Farooq Kperogi: Emir Sanusi’s quid pro quo for his friends turned fiends

Emir of Kano Muhammadu Sanusi II on Wednesday became an involuntary, if narcissistic and self-important, humorist who embodied the age-old wisecrack that says when you put a crown on a clown, he turns the palace into a circus and reduces royalty to a comedy show.

At the 21st Memorial Lecture of Chief Gani Fawehinmi in Lagos, he provoked a burst of hearty laughter in me when he said although he endorses the soul-crushing economic reforms of his “friends” in the Tinubu administration, he wouldn’t defend those “reforms” because the people in the administration have failed to requite his friendship. You can’t make this stuff up!

“I have chosen not to speak on the economy, or reforms or to explain anything because if I explain it, it will help this government,” he said. “But I don’t want to help this government. They are my friends, but if they don’t behave like friends, I won’t behave like a friend.”

That is the literal characterization of what’s called quid pro quo, which is Latin for “this for that,” “something for something,” or a “favor for a favor.” In colloquial English, it’s called “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”

When an adult of Sanusi’s learning, symbolic stature, and social status publicly, even if slyly, solicits a quid pro quo of you-scratch-my-back, I’ll-scratch-yours with a government whose suffocating policies he approves, the act inspires laughter because it is uncharacteristically juvenile and desperate.

Nonetheless, we need to unpack the fallacies and underlying assumptions in Sanusi’s absurdly self-conceited egotism.

He said, “I can give a few points here about what we are going through and how it was predictable and avoidable. But I am not going to do that.”

Well, he has actually done that multiple times in the past. In fact, he did it during the very speech where he claimed he wouldn’t.

By saying, “What we are going through today is at least, in part, a necessary consequence of decades of irresponsible management. People were warning that if we continued the way that we were going, this is how we would end up, but they refused to listen,” he effectively did what exactly he said he wouldn’t do.

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I can predict with almost mathematical precision what Sanusi will say tomorrow in defense of Tinubu’s brutally punishing “reforms” because Sanusi has a limited, predictable repertoire of apologetics for the neoliberal theology he has been a zealous evangelist for since at least 2011.

Shortly after Tinubu took over power, for instance, he visited the Presidential Villa and was ecstatic, even giddy, in his extolments for Tinubu’s unilateral, precipitous, and ill-advised removal of subsidies, which inaugurated the ongoing unbearable torment in the land.

His response to State House correspondents’ questions about the visit is worth reproducing at length:

“We’ve been friends since his first term as governor of Lagos State when I was a banker. And I have not seen him since the elections…. So, the first reason [for my visit] was to come and congratulate him formally.

“But also, I wear many caps. I wear the cap of an economist, so I came to thank him for the steps he has taken to put this economy on course. As you know, many of the issues that we have been talking about—eh, the subsidy that has caused a hemorrhage on the fiscus, the multiple exchange rate regimes, and so on.

“These are issues that I have personally been talking about for a long time, and I am happy that on his very first day, he has addressed these issues and the markets are happy. And it is important [that] when the government does the right thing for us to give them feedback. [It’s] not always when they do the wrong thing that you complain.”

By the end of 2023 when the injurious consequences of the double whammy of subsidy removal and currency devaluation began to take shape and there were fears that mass hunger and disillusionment could spark social and communal convulsions, Sanusi came to the defense of the Tinubu administration with all he had.

“It’s injustice for anyone to blame the Tinubu administration for the current economic hardship because there is no other alternative than the removal of the fuel subsidy,” Sanusi said in a widely shared article he reportedly wrote in a WhatsApp group. “After all, Nigeria cannot even afford to pay the subsidy.”

He said the downward spiral in the economy was the direct consequence of Muhammadu Buhari’s stubborn refusal to heed his counsel to “firmly and unequivocally eliminate fuel subsidies,” not Tinubu’s removal of subsidies.

