Dele Omotunde's Opiblogue

A NEW PHILOSOPHY OF LEADERSHIP

2011-11-15T16:15:00.004+01:00

Fellow Niagarans. Today is "tombo bar" day and I'm pleased to talk to my fellow countrymen and women. After staying in this tombo bar for about two years I can categorically tell you all that the best criteria for ruling an African giant are good luck and patience. With good luck you can attain the virtually impossible. With patience you can even catch the fattest bone, crunch it and wash down with "akpeteshi", Sapele water or, simply, native gin.
Hold it, Mr. Chairman. We haven't seen the dividends of good luck and patience yet.
Perhaps I should seize this opportunity to tell our critics and cynics that you don't have to be a tiger to be a carnivorous leader. You don't have to be a lion to roar to wake up a sleeping giant. You don't even have to be a General to throw bombs like Boko Haram. All you need is good luck and patience. We all need the patience of a Job and the good luck of a cobra to secure our daily bread.
What a couple of criteria!
You can count on my philosophy of leadership any day.

Opilogue as Therapeutic Humour

2011-08-26T17:57:00.004+01:00

By ADEBAYO SOWEMIMO

If you are looking for a book that is fun to read, didactic and irresistibly hilarious, then your best bet is Opilgue: Not a Laffing Matter, a compilation of the Opilogue column published in TELL between 2003 and 2010, by Dele Omotunde, deputy editor-in-chief of the magazine.

Omotunde’s choice of this genre of ‘opinion-in-dialogue’ called Opilogue is both unique and fascinating, a genre that is worthy of emulation but, I dare say, almost impossible to clone. It is a captivating style that lures the reader into the 75 dialogues, which discuss issues of serious concern to the author and his society.

The book straddles issues like ethnic marginalisation, women equality, politics, education, religion, sports and others situating them in a country the author calls Niagara which bears close semblance to his native country, Nigeria.

Virtually every dialogue or monologue in this book reeks of humour, which Omotunde uses to drive home his points, making serious issues look less stressful such that the reader can laugh them off. Yet the author in his usual satirical way warns that the issues are no laughing (Laffing) matter. This literary approach sets him apart from the crowd of columnists who raise the adrenalin as they inadvertently fuel tension and create fear while discussing issues of public importance. Omotunde’s style, on the other hand, calms the nerves as he informs, educates and entertains his readers even if they have to cry later when they fully grasp the import of his ‘mischief’. Pieces such as If I Must Die, Take a Message to Mama, This Heart Must Not Fall, and Their Chop-and-Chop Excellencies, and almost all the dialogues evoke this feeling.

Rich in its surreal form, most of the write-ups connect images, events, and objects in a strange yet fascinating and intelligent manner to not only send didactic messages, but also enthrall readers using some literary devices that blend with his rich African culture. This is best illustrated in Requiem at Ifa Mosque Cathedral, Death of Honour, These Things Called Human Beings and Return of the Farmer among others.

Although he talks about the tragedy of the state of affairs in Niagara, he imposes his poetic licence on the subject matters to drive home his point. After all he had in the prologue to the column asked and obtained the poetic licence “to write on anything I can think or unthink of!” And this licence the author uses to the maximum in all the articles he presents in the book.

Not a Laffing Matter proves that writing as an art, it is about creativity needed to do a well-informed critique of the absurdities being perpetrated in the state of Niagara without inviting the angst of its leaders, who in most cases ride roughshod on the people. Omotunde in some of the episodes also gives the impression that he has the spiritual weapon to peep into what takes place on the other side of life where the departed from Niagara hold court. His vision of heaven where he situates some of the characters is vivid and creative. The allocation of ‘residential’ quarters to these characters is a message and a warning to the living lords on earth to beware of life hereafter. Readers may want to verify this in Dividends of Deathocracy and Even Niagarans Can Kill God.

A thread that runs through the write ups is the message to the effect that Niagara is the Nigerian version of a land flowing with milk and honey; of brilliant and hard-working men and women who, unfortunately writhe in penury while their leaders gallivant about in abhorrent affluence. This the author illustrates in pieces like Death of Honour, Requiem at Ifa Mosque Cathedral, Farewell Umoru, Weep Not for Lamidi and Weep Not Crocodile (in memory of Kola Olawuyi, late presenter of a television programme, Nkan N’bee).

And his pen can be both informative and illustrative like in Mama’s Got a Brand-New Drug – where he plays on the medicinal and erotic benefits of banana.

Others could be narratives of special emotional and dreadful circumstances like Darfur, Not Yet Valentine, a paradoxical ‘speech’ of the main character before a phantom African Union, for war-torn Darfur on Lovers’ Day while suing for peace and love to reign.

Most of the articles in the compilation are fresh in ideas, distinct in thought, revitalising in presentation and alluring in style. But as different as the pieces are, a common thread that runs through them is the command of language, the flexibility and beauty in its usage, the ease and comfort with which the author relates with the characters in the realm of conversation and rich African culture including loaded proverbs employed to drive home the messages.

The use of African names, proverbs and languages, especially Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo, is predominant in some of the write-ups. This is obviously employed to draw people’s attention to the fact that local languages may go into extinction if not used. They will be as dead as Latin. The author is thus sending the message that people should not forget their language or culture. This is why he tries to make the characters speak the languages that fit them or their social-economic status. Depending on the character – area boys, military officers, politicians, legal luminaries, academics, musicians and diplomats – their language matches their social status.

You cannot help but fall in love with the book in spite of very insignificant slips, obviously printer’s devil – like ‘codemnation’ for condemnation, ‘prade’ for parade, ‘haamburgers’ for hamburger, in the Prologue. And both Baba Iyaboh My Foot! (2) and Biko, This London Na Wa o! (31), but there is no (32), the next piece is Requiem at Ifa Mosque Cathedral (33). There is The Redeemed Harvest of Names (2), but the preceding piece is missing from this compilation.

But these do not take anything away from this refreshingly different form of journalism, which elicits deep thoughts in a hilarious manner. Certainly, this book is more than a laughing matter.

Quote
‘A thread that runs through the write-ups is the message to the effect that Niagara is the version of a land flowing with milk and honey; of brilliant and hard working men and women who, unfortunately, writhe in penury while their leaders gallivant about in abhorrent affluence’

OPILOGESIC: PAPA HAS GOT A BRAND NEW DRUG

2011-05-24T15:17:00.006+01:00

Papa has got a brand new drug!
Brand new what?
I said Papa has got a brand new drug.
What type of drug is that?
He calls it "opilogesic". You need to have one.
Show me a sample.
Here it is!
Look at you. So it's a book you're calling drug?
Yes, because apart from it's literary worth it is also good as a therapeutic companion to relieve you of mental stress.
Na lie! Iro ni! It's a lie! You mean NOT A LAFFING MATTER can reduce tension in my system?
Yes! Yes!
Can you prove it?
Why not? The taste of the pudding is in the "whacking".
Meaning what?
Meaning you should get a copy today and swallow it ink, line and index.
I dey laugh o! Me I dey laugh like Baba for farm.
Stop it! It's NOT A LAFFING MATTER!!!
Hear! Hear!! Hear!!!

A Madhouse Called Niagara

2011-05-22T00:05:00.000+01:00

By KUNLE AJIBADE

Part of what lends Opilogue: Not a Laffing Matter its irresistible, tantalising power is the tragedy in our comedy and the comedy in our tragedy it lucidly portrays. Such is the surprising paradox of many of the pieces in this collection that they will repay contemplation. Once you understand what comedy of humours is all about as a mode of literary production, you will enjoy Dele Omotunde’s Opilogue. Wikipedia defines comedy of humours as a genre of dramatic comedy that focuses on a character, or range of characters, each of whom has one overriding trait that dominates their personality and conduct. This definition is not as accurate as that of Webster’s Dictionary, which says that the comedy consists in the portraiture of characters in whom one humour is overdeveloped, making them ridiculous when judged by some norm of behaviour. Satire, irony, parody, mockery and paradox are, therefore, some of the components of this mode of writing.

This book, to be sure, is not a collection of plays; it is a collection of melodramatic pieces of journalism, an interface between literature and journalism – a combination of fact and fiction. The people Omotunde writes about remind us of those marvellous characters in Aristophanes The Frogs, Ladies’ Day and The Birds. They remind us of Wole Soyinka’s Brother Jero, the charlatan, and those shameless characters in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Devil on the Cross who boast in the open about how they loot in Kenya. It also recalls John Milton’s defiant Satan. Peter Enahoro, Sad Sam, Dan Agbese, Niyi Osundare, Adebayo Williams, Olatunji Dare and Reuben Abati have used some aspects of this genre in their journalism. What distinguishes Omotunde from these other worthy satirists is that he predominantly uses Socratic Method, not necessarily in its purest form, to dramatise the state of our conditions and the conditions of our state. He tactically removes himself from the pieces in order to give his reader a false sense of neutrality.

This book is not a collection of plays; it is a collection of melodramatic pieces of journalism, an interface between literature and journalism’. See also www.tellng.com

Since its debut in 2003, Opilogue has not been a conventional, mainstream column writing engagement. In its grotesque, comic, ironic and absurd transformation of people and events, it turns exaggeration into an art form spiced with appropriate proverbs and interesting turns of phrase. This collection, then, is full of genuinely funny moments and comic tenderness, yet it is also very remorseless in its rage. To whom and to what does Omotunde turn the heat of his rage? I have given a hint of that already: lunatics and demons. Omotunde masks them in the same way that he invents Niagara as a name for Nigeria and Peoples Destruction Party for PDP. The masking of the bunch of lunatics and demons in Opilogue is not for fear of litigation or any artistic timidity. If anything, at the heart of the creative strategy in this collection of 75 Opilogue essays published in TELL, is intransigence itself. The author just wants the essays to be engaged at different layers of meanings. But I have chosen to tear all the painted masks to enhance my own interpretation. After all, I am a responsible citizen and critical student of Omotunde’s country.

The list is long. For lack of time, let us close-up on a few distinguished ones. For his astonishing buffoonery, hypocrisy, cunning, intolerance of better, dissident or opposing views, greed for power, encouragement of sycophancy, and for nurturing private and sick ambitions, which he packaged as national interest, General Olusegun Obasanjo is on top of this list. In the imaginary conversations, which he had with Remi Oyo, Folake Soyinka and Major Hamza Mustapha; in the imaginary meeting he held with the women in his cabinet; the chats he had with Nigerians on both radio and television; the talks he held with Matthew Kerekou and the madman Robert Mugabe who was very afraid of death but enjoyed killing his compatriots to remain in power, Omotunde uses the fantasies of Obasanjo to interrogate his horribly negative thoughts.

Next, of course, is the vampire of Ibadan, Alhaji Lamidi Adedibu. He was mad at Governor Rashidi Ladoja for preventing him from having unfettered access to the state treasury, from choosing his own commissioners and chairmen of government parastatals and board members. He regaled us with how powerful he had become. He had many houses, slaves, cars and a young beautiful woman to boot. What did Ladoja have, he boasted to a journalist, that he did not have except that he was the governor in Agodi while he was the godfather in Molete? He said he would deal ruthlessly with Rashidi. And he did so with the support of the federal government under Obasanjo.

It is simply riveting reading the fictional broadcast of Chris Ngige from his hellhole in Anambra. A victim of another godfather across the Niger. Like a rattled rat he squealed, asking the whole world to save his life. The venality of Chris Uba had no limit. He had the full backing of Alhaji Tafa Balogun, the inspector-general of police, and, again, President Obasanjo. As if that was not enough to belittle a country, one day at the Heathrow Airport in the United Kingdom, a melodrama played itself out right on the tarmac. A band of deranged Niger Delta activists were protesting the arrest, for money laundering, of Chief Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, the Governor-General of the Ijaw nation himself. How could these neo-colonialists arrest the people’s general? What impudence! The protesters would not leave the tarmac if the man was not released immediately. In the alternative, Britain could keep part of the money and wire the rest to Nigeria. They reasoned oddly that Britain must be foolish, in the first instance, to make noise about the money it should just have kept for itself. Yet at that time the militant Niger Delta youths were up in arms against Nigeria for stealing all the resources belonging to the Niger Delta. Hostage-taking was rife. The militants whose leaders included Alhaji Mujahideen Asari-Dokubo just kidnapped a ‘whiteman’. It was only in the course of interrogating him that they discovered that the man was Ben Murray-Bruce!

The country, in this book, is a madhouse where Atiku Abubakar, whose hands were not clean, talked like Martin Luther King Jr.; a land of opportunists like Orji Uzor Kalu who talked about Igbo marginalisation only when it was convenient; an asylum where the judiciary took bribe and brazenly perverted justice; a prison-house where the policemen remained incorrigible crooks; a stinking cathedral where pastors praised dollars and naira, not Jesus Christ; a ‘Fuji House of Commotion’ where Ayo Fayose’s sister, Bimpe Sorinolu, took her brother-governor to the cleaner in the media; a haven for Charles Taylor, a war monger and a plain thief; a theatre of the absurd where Umar Musa Yar’Adua, the dead, held the living to ransom for months; a country of fanatics and rookie bombers like Farouk Abdul Mutallab.

If these represent a group of negative archetypes who are condemned in this book, there are positive archetypes too who are celebrated. They are the Avatars. Intellectuals like Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins, Elizabeth Anderson and Christopher Hitchens have argued rigorously and almost convincingly that there is no life after death. In the imaginary Godstown of Omotunde, however, the ancestors and Avatars met and had a national conference. Justice Atinuke Ige, the wife of Bola Ige, who hardly discussed politics publicly when she was alive, became a powerful debater of Nigerian conditions. Both husband and wife had brainstorming sessions in heaven. Ige who had now made many friends including William Shakespeare, Langston Hughes, Steve Biko and Oliver Tambo shouted Pin-Di-Pi! when Atinuke told him that one of the people being tried for his murder had won ‘neat and square’ in Ige strongholds. M.K.O. Abiola, who by this time, now lived in the God’s Reserved Area, GRA, in heaven, was holding talks with Kudirat his wife when Ajibola Olanipekun walked in. He informed them how and why Nigeria had become a den of assassins. All those whose lives were cut short by the bullets of assassins actually formed what they called Association of Assassinated Nigerians in Heaven. Barnabas Igwe and his wife were members, Papa Alfred Rewane, was a notable and active member. Omotehinwa and Olagbaju were members. Ken Saro-Wiwa and Adaka Boro were members. There were many others.

Obafemi Awolowo, a politician who was given to finding practical solutions to political problems on earth, was still agonising over many great opportunities, which he thought Nigeria was missing. Professors Claude Ake, Chike Obi and Ayodele Awojobi, Raji Abdallah, a NEPU leader, Walter Sisulu, Tai Solarin, Aminu Kano and Malcolm X always enjoyed Awolowo’s company. Gani Fawehinmi was happy to meet Dele Giwa in heaven. Giwa specifically wanted Gani to describe how he was killed, and what has been done to track down his killers. When Beko joined Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, Olikoye and Dolupo in heaven, they reminisced on the essence of the struggle, which was the life of their family. We are reminded of the necessity of struggle against poverty, oppression, insecurity and bad governance. Every meaningful, effective struggle, we are told, is not a tea party.

With these refracted, mediated representations, Omotunde appears to be telling us: Let the spirit of the avatars guide us in our quest for greatness. Let the fog of the lunatics and demons clear. Let it clear.

Ajibade, executive editor of TheNEWS, identifies lunatics, demons and Avatars in OPILOGUE: Not a Laffing Matter at a public presentation of the book in Lagos, May 17, 2011.

The Redeemed Harvest of Names

2011-05-20T19:32:00.004+01:00

“He said if an ifa priest could become an ‘archbishop’, why can’t he become a pope?”

I know oko mi Adio like my palm. What else do you expect, anyway? We’ve been married for years. We eat together. We pray together. We play together. We even sleep together. Are you surprised? We do virtually everything together. And this very much I know about him: he is a very religious person. He wakes up reading the Bible. At midday, you will see him with the great book memorising its verses. At night he is also at it, fondling the robust Holy Book like a newly wedded wife. But of recent, oko mi Adio says he wants to take his romance with the Book to the next level. He has quit his well-paying job, ostensibly to engage in evangelism. But nobody can convince me that he is not up to something. I confronted him with my suspicion and I could not fault his reasoning.

What did he say?

He said all his contemporaries have become pastors and have prospered. He, too, wants to join the multitude to worship the god of prosperity. I was alarmed! How could anybody dare say that? He flared up, calling me names. I tried to dissuade him but it was obvious his hunter’s dog was destined to get lost in the wilderness of wishful thinking. He insisted he must become a pastor by all means. He said he is no longer interested in the god of poverty. I cried foul! He said if I liked, I could cry turkey or eagle, he would not care a hoot. He said if an Ifa priest could become an ‘archbishop’, why can’t he become a pope? His logic baffled me a bit. He even went further to lay a premise for his unprofessional calling. He said many “men of God” in Niagara today did not go to any major seminary or study theology in any divinity college. He gave instances of spouses of pastors taking over ministries after the demise of the breadwinners, and sons becoming deputy pastors and assistant bishops with “executive fiat”. I concurred and he thanked me for agreeing with his inordinate intention to set up his own ministry. The problem now is what name to give his proposed ministry.

Why should that be a problem? Why not just “OKO MI ADIO EVANGELICAL MISSION OF IGBOTAKO AND IGBOBINI?

Never! Oko mi Adio does not want a name like that. He wants a name that will draw crowds and dollars. And this is where he ran into a problem. To overcome this, he went out in search of specimen names and he became more confused than ever as to what name to adopt or adapt. The first day he went out, he said he almost ran back home because all he was seeing was fire, fire, fire everywhere!

Was the town burning?

No! He said virtually all the names of churches he saw bore ‘fire’ and he started wondering if he had not willingly entered hell in his quest for his daily bread. I told him he should not worry. The fire brigade is always there to rescue him even from hell. The first signboard was truly frightening: FIRE FOR FIRE MINISTRY! What could this be? Oko mi Adio said this must be a church for armed robbers and the police who are always slugging it out in their regular fire fights. He said he would never name his church like that. He can’t be ducking from bullets in the church. He had hardly moved forward when he saw another one, ANGELS ON FIRE, CHAPEL OF PEACE. He just hissed. He said how could he set up a church where angels will burn when he is not the Hitler who built the gas chambers for the extermination of Jews. No way, he said. But he had not seen anything yet. As he walked along some other streets, he saw a row of “fire ministries”. My friend, oko mi Adio had never been so alarmed.

What did he see?

He saw fire and brimstones: RAIN OF FIRE MINISTRY, VALLEY ON FIRE EVANGELICAL MISSION, FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN MINISTRY, FIRE BURNS MINISTRY, HEAL BY FIRE MINISTRY, HOLY FIRE OVERFLOW MINISTRIES, LIQUID FIRE MINISTRIES… and so on and so fifth.

Enough of fire! But how did he react to the line-up?

You can trust oko mi Adio. He just dismissed the names as those created by ignoramuses who have chosen to play with fire, despite the warning of Osibissa, in a country where the fire service is always short of water. He said he would prefer to stay far from the madding crowd. But he had not walked very far again when he saw another church name HOLY GHOST ON FIRE MINISTRY. Initially he liked the name saying instead of the congregation running helter skelter for water all the pastor needs to do is preach to them to dole out naira notes to buy “anointing water” with which to quench the fire. On a second thought he felt today’s pastors truly need FIRE MINISTRIES for practical lessons on what most of them may end up experiencing in hell. That seemed to have given him a new attitude to the “anointing business” and he grabbed the opportunity with both hands.

Please, I don’t understand. It’s confusing to me. Can you come again?

I mean that oko mi Adio started to read meanings into the names instead of just throwing them away paint, brush and signboard. So when he saw the HIGH TENSION MINISTRY, oko mi Adio suggested that it could be a church for NEPA men and their megawatts expectations. Then he brought in his diabolical interpretation. He said it could be a church where the electrocution of evils takes place. But is oko mi Adio ready to name his own church after that? No, he said. Why? Hear him: “Many prospective worshippers may be scared away with their tithes and weekly offerings”. Can you beat that? However, this must be stated. If not because my husband was determined to make hay while the opium (that’s what he calls religion), lasts, he would have been frightened out of the business project with the kind of names he encountered at the beginning, names that have to do with the elements, fear, disaster and violence: HURRICANE MIRACLE MINISTRY, HEALING TSUNAMI MINISTRY, STATAN IN TROUBLE MINISTRY and so on. Oko mi Adio was flustered. He said after what hurricanes/Andrew and Katharina did in the United States, he can never name his ministry ‘hurricane’. Neither would he joke with tsunami. He said a tsunami will definitely wipe all tithes, weekly and harvest offerings away, leaving his wallet wet and empty. You need to see how oko mi Adio was looking while narrating his story. He looked frustrated. I said he should not worry. He could stay at home while I go out to help him sort out more names and promised to come back with what I thought was best for him.

For the concluding part, see 'The Redeemed Harvest of Names 2' in the book, Opilogue: Not a Laffing Matter.

Subway to Surrealism

2011-05-12T18:05:00.000+01:00

In name and content, this is an unusual book written in an unusual way. If you have canons (of criticism) to fire after going through it, then you are at the wrong warfront. Do not expect the usual style of writing acknowledgement or introduction to a book because the author is a self-confessed non-conformist. A radical? Bury the thought. Just sit down and savour the aroma of a literary cuisine laced with African condiments. Welcome to the surreal world of Opilogue.

The idea to compile opilogues into book form is not mine. The truth must be told. It is the readers' wish. When I set out in May 2003 to experiment with the art of conversation in writing opinions, little did I know that many a reader would fall in love with the style. Again, the truth must be told. Writing opinion in dialogue format is not original to me. Many outstanding writers with a bolder claim to intellectualism have experimented and mastered the art of reducing hardcore opinions to witty, humorous conversations easily accessible to both the professor in the university campus and the pedestrian on the sidewalk. Langston Hughes, the great African-American writer, is one of the literary touchstones in this respect. His column in The Chicago Defender in the 1960s was a must read for fellow African-Americans and Hispanics.

To Hughes, humour is a weapon of no mean value against one's foes. "In the Latin American countries", he said, "the humorous magazines are often more dangerous to a crooked politician than the most serious articles in the intellectual press..." Thus, in his daily column, he used humour to treat issues of segregation and social inequality in Jim Crow America. In Opilogue, however, humour wears a less belligerent garb. Like one critic once noted, humour can be likened to a rubber sword. "It allows you to make a point without drawing blood".

Opilogue is carved out for entertainment. There is no pretence about that. But should that be the be-all and end-all of Opilogue? Should art only be for art's sake? This has always been a recurrent issue among critics. This I'd say of Opilogue: It operates at more than one level. It is a combination of fact and fiction or what is today known as FACTION. It does not pretend to be "a factual representation of the truth" as neo-classical theorists would say but a fictional representation of fact! Wait a minute. What is going on here? Well, you had better get used to this somewhat abrasive phenomenon because Opilogue, on a different level, is oxymoron in motion. Call it poetic licence!

Talking about poetic licence, Opilogue often takes advantage of this writing tool to “creatively break” the rules in order to expand the frontiers of humour. Well, in the realm of satire and comedy, the writer is at liberty to play on the follies and foibles (o my cliché!) of mankind and use both the congruous and the incongruous, the ridiculous and the sublime, the moderate and the exaggerated, to beam a searchlight on the profane and the perfidious, yet clapping and yelling when there is something to crow about. That has been the journey traversed by Opilogue. Every bone is meat. No matter how gory the story in the Opilogue is, the reader will find some laughlines. Dividends of Deathocracy, published May 12, 2003, set the tone for those opilogues in the category of tragedies. Others include Requiem at Ifa Mosque Cathedral, Weep Not for Lamidi and Farewell Umoru which appear in this collection.

Each Opilogue has its special circumstance though others are borne out of practically creative desires to tackle some issues other writers may consider inane or innocuous such as Knowing Me Knowing You, The Ghanageria Siamese Twins and Diplomatic Yabis. Others are blatantly socio-political commentaries. But whether in social or cultural or religious expositions, Opilogue tries to limit its setting to Niagara, an imaginary country that sounds and smells like Nigeria. That's where the similarity ends though. Any resemblance in the names of characters with those of actual persons, dead or alive, is just an accident which, unfortunately, is not covered by any insurance policy.

