Discussing MKO, Bisi Akande, Osimhen and Portable

Tunde Odesola

(Published in The PUNCH, on Friday, June 21, 2024)

The moin-moin thinks it is wise. It hides part of itself within the folds of éwé eeran, the green-turned-bronzy leaves encasing it. Hungry Man unfurls the leafy wraps, using his fingers or spoon as a rake, scraping out the moin-moin clinging behind the leaves: ibi pelebe la ti ń mú òlè je, the Yoruba say.

Moin-moin eating starts peripherally, not centrally. The etiquette for consuming moin-moin and agidi is written in native intelligence. If you finger, spoon, knife or fork móín-móín and èko headlong, you lose premium on quantity. Moin-moin eating is like an orchestra performance – building suspense in ibi pelebe, anticipatory nibbling of the sides of the moin-moin, preparatory to climaxing devouring.

This article is a potpourri. It’s a dish by a cook beset with overflowing ingredients of ‘assorted’ innards – shaki, abodi, bokoto, roundabout – and cow head, stockfish, snails, crabs, prawns etc.

Too many ingredients spoil the broth. Nonetheless, I lay out a five-course dish comprising an appetiser, soup, entree, dessert and snacks called ipapanu in Yoruba. The dishes are Nigerian.
At the table are the winner of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, Chief MKO Abiola; a former Governor of Osun State, Chief Bisi Akande; Nigerian footballer, Victor Osimhen, and waspish hip-hop musician, Habeeb Okikiola, aka Portable. Enjoy!

Appetiser
In the olden days when shame lived in the dark, a moral question combed the conscience, “Where would he blow it, the thief who stole the kàkàakí of the king?” This moral suasion belonged in Nigeria’s golden past. Nowadays, shame luxuriates in the sun, emboldening some faceless workers of iniquity to unchain the Sallah ram of a Chief Imam in the Bassa Local Government Area of Jos, Plateau, during a downpour, and disappear with it.

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THE PUNCH reports that Imam Abdulkadir lost his ram on Sallah eve. What was the motive behind the ram heist: religious obligation, greed or the ravaging hunger in the land? I don’t know. But I do know that as the chief imam and his relatives ruminate on Sallah, they would wish they knew whose gullets their ram passed through.

Kalakuta Republic was the Ikeja, Lagos home where the Abami Eda, Fela Anikulapo, lived. It’s now a museum. Watching a documentary a few days ago, I saw an inscription on the wall of the museum which says, “No smoking of Indian hemp, here.” Uhmm! Really? Father of tragedy, Aeschylus, a Greek, said, “Time brings all things to pass,” his fellow countryman, Pericles, concludes, “Time is the wisest counsellor of all.” I hear Fela’s voice from the grave, “Confusion break bone, yeepaa! Double wahala for deadi body and the owner of deadi body.” Fela loved his marijuana.

The soup
In a seminal article, “Tinubu’s ‘taste’ gerontocracy,” published on Monday, June 17, 2024, in Nigerian Tribune, Lasisi Olagunju lampooned the appointment of a former interim National Chairman, All Progressives Congress, Chief Bisi Akande, by President Bola Tinubu as Pro-Chancellor and Chairman, Governing Council, University of Ibadan, at the age of 85. Olagunju had no soothing words for former-this-former-that octogenarian soldier, General Ike Nwachukwu, whom Tinubu also appointed Pro-Chancellor and Chairman, Governor Council, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and a former Secretary to the Government of the Federation, 72-year-old Yayale Ahmed, whom Tinubu made Pro-Chancellor and Chairman, Governing Council, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.

Is Akande qualified for the UI top job? In 2009, Osun indigene and Peoples Democratic Party bigwig, Chief Abiola Morakinyo, was stopped as Pro-Chancellor and Chairman, Governing Council, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, after protesters hoisted in the face of President Musa Yar’Adua, the Universities (Miscellaneous Provisions) Amendment Act 2003, which says that anyone to be appointed Pro-Chancellor and Chairman, Governing Council of a national university must be a university graduate. Because Morakinyo wasn’t, he was removed.