It’s counterfactual logic, but Sanusi isn’t known to deploy the resources of logic, evidence, or even basic common sense when he evangelizes the false gospel of neoliberal salvation.

His solution to the ruthless decimation of the poor and the hollowing out of the middle class was for people to learn to live within their means and for economically well-off people who feel so inclined to help people who are less fortunate than they are. He freed the government of any obligation to cut waste and to tend to the needs of a badly hurting country.

“I can only plead with the people to endure the hardship, and those who have the means to help the downtrodden should do so,” he said. “I am also pleading with commoners to live according to their earnings; we must not peg our lives above our earnings in this difficult situation where people are looking for what to eat.”

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Never mind that the poor are writhing in pain not because they are living above their earnings but because their little earnings have lost their worth because of the policies he advocated.

So, what more could Sanusi possibly say in defense of the cruel policies of his “friends” who have turned to his “fiends” than he has already said?

That’s why his sneaky quid-pro-quo proposition to the Tinubu administration is so irresistibly hilarious in its sterile juvenility. He has by now exhausted his entire armory of neoliberal apologetics.

He already said the “markets are happy” with Tinubu’s reforms and that the people whose happiness has been stolen to make the markets happy should learn to “endure the hardship.” He’s no longer useful to his friends.

The second assumption that needs to be unpacked stems from the first. And it is that Sanusi imagines himself to be some nonpareil persuasive genius whose unrivaled communicative aptitude can magically cause suffering Nigerians to forget their sorrows and mollify their anger.

He wants his friends in government to believe that he is withholding these astonishingly unparalleled swaying powers because his show of friendship to them hasn’t been reciprocated.

“They don’t even have people with pedigree that can come and explain to the people what they are doing,” he said. “I am not going to help. I started by helping, but I am not going to help. Let them come and explain to Nigerians why they are pursuing the policies that they are pursuing.”

Had I not watched the video of these remarks, I would have said these rants were the vapors of someone’s febrile and depressed imagination, falsely attributed to Sanusi.

Sanusi, by these statements, is passing himself off as someone “with pedigree” who, if his friendship were requited, can “come and explain to the people” why they are starving and dying because of economic “reforms,” and the people would be calm, understanding, and accept their deaths by instalment with equanimity and even gratitude. Such delusion of grandeur! Such entertainingly comical megalomania!

But what is Sanusi’s record in this business of telling people who are dying that their death is inevitable, that the happiness of the markets is more important than the wellbeing of the people?

In 2012, he was one of the major architects and defenders of the removal of petrol and other subsidies. He clashed with human rights activists like Femi Falana (whose concerns about the cost of subsidy removal on the poor Sanusi infamously dismissed as “not an economic argument.”)

He also clashed with scholars such as the late Pius Adesanmi who worried about the implication of high petrol price on generators, which is the main source of electricity for the poor. Sanusi dismissed this concern with the false claim that generators run on diesel, not petrol.

Yet, with all his “pedigree” and unmatched persuasive powers (the kind he is supposedly withholding from his “friends”), he failed to dissuade the masses of the people from flooding the streets in the #OccupyNigeria protests.

The truth about Sanusi, as I have repeatedly pointed out, is that he is a self-loving sadist who actually derives delight from the misery of the masses. His only grouse with the Tinubu administration is that it is undermining the emirship he invested princely sums to recapture through massive financial contributions to Governor Abba Kabiru Yusuf’s election.

So, the “quo” in his wily, unstated, but nonetheless evident quid-pro-quo suggestion was for the Tinubu administration to withdraw its seeming support for former Emir Aminu Ado Bayero. Then he will transform into a propagandist to defend and justify your suffering. But what Nigerians want is a relief from their hardship, not a callous justification for why they must endure it.

