President Tinubu exposes Nigeria’s big thieves

Tunde Odesola

(Published in The PUNCH, on Friday, July 28, 2024)

Have you ever been to Italy? Whether real or virtual, a visit to Italy will hypnotise you. Italy is the canvas painted by the gods of art, architecture, culture, literature, opera, fashion, food and history, spreading through the Pope-led Vatican City, whose independent government inside another city, Rome, is called the Holy See, (The god’s canvas stretches) stretching to Venice, Florence, Milan, Bologna, Siena, Verona etc, in a cuddle of concrete and sexiness. Welcome to Italy!

I stiffen when politicians talk but listen when a Pope talks. Pope John XXIII, an Italian, upon retrospection about life, waxes philosophically: “Italians come to ruin most generally in three ways, women, gambling, and farming. My family chose the slowest one.”

For me, one man’s meat is another man’s poison. Pope John XXIII’s family is luckier. The economic strangulation sweeping across Nigeria has mostly zipped up men’s trousers against womanising and generally dried up pockets against gambling while bandits have chased farmers out of farmlands nationwide. Methinks Nigerians have come to ruin mainly in three ways: leadership, corruption and passivity.

Another Italian, Professor Carlo Cipolla, an economic historian, expanded the meaning and scope of idiocy in his theoretical book, “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity,” published in 1976, in which he identified five fundamental laws of stupidity. In general, Cipolla argues that stupid people suffer from arrogance, self-delusion, persistent ignorance, absent-mindedness and more.

His first law of stupidity is that everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation. Cipolla’s second law of stupidity says the probability that a certain person will be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person – that is, he may be a professor, doctor, judge or inventor while the third states that a stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself derives no gain and even possibly incurs losses.

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In his fourth law, Cipolla says non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals, adding that, in particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places, and under any circumstances, to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake. He concludes in his fifth law that a stupid person is the most dangerous type of person, worse than a pillager.

The way many Nigerians argue when issues boil down to morality, decency, honour and corruption will make Cipolla coil in his earthen bed dug for him since 2000 at the age of 78. The way the majority of Nigerians stupidly opaque transparent issues made me seek more understanding of stupidity and Cipolla came to my rescue.

A serial thief was jailed in the US for consecutive internet frauds and deported twice. The hustler ran back to the illustrious Iwo community of Osun, and emerged king, using religion and slavish philanthropy as opium, yet a lot of people are hailing him. Hailing a daylight ólè dancing ijó ìyà in the palace with a stolen lamb. Commenting in a WhatsApp group, some members of the stupidity gang even said the Yahoo-Yahoo crimes of the king were unknown to Nigerian laws. Another member declared the ruler whiter than snow. I’ll not talk.

Mahatma Gandhi’s wisdom oversteps the borders of introduction. The sage once said, “There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supersedes all other courts.”

Ogden Nash was an American poet popular for his unconventional rhyming schemes. Nashville, the capital of Tennessee, was named after his father’s brother, Francis, a Revolutionary War general. “There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball, and that is to have either a clear conscience or none at all,” Nash said. Having no conscience at all is the lot of the stupidity gang twisting the truth out of Nigeria’s realities.

President Bola Tinubu is not a prisoner of conscience, he’s a pricker of conscience. Tinubu pricked the conscience of Nigeria’s civil servants a few days ago when he rightly called for the heads of public workers still receiving salaries despite relocating abroad. THE NATION newspaper quoted the President as saying, “We must ensure those responsible are held accountable and restitution is made. The culprits must refund the money they fraudulently collected, and their supervisors and department heads must also face consequences for their complicity.” I offer a clap offering to the President for his clear conscience.

Eri Okan is a 1983 song by King Sunny Ade, the ageless Juju music superstar. It’s my top pick among all KSA’s songs. Eri Okan means conscience. In the forever green song, KSA describes Eri Okan as the unseen witness who watches the doer of good and evil, pricking the doer accordingly. He prays for his conscience to vindicate him.

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In his 1975 song, “Iduro S’oro,” KSA talks about the beauty of question and answer, explaining that both are mutually inclusive. Adegeye, however, cautions that anyone bent on receiving an answer to a question should also be ready to receive a hiding just as he warned the evil-doing adáni lóró of recompense.