The opilogues in this volume have been carefully selected and, deliberately, not much of annotation has been done to explain the circumstance of each one so as not to limit the reader’s interpretation. The joy of Opilogue, like poetry, is in the elasticity of interpretation and appreciation. For example, Far from the Madding Cow is one Opilogue that will be a hard nut to crack now except the reader can connect it with Dividends of Deathocracy. Same with some of the predominantly satirical pieces…

Want to read more? See the introduction to the book, NOT A LAFFING MATTER, an illustrated Opilogue compilation, due for launch May 17, 2011. It’s a cocktail of the satirical, the surreal and the sublime.

My Children, Too, Want to Be Governor

2011-02-17T07:00:00.001+01:00

"Government money is our money and no Jupiter can query us on how we spend it. Those who don't like it can go and 'suicide' themselves"

Alao! … Alao!! … yes, I say Alao! … hmmm… you say there’s no any Alao there… Is that what you are saying? Look at you! Who says he wants to talk to Alao? I’m just greeting you the alakowe way. Alao! Alao!! (Hallo, Hallo) Who’s there? I say who’s speaking? What?! Akalamagbo, so, it’s you… you mean you cannot recognise my voice again. It’s true I have always summoned you to my palace any time I want to talk to you but you should be able to recognise my voice on the phone … Haba! Alao! Alao!! Alao!!!… What has happened? I can hear something falling… Akalamagbo, hope nothing…? Yes, yes… what? You fell down? O! You mean you fell while trying to apologise to me… That’s alright… that’s alright… stand up. Thank you… no, no… no, that’s not why I’m calling you…

Ngbo, what happened between you and Igbakeji? I learnt you are doing 'two fighting' in the office. Sebi, I have told you to be careful or you want me to flog the two of you inside the Government House? Yes… yes… Shurrrup! You children of nowadays are too stubborn. Sebi I told the two of you that any time you want to cough or sneeze or even vomit, you must let me know… Shurrrup! I say shurrrup!… listen… Akalamagbo, abi you want to see the red of my eyes? Why are you behaving like a thug? If the two of you had listened to me, your boys will not be exchanging blows in Agodi over chickenfeed. If you want to eat frog, at least you must choose a fat, juicy one for supper… Alao!… Alao!… can you hear me? Alao! Alao!!… Thank God you are still there. I don’t know what’s wrong with all these GSM phones.

Can you hear me now? Good… I was saying that if you want to fight, fight over millions and billions, not over chickenfeed. Don’t disgrace our great party. The two of you are my sons, if you don’t know, and I did not put you there to be doing what you like. You hear? Alao!… Alao!!… can you still hear me? Okay. Yes… yes… yes… that’s alright. But wait. The N50 million you sent last time was not enough for the number of cars I wanted to buy for the lawbreakers. You had forgotten that I needed to buy, also, patrol vehicles for our local ‘police’ and bodyguards. In fact, I needed an extra N300 million to buy boats and canoes for some of our guests who will like to cruise around in the Premier Motel swimming pool any time they come for the convention of our great party.

And that reminds me, Akalamagbo, I learnt you said you, too, want to continue licking soup beyond 2007. You must be joking. Even if we are spraying political posts like confetti, not a single flake will drop on your lap. Nibo? For where? If not because Aare Latosa did not play ball according to my rules, would you have ever smelt that seat? Our people have said it, “Nobody will ride a horse and not gallop”. Akalamagbo, you are galloping… o nma ga (you are overdoing it). Take it easy o, I’m warning you. Impeachment is two for a kobo here and if you don’t mind, it is the money I have that I am lending you… What? What did you say? Ah, you say I am speaking Yoruba-English? Wonderful! Wetin you speak, Your Excellency? Is it not olopa (police) English you are speaking? Look at His Excellency! Let me remind you, the koboko (horsewhip) used to beat sense into the senior wife’s head is still hanging in the ceiling… Yes… remember what happened to Aare Latosa. After dealing with him, he could only order for pounded yam. Did you see him wait for the soup? The matter became, for him and his supporters, a case of if the rat cannot make a quick getaway, it should make way for the tortoise. That’s how they disappeared from Agodi one by one because it’s what we tell ogbo that ogbo will hear… When a child sees Fear he must run. Beeni.

Yes… yes… of course, that’s a warning for you. A foretold war does not catch the cripple unawares, but that depends on how clever your own cripple is. Just as wrestling is the favourite pastime of the Offa people, so is civil unrest our own hobby in Ebaodan. I know you are a young calf trying to cut his teeth in the politics of this city but let me warn you that Oluyole doesn’t take nonsense from any premier, or gomina (governor). Ask Akintola. Ask Ige. No past non-native civilian ruler left this city alive. We killed them right inside their bedrooms except Baba Layinka. You can prove me wrong. And… Akalamagbo, if you don’t want to die suddenly in your bedroom now or later, I think that’s a timely warning for you. So, this your “third time” ambition will not work. Drop it. My own children are also warming up for aksion. I am tired of doing ijagboro (street fighting) on account of somebody else’s children… What? Oh, sorry, Akalamagbo. I don’t mean it that way. You are all my children but as we say it here, "A father knows who his real children are…" Yeesi o! A nursing mother should be able to feed herself also as she breastfeeds her baby. Afterall, the child is not the only hungry mouth in the family. My children are also coming! You hear? You had better do. I don’t want you to do like all of them who don’t know when to say goodnight to ayo game. And that reminds me, you must not spend all the money in the treasury. You hear? But don’t forget to send the usual N10 million weekly security vote for me to police our area here. Remember also to send the N20 million for entertainment for this week. You may add something on top because I will be receiving more visitors from Oyo and Abeokuta. Sebi you know, these are the real amala people. While the Oyo take amala dudu, the Egba (Abeokuta) are fond of amala funfun with abula to match. And lest I forget… if there is another controversy over the money voted for my ‘office’ and ‘palace’, you must clear from me before talking to the press. I don’t like the way you handled the N50 million car gifts that I dished out like amala the other time. Government money is our money and no Jupiter can query us on how we spend it. Those who don’t like it can go and 'suicide' themselves in Igbo Agala… Yeesi o! Greet Her Excellency, your wife, for me. Greet also His Excellency Jnr, I mean your son. I hope he is drinking milk well, well … ahaa … you are laughing? Hmmm… Okunrin meta (three-men-in-one)! When should I be expecting the Accountant-General? Yes… hmmm… Before I go for Jumat? Your head is correct! I know you are a good boy, any day.

Note: This Opilogue was first published in TELL, June 19, 2006

Valentine Blues

2011-02-13T07:00:00.001+01:00

Credit: creoleindc.typepad.com
"Marriage is the only war where you sleep with the enemy"

My friend, you must have been wondering where I have been since all these days. Well, it is Adio, my husband, who has been giving me the treat of my life. Since our reconciliation meeting, he has been showering me with blessings and affections, especially since his thugfather single-handedly made him the new president of the Semovita Kingdom. You need to see how he is now crazy about me. Without me, he cannot eat. Without me, he cannot sleep. Without me, he cannot even urinate. Because of me, he bought a book of text messages and, ever since, it has been messages galore on my handset. I never imagined that Oko mi Adio, without ever having been to Rome, could be so romantic… He has 're-valentined' my life.

You are making me jealous.

Jealous? Just spare me that crap lest you end up inside the well because that's where your type always ends. But, my friend, help me thank Baba Iyaboh, my national father-in-law, for the GSM he introduced to the country. If not for his revolution, I would not be receiving the kind of Valentine messages and calls I have been receiving from my heartthrob. I remember his first message to me the very day he purchased his GSM phone: "My darlin', where were you before you came camping in my heart? You started a fire and now my heart is filled with flames." I couldn't believe it. Oko mi Adio sending me a romantic message? I teasingly asked him to forward his message to the GSM provider or the Fire Brigade. The wonderful blockhead did not get the message. Instead, he sent what he thought to be another love booster: "Everyone wants to be the sun that lights up your life but I, your darlin' husband, would rather be your moon, so I can shine on you during your darkest hour when NEPA strikes". I quickly picked up my phone and told him some home truths. I said I deserved more than a standby generator. "I want you as my constant supply of light till death do us part", I concluded. You know what? Oko mi Adio lifts his text messages, word for word, without taking cognisance of the prevailing circumstance or mood. I have never seen such a pleasantly idiotic plagiarist in my life. The other day when I was on admission at St. Patient's Specialist Hospital, Apongbon, in downtown Lagos, all Oko mi Adio did was to send me this message: "Of all the friends I've ever met, you're the one I won't forget in a hurry. And if I die before you do, I'll go to heaven and wait for you." I read the message over and over again. What's Oko mi Adio up to?

He didn't mean any harm, you know.

You think so? Is that the kind of message people send to their loved ones who are convalescing in hospital? You kuku know me. I managed to sit up in bed and scribble a wait-and-get response: "Obtain your visa fast but make sure you write your will". He thought of atoning for his deed by sending me another fast-food-like text package: "I have a little angel flying around with a hammer, each person he hits gets a little dose of my love. I hope he beats the hell out of you.” I was devastated. Why should Oko mi Adio send an Iron Mike Tyson as angel to me? I called him, “Haba! Oko mi Adio. I know where you got that message from but can’t you use your sixth sense to recycle and tailor it to suit the prevailing circumstances?” He did not allow me to finish when he said he would send another message that I'd definitely like. And what was it? He went through the text book and came out with a message that had recycle in it: "Darlin', it's true they recycle paper till it's as good as new; reproduce cans, jars and old bottles too, but they can never recycle another person as you." I said, "look at this suegbe. Where was he when the oyinbo people recycled a sheep and they named it Dolly? Very soon, they will recycle even Dolly Parton herself. Oko mi Adio was terribly angry and, for the first time in his life, asked the chief of staff, COS, of Government Villa to talk to me. "Is that Her Excellency?" the COS started. I told him, in no unmistaken terms, that I am not Her Excellency. Only God is His Excellency. All mortals are mediocre. Only Oko mi Adio and those who are backing him like his thugfather can call themselves Their Excellencies. I am simply Mrs. Adio.

And what was his response?

He pretended he did not hear me. Instead he launched out like a battering ram, "Madam, do you take His Excellency to be your lawful text mate, to love and to hold, in fine and good lexicon, in poor signal and no service, till low credit do you part?" I said, "I do, I do". He said if I did, then I should not harass His Excellency again over his text messages to me whether they were original or copied, creative or not, pedestrian or motorised, logical or illogical, wise or foolish. I said, "Yes, sir." Afterall, one should learn to say, "Yes, sir" to the mad man so he could make way for one to pass.

You don't mean it!

I do, but that was the greatest mistake of my life. Oko mi Adio now took liberty for licence. 'Gyraffing' and xeroxing became his real business as if he were a WASCE or JAMB candidate. He started lifting messages indiscriminately to 'impress' me. Only God knows whether he did the same for his thugfather. On my last birthday, Oko mi Adio sent me the most unromantic message any spouse could send to his partner. "I never forget my wife's birthday. It's usually the day after she reminds me about it. Happy birthday, Mrs. Adio." I know he lifted it ink, pen and paper. The only new thing there was my name. I ignored him and his message. Then he sent another after waiting, as through for Godot, for my response. "No man is truly married until he understands every word his wife is not saying." That sounded intelligent to me and I told him so. What he sent the following day was even more philosophical: "Marriage is the only war where you sleep with the enemy". I reflected on this message and wondered aloud whether it's not true, indeed, to always learn to endure what one cannot avoid like Oko mi Adio. As if he was reading my mind, another message just came into the inbox: "Love is not finding someone to live with, it's finding someone you can't live without". I called him to ask why this is so. You know what the graceful pig of a chauvinist said? He said the full meaning of wife is actually: "Worries Invited For Ever". I argued why anybody should live with worries at all. If my husband does not love me again, then I should have the right to seek for divorce.

And what's his take on that?

He said divorce is the past tense of marriage and we should rather focus on the present tense which is love and the future tense which is children. Can you believe that? But he agreed that nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes because "there's too much fraternising with the enemy". I asked if I should be considered an enemy. In his usual chauvinistic, arrogant style, he said even if women were in jet fighters or helicopter gunboats, men would always be on top in any war of the sexes. I quickly called off his bluff: "You may conquer with your sword, but you are easily conquered by a kiss". His response was devastating. "Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties". I chuckled to myself, "No wonder some men are empty upstairs despite their huge endowments downstairs".

Sure?!

Note: Valentine Blues first appeared in TELL March 6, 2006

We Steal, We Kill, We Rig…

2011-02-03T07:09:00.000+01:00

Ibadan City Pix: northoflagos.wordpress.com
“No matter how independent you may think you are, he who pays the viper dictates the poison”

Mr. Iru, I am surprised that you could initiate a political party conference without inviting people like me, or is it that you don't know me in this land? Who is your own father nihahin? If you don't know the sea, don't you taste salt in your wife's soup? It’s when people want to demystify the elephant that they say they saw something pass by. It’s a lie! Ajanaku (elephant) is more than "something" passing by. If I'm not the whale, at least I'm a shark, in the Niagaran waters. In this democracy, there is no stakeholder greater than I in our zone. Every politician, including the Owu chief, knows that I'm a free-for-all agent. If you want to be democratically elected before the election, you need to see me or else your pounded yam will turn into ordinary porridge in the mouth... Perhaps, I should introduce myself better. I'm a general political contractor. We beat. We kill. We steal. We rig, sorry, I mean...emmm...we can democratically elect you before the actual election. Ours is general merchandise.

I'm sorry, it's not your type that we want here. This is not democracy of mediocre politicians.

Stop there! Mondioka ko, Mondi amala ni! You think this thing called politics is for alakowe (the elite)? You must be joking. You think politics is child's play? Ah! I'm sorry for me. What a pity! Can you do roforofo fight in the streets? Can you kill? Can you lie three thousand times before the cock crows at dawn? Can you swear for fun with the Koran or the Bible? The real alakowe that I know cannot do these, can they?

Are these the only criteria for participation in Niagaran politics?

What have bacteria got to do with what we are saying?

I didn't say bacteria. What I wanted to know is if these are the only conditions that can make one participate successfully in party politics...

Not enough o! You must have money. You must have mouth...

Beg your pardon? Is there anybody who does not have mouth?

There you are! And that's exactly what we are saying. You are just alakowe for nothing, you don't know anything. Listen to me carefully. You must have money, you must have big mouth or what these larodo (young) people call basket mouth and … emm…plenty juju...

What?! Juju for what?

Look at you! Can't you see all of them just dying like rats all over the place? Before the assassin pulls the trigger, they have fallen down yakata and died, just like that! Is that how to do oselu (politics)? If it's not Ewedu State today, it's Lagoon State tomorrow. And if it's not Osemawe State this week, it's Okitiland next week.

Chief, you mean you still rely on this your useless juju power? As for me, it's blood of Jesus...

Look at you! Who says it is blood of satan that is in his own vein...? A youngster, not knowing danger, sees hand grenade and calls it small pineapple! If you cannot carry a tortoise around on your chest and be ever ready to pull the trigger first before the assassin does, like the mystery man of Ado Okiti did, then you are a goner!

I'm still baffled how you got here, chief.

Don't worry. Actually, my governor is not here because I sent him on an errand to Upper Yemoja River to settle some disputes between the Ibariba and the Fulani herdsmen who are always fighting over grazing land. And as for his deputy, you know that one is my house boy. He was still busy cleaning my bedroom when I decided to come myself.

By the way, who really allowed you in?!

Iru, or what do you call yourself? You have to be very careful when it comes to election in Niagara. You must consult and listen to the elders. If not, you will regret the day you were born, like Henry Nwosu.

You mean the footballer? Has he ever regretted being a footballer?

Who is talking about a footballer? I mean your oga before before. That one overstepped his boundaries by not consulting with the council of elders before releasing the so-called free, fair and peaceful election result. Na peace we go chop? We quickly sent our thugs in uniform after him. Have you heard from him ever since? Those boys dealt with him well, well. They slapped him a little to the right and kicked him a little to the left. He was so dazed that if he saw Babangida then, he would have thought it was Nzeribe he saw. Your own will not be like that o! Say "aamen!!" But let me tell you, to be forewarned is to be forearmed. No matter how independent you may think you are, he who pays the viper dictates the poison...

It’s not like that. It is “he who pays the piper dictates the tune”.

Is it not the same thing? Just let me warn you…

If you will just allow me to talk, sir…

Sure, why not? The slave master cannot be so wicked that he will deny his steward the right to urinate. Spoke on (sic).

With people like you in the corridors of power, there is no hope for the electoral process.

Eeemi?! (Me?!). Who is talking of hope? Politics in Niagara is not for HOPE but GOLD. Have you not heard their excellencies arguing lately?

Over what?

One says his goldmine is big. The other says his is bigger. And they are drawing more daggers as they dig in in their respective holes. While they are at each other's throat, the other parties are making hay on the campaign ground, trying to win the heart of both the men and womenfolk.

What are they saying?

One is trying to woo the male voters by saying: "The other party has been robbing you for eight years, now give us a chance too". Another says to the women: "That party has been killing your husbands' batteries for too long, we are here to revive them with ACiD, insha Allah!".

We are in trouble!

Note: This Opilogue was first published in TELL, September 25, 2006.

Siddon Look. Africa Is Watching

2011-01-31T18:59:00.003+01:00

It's happening again.

What's that?

The wind of change that is blowing across Africa.

Wind of change? You must be joking.

You are the one joking. You mean you are not aware of the happenings in North Africa?

Tell me story. I’m full of ears.

Sure, why not? The wind of revolution is blowing away sit-tight rulers as it did the remaining colonialists in Africa in the 1980s. Tunisia has fallen. Egypt is falling. Algeria is waiting. The wind is even blowing across the Arabian Peninsula. Yemenis are protesting. Jordanians are complaining too. The Arab world is turned upside down. Things are falling apart.

Wonderful! You mean these are happening in the Arab world? How did it happen?

A hungry man is an angry man. In Tunisia the people defied the police. They defied nature. They defied the law of self preservation. They set themselves ablaze. Algerians did the same. Egyptians followed suit like the kami-kaze Japanese pilots. Self immolation they call it.

I just hope the rest of Africans are watching.

Sure. It's "Siddon Look". We are watching. Ivorians are watching. Niagarans are watching. Everybody is watching

Waiting for Mr. Gomina

2011-01-24T17:19:00.001+01:00

“Politics without violence is like Xmas in London without snow, Wallahi!”

Right, left! Left, right!! Right, left!!! They are on the march again. The lilliputians. They are on the march again. Marching to Government House. Left, right. Right, left. Left, right. Some are clenching their fists, ready to fight. They shout, "Pack a punch!" "Power!" Some are holding corn cobs as if ready to feed the hungry but they themselves look so lean and mean that they require urgent "food transfusion". They shout, "Operation Fool Niagara!", "OFN!" Some are carrying brooms as if ready to sweep something under the carpet. They shout, "Corruption for Where!" "Action!" Right, left, right, left, right, left...abouuut turn! This is Radio Wayo. DJ, play me Zombi.... No, play ITT. That's better. "....Like Abusanjo and Obatiku, international tough tough...ITT, international tough tough..." Stop! Second base joh! On the march again...waiting for His Excellency, Mr. Gomina...4-1-9 is our man o! Alaya Biagba is our warrior! Josman is our saint! Okirika man is our saviour o o o!! This governor, na we own!!!

It's a lie! It's a lie!! It's a lie!!!

Who's this?

Jigijigi Bamubamu...

Wait, what kind of name is that? Do you mean Jigijigi Majimaji?

No, I'm Jigijigi Bamubamu, original. I'm calling to let you know that those your lilliputians are going nowhere. It's a lie! We are going to stop them by all means.

How are you going to do that?

We have guns, matchets, swords and daggers...

Stop! Who really are you?

I'm Tokyo Japan!

Wait a minute. But you've just said you are Jigijigi Bamubamu or something to that effect.

Yes. Tokyo Japan is my trade name. I'm a professional killer. I mug. I hug. I shoot. I rob. I kill for anything. Do you have anybody to fight or kill?

No, no, no, don't say that on air, Mr. Japan.

There's nothing new under the sun. Niagaran politics is not sweet without gidigbo and jagidijagan...

Eh! What's that?

Politics without violence is like Xmas in London without snow, wallahi!

Ha! Tokyo Japan!! How dare you? Do you know somebody called Waziri Ibrahim?

Is he an Ibadan man?

Sorry, Mr. Japan, does that name sound Mesiogo? Is that Oluyole name? How old are you?

I am 43, going to 44.

And you say you don't know the late apostle of politics without bitterness?

What concerns me about that? Will that belleful me? I trust our own paymaster. This Saturday, we shall get double pay. We shall also eat plates and plates of amala with abula and orisirisi... at Oga’s place.

Sorry, Mr Tokyo Japan, we have to cut you short. We have another caller on the line. Thank you for being part of the programme but don't forget to shun violence on election day so that we can all live to vote another day....Eh...? Who's this? Kareem Oji...what? Oh, Ojikutu? What a name early in the morning! Ahaaa...Ojikutu laro kutukutu... It’s obvious you are boiling and bubbling with energy kutukutu! I like that. My brother, how're you doing? What's going on?

Sorry, my name is Kareem Ojikutu, not Ojikutu Laro Kutukutu. Please take note of that. Yes...I was listening to the last speaker and I'm really pissed off...

Eh, eh, eh...watch your language. You do not say that on air. What exactly do you want to say?

Sorry, I mean it's very disgusting to hear somebody say he has guns and matchets. What for? Is he an alapata (butcher)? Haba! The only weapon against the ugly lilliputians is our vote. Niagarans must put on their thinking caps. The lilliputians are only coming again to loot the treasury.

Beg your pardon! Who says?

Hear them making empty promises. Free air, free water. Free women, free husbands, free injuries, free deaths, free mortuaries....free this, free that. One even promised to build bridges for Niagarans in the Sahel Savannah and when they reminded him that there are no rivers in that region, he said they should not worry, he would either set up labs to manufacture beautiful rivers or import them from Europe to flow under the bridges immediately he is voted into power!

Waoh! You don't mean that, do you? Could you please tell the kind lilliputian to move fast by air-freighting the rivers when he comes to power in order to beat the people's expectation....Yes, who is this?

I am Jacob Essien. My friends call me Johnny Hotdog.

Are you from Calabar?

No. I'm from Oron.

What's the difference?

By the way, why are you asking?

I thought you said you are hot dog.

And so what?

I'm so sorry. I was just thinking of your personal safety.

You mean the likes of Tokyo may take offence over what I intend to say? Who cares?!

It appears we are operating on two different wavelengths. Okay, forget it. What have you got to say?

I think our lilliputians are just great on abuses but small on issues. They are too busy abusing the incumbent office holders that they forget to espouse their own motives for seeking power. Somebody told me the other day that the election results had already been compiled but I disagree vehemently over that. Methinks Niagara is too advanced for that. Or what do you think?

I think of Ondo ’83 when the riggers rigged so well that the voters went mad. I think of Rivers ’03 when all the voters incredibly voted for only one candidate in an election. I also think of the day when the he-goat went to the market and failed to return.

You are right, my brother. Every day is for the thief; one day is for the owner.

Ohimai, I hear you.

What’s Ohimai?

That’s the in-thing in Lagos now. Just check it out!

Presidential Debate Live !

2011-01-13T18:04:00.002+01:00

"Women, arise! Drop the flower! Grab the power!! This is our chance to show that we can do better. Yes, they have always been on top while they rule us. This is our time to pin them down and show them how to do it (yes, you heard me well, no pun intended though)."

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. The Presidential debate has started and I hereby call on Alhaji Abdulhaziz Article to come and tell the delegates why he thinks he is the one to carry our party's ticket. Over to you, Alhaji.

Thank you and, please, allow me to go to my points straight away. As a former Vee-Pee nobody qualifies more than I do, most especially after having served under the mercurial General who thinks he can bamboozle anybody. I fought him to a standstill. I guess my fighting spirit qualifies me more than anybody else. But that notwithstanding, I'm a gentleman who believes in agreements. I believe so much in zoning that I zoned my household by marrying six wives from the six geopolitical zones in the country. I already have Hausa, Kanuri, Igbo, Nupe and Yoruba wives. Very soon I'll add an Ijaw woman to my harem though she has to be properly screened to make sure she is not a tokunbo (fairly used) MEND wife. I'm aware that many people are wondering how I'd get money to finance all the national projects. Let me assure you that I have enough personal money to prosecute these projects. This is part of the change philosophy that I've been preaching. Finally, let me emphasise that there will be no more religious riots the very moment I'm sworn in as the next executive president of the Federal Republic of Niagara, insha Allah.

Thank you, Alhaji. Shall we now call on the Owelle of Otuoke, Jonattan Nnamdi to tell us why we should vote for him.