Farooq Kperogi: Emir Sanusi’s quid pro quo for his friends turned fiends

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

Borgu, Northern Nigeria and Yoruba history, By Farooq Kperogi

My December 21, 2024, column titled “Kemi Badenoch’s Yoruba Identity Meets Inconvenient Truths,” where I set out to show that, contrary to Kemi Badenoch’s claim, the Yoruba and the “North” have had and still have a lot in common, hurt the ethnic susceptibilities of many Yoruba nationalists who misunderstood me as creating a hierarchy of historical and cultural dominance in which the Yoruba are inferior.

That was not what my column was about. If it comes across that way, it’s because people are gazing at the past with the lenses of the present. Historians call that presentism. Presentism animates the sort of defensive, ahistorical, knee-jerk, decontextualized, and emotive reactions that some people gave to my column.

Notions of collective identity with definite ethnographic boundaries are relatively new all over the world. I made this clear to Dr. Lasisi Olagunju who wrote a 3,526-word response to my column last Monday in which he cherry-picked evidence from the self-comforting presentist fantasies of certain Yoruba historians to countermine my arguments. Here’s my response to his response.

Dr. Olagunju took issue with my restating of a well-known, uncontested socio-historical fact: that “Yoruba,” the collective name for the people of western Nigeria, is an exonym that traces etymological provenance from what is now called northern Nigeria and that it originally referred only to people from Oyo, not other subgroups such as Ijebu, Ondo, Ijesa, Egba, etc.

It explains why Oba Sikiru Adetona, the Awujale of Ijebuland, still says the Ijebu are not Yoruba and are not even descendants of Oduduwa. It also explains why, as I pointed out in my October 26, 2019 column titled “Fulani and Origin of the Names ‘Yoruba’ and ‘Yamuri’,” Nigeria’s first modern newspaper, called Iwe Irohin fun awon Egba ati Yoruba (Yoruba for “newspaper for the Egba and Yoruba people”) indicated from its name that the Egba and the Yoruba were different ethnic groups who nonetheless belonged to the same linguistic group.

In other words, as of 1859 when the newspaper was set up, the Egba didn’t call themselves “Yoruba.”

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That the name Yoruba is an exonym from the North of Nigeria for the people of Oyo is so settled in the literature that I am befuddled that anyone would contest it with mere implausible conjectures and self-created oral histories.

For example, in his 1984 article titled “Yoruba Ethnic Groups or a Yoruba Ethnic Group? A Review of the Problem of Ethnic Identification” published in África: Revista do Centro de Estudos Africanos, Professor Biodun Adediran argued that the term Yoruba wasn’t native to Yoruba and was, in fact, a word first used for Oyo people by northerners.

He said, “the term first appeared in Arabic sources and in European accounts based on information from the Hausa country,” arguing “It was probably the Hausa who first gave the name ‘Yarribah’ to their Yoruba-speaking neighbours. Since the Oyo were the sub-group the Hausa came most frequently in contact with, the name easily became synonymous with ‘Oyo’” (p. 62).

Adeniran also argued that the term “Yoruba” initially remained confined to “the dictionary of those who invented it” (p. 63) and gained broader use only in the early 19th century due to increased interactions between the Yoruba and their northern neighbors. During this period, local wars fostered sub-group pride, leading many non-Oyo groups to reject “Yoruba” as a foreign name.

It was only toward the end of the century, when Europeans insisted on its use and referred to the Alaafin as the King of the Yoruba, that even the Oyo (to whom the name originally referred) began to embrace the term (p. 63).

In his 2019 book, Partitioned Borgu: State, Society and Politics in a West African Border Region, Dr. Hussaini Abdu investigated it further and found that the Hausa themselves borrowed the term Yariba (or versions of it) from the Baatonu people of Borgu, known to the Yoruba as Bariba, Baruba, or Ibariba, who are Oyo’s northwestern neighbors. The Baatonu, as I argued before, refer to the Oyo people as “Yoru” (singular) and “Yorubu” (plural), with “Yoruba” used in third-person references.