I don’t want to receive answers to my article from the army of stupidity who always pounce to defend the ignoble in palaces, parliaments, presidency and everywhere. I don’t want war; I want peace! The stupidity gang, which comprises many civil servants, whom the government told it can’t afford N70,000 minimum wage, sees nothing wrong in the FG building a house of N21bn for Vice President Kashim Shettima, leaving the mind to wonder if Vice President Yemi Osinbajo lived on a tree.

With his alacrity in unmasking economic saboteurs, President Tinubu should kúkú double up as the Minister of Police Affairs, Inspector General of Police, EFCC Chairman and Generalissimo, Operation Amotekun.

June was the month the Alaafin Molete, Alhaji Lamidi Adedibu, died 16 years ago. Kwara-born Odolaiye Aremu was a popular and peaceful-looking songster but his Dadakuade music was a stormy petrel. In his renowned panegyric on Adedibu, Odolaiye captures the essence of Nigeria’s political class. Exploring poetic licence, Odolaiye describes Adedibu as an unyielding and unbending hard nail. Odolaiye says Adedibu storms the heart of Ibadan and returns home with plenty of chickens, adding that Adedibu didn’t buy the chickens in his possession, neither did he steal them nor were they given to him by the owner; the chickens were only unfortunate!

Exasperated by the callousness of the political class, foremost Nigerian columnist, Tunde Fagbenle, in an article, “A sickening country of conscienceless people,” published eight years ago, berated the lifetime salaries and emoluments ex-presidents, ex-governors and ex-deputy governors receive. Fagbenle said only a bloody revolution could reset the country’s feet on the path of redemption.

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A back-pat should be given Labour Party presidential candidate in the 2023 election, Peter Obi, who refused the lifetime payment despite being an ex-governor. The same commendation goes to former Governor of Ogun State, Gbenga Daniel, who in 2023, wrote to the Ogun State Government to stop the payment of his retirement benefits, saying receiving such would amount to double emoluments – going by the fact that he is now in the Senate. Daniel said since he left office as governor in 2011, he has not received any welfare package from the state. Many former governors and their deputies are currently in the National Assembly, receiving salaries for their old and new jobs, feeding from two cauldrons in the hamlet of the proverbial Àlàdé.

I didn’t forget that each of these spongy leaders had their state governments build for them in the locations of their choices within the country a palace. They also get brand new cars of their choice as and when due.

Today, there’s no more space for holes in the common man’s belt, he’s now thinner than a rake, his life is popping out of his mouth like a dog hit by a truck. He’s stressed, frightened and threatened. Yet the revolution called for by Fagbenle won’t happen because the stupidity gang will make itself available to be used by government though their members suffer, too.

The President is busy looking for money to alleviate the economy, the economy of the Villa. The President needs a new jet. New president, new jet. Minister of Finance, Wale Edun, said the Tinubu administration has its gaze on the N20trn available within ‘the pensions, life insurance and investment fund industry’ (his words) to borrow money for infrastructural development. The presidential jet is a critical infrastructure, of course.

There’s no money! There’s no money! There’s no money to pay Labour a living wage. The only money available is to subsidise Hajj for N90bn, buy a presidential yacht, take care of the elected and prepare for re-election. Where’s the prodigal son?

President Tinubu exposes Nigeria’s big thieves
Email: tundeodes2003@yahoo.com
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Tinubu’s June 12 fall: Humour, karma, compassion, By Farooq Kperogi

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s harmless trip-and-fall mishap at the Eagle Square in Abuja during this year’s June 12 Democracy Day celebration simultaneously got camps of people who exulted in emotional triumph, who laughed in self-satisfaction, who lamented the state of the president’s health, and who sulked at people who exulted, laughed, or called attention to the president’s health.

Although the president is obviously ravaged by the infirmities of old age and possibly ill health, his fall obviously wasn’t triggered by any of these. It appears to be caused by a mere missed step or a trip over his flowing agbada. Fortunately, his fall was benign. I hope his minders learn from this and let him dress more appropriately next time.

But even if his fall was prompted by ill health, it is presumptuous to make any connection between the prospects of his longevity and the state of his health. Some of the most fragile people on earth can turn out to be longest-living people.

Take, for example, former Kaduna State governor Ahmed Mohammed Makarfi, who was so infirm and so sickly during his governorship that most people thought he wouldn’t survive his first term.

