Opinion

Dr Busari Adebisi: Reflections On Death And Genius

Published

3 years ago

September 1, 2021

NewTimes

Professionals In Government: Issues In Navigating The Policy Space In Nigeria

Dr Busari Adebisi

By
Tunji Olaopa

If there is a tribute that gave me so much pleasure to write, this would be one in a very few ever written. And I can tell in advance how much pride that generations of political science graduates of the University of Ibadan would have, reading a befitting celebration of an iconic teacher who impacted our budding intellects with such indescribable but indelible imprint. When therefore I reflect, with hindsight, on the trajectory of my education and intellectual maturation, I come again and again to the conclusion that Providence situated me within a period and context that was specifically electric in terms of the number of galaxy of intellectuals and scholars that molded my worldview. Apart from those I met on the pages of the countless books that I voraciously consumed as an eager bibliophile—from Plato through Claude Ake to Ben Nwabueze; there are also so many living and dead, that were the heroes and heroines on whose shoulders I gained enlightenment. One of these is Dr Busari Adebisi. Out of the many others that gave me the foundation for political theorizing, Dr Adebisi was mercurial. The trajectory of his upbringing with a father who had no respect whatsoever for university education, and his intellectual rise as well as political aspiration constitutes a tale worth telling as a tribute. At 84, Dr Adebisi defined for me the figure of a committed personality that lived his aspirations. This tribute is not a lamentation. Dr Busari Adebisi—husband, father, scholar, theoretician, political scientist and politician—left an indelible model of scholarship that fed my imagination for a long time.

Dr Busari Adebisi

Let me first narrate the story of his pedigree. Who would claim to know Ibadan in and out and does not have fond knowledge of the legendary tourist destination and edifice built by one of the earliest Ibadan billionaires, ‘Ile Adebisi Idi Ikan’? That story is all the more significant because it accentuates the person that the son became despite the unfortunate circumstance of his crippling foundation. He came into the world through the popular Adebisi clan of Idi-Ikan, Ibadan. Dr Adebisi’s father was the famous entrepreneur and one of Ibadan’s significant business elites – Adebisi Sanusi Giwa. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the emergence of three categories of Ibadan entrepreneurial and business elites. They fell into three categories. There were some of the indigenous business elites that were direct competitors with the Europeans and Lebanese. Then there were the middlemen. The third class is made up of the small-scale traders. Adebisi Sanusi Giwa’s entrepreneurial wizardry straddled the first and the second categories. From the Ile Wonuola clan, Giwa started farming at a very early age before becoming an agent for Miller Brothers, a British firm. This was the beginning of his entrepreneurial status. By the time he acquired several hectares of land for his cocoa plantation, he was already extremely wealthy. Adebisi Sanusi was the very epitome of wealth and philanthropy. Unfortunately, however, his wealth and philanthropy failed to translate into a deep appreciation of education, not only for himself but especially for his many children.

The late Prof. Busari Adebisi was the last son of Sanusi Adebisi Giwa. And we can now begin to relate with the type of trajectory that brought the son of a wealthy entrepreneur, who disdained education, to the height of the academic profession, and even beyond it. Even though his father held the principle that the person with means will eventually employ the ones with knowledge, Dr Adebisi was called upon, by vocational imperatives, to supervise the future of hundreds of students in terms of knowledge acquisition for human development. And, from my unique experience of his pedagogical and human relations competence, he did it with panache. For me, Dr Adebisi was phenomenal both as a teacher and as a scholar. He was one of my respected teachers, par excellence. We valued our lecturers back then in the 1980s for different reasons. For instance, we had someone like the late Ojetunji Aboyade who was extremely quantitative; every argument had a statistical grounding, as if he needed to remove whatever objections we might have to his solid qualitative arguments. And we have the late Prof. Peter Ekeh, the scholar with a gigantic stature but who treated us in the gentlest of manners—he was significantly in loco parentis in nurturing knowledge in us.

When we resumed at the department, news had already filtered about the scintillating fact that there was one Dr Busari Adebisi who had a Doctor of Science degree. Of course, this was huge, mouth-dropping news for us as freshers. It was one piece of news that later accentuated our appreciation of the context of world-class scholarship and pedagogy we would be introduced to. No one who was interested in educational news and the educational achievements of Nigerians back then would have failed to hear the ground-shaking news of Prof. Ayodele Awojobi, alias “Dead Easy.” After a most phenomenal and meteoric educational advancement, his intellectual efforts were rewarded with a DSc, and by no less a distinguished institution as the Imperial College London. And he was the first African to receive that award in mechanical engineering. It is only in retrospect, and with the award of the D.Litt to Professor Toyin Falola, by the University of Ibadan, that I had an insight that I did not have back then, as to the intellectual rigour that goes into such honor and award. Getting recognition at that level has to do with a commensurate global and disciplinary recognition by one’s peers and the academic community that gatekeeps the disciplinary boundary one belongs. Thus, to hear the news that one of our own teachers, in flesh, had that significant title in the social sciences was the height of significant pride for us all.