Abdu traces the name’s spread to Songhai-Borgu interactions, later reinforced by interviews with Baatonu slaves in Sierra Leone and popularized through European travelers and missionary records, such as Samuel Johnson’s 19th-century writings. This theory aligns with the historical and cultural links between Songhai, Borgu, and Oyo, including the spread of Islam to both Borgu and Yoruba land by Songhai-speaking Mande from ancient Mali, reflected in the Yoruba term for Islam, “imale.”

This is consistent with collective naming practices all over the world. Immediate neighbors typically name each other, which others then adopt. Olagunju cited the examples of “Hausa” (which came from the Songhai) and “Fulani,” which came from the Hausa.

The older Hausa name for Yoruba people was Ayagi (see my August 19, 2022, article titled “‘Ayagi’”: Earliest Nupe-Influenced Hausa Name for Yoruba People” based on my review of Professor Rasheed Olaniyi’s work), not Yariba, which strengthens Abdu’s research about the Borgu origins of the name Yoruba.

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Of course, Katanga, the name of the old capital of the Oyo Empire was, according to Professor Stefan Reichmuth, the “Hausa name for Old Qyo,” adding, “This term which might even be originally a stranger’s name of northern origin was in the late nineteenth century coming to be accepted as an overall ‘national’ name not only by the Oyo themselves but by other related groups as well.” (p.157).

However, in his 1934 book titled A Hausa-English Dictionary and English-Hausa Vocabulary, G.P. Bargery defined Katanga as the Hausa word for a “wall of a house or compound” (p. 583).

Well, in their 2015 article titled “’Lucumi, ‘Terranova’, and The Origins of the Yoruba Nation,” published in The Journal of African History, Henry B. Lovejoy and Olatunji Ojo point out that all the collective names by which the Yoruba people were known are exonyms. They also agree that “Yoruba” came from the North.

Most importantly, they found that the term “Yoruba” does not appear in European slave records, slave-owner documents, or early self-references by the Yoruba people themselves before the 19th century. So, Olagunju’s argument that Baatonu people might have imitated the name from Oyo people whose Alaafin sought refuge in their land seems highly unlikely.

Yoruba isn’t the only exonym by which the “Yoruba” people were known. A common name in slave records that historians have found is “Lucumi” (or Lukumi). Lovejoy and Ojo found that while the term could mean “my friend” in Yoruba, or “female lover” or “concubine” in the Owo dialect, it was the name Bini people called people in eastern Yorubaland.

They said it originated as a pejorative Edo term for foreigners, likely slaves, who spoke unintelligible languages, including Yoruba. In Edo, they pointed out, oluku means “young animal,” while mi or mie translates as “that” or “to have.” The term’s dual meanings in Yoruba and Edo, they said, suggest an ironic basis for its later identity formation.

“Nagô,” a self-appellation of the Anago subgroup of Yoruba, became the dominant term in Brazil for enslaved Yoruba speakers. Fon-speaking Dahomeans adapted this term as “Anagonu” to refer broadly to Yoruba-speaking groups (p. 355).

“Aku,” derived from the Yoruba greeting “eku,” was also used to identify Yoruba-speaking recaptives in Sierra Leone following British anti-slavery efforts in the early 19th century.

Nonetheless, as I pointed out in my 2019 column, which Lovejoy and Ojo supported with more scholarly evidence, the people of Western Nigeria aren’t called “Yoruba” today because the Borgu people called them so, or because they were identified by a version of that name by Songhai, Hausa, and Fulani people.

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They self-identify as “Yoruba” precisely because returnee slaves of Yoruba descent chose the name, popularized it, and encouraged people in the region to embrace it. More significantly, though, it was because colonialists insisted on it even when other subgroups protested its imposition.

To put it cheekily for Kemi Badenoch, the same Europeans who stitched the North and South together to form Nigeria were the ones who insisted on calling her Ondo and Ijebu kin “Yoruba,” a northern label originally meant for the Oyo, a group her people weren’t even part of. Oh, the irony!