According to his personal website, bisiakande. com, the highest certificate the Ila-born politician attained in Nigeria was a Grade III Teacher Certificate at the Divisional Teachers’ Training College, Ile-Ife, before proceeding abroad, where he did correspondence courses at Wosley Hall, Rapid Results College, and the School of Accountancy, both in England but both were not universities.

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Vanguard columnist, Owei Lakemfa, titled his 2009 article, which condemned the appointment of Morakinyo, “To be led by the blind.” I am from Osun, the Omoluabi state; I cannot call Baba Akande blind. But I can call him a retired accountant and in-luck pro-chancellor, unlike Baba Morakinyo, a retired accountant and out-of-luck pro-chancellor. Nigerians, if you like, jump into the lagoon in protest, does the APC care? Have you forgotten too quickly the 2020 Night of Long Knives at the Lekki tollgate?

A joke explains why it’s incumbent for pro-chancellors and chairmen, governing councils of Nigerian universities, to have university education: “So that when a member of council lays a report before the Senate, the ‘un-university’ pro-chancellor and chairman of council would not ask, ‘Where is the report for the House of Reps!’

Entrée
A few days ago, one of the children of the late MKO Abiola, Abdulmumuni, lit a fire on June 12 mountain when he granted a podcast interview to Seun Okinbaloye, accusing his elder brother, Kola, of having an affair with the daughter of his father’s jailor, General Ibrahim Babangida, the architect who designed the failure of the Nigerian nation.

Being family friends, there’s a possibility that Kola and Babangida’s daughter might have been dating before June 12, 1993. There’s also a possibility that the tricky Babangida, being a dribbler noted for booting penalties into throw-ins, might have repeatedly assured Kola that he was going to free MKO and make him President. Mumuni didn’t give Nigerians an idea of the particular period of the June 12 struggle Kola was knowing the daughter of the bloodiest Nigerian General. Neither did he reveal if Kola stopped at any point of the struggle. Is it the blindness of love or the madness of lust that sustained the frolic? So, when Nigerians were being shot, maimed and incarcerated by soldiers during the protest, Kola was sweating with Babangida’s daughter inside Aso Rock?

Though it was insinuated MKO died after drinking a cup of tea in incarceration, I still prefer the quote of English musician, Boy George, who says, “I would rather have a cup of tea than sex,” to the opinion of American actress, Angelina Jolie, who says, “I need more sex, OK? Before I die I wanna taste everyone in the world.” Between George and Jolie, who would Kola vote for?

Abdulmumuni also said Kola was unfit to be Nigeria’s President, adding that his elder brother couldn’t manage MKO’s empire. The younger Abiola didn’t shout obscenities, he spoke like he was discussing football’s Greatest of All Time, Lionel Messi, with Okinbaloye.

Dessert
Eccentric musician Portable recently blew his lid in a viral video in which he insinuated that Davido misadvised him. Hitherto, Portable had sung the praise of Davido to high heaven for taking him out in Atlanta, Georgia, and buying things for him. In a sharp twist afterwards, however, Portable came out with a video, poking innuendos at Davido. The Omo Baba Olowo didn’t take issues with Portable, he only unfollowed him.

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Like Portable, Napoli striker and Nigerian international, Victor Osimhen, threw caution to the wind in a viral video, spoiling for war against former Super Eagles coach, Finidi George. Osimhen alleged that Finidi wrongly accused him of faking an injury just to avoid playing for the Super Eagles.

Instead of Osimhen foaming in the mouth with rage, like Portable, an articulate podcast would have presented him an opportunity to air his side of the story, but he ended up racking up sympathy for Finidi and a backlash for himself. Osimhen failed to realise that he’s a global icon, not a ghetto tout, he allowed the ‘We All Die Here’ mentality to get the better of him, and he fell into dishonour. I’m glad Osinhem speaks Yoruba fluently; he should know the meaning of the proverb, “Ejo la n ko, ki a to k’oja,” meaning you learn how to articulate your case before you learn how to fight. He should redeem his image by making a public apology to us, his fans. I won’t call for a ban on him, but Osimhen knows the Super Eagles have been winning matches without his goals.

Going by his coaching experience and achievements, I had thought the Nigeria Football Federation would appoint Emmanuel Amuneke ahead of Finidi. But this is Nigeria. By the appointment, I feel the NFF deliberately set Finidi up for failure so they can appoint a cash cow foreign coach. The NFF knew ab initio that Finidi lacked the experience to handle the Super Eagles.

