The Af’eyin pin’ran intervention in Rivers

After President Bola Tinubu intervened in the seismic crisis that rocked oil-rich Rivers state last week, one thing and two people unravelled. By their unravelling, pretentious veils were lifted off their faces. They were the president himself, the nature of Nigeria’s presidential democracy and the governor of Rivers state, Siminalayi Fubara. Nigerians distrusted the piece of paper that emanated from the Tinubu intervention. To them, it reeks of the proverbial partiality of one entrusted with deploying their incisors to halve a piece of meat called the “af’eyin pin’ran”.

Let me break into granules who the Yoruba af’eyin pin’ran is. Whenever there is a tie in the need for an equal halving of a piece of meat, Yoruba are often suspicious of the human teeth being able to dispense equitable justice. They fear that hiding under the cavalier clouds of the mouth, meat justice, with the incisors as the gavel, often results in inequity, tyranny and cheating. In their resignation to this incisor tyranny, they say only God can judge the af’eyin pin’ran.

There is often a cache of assumptions in cases where an af’eyinpin’ran’s equitable justice sense is sought. One is that they are older in stature and wisdom. Second, that they are assumed to be reputably impartial arbiters, and third, that the meat to be halved is beyond the oesophageal lust of the one to share the meat; that is they are not greedy. But in most cases, the dental judge, an alagata, is the arbiter who no one trusts. He is guilty, ab initio of hiding chunks of meat inside his own mouth.

This same Yoruba, in their extreme sense of empathy, reserve ample space in their hearts for one who is down. So they say, even if you are as unfeeling, uncaring and beyond bother as to be able to crush the ugly, meatless head of a tortoise with your teeth, you must wail on behalf of the mother who begot the person undergoing travails. “Eni ba j’ori ahun, yio se’daro alabiamo” they say. I mean, the matter of Governor Simnalayi Fubara of Rivers state and his abductors deserves our wails. Yes, Simnalayi has been abducted. No, there are no physical manacles around Sim’s feet and hands; yet, he is in chains. Or, forgive the disgusting epithets it evokes, but no pun or alliteration is intended, Sim is in deep shit.

His situation can be compared to that of little Alice and her adventures in a strange wonderland. In that famous and widely burnished 1865-written children’s book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, authored by Lewis Carroll, a potpourri of fantastical tales and riddles are cobbled together to explain Alice’s dilemma. The young girl, Alice falls asleep in a meadow and begins to dream that she accompanied the white rabbit into its hole. In the hole, she encounters several wondrous, bizarre and illogical encounters with strange creatures which change their sizes. Alice attends a strange endless tea party in the company of the Mad Hatter as well. She then gets to the presence of the Queen who calls for the execution of almost everyone present. Later, the Queen ordered Alice to be beheaded even in her presence. She then wakes up.

In that Aso Rock resolution, Simnalayi was beheaded at the request of FCT Minister Wike. It reminds one of the biblical Herod Antipas. Antipas had ordered the beheading of John the Baptist at the request of Herodias’ daughter. The head was subsequently placed on a platter. If you don’t want to go that Alice or John the Baptist extreme to describe the Simnalayi fate in Aso Rock last week, think up the fable of Tortoise the Trickster and the Squirrel. Justifying the need for the evocation of the Tortoise to explain contemporary phenomena, Alice, in the same Alice in Wonderland, had asked, “Why did you call him Tortoise if he wasn’t one?” and the reply she got was, “We called him Tortoise because he taught us”. Tortoise teaches us that we have contemporary tricksters scattered in every plane of life, at the political, leadership, governmental and all existential levels. The wary enter their traps and some never return. So animals are deployed as metaphors for life, simply because in them is an embodiment of human potential. They also mirror the vagueness and vagaries of life and the tensions that we encounter in our daily struggles while journeying to the top.

Last week, perhaps assuming that the race for the jugular of Rivers state was a duel between gentlemen, Simnalayi was in Aso Rock, with Peter Odili, the state’s first Fourth Republic governor. It was a meeting most probably called by President Bola Tinubu. Rivers had fluctuated dangerously in the past couple of weeks, so much that the oil-rich state could implode and explode if not tamed. In an act reminiscent of pressing the nukes, Simnalayi had ordered the demolition of the State House of Assembly while the 24 defecting lawmakers from the PDP, in cahoots with Wike, had begun to march Rivers towards the precipice. The resolution, which later turned out to be an autocratic military decree from Aso Rock has received scalding criticisms from Rivers people and Nigerians. Ijaw youths held a public protest against it while some of their leaders threatened court action against Tinubu and Fubara. The general belief that originated therefrom was that the age-long Tortoise trickery was deployed to wangle the way for minister of the federal capital territory, Nyesom Wike’s continued Adolf Hitler hold on the oil-rich state.