Dr. Olagunju reproduced passages from his favorite Yoruba nationalist historians to dispute specific claims about Borgu’s immersion in Oyo’s history but dismissed the claims of the well-regarded Akinwumi Ogundiran’s well-received book, The Yoruba: A New History, which supported some of my claims, as suspect because he “did not cite any authority to back this claim.”

Never mind Dr. Olagunju’s unsupported claim that I. A. Akinjogbin said Borgu was under Oyo “until 1783.” Well, he made no such statement. What he actually wrote was that Oyo’s “tributaries included at least parts of the Nupe and the Bariba countries” (p. 450). How “parts of” a territory paying tribute translates to the entire country being under Oyo’s rule is beyond me.

Nonetheless, later Yoruba historians have challenged the exaggerated narratives of Oyo’s rule and reach and undermined claims such as Akinjogbi’s and the predecessors that inspired him. For example, Professor Olayemi Duro Akinwumi, in a 1992 article titled “The Oyo-Borgu Military Alliance of 1835: A Case Study in the Pre-Colonial Military History published in Transafrican Journal of History wrote:

“The extent of the Old Oyo Kingdom had been a subject of debate among the professional and non-professional historians. Crowder, for example, had given the impression that Oyo at its peak of glory extended far and wide to cover north, south, west and east of the kingdom…. Among the states incorporated into the Kingdom was Benin on the east, and Dahomey on the west. Samuel Johnson (1960:179) went further by including a portion of Nupe, Borgu and Dahomey. It is now certain that the Kingdom did not embrace all the Yoruba and the non-Yoruba states as claimed by many authors” (p. 160).

Dr. Olagunju doubted that the bashoruns of the Oyo empire were of Borgu origins even when Professor Ogundiran pointed it out in his book. Well, they were more than bashoruns. According to Professor Babatunded Agiri, whom Dr. Olagunju quoted in his response to me, “This process, by which the earliest Yoruba dynasties lost their political power to an invading Borgawa group, is also found in the Save area (now in Dahomey).

“Here the invasion probably took place sometime in the seventeenth century or slightly earlier. That the ruling dynasty in Old Oyo was non-Yoruba is also supported by the existence of a relic of an extinct (and probably Yoruba) dynasty in the lineage of the Basorun” (see “Early Oyo History Reconsidered” by Babatunde Agiri, History in Africa, 1975, p.7).

Agiri also pointed out that, “The Oranyan dynasty was from Borgu and the traditions of its origin in Old Oyo emphasize this link. The conquest of Old Oyo by the Borgawa dynasty must have occurred well before the fifteenth century” and that Borgu “established satellite dynasties in the Yoruba towns in the area, including Oyo, replacing the former Nupe influence there” (p. 10).

He said Alaafin Abipa owed his success in reestablishing his dynasty at Old Oyo to the large following of warriors from Borgu who accompanied him and that some of these warriors were rewarded for their services by being permitted to replace the rulers of some former Yoruba settlements such as Kishi, Igboho, and Igbeti.

“Others became rulers of new settlements like Ogbomoso, located in strategic areas to guard the state against further Nupe incursions. Thus, the post-Igboho period witnessed another influx of Borgu men and blood among the Oyo but, as with the earlier conquerors, their descendants have been absorbed completely into Yoruba culture-a culture which probably expressed a broad continuity with the earliest inhabitants,” he wrote (p. 10).

However, in his 1985 article, “How Many Times Can History Repeat Itself,” Professor Robin Law argued that the Alaafins of Oyo were of Borgu origin. He dismissed the idea that these rulers were returning Oyo refugees, labeling it a stereotypical narrative used to legitimize foreign rule.

Instead, Law suggested a Borgu conquest, noting that several northern Yoruba towns, including Saki, Kisi, Igbeti, Igboho, and Ogbomoso, had royal dynasties of Borgu descent. He linked the foundation of Igboho to a significant influx of Borgu settlers, who likely introduced cavalry, enabling them to dominate northern Yorubaland despite their small numbers.