Despite this huge honor, Dr Adebisi kept an open door, and I exploited it to the fullest! Since I was constantly mediating and modifying my understanding of my future prospect, I was always in need of someone more knowledgeable to explain the dynamics to me. And to find a willing help in Dr Adebisi was such a humbling privilege. Under the influence of Prof. Aboyade, I had started tilting towards knowledge-propelled development work that, for instance, would deploy the Aboyade-Mabogunje OPTICOM method of rural development for understanding the relationship between development and the context within which it needs to happen. Dr Adebisi however saw in me more of an academic. We had countless personal communication moments, including seminal conversation on possible leverage points to venture into politics at the residence of the cerebral intellectual of no mean standing and High Chief (Dr.) Lekan Balogun. And some of those moments were also to clarify issues, arguments and perspectives expounded in class.

The 1980s were not just a period when Nigeria’s foreign policy template was already getting hammered to fit what was considered to be Nigeria’s leadership role in the West African region, it was also the heyday of anti-imperialist posturing, especially within the Marxian theoretical framework. That was the time when Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, V. I. Lenin’s Imperialism—The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Nkrumah’s Neo-colonialism, the Highest Stage of Imperialism, and many others such ideological books were very hot in the curriculum of political science pedagogy. And at the University of Ibadan, Dr Busari Adebisi was right at the centre of the dissemination of these ideas to the willing ears of students who were highly ideologically sophisticated back then. While the theorization of the structural debilitation of the postcolonial African state was a subject matter that cut across the entire syllabus at that time, we got a full dose of it when Dr Adebisi explored and expounded to us the political economy of structural imperialism, especially from the popular centre/core-periphery perspective central to Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems theory.

Wallerstein conceived of the imperialist world as being divided into two—the core/centre and the periphery. The core countries, of course, have had the benefits of colonial advantages and they still do through dependency dynamics. The periphery countries are tied, though not in any deterministic sense, to the dependency framwework facilitated by the world capitalist system. Dr Adebisi brought these thorny theoretical and ideological issues alive for us in class. Under his tutelage, we had a deep perception of what was happening to the post-independence Nigerian state caught in the grip of global imperialist political economy. And we were justifiably infuriated! And that was brilliance for me—a teacher who is able to cut through the jargons of theoretical postulations and still be able to get the students to see, with clarity, the issues and arguments involved. In those classes, pedagogical admiration was always mixed with revulsion at the tragedy of colonialism and imperialism for the African state.

It was therefore not surprising that Dr Busari Adebisi would take a courageous plunge into professional politics. The ivory towers have their own allure—the sanitized atmosphere of deep theoretical contemplation, unadulterated by the riotous realities around. Only very few could see the relationship between theory and practice, and Dr Adebisi did. It just was not sufficient for me seeing and theorizing the debilitation of the Nigerian state. Why not just do something concrete about it? Why not just bring the theories to bear on the dirtiness of politicking? And he did! He finally rose to the position of the commissioner for education and then the secretary to the Oyo state government. Whether he succeeded or not is not for me to say. All I am sure is that Dr Busari Adebisi inspired generations of students to appreciate the deep theoretical and global dimension that impinged on the shaping of the African states, in ways they could relate with because they bear the brunt of imperialist domination.

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, a former president of Indian once wrote: “Teaching is a very noble profession that shapes the character, caliber, and future of an individual. If the people remember me as a good teacher, that will be the biggest honour for me.” I ascribe this honor to Dr Busari Adebisi. He was a great teacher and mentor.