Pee Dee Pee!

Pawa!

Thank you very much. If my opponent says he was once a Vee-Pee I want to say I have been more than that. I was Vee-Pee, Acting Presido and now Presido. I was also Deputy Chairman, Acting Chairman, Chairman (Niagara), Chairman (ECOWAS) and Chairman (Oloibiri Descendants’ Union). I'm sure you will be wondering why I still want to be President. The answer is simple. I need to establish a strong foothold in the polity by extending my magic wand to every nook and corner. As for the argument on zoning let me say I don't believe in it at all. That's why I have only one wife. Mine is one man, one wife. One man, one vote. One angry man, one matchet. One nation, one destiny. Why do I need more than one wife when our people believe that one wife is equal to one trouble? Therefore, it follows that six wives will be equal to six troubles! Niagara is enough trouble for any president. My opponent also claims that he has enough personal money to carry out the nation's responsibilities. Good. As for me I have no such money but come to Oloibiri and you’ll see a bottomless well of crude money. With this kind of money I can assure you that Niagara will, by 2013, be producing 16 megawatts of electricity for our tiny population of 150 million!!!! At this juncture let me assure you that if you vote for me there will be no more kidnapping, no more pipeline vandalisation and no bomb explosions. Finally, ladies and gentlemen, I want to say before every man and woman present here today that I don't have a kobo (penny) abroad but plenty of goodwill on FaceBoob (yes, you hear me well), inexhaustible good luck on the corridor of power and abundant patience at the homefront.

We shall now call on Mrs Jubrilla Aminu to round up with her own argument.

Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Everybody knows me as the stubborn she-goat that never gives up. I'm brave, bold and beautiful. I'm resillient, tenacious and, even, pugnacious! The harder the men intimidate me, the harder I kick their underbelly. I don't mind being the perennial presidential candidate. Who cares? I'll always show my face. Men are good for nothing. The only good one among them is a loverboy, nay, gigolo! They must be confronted whether on FaceBoob or BackBoob on whatever! During the day they do gragra, displaying fake muscles, only to fall like a pack of cards at night. They are useless. Women, arise! Drop the flower! Grab the power!! This is our chance to show that we can do better. Yes, they have always been on top while they rule us. This is our time to pin them down and show them how to do it (yes, you heard me well, no pun intended though). Vote for me, vote for gender equality, affirmative action and free, qualitative beauty treatment in all salons in the federation! Yes, give me a place to stand and I'll shake the world!

Hear! Hear!! Hear!!!

Pastors, Impostors and Liars

2010-12-02T12:18:00.003+01:00

‘My husband] believes that there is no other business that pays more than church business and he is bent on setting up a ministry or church…’

My friend, I guess you must have been wondering where I've been since all these days. Well, you don't have to worry. I dey kampe like the husband of my Egba friend would say. The only problem is Oko mi Adio who has been causing one wahala or the other since they laid him off at his work place.

Can't he look for another job?

Thank you o! The problem with my husband is that he just wants to get rich quick and I have suggested many things he could do to achieve this but he would not listen to me.

Maybe what you are suggesting is not promising or lucrative enough.

Haba! Except he wants to become an armed robber! I suggested to him to set up a police force but he said there's no difference between police job and armed robbery. Can you believe that? When he said this I almost puked on behalf of the police.

If you did that, you would just have wasted your vomit. The police is not worth dying for since they can't even die for anybody, anyway.

Don't you know that he must be out of his mind? I said, okay, if you don't want police job, how about going into politics? He agreed there is plenty of money in politics but he said he could not stand the wahala (trouble). He said he cannot allow anybody to turn him into a punch bag in their wuruwuru assembly because of constituency allowance or get riddled with bullets from the assassin's gun because of a mere political disagreement.

I don't blame him. Why should anybody die like a chicken because of "chicken change"? You mean your husband calls all the "biribiri" (illicit) money in politics "chicken change"?

I could reason with him, too. So I suggested to him to set up an embassy and be issuing visas for those going to Britain or America, Hong Kong or Taiwan? I know he could be making between two and three million naira per day, five times a week. I thought he would gladly accept to do this because consular business is a very lucrative business in Niagara because everybody wants to check out like Andrew. Actually you can't blame the willing immigrants who want to break the yoke of internal slavery and escape into the land of perceived freedom where dollars are being picked on city pavements. But Oko mi Adio also rejected that. He said he would prefer another means of making money without sweating.

And which was that?

Do you know what Oko mi Adio said? Alakori e (the ne'er do well) did not mince words telling me that he wanted to set up a church and be its pastor or bishop.

What?! You mean your husband said that? Does he think there's money in church business?
Oko mi Adio believes there is no other business that pays more than church business and he is bent on setting up a ministry or church or whatever catches his fancy.

This "oko re Adio" (this Adio, your husband)must be a strange specimen of humanity.What the hell does he mean? I bet he cannot be serious.

You still do not know who oko mi Adio is. He is more than serious. For the past few months, he has been going everywhere to gather information on his project of setting up a church. The problem he has encountered is that of choosing an appropriate name for his company. It's a big dilemma for him.

Hasn't he seen some samples in town?

Yes, he has. The problem is this, he doesn't know which name to use or adopt out of the myriad of names he has come across. His feasibility study suggests that the church is a goldmine. He said he would be the pastor in charge while I, his wife, would be the Grand Matron and our son, Jimoh Omi Adio Jnr, would be the chief accountant. I said "no be me and you". I said I would not want to become the grand matron of Kirikiri Prison when the EFCC (detectives) start probing the accounts of churches. He said I should not worry my soul. But how about a name for his ministry or church? The other day, oko mi Adio showed me some names and I was equally overwhelmed not by their sheer number but what he interprets the names to be. At least, you have to give my husband that; he is as witty as they come. When I pointed out what should be the name for his church, he just waved it off immediately. It was the same story for others.
What reasons does he have for rejecting them?

Oko mi Adio is both cynical and skeptical. He looks at every name through the prism of pessimism.

Whao! Can you give examples?

Plenty. When he saw HOUSE OF JEHOVAH's PADAWANS, he did not hesitate to dismiss it as a dogmatic Calabar church where they speak in tongues after eating too much of dog meat. As for GOD'S MENNONITE CHURCH, he said he has nothing to do with a 16th century church where the emphasis is on adult baptism and, perhaps, late circumcision. He said only randy men will like to be pastors of such ministries. As for OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY CHURCH, he gave credit to the owners for being honest enough about their intention and forewarning whoever may think of joining them to think twice before handing over their wallets. Definitely he would not name his own ministry like that. For GOD IN ACTION MINISTRIES, he just concluded that money must flow to oil the wheels of progress. But he has questions for the MOVING MOUNTAIN GOSPEL CHURCH. "Have they moved Mount Kilimanjaro from where it has been all these ages?” As for this funny one, MY BROTHER IS A CHRISTIAN CHURCH OF GOD, he has an option, how about MY SISTER IS A MUSLIM CHURCH OF ALLAH? According to him, what is good for Jesus is also good for Mohammed.

Mrs Adio, don't let us waste time. Just give me the list and let me read to you one by one while you let me have your husband's interpretation or reaction to each of them.

Good idea. Now, have it.

Here we go: DEVIL GO HEAR AM JESUS MINISTRY.

"Sermon topic or name of a church?"

ACCREDITED CHURCH OF GOD.

"Perhaps the only one licensed to clean people’s wallets".

POWER PASS POWER CHURCH OF THE MOUNTAIN MINISTRY INCORPORATED.

"True talk, especially when scriptures collide with incantations".

LABORATORY CHURCH OF GOD

"Where 'miracle babies' are manufactured".

GOD IS REAL MINISTRY. (MOTTO: JESUS NO GET MUSCLE BUT HE GET POWER)

"Sure, who no know say akpu power pass amala power?"

FIRE BURNS MINISTRIES

"Then call the fire department!"

TRIGGER HAPPY MINISTRY

"Exclusive for drunk police and extra-judicial killers".

JESUS OF GOD MISSION

"Precision! No waffling. No dragging. No dilly-dallying. Just straight to the point. Thank God, this is not Jesus of Oyingbo ministry".

GUIDED MISSILES

"For remote control during spiritual bomb attacks"

FACE TO FACE MINISTRY

"Definitely this is what remains of 'Face to Face Pools Agency' of the Kessington Adebutu days. Unfortunately after losing their savings on pools betting, church members may have nothing left for the Lord.”

EL SHADDAI SHALL NOT DIE MINISTRIES

"They say El-sha-ddai (El shall die) shall not die. This is Ministry of Confusion where people may not know whether to donate naira or dollar"

GO AND TELL AHAB THAT ELIJAH IS HERE MINISTRIES

"Why not 'Go Tell It on the Mountain that Liars are Here?"

The Maradona in Me

2010-11-22T07:10:00.002+01:00

*Arthur Nzeribe

‘If another civil war breaks out now, I’m more than eager to sell the latest weapons of mass destruction to both the federal side and the new Biafrans’

“I have a President nicknamed ‘Maradona’, who has done everything he said he would not do, and has not done everything he said he would do. My President set out initially trying to be loved by all and to please all but ends up being doubted by all for being unpredictable and contradictory… He dribbles and joggles Nigerians better than Maradona does with football players, but does he score with the ‘hand of God’ as Maradona does? My distant view and assessment of my President is that of a consummate soldier, leader, strategist, ruthless and selfish politician whom we believe to be a humanist, an opportunist in the political arena, a good manipulator of men and circumstances, by his own admission ‘a law breaker,’ having participated in all but one of the illegal acts of coup-making in Nigeria.”

Wait, Arthur. You mean you once wrote all these about the new president-in-waiting?

Sure. But you haven’t seen or heard anything yet. Just let me continue reading out my views about him… “He is a man who does not completely break with his enemies, nor completely embraces his friends, there is an iron fist inside the gloves; thus a winner in the deadly game of power. The only Nigerian leader so far, both from the military and civilian folds, who appreciates what power is all about and uses it effectively for his own ends as do most rulers…”

Wait a minute. I still don’t understand why you have chosen this portion of your book to read to the audience during the literary fiesta for Kongi’s birthday.

How naïve can you be? Open your eyes and read between the lines… “Like Maradona, my President is the best in his chosen trade, to wit, soldiering, and by public acclaim, the best juggler and dribbler in the art of governance and politics in the Nigerian scene since independence. I admire certain qualities in my President. In fact, I see a bit of me in him. My President is bold, courageous, fearless and full of enterprise. He is cunning and foxy. I am. He knows what he wants, plans for it and goes for it deliberately, believing that the end justifies the means.”

Wayo, Allah! Chei!! So, this is why you have chosen to read from your last book — Nigeria: Seven Years After Shehu Shagari? You mean you want to launder the image of this man again?

If the price is right, why not? After all, after revealing all the skeletons in Maradona’s cupboard in 1990, I was still readily available to serve the self-interest of the military president and his henchmen in aborting the June 12 election. But, actually, that’s not my motive for reading those excerpts from my book. If you read between the lines, you’d see Maradona’s character sketch, and my own self-portrait as a cunning, foxy businessman. This is not meant as self-advertisement but as an attempt to explain my roles so far in the polity. Since 1999, you’d have seen my finger in every controversial, if not stinking pie in the House. Wherever the beef was you were likely to see me as the butcher. If you want to cut any senator or representative down to size, or pieces, you can always count on my dexterity with the knife. And this, perhaps, explains to you why I am the vulture-in-waiting, ready to perch on the carcasses and corpses left on the battle field after the gun smoke would have cleared from the Panambra crisis.

Ah! You mean you are the hawk in the proverb who feeds fat on sacrifice? That is immoral.

Imo-what?! There is no morality in business and don’t forget that I am first and foremost a businessman. Everything I do is an extension of my business frontiers and, like the Maradona in the script, the end justifies the means. If another civil war breaks out now, I’m more than eager to sell the latest weapons of mass destruction to both the federal side and the new Biafrans. Whatever each party does with the goods bought is not my headache. Mine is to sell and collect my own money.

So, you live on blood money?

Stupid man. In business, there is no blood money. Profit is both the watchword and the password or have you ever heard of anybody who goes into business with the aim of going bankrupt?

No, but, at least, there should be a little bit of morality and rationality.

My friend, you are cunningly dragging me into the realm of ethics and I can assure you that I’m not one to shy away from arguments. If you have read my other books, you’d realise that I depend on the power of logic to canvass my views and opinions. I don’t dance to suit anybody’s drumbeat and rhythm. Neither do I play to the gallery. I am a businessman through and through. By the way, do you know how I secured my ticket to this destination? I had to fight my political opponents right from the NPN days, thug for thug, naira for naira, rice for rice, garri for garri, okporoko for okporoko and ogbono soup for ogbono soup, and my voters, sorry, my people, love me for this. They see me as the Oyibo (white man) of business and Enyimba (elephant) of cash-and-carry politics. So, they combined the two and gave me the title of Oyi-nba of Okuta. My people are as creative as the blacksmiths of Awka.

Which means you truly have a pedigree of creativity. Which other titles are we expecting from you and how soon?

The first one is Obasanjo: Another Hope Betrayed. This is meant to prepare the ground for the next president, the way Buhari and Idiagbon were shoved aside from the political scene. Don’t ask me who commissioned the book because I don’t want to be accused of being a double agent. The second is Maradona: Return of the Political Nymphomaniac while the third is Nigeria: A Nation in Captivity, a major book on which I have been working since the military seized power in 1966.

I hope these are not satanic verses?

How can? Will you call The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli, a satanic write-up? They are just products of my creative imagination. No more, no less.

Arthur, the Prince!

Ummh, yes, but call me the Maradona!

*This Opilogue was first published in TELL on February 23, 2004.

I'm a Lesbian! And So What?

2010-11-11T07:05:00.002+01:00

*Ms Garner and partner Ms. Johnson (photo by GettyImages)

“…Being gay or lesbian is no crime. They should always tell anybody heckling them over their sexuality to shut up or go to hell”

Eh, you intern, come here! Tomorrow you are going to the City Hall to talk to Ms Darlene Garner, the new director of the Commission for Sexual Minorities, CSM. I hope you know what that means.

What's that, Mr. Wood? I am at a loss.

You don't have to be. Ms Garner is a lesbian and you must talk to her about the activities of her commission and, if you like, for your own personal consumption, you can ask her questions about her sexual preference.

And she would not take offence?

Why should she? This is an open society. Moreover, you are covered under the First Amendment...

You don't mean it! In Niagara, you dare not ask any lady that kind of question. She would slap okro seeds out of your mouth!

Why?

Homosexuality is a taboo!

Well, there are no taboos or Talibans here. This is America. Just go ahead and ask her any question under the sun and we expect a good story from you. Good luck.

*** *** ***

Good morning, Ms Garner.

Hi, are you the guy from the City Metro?

Yes, madame.

Cut that crap. You can call me Darlene.

Darling? Sure! That’s great!!

No, D-A-R-L-E-N-E, like in Helen.

Oh, I see. It's a pleasure meeting you, all the same.

'Xcuse me!

I said I'm happy to be here.

Youuu... welcome.

Can we start this interview by having you tell our readers what the Commission on Sexual Minorities, CSM, stands for.

Thank you. Let me start by giving a brief background of the commission. The CSM came into being by executive order from the mayor shortly after winning the mayoral election in 1984. Actually, the idea of the commission came from other members of the gay/lesbian community who expressed, during the mayor's campaign, that there are a number of issues and needs that were of particular interest to the gay and lesbian community that had been ignored by previous administrations or, at least, that had not been dealt with effectively. So, one of the campaign promises that the mayor made was to, indeed, create a vehicle for the gay/lesbian community to have a voice within the city administration. Going back to your question, our concerns are on behalf of those people who, indeed, are or are perceived as gays, lesbians and bisexuals.

Precisely, how many gays and lesbians are there in this city?

It is impossible to determine the precise number of gays and lesbians but a number of studies have been conducted in various parts of the country that have projected that at least 10 per cent of any population group is gay or lesbian.

If I may ask, are you a lesbian yourself?

Yes, of course. I am a lesbian.

Does it run in the family?

As far as I know, I am the only one of my siblings who is a gay or lesbian.

So, when did you become conscious of your being a lesbian?

Within our community, we call it "coming out". I was... hmmm... I first became conscious of my lesbianism in the early 1970s... Actually, I have pinpointed the year 1972 as the time I acknowledged to myself, my family and the public, whoever the public might be defined as being, that I am a lesbian. I told my family "I want you to meet the rest of me" and they have been very supportive. I was 24 then and single. Since then, I have had two marriages and subsequently two divorces, though not as a result of being a lesbian. I now live with a partner, a fellow lesbian.

This, indeed, must be God's own country. You have a supportive family and a caring government that sets up a commission to take care of the interest of sexual minorities. In Niagara, the issue of homosexuality is a closet affair. Woe betides people suspected of being gay or lesbian. They dare not come into the open and this explains why those labelled gays or lesbians can go to any lengths to deny their sexuality. An ex-beauty queen has denied being a lesbian many times. A popular actress has done the same. A successful lawyer, believed to be a homosexual, has used all the legal jargons in the statute book to deny his sexual orientation. A famous male artist also denied sleeping with fellow men. Not only the ordinary folks have been so labelled. Military officers, ex-military governors and, even, a former military head of state had been fingered as homosexuals but they all denied because of societal repercussion. My question is this: Is there anything you can do to help these people who, afterall, did not create themselves homosexuals?

My greatest ambition in life is to be able to do ministry fulltime because people of faith who are gay or lesbian suffer certain social and political realities by virtue of their sexual orientation... By taking to the pulpit, I can have another avenue to influence their lives.

But don't you foresee the kind of crisis that arose over the consecration of a gay clergyman in the Anglican Church?

No, I do not. This is because I'm in a church that is not opposed to having a gay or lesbian as a clergy. Almost all of our clergy are gays and lesbians. It is called the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches. It has over 200 churches in the US as well as in Mexico, Canada, Niagara, Indonesia, Britain... with its headquarters in Los Angeles.

You mean there is a gay church in Niagara?

Oh, sure! In fact, the church there is growing, if it hasn’t had more branches already.

What message, then, do you have for fellow gays and lesbians?

They should believe in themselves and be proud of the way God has made them. Being gay or lesbian is no crime. They should always tell anybody heckling them over their sexuality to shut up or go to hell. Yes! They should say: "God made me me and made you you. I am not you; you are not me. I can never be you and you can never be me. So, why not let me be me because you are not God?".

I'M A LESBIAN! AND SO WHAT? is a surreal presentation of an interview the writer had some years ago with Ms Darlene Garner, co-founder, National Coalition of Black Lesbians and former executive director of the Mayor's Commission on Sexual Minorities in Philadelphia, PA, USA.

*This Opilogue was first published in TELL on February 5, 2007.

Why Our Own Baba Must Rule

2010-10-19T07:00:00.001+01:00

‘I trust our baba who art in Minna… He spends like there is no tomorrow because his philosophy of life is eat and let’s eat’

On behalf of the Elders Ernestly Ask for Baba Movement, EEABM, a.k.a Project 007, I, Chief Alex Ekimogun, the Ogidi Omo of Ondoland, hereby assert that the only way by which Niagara can move forward is by handing the baton of power back to our father, come 2007. I am singularly happy, pleased and grateful to God that I had the unrivalled honour, pleasure, privilege and luck to have served Baba before, in the capacity of a Public Megaphone. For reasons that I will soon enumerate, you will agree with me that Baba is our best bet under the prevailing political conditions. He is a consummate general, a master strategist and an extremely cunning politician. He is, indeed, a fox extraordinaire. It is such a person we need inside the Rock when Baba Iyaboh vacates the place. Somebody who will say ‘what a rainy day!’ and we shall have to consult the weatherman for confirmation, not somebody who will say ‘good morning’ and we shall all be scrambling for the breakfast table.

Fellow elders and the youths who are old at heart, this is our time. Let’s get rid of those who are pretending to be working. We want a new set of practical and realistic politicians like Baba. Not people who will turn us to football and be kicking us around. We need an Okocha or a Maradona to run rings on the periphery of our consciousness and score hand-of-God goals from all angles. Our baba is the man. He is a goal-getter any day. Do you remember how he used his god-fatherly figure in 1985 to save drug couriers from untimely deaths, after Bartholomew Owoh and co had already been executed by Buhari and Idiagbon? Our father saved other young aspiring drug couriers who would have met the same kind of death. In fact, this is the kind of saviour we elders earnestly ask for. Baba used his messianic touch, also, to stop further dismissal of decently corrupt civil servants and premature retirement of erring army officers. Our father can also be very resolute in fighting for the fundamental rights of his citizens. When Dele Giwa, the founding editor-in-chief of Newswatch, was killed in 1986 by unknown assailants, who used the novel weapon of a parcel bomb to achieve their aim, he stood up firmly in support of every effort to unravel the cold-blooded murder. He even encouraged my town’s man, Gani Fawehinmi, to pursue the case independently by jailing him in order to have free access to his client. Niagarans need such a concerned, considerate man to come back to power, a man who, even out of power, still continued to fight for the interest of murder victims. At the Oputa panel, for instance, he did everything possible to exhume the bones of Giwa for further forensic analysis but, alas, he had no digging implements. If he comes back to power, you can be sure that the case would be finally consigned to where it should belong.

Today, everybody is talking about corruption but nobody seems to know what to do. My father, our father, knows exactly what to do. During his first coming, he abolished corruption by simply erasing the word from all the dictionaries in the country and replaced it with ‘settlement’. It was a master stroke. Everybody was, thereafter, settled fifty-fifty, no cheating. And corruption disappeared from our sub-conscious. When Baba introduced the Structural Adjustment Programme, SAP, people thought he was being unfair to the masses. No, baba was just being pragmatic. Every government needs SAP to sap the energy of stubborn activists like Beko, Falana, Gani, Sani and their equally stubborn followers. After all, if you don’t have food in your stomach, where will you get the energy with which to shout “Aluta!” on the streets? Not to talk of shouting, “Baba Must Go!” For his native intelligence, we need such a man back in the saddle of power. He is a man who can dance out of trouble any day. When all the armed forces chiefs were appointed from the same geographical zone and from the same religious background, baba explained it away matter-of-factly, and I want to quote him: “In the military, there is no north or south, neither is there Muslim or Christian. Appointment is simply by merit.” Every fool was disarmed. The current Baba cannot be that logical. When there was a stalemate after the June 12, 1993 presidential election, my father, our father, was at his best. “You want a president?” he asked the nation as he looked into his crystal ball. “I’ll give you one.” True, true, he gave us a lame duck, Ernest Showboy. And the one who turned out to be the Commander-in-Thief of the Armed Robbers. Baba achieved what others could not achieve for decades. He conducted the fairest, freest and most peaceful election in modern Niagaran history though the Chief Electoral Officer swallowed the official result ink, line and paper. Fellow Niagarans, give baba another chance to do another June 12 and he will force the erring electoral officer out of hiding to come and vomit the result kia kia. It gives me, therefore, immeasurable pleasure, unparalleled joy and unqualified privilege to recommend our baba in Minna to succeed your Baba in Aso Rock. He is the only person who can sustain the status quo in the villa as it is today. He is more liberal than the Sharia man who will refuse to be sworn in (if elected) as president until the unwanted and unwarranted chapel in Aso Rock had been uprooted.

I trust our baba who art in Minna. He will give everybody his daily bread because he is not tight-fisted like the Egba farmer in the Rock. He spends like there is no tomorrow because his philosophy of life is eat and let’s eat. Many people like me seized the opportunity to make hay while he was in power. This is why he was able to make millionaires of his friends and those who can genuflect and dobale like me. Thus, I am imploring all who aspire to be billionaires to join the league of Baba’s friends clamouring for his second coming. Let me warn you, however, that he is not a magician but he has a creative mind of the Luciferian school of thought. During his first coming, he created new parties, one a little to the right, the other a little to the left. The rhythm of his creative imagination was good enough to win a Grammy Award for Niagara. And for each party, he created new members and officers and also the party secretariats in each local government. I heard that some people are already bellyaching, asking why is it that only generals are supposed to be ruling us even under a democratic dispensation? Why not? We, full-fledged bloody civilians, cannot do it. The soldiers are our husbands and our fathers. We must continue to recycle them. We have already started with General Baba Iyaboh. Now is the turn of our father in Minna, the people’s general. He is a tested officer and gentleman who has learnt never to step aside again. Once beaten, thrice shy. His experience will perfect our future. Check it out.

