Tinubu: Alone in Egotopia Island.

Tinubu: Alone in Egotopia Island.

By Taju Tijani

Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the Jagaban of Borgu and former Governor of Lagos State has been serenading us with his Herculean efforts as a political lifter who orchestrated the political fortunes of many Nigerians to a place of high office. In Ogun state last Thursday, Tinubu became a wailer loudly calling out names of Nigerians he had helped climbed the greasy pole of high political office. The list of orphans his wealth helped from dark places included all the South West Governors and even President Muhammadu Buhari. He was the dominant actor who shaped their political glory with his wealth and connections.

In his island of self-created egotopia, Tinubu, in anger, echoed an obvious truth: “If not for me that stood behind Buhari, he wouldn’t have become the president. He tried the first time, he failed, the second time, he failed, the third time, he failed. He even wept on national television and vowed never to contest again but I went to meet him in Kaduna and told him he will run again; I will stand by you and you will win, but you must not joke with Yorubas and he agreed. Since he became the president, I have never got ministerial slots, I didn’t collect any contract, I have never begged for anything from him, it is the turn of Yoruba; it is my turn.”

Tinubu’s power to take command of the circulation of thoughts and political arrangement, however dictatorial and threatening, has never been his concern. His hold on Lagos and the South West has been a long and irritating self-perpetuating political dynasty that brooks no challenger. Today, Tinubu might be facing an overdue poetic justice from the hands of the people he helped groomed to high offices. Among the Yoruba, the handwriting on the wall is crystal clear. To them, Tinubu is today orbiting between public shame and worse, losing the all-important APC primary to this shadowy but omnipotent anti-Tinubu gang up!

With the emergence of Atiku Abubakar as the Peoples Democratic Party’s candidate for the position of President come 2023, Northern reactionary forces are now perfecting gaslighting orthodoxy against the ambition, aspiration, and political dream of Chief Bola Ahmed Tinubu, come 2023. You will recall that in May 2019, the Governor of Kaduna State, El Rufai gaslighted Tinubu with a powerful grenade.

The grenade launched against the Jagaban of Borgu, the Asiwaju of Lagos and the National Leader of APC, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, was to checkmate Tinubu’s omnipotent and overreaching political influence.  

El Rufai’s anger, argument, narrative, polemical assault, crude vulgarities, and disrespect of Tinubu were all designed to further reinforced El Rufai’s iconic signature as a dismantler of godfatherism in politics. He wanted to be seen as an epochal figure who desired to help Lagosians redirect the course of Lagos political culture of slavish and subservience attitude towards the whims and caprices of the mythic Tinubu, who, in all honesty, looms larger than life in South West politics. The seed of El Rufai’s barbarian transgression against Tinubu has today grown to the secret revolt going on against him.

Bola Ahmed Tinubu is a master of political witchcraft. A whole oeuvre of his political life will form a course of study in any university. For decades, he has been weaving his political sorcery on the South Western Nigeria’s political savannah where captive politicians are automatically sired to obedience, loyalty, and respect.  

His home-grown Baba Sope political doctrine is driven by brutal and merciless dictation from the Bourdillon headquarter in Ikoyi. There is no escaping from the merciless fork of his political assassination against any offender, naïve enough, to contradict the whim and caprices of Baba Sope. He charges at political dissidents like a wounded cougar demanding blood, body, and broth. Politicians under his tutelage from Lagos to Kogi live with fear of this lovable and enigmatic politician who could mutate between benign benevolence, into a deadly Mafia enforcer, using invisible footsoldiers like Mr Musiliu Ayinde Akinsanya (MC Olu Omo) all the way to intimidation, blackmail, and divination. 

Within the South West political architecture, Tinubu has introduced a full blown democratic oligarchy where he knights anybody he wishes – be a banker, civil servant, housewife, journalist, pastor and common tout into places of social and political relevance in SW Nigeria, his fiefdom!!! That monarchical power is causing massive inflammation within APC and leaving room for dissidents and rebels.  