The tortoise trickery? So, one day, there was a contest for the animal leadership kingdom in the forest. Tortoise and squirrel hit the finals of the contest. The ageless trickster, Tortoise, put forward a suggestion of a race to determine who the rightful animal leader was. Other animals were astounded. Tortoise runs in a crawl and is reputed to be one of the most snailish of all animals. The Squirrel was in high spirits, persuaded he would win the race. The night preceding the race, however, wily Tortoise went to the proposed race track and decorated its strategic paths with noticeable palm-nuts. He also dug a hole beside the last track by a bush path, decked it with grasses and decorated the holes with palm nuts. As all animals gathered the next day for the race, the two sprinters were invited. And the race begins. In a jiffy, the Squirrel sprinted off like a cheetah. However, at each stop where Tortoise decorated with palm nuts, Squirrel stopped, looked sideways and not seeing Tortoise, assumed that he had enough time. He then began to feast on his favourite nuts. He stopped at every intersection where the nuts were placed and when he got to the final one, he began to eat the palm nuts and fell into the ditch. Struggling to wriggle himself off the entanglements, by the time he came out, Tortoise had beaten him to the race and emerged the winner. The slowest animal, Tortoise thus emerged as the fastest and leader of the animals.

The piece of paper claiming the resolution of the crisis was audaciously one-sided. In one of the issues, while ordering lawmakers who had earlier defected to the APC to be recognised by the governor, it didn’t ask the defected lawmakers to return to the political party under whose banner they secured membership of the house. Hitler couldn’t have authored a more tyrannical verse.

Chief David Briggs, member of the Rivers Elders’ Forum and former Rivers state commissioner for works, last week tremendously helped to unravel the nature of the Tinubu presidency that we will have to grapple with. In an interview, Briggs, who claimed to be present at the Villa reconciliation revealed that Fubara signed the resolution under veiled presidential threat and without a single input into it. “I was there, so what I say is primary, not secondary. We were invited to a meeting, but that was not a meeting. What happened is that Mr President walked in with a written resolution, addressed us and declared that what he had in his hand was a presidential proclamation, therefore he could whip. He emphasised the fact that he is the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and anybody who tends to say no to what he is saying, has consequences. That in a simple layman’s words is a threat. He (Tinubu) wrote the resolution but refused to read it. He handed the resolution to Dr Peter Odili to read,” Briggs said.

Now, apart from his presidential powers, Tinubu possesses a Janus-faced political pedigree that makes him both wrong and the best person to be entrusted with the task of impartial arbitration of the Rivers conundrum. What seems to qualify him for the arbitration was that Tinubu’s rising profile in Lagos politics was amplified by his rebellious elbowing and subsequent vanquishing of his Afenifere political godfathers in Lagos. The elders had thought they could hold a toll on him having made him governor. Again, when President Olusegun Obasanjo attempted to subjugate Lagos as one of the stools of his southwest fiefdom, Tinubu audaciously repelled his quest for conquest and made nonsense of Obasanjo and his presidential powers. With this pedigree of standing up to a self-imposed titular, it must have been expected that Tinubu would queue behind Fubara against the menacing principality of Wike. How come such thinking didn’t factor in the fact that, conversely, having conquered godfatherism, Tinubu installed himself as the numero uno godfather of Lagos politics with dystopian consequences for the good of that state in generations to come?

While the warring stakeholders sympathetic to Fubara felt that Tinubu was qualified to bring equitable justice to Rivers because he suffered the deleterious consequences of godfatherism, the Wike faction didn’t think along that line. It must have encouraged Tinubu to use his incisors to halve the Rivers meat inequitably due to his recent past medallion as a Lagos godfather whose godfatherism tickles Wike’s fancy. Didn’t it occur to the Fubara group that the dalliance with the Rivers godfather may have much to do with the wealth of the oil-rich state and its link to the 2023 presidential campaign?

To confirm how fatal it was to take the dispute before Tinubu as an Af’eyinpin’ran, the reported reply of the president when former attorney-general of the state and justice commissioner, Adokiye Amiesimaka, allegedly confronted him with indubitable facts of his partiality speaks volume. Amiesimaka had reportedly asked him, “Fubara should do this, he should do that. You (referring to the president) have not said what those 25 or 27 Assembly members that defected from the Peoples Democratic Party to the All Progressives Congress without consulting their constituency and constituents… should do”. In the words of Briggs, Tinubu’s reaction was, “I’m the leader of the APC in Nigeria. And you are telling me when babies are born into my family I should ask them to go”. Thus, it is obvious that the Rivers meat to be halved is not beyond the oesophageal desire of Tinubu, who incidentally was the one they took the meat to for sharing.