Snacks
Where’s the ex-Governor of Kogi State, Yahaya Bello? It’s a shame the EFCC, DSS and police have kept quiet on his case. This is also an indictment on the Presidency – an alleged treasury looter appears to have been warned by the APC government and told to go and enjoy his money in silence. Nigerians deserve an update on Yahaya Bello.

Nigeria, we hail thee! Internet fraudster, Ramon Olurunwa Abass, aka Hushpuuppi, is serving an 11-year jail term in the US, but his accomplice, Abba Kyari, a criminal Nigerian police officer indicted by the US and Nigeria, was granted bail to go and bury his parent. When Hushpuppi is freed, Kyari’s trial for drugs will still be ongoing. Why are we so cursed?

Email: tundeodes2003@yahoo.com

Facebook: @Tunde Odesola

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Discussing MKO, Bisi Akande, Osimhen and Portable

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. 

Sanusi Lamido and Kano’s royal ding-dong – Farooq Kperogi

Kano’s Muhammad Sanusi II has been rethroned the exact way he was initially enthroned and dethroned: in the melting pot of the politics of vengeance and recrimination.

And he just might be dethroned yet again by this, or another subsequent partisan government, given Sanusi’s infamous incapacity to rein in his tongue and to understand the wisdom in restraint and tact, which his position requires of him—and, of course, the juddering, hypocritical contradictions between what he says and what he does.

Recall that when he worked at the UBA, Sanusi had derided then Governor Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso as a scorn-worthy “rural aristocrat” who “surrounds himself with provincials and places key posts in the hands of rural elite.” He characterized the Kwankwaso administration as “the classic comedy of the Village Headmaster in a village council.”

Kwankwaso was so incensed by Sanusi’s boorishness and Kano urban condescension that he threatened to pull out the Kano State Government’s money in UBA if Sanusi wasn’t fired from his job. Yet it was the same Kwankwaso who, for partisan, anti-Goodluck Jonathan political considerations, enthroned Sanusi as the emir of Kano even when he wasn’t the choice of the kingmakers.

And let’s not forget that Sanusi is a vicious, unashamed enemy of common people. His entire economic philosophy revolves around sheepishly advancing the annihilating policies of the IMF/World Bank, such as removal of every kind of subsidy for the poor while leaving intact the subsidies that sustain the sybaritic extravagance of indolent but overprotected elites like him.

Well, after destroying properties worth billions of naira and restoring Sanusi as emir all in the bid to get even with Ganduje, I hope the government will now get down to actually governing and improving the lives of the people who elected it.

The sense I get from people in Kano (many of whom are supporters of the government) is that governance has been on hold in Kano in the last one year in the service of retaliation.

There is also no doubt that Sanusi’s unrelenting public censures of the rotten, if time-honored, cultural quiddities of the Muslim North discomfited many people who are invested in the status quo, and this became one of the convenient bases for his ouster.

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But Sanusi isn’t nearly the victim he has been cracked up to be by his admirers and defenders. First, he rode to the Kano emirship in 2014 on the crest of a wave of emotions stirred by partisan politics and came down from it the same way.

Even though he wasn’t initially on the shortlist of Kano’s kingmakers, APC’s Governor Rabiu Kwankwaso (who is now in PDP) made Sanusi emir in 2014 to spite PDP’s President Goodluck Jonathan and shield Sanusi from the consequences of his [false] unmasking of multi-billion-dollar corruption at the NNPC. Apart from his unceremonious removal as CBN governor for his [false] whistle blowing, he was going to face other untoward retributions from the Jonathan administration, but his appointment as emir put paid to it.

Now, Sanusi lost his emirship to the same partisan politics that got it for him in the first place. In an ironic twist, he was made emir by an APC government for making privileged [if false] revelations that disadvantaged a PDP government and was removed as an emir by an APC government for his overt and covert acts that could have benefited the PDP in 2019.

In other words, Sanusi’s emirship was molded in the crucible of partisan politics and was dissolved in it.