Tinubu’s grip on South West political levers is constantly at war with Yoruba unsleeping passion for liberty, and hence the clamour to reduce his political voltage. This defenestration of Tinubu political power became a persistent utopian dream for many homo modernus within the APC family who will later package their anger into Otoge and the recent Soro Soke wake up call. For nowhere is Tinubu more persecuted, hounded and sabotaged than in his own party, the All Progressive Congress (APC). The intricate dialectic of destiny and fate cannot be confronted by mere political wizardry. What is most shocking is the ongoing gaslighting of Tinubu? The ambiguities of his 2023 presidential candidacy seems darker and darker.

The straw of comfort and support is fading fast from his natural constituency – the Yoruba people. Yoruba are becoming sullenly hostile to a cult of personality and godfatherism in Nigerian politics. As I write, the people he helped into political limelight are the very ones imperilling his presidential dream. The list of the rebels cannot be more ironic. Governors Kayode Fayemi, rather than campaign for Jagaban, threw his hat into the race, Dapo Abiodun is not campaigning for his benefactor, Gboyega Oyetola is not a campaigner, Rotimi Akeredolu is not a campaigner, Senator Ibikunle Amosu is in the race too, Babatunde Fashola, Rauf Aregbesola, Akinwumi Ambode, Femi Gbajabiamila, Lai Mohammed, Olurunnibe Mamora, Sunday Dare and Abike Dabiri-Erewa are all facing different directions.

Tinubu is today facing a mass expression of well-co-ordinated political mutiny from inside his own camp – his party! What is at play is a malignant, manipulating and gaslighting fireworks against Tinubu’s 2023 presidential ambition from the engine room of Fulani political arrangers of Nigeria.  

In politics, there is no weapon more deadly than receiving a Judas kiss from the men and women who once dined and drank with you and today are the hindering forces against your life’s greatest trophy. Is Buhari going to memorialise Tinubu’s contribution to our democratic renewal with insult and clannish betrayal? Are the Fulani who are the regents of our civic values, the shapers of our political destiny and the gatekeepers of Aso Rock decided to throw Tinubu under the bus of irrelevance? Is Tinubu not reliving the travails of Chief MKO Abiola all over again?  

Can anybody tell me if Tinubu has not been psychologically manipulated in believing that someday in 2023 he would be the next matador in Aso Rock? Can someone tell me if Tinubu has not been emotionally drained on all fronts in harbouring insane desire to rule Nigeria? Can someone tell me if Jagaban has not been crushed as things now stand? Buhari who has been gaslighting Nigeria has now succeeded in equally gaslighting the man who delivered him to Aso Rock! Can we still trust anyone in politics of Jeun Soke?

Or is the APC primary going to be a moment of shock and awe that will return the trophy of Houdini of Nigerian politics back to our Jagaban? Be warned, Tinubu wants Aso Rock and not a self-constructed egotopia of loneliness, sadness, and political castration.

Professor Adebayo Williams: Afternoon of Jollof Rice in Forest Gate

By Taju Tijani

When you arrived suddenly in the lachrymose milieu of midlife, you are always looking for ways to relight your dying fire. Mid life is like a graveyard when there is no fun. It is the period of life that keeps you focussed on worry and the limited resources at your disposal to overcome it. The standard narrative that London is like a self-imposed exile for thousands of Nigerians has sailed passed the hurdle of cliché to becoming a daily and abiding truism. And for a hardcore Anglophile who had seen many moons in the UK and many T-shirts to prove my iconic fixture as a rugged Londoner, parties hardly hold any new thrill for my old hedonistic soul.

Until. Yes, until that fateful day when an invite creatively woven into a thumping music assaulted my WhatsApp. I was momentarily struck by a professorial conundrum. An invitation to attend Professor Adebayo William’s son’s wedding seems like a fairy tale. Is Professor Williams baiting me to the trap of intellectual snobbism common to Nigerian professors? Or is he inviting me to experience the luxury and sybaritic pleasure of Owambe wedding party for Ladi and Sarah? When it comes to party, I am neither as cool as a cucumber nor as a virgin like the Arctic zone.