With him in power, Niagara will be totally free of corruption, assassinations, drug trafficking, 419, premature retirement, incoherent policies, unfocused political activism, ill-advised revolutions of the Gideon Orkar School of Artillery Thought, annulment of elections, wasteful spending and wastage by letter bombs. But mark you, fair is foul; foul is fair. That’s his new old philosophy. Vote for the general to safeguard the future of democracy in Niagara. He did it in 1993. He can do it again. He is a genius! He is a personification of experience. Above all, he is indispensable and infallible.

*This Opilogue was first published in TELL on January 5, 2004.

Sermon on the Mountain

2010-10-11T07:27:00.002+01:00

“I have a dream that one day, on the sand dunes of the Caliphate, the sons of the dongaris and the sons of former sultans will be able sit down and eat tuwo together…”

I am Martin Dauda Turaki Jnr, and I am happy to be with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration of our collective resolve to fight residual military dictatorship in our democracy. For more than 50 years, our forefathers fought the colonial masters to secure our political freedom. But 46 years later, the Niagaran is still in bondage. Forty-six years later, the Niagaran is still crippled by the manacles of dictatorship and self-righteousness. Forty-six years later, the Niagaran lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a mighty ocean of opulence. Forty-six years later, the Niagaran is still languished in the corners of an intolerant primitive society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we have come here today on this hallowed ground of Tafawa Balewa Square, Lagos, to dramatise our opposition to a shameful political situation.

In a sense, we have come to the nation's commercial capital to cash a cheque. And lest I forget, when the neo-architects of our republic wrote the captivating words of the 1999 Constitution and the Declaration of Independence from Military Usurpers, they were signing a promisory note of which every Niagaran was to become heir. This note was a promise that all Niagarans, yes, men as well as women, would be guaranteed the "unalienable rights" of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". It is obvious today that Niagara has defaulted on this promisory note, in so far as the talakawa are concerned. Instead of honouring this sacred obligation, Niagara has given the common man a dud cheque which has bounced back, like a rubber ball, marked "re-present, insufficient funds". But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are no sufficient funds in the central bank of opprtunity of this great country. But let me assure you that we are going to cash this cheque, a cheque that will give us, upon demand, the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

Fellow Action-men and Congress-women, we have also come to this hallowed spot that used to be the racecourse for the colonial masters to remind the powers that be of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to waffle or to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to swallow the valium of gradualism. The youths and the generality of our people are becoming restive. Now is is the time to make real the promised dividends of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of civilian dictatorship to the sunlit path of participatory democracy. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children. Let me warn that it would be fatal for the nation to everlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering heat of a growing revolution will not pass until there is an invigorating sunshine of freedom and equality. Take note that 2007 is not an end in itself but just another beginning. And those who hope that the Niagaran needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening when the nation returns to monkey business as usual...

Congress-men and women! I am not unaware of the fact that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you came from the narrow cells of emotional jail because you refused to succumb to one man's inordinate ambition. And some of you have come from where your quest for political freedom and economic independence left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality and the barkings of EFCC. Do not worry. Children of God should fear no foe. Yes, you have been victims of "creative persecution" but you should continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Gombe, go back to Aba, go back to Sapele, go back to Yola, go back to Yenagoa, go back to the slums and ghettos of our cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed, insha Allah!

My people, let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I promise you that with this broom in my hand, we shall sweep away political intolerance, moral deliquency, religious bigotry, social injustice, abuse of power and unbriddled contempt for the rule of law by those who are supposed to be the custodians of the law!

Action-men and women! I stand before you today to give hope where there is none, to give courage where everybody else has turned a coward and to put my life on the line in the absence of true, genuine "heroes". Some of you may call me the reluctant rebel or a rabble rouser with a death wish but these are times that call for self-sacrifice and, if need be, martyrdom. I have a dream today! I have a dream that our tomorrow will be better than our today. Yes, I have a dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of our constitutional provision, to wit, that all men are created equal, and that nobody, no matter how powerful, is above the law. I have a dream that one day, on the sand dunes of the Caliphate, the sons of former dongaris and the sons of former sultans will be able to sit down and eat tuwo together from the same bowl at the table of equality. I have a dream that one day, even the Niger Delta, a region sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. Yes, I have a dream... that my four wives and their little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the character of their husband and father but by the content of their own character.

I have a dream today! I have a dream that one day, down in Anambra, with its vicious anarchists always on the prowl, with its godfather having his lips dripping with the words of "imposition", "rigging", "impeachment" and "nullification"...one day, right there in Anambra, the rampaging Bakassi boys and Bakassi girls will be able to hug and join hands with the true fighters of democracy and jointly say: Free at last! Free at last!!

I have a dream today! I have a dream that one day, every valley shall be exalted, and the Obudu hills in Cross River State as well as the Alantika mountains of Adamawa State and the Jos Plateau in Plateau State shall be made low, the rough roads plain, and the crooked places straight...

This is our hope, and this is the faith I go back to Abuja with.

With this faith, we will be able to chip out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the discordant tunes of our anthems, old and new, into a beautiful symphony of nationhood. With this faith, we wil be able to work together, pray together, struggle together, go to jail together and stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day. And that will be the day...the day when all of us will be able to sing with new meaning that... though tribe and tongue may differ/In brotherhood we stand.

Sermon on the Mountain is an adaptation of the famous "I Have a Dream" speech by Martin Luther King Jr, late civil rights leader, in Jim Crow America, August 28, 1963.

*This Opilogue was first published in TELL on January 22, 2007.

50 Hearty Cheers to Our Politicians!

2010-10-01T07:24:00.005+01:00

"We got our independence on a platter of gold in 1960 and 50 years after, we are still behaving like the prodigal son who never suffered any want”

Good morning, students. And how're you all?

We are fine, sir.

Good. Today's political science class is going to focus on what present and past world leaders and philosophers have said about politics and we shall examine how these apply to our own experience. First is Thomas Payne, the 18th century American political philosopher. He may be famous for his books, 'The Rights of Man' and 'The Age of Reason' but right in America he is better remembered for the role he played during the American Revolution. His words: "These are times that try men's souls", he declared on the eve of the war of independence from the British. "Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. It's dearness that gives everything its value". Who can decode that to suit our own political environment?

I, sir. The man is perfectly correct. We got our independence on a platter of gold in 1960 and 50 years after, we are still behaving like the prodigal son who never suffered any want. We have squandered our riches on vanity, chasing shadows all over the place and catching none.

Okay, okay...Any other contribution?

Yes, sir. We don't seem to know the value of what we have and that's why we don't show respect for our national flag or anthem. All over the world Niagarans are known as the only nationals that don't give a damn about their national pride. Visit America on July 4 and see the display of the American flag in every home, on every car and at every public place. Here the nation's birthday is nobody's business because we did not sweat blood to become independent. Go to Zambia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia, South Africa and even Ethiopia that was never colonised and see genuine smile on everybody's face on their national days. Here, what you see is larcerated smile on shattered faces because the politicians have continued to let down the nation....

Okay! Let me introduce the next speaker and what he has to say. Hear him: "No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people", Walter Lippmann in 'Revolution and Culture: A Preface to Politics'. What's your understanding of this?

As for me, I think the man is saying that education is key to the understanding of how democracy works. Democracy is not working in Niagara not only because of the attitude of the politicians but also as a result of the low or lack of education of the electorate...

Let me cut you short by introducing Bertrand Rusell and what he said in 1958 in 'Silhouettes in Satire'. "If one man offers you democracy and another offers you a bag of (rice), at what stage of starvation will you prefer the (rice) to the vote?". Can anybody put this in perspective? Yes, Alex.

This one na kongi, sir!

How do you mean?

I mean this is a tough one. But let me try my best. I believe a poor, hungry man will not even think about democracy at all before opting for the bag of rice. To him democracy of the stomach is superior to any form of government. And the uneducated man? He cannot differentiate his left from his right. Definitely he will also opt for the grain. This is exactly what has been happening since independence. The politicians and the few educated but selfish elite in government underfeed and undereducate the masses in order to keep them perpetually in bondage.

What you are saying, in essence, is that the status quo ante remains because poverty and ignorance remain weapons of repression in the land. Good but how about this as a warning of repercussion? "If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich", President J. F. Kennedy said this in his inaugural address on January 20, 1961...Eh! Hold it! Take this also for measure, "Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime", says Aristotle, the great philosopher in 'Poiltic'. Now, you can react.

Sir, I think Aristotle has preempted me. All these political shenanigans will have to come to an end one day whether we like it or not. And, if I may add, sir, the problem is not peculiar to Niagara except that the rest of the world looks up to this once-upon-a-time giant in the sun to lead the way in bringing about a sort of politico-economic renaissance in the continent to prove that we, indeed, can make the difference. Permit me, sir, to also quote a former American ambassador in Kenya who was contributing his views on the political changes then taking place in Africa. He said and I quote, "Africa missed the industrial revolution which formed the basis of modern democracy in the West". That may be true but my worry is why Africa through the African Union cannot initiate an agrarian revolution and become the food basket for the rest of the world. Instead we are better known for our "African tigers and lions". Sheer bunkum! Niagara should be at the forefront of this kind of initiative...

Shh! You want to spoil a good argument. Niagara is in no mood for any revolution whether political or agrarian or ethical. Ours is a system of "anything goes". But lest I forget, let me remind you that what that ambassador was saying is that democracy without a strong economy is a blatant dream. Unfortunately in our own case politicians think the art of governance is not a serious business and thereby don't give a hoot seeing the ship of state drifting in the sea of uncertainty for the greater part of the country's 50 years of independence...

Sir, I think they are all a pack of jokers.

Why do you say so?

It's only a joker who would say the art of governance is not a serious one. Sir, I humbly submit that politics is serious business. Even a circus show is a serious business. Acrobatic displays in mid air can, indeed, be fun but it's serious business all the same.

Well, I have listened to all your contributions and I just want to remind you that the average Niagaran politician is a lotus eater and that's why they keep coming back like locusts. You should not take them serious. The current hooplah and shouts over who becomes the next president will sooner than expected simmer down like hot plate soup because as one philosopher once said, the first rule of politics is never say never. "The ingenious human capacity for manoeuvre and compromise may make acceptable tomorrow what seems outrageous or impossible today". Politicians' actions are often dictated by self or class interest. The common man is the unknown factor, the unidentified grumbling object and the undistinguishable character in their formula of sharing. Unfortunately they seem not to know that in a chemical reaction, which politics has gradually become over a period of 50 years, 'X' is always the unknown factor.

Sir, that's an explosive one! But I tend to agree. Perhaps this is why we are where we are today. Niagara is ripe for change. Real, meaningful change, not just generational shift.

Change indeed!!! Happy anniversary, though, to you all but, please, don't forget to submit your long essay on GREED AND PREJUDICE: THE POLITICS OF ‘LONG THROATS’ IN AFRICA or STEPPING ASIDE AND STEPPING BACKWARD IN AFRICAN POLITICS, THE NIAGARA EXPERIMENT to my secretary before you go on your Independence break. Have fun. Chill in, don't chill out. Kidnappers are many in town. Catch yah!

I, Too, Am the Evil Genius

2010-09-29T07:11:00.000+01:00

Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of Governor Aladoko of Okitiland I want to apologise for this surprise visit. His Excellency thought that a visit to Lagos would not be complete without saying ‘hello’ to his ‘friends’ at the NewsTeller more especially in view of some events that nearly torpedoed the boat of His Excellency’s administration shortly after coming to power. It is my privilege and honour, therefore, to present ‘live’ my governor and benefactor to the People’s Assembly. Your Excellency, sir.

Thank you, Atokun. Gentlemen of the Press, I salute you and I want to thank you for welcoming me despite the gatecrashing. In fact, what I met on the ground is not what I have been made to understand. If I must be honest with you, I was expecting to see men and women with fire burning in their eyes and smoke oozing from their foreheads but surprisingly you are all as cool as ladugbo water. I’m really impressed by your seemingly accommodating poise. Before I go into my choreography, I want to seize this opportunity also to thank those who stood by me during the ‘arrangee’ assassination attempt on my person while in Lagos the other day. My enemies did not want me to eat pounded yam again but my God said no to them. Now, to my speech proper…

Excuse me, Mr. Governor, your man has just told us that this is an impromptu visit, so how come you want to read a prepared speech?

Don’t mind him. The way of we politicians is quite different from the way of you ordinary people. For instance, when a politician says “what a sunny day!” make sure you contact the CNN meteorologist before you respond. To be honest with you, we operate like 419 people – we deceive, distract and ambush the people to achieve our aims. Indeed, if this is just a surprise private visit, you won’t see this battery of television cameras trained on your management and staff. Surely, it’s all for a purpose. So, Mr. Chairman, editors, managers, reporters, all other protocols observed, it gives me great displeasure and rheumatic pain to stand before you today smiling when, indeed, I should be crying in view of the evils done me by the Alliance for Destruction and the unwary Fourth Estate of the Realm over my gubernatorial success in the last elections. Naturally, I should have declared a state of emergency in the entire Okitiland because of the perfidy of the Alliance and the naivety of the pen pushers but I have resolved to give you people a chance to swim or sink with your sponsors. Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I have not come to praise the Caesar of Acme Road but to lambast him. Please, don’t regard my approach as that of a foolhardy Daniel who dared the lion in its den; rather, take it as that of a young freedom fighter who has come with an olive branch in one hand and a loaded pistol in the other. The choice is yours. If you pick the former, we shall all live to enjoy the dividends of democracy. And if, in your collective wisdom, you opt for the latter, then you will have yourselves to blame for the consequence. The problem with you Niagarans is jealousy. I don’t claim to have a Pull Him Down, Ph.D degree like you. Neither do I have a Toronto certificate. I never even claimed to be an alumnus of the University of Chicago. I am an HND holder and, by God’s grace, the Big Boss of all professors and Ph.D holders in Okitiland. It’s not a matter of arrogance but just the reality of the situation. I make bold to claim that I have been to the top of Mt. Olivet and descended to the grassland of Ilaro where I entered the Poly to do research into the chemical contents of cassava and the dangers posed by cyanide to “sailors” (a.k.a garri drinkers) and other consumers of cassava-based foods. From there, I transferred myself to the Mechanical Engineering Department of the Oluyole Poly where I switched from paki (cassava) research to automobile engineering. My area of specialisation is how raw physical energy can propel a danfo bus into a racing landcraft for ferrying people from obscurity to stardom in government houses. I remember the day my head of department singled me out for praise for my seminar paper on “The Psychotic tantrums and socio-environmental idiosyncrasies of the alupandugbe drivers – a case study of danfo drivers in Oluyole and Oluyole-Less-City.” To have an insight into the inner workings of the minds of the drivers, I had to infiltrate their ranks by also doing shuttle service between Ijokodo and Sango. Unfortunately, this is what my political enemies misconstrued to mean that I, too, was a danfo driver. But come to think of it, if, indeed, I was, there is nothing to be ashamed of. In the United Kingdoms of America, Britain and London and, even, in the United States of Paris and France many Nigerians with masters and original Ph.Ds are… sorry, I don’t know how to put this in English —won nfa gburuu …

You mean they do odd jobs to survive?

Yes, you get it. Over there, there’s oddity in labour.

No. Your Excellency, you mean there’s dignity in labour.

Oh, that’s just a slip of the tongue.

I guess it was also a slip of the tongue when you glibly accused NewsTeller of demanding gratification from you. Is that not cheap blackmail?

No, that one was a slip of the mind. Actually, someone picked the intelligence in a danfo bus while travelling between Ilara Mokin and Owena in Ondo State. My friend in Afao-Ekiti told me the intelligence was coded but the security officers decoded it wrongly. So, my good friends, I never intended to cross swords with you and I know you, too, are a peace-loving people who will opt for the olive branch. We are partners in progress and I want to assure you that I’m a man of honour. Mr. Devil, himself, can attest to this. Before the last elections, I used to see him in my dreams as he lit a candle and carried it about in broad daylight, moving from one street to the other as if looking for something. One day, people moved close and asked him why he was in the habit of doing that. He said he was searching for men and women of honour in Niagara. To my greatest surprise, he just pointed in my direction. Ladies and gentlemen, here I am today. I may not have genuine credentials as you claim but, at least, I have the devil’s testimonial. And ever since then, I, too, have become a chartered evil genius. Yes.

*This Opilogue was first published in TELL 27th October, 2003

*Ali Baba in the Eyes of Baba Ali

2010-09-27T07:00:00.000+01:00

*theguardianlifemagazine...

"Ali Baba and his tribe are another good example that democracy is working"

This man is well known to me. He is the greatest comedian of our time. But I don’t know why he should ask me to give an after-dinner speech on the occasion of his book launch. Or am I being asked to pay back the cost of the plate of rice I have just eaten?

Well, it is with deepest reservation that I am saying what I am about to say. First is to say that nearly all the things that this naughty boy may say in his book may not be the truth. I have known him for many years in and outside Aso Rock. But who cares? This young man has made so much money from picking on people for a living, for only-God-knows-how-long, that I’m beginning to doubt his true talent. Nobody, no matter how mighty or low, has escaped his deodorised scathing remarks and diabolical sense of humour at social events. So, after inflicting his reign of comic terror, what sane thing should he have done? Apologise to every single person he has maligned? So I thought, too. But what did he do, instead? This son-of-a-bitch went ahead to put the same things in a book form. What the hell does he think he is doing? After yabbing the hoi polloi and maligning the nouveaux riches, he has the guts to put the jokes down for generations yet unborn to peruse. Talk of everlasting rip-off?!

By the way, where is this Ali Baba of a man? Hunnn… Uhunn… I can see him over there. He is even wearing a tie. Who dash monkey banana? Now, let me yab him, too. Ali, how on earth could you be charging people for yabbing them and enjoying it at the same time? We pay you to add pep to normal events that could easily do without your services, yet you come there only to yab us. Ladies and gentlemen, I think there should be a law tucked somewhere in our statute book, that forbids this obnoxious practice of living off people who pay you to enjoy yourself. If there isn’t, this should be a good excuse to have one. I mean, why should you be paid to entertain only for you to come to yab people who paid you and, during the buffet, you join the guests, some of whom you have picked on, to queue for food? You even drink our wine, the choicest of them all! It’s not only this Ali Baba of a man o! They are many in town. Some have long moustaches like those of igangan yam. The bigger their mouths, the louder they yab. And they have funny, if not exotic names that go with their trade. You have names like Basketmouth, Gandoki, AY, Tee A, Teju Babyface and I Go Die. But that one never die since he begin dey yab people. Na so so shakara! Do you know that the women, too, have joined them? Some are what my children call lepa. Some are orobo. You will hear names like Princess Bakassi, Yellow Pawpaw and Lepacious Orobo. Such effrontery!

But Ali Baba and his tribe are another good example that democracy is working. In a dictatorship, like during my first coming. Ali could only have imagined the hardship he would have gone through hawking his humour in the precincts of absolute power. I doubt if he could ever survive the dumb wits of many a brass hat who shot their way to the throne. Why do I say this, you might ask. I will show you why. There is no name that I have not been called by those who do not like me. They called me all sorts of names but they have cleverly avoided open confrontation with me. Only Ali Baba has dared to say it to my face that I, Aremu Olusanjo Obasegun, is stingy. Did he stop there? Of course not. That will not make him the Ali Baba that we all know. Like a brave warrior that he claims to be (even if he is a fake one), he took the fight straight into the inner recesses of the chamber of the Senate Committee (on budget). He told them that once money enters my hand, it sticks and nothing can get it out. Did he stop there? For where? He went on to suggest my appointment as the chairman of Aradite Bank. But I think he goofed there. He should have suggested GlueRanty Bank. For whatever reason, I can still manage the caustic joke. The one I cannot get over, although not true, is when he said that some top members of my former cabinet were planning to erect a statue of me somewhere in the federal capital and that they came to discuss it with me and possibly get my approval. This alawada of a man said I asked how much the project would cost and when they told me it would cost N35 million, I promptly asked to be given the money while I volunteered to take the place of the statue! Iro ni!! It’s a lie!! Just imagine!!! The point of prudence in the story is a trick to hide the jester’s impudence!!! O my God!

Indeed, democracy is working. There is another story that Ali likes sharing. It goes like this, that during a visit to Zimbabwe, the President, Robert Mugabe brought up an issue of diplomatic importance and, when I asked him what it was about, he could not help showing his anger. He said that his High Commissioner in Niagara reported a matter of grave concern about a comedian who joked that he, Mugabe, was asked by the British Broadcasting Corporation, BBC, what the damage was after a fire outbreak that engulfed Zimbabwe’s own INEC headquarters and that his response was that, apart from structural damage, the only thing that was lost was the result of the following year’s presidential election! Naturally, I knew it was Ali Baba but I diplomatically came to his defence. On hindsight, maybe I should not have. But I did with all my strength and conviction. I told him Ali was my friend and that he meant no harm. I even added that I had asked this same Ali to collect all the jokes that people were circulating about me. Mugabe noted that Ali was very lucky; in his case, he was already collecting all people circulating jokes about him! As I said, our own democracy is working. That’s why anybody can come out in the open and shout, “Umoruuu, are you deaf?”, when the man is neither deaf nor Umoruu.

So, ladies and gentlemen, you will come across several things in his book that will make you think, make you laugh and, let me warn, make you feel like slapping somebody! All these can happen. But I would advise that you take them for what they are: just jokes and issues crafted to provoke laughter.

*Ali Baba in the Eyes of Baba Ali is a parody of ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo’s foreword to Ali Baba’s yet-to-be-published book of jokes.

*First published in TELL, March 10, 2008.

Parlez-vous Esperanto?

2010-09-25T07:00:00.000+01:00

awf.org - Mozambique

Obladi, oblada! Or is it obligo, oblago? I’m sure it’s obla — something…

Hey Jeed! What the hell are you saying?

Carlos, I have asked you never to call me Jeed again. I’m not Jeed. My name is Jide…

No way! You either bear John or Joseph. You can’t be bearing Jeeddah here. This is Mozambique, the Pearl of the Indian Ocean.

I don’t give a damn whether this is Mozambique or Matabeleland. I don’t even give a damn whether it is Pearl of the Indian Ocean or Coconut of the Limpopo River. Just let me say thank you to the waitress in the language she understands.

Ahaa! Is that why you were trying to obladi-oblada me? What exactly were you trying to say? Maybe I can help you.

I was trying to say thank you. Is it not obladi, oblada?

No, it’s obrigado…

Obri-what?

Obri-ga-do.

I don’t want this obrigado business. It sounds like desperado. How about something in her native tongue? Something African, something very authentic.

That’s asking for the impossible because I don’t know which ethnic group she belongs to. As small as they are, they have about 10 different languages.

How many are they?

I think they are about 18 million divided into about 10 different ethnic groups. There are the Makua from the north, the Tsonga in the south, the Chope, the Shona, the Sena, the Nyanja, the Nyangue, the Chuabo, the Yao, the Ndau, and the Makonde…

That’s even manageable. Do you know that tiny Gabon, with a population of less than two million, is made up of about 40 ethnic groups and each having its own language?

Wao! Then the giant itself, I mean Niagara, must have up to 100 languages…

Hundred what?! You must be joking! With a population of 140 million, we already have over 250 ethnic groups and languages. And that’s tentative. They may soon discover new Niagarans, like the Koma were accidentally discovered by some evangelists in the jungle.

Who are the comma?

Well, the KOMA, not comma, people were discovered sometime ago to be Niagarans. And this is no joke. Through aerial surveys and new imaging techniques, more ethnic groups and more languages are bound to be discovered going by the Wakama census conducted last year.

That’s the problem of Africa.

What’s that?

The continent is a babel of tongues. We do not understand one another. Can’t we, for a moment, leave politics aside and decide which one out of our many languages we should choose as our lingua franca?

Never! It’s not possible.

Why do you say so?

Nobody will want to surrender his mother tongue to another, no matter the need to attain mutual intelligibility for the common good.

Indeed, that’s the bane of African unity. For many decades, there have been calls for Africans to come together to fashion a common means of communication among the more than 2,000 ethnic groups and languages in the continent. In North Africa, Arabic is the lingua franca but it is not original to Africa. In Southern and Eastern Africa, the common lingua franca is Swahili, while in the West African sub-region, Hausa is the most widely spoken. Both Hausa and Swahili are two African languages on both BBC and the Voice of America. In 1977, there was a gathering of eggheads at the Festival of Arts and Culture, called FESTAC ’77, to brainstorm on the possibility of adopting a common language as Africa’s lingua franca to ease understanding among Africans and give us a sense of pride. As usual, the evil combination of unhealthy rivalry and unnecessary politicisation made sure that the colloquium did not matter much to the political leaders and its recommendations, like the often much-touted African unity, were thrown into the pending tray where they have been ever since.