.Olaopa is a retired Federal Permanent Secretary, and Professor of Public Administration, National Institute For Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS), Kuru, Jos tolaopa2003@gmail.com

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Opinion

Afe Babalola And Dele Farotimi: On Justice, A Just Society And The Nigerian State

Published

5 hours ago

December 22, 2024

NewTimes

Prof. Tunji Olaopa

By Tunji Olaopa

The feud between elder statesman, Chief Afe Babalola and civil rights activist, Mr. Dele Farotimi, is perhaps the most significant discourse that postcolonial Nigerian state has thrown up for the moment, one in a class of those grand defining disputations that surely will gather dust which will take some time to abate. And it is one case that is fraught with all sorts of legal, jurisprudential, moral and political traps and complexities that speak to more than the trivial interventions—leveraged around the David and Goliath motif—that are attending the matter. Those who have been able to go beyond the surface of the case will agree that it goes to the very foundation and founding of the Nigerian society, and the fundamental objective of crafting a good and just society for Nigerians. That the issue revolves around the dispensation of justice immediately alerts us to the deep insinuation about the idea of social justice itself, and how the conception of fairness could be written into the very fabric of the Nigerian society. And yet, the complexity of the case is what makes it a case that is too critical for a public servant like me to dabble in.

(Un)fortunately, my intellectual maturation, my political science education and my professional endeavor in institutional reform advocacy have prepared me to intervene in this critical matter. I have always been involved with Nigeria, and with reflective thoughts about how to reconstitute her greatness. Three learning encounters with three world-historic icons configured my passion for wanting to see that Nigeria becomes a state we all can be proud of. The first came from my reading of Plato’s Republic. There is a reason that the entire treatise commenced with the question, what is justice? Justice was a fundamental issue in the decline of the ancient Athenian democracy that allowed Socrates to be judicially murdered. The second learning derived from Wole Soyinka’s dense prison memoir, The Man Died. And like most who have read it, Soyinka was troubled by the idea of justice: “For me, justice is the first condition of humanity.” By the time I would be coming to Thomas More’s Utopia, I was already apprised of the connections between my political science education, my professional endeavor as a public servant, and the key elements of institutional reform as a cogent framework for transforming Nigeria.

From Plato to Soyinka, we have a trajectory of political reflection that takes justice seriously as the basis for organizing a just society. This is part of the intellectual frameworks for my undergraduate and graduate studies at the Department of Political Science, University of Ibadan. In one of those explosive seminar classes that played some fundamental role in my intellectual maturation in the graduate school, I had proposed an argument through a seminar paper titled: “Is a revolution an option to fix Nigeria?” The topic was meant to titillate the collective yearning for revolution that would serve as the ultimate mechanism for social change that would flush off all traces of corruption and degeneration in postcolonial Nigeria. Revolutions seem to possess some allure for the masses because they constitute a framework of justice that the constitutional justice mechanism might not be able to handle.

However, as Wole Soyinka, Thomas More, Martin Luther and even Galileo Galilei would realize, the need for radicalism is balanced by the force of establishment orthodoxy. The Nigerian predicament has, as a fundamental foundation, a lot to do with the connection between governance failure and injustice in terms of the persistent and protracted class strife between the haves and the have-nots, between the rich and the poor, indeed, in the final analysis between the government and the governed. And in the case between Afe Babalola and Dele Farotimi, the issues boil down to the administration of justice and the entire edifices and institutions of social justice and the rule of law in Nigeria. And so, in outlining the key issues involved in the matter, we must be careful enough to read between the lines and the noises of analysts who are eager to queue behind their favored protagonists.

First things first. Let us remove the surface debris. Indeed, and in this case, the debris points us in the direction to look for the rot within the matter. First, there is the matter of civil defamation and its legal ramifications. And second, there is the issue of the legal and moral protocols involved in dealing with the pursuit of redress by someone who knows and understands the law. Barrister Farotimi has a legal right to seek redress in court. Chief Babalola has a legal right to defend his reputation in court. In raising the specter of legal prosecution against defamation, I see Chief Babalola as being at the forefront of gatekeeping the legal establishment in terms of what is and is not permissible or possible under the law and its conservative tenets. If you are hurt or an injustice has been done to your person, then the best place to seek redress is not the court of public opinion but the constitutional legal establishment.

Unfortunately for him, Barrister Farotimi’s book, Nigeria and Its Criminal Justice System, impugns the entire legal and judicial establishment up to its apex institution, the Nigerian Supreme Court. However, does radicalism preclude moral decency? A book could be written and allegations made without the complement of atrocious language. Or maybe the rot in the judicial system, and the need for a revolution preclude any niceties, especially with those who are allegedly at the forefront of perpetuating and protecting the rot. But then, how to prove what we all consider to be the norm in terms of legal prosecution of judicial corruption remains a hanging question.

