The Isese stoppage in Ilorin

A little over a week ago, Professor Wole Soyinka turned the attention of Nigerians from their current harrowing economic existence to one of the tyrannies that religion inflicts on them. Prof was apparently in his element. For decades, he had fought battles of willful violations of human existence in various guises. Young Yakubu Gowon was one of the experiments Soyinka conducted on his intolerance of governmental tyranny. Gowon’s government had detained the comparative literature professor for two years in the wake of the civil war on allegations of hobnobbing with bearded Odumegwu Ojukwu who had just declared a civil war.

From Gowon to Olusegun Obasanjo and down to Sani Abacha, Soyinka had always demonstrated his resistance to tyrannies. In this particular instance, however, the Emir of Ilorin, Sulu Gambari, was the object of his singeing pen. The Emir, through some Islamic zealots, called Majlisu Shabab li Ulamahu Society, had stormed the residence of an Olokun – water goddess – worshipper, Adesikemi Olokun, to warn her to desist from holding a festival of culture tagged Isese in Ilorin, capital of Kwara state. The Islamic group reportedly claimed they were emissaries of the emir.

“Year after year, Ramadan has been celebrated in this nation as an inclusive gathering of humanity, irrespective of divergences of belief. Not once, in my entire span of existence, have I encountered pronouncements by followers of any faith that the slaughtering of rams on the streets and marketplaces is an offence to their concept of godhead. Vegetarians hold their peace. Buddhists walk a different path,” Soyinka wrote in an open letter to the Emir.

The audacity of the Ilorin zealots and the Emir of Ilorin are tiny specks of the intolerant religious space that Nigerians live in. The two foreign religions of Christianity and Islam have chosen to deliberately forget that they are tenants in this space and have magisterially been muzzling their landlord, the traditional religion. The three cardinal religions in Nigeria – Christianity, Islam and Traditional African worship, have been engaged in a battle to neutralise one another. The competition for pre-eminence and supremacy is such that endangers the peaceful coexistence of the people. Indeed, the rising tide of fundamentalism is such that checkmating the monster of religious intolerance and insensitivity of these religions who believe in the supremacy of their own faiths is necessary if the country desires peaceful coexistence and sustainable national development.

While Islam penetrated Nigeria from the Northern flank about five or six hundred years before Christianity, sometime between 1000 A.D and 1100 A.D, Uthman Dan Fodio’s Jihad took the religion to the nooks and crannies of Northern Nigeria. On its own, Christianity’s incursion into the place now known as Nigeria was through the Portuguese Roman Catholic Mission that came to Benin in 1485, having been invited by Oba Uzolua and later in 1514 by Oba Esigie, kings of Benin. This history does not obviate the fact that the two foreign religions met the Africans fully involved with Isese and its cultures.

Sulu Gambari’s involvement in this roulette of intolerance and the fact that this was happening in Ilorin seem to be the kernel of the issues of concern. Soyinka alluded to them peremptorily. History told us that Ilorin was under the suzerainty of the Yoruba, having been founded by Laderin, the great grandfather of Afonja, who later became the Aare Ona Kakanfo, the generalissimo, or chief military leader, of the old Oyo Empire. Alimi, the progenitor of Sulu Gambari, actually came into town as On’tira (phial maker) of Afonja. He got killed when a brawl broke out between him and Yoruba forces on one hand whose masquerade came out in Ilorin and his boys who had constituted themselves into the Jam’aa who opposed the Egungun masquerade. The Jam’aa, in cahoots with forces loyal to them, then gathered to eliminate him. Afonja was not only killed but his body was also burnt to ashes and the son of Alimi, a Fulani priest, then took over the leadership of Ilorin. Since then, the Yoruba traditional religion and Egungun festival were banned in Ilorin due to this clash. It was how and why Ilorin became the suzerainty of Fulanis whose treachery in the killing of Afonja has become a folk narrative in coup plotting.