Yes, my presence at Forest Gate may signal a step forward intellectually. Then I was entrapped in a bog of confusion. Should I brush up on my Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorky, Karl Marx, Edward Said, Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell, Sartre, Primo Levi, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Achebe, and Soyinka? When I was younger, my mortal affinity with these lovely authors knew no bounds. They shaped and moulded my affection for literature, journalism, and writing. I decided after unblocking all my permutations that I will attend the party purely to enjoy, amuse and feast my writerly eyes on two new couples taking a step of fate into the shark infested waters of married life.

Forest Gate is like world’s end to Stanmore. I called on one of my London aburos and together, like train spotters, we traversed station after station until we arrived at Romford station. It was a Saturday, and you could see the unspoilt loveliness of life everywhere. In the exuberant joy of freedom from lockdown, Londoners are out in battalion to sunbath the summer weather and reconquer the lost glow of party and club scenes.

At Romford, we jumped on the bus. The bus took us to a gentrified and lush corner of Romford reserved for the rich and the truly opulent. The area was truly a cut away from the banging sound of Romford battleground. We were too engrossed to know that we were on the right bus but toward the wrong direction. “Kenny, kilo nhappen, I could not hear our bus stop,” I said curiously. “Egbon, probably it is still ahead,” Kenny said encouragingly. I knew instantly that any reliance on our human radar would mean a failure. When I looked at my time piece, there was a little rush of adrenaline.  

Then that dread of morbid defeat happened. The bus grounded to a final stop. What, I shouted! Kenny made an ironic crack and asked if the details I had on me was correct. I was expecting a straw of comfort and sympathy, but those became instantly subjective – to Kenny’s mood. Stiff upper lips and heroism are pointless at this quiet reserve of world’s end. I approached the Chinese bus driver. He looked like a martial art instructor than a bus driver. We were on the right bus but had come to the wrong direction. The Chinese said sternly.

We embarked on the same bus and journeyed back towards the other direction to get to Forest Gate where I hoped to recharge my light. Forty-five minutes later and after defying the law of street mapping, we arrived at the precinct of the hall where the aroma of colliding perfumes was mixed with jollof rice and a barrage of colourful sartorial display. In a crowded party hall where we have intellectuals hiding in cultural robes, I asked myself, how many here carry the gene of a hero like Uncle Larry B, as Professor Williams is known to close friends? How many here bear the moniker of Tatalo Alamu – his wit, awe, satire, depth, confidence, high culture, rigour, knowledge, and the inimitability of his style?

In the columnosphere communities, Tatalo Alamu represents the grandest platform where an unsmiling and unassuming assassin unleash his silver bullets on the political and social scoundrels who have made cultural choice for corruption. Professor Williams is a bruiser with words. He is one of Nigeria’s best public intellectuals – the best columnist of all time! He could afflict, cajole, comfort, confront and condemn with his satire.

The hall was brightly lit with soft decoration of a pink tree on each table. The bevy of ladies were gaily and merrily dressed. The master of ceremony (MC) had us in temporary suspended animation. She held us bound by her wit and the traditional mores or protocol of traditional Yoruba wedding. She was not a woman who entertain a timid, cautious, and restraining attitude to social

etiquette. Ladi Williams, the tall, handsome groom lapped all the fun with his friends. The crucible of marriage is laden with stress and uncertainty. Ladi looked prepared and had hope written all over his face. By the time the bride sailed in with her bridesmaids, we were all standing in applause to a petite Sarah who looked like a beauty queen. At this stage, Professor Williams did not betray any emotion. He held on to his professorial calmness – his intellectual fortress of observation.

I was relieved when at last I saw Professor Williams tucking into his jollof rice. He had undergone the punishing task of sitting still for hours as memories are woven for posterity. He had to allow for a reasonable accommodation of our culture and its rigid etiquette that could render a mighty man of the pen totally powerless. Then the dance by the couple, the food, and the booze.

“Oh, Taju, thanks for coming,” Professor Williams said when he saw me. Instantly, I was reminded again how circular history could be. My first meeting with Professor Williams was at Hendon in the home of Uncle Tunde Fagbenle. My second meeting was at the premises of The Nation newspaper. The third meeting happened last week Saturday at Forest Gate in an atmosphere of jollof rice, hearty goodness, jolliness, and respect for an intellectual enigma.