You can’t blame our leaders for that. Even the United Nations, UN, has not been able to adopt one of the five languages of the super powers as the official language as well as lingua franca among all nations. So, that’s what Africa copied and what countries like Niagara copied by having no local lingua franca. Instead they adopt foreign languages, vestiges of colonisation, as both their official language and lingua franca. What a shame!

I think the UN should be more ashamed because I learnt that some linguistic experts once suggested that the UN should adopt a neutral language as the world’s lingua franca some years back, but the idea was shot down in mid-trajectory…

Is there any language that is neutral?

Yes. In 1887, an artificial language called ESPERANTO was invented by one Dr. Ludwik Zamenh aka Dr. Esperanto (a Polish physician) to facilitate global mutual intelligibility but the idea was left to die…

No. I think we need to do something like that for Mother Africa. Swahili is already one language that is an aggregation of many south and east African languages plus, even, Arabic woven together in a sort of creative linguistic tapestry that is easy to learn and is acceptable to all and sundry. Can’t we have something like that for the rest of Africa? Esperanto, where are you? Come and rescue us.

Perhaps, we shall all be saved the embarrassment of communication with one another through alien languages.

Parlez-vous Esperanto?

Yah!

Kiss the Queen and Spite the Al-Qaeda

2010-09-15T07:00:00.004+01:00

Pix*locatetv.com

“He who believes in a just cause will give no damn about any religious Ku Klux Klan. He will stand up to look truth in the face and speak out in its defence”

My friend, have you heard the news?

Which news?

You mean you have not heard?

Heard what?

Heard that their Prime Minister, PM, has done it again?

Who is their PM and what has he done again?

Who else but the Australian PM!

Johnbull or John Silver?

There you go again. You are never serious. I don’t mean John Howard, the 25th Prime Minister of that far-flung country, the ancestral home of the Aborigines. I mean Kevin Rudd, the current PM.

Yeees, and what has he done?

You are asking me? Don't you know the antecedents of Australian PMs?

Yes, I do. I know they can be whacky at times and they are also in the habit of shooting straight from the hip. I remember what Paul Keating did when Her Royal Majesty, the Queen of England, visited Australia in 1992. You know what the PM did? He literally grabbed the waist of the queen in a show of affection for the head of the Commonwealth. He almost gave her a peck.

Is that not a breach of royal protocol? How did Prince Phillips feel?

The PM would not give a damn and the British press hammered and pilloried him for what they called his lack of etiquette. It was a diplomatic row that shook the world. In 2000, Howard, his successor, also placed his arm around the Queen while walking her down the aisle though he denied touching her. I wonder what the Australians gain by grabbing Her Royal Majesty’s waist! So, if I may ask, what has Rudd done?

My friend, this is worse than grabbing a queen from behind.

Has he kissed an al Qeda woman in public?

If he did that, of course, there won't be too much brouhaha since his action could be interpreted as a show of love for the Gentiles and not as a kiss of death.

What has he done gan (really)?

Na wah o! The man threw a bombshell recently when he called on Muslims who want to live under Islamic Sharia in Australia to get out fast.

Why did he say that?

Don't mind him. He was just being unduly paranoid over the new upsurge of religious radicalism in the Pacific region more so after the Bali incident in Indonesia.

But I think he went too far. Don't you think so?

Waiteee! You haven't heard anything yet. Let me fetch my diary and read to you what he said in his own words.

Okay, open sesame.

He said and I quote, "Immigrants, not Australians, must adapt. Take it or leave it.

I'm tired of this nation worrying about whether we are offending some individuals or their culture..."

Sorry to cut you short. This man must be a damn crazy Aussie. Is he not the leader of his country? What kind of kangaroo declaration is that? This may boomerang. Don’t you think so?

It seems you don’t know much about this firebrand. Again, hear him: "Most Australians believe in God. This is not some Christian right-wing, political push but a fact because Christian men and women, on Christian principles, founded this nation, and this is clearly documented. If God offends, then I suggest you consider another part of the world as your new home because God is part of our culture...."

Foul! Which culture is God not part of? He must be a wicked landlord.

Just wait. He seems to mellow down a bit. Listen. "We will accept your beliefs and will not question why, all we ask is that you accept ours and live in harmony and peaceful enjoyment with us. This is our country, our land, and our lifestyle and we will allow you every opportunity to enjoy all this. But once you are done complaining, whining and gripping about our flag, our pledge, our Christian beliefs, or our way of life, I highly encourage you to take advantage of one other great Australian freedom, the right to leave...If you aren't happy here, then leave. We didn't force you to come here. You asked us to be here. So, accept the country you accepted." End of quote.

You mean he said all this? How did the people react to his firestorm?

Of course, the Muslims did not like it but the generality of Aussies hailed him, not actually for the tone of his address but for the fact that they had a leader who could stand up and speak on their behalf in a moment of potential crisis. You may not agree with what he said but you must concede to him his revolutionary zeal in confronting a potentially volatile issue without caring whose ox is gored.

But don't you think that is a dangerous gambit?

Gambi-what? In a society where there is a recurring problem, man can always find solution to such a problem. All it takes is a visionary leadership that is genuinely interested and passionate about the welfare of its people without fear or favour.…

But I beg to disagree with this Ruud of a man. Is he not afraid of the al-Qeda warriors?

He who believes in a just cause will give no damn about any religious Ku Klux Klan. He will stand up to look truth in the face and speak out in its defence.

How I wish our leaders, too, can stand up to be counted when it matters most.

Yes, they should have the courage to confront the banality of evil which has become our unsung anthem. Truth, they say, cannot suffer from being challenged and examined. "Unthinking, uncritical, kowtowing, party-toeing is fatal to a vibrant democracy," says Desmond Tutu, a clergyman, who on many occasions stood up to criticise his friend, Nelson Mandela, when he was President, and the ruling African National Congress, ANC, on matters bordering on personal principles and national ethics. His country, South Africa, is the richer for it.

Let me tell you, this is not South Africa, this is Niagara. Nobody can teach us how to deal with our own problems. We deal with them our own peculiar way.

How?

For instance, when our house is burning, we call the fire brigade to quench it. We never prevent fire incidents because that will throw the firemen out of job. That is the home truth, however diabolical it may be. So, if we should have our own Bali or 9/11, God forbid, our leaders would still shy away from admitting that ours is a nation bound to violence on the altar of religious extremism.

Have you bought a bullet-proof vest?

What for?

Just in case the authorities chase the wild goose to your doorstep.

Note: First published in TELL, March 16, 2009

Cry, the Beloved Minister

2010-09-06T07:00:00.001+01:00

Pix*skyscrapercity.com

This country na wah o!

You have come again. What’s na wah about the country that will make you open your mouth like that?

You are asking me? Just siddon there and begin dey look like Luke!

You too, tanda gidigba there and begin dey shake like Shakespeare. Wetiiiin? Abi today na for yabis again? Ahaaa…you just dey yab man any how. Na fight?

No. I just want to let you realise that true, true some good can come out of Israel.

You haven’t said anything. What really are you trying to say?

Do you remember the day I said I was travelling to Oluyole City via the expressway from Lagos? My brother, na wah! I thought I could dash to Oluyole and dash back to the hurly-burly of Lagos within 24 hours, but it was mission impossible.

How do you mean?

I thought the trailer/tanker drivers had finally heeded the voice of reason and left the highway free of their articulated debris. At Ibafo, we didn’t see any of them.

The same for Mowe. We had already heard the news of the frantic cleansing done at the old Ogere toll gate. We then heaved a sigh of relief. We thought God don butter our bread.

You go wash am o!

Wash wetin? We never reached Ogere! At Shagamu, we were forced to detour to Benin-Ore Road…

Why Armed robbers dey operate?

No. They said the tanker drivers were doing aluta and we could not pass through…

Which one be aluta?

Aluta Continua! That one mean say, the struggle continues. They blocked the highway like university students would do when they want to do their own aluta… To cut a short story long, we thus embarked on an Israelite’s journey. We climbed many hills crossed uncountable rivers and nearly crossed the Red Sea as we searched for a short cut. We reached some “funny, funny” Ogun (State) towns…

Are towns funny?

Just waiiiteee, as Baba would say. We went through Ilishan, home of Babcock, got to a town which was apparently not on the political map of Niagara. They call it Ilara-Remo. Me, I never hear of that town before. I know of Ilara-Mokin in Ondo State…

Sebi that’s where Elizade comes from. Abi no be so?

But this our people sef, dem too relate to one another. Ilara-Remo, Ilara-Mokin. You will also hear Ijebu-Ife, Ife-Ijebu, Ijebu-Ijesha, Ijesha-Ijebu, Ijebu-Mushin, Ijesha-Isu, Oke-Imesi, Imesi-Ile, Ode-Ekiti, Ode-Remo, Ijebu-Ode, Ijebu-Igbo…

Exactly, that’s what I’m talking about. After Ilara-Remo, the next place we reached was Ijebu-Remo. Then, wait for this, Ishara-Remo! The sound of the name is akin to that generated when you light a match… ‘sharrrr!’ like that.

Is it the onomatopoeic name that is special about the town?

For where? That’s a town that sparks something like thunder in the memory.

What?!!

Abi na Remo plug be that?

Remo plug ko, Remo carpet ni. Open your ears and shine your eyes. That’s Kongi’s town!!

You don’t mean it! Abi, no be Wole Soyinka be that? Wetin he come do for Ishara? Is he not an Egba man?

For where? You know what? You can’t just unravel that man. He is a mystery packed in a box of dynamite. He says he is Ijegba, Father is Ijebu (Ishara) while mother is Egba (Abeokuta). Hence the hybrid nomenclature — IJEGBA. He leans more on the mother’s side, though, like the Ghanaians, and it is in that Abeokuta that he built his house.

I leant he built it right inside the bush. Is that so?

Where else do you expect an ogboju ode (brave hunter) to build his house other than inside igbo irunmole (forest of a thousand and one demons)? Soyinka is an embodiment of creativity. The forest is his canvas. He shuttles in the wild quite often to commune with nature and hold seminal dialogues with fellow spirits and gnomes. You know, he is iwin, some inferna, no fraternal spirit!

Did I hear you say “fraternal spirits”? I learnt his favourite deity is Ogun, god of creativity and destruction. By Jove, how can one god be such a bundle of contradiction? It creates. It destroys! What kind of “agbako” (enfant terrible) god is that?

Ask Kongi when next you see him in Ishara.

That will be waiting for Godot or, worse still, for an iwin in broad daylight!

As I was saying, our Israelite’s journey was an eye-opener. The road linking Ilishan-Remo with Ilara-Remo is an undulating mockery of governance. Unfortunately, there was no any Madukeke woman to cry for the forgotten Ilara-Remo people. Maybe the woman’s crying jurisdiction did not extend to a tucked-away village near ‘Kongi Town’.

No, I disagree. The woman was too busy crying about other things. How about lack of electricity? How about lack of potable water? How about kidnapping of people for ransom, the new trend in criminal mercantile opportunism? How about the increasing wave of armed robbery and corruption, its twin brother? How about ethnicity and nepotism? How about religious intolerance? How about the promotion of the corrupt and the demotion of the upright?

Na true you talk o. If the men in government can’t do anything at least the womenfolk can do something. They can cry! Can’t they?

Yes, they can. They can cry for their unbeloved country.

Rich Daddy, Poor Mummy

2010-08-18T07:00:00.000+01:00

We are not poor because we lack natural resources or because nature is cruel to us… We are poor and will remain poor because we lack attitude

By Dele OMOTUNDE

Good morning, class. Today we are going to reflect on why some people have everything and others do not. To do this, we shall have to take a global look at the disparities between nations. And the question we have to answer is: Why are some countries rich and some are poor? Let's start by saying that the difference between the poor countries and the rich has nothing to do with the age of a country because, if it is age, countries like Egypt and India, which are more than 2000 years old, would not be poor. On the other hand, countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand that were inexpressive less than 200 years ago would not be counted today among the rich and developed countries of the world. Take a look, too, at South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore. Again, the difference between poor and rich countries does not reside in the available natural resources. If it is so, Japan, which has a limited territory, 80 per cent of which is made up of mountains, would not be the world's second largest economy. The country is like a mega factory, importing raw materials from the whole world and exporting manufactured products to every nook and corner. Switzerland is another example. It does not plant cocoa but has the best chocolate in the world! As little as the country is, it raises animals and tills the soil during the four months that its climate allows a year. They produce dairy products of the best quality. Not only that, it is a tiny country that radiates an image of security, discipline and hardwork, which makes it the world's strongest safe for billionaires. Talk of Swiss accounts and our thieving public officers are wont to hop on the next available bullion van to the Swiss capital to deposit their new loot.

What's really the problem with poor nations? Is it a question of intellect? No! There is no significant difference in the intellectual abilities of the entire human race. Whether you are white or black is also not important. Immigrants labelled lazy drones in their respective countries of origin are the productive power in rich Western countries. By the way, have you ever wondered why the Americans want thousands of immigrants every year to come and reside in their country? Think about it.

But what is the difference between rich and poor countries, sir?

Thank you. The difference is in the attitude of the people, framed, along the years, by their education and culture. Studies have shown that the behaviour of the people in rich and developed countries reflects their attitude to certain principles they hold dear. After taking a serious look at the behavioural patterns of the people in rich and developed countries, it was discovered that the great majority follow certain principles in their lives. These are ethics, integrity, responsibility, respect for the laws and rules and regulations guiding their day-to-day conduct, respect for the rights of other citizens, love for work, punctuality, quest for saving and investment and the will of super action. These principles may appear ordinary or simple but, in developed countries, they are perceived very important and are held sacrosanct. They have standards for morality which they do not encourage anybody to go below. Integrity and transparency are a sine qua non for business transactions. To them, time is money, thus punctuality at public functions and workplaces is non-negotiable. In their everyday life, there is the urge to aspire to reach greater heights. They want to reach the deepest parts of the ocean, climb the highest mountains and fly into space to conquer new territories...

Sir, I think that's how their explorers discovered Africa and the new world, because they wanted to expand their horizon.

Good, you get the drift. They have this willing attitude to do something super and the ‘can-do’ spirit to achieve. That's how they landed a man on the moon in 1969 and, today, they have satellites in space that can pinpoint the exact locations of troop movements anywhere in the world. They can use their satellites, too, to close in on their target in a taxi on a lonely road in Badagry or Baghdad and blast it to smithereens within minutes. How do they do it? It's because they have been brought up with the principles of hard work, adventure, a striving for excellence and the urge to do the impossible. In poor countries, only a minority follow these basic principles in their daily life. And that accounts for our poverty. We are not poor because we lack natural resources or because nature is cruel to us. There are very few countries among the rich and developed nations that have the kind of natural resources that our country has. We have the 'sweetest' oil in the market and we are the sixth largest producer of crude oil in the world; yet we rank among the poorest! Nature has been kind to us, like Ethiopia which prides itself with having 13 months of sunshine in the year! Yet, both are not tourist havens for the rich daddies of developed nations. We are poor and will remain poor because we lack attitude. We lack the will to comply with and teach those functional principles which are held sacrosanct by the rich and developed societies. Most of the leaders in the poor countries lack the will to serve without grabbing. They lack integrity and responsibility. Neither do they have respect for the laws of the land. They prefer to break all the rules and regulations that aid in the development and advancement of their societies and still expect their followers to obey! They do not save and invest for their countries like, for instance, Saudi Arabia which has a respectable stake in the US economy through investments in banking and other ancillary industries. The Asian Tigers are also ahead of the pack because of their strict adherence to these basic principles which are practically ignored by the poor countries. Our country, for example, is happy to be the fastest-growing market for mobile telephony in the whole world; yet it lacks both the will and discipline to aspire to be the biggest manufacturer of GSM handsets. Tiny Finland is the home of Nokia! And Samsung is to Korea just as Motorola is to the US. We eat chocolate made in Switzerland, yet the raw material is from the cocoa farms in Ondo and Owo. There was a time local entrepreneurs produced cocoa bread, cocoa butter and cocoa cookies in Ibadan but Niagarans would not have anything to do with them. They preferred Australian butter and Swiss chocolate. Attitude, that's the difference between rich daddies (developed countries) and poor mummies (underdeveloped nations). As part of their own extended responsibility, borne out of unprecedented magnanimity, developed countries even encourage leaders of poor countries by providing part of their own savings as lifelines for ailing economies. They call it aids or soft loans. Unfortunately, many have collapsed under the heavy burden of such liabilities.

God bless Africa!

And also those leaders who may vow today to embark on a systematic change of attitude to work ethics and civic responsibilities in their respective countries!!

*First published in TELL 2007

Like Father, Unlike Son

2010-08-03T07:00:00.000+01:00

By Dele OMOTUNDE

“Everybody wants a share of the robber economy and the real bone of contention is the percentage of share from the oil and gas account”

Hi, Jagunlabi. Long time! No see!! Where have you been?

My friend, I have been away to participate in the last voting exercise.

Which one? Do you mean the wuruwuru thing of last April? So, how did it go in your state?

It wasn't funny at all. It was like April Fools' day. Do you remember my uncle, the politician?

Yes, Uncle Fijabi. I remember...

No, it's not that one. I mean Uncle Jegudujera, my paternal uncle who has been in the Upper House since the soja go, soja come “arrangee” democracy of the Salami days.
I seee! So, what happened?

On election day, Uncle Jegudujera came out very early in the morning to monitor the electoral activities in his constituency but all he saw were deserted streets and heavily armed soldiers at roadblocks. Everywhere he looked he was confronted with stern-looking soldiers. He just put two and two together and quickly rushed back home, donned his wife's attire and headed straight for the (Idi Iroko) border.

Why? Did his two and two give him 40?

I really don't know... That would be kabukabu mathematics. He didn't tell anybody. It was only after he came back from the closed border that he deemed it fit to let us know why he bought the proverbial pounded yam and did not wait to collect the mandatory soup. He said he thought the jackboots were out to collect their power back as they were wont to in the dark days of military siege to the commonwealth.

Can you imagine that?

Poor man! What's he afraid of?

My friend, I don't trust these I-chop-you-chop politicians, not even my uncle.

Why do you say that?

They all have one skeleton or the other in their underpants. If not, why did he race for the border on seeing soldiers on the roads?

Maybe he is allergic to green uniforms. But, by the way, let's leave the politicians underpants and come back to the polling booths. So, generally speaking, how did the election go?

It was abracadabra all the way.

Kai! Who says? Is it the retired general or the ever-bubbling professor?

None of the above.

So, who is your source of information?

You want me to tell you?

Yes, why not? Or are you a journalist who will not disclose his source of information even at the point of death?

Well, I'm not a journalist but a man who has a third eye and a satellite dish...

It’s a lie! Third eye... Satellite dish!! What's that supposed to mean?

An inner eye and a listening ear, of course.

Whose ear is not for listening and hearing?

Are you asking me? A lady's ear, of course!

Beg your pardon! You must be kidding. Bring it up... Come again!

A lady's ear, if you do not know, is meant for decoration.

There you go again! Bloody chauvinist!! So, what did you see and what did you hear with your so-called satellite dish?

My friend, I heard a lot and saw wen! For the first time in my life, I saw hoodlums parading the streets in four-wheel-drive vehicles, posing as electoral officers and, in some cases, as policemen. I saw ballot boxes snatched in the presence of policemen who chose to look the other way. I saw an under-age voter thumb-printing one thousand ballot papers in one minute!

Akika! Small, small...

True! Before God and man, I saw returning officers returning home with bundles of naira notes...

Jesus Christ!! Is that all?

Look at you... I heard one politician complain that one party was just being too greedy by not allowing his own party also to capture the cake, saying, afterall, the said party had been robbing the people for the past 18 years and it was time it allowed them also to do their own bunkering while the oil well runs.

Now you can see why those militants are itching for a piece of the cake, too. As a matter of fact, everybody wants a share of the robber economy and the real bone of contention is the percentage of share from the oil and gas account. What do you pay the explorers? What do you give the exploiters? What do you concede to the owners? What do you share among the remaining citizens? For as long as this problem remains unsolved, so shall we continue to have political unrest, electoral robbery, social inequality and a permanently drifting entity called Niagara.

You forgot to add that so also shall the politicians be sleeping with one eye closed because of the persistent threat from their opponents who reside in the barracks. And so shall Uncle Jegudujera and his friends continue to be keeping their ECOWAS passports and NAGBAKO maps under their pillows every night. They come in handy just in case...

It means we are still living in a fools' paradise. Just too bad.

Real super bad. But I think the Gentleman on the Rock is up to something. He can perform miracles with his the-less-you-look-the-more-you-see style of governance.

For where? We need an Iron Lady like Thatcher, the Milk Snatcher, or a Strong Man like Ghadaffi, the Desert Warrior, to scatter everything and make everybody sit on the edge of the knife.

Ah! You must be kidding!! What did the king of yesterday achieve with his crude bravado, impressionistic bravura and volcanic eruptions?

We are still counting.

The losses or the gains?

Na you sabi. My friend, give unto Baba what is Baba’s and give unto son what is son’s.

Thou sayest.

*First published in TELL July 9, 2007.

M’God! They Have Kidnapped the President!

2010-07-18T07:00:00.000+01:00

“At the rate things are going on today, we may all wake up tomorrow to discover that the country, itself, has been kidnapped!”

Gentlemen of the Press, it is with a heavy heart and a deep sense of sorrow that I announce the sudden kidnap of Mr President in the early hours of today. Eye-witness accounts reveal that His Excellency was waylaid between the mosque and the villa shortly after performing his early morning prayer. We learnt that his ADC and personal physician were also abducted by the dare-devil gunmen believed to be “next door” criminals and not the ultra-fearsome Niger-Benue Confluence militants opposed to the dredging of the River Niger. Immediately the Zuma Police Command was informed of this criminal act, we swung into action. Our men have been posted to all the nooks and crannies of Zuma to cordon off the getaway routes of the suicide kidnappers. Our men have also been posted to rooftops and treetops, armed with binoculars, telescopes and night goggles with which to locate the kidnappers and their hideouts. So far our efforts have started to yield apples, mangoes and oranges. In the last couple of hours, for instance, we have been able to establish contact with the kidnappers and I am happy to inform you that the President is hale and hearty. However, the kidnappers' demands are too many and outrageous. They want the government to deposit 100,000 megawatts of electricity at the NEPA Headquarters within the next two days. Haba! They also want billions of drums of drinking water to be fetched and deposited in all the hospitals in major towns and cities in the country. In addition to that, they are demanding that the government must dig millions of boreholes in all villages and other rural communities in the federation. They did not stop there. They are also demanding that the First Lady should surrender all the money for her Cancer Project to the Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital where there is an established national centre for cancer research and treatment for proper naira diagnosis and management. They also want 1,000 first-class diagnostic centres and heart institutes built in the country within the next few days before the President can be released. The mother of all demands is the one asking that all corrupt officials in the cabinet be fired with immediate effect, if we want to see the President alive. These Oliver Twists would not just stop asking for more.

Gentlemen of the press, can you see our dilemma now? Yes, the country is rich enough to provide electricity, water, shelter, free health care and free education for all with immediate effect but it cannot afford to fire all corrupt men. Will they not be identified first, arrested, tried and convicted before firing them under Mr. President's rule of law mantra? This is impossible! It is the most wicked and most outrageous demand. I can tell you on authority that the Minister of Injustice and the Anthony General is personally cross with this demand of the godless kidnappers who have kidnapped the most gentle, most God-fearing and most loved leader we have ever had in this most lucky, in fact most luckiest, nation on earth. In fact, if all corrupt men and women were fired to appease the angry gods of the kidnappers, who else would be left to negotiate with them? This is the question we are waiting for them to answer. To us in the Police Force, this is treason through the back door. The kidnappers want to topple a legitimately, democratically elected African government by acts of kidnapping and brigandage, which are prejudicial to good governance and the corporate existence of this God's own, one indivisible country.

For your information, we, the police, are awake and alive to our responsibility of maintaining law and order. No stone will be left unturned in our effort to flush out all kidnappers and would-be abductors of the national will. Let me repeat, for the avoidance of any doubt, that the Niagara Police shall and will not allow kidnappers to dominate our national life and damage our public image as armed robbers, assassins and 419ners have done. No way! We just cannot allow unscrupulous, disgruntled, “unpatriotic saboteurs”(!) to kidnap our destiny before we call them to order.