The issue at hand is not even who rules over a people who have been cunningly displaced from their land, but how the people have fared ever since in ethnoreligious relations. Progenies of Alimi have made Ilorin an Islamic and emirate town, which is indisputable and commensurate with the nature of conquests. However, the wave of modernity and civilisation that is sweeping through the whole world has made it anathema for one religion to assume superiority over another. Skit makers, after Gambari and his zealots’ rude stomp on the home of Adesikemi Olokun, went to town to reveal that Ilorin, not totally disconnecting from the roots of its Afonja forebears, is replete with Isese. The skit makers demonstrated this through the many videos on the social media they posted. In them, we see that in the hordes of spots in Ilorin where roots, herbs, native talismans and amulets (called l’eku l’eja in Yorubaland) are sold and a thriving market administered by Alhajas and Alhajis and probably Christians, is the realisation that Ilorin has not forgotten its Isese past.

The hypocrisy of Gambari and the Islamic zealots of Ilorin is manifest in that throughout Yorubaland today, there is a gravitation towards the medicine and practices of our forefathers. Though it took centuries of brainwashing to accomplish this brain reset, during which period the people threw away their religious and medical identities, there is an attempt to reconnect with them.

Of particular bother is why Ilorin would prefer religion ahead of moral chastity. While the Emir and his zealots hypocritically advertise their disdain for sacrifices to gods in traditional religion, they are not averse to the widespread belief that Ilorin is the capital of adultery, where there is no societal condemnation of flesh sacrifices on the altar of sexual illicitness. This is done through the On’tiju Mi syndrome. In Ilorin, adulterous liaisons between a man and a woman, reified in On’tiju Mi, no matter whether the parties are married or not, are alleged to be accepted canon of interpersonal relations. They are not frowned upon as it is done in many other cultures and they flaunt the beauty of the On’tiju Mi without an iota of shame.

Why the Emir and his zealots opposed to Isese cannot be allowed, on the altar of religion, to pollute the long chain of cultural affinity between this historical city and the culture of other parts of Yorubaland is that Ilorin is home to the best of Yoruba-speaking musical talents. These are talents, living or dead, who evoke the rawest and best of Yoruba cultural music. When Ilorin-born musicians like Odolaye Aremu, Iya Aladuke, Jaigbade Alao and down to Kollington Ayinla, sing, they strike a chord in ancient Yoruba culture. Ilorin is home to genres of Yoruba music like Wákà, Bàálù, Senwele, Pankèkè and Dadakúwàdá. It also boasts its own brand of Àpàlà, different from that of Egba and Ijebu, like that of Alhaji Àjàdí Ilorin and Salahu Woro Idofihan. Incantations and panegyrics of Yorubaland, including even salutations to the spirits of ancestors, reign supreme in those songs.

Samuel Johnson, the foremost Yoruba historian, even claimed that Egungun originated from among the Nupe people, who can be said to be somehow contiguous to the Ilorin. Dadakuwada, an African traditional ritual performance, kindled by Ilorin oral art, also took its origin from the Egungun poetry, the Iwi. This counterpoises the pretext of the ancient city of Ilorin which, in overwhelming abidance with the Islamic religion, frowns at intoxicants and where Egungun is banned from being displayed due to the spat in history that spilt the blood of Afonja, a spat sparked by the celebration of Egungun festival.

Sulu Gambari, by banning Isese in Ilorin, is merely re-enacting the attack on Afonja and his killing for bringing out masquerades in Ilorin. There must be something about Isese that threatens the received religion of Alimi’s progenies. However, no matter how much they try, thousands of Gambari, his Islamic religious zealots and their allies in the Christian faith cannot stop the realisation that Ilorin and its Afonja ancestry cannot be divorced from Isese.

N8,000 for Bourdillon street sweepers too?

In the last few days since Nigeria’s new government announced an N8,000 palliative for 12 million poor Nigerian families, you would think that all of a sudden, Nigerians had gone back in time to the Ayi Kwei Armah’s Ghanaian years. Or that the scales had just suddenly fallen off the people’s eyes. Criticisms, snide commentaries and comparative placements of this government, side by side with the Muhammadu Buhari government’s similar policy failure, are pelted on Aso Rock Villa. Has the matrimony of barely eight weeks begun to manifest traces of rupture?