By the time I had my second Guinness, Okon touched me on the shoulder and asked when I was leaving. Unfazed, I asked him to inform Mama Igosun that I must go home with some jollof rice takeaway with assorted chicken and meat. Okon gave me a dirty look. I knew it was time to leave. Prof, wishing Ladi and Sarah, a happy married life.

Pastor Bakare: Buhari, Touch Me if You Can, I dare You!!!

By Taju Tijani

To appreciate the brutal candour of Pastor Tunde Bakare, we must focus on the interplay of General Buhari’s virulent, violent politics; his resistance to alternative voices, his shameless embrace of Fulani exceptionalism, his tribal intolerance, his granite love for fundamentalist jihadism, and his countervailing impulse to reduce Yoruba and Ndigbo to subservient slaves to Fulani primordial timelords. The gestation of Fulanisation agenda is not just a project of whim and fancy, it had been a consuming passion among the Fulani political elites since the 60s when we had storm trooper Northern politicians who lived to crush the Southerners whom they regarded with homicidal malice and indentured slaves.

Those who challenged this dominating wisdom were either jailed, maimed or killed. This bully tactics between the North and South had been at play from year dot. It had been there throughout our relationship with these foreigners from the Sahel. The savagery and public degradation they put Southerners who have the balls to call for radical change amount to having the meanest junk yard dogs among humans. Yet, Southerners continue to disagree with the North because their political model of master/servant relationship would not be allowed to take root in Nigeria of disparage nationalities.

Today, Buhari and his Northern cheerleaders are vexing Southerners big time. Daily, they recalibrate a communal sense of moral and political indignation in their caliphate struggle to achieve the prehensile dream of Uthman Dan Fodio. This tribal and ideological blinker got more fatal when Buhari reversed Nigeria into a nation of perpetual tribal travesty and cleavages. Buhari came and began to prove to the world that he carried the desperate expectations of his Fulani clan and Bedouin cousins on his lanky shoulders. He began the process of industrial fabrication of purpose-designed agenda to create homelands for Fulani across Nigeria using the armed forces as punishment guards where there was resistance against forceful occupation.

All his agendas turned into a cyclone of disasters after disasters. Islamisation was turned down, Ruga was rejected. Waterways was dumbed down. Open grazing was return to senders. There was madness in Buhari’s method to Fulanise Nigeria. There were methodical deviations from the South, but the recalcitrant North still has historical agenda to defend and fight for.

The desire of the ancient Fulani land confiscators to steal the beautiful Southern landscapes is today meeting brick walls of resistance from Abeokuta to Benue. Fulani land thieves would not be allowed any further extension of their criminalities, anti-social behaviour, sub-human violence, and destruction of Southern farmlands with their cows.

Buhari is not a benign actor on a democratic stage. Rather, he is a huge monster with a hammer looking for things to smash. Today, Nigerians are picking the broken pieces of their hard-won democracy. His seemingly endless capacity for self-delusion, an essential part of Fulani mythology, means that while much of the world see Nigeria for what it is, Buhari is blind to it all.

He has succeeded in pushing the Ndigbo and Yoruba into modern servitude. He has been testing our endurance by deploying extremely partisan state forces to clamp down in a meaningless battle he could not win. Now men and women of conscience are coming out of their stoical silence to speak to Buhari’s cavalier, stubborn, irrational, and contemptuous reflexes. Today, Southerners must learn to invoke a new standard of conduct in the face of Southern genocide going on. The conduct of courage and speaking bitter truth to power. That conduct is a tribute to shielding our humanity from Fulani murderous extinction agenda.

Within the contested fields of uncouth gratuitous swipe, probably we may want to exclude pastors and save them from eternal damnation. But as we write, courageous pastors are fuelling public discourse with their stout defiance and head banging bitter soundbites. We may say that Buhari is receiving spiritual caning because he has eaten the forbidden fruits. Pastors are becoming uncomfortably angry and are finding ways to deploy verbal gunfire when rattled by Buhari’s dictatorship that seeks to crush alternative ways and dissent.