No matter how we look at what we are calling the surface debris, we are redirected deeper and deeper into what lies beneath the surface. The ultimate question is that between Chief Afe Babalola and Barrister Dele Farotimi, what we are asked to contend with is the state of the Nigerian judiciary and the corrupt impediment of social justice, especially for an average Nigerian. What Barrister Dele Farotimi said about the Nigerian judicial system is not new. We are all familiar with the rot within the system. Indeed, this is not the first time an alarm would be raised about what we are all familiar with. Indeed, as far back as 1999, The News magazine carried a most unsalutary headline, “Crooks on the Bench: An Expose on the Rot in the Judiciary.” The magazine headlined the names of 47 judges indicted for judicial corruption. What is new is that Dele Farotimi dared to go so far as to mention specific names, and to confront the big players in the legal establishment. And he did this in a most scurrilous manner targeted at getting maximum traction and attention. It is as if Mr Farotimi, through the public sphere, is throwing the gauntlet to every Nigerian and challenging us on our collective responsibility to clean the Augean stable.

If Barrister Farotimi cannot prove his allegations in court, it would not mean that his charges are false. It might only imply that the system which is supposed to guarantee justice has become too corruptly dense to achieve its mandate. But there is also the chance that since the entire judicial system cannot be tarred so broadly with the same brush, Farotimi’s allegation might receive a dispassionate hearing that might deliver justice as we expect it. This might be a tall expectation. Nigeria’s postcolonial predicament has inevitable consequences on the capacity of the judicial system to facilitate the delivery of justice. And this failure also complicates the capacity of the Nigerian state to deliver on its social contract to Nigerians. This is what makes the Babalola-Farotimi case too complex to be decided either in the constitutional court or the court of public opinion. The burdens of postcolonial disruptions that the Nigerian judiciary system carries are enormous: judicial corruption, miscarriage of judgments, executive lawlessness, delayed trial due to insufficient infrastructure, financial dependence on the executive arm of government.

To outline the fundamental challenges of the judicial system in Nigeria this way is not to give in to cynicism and a deterministic mindset that we might be caught in a vice that is inescapable. It is simply to say that the ongoing uproar between the two dramatis personae demonstrates that the court has been given a chance to reflect on the role that (in)justice plays in the fundamental understanding of the Nigerian postcolonial predicament and the capacity of a democratic system to correct itself. When Chief Afe Babalola and Barrister Dele Farotimi are given their day in court, we will have no choice but to trust that same judicial system to deliver unbiased judgment no matter our misgivings about how objective and untainted that judgment could be. This is just a way of saying that though our judicial system is not perfect; it is still the best that we have.

The last words on this reflection on the connection between the ongoing feud between Babalola and Farotimi and Nigeria’s postcolonial predicament must be given to Haile Sellasie, former emperor of Ethiopia: “Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.”

Olaopa is the Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission,Abuja, and Professor of Public Administration.
tolaopa2003@gmail.com

Opinion

Fear Of Witchcraft And Politics In Zambia

Published

1 day ago

December 21, 2024

NewTimes

Witch Burning, Impunity And Abuses Linked to Witchcraft Beliefs In Benue State

Dr Leo Igwe

By Leo Igwe

The Advocacy for Alleged Witches (AfAW) is concerned over the reported arrest of two men accused of being ‘witchdoctors’ in Zambia. The arrest underscores the potency of witchcraft fears and the connection between occult anxieties and the country’s politics. These individuals were accused of trying to bewitch the Zambian president, Hakainde Hichilema. The police claimed that they had charms. They planned to use the charms to harm the president. The report says the two persons have been charged under Zambia’s Witchcraft Act. The Act criminalizes “possession of charms”, “professing knowledge of witchcraft”, and “cruelty to wild animals”. The police found the two with assorted charms, including a live chameleon.

This development is utterly embarrassing and shows that the Zambian government is slowly losing its focus and bearing.The country has many socio-economic challenges. Suspicion of bewitchment or possession of charms should be the least of its worries at this time. There should be no place for witchcraft and possession of charms in modern politics because there is no evidence for these beliefs and practices. Zambian authorities should not weaponize the Witchcraft Act or use it to justify this incident. Zambian law does not recognize witchcraft. Zambia’s Witchcraft Act criminalizes naming or imputing witchcraft. It prohibits accusing or threatening to accuse any person of being a witch or a wizard. In this case, it is the police who are breaking the law.

Otherwise, how did they know the two individuals were ‘witchdoctors’? Did these persons identify as witch doctors? If not, the police are liable because they named and imputed witchcraft and have to prove that these individuals have witch-doctoring powers. The police claimed to have charged these individuals for possessing “assorted charms”, including a chameleon. Really?