The matrimony of pre-independence Ghana with Kwame Nkrumah witnessed a similar rupture not too long after it began. Ghanaian politician, political theorist and revolutionary, Nkrumah had led the then Gold Coast to independence from Britain in 1957, having become its first prime minister in 1952. One of the most greatly debated African leaders, Nkrumah came into office with great hopes as a young, promising leader with theoretical plans of how to liberate Ghana and Africa. This renown preceded him into office. He spoke glowingly about how he would show the world the model of a peaceful transition from colonial rule to independence. Not only did this transition from colonialism to democracy fail, but in 1964, Nkrumah made Ghana a one-party state. This sponsored amendment to the constitution made him president for life. As a socialist and nationalist, Nkrumah ran a totalitarian, authoritarian government that was intolerant of dissent and mowed opposition. He also conducted elections that were considered everything but free and fair. He was however eventually toppled in a coup d’etat in 1966 by the National Liberation Council and he escaped to Guinea where he lived the rest of his life.

Arrmah fictionalised this romance between Ghana and Nkrumah in ‘The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born’. Therein, he painted the canvass of Nkrumah leadership’s disappointment, darkening the pictorial image of post-independence Ghana with graphic descriptive images of filth, messy environment, excreta, phlegm and putrefaction. With these, he depicted the intensity of the various levels of corruption and poverty under Nkrumah. To reinforce the images, Armah conjured powerfully disgusting scenes of fictive Ghana enveloped by decaying lavatories and rotting dump yards. In reality, Ghana sunk phenomenally and with it incinerated lofty dreams which then began to give way to desperation. Rather than the hopes that Ghanaians reposed in Nkrumah for a revolution that would liberate them from the dark times of colonialism, what they got confronted with was postcolonial disillusionment. Armah painted these in fictive images of the new national elite’s power abuses, corruption and mind-boggling poverty.

Nkrumah, The Beautyful Ones seemed to have concluded, was the leader of a band of men who the people realised, rather late, were false Messiahs. They were leaders who, unbeknown to the people, ascended to power with the major aim of improving their own elite fancies. As he went back home in a bus, the book’s main character reflected on how “all around decaying things push inward and mix all the body’s juices with the taste of rot” and how this degeneration symbolised the doomsday of a corrupted Ghana.

In Nigeria, shocks and disgusts have ruled the airways since the presidency sought and got the approval for N500 billion to cushion the effect of harrowing pains occasioned by the subsidy removal. To be fair to this government, after its sudden, peremptory and unilateral removal of subsidy and the harrowing pains Nigerians have gone through thereafter, very few quick-win opportunities exist for it to make an instant show of empathy to the people. In virtually all sectors of the Nigerian economy where this government could demonstrate its empathy to the plights of the people, no visible or achievable low-hanging fruits abide.

For instance, if the Bola Tinubu government decides to flood the streets with public transportation, how long will the formalisation of purchase agreements for those vehicles take for the mass of the people to feel the pulse of transportation ease? Thus, the government’s apparatchiks justify the recourse to this failed model of palliatives as the only available to the government at the moment. However, if the government had begun from the angle of talking to and engaging with Nigerians ab initio, it would not have been difficult to convince the people to wait for the maturation of a holistic package to tackle the endemic poverty in the land. This would have been more desirable than merely throwing palliatives at the “poorest of the poor” like feeds thrown at dogs as this palliative regime indicates.

There is no doubting the fact that there is a connection between governmental policies and poverty reduction in Africa. So, if the Tinubu government gets its policies right, it can significantly reduce poverty in Nigeria. World Bank, IMF and other multilateral agencies have studied the incidence of poverty in Africa and have come to the conclusion that fighting it goes beyond simplistic policies. For instance, factors like lack of income and productive resources sufficient to ensure sustainable livelihood, hunger and malnutrition, ill health, limited or lack of access to education and other basic services, increased morbidity and mortality from illness, homelessness, inadequate, unsafe and degraded environment, social discrimination and exclusion and lack of participation in decision making in civil, social and cultural life, among many others, have been found to aid the multiplication of the destructive cells of poverty. Poverty in Africa has also been attributed to corruption and poor governance, infrastructure, diseases and poor health facilities. Indeed, poverty and corruption are said to share the same umbilical cord, with one cankerworm breeding the other.