Senior Pastor Paul Adefarasin, founder of House on the Rock once rocked us all by throwing a ricocheting bombshell that Nigeria is a “scam”. According to Adefarasin, it is time we do something about Nigeria. No politician, according to him, has the right to talk to “us on this matter unless they believe as we believe on this matter, Nigeria can do better, we are suffering in Nigeria in our hundreds of millions.

“We could easily be one of the top three countries in the world with the kind of resources we have. And it is about time we let the international community know that there must be purpose, don’t tell us you are protecting democracy, don’t tell us you are looking for free and fair election, which election has been free and fair in this country except the closest to it is Abiola and Babagana Kingibe which was annulled?” Nigeria after all is a scam!

In his own sonic blast, Pastor Tunde Bakare, the general overseer of the Citadel Global Community Church, has accused General Buhari of denying Nigerians the oxygen of liberty and freedom. Bakare, for years has been enriching the Pentecostal space with his hounding, rebuking and correcting sermons. Today, he wants to take back Nigeria from an interloper Buhari and re-energise the spirit of everything good and worthy. There is no more any accommodation of tyranny from a man who had betrayed his trust. No more cautious, timid, and subservient attitude towards Buhari. He believes that Buhari has lost popular confidence and has become hugely disconnected from the people that elected him.

To Bakare, Buhari has individualised Fulani tribalism and the time to call him out is now. This hour. This minute. This second. To him, “Sovereignty is not in your hand anymore, you are commander-in-chief of nothing, except the people put you there. The highest office in the land is the office of the citizen. Nigerians are going to rise and demand for their rights.” In a shocking roar of challenge Bakare said, “And I dare you to try to stretch your hand against me like you have done to others, then you will know whether God sent me or I’m just empty and just making noise…”

Tunde Bakare is obviously tired of Buhari’s shambolic government. He wants him out of his way. Bakare is daily irritated like all Nigerians by Buhari’s ubiquitous and shameless brutality which morphs ever lower into bestiality as he brings Nigeria further and further into international shame and disdain. Bakare words are weighty and are made straight for the records. He has lent his canonical voice at a time when Nigerians are silenced by bestial tyranny, brutality, and ugly dictatorship.

Yes, Nigeria Pentecostal pastors are not monastic recluse. They are not gloomy ascetics. They hardly thank God for suffering but prefer life’s pleasures – private jets, huge churches, expensive wines, designer clothes, international travels, prestige cars – to a life of pretentious moral ambiguity. To them, blessed is him that likes to enjoy everything! They are never old light puritans but millennial connoisseurs of the good life.

However, nothing refreshes more than when men of God shared in the burden of the voiceless laity as we have seen in the canonical rage of Pastors Bakare, Adefarasin, Mbaka, Ehusani and Bishop Kukah. Men of God are now jettisoning the illusion of detached saintliness to redefine who they are in clearer political terms. General Buhari expected them to be passive, polite, politically neutral, and pleasant. The miracle of Christianity does not respect political yardstick: pastors could be a lamb today and lion tomorrow. Buhari is a sinner, and they are not afraid to say so.

Igboho Oosha in Fulani Chains: Provoking Yoruba to War

By Taju Tijani 

Monday night in Cotonou, Republic of Benin, will remain a dark chapter in the fight for a Yoruba homeland. The silence of the graveyard was so loud that all Yoruba heard it loud and clear. That night will either remain a memory or a day of grander aspiration for all Yoruba worldwide. That was the night the enemy got him – Sunday Igboho was caught in the autocratic fork of the most hated demagogue in the world. His ‘kidnap’ was like a stab in the heart – in the heart of millions of freedom loving Yoruba who are now facing the ugly prospect of facing down the irrational autocracy of General Buhari by all means necessary. 

General Buhari has trampled the waveless form of our democracy by building bonfire of lies and wicked framing against Nigerians who are raising their voices against the terrorism he is unleashing against Southern Nigerians. The pervasive effect of his authoritarian reflex and blind obduracy is exerting restraining voices to speak out by calling him out in the most unflattering and indelicate languages ever used for a sitting Nigerian leader. 