Siminalayi has received tomes of incendiary comments on account of appending his signature to the Villa resolution. He has been called simpleton, lily-livered and cowardly. Briggs’ intervention has helped peers searchlight into the fact that beyond the meek-like bespectacled visor of Tinubu lies the tendency to, like a deadly viper, spit cold-blooded poison of power that can meander into the heart and kill its victim. Anyone who thought that African wielders of power are democratic, off the klieg of cameras, is mistaken. In their closets, they constrict their prey like a viper and are reincarnates of Idi Amin Dada and Emperor Haile Selassie. Many African leaders are despots and tyrants, cloaked with such totalitarian inclination by the raw powers at their disposal. They romance a one-party state like a dog coddles its puppy. This fact is corroborated by Tinubu’s reported reply to Amiesimeka in his baby analogy. I know of a 4th republic governor of Nigeria whom Obasanjo rose against with an orchestrated plan of impeachment simply because the governor was tape-recorded as calling the president a “senile old man.” The rhetoric from Briggs speaks volumes of how Tinubu could go down this despotic route. Briggs had asked in the interview, “If you were in the position of the governor, what would you do? Get up and go? Say no to Mr President with that kind of subtle but energetic threat?”

This is why, as I said earlier, even if you are as unfeeling, uncaring and beyond bother as to be able to crush the ugly, meatless head of a tortoise with your teeth, you must wail on behalf of the mother who begot Siminalayi Fubara. In his agreement to be a placeholder for Wike as third-term governor of Rivers, Fubara has found himself in the belly of the whale. What he obviously won’t be able to confess to the people of Rivers is that he had the pre-governorship agreement to keep Wike belching behind the till of Rivers and ensure his hold on the levers of power even while in Abuja. Only a fool would continue the perpetuation of this slavish status quo.

Those who subscribe to the Wike ladder theory are those who encourage despots to grow out of the ashes of the governorship succession system. A couple of weeks ago, upbraiding Fubara, Wike had asked those who climbed up by the leader not to break it. Their eyes were permanently fixated on the bolts of the maggoty wardrobes they left behind in the Government House which are fastened securely to avoid spillage to the eyes of the public, governors would always skew their succession in favour of their placeholders. They look for the most pliable person as a successor to do their dirty deal. For the sake of the states, we must encourage the rebellion of these placeholders against their governor taskmasters. Not doing this will ensure that the resources of Nigerian states would continually be siphoned into the greedy purses of governors’ predecessors. What Tinubu did last Monday by that veiled threat to Siminalayi was to brusquely assist in the return of oil-rich Rivers to the insatiable pocket of his consort.

When President Tinubu on Friday at the Surulere Ansar-Ud-Deen mosque promised to be fair to all Nigerians, the Briggs revelation should nudge us to ask if that fairness has the same colour as the Fubara Af’eyinpin’ran fairness. The reality of that Briggs revelation is that we should prepare for the dystopia to come in Nigeria. Those who shout “On your mandate we stand” should also prepare to stand on the wings of the Fubara treatment to come.

The Emefiele execution in China

We wait to hear what the fallen former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, Godwin Emefiele has to say on the lurid report of a probe of his years at the apex bank. The report was leaked on Friday and is a sensation in town. Emefiele himself is said to have perfected his bail conditions and has been released from prison custody. Whatever it is, we are sure of weeks of circus shows akin to that of Sambo Dasuki.

Meanwhile, all manner of epithets are today being used to describe Emefiele. The latest is the scathing attack on him by the Nigerian presidency. Unearthing virulent details of Jim Obazee’s report last Friday, the presidency descended on Emefiele like a cruel matador. Apart from telling us of the several unauthorized accounts he opened and the banks he covertly acquired for himself, the presidency suggested that were Emefiele to have committed the alleged theft of public funds in China, he would have faced execution. The China reference is very instructive. Only a few years ago, China executed two officials from its eastern cities upon corruption conviction. They were Xu Maiyong, a former vice-mayor of Hangzhou, and Jiang Renjie, vice-mayor of Suzhou, who were both put to death after the rejection of their appeals. Xu and Jiang were accused of stealing about 300 million yuan ($46 million; £29 million) through embezzlement and receiving bribes, crimes that have become regular occurrences in the Nigerian government. In China, the corruption these crimes that have become commonplace in Nigeria are the main causes of public discontent leading to hundreds of officials being convicted yearly.