He not only survived his first term, but he also won a second term, and has outlived many of the people who said he was a walking corpse. His deputy, Stephen Shekari, who looked visibly healthy, unfortunately died in 2005 during their second term.

Our compassion or ill will do absolutely nothing to shorten or lengthen people’s lifespans. And there is neither reward nor punishment for our attitude toward people’s ill fortune or good fortune in spite of what superstitious people would want you to believe.

Nature and its vagaries are inexorable. They are insensitive to and unswayed by human emotions. Coincidences, happenstances, serendipities, flukes, etc. aren’t laws of nature. They are freaks of nature.

But while it is valid to fulminate against the celebratory tone that some people took over the president’s physical misfortune, it is helpful to situate its context and understand its utility.

Vast swathes of Nigerians are being roasted alive, like never before, by the heartless, self-centered, and anti-people “economic reforms” of the president. In its June 11 report on Nigeria, even the New York Times characterized the economic crisis Nigeria is going through now as its “worst crisis in a generation.” That’s a significant admission from one of the institutional mouthpieces of the West.

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Yet Tinubu and his minions insist that they won’t change course, that Nigerians must learn to live with superhuman pain for a supposed deferred gain that I am certain will never come. Plus, it’s a pain that the people inflicting it and explaining it away are totally exempt from.

Predictably, there is so much bottled, combustible rage welled up in the minds of people who are struggling to stay alive, who are almost giving up on living. Two viral videos give expression to the untamable fury that most people feel toward Tinubu, the immediate source of the mass anguish in the land.

One is a protest video of intensely enraged women in what appears to be Lagos some weeks back. Some of the women in the video said in Yoruba—and with stone-cold, deathly seriousness—that they wished they had a chance to physically meet Tinubu so that they would pummel him mercilessly for the unendurable hurt that his policies are visiting on them.

The second video, which trended a few days ago in Hausaphone social media circles, shows teenage boys in a northern Nigerian city (possibly Kano) stoning a poster of Tinubu affixed to a wall while “Labbayka Allahumma labbayk (translated in English as, “Here I am, O Allah, here I am”), a prayer invoked by pilgrims in Makkah while stoning the devil, plays in the background.

People whose staggering misery has led them to desire a physical confrontation with the president and who stone him in a symbolic eruption of rage as the representative of Satan in Nigeria would find tremendous emotional release in his fall and physical hurt. To deny them this harmless, no-cost joy is to hurt them doubly.

In psychology and literature, we talk of something called catharsis, which refers to the process of releasing and thereby providing relief from strong or repressed emotions. Catharsis serves as a crucial psychological alternative to violence by offering safe and constructive ways to process and release emotions. It is said to foster emotional well-being and reduce the risk of aggressive behavior.

In other words, for millions of Nigerians who have been pushed to the very precipice of existence as a direct consequence of Tinubu’s pigheaded implementation of IMF’s people-annihilating “economic reforms,” his fall on June 12 was cathartic, that is, emotionally satisfying.

Don’t deny them the mentally purging sensation they derive from this by guilt-tripping them as being hardhearted, especially because Tinubu wasn’t hurt.

Senator Shehu Sani has told Nigerians that Tinubu is the patron-saint and chief financier of protests in Nigeria. Now that he is president and causing the exact conditions that inspired past protests that he funded, there is no one to protest. Cathartic satisfaction from his karmic physical fall is all that severely grieving people have now.

Additionally, humor is the oxygen of democracy. As my friend Professor Moses Ochonu also pointed out in his Facebook status update a few days ago on Tinubu’s fall, comedians in the United States feast on the literal and metaphoric missteps of leaders, especially presidents, and citizens lap it up.

“In the US, where I live, late night hosts and comedians have jobs partly because the foibles, quirks, gaffes, and public physical failings and awkwardness of the president and other leaders are fair game for jokes and laughter,” he wrote.

Power confers an appearance of superhumanness, of invincibility, and of perfection on people who wield it. An occasional fall from this illusion of transcendence from familiar human weaknesses is often great grist for the humor mills.

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President Gerald Ford is perhaps the most famous U.S. president for his falls. He slipped and fell multiple times during his presidency, including a notable fall while disembarking from Air Force One in 1975.

In 2003, President George W. Bush fell off a Segway. He also experienced a minor fall while running in 2004, which caused a scratch on his face.