In view of the above, the Niagara police command has met and decided to take the bull by the horns and strangle it to death through the following steps and action. First, we have sent our men to Israel and Iran to learn how to counter ordinary terror with nuclear terror but, in our own peculiar case, with a human face. Henceforth, policemen are to shoot kidnappers "on sight" and not "at sight" as we used to. Second, we have asked the Accountant-General of the Federation, through the Police Service Commission, to release the sum of $100 billion for us to buy new equipment to combat this new threat to the peace and stability of Zuma Rock Villa. For instance, we need to purchase new surveillance satellites, fighter drones, RPGs (rocket propelled grenades), robots, scud barracks-to-hideouts missiles, and native air-force equipment like AK-47-calibre charms, high grade Otumokpo, et cetera.

I want to assure you all that we are combat ready to face these cowards who kidnap children, women, retired generals, tired permanent secretaries, old local government chairmen, lame leaders and other innocent people for ransom. Let me, at this juncture, further assure all law-abiding citizens that they have nothing to fear. But in case they are kidnapped, they should just remain calm and not struggle with their abductors. The police are always there to rescue you. If you are in doubt, just allow yourself to be kidnapped and see whether we shall rescue you within 24 hours or not. The family of the kidnapped secretary to the state government in Kaduna can attest to that. We are always at your service. We fought house burglars to a standstill and they ran away, only to regroup and rob banks. We fought the Internet robbers hands down and they absconded from cyberspace now to be duping people face-to-face. Now we have fought the kidnappers and chased them to a blind alley only for them to beat a retreat to the inner sanctuary of governance and cause panic in the corridors of power. We shall continue to fight them on land, in the air and even inside water because at the rate things are going on today, we may all wake up tomorrow to discover that the country, itself, has been kidnapped!

Note: This Opilogue was first published in TELL, October, 12, 2009

Our Son, Obama bin Abamo!

2010-07-15T07:00:00.002+01:00

"Your Excellency, we would want you to order that no Afrikan needs to apply for visa again to enter America. Anybody that wants to come and carry load, wash toilets, bathe corpses and ‘do gateman’ with masters and Ph.Ds should be free to do so"

By Dele OMOTUNDE

Your Excellency, we, the representatives of your original ancestors, bear good tidings from the Mallam-in-chief and people of the Prodigal Republic of Afrika. We also bring unbridled joy, undiluted happiness and audacious hope for you and the entire Abamo family in America and the diaspora. You may be wondering, sir, whether we have any locus standi to lead a delegation to this beautiful city on one of the Great Lakes. Yes, we do. We have the mandate of the Mallam-in-chief to let you know of your authentic ancestry.

Your great great-grandfather actually migrated from the west of our great republic to present-day Kenya. He was known and called Pa Kasumu. He migrated a couple of centuries ago to that land of the Massai people in search of greener pastures. Being an adventurer extraordinaire he settled in a virgin area which he named after himself, Kasumu. This was later corrupted by the natives as 'Kisumu'. His first son, whom he named Ayokunnu, soon had his name Kenyanised to become Nyokno. For quite some time things were not going smoothly for Pa Kasumu and he started regretting his foray into the new world in Kisumu. Feelings of nostalgia started creeping in. It was at this time that Nyokno had a child and Pa Kasumu did not hesitate to name him Abamo (a matter of regret), a name that was also corrupted to Obama by the natives. Obama was barely three years old when his father went to settle in Nyangoma. As we always say, the rest is history. Your Excellency, you will see that we, the Prodigals, even have a greater claim to you than the Kenyans but we are ready to allow them to share in the glory of the moment. After all, if the Japanese can lay claim to him, why not fellow Afrikans like the Kenyans?

It is in view of the above that the Mallam-in-chief has sent us, the council of elders, here to share with you our vision, ideas and experience so that you can rule successfully like we, Afrikans. The first thing you have to do is this, and it is urgent. We learnt that Bushman said he and Lara, his wife, were ready to welcome you and Musili (please, your wife is Musilli, not Michele) to the White House. Please don't go until we have spiritually fumigated the place. The bush men and the Ku Klux Klan might have laced the threshold of the White House with magun (Don't Enter). Be warned! You are too young to somersault to death when you are not a drunken Chinese gymnast. Make sure the fumigation is done before you pack in because of the evil machinations of white witches. For your information, white witches don't like black men especially now that we are in the Oval Office where we shall be calling the shots and they will be answering the bullets. Change the colour of the White House to black to reflect the fact that a black man is in power. And, of course, change the name to BLACK HOUSE! Black is beautiful!! That's to show the true meaning of change, your campaign slogan.

Within your first 100 days, make sure you make the whole world sit on the edge of a sword with your revolutionary actions. Probe Bush for all his bush policies, especially in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. Set up an American EFCC to probe McCain on how he spent his election subvention in order to discredit his party. In Afrika, vendetta is the name of the game. The opposition must be destroyed to pave the way for democracy. Even CNN must be probed for practising voodoo with technology when it used egbe (magic carpet) to transport a reporter in Chicago to its New York studios to do analysis. That’s too hologrammatical for change. It’s unacceptable. A news media house is not expected to use Hollywood magic to create surreal effects to bamboozle the electorate, nay the observers from outer Mongolia.

Your Excellency, as we say in Afrika, nothing is free, not even in Freetown. We have a short list of what you can do for us now that an Afrikan son of the soil is in charge. This is our opportunity. We would want you to order that no Afrikan needs to apply for visa again to enter America. Anybody that wants to come and carry load, wash toilets, bathe corpses and "do gateman" with masters and Ph.Ds should be free to do so. No airline should weigh our luggage again. We should be allowed to carry and swallow anything we like. After all, we are the owners of our stomachs.

And this is a special request from the Mallam-in-chief himself. He has advised that when you want people to fill certain positions, the Prodigals are capable of doing anything. We know how to handle money, so we would like one of the executive governors who managed Mallam’s campaign funds in 2007 to be appointed as minister of finance or treasury secretary, as you call it here. He also wants our men to handle your juicy portfolios for you. Thus we are ready to second tested potbellied paramilitary officers to take charge of your police, customs and immigration. Our Mallam-in-chief is even ready to lend you his wife in order to train Musili on how to be an effective First Lady. He urges that you allow her set up a parallel government in the Black House by dividing the Oval Office “into twice” (apology Zebrudaya).

Your Excellency, the Prodigals are never known to be greedy or selfish. Hence we are suggesting that you take care of yourself too by starting your own war since the bush men and the Hottentots have cornered all the contracts for the prosecution of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Fight Iran, fight Pakistan. Provoke Kim Sung II to war in North Korea and you will get in return a lot of body bags ripping of dollars. Yes, you can!.

We learnt you've been talking of how to revamp the Yankee economy. Here is a warning. Don't tax the rich to bring succour to the poor. That will not be in the true spirit of the Afrikan way of bringing the greatest good to the smallest number. Remember you are an Afrikan first and foremost. So you should tax the poor to further enrich the rich. That's how it is done back at home. And that's why those poor things remain poor. It has to be so because, in Afrika, from Kisumu to Kigali, from Kogelo to Kontagora, and from Kano to Cairo, the existence of the wretched of the earth is a necessary condition for the emergence of another Obama bin Mubarak to mobilise our people for our own inevitable CHANGE, Insha Allah!

*First published in TELL January 26, 2009

Parlez-vous Esperanto?

2010-07-13T19:00:00.003+01:00

awf.org - Mozambique

Obladi, oblada! Or is it obligo, oblago? I’m sure it’s obla — something…
Hey Jeed! What the hell are you saying?
Carlos, I have asked you never to call me Jeed again. I’m not Jeed. My name is Jide…
No way! You either bear John or Joseph. You can’t be bearing Jeeddah here. This is Mozambique, the Pearl of the Indian Ocean.
I don’t give a damn whether this is Mozambique or Matabeleland. I don’t even give a damn whether it is Pearl of the Indian Ocean or Coconut of the Limpopo River. Just let me say thank you to the waitress in the language she understands.
Ahaa! Is that why you were trying to obladi-oblada me? What exactly were you trying to say? Maybe I can help you.
I was trying to say thank you. Is it not obladi, oblada?
No, it’s obrigado…
Obri-what?
Obri-ga-do.
I don’t want this obrigado business. It sounds like desperado. How about something in her native tongue? Something African, something very authentic.
That’s asking for the impossible because I don’t know which ethnic group she belongs to. As small as they are, they have about 10 different languages.
How many are they?
I think they are about 18 million divided into about 10 different ethnic groups. There are the Makua from the north, the Tsonga in the south, the Chope, the Shona, the Sena, the Nyanja, the Nyangue, the Chuabo, the Yao, the Ndau, and the Makonde…
That’s even manageable. Do you know that tiny Gabon, with a population of less than two million, is made up of about 40 ethnic groups and each having its own language?
Wao! Then the giant itself, I mean Niagara, must have up to 100 languages…
Hundred what?! You must be joking! With a population of 140 million, we already have over 250 ethnic groups and languages. And that’s tentative. They may soon discover new Niagarans, like the Koma were accidentally discovered by some evangelists in the jungle.
Who are the comma?
Well, the KOMA, not comma, people were discovered sometime ago to be Niagarans. And this is no joke. Through aerial surveys and new imaging techniques, more ethnic groups and more languages are bound to be discovered going by the Wakama census conducted last year.
That’s the problem of Africa.
What’s that?
The continent is a babel of tongues. We do not understand one another. Can’t we, for a moment, leave politics aside and decide which one out of our many languages we should choose as our lingua franca?
Never! It’s not possible.
Why do you say so?
Nobody will want to surrender his mother tongue to another, no matter the need to attain mutual intelligibility for the common good.
Indeed, that’s the bane of African unity. For many decades, there have been calls for Africans to come together to fashion a common means of communication among the more than 2,000 ethnic groups and languages in the continent. In North Africa, Arabic is the lingua franca but it is not original to Africa. In Southern and Eastern Africa, the common lingua franca is Swahili, while in the West African sub-region, Hausa is the most widely spoken. Both Hausa and Swahili are two African languages on both BBC and the Voice of America. In 1977, there was a gathering of eggheads at the Festival of Arts and Culture, called FESTAC ’77, to brainstorm on the possibility of adopting a common language as Africa’s lingua franca to ease understanding among Africans and give us a sense of pride. As usual, the evil combination of unhealthy rivalry and unnecessary politicisation made sure that the colloquium did not matter much to the political leaders and its recommendations, like the often much-touted African unity, were thrown into the pending tray where they have been ever since.
You can’t blame our leaders for that. Even the United Nations, UN, has not been able to adopt one of the five languages of the super powers as the official language as well as lingua franca among all nations. So, that’s what Africa copied and what countries like Niagara copied by having no local lingua franca. Instead they adopt foreign languages, vestiges of colonisation, as both their official language and lingua franca. What a shame!
I think the UN should be more ashamed because I learnt that some linguistic experts once suggested that the UN should adopt a neutral language as the world’s lingua franca some years back, but the idea was shot down in mid-trajectory…
Is there any language that is neutral?
Yes. In 1887, an artificial language called ESPERANTO was invented by one Dr. Ludwik Zamenh aka Dr. Esperanto (a Polish physician) to facilitate global mutual intelligibility but the idea was left to die…
No. I think we need to do something like that for Mother Africa. Swahili is already one language that is an aggregation of many south and east African languages plus, even, Arabic woven together in a sort of creative linguistic tapestry that is easy to learn and is acceptable to all and sundry. Can’t we have something like that for the rest of Africa? Esperanto, where are you? Come and rescue us.
Perhaps, we shall all be saved the embarrassment of communication with one another through alien languages.
Parlez-vous Esperanto?
Yah!

Octopussy!

2010-07-13T17:21:00.004+01:00

Pix* southdacola.com

Ki ne ko o o!

Yes, the Jubilani War is over and it’s time to do a post-war analysis. Over to you, once again, Chief Ademoyega.

Thank you. Actually there isn’t much to say other than to let you have some snippets about what has made this 2010 World Cup a very interesting and unforgetable event. My intention is to take you on a roller coaster ride down the Table Mountain and see how the different teams had fared and to show one or two lessons accruing from the 30-day fiesta. However, I want to digress a little to go down memory lane. First and foremost I want to congratulate the Zulu and the Xhosa for waging the jabulani war otherwise known as the 2010 Woza World Cup. Azania, their ancestral home, had been the theatre of war for 30 days and many elephants had trampled on their sacred turf causing a lot of direct and collateral damage. Within this war they successfully fought the war of nomenclature — whether the ball’s name should be spelt jabulani or jubilani or jebalawin. Can you imagine? But so liberal are they that they gave their nod for any one chosen, be it jabulani or jubilani or jebalawin or, even, jagunlabi or whatever. Hence the confusionist theories of nomenclature which pervaded media reports right from Cape Town to Cape Kennedy and from Port Elizabeth to Port Said. Second is the fight over the origin and use of vuvuzela, the noise making device, supposedly native to the South Africans. This was very interesting and, as a FIFA archivist, I had to dig deep into this high decibel controversy. My findings show that different groups lay claim to the copyright. The Zulu, for instance, say vuvuzela is a descendant of their traditional kudu horn, a type of instrument created from the horn of a kudu antelope which they used to communicate with one another in those days when human eyes were located on knees! Members of the Shembe Church also known as Nazareth Baptist Church of South Africa also claim the vuvuzela was introduced in 1910 by one of them, Prophet Isiah Shembe (founder of the church), to play alongside African drums when they dance and worship. It was a way of indigenising and enlivening the somewhat plastic, frigid lithurgy of the orthodox religions. It was a musical fusion that worked like magic on depressed souls. The third group are the Chinese who lay claim to having a similar bugle which their forebears used to drive away locusts on their farms, something akin to a scarecrow. Today, they have perfected the art of making about 200,000 plastic vuvuzelas per day. And they are, as Niagarans would say, smiling to the banks. By the way, who cries to the bank? Many of the vuvuzelas you saw on television were made in China. But neither the noise making nor the exhibitionist show of faith by most African teams at the beginning, middle and end of matches won games for them.

Ki ne e ko!

Yes, it’s time but the race is not always for the swiftest (Usain Bolt must not hear that). If it were, Uruguay, the weakest of the six South American teams would not have been the only semifinalist where Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Honduras were expected to hold sway. But they all fell like mortally wounded elephants. Among the African teams Ivory Coast was adjudged the best before the World Cup started but it could not survive in the group of death. Ghana was equally in a dangerous zone but it survived. As fate would have it, Ghana was the first country to be awarded a penalty kick which it utilised to beat Serbia. Yet it was a penalty shootout that put paid to its ambition to become the first African nation to reach the semi-final. Thus, the Osagyefo boys ended their journey the way they started. Penalty in, penalty out. However FIFA has noted that those countries that invested in youth performed exceptionally well. Rewind the tape and see how both Ghana and Germany went on the rampage chasing their opponents all over the field like drunken bulls. Indeed, the future of soccer is in the legs of genuinely young players not fabricated youths with surplus overaged gangling (read dangling) legs that have sired many football heroes before the Woza World Cup. But the Germans overshot the runway in their bid to win the cup the fourth time. They relied too much on superstition. Like Macbeth and the three witches, they seemed to have had their destiny locked up in the crystal ball of Paul, the octopus, who doubled as their “babalawo” with an unusual psychic power. He had predicted that Spain, their semi-final opponents, would defeat them though they (the Germans) had a seemingly unstoppable machine against any foe. Alas, the fear of failure rendered them impotent on the day that mattered most. It was a cagey, unusually ultra-defensive German team that faced the extremely mobile Spaniards in that encounter. They (the Spaniards) did not stay back like matadors taunting drunken bulls in Madrid. Instead they charged like battering rams at the Germans who, uncharacteristically, refused to come out smoking and firing on all cylinders as they did against Australia, Ghana, England and Argentina. Rather, they came out with their tails tucked between their legs. Their eight-legged “voodoo priest” had instilled fear in their brain! Even their coach was also caught up in the psychic “go slow” drama. He would not change his “magic” blue sweater even if it was smelling of stale cologne! The “sea prophet”, no doubt, had turned every German into “mumu” (prisoner of superstition). They were too “octopussy” for my liking.

Ki ne e ko!

Yes, it’s time to look further away from the octopoid psychic saga that is as surreal as James Bond’s Octopussy or Goldfinger or Dr. No. The most talked about stars were no where to be found. Rooney was just roaming the field like a blind man in a blind alley. Ronaldo had a goal dry-spell and could only use his back to smuggle a goal in against the North Koreans who may have ended up in jail for disgracing “The Leader,” Kim Sung II, for conceding a tsunami of goals in the competition. And how about Messi? The poor boy thoroughy messed up himself with his unprofitable mesmerising moves on the periphery of the 18-yard box. No thanks to Enyeama, the super goalie of the super flop eagles, who “stole” his confidence when they met on June 12. How’re the mighty fallen! But it was not Messi alone that messed up... We also messed up. One day NFF was killed and buried. The second day ghosts sauntered out, a la Michael Jackson’s Thriller, to sack some of the killed and buried executives. The third day government unburied and unkilled the already killed and buried NFF. And FIFA, same day, returned the red card to its breast pocket. No more sanctions. And everybody smiled. Government magic! Fela must be laughing in his grave.

Ki ne e ko!

Yes, it’s time to shout. Viva Blatter! Fifa Jonathan! The more we look, the less we see.

Your Excellency, Your Macbeth Has Murdered Sleep

2010-07-08T07:00:00.001+01:00

By Dele OMOTUNDE

‘We Africans love to fight one another until death do us part because it’s in our genes to be aggressive, wicked and homicidal…’

‘If your army engaged in a real progrom, call it a mere programme for the emancipation, not pacification, of the primitive tribesmen of the lower Sahel. That is what the international community wants to hear’

Bashiru, it is true that you have suddenly become another dancing African leader?

What's wrong with that? We, Africans, are known for our dancing culture. Aren’t we?

You mean you are no longer an Arab? Ah, thanks to the indictment. But come o, can you really dance from the heart like Zuma, the Dancing Zulu of Soweto, or Jonathan, the late Dancing Chief of Lesotho?

It means you didn't see me on CNN. Did you? I really got down to it. You needed to be there to see me in a hail of dust as I danced to spite them and their indictment.

Can you really call the bluff of The Hague?

Yes, we are ready to confront the plague of injustice and international conspiracy to recolonise Africa by the "lawlords" who think they can intimidate courageous "warlords" like me. Tell me, Mr. President, is this not interference in the affairs of an independent African nation? Those vultures! They always hover around our rich landscape of bloated corpses and swollen carcasses.

I hope you are not getting things wrong. In Rwanda, when the Hutus took on the Tutsis and massacred them in their thousands, the International Court of Justice sitting in Arusha, Tanzania tried the ring leaders for genocide and crimes against humanity. Right now, the former President of Liberia is undergoing trial abroad for war crimes. So, this is not a strange phenomenon in Africa.

Yaah, it may not be a strange phenomenon, but what I hate is the usual Western propaganda. They accused me of assisting the janjaweed in attacking Darfur which is a lie. We did not provide any logistic support other than air cover by our air force, and intelligence by our secret service. They also accused the militias of raping, torturing and killing over 300,000 within a period of five years. Let me debunk those allegations one by one. No decent Arab will rape those dirty, dark things in dust-laden skirts. Two, the militias were trained not to torture or kill anybody, but to kill to defend themselves because attack is the best form of defence. Three, it is a blatant lie to claim that over 300,000 people have been killed since "Operation Darfur" started. No, I disagree. Those killed so far cannot be more than 295,000 by our own estimation. Can't you see that those Western media can exaggerate too much?

Yes, I know. At times they are so stupid that they don't know that there is a difference between six and half a dozen!

Thank you, Mr President. Those foreign things don't know that this is just a brotherly fight. We Africans love to fight one another until death do us part because it's in our genes to be aggressive, wicked and homicidal in thoughts and deeds.

Bashiru, so you can now call yourself African. I thought you were Arab?

Yes, geographically, we are Africans, while, genetically, we are Arabs. But recent studies have shown that Arabs, indeed, have the same genes as Africans, so we are Africans, too.

Is that why Darfur is such a man-made humanitarian tragedy, a sort of slaughter slab for fellow dark-skinned citizens? Yet you have natural disasters like dust storms and droughts staring you in the face every minute. You have River Nile passing through your vast country, the largest in Africa, yet, you do not have a sound irrigation scheme that could aid agriculture throughout the year and turn the sand dunes into oases of affluence. Are you trying to fast-forward the creeping revolution in the South?

Excuse me, sir. I appreciate the fact that my country is the largest in Africa, two and a half times the size of Niagara, your country, and slightly more than one quarter the size of Obama’s America. I just hope this is not the case of the kettle calling the pot black.

What do you mean?

Mr. President, the fact remains that your country is the most populous and one of the richest in Africa. Yet, you are also battling with internal strife and hunger every minute. You suffer from periodic religious and political crises. You have your own Darfur in the southern part of your country where you equally have your own janjaweed militias holding tight to the jugular of the nation. Up north, your people, without provocation, have often killed one another at the drop of a rosary; yet, no Niagaran leader has been indicted for crime against humanity. Why should it be me? Those criminals are just being partial.

How many have we killed?

Bashiru, it's your fault. You do not seem to have experience in the art of eating and wiping your mouth clean like our politicians.

Sorry, I do not understand that. This is no eating business.

I mean you should never leave any tell-tale signs in the killing fields. If your army engaged in a real progrom, call it a mere programme for the emancipation, not pacification, of the primitive tribesmen of the lower Sahel. That's what the international community wants to hear. It’s a question of semantics and packaging. Honestly, you made a mistake. And a costly one at that.

What could I have done in the circumstance other than cursing those things in Arabic? This their English is irregular and confusing.

You should have got in touch with us and we could have given you the "Kenabacha" antidote against international indictment.

What is that?

While your soldiers and the militias were busy doing “environmental sanitation” in Darfur, you should have arrested or kidnapped many Darfur activists. Arraign them before a kangaroo court, try them and have them sentenced to death. The entire world would be too busy appealing for clemency to be thinking of indicting you for crime against womanity or whatever. The Butcher of Abuja did it successfully here. He killed at will. He would not take prisoners except as bargaining chips. He even had his cake and ate it. He used Ken Saro-Wiwa as a chip and still went ahead to crunch him with his deadly molars. Can't you remember he roped me also in a phantom coup d'etat at a time the entire mankind rose up against his bloody regime? He used me to shake off pressure from the human rights communities. It’s the most effective antidote against ‘the plague of The Hague’, to quote you.

Everybody has his own strategy. Yours is to prevent the indictment, mine is to make a joke of it by dancing Makoussa dance on the grave of the victims.

Bashiru, I’m sorry for me. Your Macbeth has murdered sleep…

*First published in TELL April 6, 2009.

Affidavit Written in a City Courtyard

2010-07-05T07:00:00.002+01:00

pix *www.nigeria-law.org

“I have made this declaration in good faith believing same to be true and correct in all materials particular in accordance with the statutory declaration of Egin State law of Oaths and Affidavits of 1958”

I, Obaluwaye Adelana, Ologbo Ijakadi II, the Oriade of Kobomoje, male, Chrislam traditionalist, ruler and pencil, Niagaran citizen, residing at No 1, Aafin Edidare Street, Enuowa, Kobomoje, do solemnly swear and declare as follows:

That as the second in command to the gods I can do and undo. I can kiss. I can kill. I can love. I can hurt. I can put my foot on the bosom of any woman that catches my fancy and marry her on the spot;

That I'm not mad. Neither is mad madding me. I'm far from the madding crowd;
That, because of the aforesaid, I accepted to become the king of Kobomoje because of the premordial powers kingship thrusts on the incumbent;

That the recent allegations against my person that I unlawfully assaulted a woman believed to be my wife are baseless, null, void and of no consequence;

That the woman parading herself as the First Ayaba and victim of an alleged battery and assault by my royal self is a fake, pirated copy of the original "tear rubber" ayaba (king's wife);

That the fake First Ayaba has no locus standi in my palace;

That, in fact, the so called ayaba was born and bred in Taiwan, so she is the one that should be sent back to her mother in Taipei as “fairly used tokunbo engine”, not me;

That on the day of the so-called ritual combat that has become the talk of the town I was not the one that led the commando unit that raided her hideout;

That, rather, I was in the control room in my multi-purpose humvee while the royal commandos and chiefs were "doing etutu" (performing sacrifice) on her body;

That it was not cocaine that was poured on her but coke brewed and bottled in Colombia;

That such a liquid substance cannot peel anybody's skin except the skin of an "ajebutter", pepperless, gravy-leaking woman;

That I'm a modern, progressive, forward-looking king who admires and loves his wives equally and would not do anything to brew unhealthy rivalry and jealousy in the royal court;

That I am a firm believer in domestic democracy and that's why my wives have equal rights and claims to my fountain of goodies where they drink to their satisfaction;
That I only sow my seeds where I can reap a bountiful harvest after nine months of rainfall and sunshine;

That as far as I know all my wives have diplomatic relations with one another and none of them needs to be dean of the "diplovematic" corps to enter the royal bed;

That I am a victim of circumstance and I have the following facts to prove my case:

*Fellow kings do worse than what I am alleged to have done. They pronounce wicked judgements in their palaces and order extra-judicial punishments on civil matters involving their subjects. They jail the poor and let go the rich while government pretends not to see them except innocent king like me.