Today, General Buhari is variously perceived as a bigot, bully, storm trooper, mad dog, autocrat, repressive, wicked, nepotistic, sectionalist, tribalist, divisive figure, stubborn, clueless, anti-democrat, spiteful, illiterate, unfit, Islamic fundamentalist, Jihadist, militaristic, shameless Fulani apologist, anti-Igbo, anti-Yoruba, anti-Benue, dangerous, war monger, one realm thinker, lawless, backward, tyrant and incompetent.  

Right in the middle of the 21^st century, Nigerians are witnessing the rise of a muscular form of democracy from a leader who is daily retreating into a dangerous cave of dictatorship. By his conduct and action General Buhari has brought democracy to disrepute by grounding it in injustice, repression, intolerance, and shame. Through his jaundiced and narrow vision of nation building, we are witnessing a resurgence of military diktat under the cover of democracy across Nigeria.  

Both Nnamdi Kanu and Sunday Igboho are the brew from his distillery of nepotism and bad statesmanship. Sunday Igboho did not just crawl into our tribal consciousness just like that. What is unfolding speaks to the administration of General Buhari. He brought division into the polity through his stubborn and narrow spectrum Fulani hegemonic dream.  

He emboldens and weaponises the Fulani nationalism through his policies of nepotism, capture, dominion, and the narrative from Allah that Nigeria is the property of the Fulani. The Fulani have continued to pose a threat and present danger to Yoruba social fabric. And getting our land back, though a matter of life and death, is nevertheless a future war we must fight. We remember the despoliation, savage killings, and kidnappings of Igangan. To Igboho, Igangan, Igbo Ora, Tapa and Ayete was momentous history that would never go without making a stand. He made a civilised stand and rallied the Yoruba to a just cause.  

Of a truth, the Ibarapa local government area of Igangan is an unlikely place for the theatre of tribal insurrection. It is an unlikely place to commence a trench warfare to decide once and for all who owns the land? This is a sleepy, rustic, nondescript, and peaceful Oyo town. However, small as the town may be, it harbours Seriki Saliu Kadri, his family and a strong cohesion of Fulani jihadists who are ready to kill Yoruba in a dirty turf war. Igangan has turned into a stronghold of rapists, extortionists, kidnappers, killers, and land grabbers. 

Igboho as a latter-day saviour came at the back of Igangan and we televised his velvet revolution live as he sailed across our cities in carnival-like rallies. With his courage, disarming smile, simplicity, and humility, he was able to mobilise a large circle of trust and solidarity with his Yoruba tribe at a defining moment when his people faced genocide from armed Fulani herdsmen. He gave us an elevated understanding of the auguries that lay ahead if the activities of Fulani invaders are not curtailed in South Western Nigeria.  

 He was able to contribute to a new social education through his seamless and peaceful awareness rallies that soon gained global respect, support and cult following. On the other hand, General Buhari has been able to foist on Nigerians a “bent” democracy that suits his autocratic temper to defend Fulani sectarian interest, curtail freedom, brutalise Nigerians, clamp down on protesters and hunt down self determination groups. His totalitarian impulse ferments in more oppression, tyranny, and irrational reactions to oppositional figures. He has droned rule of law in his insidious journey of evil legacy of pain and punishment against cowed and traumatised Nigerians.  

In his bigoted and identitarian politics, he cuddles armed Fulani herdsmen, murderous bandits, merciless kidnappers, and millions of Northern terrorists while sending his gestapo police to hunt, maim and kill southern protesters and self determination agitators like Mazi Nnamdi Kanu and Igboho Oosha. With General Buhari, there is no swing away from the brutalising pendulum of militaristic fetishism.  

The Beninois “kidnap” of Sunday Igboho has brought Yoruba to a place of existential tribal panic. That motor of progress for a Yoruba homeland may have gone quiet but we are standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Igboho as he battles to free himself from the evil fork of Daura monster. We are evolving a more radical determination to win our freedom from the evil unity with Northern barbarians who have scant regard for human lives.  