Law also questioned the traditional timeline, proposing that the Borgu dynasty’s arrival at Igboho could predate the 16th century (p. 47), which annihilates the notion that Borgu could ever be a tributary state of Oyo, especially because there is not a single ruling dynasty in all of Borgu that traces ancestry to Yoruba.

All that this shows is that the Yoruba and the North have always been intertwined since precolonial times. That’s not a reason to force a union of the people or to deny anyone the prerogative to take pride in their ethnic or regional identity. It’s merely to set the records straight.

Borgu, Northern Nigeria and Yoruba history, By Farooq Kperogi

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

The day alcohol showed me shégè
(1)

Tunde Odesola

(Published in The PUNCH, on Friday, January 10, 2025)

I told this true-life story to my children a long time ago. But I censored its indecent climax because of their young age. Today, I’m going to tell it in full because they have come of age. I don’t mean this story to be a comedy. I mean it to be a piece over which guardians, parents, teachers, mentors and all can chew the cud and consider which tactic is more effective in child upbringing: spare the rod or spank the child?

Growing up under my parents’ roof, the Holy Bible was worshipped. If it mistakenly falls down from your hands, you must fast for a day. That was the unwritten law enforced by my mother. Every child owned a Bible and a bed. Your Bible must be under or beside your pillow, and your bed must be neat because father and mother drummed it into our ears that cleanliness was next to godliness.

A verse in the Book of Proverbs 13:24 that says, “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” was a refrain within the family. Its corollary in the same Book of Proverbs 22:15 (New Living Translation) says, “A youngster’s heart is filled with foolishness, physical discipline will drive it far away.” In its version, God’s Word Translation of the Bible says, “Foolishness is firmly attached to a child’s heart. Spanking will remove it far from him,” and the New King James version says, “Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child; The rod of correction will drive it far from him.”

But my literate parents will never quote any of the English interpretations. They prefer the Yoruba version which talks about the MADNESS in the heart of a child and the need for exorcising it with a cane: “Àyà omodé nì wèrè dì sí, egba ló máa túu.” I think they quote the Yoruba version to amplify the lodging of madness in a child’s mind and justify their deployment of the cane.

Therefore, canes were part of our home’s furnishings but many of the canes vanished into the thin air without me knowing anything about how they disappeared, I swear.

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In the Holy Quran, Prophet Mohammed (SAW) orders the beating of a child for purposes of correction.

Because I was growing like a rampant corn stalk in raining season, mother soon abandoned caning me as each flogging episode was akin to wrestling that left her with body aches. Then, she employed ìfótí olóòyì aka brain-resetting slaps but when I blocked her slaps repeatedly with my bony arms and her wrists hurt, she jettisoned that idea, too. She finally resorted to verbal chastisement and threat, “You wait till your father returns from work and see if I won’t report you to him.” And she always made good her threat.

My father was predictable. The first thing he does when he comes back from work is go on his knees and pray. The second thing he does is get a bath. Food is the third. If my mother told him about my sins as soon as he got home, he would order me to stoop down while he got a bath and ate. As a child, I used to think the punishment was called ‘stood down’.

It’s the foolish that gets famished when fasting, goes a Yoruba proverb. When my father was out of sight, I would sit on the floor and listen attentively to pick up his footfalls. If my mother passed by and saw me observing the punishment in breach, she would complain loudly so my father could hear I wasn’t doing what he ordered me to do. Double wàhálà.

At times, when I rush to bed before nightfall in order to evade the arrival of my father, my mother would barge into my room without knocking, upon the arrival of her husband, and peel my blanket off me, announcing with relish, “Daddy e ti de. O n pe e” – “Your daddy is back, he’s calling you.”

To picture the state of my mind whenever I ‘stood down’ waiting for sentencing is to imagine the mind of a goat cornered by a lion. I was the stubborn goat, my father was the lion.