*People in higher authorities do worse too. I know of a former chairman of the nation's unlimited liability company who caned a gateman publicly while on an inspection tour of the company's factories.

*I know of a damaging director who almost damaged his wife chasing her down the road and giving her the beating of her life for daring to fight his mistress after catching both of them "red-legged" on their matrimonial bed. No director raised a finger.

*I know a judge who engaged a litigant in fisticuffs right on the road for only God knows what. He was punished but not sent to Siberia like me.

*I know of a king who is also a pastor who beat up his mistress, a member of his congregation, poured petrol on her and set her ablaze in a fit of jealousy and anger. They punished him but nobody removed his "bearded crown", yet they have snatched my own "beaded crown" for a lesser offence.

Furthermore, I solemnly and respectfully declare:

That I have been wrongfully accused and put in the same dock as ordinary criminals;

That, yes, I'm wild but it's for a reason. It is not with "ojuboro" (ease) that you snatch the children of palm kernel from their mother;

That one is an endangered species if one doesn't have money, doesn't have "gbekude" (spiritual protection) and doesn't have eyes that are perpetually red like "oju amugbo" ( the eyes of pot smokers)? What will one use to frighten "omo araye" (people)?;

That it's a lie that I beat my wife;

That it's she that behaved like a female "ajantala" (enfant terrible) and attacked me by removing my crown, wrapping my "agbada" round my face and dumping me in the ditch --- crown, beads and horsetail. Come and see Oriade panting in the gutter!;

That she is the one that should be restricted to a remote area. It's wrong to snatch my crown and ask me to leave town. Thus, I submit that my transfer to Igbobini is malicious, ultra vires, anti-culture and anti-status of a first class oba;

That Igbobini, the hometown of my "ajantala" wife, is too remote for my status. If Oriade should be restricted at all I'd opt for Igbotako or Oke Igbo or Igbokoda but if it is compulsory I must be restricted to one bush (igbo) or the other why not Igbo Olodumare or Igbo Irunmole or Igbo Elegbeje where I can have free daily access to fellow demons? I appeal.

I have made this declaration in good faith believing same to be true and correct in all materials particular in accordance with the statutory declaration of Egin State Law of Oaths and Affidavits of 1958.

Signed (Ologbo Ijakadi II)

D E C L A R A N T

Sworn to at the Adesina Court Registry, Kobomoje, Akure, Egin State, this 15th day of June, 1986.

BEFORE ME

Bolanle Oluwasesan Tenibegiloju
COMMISSIONER OF OATHS

Note: This Opilogue first appeared in TELL, June 21, 2010.

Kudos to the Kaitastrophic Eagles!

2010-07-01T07:00:00.002+01:00

Pix* Daylife

I have come here today not to bury the Super Eagles but to praise them. They may not have won the cup but they have won our hearts for their acts of valour in the thick of battle. They fought the battle of consistency and they won hands down. It is those who do not know history that will fail to see the achievement of these great heroes who crossed many rivers and mountains to reach Zululand to play and dance to the rhythm of jubilani. They went, they fought and they conquered. Why should we not praise God for His mercies on these wonderful gladiators?

Watiii! Who are you? You just stood up and started bamboozling us about your Super Eagles and their imaginary success.

I don’t know what is paining you. Is it the fact that you don’t know me or that you don’t know that the Super Eagles did not lose anything, rather they won all the laurels available except the cup, a replica of which we can easily make with the assistance of the Benin bronze casters. And if we are in a hurry we can just dash to Felix Idubor arts gallery in Benin and pick a ready-made World Cup or just any of those shops on Eweka Road. So we don’t need to sulk over any imaginary loss. Do we?

You have not answered my question. Who are you?

Well, I am Chief Ademoyega Onipanlade, FIFA instructor and archivist. I have been commissioned by FIFA to give this talk about the Eagles’ performance and to let you know that you have nothing to be ashamed of. The national team has been very consistent in its performance and FIFA thinks that it is the best team of the tournament...

Sorry to cut you short. You mean we are the best team despite the fact that we didn’t go beyond the first round?

Yes, we are the most consistent. Record shows that we have made four appearances in the World Cup (1994, 1998, 2002 and 2010) and have continued to show a consistent pattern of performance. Mark you, FIFA has scored the national team high only as far as consistency is concerned. For instance, in 1994, we scored six points to get out of the group (won two matches, beating Bulgaria 3-0 and Greece 2-0, lost one to Argentina). In 1998 we scored six points again (won two, beating Spain 3-2 and Bulgaria 1-0, lost one to Paraguay) to top the table and move to the next round. In 2002 we managed to get one point and a knockout. In 2010 we succeeded in securing another one-point hammer blow that sent us crashing on the green canvas. But that is not the real consistency we are talking about. In the World Cup we have consistently maintained a cosy relationship with our ‘best friend,’ Argentina. In 1994 they beat us 2-1. In 2002 they knocked us out with just one devastating upper cut (1-0) and again in the first round of South Africa World Cup tournament they hit us again in the solar plexus with one dangerous blow (1-0) that made nonsense of our soccer room strategies and permutations.

I want to believe that with a friend like Argentina, honestly, we don’t need enemies again. By the way is that all about the Eagles’ consistent inconsistencies?

Just wait. It’s you calling them “inconsistencies”. You haven’t heard anything yet. Now listen carefully to this mother of all analyses. Like I have already told you, we only managed to secure one point each in the first round (2002 and 2010) and went down crashing like a pack of drunkards. This is how it worked out consistencywise.
For 2002 World Cup we lost our opening match with Argentina by 1-0. In 2010 we also lost our opening match to the same Argentina 1-0. In 2002 we played against Sweden in our second match and we lost 2-1 despite the fact that we opened scoring first. In 2010 we equally lost our second match to Greece (2-1) though we scored first. Our third and last game in 2002 was against England. It was a 0-0 draw. Same with the final match with South Korea in 2010 that ended in a 2-2 draw. In each tournament the Eagles were coached by an emergency, cash-and-carry technical manager while the sacked coach was in the stands bemoaning his loss and praying either for a miracle or disaster...

My God! And there was a disaster!

What happened?

The “Isa Kaitastrophy” during the Super Eagles-Greece match.

No, it wasn’t a disaster or a ‘kaitastrophy’, as you call it. Rather it was a blessing in disguise. The red card the BBC grammarian got actually fetched us the FIFA fair play award for the first round...

‘Xcuse me, why did you call the kaita boy a BBC grammarian?

Because murder he wrote when he spoke with the BBC sports correspondent on the kaitastrophic fiasco between him and the Greek gladiator. For the simple question, “Why did you kick your opponent like that?” his response nearly caused an earthquake in Buckingham Palace.

Ha ... ah ... What did he say?

It was a grammatical explosion! “I doesn’t kick am,” he said twice. Wayo Allah! It’s a lie!

I’m sure the tape of that interview is still in Bush House. In fact FIFA has called for it to see whether Kaita should not be given another red card for kicking and committing a “fowl”(?) in the penalty box of Her Majesty’s Queen’s English. Unknown to the world Kaita’s gaffe is a metaphor of the consistent bungling of sports administration in Niagara. No shame to Kaita but kudos for showing to the world that Niagara knows how to muddle up things at the critical moment. But the best award received by the Eagles is that of the Golden Boot presented to Yakubu for scoring the most spectacular miss of the tournament. Nobody will forget him in a hurry for that miss, an opportunity which the commentator said his 83-year-old grandmother could never miss! And to add insult upon injury Yakubu was captutured on camera smiling and chewing gum like a psychedelic goat after failing to put the damn thing (jubilani) inside the damn hole (net) in front of him.

By Jove, why was he smiling?!

Maybe excess joy weeps, excess sorrow laughs.

I think he must be Escobar-red!

No, we must learn to forgive and forget. Both ‘Yakaita” and ‘Isagbeni’ should be forgiven. This is not Latin America where two neighbouring countries go to war, a la Honduras and El-Salvador, because of football.

God forbid!

To Sir With Pun!

2010-06-29T07:00:00.001+01:00

By Dele OMOTUNDE

“Everything about everyone of us points to the fact that everyone is unique… This is the foundation on which I have built my persona which has become a brand”

The editor appreciates your desire to grant this interview and prays you oblige me a copy of your private part.

Do you really mean that? Are you sure your editor actually said it the way you've put it to me? I guess he must just have asked you to ask for a copy of MY PRIVATE PART for review in your magazine.

But, sir, we are saying the same thing. You yourself have just said it, so what is the problem? Once again, in case you didn't hear me well, can I have a copy of your private part as requested by my editor?

Okay, you will have it at the end of the interview. Or are you in a hurry to have it now?

Wharrrever!.... Let me just begin the interview by asking how you came to be so different among all men I have ever come across. You are the first area fada (father) I ever knew and you are so punky!

Thanks for the compliments. You are really knowing of area fada for the first time? Maybe it's because you are such a young girl. Have you ever heard of somebody called King of Boys before?

No! But what kind of man would call himself king of boys?

Late Pa Majekodunmi of Ibadan was the King of Boys during his own days. He was a first generation area fada (father) whose popularity and generosity went beyond the Ibadan city walls in the 1970s and 1980s. At over 70, he was as agile as his young followers. At such an age, the King of Boys stood out of the crowd. He treated the boys like his equals and they loved him for it...

But you have not really answered my question, sir.

If only you will stop interrupting ... As I was saying, it's people like late Pa Majekodunmi who tend to prove the point that it pays to stand out in a crowd and make the difference. I had the best of liberal education that money could provide and after graduation, I felt within myself that I needed to be different from the pack.

What's the philosophy behind this choice of yours?

Thank you, my sister. I borrowed my philosophy from one author called Herman Melville who once wrote that "it is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation". I just wanted to be myself. You see, everything about everyone of us points to the fact that everyone is unique. And this has been scientifically proved. No two people have the same fingerprints. My DNA coding is just as different from that of yours, even if we are twins! So, why can't I be me? And you be you? This is the foundation on which I have built my persona which has become a brand. I refuse to be like the Joneses because he who blends with the crowd can easily get lost. Look at Muhammad Ali, the boxing legend. He refused to be like other fighters of his time by promoting his talents on a higher and unique pedestal. While others fought with only their fists, he brought razzmatazz into the fighting profession with his legendary 'Louisville lip'. Our own Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, too, stood out from the pack after rediscovering himself as a revolutionary musician. He was more than an avant-garde artiste. He was an irritant gadfly on the private part of the powers that be and...

Sorry to cut you short. Since you mentioned private part again, maybe I could just quickly ask this question: why the reference to your private part in the title of your book?

Have you really seen MY PRIVATE PART?

Nnnnnoooo, sir! And...emmm...emmmmm... I don't intend to. O ti o. No way!

But your editor asked that I should give you a copy?

Yyye...yyyeee...yes, sir! I didn't know that's what you meant.

Look at you! Even if one wants to eat toad for supper at least one should look for a fat and juicy one for that matter... I don't blame you. All grasscutters claim to be big, robust and mature. Well, to answer your question, MY PRIVATE PART, no pun intended, is just a semi-biography detailing aspects of my private life hitherto unknown to the public, especially my constituency, made up of the performing musicians, dispatch riders and the 'footwagen owners' association of Niagara.

You said your private part...

Point of correction. The correct title of the book is MY PRIVATE PART...

We are still saying the same thing. It is your private part, not mine...

Young girl, don't get on my nerves. What's really wrong with you? Or is this temptation by subterfuge?

Sir, I'm not tempting you by whatever. The point is that my pastor will not forgive me if I mention the title the way you want me to...

You are like the squirrel in the tale who will not listen to corrections and warnings. I say MY PRIVATE PART, not YOUR PRIVATE PART, is the title. Now, say it...

Sorry, I can't say it as it is.

There you are! And you say you work for a media house that is bold, daring and different from the others. Do you want me to change the title of my book because of your religious sensibility?

Sir, this thing you are asking me to do is ethically and morally wrong. It offends morality … But if you don't mind, let us proceed with the interview... What advice do you have for the youths of nowadays on this philosophy of being different?
Let me first of all start with you. From the little I have seen of you, you need to reexamine yourself, identify your strengths — your gifts and talents — and give them expression in your own special way. No doubt, you were designed to be an original unto yourself. You are a reporter today. Tomorrow you may rediscover yourself as a Bimbo Odukoya or Mrs Okonkwo or Mrs Ashimolowo, go for it. Mount the stage and prophesy... Every individual should realise his or her full potential. Just be yourself. And that reminds me of John Mason who said: "You are born an original, don't die a copy". If you try to be like someone else, then who will be you? Be different. Brand yourself and become a marketable prodigy.
Thank you, Mr. Shirley Boy. Now, for the umpteenth time, can you give me a copy of your private part?

Over my dead body!

*First published in TELL July 23, 2007

BULLSHIT IN THE HOUSE

2010-06-28T07:00:00.001+01:00

Pix credit *www.nigerianbestforum.com

Yeh! Yeh!! Yeh!!!

What's troubling you?

Sir, can't you see the legislators fighting themselves?

Point of correction. They are not fighting themselves but one another. That's what I taught JSS 3 last week. Nobody fights himself except he is mad.

Exactly, sir! I think they are mad.

No, they are not mad. It is mad that is madding them.

Then we should leave the public gallery immediately, sir. Our literaure teacher says we must always be far from the madding crowd.

Actually I didn't know this would happen today we wouldn't have come visiting on the day the road to the national assembly was famished. Well, I hope you did not see too much of the ugly display.

As for me, sir, I saw plenty. I saw a law breaker, sorry, a law maker give another one a blow on the head. I saw one tear the dress of the other to pieces and made him look like a student on a rag day.

Sir, I also saw something.

What's that?

I saw a woman almost disrobed and I bet they would have exposed her nakedness if not for the TV cameras that saved the situation.

How do you mean?

Master! If those people didn't fear anything at least they feared the cameras. I could see that anytime they saw the TV camera panned in the direction of two combatants the others would provide a human shield to cover them.

Okay, let me tell you that what you saw was just a child's play compared to what normally happens in Japanese, Korean, Pakistani and Indian parliaments. Even in the old Western Region it was battle royale in their house of assembly. There was even a time that the fighting was so tough that the law makers had to jump out through the window to escape the mini war inside during which matchets, knives, guns, tear gas, amulets and talisman were used. Anyway I hope you have learnt a lesson from this. Liadi, you used to say you would like to become a legislator, do you still think that is feasible in view of what we have just witnessed?

It's still feasible, sir. It's the most lucrative business in the (Niagara) world. Even at the point of death I'd like to have a bite at the national cake also. All I have to do is that I will always arm myself to the hilt with American, British and Native insurance before leaving home everyday. Actually it's good I came here today. The works of our elders are works of wisdom. I have learnt a lot. As Chinua Achebe says in "Things Fall Apart" when mother cow is chewing grass its young ones watch its mouth. We have watched our elders in the house and we shall put to practice what we have learnt, insha Allah!

Bullshit! God have mercy!!

The Sabainah Monologue

2010-06-22T07:00:00.000+01:00

By Dele OMOTUNDE

“Life after power is sour like yoghourt. It is not as sweet as fresh palm wine”

Is this Ita Eko or Ita Oko? What is this? Look at me, a whole me spending two nights with ordinary wetin-you-carry, street urchins, pickpockets and other petty felons. What an insult! If it's not because of the rain, you don't pack chickens and pigeons together. Do you? That’s an abomination! Now it's raining cats and dogs and heaven is let loose on innocent pigeons like me. What have I done to warrant this humiliation? I did not do anything to disgrace our House. Did I? But I know. Everybody knows. Now that they have got me, they don't even need to go on with the trial any more. They have achieved their aim. I, Sabainah, the VIP daughter of the VIP-in-chief, remanded in custody? It’s all photo trick. I know their game plan. It's not me they have remanded, it's their olodi. Yes. I know it. I can see daddy with my inner eye as he ponders along the corridor, trying to temper his angry nerves.

Poor daddy! I now see why he didn't want to leave Mr Langbodo the other day. It is the same reason why Mugabe, Kibaki, Campaore and Gaddafi don't want to leave. Life after power is sour like yoghourt. It's not as sweet as fresh palm wine. Sergeant Doe tasted it and refused to let go. He told Nancy, his wife, “only death can take us out of this mansion. This thing called power is sweet". That's what daddy threw away just like that, like the proverbial Alaatan who threw away his beefy ration. Was he afraid of a Yormie Johnson or a Jerry Rawlings knocking on our door with bayonets? Now, see where his 'patriotic' decision has thrown me, Sabainah, his daughter! A whole me languishing in police jail and all these rugbe rugbe (riff-raff) wetin-you-carry recruits twisting my tail and groping me in the dark. No thanks to NEPA. No thanks to EFCC, daddy’s frankenstein’s monster. When we are down with a major problem, the little ones set our bodies up for a game of hop-step-and-jump!. O ma bloody se o! What a pity! If daddy had had his way with a third bite at the apple, I wouldn't be here today. But see poor me rubbing shoulders with area boys and these unkempt things in custody! How are the mighty fallen…!

But come to think of it, why are they doing this to me and Baba’s disciples? Why is the Demolition Party, our party, doing this to fellow members? Is it every foe and friend that our "caterpillar" must destroy even without an election in view? Or is it a case of the falcon not hearing the falconer again? If gold rusts, what will iron do? What would have happened if the Air Conditioning (AC) party had been in power? Freeze me and daddy to death? God forbid! But I don't blame them. If there's no opening in the wall, a snake cannot gatecrash into the bedroom in the middle of the night to put asunder what God has put together. Eewo! Taboo! See what my brother did to my daddy. See what daddy did to my mummy. See what mummy did to daddy. See what my sister-in-law did to my brother. See what my brother did to our daddy-in-law. See what daddy did to... See me, see trouble o! How many teeth are we really going to count in the mouth of a person with double denture? They are legion! We have done very bad things to ourselves and, now, outsiders are cashing in to do worse.

Nobody has sympathy for us. Is this what they call nemesis? Where are my baba’s friends? Are they just summer friends? Or are they friends at all? Are we that bad? We pressed buttons as usual, but the buttons are stiff and the response very cold. It's no longer business as usual. This one is worse than daddy. He is ready to step on any toe no matter how sacred. He is even ready to crush the toe of the person who bought him the executive iron shoe he is wearing. The other day, we begged him to intervene but he said his hands were tied. You kuku know my daddy. God bless him. He asked him pointedly who tied his executive hands. He had no answer to that question. He was just looking booooh… murmuring and murmuring and murmuring like some distant waters without a soul. What are you murmuring?” daddy demanded to know. He was incoherent. All we could hear were "roll of law", "dew process", "feace and sucurity", "stability" and whatever. Then he started gazing at daddy. Come and see cinema for inside Aso Hall. Daddy roused him back to life with a shout, "Ocee, are you there?!" He jumped up and started murmuring again, "I zee zomezing! I zee zomezing!" I seeee. Is this the “zomezing” he saw? I, Sabainah, omo baba mukomuko, (the direct descendant of the one who drinks eko for breakfast every day), rubbing buttocks with hardened criminals in the junior version of Ita Oko (detention centre)?! O Nina and Frederick! “Time Changes Everything…” O la la!!

Look at this one looking at me as if I'm Lagbaja, omo Lakasegbe. They don't have to stare at me like that?! My own Lagbaja is not wearing masks. My face is in all newspapers across the length and breadth of Niagara and on the internet. It's even on YouTube! Good things, after all, do come out of evil. Don't they? All these yeye rugbe, dane-gun-carrying wetin-you-carry can never be 'famous' like me. Some drugs can only be like Panadol; they can't be Panadol. Lai lai! But come o! What has popularity got to do with it? Are these people really telling me that the law is no respecter of anybody? In our own farm, all animals are equal but some are more equal than the others. If these “things” think I'm lying, they should find time to visit our farm, a micro world for this quintessential animal called man.

*First published in TELL August 25, 2007.

WOZA! RUIN RONALDO, MESS UP MESSI

2010-06-16T07:00:00.000+01:00

*Credit: oohsa.wordpress.com

You really wanted to know how Africa can win the World Cup? Simple. First and foremost we should learn to believe in our propensity and capacity to bring about the 8th wonder of the world in South Africa.

How do we do that?

It's as easy as drinking akamu. A Ghanaian player set the ball rolling last month in England.

Who is that and what did he do?

It's Kevin Boateng, the Prince of Ghana as well as Portsmouth where King Kanu holds court. He jazzed his country's opponent in the opening round. Michael Ballack, the German machine, is no longer a threat to the Black Stars. Whether by actual tackling or by remote control we should demobilise our potential opponents. And let me tell you this, African magic is already working. Rio Ferdinand is already out of the World Cup race for England. Arjen Robben, the Dutch, may also end up in Robben Island nursing injury during the tournament. Our gods are already awake doing the job for us.

Na lie! Which gods? How about our own players who are down and out? Michael Essien of Ghana, our own Mikel Obi and Didier Drogba a.k.a Aderogba of Ivory Coast have also had their chances of representing their countries messed up. Are the African gods also responsible for this?

Don't worry yourself. The gods are not to blame. In football the end justifies the means. Use what you have to get what you desire. *If you are less busy let's go down memory lane to examine how Machiavellian tactics had been used before to achieve a continental objective.

You must be kidding!

Siddon dia (sit down there) and be talking grammar. World Cup is no tea party. It's the equivalent of war. Every nation or continent is ready to play dirty to have a grab of the golden goblet. Fair is foul; foul is fair. Every team wants to win either by clean tackles or by unlawful shouldering. Jersies will be torn and bones will be crushed.

So, where is the FIFA fair play plea?

My friend, fair play does not win trophies. It's Machiavelli all the way. *So if you don't mind let's go down memory lane like I said and see how the fair play doctrine was sidelined by the Darwinian theory of survival of the fittest...In 1958 a precocious 17-year-old Brazilian boy caused sensation at the World Cup in Sweden and made his country win for the first time with his computerised football. In 1962 he was back to cause further upsets in Chile as Brazil won back to back. In 1966 he was back yet again fully loaded to cause further havoc. His artillery legs and nuclear war head were the cynosure of all eyes. Brazil looked certainly set to win the World Cup in England the third time consecutively but that was not to be. A carefully planned ambush on the field of play by Portugal was enough to take care of his dancing legs and Brazil's hope of a third win. Brazil subsequently crashed with him because he was the pivot around which other players oscillated.

Are you suggesting that African nations should field butchers, a.k.a bonecrushers, as defenders of our continental pride?

Why not, if not? I have told you the end will always justify the means.

No, I don't think that's appropriate.

Eh, look at you! Do you know what Italy did to Niagara in 1994? They studied our style of play and they found out that Daniel Amokachi was the bull, the engine room of our operations, and they technically put him out. They also devised a diabolical means of excusing Amuneke, another bulldozer marauder, from his duty post after scoring his Alice-in-Wonderland goal against them.

So, what are you suggesting we do?