Pa Ayo Adebanjo has said that the Dauran tyrant has declared war on the Yoruba people by going after Sunday Igboho. Yoruba worldwide have now decided to crawl out from their insulated lives and defend the humanity of Igboho and his noble cause. The next few days pose a tough challenge for all Yoruba and we must show unflinching loyalty, solidarity, and readiness to fight should a pin singe Sunday Igboho. We all stand with Igboho. Yoruba Nation Now!!! 

How much longer can we continue to bear Fulani conceit without a radical and major response in the language they too understand? Fulani are miserable cowards. They are bullies. They thrive with the politics of fear and intimidation. With the seizure of Sunday Igboho, are we therefore going to see the end of Fulani cavalier insolence in the South Western States? For years, it had become lazily orthodox to imbue the Fulani as the imperial, conquering and fighting force that could face any battle and retreat from none. They are seen as valorous die hard. The fear and terror they carefully succeeded in creating on our psyche has remained a scar across our collective soul. They were able to turn the Yoruba into wilting cowards in their own land. Also, the thunder of money and ambition have both drowned the conscientious voices of Southern politicians in the face of genocide on the people who voted them.  

Today the Ndigbo and Yoruba are facing a common enemy that must be routed, driven back to the Sahel, and made to face justice for the crime perpetuated across Nigeria. The campaign by General Buhari to demoralise those agitating for their own homogenous republics has failed. The capture of Nnamdi Kanu and Sunday Igboho has turned a new page in the struggle for our dissolution. We, the Ndigbo and Yoruba now have a God-sent chance to collectively reshape our destinies on our own terms through our worldwide army of self-determinants in a blaze of independence, freedom, and victory. For everyday Sunday Igboho and Nnamdi Kanu are kept in Fulani chains, the Ndigbo and Yoruba must be prepared for war. 

Tolani: ‘I Activated My Plan B, 32 Years Ago’

By Taju Tijani

Tolani Opere is a member of the choir in my church. I cornered her in our study room, and we got chatting. I deliberately teased her out on Nigeria and like a thunderbolt she prized open a closed chapter on her mind with ferocious interest.

Tolani adjusted her glasses and began, “You see, in 1989 I won the war against Nigeria. It had been a long war of real emotional anguish, tears, and broken dreams. The war deflated the balloon of my hope in Nigeria and, sad to say, black Africa. Each day, I woke up to confront the reality of being a black man in a forgotten continent of squalor and waste. Each day, it dawned on me that looter-rulers in black Africa had no vision. They had no plan to create opportunities for their fellow citizens. Each day, I had to fight the demon of tyranny and the psychological effect of being perceived as a third-class citizen in my own country”.

She went to the kitchen and grabbed a cup of coffee and continued, “Before making it out of Nigeria, I was a believer in Afro-centrism. The sentiment that Africa was the cradle of civilisation was part of my daily mantra. The idea that Africa is a great continent made me proud. Until 1989… That was the year of my deliverance. The year I escaped from the oasis of darkness to a bright, shining light. I guess some might demur at the betrayal of my place of birth, but the sad and touching truth is that I owe Nigeria nothing. Rather, that country still owes me a great deal and still refuses to settle. Cynical, unpatriotic, pessimistic, and pathologically unbelieving: these are my shield against Nigeria”.

Tolani eyeballs were now tinged with a bit of sadness as she mournfully said that “Living abroad has thrown up the plethora of abnormalities which dehumanise us as a race. Daily, we cheerfully absorb the cruelty of living without electricity. Helpless and pulverised Nigerians had to queue for days to get petrol to move them around. We exist and subsist in a vast ocean of chaos. The perilous sight of sun-drenched humanity in Oshodi and CMS bus stops as they squeeze into death contraption called Molue always invoked moral revulsion. In Nigeria, dreams are destroyed, aspirations are withered, and opportunities remained stubbornly elusive in a country that is supposed to be a beacon of hope to the black race”.

“All the tools of mayhem, murderous madness and speedy deaths dot our cities. Uniformed men and women constitute real and present danger to poor Nigerians. They slap, beat, kick, and even kill for paltry N20.00 naira with no hope of justice. All the joy of having a taste of what life and living should be are daily eroded by a lecherous, parasitic vermin class of oligarchy who feed shamelessly on the petro-fortune of commonwealth of Nigerians”.