The only thing we remember vividly is that, as Nigerians, we have travelled this Tinubu government demonization route before. At the end of the day, it was a barren and lean road that led to nowhere. When Major General Muhammadu Buhari forcefully took over the reins of power in 1983, sending elected the civilian government scampering and grovelling for its under-wears in the dark, Buhari levelled very crowd-pulling allegations against the Shehu Shagari-led government. One such was that chairman of the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) Chief AMA Akinloye had his photograph embossed on champagne bottles, as an underscore of the profligacy of the government of the Second Republic. Fast-forward to 1999 when the military was handing over the reins of power, men in khaki had sufficiently engrafted their names in halls of infamy. Allegations of enriching themselves with Nigeria’s money and misgovernance were so rife that the allegations against the Shagari government were child’s play.

Buhari cyclostyled that same propagandist condemnation when he took over the government in 2015. Sambo Dasuki, former National Security Adviser (NSA) was so dirtily tar-brushed that no one would buy him for a farthen. He was accused of colossal theft of Nigeria’s national patrimony funnelled into several individuals for the prosecution of Nigeria’s 2015 elections. A viral video soon emerged of an alleged dalliance with a girl in detention. Till today, Dasuki roams about a free man and after the ice of power arrogance had thawed, no reference is ever made to the Sokoto prince any longer.

It will seem that immediately governments in Nigeria take over, they look for a scapegoat to serve as escapism for their governmental inadequacies. Right now, there are massive grumblings in Nigeria. Hope is turning into despair. It was so bad that at the public presentation of a book entitled, ‘APC and Transition Politics’ in Abuja last week, former Ekiti state governor, Kayode Fayemi, told the APC chairman, Abdullahi Ganduje, to be bold enough to report the correct state of despondency on Nigerian streets to President Tinubu. “The party leader should be the one to tell our president this is the feedback from the communities and constituencies out there. Not what he is hearing in the villa where he is locked out,” he said. The walls of the Villa and the drowning choruses of sycophants are deafening enough to block the ears of a president from the true rendition of events.

In the bid to escape condemnation and favourably recontextualize the cries of the people for its adulations, governments are known to deploy what is called in Latin argumentum ad misericordiam to shore up their sagging pride. It is one of the major pitfalls in arguments which is appeal to emotion or literally, argument from pity. It is an emotional appeal that tugs at people’s pity and emotions, rather than through logical reasoning or argument.

We all know that Emefiele was at the top of a band of men and women who grossly and wickedly misused presidential powers during the Buhari government. Emefiele was audacious, power-hungry and dangerously fiddled with CBN policies to benefit hirelings of the Buhari government and members of his family. This didn’t bother the Nigerian people that much. When he however began to tinker with the policies, like the Naira redesign policy, which pauperized, hungered Nigerians, he became a pariah. No one was considered greater in notoriety in that government like Emefiele.

If this government is so afraid of its shadows that it cannot call a spade a spade, it should however not insult the people of Nigeria. When the Tinubu-appointed Special Investigator on the Central Bank of Nigeria and Related Entities, Obaze said that the redesign of the Naira by the Buhari government was not expressly approved by the president, he was saying one or two things. One, he was confirming what many have always said that Buhari was just a figurehead president for eight years who had no idea of how government under him was being run. Second, that Nigerians are purely stupid. Obazee had said that the approval for the redesign came from Buhari’s aide, Sabiu Tunde ‘Yusuf’. Obazee said this while presenting his final report tagged, ‘Report of the Special Investigation on CBN and Related Entities (Chargeable Offences)’ to the president last Wednesday.

If Buhari didn’t run a figurehead government or wasn’t a placeholder for some vermin whose aim was to use his name to suck the Nigerian blood, how would such a massively consequential policy which eventually dragged people to their graves, be taken by an aide of no economic or fiscal consequence, a personal assistant?

If Obazee’s role in making that statement was to appeal to Nigerians’ emotions, he failed woefully. This is because, a few weeks ago, in an interview with the NTA, his first since leaving government, Buhari confirmed that he approved the naira redesign policy as a way of ensuring that his “integrity became unquestionable”. On November 23, 2022, Buhari even unveiled the redesigned naira notes earlier than scheduled and was shown in pictures taken with Emefiele giving his imprimatur to the policy, the two grinning from ear to ear. At the launch of the Naira notes which preceded the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting, Buhari expressed his happiness that the notes were produced in Nigeria and were well-fortified. If this government is afraid to hold Buhari accountable for his sins of silence, collaboration or abetment of Nigeria’s past fiscal woes, it should not hoodwink us with those illogical statements. More instructively, why would Emefiele be accused by the CBN investigator this massively in crimes that the presidential office said would earn him public execution in China and the Smart Alec ex-CBN governor is merely being charged for procurement fraud?

By the way, does the presidential office realise that if the China model were to be in place in Nigeria today, where bribe receivers and embezzlers are executed at the drop of a hat, we may probably have no government in place as virtually everyone would have faced a squad of nuclear warheads?