If we want the World Cup to stay in Africa we must do the following. We all know that the oyinbo people don't like noise. We can catch them on that. We should bring in African musicians to come and play, sorry, make noise, at the stadium anytime an African team is playing. Let's bring Alariwo of Africa, the guy who sang "Kini Big Deal", Fuji crooners like Obesere, oko onikulikuli (grand lover of groundnut cake sellers), and all those who sing noise to come and confuse them. In addition we can put about 10,000 well trained African monkeys in the stands yelling and making a hell of a noise and calling the oyinbo players names and hissing and spitting any time they have possession of the ball as they do to ebony players in Spain and Portugal. And the real Mccoy of it all? Let every African be blowing the vuvuzela and hitting metal gongs on and off the field of play to destabilise them. Make noise in restaurants, in front of their hotels, in their bedrooms, at their training camps and even when they go to the gents! Make it difficult for them to urinate or concentrate. Bring in all the sangoma, babalawo, marabouts and voodoo men in Haiti, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Benin Republic, Mali, Senegal, Sango-Otta and Arochukwu and everywhere to work in conjunction with African witches and wizards to render the attackers against our teams impotent in front of goal even if their team doctors and psychologists had injected them with high doses of viagara and ecstasy and birbiturate, all combined. When they are face to face with African goalkeepers they will see lions not human beings and run away, abandoning the ball in the 18-yard box. Whether by crooked means or by lawful elbowing we must to win! Yes o!! And if going native or malicious is dated our players should be asked to embark on a three-day dry fast before any match and make sure that they don't drink water during half time. Already the Niagara Pray Association has already sent an advance party of aladura led by Brother jacobin and it is camped on the Table Mountain praying and fasting and cursing and speaking in tongues... "Whatever we tell the referee is what the referee will hear, jah Jehova. It's whatever we do or say that the referee will accept, jah Jehova. In this World Cup, all goals scored against any African team will be rejected for offside positional play, jah Jehova. When penalty taken against us let the ball end up in the moon, jah Jehova". That has been their prayer since they landed on the Table Mountain, almost burning the mountain top with candle fire. But I learnt their prayers on penalties have already been answered. FIFA has forbidden the ojoro tactics of strikers who often run, stop and confuse the goalkeeper before taking a penalty shot. Just go straight to the point, says FIFA. That will help African teams. Shoot straight at our goalkeepers and no goal will be scored. Yashin!

Does it mean Ronaldo will not be allowed to play his panada (dummy) penalties again?

You mean banana shots?

No, I mean panada, ojoro (deceptive) penalty kicks. Who is talking of banana? Is he a monkey? I mean he will run and then suddenly stop to see the goalkeeper move before making hay.

At least not when he is playing in Africa. If he does, not only FIFA will fight him but all the gods of Africa will descend on the pitch and bite him to death. To be forewarned is to be forearmed.

Don't you think that's too much for ordinary Word Cup?

Ordinary ke? You must be joking! Remember Escobar of Colombia? He was killed for scoring an own goal in a World Cup tournament. Is that ordinary? Our U-23 team beat Mexico, Brazil and Argentina in 1996, Atlanta Olympics, do you know how many people committed suicide over this? Anyway, I was just joking about Ronaldo invoking the anger of the gods. There are many ways of killing a rat. Some of the players who can be thorns in our flesh can easily be taken care of without violence. Let's begin with Argentina. All our players need do is make a mess of Messi by taunting him, calling him "short man devil", "Falklands Fokker", "messy diapers" and "little humpty-dumpty" and he will lose his senses and do a Zinedine Zidane against Yobo. The instant penalty, of course, is a red card. We should adopt the machiavellian tactics pioneered by the Italians. If we should meet Portugal it's easy to render Ronaldo impotent. Just detail two busty Falconets to closemark him. Because he loves women he will be too carried away "ball" watching to notice any jabulani on the field. Ah! Africa, we are win before before (We've won even before kicking the ball)!! … Because it is Africa’s turn to become world champions. We must to win either by crooked tackling or by lawful shouldering and elbowing, afterall fair is foul; foul is fair in war.

Meaning we can go physical, psychological or metaphysical to achieve this?

I repeat, fair is foul; foul is fair. The World Cup must stay in Africa, placed on the Table Mountain in Cape Town for all men to see the glory of zoning and clowning and clannishness in Africa, nay Niagara, the giant in the sun.

Sex and the Bishops

2010-06-15T07:00:00.000+01:00

By Dele OMOTUNDE

“(A gay bishop), being head of a diocese, is like the head of the police being an armed robber, or the head of the fire department being an arsonist”

Good morning, Monsignor.
Good morning, Father Osanyin. And if you don't mind, let me also say Dominus vobiscum (May the peace of the Lord be unto you).
Et cum spiritum (And with your spirit, too). Please, I have something very important to discuss with you, sir.
What's it about?
It is about this raging controversy in the Anglican Communion over the issue of the consecration of a gay bishop in the US.
How does that concern us, Catholics?
Ha, Monsignor! I think it more than concerns us. Since the Episcopal Church installed Rev. Gene Robinson as bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire, USA, the first openly gay bishop to be so consecrated, the Anglican Church has known no fury like a congregation scorned. The rest of the Anglican world has risen up in arms against the pro-gay elements in the church and leading the opposition is Peter OmoAkin, a Niagaran bishop, who has become an icon of ecumenical defiance to Robinson's appointment.
What's our own problem in that?
Simple. Whatever is troubling Aboyade is bound to trouble all Oya devotees, whether now or later.
Father Osanyin, you've come again with these your fetish proverbs.
Fetish? This is the more reason why I'm here this morning. Some of the faithful among us believe that what is happening to the Anglicans is 'fetish', 'sodomic', 'gomorrahic' and, therefore, can never happen to us because we are more conservative, better organised and, lest I commit heresy, more catholic than the Pope. Look up, sir, and see the writing on the wall.
What?! Are you saying we may also have openly gay bishops controversy? Never! We are Catholics, not Protestants.
Yes, sir, but I think we may soon have a rebel gay padre or bishop or a lesbian Mother Superior that may turn the applecart and make nonsense of our credo.
Never! We shall excommunicate them or send them to Siberia, the land of Never-Never.
You dare not say that. Even the Pope, himself, has hinted that the Catholic Church is ready to accept gay reverend fathers and bishops, provided they adhere strictly to their oath of celibacy.
Clever Papa! I trust His Holiness for ordained wisdom. Celibacy, poverty and obedience to the papal order. Hmmm... The Holy Father is a genius like his predecessor. Clever Pope, indeed!
Why do you say that?
It means a gay clergyman cannot practise homosexualism in the sanctuary of Roman Catholicism because he is supposed to be celibate. So, being gay or not being gay is out of the question because there is no room for him to exhibit and indulge in his sexual reality or preference or whatever you call it.
Sir, we have to be careful. A celibate environment can be a breeding ground for homosexualism and lesbianism. For instance, I learnt Robinson, the gay bishop, had his first homosexual relationship while in the theological seminary! After two years of therapy, he was rehabilitated and got married to his first wife, Isabella Martin. His 12-year marriage to this woman produced two daughters.
You said first wife. Does he have a second wife?
Yes, sir. His second 'wife' is a man called Mark Andrew and they have been together for about 22 years.
Doing what?
Nobody has ever peeped into their bedroom but that's the bone of contention. Bishop Peter OmoAkin and company say homosexualism is a sin and it is not compatible with the teachings of the Bible. They say it is bad enough to be gay, but worse to be a gay bishop in charge of a diocese. And they are vehement about it, so much that the church has been divided into two. They argue that Robinson, being head of a diocese, is like the head of the police being an armed robber, or the head of the fire department being an arsonist.
Or the head of our nunnery being a serial rapist! That's too strong an indictment.
But the gay bishop is not bothered about the hue and cry over his consecration. He says his mission is to challenge his congregation and to reach out to those on the fringes of society. Then he says something I'll never forget.
And what's that?
He says: "The only way you get through Easter is through some Good Fridays". That is food for thought and it has dropped an anchor in my memory. It appears we, clergymen, find it difficult to understand the kind of emotional turmoil causing some kind of internal combustion in fellow human beings and minister unto them instead of callously and selfishly condemning them. Everybody has a cross to carry. When our Lord Jesus Christ carried his own cross 2,007 years ago, we sympathised with him; why should they not empathise with a fellow clergyman on his own spiritual road to Golgotha?
Let me tell you something. In the Catholic Church, we know how to tackle such problems.
What do we do?
We just transfer all potential troublemakers to Rome! When Martin Luther did his own thing in the old Christiandom, the Protestant Church emerged. We shall not be caught napping, like those Anglicans who are now in two camps: the GAY and the STRAIGHT. Or, as the indomie generation will put it, the zip-up and the zip-down groups. Jesus Christ! The men that God put together are now being put asunder by virtual reality. What a pity!
But for how long shall we continue to postpone the day of the sex rebels in our own church, too, as religion is no longer exclusively an expression of faith but also of creativity and freedom?
And also of mercantilism and entrepreneurship a la Niagara. Remind me next Sunday to deliver a homily on Virtual Sex Reality and the Church.
I am sure the Charismatic Movement will kick against that with everything it has.

*First published in TELL August 20, 2007.

Playing Soccer on Table Mountain

2010-06-14T18:33:00.000+01:00

*Credit: southafricatoday.wordpress.com

They have been kicking one another in the groin as if the crotch is the ball. Battles royale, no doubt. Yet they call them international friendlies. A kick in the face, a stud on the backside and a mock wrestling combat with a goal-bound attacker...Foul! It’s a penalty!! The kicks and the tackles are bone-crushing and the acrobatic gladiators are having a field day. Their Nike boots uproot grass blades and their Adidas studs dig black soil out of the turf. The stadia are engulfed in the euphoria of the soccer fiesta. From Cape Town to the City of Gold, from Durban to Port Elizabeth and from Soweto to Sun City, everybody is dancing the Samba dance and getting down to it. Even Zuma, the Zulu, is not left out. He dances like a possessed “Brother Jero” and speaks in strange tongues like a “Sangoma” Then he hits the air with his clenched fist, jumps up and down like a spear-wielding Zulu warrior about to capture a new wife and...and... increase the population of the spectators… Noise, noise, noise everywhere. Will somebody make some noise? Now, can you hear the sound, the high-decibel overwhelming sound of the vuvuzela? The message is clear. Africa, blow your horn. Beat the gong. Blow your sax. Let’s hear the tambourine. Play the maracas. Play the conga. Play the agidigbo and beat the talking drum...Bring up the war songs, and pump up the volume. Yes, digbolu kolu. Bafana Bafana, can’t you do like your ancestors? Sizwe Bansi is dead, yes, but Sisi Bonsue is dancing bonsue dance for the Bafana Bafana. Now wake up the roving souls! Make the click sound. You are not alone in the struggle to free Africa from the clutches of European and Latin American domination in soccer! The Black Stars are coming, armed with borrowed PHCN power extinguishers, to dim the stars of the perpetual winners. The Elephants will trample on their soccer boots like the jackboots of Guinea and Niger are trampling on the common man. The Indomitable Hungry Lions will roar and eat the other teams for dinner on the Table Mountain. The Desert Warriors will ride on camels and race to the battle field to stab them with Arabian swords and draw out the first blood in every encounter. Bafana Bafana will plant banana peels in the veld and ambush the soccer-roos and football tigers lurking in the undergrowth. Let them slip and get trapped in the eighteen-yard box when it matters most for them. Let the fighting Zulus come out with their spears to fight the invading Lakayanas. Blow the whistle for the Xhosa braves to come out and defend the fatherland once again. “Kill the Ball”. Sing and dance the miners’ dance. “Kill the Ball”. “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrica”. Everybody sing a song, a song of war. “We Shall Overcome”. Where are the Super Eagles? Let them and their supporters come with their lager packs and talking drums as they lead the battle cry, “digbolu kolu, digbolu kolu, Africans, can’t you do like your ancestors? Digbolu, kolu, digbolu kolu...” Make some noise and let them lose their concentration. Yes, this is your year. Africa, this is your year. The moin moin that enters Agege bread in Hungryman’s restaurant can never and will never come out alive! Eewo! Taboo! This world cup is ours, no Jupiter or Neptune can snatch it from us. Iro ni. It’s a lie! Africa shall win and place the World Cup on the Table Mountain in Cape Town for all men to see. Yes o! We shall all drink mqombothi, the African beer, with that gold cup, insha Allah! Igwe! Igwe!! Igwe!!!

Come, are you running mad? What’s wrong with you? Are you soliloquising or what? You are just rambling and rambling like the Ramblers Dance Band without letting any other person talk. You are not even coherent. Why all these shouts of Allah and Igwe? Is there anything amiss?

You must be an ignoramus. Don’t you know that an African team is set to win the World Cup on African soil come July 11?

Fa...fa...fa...foul! What did I say? Foul, not even ordinary foul, it’s guinea fowl!! It’s a lie! For where? No matter how cheap pork is no Muslim can have it for dinner, except a made-in-Taiwan adherent.

I see! Are you Carlos?

No, I’m not carlous or what do you mean?

I mean, are you Carlos Alberto Torres?

Who the hell is that?

He is a Brazilian football legend who said recently that no African nation can win the World Cup this year even if it is played with African electoral commissioners doubling as the centre referee and linesmen.

Haba! That’s uncharitable. What’s that supposed to mean?

Well, he said no African team can go far not to talk of winning. He said our record at the youth level may be impressive but we don’t stand a chance at the senior level.

This is demoralising.

You haven’t heard anything yet. He said, yes, we may have good and skilful players but we need to be more professional.

He may be right. Physical play alone does not win a match. The state of mind also matters. So does the attitude of the player. And, of course, becoming a world champion is not a one-day affair. You can’t just wake up and say you want to win the World Cup without adequate preparation.

I don’t care what you say. All I know is that the World Cup must not leave Africa for the next four years. The moin moin that enters the belly of Agege bread will never come back. The cup has entered Africa and it’s not going back because an African nation must win it. It’s possible if we do our homework very well.

How do we do that it?

You mean how do we fix it? In every African country there are many “Mr. Fix It”. If South Africa does not have we can lend them one.

If you don’t mind, can you be specific on what can be done to achieve this?

Waitii! You are going to Oyo and you are in a hurry, who tells you that the Alaafin will not be in his palace all day holding court? Just be patient like Patience whose patient dog is now eating the fattest bone on the field of play and sipping scotch-on-the-rock inside the rock.

That one na ngbati ngbati proverb. When you are ready, you will come down to my level in the dressing room.

* To be continued.

The GodAllah Solution and the 'Primitive Tribes' of Naija

2010-06-08T07:00:00.000+01:00

"Power, in this country, seems to continue to oscillate between two major power blocs, the arrogant and the ignorant"

*Photo courtesy abc.net

By Dele OMOTUNDE

Chairman, First Gentleman, Mr. Depooti Waif Jang, husband of our amiable, beautiful and stylish first female governor of this blessed state, Her Excellency, Mrs. Queen Jang, obongs, obas, obis, emirs, chiefs, members of the diplomatic corps, gentlemen of the press, ladies and gentlemen. I am happy to welcome you all to the third in the series of the bi-annual STATE OF THE TRIBE lecture and it's a big privilege to introduce to you the lecturer for today, in the person of Professor Al Mazoori, the famous itinerant motivational speaker who is blessed with a combined honours degree in History and Anthropology. Professor Mazoori, as some of you may be aware, is not a stranger to us here, but as much as I would have loved to recount his antecedents, I have been asked to allow these to come from the horse's mouth. Prof, over to you, sir.

Thank you, Mr. Moderator. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Once again, I want to express my gratitude for being invited to this great nation of yours to do what I have been doing in other parts of Africa and the rest of the world. The last time that I was here I talked about the similarities among the people of Africa and how really related we all are (See KNOWING ME, KNOWING YOU, TELL, November 29, 2004). In 2006, I was back to talk about the seeming peculiarities that exist between your country and Ghana (See THE GHANAGERIA SIAMESE TWINS 1 & 2, TELL, October 2 & 9, 2006). Now I have been commissioned by the Civil Rights Association and Democracy Watchman of Niagara to take an anthropological look, this time, at your seat of power and see if there is any deviation from old practices and practitioners.
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm not here to cast aspersion on any power bloc, neither am I here to judge anybody. My mission is to find out if real progress has been recorded in your march towards the promised land of democracy. Unfortunately, it is, as they say in Kenya, not yet uhuru. Very sad, indeed. Power, in this country, seems to continue to oscillate between two major power blocs, the ignorant and the arrogant. For many years, you have been led and ruled by the ignorant who seize power but do not have any ideological basis for doing so. Theirs is to be in charge of the oil wealth that you are blessed with and dispense favours to cronies such as spouses, cousins, relations, political stooges and henchmen. To them, the age-long theory of utilitarianism, a doctrine which says that actions are right if only they are useful for the benefit of a majority, has no meaning. The second group which understands the need to initiate programmes that will bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number, choose to be arrogant and nonchalant. They forget that those who are in the position of power have the responsibility of improving on the welfare of the citizenry. They also forget that it is not the number of mansions they build on reclaimed lands of Lagos and Port Harcourt that matters but the quality of castles they erect in the hearts of the people.

One other thing my research has found out is the lack of a permanent national framework on which everybody in power must build. What I have discovered is that there is no clear-cut national policy on how to direct the affairs of your country. It is an all comers' affair. Everybody rules according to his whims and caprices, pardon that cliché. But do I really have to beg for a pardon? When you are discussing a cliché which the Niagara issue is, actually, you can't help running into dated expressions. Niagara, in the international community, has become an irritant, worrisome cliché. Terrible, isn't it? For instance, have you not been talking and shouting about peace and unity since independence? Is the country peaceful? Are you united? And I blame the respective occupiers of your seat of power since independence for not thinking out of the box. I learnt that your seat of power used to have only a mosque as the only place of worship until a Wild Christian came, by happenstance, to power and caused a chapel to be built also. To me, that is a reactive measure. What stops a Niagaran President from saying that for the sake of unity, the seat of power will lead by example and henceforth have a common place of worship for both Muslims and Christians? On Friday, the Muslims go in to knock their heads against the floor in the direction of the Kaaba, shouting Allahu akbar! and, on Sunday, the place is rearranged for the Christians to go in, to kiss the lifeless feet of a statue on the altar, shouting God is great! If Aso Rock, I learnt that is what you call your seat of power here, could worship together (both Muslims and Christians) in the same building, the entire country will take a cue. Never will anybody burn down any place of worship again, except 'Worst Class' savages!
Then how about this? Instead of an ecumenical church which you have in your capital, Abuja, why not a chursque, a church-mosque of sorts, where all Niagaran Muslims and Christians can worship during the National Day celebrations? (Some murmurings in the audience) ...Sorry, have I stirred any hornet's nest? Beg your pardon? No, no, no, there are no infidels anywhere in the world. This is what I have been preaching on my lecture tours. Everybody is a believer. It is only the ignoramus that will label another fellow an infidel or unbeliever. We all believe in something, so let's come together and worship that Being we believe in once in a year, for the sake of our country. That's not too much a sacrifice. Is it?

Let me end this lecture by reminding us all that there's nothing wrong in having a cabal, mafia or inner caucus in any political setting. It depends on the interest they are serving, the ruling elite's or the people's. During the process of gathering material for this speech, I came across some of the most prominent mafia groups in your country. The list is long but permit me to mention just a few. They are the military mafia, Kaduna mafia, Arewa mafia, Katsina mafia, Polio mafia, Polo mafia, Gumi mafia, Egba mafia, Ekiti Parapo mafia, First Lady mafia, Ijebu mafia, Ikenne mafia, Ndigbo mafia, Amala mafia, Ogbonno mafia, Langtang mafia, Okija mafia, Gbegiri mafia, Bakassi mafia, Fattening Room mafia, Oil mafia, Ahoy mafia... Whether seadogs or seagulls or landhogs, why can't all the mafiosi come together for the sake of the country? But this I know — myopic visions, class interests, primordial stereotypes, savagery, primitiveness, wickedness, greed and inordinate ambitions are always cogs in the wheel of progress in many African nations. The rest of the world look up to Niagara to put its house in order but for how long shall we wait for the "giant in the sun" to wake up from its deep slumber? I'm sure we do not have to wait till the Second Coming. Thank you and GodAllah Bless.
Allah-luya!

*First published in TELL September 22, 2008.

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We Steal, We Kill, We Rig…

Ibadan City Pix: northoflagos.wordpress.com“No matter how independent you may think you are, he who pays the viper dictates the poison”

Ibadan City Pix: northoflagos.wordpress.com

“No matter how independent you may think you are, he who pays the viper dictates the poison”

I'm sorry, it's not your type that we want here. This is not democracy of mediocre politicians.

Are these the only criteria for participation in Niagaran politics?

What have bacteria got to do with what we are saying?

I didn't say bacteria. What I wanted to know is if these are the only conditions that can make one participate successfully in party politics...

Not enough o! You must have money. You must have mouth...

Beg your pardon? Is there anybody who does not have mouth?

There you are! And that's exactly what we are saying. You are just alakowe for nothing, you don't know anything. Listen to me carefully. You must have money, you must have big mouth or what these larodo (young) people call basket mouth and … emm…plenty juju...

What?! Juju for what?

Chief, you mean you still rely on this your useless juju power? As for me, it's blood of Jesus...

I'm still baffled how you got here, chief.

By the way, who really allowed you in?!

Iru, or what do you call yourself? You have to be very careful when it comes to election in Niagara. You must consult and listen to the elders. If not, you will regret the day you were born, like Henry Nwosu.

You mean the footballer? Has he ever regretted being a footballer?

It’s not like that. It is “he who pays the piper dictates the tune”.

Is it not the same thing? Just let me warn you…

If you will just allow me to talk, sir…

Sure, why not? The slave master cannot be so wicked that he will deny his steward the right to urinate. Spoke on (sic).

With people like you in the corridors of power, there is no hope for the electoral process.

Eeemi?! (Me?!). Who is talking of hope? Politics in Niagara is not for HOPE but GOLD. Have you not heard their excellencies arguing lately?

Over what?

What are they saying?

One is trying to woo the male voters by saying: "The other party has been robbing you for eight years, now give us a chance too". Another says to the women: "That party has been killing your husbands' batteries for too long, we are here to revive them with ACiD, insha Allah!".

We are in trouble!

Siddon Look. Africa Is Watching

Waiting for Mr. Gomina

“Politics without violence is like Xmas in London without snow, Wallahi!”

It's a lie! It's a lie!! It's a lie!!!

Who's this?

Jigijigi Bamubamu...

Wait, what kind of name is that? Do you mean Jigijigi Majimaji?

How are you going to do that?

We have guns, matchets, swords and daggers...

Stop! Who really are you?

I'm Tokyo Japan!

Wait a minute. But you've just said you are Jigijigi Bamubamu or something to that effect.

Yes. Tokyo Japan is my trade name. I'm a professional killer. I mug. I hug. I shoot. I rob. I kill for anything. Do you have anybody to fight or kill?

No, no, no, don't say that on air, Mr. Japan.

There's nothing new under the sun. Niagaran politics is not sweet without gidigbo and jagidijagan...

Eh! What's that?

Politics without violence is like Xmas in London without snow, wallahi!

Ha! Tokyo Japan!! How dare you? Do you know somebody called Waziri Ibrahim?

Is he an Ibadan man?

Sorry, Mr. Japan, does that name sound Mesiogo? Is that Oluyole name? How old are you?

I am 43, going to 44.

And you say you don't know the late apostle of politics without bitterness?

What concerns me about that? Will that belleful me? I trust our own paymaster. This Saturday, we shall get double pay. We shall also eat plates and plates of amala with abula and orisirisi... at Oga’s place.

Sorry, my name is Kareem Ojikutu, not Ojikutu Laro Kutukutu. Please take note of that. Yes...I was listening to the last speaker and I'm really pissed off...

Eh, eh, eh...watch your language. You do not say that on air. What exactly do you want to say?

Sorry, I mean it's very disgusting to hear somebody say he has guns and matchets. What for? Is he an alapata (butcher)? Haba! The only weapon against the ugly lilliputians is our vote. Niagarans must put on their thinking caps. The lilliputians are only coming again to loot the treasury.

Beg your pardon! Who says?

Waoh! You don't mean that, do you? Could you please tell the kind lilliputian to move fast by air-freighting the rivers when he comes to power in order to beat the people's expectation....Yes, who is this?

I am Jacob Essien. My friends call me Johnny Hotdog.

Are you from Calabar?

No. I'm from Oron.

What's the difference?

By the way, why are you asking?

I thought you said you are hot dog.

And so what?

I'm so sorry. I was just thinking of your personal safety.

You mean the likes of Tokyo may take offence over what I intend to say? Who cares?!

It appears we are operating on two different wavelengths. Okay, forget it. What have you got to say?

I think of Ondo ’83 when the riggers rigged so well that the voters went mad. I think of Rivers ’03 when all the voters incredibly voted for only one candidate in an election. I also think of the day when the he-goat went to the market and failed to return.

You are right, my brother. Every day is for the thief; one day is for the owner.

Ohimai, I hear you.

What’s Ohimai?

That’s the in-thing in Lagos now. Just check it out!

Presidential Debate Live !

Ibadan City Pix: northoflagos.wordpress.com
“No matter how independent you may think you are, he who pays the viper dictates the poison”