Poverty is the oldest and the most resistant virus in the Third World, unleashing a devastating gale of destruction on developing countries. Its rate of killing is held to be far more than any disease known since the genesis of mankind. Poverty has been said to be more corrosive than malaria and HIV/AIDS and is far deadlier than Ebola. Thus, if the Tinubu N8,000 palliative, just as its name indicates, is merely for the poor to feed for six months, not only is it barely enough, it is a colossal waste of N500 billion by any government whose utmost aim is to combat poverty and lack. If the overall Bola Tinubu government’s plan is to fight poverty, it has to begin with a much more encompassing umbrella and strategy because fighting poverty isn’t as simplistic as offering a token of palliatives to a blood-guzzling god of penury. It can only be fought with strong institutions and equitable distribution of resources and done by a non-corrupt government.

Africa and Nigeria are plagued by programmes which, on the outward, are designed to fight poverty but which are disguised conduits to fatten the stomach linings of governmental elites. Experience has shown that the funds, most times, ended in the oesophagus of corrupt individuals. Because of the paddy-paddy government we run in Nigeria, apprehending those who stole previous governments blind is always the best way to begin. New governments lack the political will to take on these dinosaurs of corruption. If this government were serious about disconnecting the chain of poverty in Nigeria, the first thing it should do was to investigate what went wrong under the Buhari government. Trillions of Naira, in various funny shibboleths grouped as social investment programmes implemented by the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development were, in the opinions of Nigerians, avenues to divert national monies into private pockets.

As I have asked previously, what is the street credibility of the Bola Tinubu government to assure Nigerians that the N500 billion earmarked for the poor would ultimately get to them? There is acute cynicism on the streets of Nigeria. Like the Nkrumah totalitarian government, what we have today is a “one-party state” filled with the single profile of officials whose pasts are pockmarked by maggots, filth, messy excreta, phlegm and putrefaction, decaying lavatories and rotting dump yards that Ayi Kwei Armah gave a vivid description of. Totalitarianism isn’t about a single political party, it is that of a single mind of filth and corruption. This is a government in which, in less than two months, allegations of mounting corruption of governmental aides demanding and getting bribes that run into billions of Naira to put persons in office are rife. The Senate, under a man who shortly before his ascension into office, was alleged to be wanted by the EFCC, has also been said to have padded the palliatives sum to benefit its members. These are the aides of the president who would prosecute the disbursements of the N500 billion palliatives.

More importantly, what rationale would justify the presidency offering N8,000 to “the poorest of the poor” while a bill, brought before the national assembly last week, demanded the sum of N70 billion for parliamentarians to “improve the working conditions of new members”? We have been told by those who foisted this regime of poverty on the poor that the N8,000 will cushion the agony of poverty on them. Even sweepers of President Tinubu’s Bourdillon Street, Lagos, cannot rejoice at being dolled that condescending sum. If a sweeper on that elite street buys doughnut and pays for commuting to their place of work daily from N8,000, the palliative cannot last a week. So, if the amount is indeed a palliative, as its name connotes, what succour would it bring the way of the poor? Somebody did the arithmetic and concluded that each of the lawmakers involved in the N70 billion “palliatives” demanded by sinecure legislators from Nigeria would be hoisting home a booty of approximately N149 million. As poor as the Nigerian poor are, what can N8,000 do for them? Conversely, in the same bill brought before the House of Representatives, farmers who suffered devastating blows from floods across the country in 2022 will be getting N19 billion.

The food security announcement made by the government last week sounded too vague, too omnibus to capture the dire situation at hand in the Nigerian economy. We all know that insecurity is a major bane of food production in Nigeria today as farmers cannot go to their farms. Insurgents in the north demand taxes from farmers before they can access their farms. Poultry farmers are facing the harshest time of their entire operations in Nigeria today. What is the texture of this omnibus declaration of food security emergency? What are its details? These are the essentials Nigerians demand to know whether it is another Nkrumah pronouncement of the liberation of Ghana. The food emergency declaration by this government sounded, to many Nigerians, like a throw-fodders-to-hungry-ruminants strategy which lacks cogency, articulacy and verve. If it was well thought out, please provide the details.

The N8,000 palliative for the poorest of the poor smacks of a cynical contempt for them. It seems to approximate the disdain this government has for them.