The police in Zambia have questions to answer: What are charms? How did they know that what was in their possession were charms, not pets? Is a chameleon a form of charm? What makes possession of a chameleon possession of a charm? When and how does a chameleon become a charm? The police need to answer these questions and more before one takes them seriously.

Again, did the individuals describe what was in possession as ‘charms’? If they did, does confessing or designating something as a charm make it a charm? And if they did not, the police are liable because they need to prove how those possessions translated into charms.

In addition, the police claimed that the duo wanted to bewitch the president. What does that mean? How did they know? Are the police not contravening a provision under the Witchcraft Act by professing knowledge of witchcraft? Can one harm another person using a chameleon? They claimed that the two persons wanted to use the charms in their possession, including the chameleon to harm the president. How did they know that? What is the evidence for that?

The Advocacy for Alleged Witches calls for an end to this state-sponsored witch hunt. There is no evidence of harm through witchcraft or charms. The Zambian government should desist from witchcraft- related infractions and violations including arbitrary arrest, and detention of innocent citizens. These allegations are baseless and absurd. The arrest was politically motivated. This development demonstrates that Zambian authorities are out of sync with their duty and obligation to uphold the rule of law and protect accused persons.

Zambian authorities need to act in compliance with the 2021 UN resolution, which urged states to take measures to combat abuses linked to witchcraft beliefs and ritual attacks. End witchcraft allegations in Zambia. End witch hunts in Africa now!

Dr Igwe directs the Advocacy for Alleged Witches.

Opinion

Burning Issues: (FCT Minister And Paulosa) (2)

Published

3 days ago

December 19, 2024

NewTimes

Prof. Tony Afejuku

By Tony Afejuku

The other burning issue, apart from Farotimi and Babalola’s, which I wish to take a look at – and which I am taking a look at now – relates to what is happening in our capital territory. What is this burning issue – which our human rightists and civil society organisations and personages are surprisingly and un-satisfactorily not inclined to focus attention on and examine as they should? I may be wrong, but it surely seems to me that this issue, this burning issue, which is of more importance than Farotimi and Babalola’s – which has been given undue adulation – is deliberately being neglected and depreciated by proclaimers and heroes and heroines of human rights, justice, equity and equality of rights in your country my country our country. Why, why, why and why, why, why? Anyone who has any iota of patriotic sensibility, feeling and judgment well watered and buttressed by a very great influence upon his or her critical judgment will keep on asking the question I am asking.

Mr. Nyesom Wike, as almost everybody who can read and write a little knows, is the current minister of your, my and our Federal Capital Territory. His post or office is akin to that of a governor of a state. As the immediate past governor of Rivers State who was drafted, after his two terms there expired, to continue in the FCT as its new minister-governor or governor-minister under the auspices of a party he is not a true member of, Mr. Wike cannot but be seen as a lucky man. He is in every possible and impossible way. Minister-Governor Wike is a lucky man and a very fortunate one indeed. No former governor of Rivers State (or of any Nigerian state), as far as I know, has achieved what the famed political rouser of rabbles has achieved in one short gubernatorial life-time, and at a relatively young and fertile age. His dual achievement with and in two different political parties at this delicate point of Nigerian politics indicates to our politicians and us all that there is always time for a reminder that there are ready-made high rewards for arch-angels of betrayals. And Mr. Wike may go down in Rivers and Nigerian history as both an arch-angel and an emperor of betrayal of us all if we attempt to indicate what I have defined here as his dual achievement.

We can roughly divide, briefly, Wike’s political development into two periods. During the first, excluding his lower political positions before he became the governor of Rivers State, he quickly adapted his style to that of an emperor who became a rabble-rouser of rabble-rousers whose gubernatorial efficiency moved from stiffness to stiffness. He did not at any time feel that he needed suppleness to govern Rivers State. “Let the heavens fall if they must fall!” We are not there yet in this attempted analysis of the stiff-hearted and stiff-minded one. True? But he is already demonstrating this characteristic in Abuja. False? Judge and give the answer yourself.