That was the kind of house that produced me. A house of five male children and a female. A house that requites good deeds with rewards and punishes wrongdoing severely. I remember everything clearly. I remember we, the children, had Chopper bicycles. I remember plucking out my eyelashes and putting them on my head as a fetish for my parents to forget my wrongdoings and not punish me. Sometimes, it worked; sometimes, it didn’t. In all this, I always remembered the son of whom I am.

But, reminiscing on my secondary school days, I arrived at the intersection of doubt as to my long-held belief that sparing the rod spoils the child. When you’re raised in my kind of home, the tendency is for you to agree that the use of the rod was divine and productive.

However, I have some doubts today. Today, I’d rather a cane was kept at home, used rarely, while moral suasion took centre stage in child upbringing.

I lay the validity of my argument on this story below.

At the Archbishop Aggey Memorial Secondary School, Mushin, we were four bright friends – Akeem Adigun, Akinade Ayodeji, Jide Oladimeji and my humble self.

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We had some other friends who were not bright. When examination approached, some of my struggling friends would ask me a favour – to sit with me during the exam period. But only one student could sit beside me in an examination. So, to grant their requests, I devised a plan that we all should sit in the same row, with a bright student pairing with a dull student.

In the early 80s, there was an Italian wrestling duo – Gino Brito and Dino Bravo – called the ‘Love Brothers’ of the International Wrestling Federation fame. We adopted their name, Love Brothers.

My house was a favourite rendezvous for the Love Brothers because it offered eat-in food and grocery takeaways from my mother. One day, we carried our sàárà food offering past the mosque when we went to Akeem’s house.

Akeem was living with his foster parents in a three-storey building right at Olorunsogo bus stop, Mushin. We all pass by his house to and fro school.

On this particular ‘ojo buruku esu gbomimu’ day, I think someone said he wanted to drink water. Instead of waiting downstairs for Akeem to go and bring water, we all ran to the topmost floor.

Instead of allowing Akeem to bring water from their tall refrigerator, some of us ran towards it, each curious rat wanting to behold the occupants of the refrigerator. When Akeem opened the fridge, we saw water, food and more.

We saw rows and rows of assorted beers imprisoned in the bowel of the refrigerator, begging to be set free. And we did set some beers free together with the pots of rice and soup in the refrigerator. We all departed happily thereafter.

The next morning, I saw Akeem in front of the assembly ground while students were singing devotional hymns. He wasn’t standing alone. His foster mother was beside him. Right behind them were some fearsome male teachers. Akeem was staring at the floor.

After the day’s announcements were made and the national anthem and pledge were rendered, students sang as they marched to their various classrooms. The first to go were Class One students of various arms, followed by Classes Two and Three students.

The die is cast. I watched him pick out his fellow criminals – Jide, Akin etc – as they were marching to class. Quickly, I sneaked from the rows of the knicker-wearing junior classes, where I belonged, to Class Four row, which was trousers-wearing.

Luckily for me, some Class Four students wear shorts even though the right uniform for them to wear was a light blue shirt over dark blue trousers.

Life and its absurdities. The dream of every Class Three male student was to wear trousers when they got to Class Four, yet some Class Four male students refused to wear trousers when the handle of the machete was in their hands. Left-Right! Leff-Rai!! I marched with senior students past Akeem who wasn’t expecting me in Class Four.

After escaping the assembly crackdown, I fled to the school farm. Akeem’s co-conspirators, who were not ferreted out at the assembly ground, were picked up in the classroom. Although no bounty was placed on my head, a manhunt was declared for me while I nestled under cocoyam leaves on the school farm, pretending to be reading.

Intelligence soon reached the staffroom and a crack team of hefty seniors was dispatched to arrest me dead or alive. To date, I do not know the Judas who sold me out. When emissaries from the staffroom stormed the school farm, I submitted myself like a lamb, and they led me to Golgotha.

To be continued.

Email: [email protected]

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The day alcohol showed me shégè