Most people know that President Joe Biden has had a few notable falls, including tripping multiple times while boarding Air Force One in 2021 and falling off his bike during a ride in 2022.

The UK has also had its fair share of prime ministers who fell. For example, “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher had a fall in 1988 while walking at her official residence, 10 Downing Street.

In 2009, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown slipped and fell at the Cenotaph during a Remembrance Day ceremony. Another British Prime Minister, John Major, fell and injured his knee in 1995 while jogging.

And Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison famously fell during a football game in 2019.

In all these cases, citizens laughed at the expense of their leaders. People weren’t guilt-tripped for laughing. No leader is entitled to any citizen’s unearned sympathy.

Thankfully, Tinubu appears to recognize this. He joked that he didn’t fall but merely observed the Yoruba tradition of dobale, that is, the physical gesture of prostration or kneeling as a show of respect to elders and people in positions of authority. It was good-natured, self-deprecating humor.

It reminds me of a popular humorous quote in America when people fall: “I did not trip and fall. I attacked the floor and I believe I am winning.”

Unfortunately, some people who have no capacity to appreciate the nuances of humor, irony, sarcasm, and satire missed it and thought Tinubu told a barefaced, face-saving lie in the aftermath of his embarrassing fall! That’s such clueless humorlessness.

Tinubu’s June 12 fall: Humour, karma, compassion, By Farooq Kperogi

Farooq Kperogi is a renowned Nigerian newspaper columnist and United States-based professor of journalism. 

“New” national anthem is national self-debasement – Farooq Kperogi

Nothing in my adult life has made me more ashamed to be a Nigerian and more inclined to completely divest my emotions from Nigeria than the readoption of “Nigeria, We Hail Thee,” a colonially created national anthem whose first stanza drips wet with the spit of racist condescension, gender exclusion, and stodgy, ungainly archaisms.

First, it’s inexcusable national self-humiliation to discard a home-made national anthem, irrespective of its defects, for one that was made by an imperialist whose influence we’re supposed to be independent of. That instantiates a phenomenon that social anthropologists call cultural cringe.

First propounded by an Australian scholar by the name of Arthur Phillips in the 1950s to describe Australia’s complicated cultural relations with Britain and the US, cultural cringe is the deep-rooted inferiority complex that causes psychologically damaged, formerly colonized people to inferiorize and disdain their own country and its culture and to uncritically valorize cultures and countries that their low self-esteem persuades them to believe is superior to theirs.

In previous columns, I have called this Nigeria’s national xenophilia, which I have defined as our predilection for irrational, unjustified, inferiority-driven veneration of the foreign and the corresponding sense of low national self-worth that this veneration activates.

A country whose symbolic song of independence is inspired, written, and composed by the appendicular remnants of imperialist oppressors of whom the country has supposedly been independent for more than six decades isn’t worthy of its independence. Such a country has lost the moral and philosophical argument for independence and against recolonization.

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That is why, as I’ve argued in the past, our leaders are routinely infantilized by the West. As a people and a culture, we have internalized a mentality of low self-worth and an unwarranted veneration of the foreign, especially if the “foreign” also happens to be white. Nothing has demonstrated this more than the readoption of a national anthem that was written and composed by colonial British women.

But my worry transcends this. I am mortified that the very first stanza of our national anthem derogates our humanity. I have written multiple articles on what I have called the vocabularies of racial differentiation and exclusion in which I have repeatedly pointed out that “tribe” and “native” are racist words that white people reserve only for people they consider inferior, and that their appearance in Nigeria’s first national anthem was one of the reasons for the anthem’s rejection in 1978.

I’ll repeat some of the things I’ve written over the last few years on this issue and hope that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu sees reason to rescind the readoption of this denigrating British anthem written for Nigeria.

Shorn of all pretenses, “tribe” basically means backward, primitive nonwhite people. Let no one deceive you that the word means anything other than that in the English language. Even the Oxford Dictionary of English recognizes this fact. Its usage note on “tribe” reads:

“In historical contexts the word tribe is broadly accepted (the area was inhabited by Slavic tribes), but in contemporary contexts it is problematic when used to refer to a community living within a traditional society. It is strongly associated with past attitudes of white colonialists towards so-called primitive or uncivilized peoples living in remote underdeveloped places. For this reason it is generally preferable to use alternative terms such as community or people” (p. 1897).