Even after he left Rivers State a short while ago as governor, he is still trying to control happenings there to the political discomfiture of his hand-picked successor, his erstwhile “boy” and “son” – with whom he has fallen out. As the minister-governor or governor-minister of the FCT, Wike is occupied with the other taste of the emperor-juggernaut formulator – doing the work of two key political masters in one room and desk of political jugglery. Since his appearance in the FCT, minister-governor or governor-minister Wike has allegedly attempted to recover or transform for Abuja what is not traditionally or socially Abuja’s, for example, the city’s social idiom and landscape and terrain as well as its environs. In doing this he sometimes over-steps his bounds and mark of human/inhuman decency/indecency and psychological understanding of human nature, if you follow well what I am saying; he has so far become at best not really better than a typical pedestrian Nigerian lawyer and officer of political power: in his explorations so far in the Federal Capital Territory we have come to the realization, as T. S. Eliot would say, that “it is so often true that only by going too far can we find out how far we can go.” But one has to be a very negatively obstinate and self-serving emperor and a thorough-bred arch-angel of betrayal of the people and masses to justify such perilous and perfidious expeditions and adventures.

Last week, I saw on Arise Television “The Morning Show” Chief Rita Lori-Ogbebor, the dutiful widow of the late Nigerian supreme patriot and soldier, Colonel Ogbebor (of Benin stock) battling, so to say, to wrest the legacy of her late husband from the tight grip of the adventurous FCT minister-governor who has registered his name and signature in the hearts and consciousness of the people as the depriver of their possessions. The three anchors of “The Morning Show” were in their respective ways splendid in their structures of remarks and questions to Chief (Mrs.) Rita Lori-Ogbebor whom I have had occasions in times past to call patriotically Rita A-K 47 on account of her natural right to fire her beautiful tongue at any person, usually an enemy, of just actions. When she made the case she made to protect the estate of Paulosa Nigeria Limited, her late husband’s aforesaid legacy in the FCT, she was in her natural territory, habitat and element where even at age eighty-four, she never ever loses her stability – although she unusually restrained herself in the Arise Television appearance. Dr. Reuben Abati, Rufai Oseni, and Ayo Mairo-Ese clearly explored seriously but delightfully the mind of the mother-hen of Warri – my other coinage and appellation I gave her in my poetry. Her “The Morning Show” appearance enabled me to see the poignant cry de profundis of the FCT inhabitants whose property and residences in different guises have been demolished. She did not say anything that was out of joint. She spoke and came out as a mother, protector and symbol of the people who have suffered – and are suffering – from the state of affliction and anguish Wike’s demolitions have placed – and are placing – the people.

Ojy Okpe in her delicious and delectable “What is Trending” slot on the same show, showed without exaggeration but with further elaboration what people in and outside Abuja/FCT think of the mighty Wike’s demolitions, a burning issue that the Senate has asked “Let Heaven Fall” minister-governor Wike to halt as the committee the Senate set up on the issue starts its work. Of course, we cannot but assume that Chief Rita Lori-Ogbebor, Mrs. Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan as well as Mrs. Ireti Kingigbe, the senator representing the FCT in the Senate and other patriotic senators diligently did what they did on the floor of the Senate when the burning issue was tabled for debate with the gracious understanding and authorization of the Senate President.

I need to state further that the “The Morning Show” anchors did well and extremely so by giving the minister-governor the opportunity to air his anti-Paulosa story. His senior special assistant on public communication and social media, Mr. Olalere Olayinka, stood in for him. After he gave the reasons for the clamp-down, his responses to the questions the anchors put to him followed the usual pattern of denials by artificial men in power – denials that they always use to intimidate and betray the people. In fact, Mr. Olayinka’s ploy to ride easily over our dear Rufai Oseni, a wholesome representative of the deprived, that the chap (or is it guy?) and his boss always employ their colloquial speeches and remarks to dishonor, failed. Yes, the ploy failed woefully. In stanza after stanza of the exchanges between Mr. Olayinka and the Arise anchors, he deteriorated – and his deterioration was hall-marked when he unwittingly revealed that the Paulosa land had been acquired by his minister-governor’s close cohort, an act that was nothing short of gross abuse of power and authority.

Because the Senate is already using its authority, power and privilege to resolve the burning issue, hopefully, in a way that the late Colonel Ogbebor’s legacy and family will not be subjected to any kind of degradation, I will utter no more words for now. I trust, however, that the liberties the Senate is taking – or has taken – are for the sake of order to favour the down-trodden.

As for the minister-governor, the PDP emperor at large, here is an immortal quote from Marcus Aurelius, the magnificent and authentic Roman Emperor and philosopher (A.D. 121-180): “If it is not right, do not do it; if it is not true, do not say it.” You lose nothing by giving us a slice of your humanity by your right acts and correct words. Everything changes and passes. Be humane as a human being.

Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.