Nonetheless, Sanusi, given his intellectual sophistication and pretenses to being an advocate of egalitarianism, had no business being an emir. Monarchy is way past its sell-by date not just in Nigeria but everywhere. It’s an anachronistic, vestigial remnant of a primitive past that invests authority on people by mere accident of heredity. Any authority that is inherited and not earned, in my opinion, is beneath contempt.

Emirship isn’t only a primeval anomaly in a modern world, it is, in fact, un-Islamic. In Islam, leadership is derived from knowledge and the consensus of consultative assemblies of communities called the Shura, not from heredity.

Monarchies in the Muslim North, which have constituted themselves into parasitic, decadent drains on society, but which pretend to be Islamic, are grotesque perversions of the religion they purport to represent. Anyone, not least one who makes pious noises about equality, that is denied the unfair privileges of monarchy is no victim.

Most importantly, though, Sanusi embodies a jarring disconnect between high-minded ideals and lived reality. He rails against child marriage in public but married a teenager upon becoming an emir. When the late Pius Adesanmi called him out, he told him to “grow a brain.” He suddenly became the patron saint of conservative Muslim cultural values.

He expended considerable intellectual energies critiquing polygamy among poor Muslim men, but he is married to four wives. His defense, of course, would be that he can afford it, and poor Muslim men can’t. Fair enough. But transaction-oriented reformists lead by example.

Fidel Castro, for example, stopped smoking when he campaigned against it. It would be nice to say to poor, polygamous Muslim men, “Why are you, a poor man, married to four wives when Sanusi, a wealthy man and an emir, is married to just one wife?”

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That would have had a much higher impact than his preachments. In spite of their moral failings, Buhari, Abba Kyari, and Mamman Daura would be much more effective campaigners against disabling polygamy by poor Muslim men than Sanusi can ever be because they are monogamists even when they can afford to marry four wives.

This is a legitimate critique since Sanusi has a choice to not call out poor Muslim men who marry more wives than they can afford since polygamy is animated by libidinal greed, which is insensitive to financial means.

Sanusi habitually fulminates against the enormous and inexorably escalating poverty in the north, but even though he is an immensely affluent person, he has not instituted any systematic mechanism to tackle the scourge of poverty in the region in his own little way.

Instead, he spends hundreds of billions of naira to decorate the emir’s palace, buy exotic horses, and luxuriate in opulent sartorial regality.

And, although, he exposed [what he thought was] humongous corruption during Goodluck Jonathan’s administration and dollar racketeering during Buhari’s regime, he is himself an indefensibly corrupt and profligate person. In two well-researched investigative pieces in 2017, Daily Nigeria’s Jaafar Jaafar chronicled Sanusi’s mind-boggling corruption as emir of Kano, which apparently didn’t abate until he was dethroned.

Sanusi was ostensibly a Marxist when he studied economics at ABU, which explains why he exhibits flashes of radicalism in his public oratory, but he is, in reality, an out-of-touch, unfeeling, feudal, neoliberal elitist who is contemptuous, and insensitive to the suffering, of poor people.

He supported Jonathan’s petrol price hike in 2012 and even wondered why poor people were protesting since they had no cars, and generators, according to him, were powered by diesel, not petrol!

When his attention was brought to the fact that only “subsidized” and privileged “big men” like him use diesel-powered generators, he backed down and apologized. But I found it remarkably telling that until 2012 Sanusi had no clue that the majority of Nigerians used petrol-powered generators to get electricity.

In a September 1, 2012, column titled, “Sanusi Lamido Sanusi’s Unwanted 5000 Naira Notes,” I noted that Sanusi was “one of the most insensitive, out-of-touch bureaucrats to ever walk Nigeria’s corridors of power.”

Again, in my December 10, 2016, article titled, “Dangerous Fine Print in Emir Sanusi’s Prescription for Buhari,” I wrote: “If you are a poor or economically insecure middle-class person who is writhing in pain amid this economic downturn, don’t be deceived into thinking that Emir Sanusi is on your side. He is not. His disagreements with Buhari have nothing to do with you or your plight. If he has his way, you would be dead by now because the IMF/World Bank neoliberal theology he evangelizes has no care for poor, vulnerable people.”

Sanusi Lamido and Kano’s royal ding-dong – Farooq Kperogi

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