I personally prefer “ethnic group” as an alternative to “tribe.” But I am aware that “tribe” has been congealed in our lexical repertory and can even be said to have been resemanticized by Africans, that is, given a meaning that is different from its original one.

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For most English-speaking Africans, “tribe” is simply the English lexical equivalent of the words in their languages that they deploy to denote peoplehood. That may be so, but I come to language from a communication standpoint. To effectively communicate, you have to speak the same codes and share the same meanings.

Native English speakers would never call themselves “tribes” and understand the word to mean a group of primitive, nonwhite people who are still stuck at the lower end of the civilizational hierarchy.

You may understand the word differently, but if you tell a native speaker you belong to a tribe, you are inadvertently authorizing your inferiorization. That’s why when anybody asks me, “What is your tribe?” I always say, “You mean my ethnic group? I don’t belong to a tribe.” That was, by the way, Chinua Achebe’s attitude, too. He hated the word “tribe.”

That was also why when former US President Bill Clinton visited Nigeria and other African countries in 1998, experts told him to steer clear of the word “tribe” and its inflections such as “tribal,” “tribalism,” “tribalistic,” etc.

An influential American newspaper called Politico contrasted Clinton’s studied avoidance of the word “tribe” and Obama’s liberal use of it. “Keep in mind that the word ‘tribal conflict’ is extremely insulting to Africans,” the paper quoted a scholar by the name of Marina Ottaway of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to have told American reporters who would cover the presidential visit. “Don’t write about ‘century-old tribal conflicts in African countries’… Yet, when Obama uttered the phrase ‘tribal conflicts’ at a press conference Friday as he discussed his planned trip to Africa, it went virtually unremarked upon. So too did several references he made in his Ghana speech to battles among ‘tribes.’” “Another president,” the paper concluded, “might have been accused of racism…”

Well, I criticized Obama for this in a Jul 18, 2009, column titled, “The Anti-African Racist Insults Obama Got Away with in Ghana,” which attracted the attention of the White House at the time.

A column I wrote earlier on February 27, 2009, titled “What’s my tribe? None” got the attention of CNN International’s copy desk. After a back and forth with its Chief Copy editor, the organization banned the use of the word “tribe” from its style guide. It came from their admission that no white ethnic group would ever be called a “tribe.”

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In my September 30, 2018, column titled, “‘Tribe’ and ‘Detribalized’ are Derogatory Words,” I wrote: “Sadly, in 2018, our elites not only still call us ‘tribes’; they defend doing so. Lillian Jean Williams, the British colonial who wrote the anthem, would be proud.” I had no inkling that Tinubu would take this embarrassing sociolinguistic suicide to the next level.

“Native” is another linguistic marker of racial inferiorization that has no business being on Nigeria’s national anthem. The word was originally used by white colonialists and later by Western anthropologists to refer specifically to nonwhite people. The New Oxford American Dictionary (3rd edition) captures this subtlety well. One of the definitions of “native,” which the dictionary says is “dated, often offensive,” is “one of the original inhabitants of a country, especially a nonwhite as regarded by European colonists or travelers.”

Lillian Jean Williams was a British colonialist who thought herself superior to the “natives” and reflected that in the first stanza of the anthem she composed for us.

Notice, though, that in American (and Canadian) English “native” is used widely in a non-racially discriminatory way. When people call a city their hometown they often say they’re natives of the city, as in “I am an Atlanta native.” I am not sure how widespread this usage of “native” is in British English, but it appears only 148 times in the British National Corpus.

The New Oxford American Dictionary’s usage advice on “native” is instructive. It says, “In contexts such as native of Boston or New York in the summer was too hot even for the natives, the noun native is quite acceptable. But when it is used to mean ‘a nonwhite original inhabitant of a country,’ as in this dance is a favorite with the natives, it is more problematic. This meaning has an old-fashioned feel and, because of its association with a colonial European outlook, it may cause offense.”

There is exactly zero reason to revert to “Nigeria, We Hail Thee.” Its readoption symbolizes the starkest evidence of national defeat, national self-humiliation, and national inferiority complex that I have ever seen. If Tinubu doesn’t reverse himself on readopting this national disgrace, the next government should. This is simply unbearably embarrassing!

“New” national anthem is national self-debasement – Farooq Kperogi

Farooq Kperogi is a renowned Nigerian newspaper columnist and United States-based Professor of journalism.