The Sun stable in similar arguments.

He would seize every opportunity to remind us that, that he was in PDP meant we must ensure the APC was not shut out of the paper. The only way I reconfirmed that we were successfully navigating that course of editorial balance was when my friends in the PDP called to protest we had ceded the paper to APC.

And because the average Nigerian politician would always seek a religious or ethnic answer to every nagging question, they put the blame on Femi Adesina. He was Yoruba, defending Yoruba interest. To them, it was even more painful that Femi was using a platform set up by an Igbo man to pursue this ethnic agenda.

It was, however, when they tried to sell this tale to Kalu that they discovered he was an Igbo with a difference.

If Kalu could go out of his way to ensure we fairly represented, and projected the APC in The Sun, despite his being in the PDP, he would be the first person to concede defeat in Abia North if the course of democracy and fair play has been served. But nobody should expect the fighter in Kalu to be blackmailed into giving up a mandate that has been freely given to him by his people, simply because the PDP has cooked up some figures.



Source http://odili.net/news/source/2015/apr/8/511.html

There is method in our madness

Will come back to read this as it is so lengthy. May I ask if it was written in a drama form as the few lines I read suggested some drama cast talking to his/her audience.