Adjusting her seat, she said, “Such cascades of images where the only economic growth is poverty and nothing functioned, but the institutions of corruption and the rise of urban armed robbery, kidnapping, and banditry are enough to cause dismay in the most hardened optimist.

A cat is said to have nine lives. In Nigeria, a poor man has eighteen, empty lives. In retrospect, I still wondered how I managed to cope in a continent that had slipped from third world to the poverty capital of the world. Until 1989, I lived with loathsome dirt, animalistic brutality, pained planlessness and deep pessimism. I woke up each day with complete mesmerism that one day good thing might come out of Nigeria. As a starry-eyed young dreamer, I regarded Nigeria as a great country”.

“At least that was the ever-present propaganda on the dry lips of our looter-rulers—–“this our great nation”. It took me years to debrief myself from the monumental myth of Nigeria’s greatness. Yes, in the deep recess of the average Nigerian’s subconscious, Nigeria is seen as a great country. That myth starts to crumble when one realises that, in brute practical terms, Nigeria has nothing to show the world for her wonderful greatness. The vigour with which so many optimists called Nigeria a great country still baffles. In fact, Nigeria is worse than all other black Africans quarantined together”.

“We exhibit the continent’s worse traits. Corruption, we own the copyright while others merely plagiarise. To growth, we prefer stagnation. Nigeria, the greatness figment, not withstanding, has had six coups in her 61 years of retrogressive existence”.

“Great Nigeria with all her fabled wealth and brains is now the new colonial outpost for rapacious Chinese. Government aside, Chinese are now the second employers of labour in great Nigeria!!! In a moment of greedy epiphany, our rulers have sold the future of Nigeria to foreigners under the guise of foreign assistance.

The Chinese are the clearest danger confronting the destinies of most black African nations. They are drawn to black Africa by the twin evils of greed and corruption of our looter-rulers. The Chinese have not hidden their new imperial ambition for the entire African continent. Great Nigeria is the only country on earth that actively encourages her brightest and best to look for greener pastures elsewhere. The only country on earth where government officials will brazenly aggrandise public money and yet receive national award for moving Nigeria forward”!

Tolani gave me a winsome look and said, “I must say that the fear I had when I made that giant leap in 1989 had turned out to be the best decision of my life. My finest moment! Being out of that rat hole called Nigeria has unlocked a positive Pandora box of untapped, latent skills and potentials I never knew I had. My escape from Nigeria has made me rediscover the meaning of hope and optimism. For the past 32 years, I felt the absence of tyranny, chaos, poverty, and man’s wickedness. The forces of adversity and regimented existence that punctuated my old life in Lagos have all given way to opportunity and well-ordered life of peace and quiet in a rich, salubrious borough of London.

Life abroad has given me security of life and limbs. I drive around the streets of London in my gleaming 4×4 Lexus with a soft, modulated, and jazzy voice of Pamela Williams serenading my satisfied soul.

The fear of being wasted by ubiquitous, red-eyed monsters we called armed robbers and armed Fulani herdsmen are gone forever. 

The fear of being torn, limb by limb by Nigerian police personnel at checkpoints does not give me any jitters. It had been 32 years since I divorced myself from poverty, diseases, cruelty, greed, corruption, and sudden death. With British passport in my kitty, I can now give a winsome smile and travel the world. My children have far more life chances of realising all their potentials, dreams, and ambitions than most kids in Nigeria. No wonder, your looter-rulers send their kids here to study abroad. Who wants his children to be victims of wasted generation who will eventually ship into area boys under the tutelage of Olu Omo?

I pop my vitamins in the morning. I run hot bath after work every evening to the burning, vanilla smell of Body Shop candles. Do you blame me? Daily my heart is full of gratitude to a country that reinvented and gave me my destiny back”! I am a proud British!

Wiping her tears, she finally lamented and said that “Nigeria, like any other poorly managed, badly planned black African country, is a place where life torments you from birth to death. The only way to break free is to follow my carbon footprint and get out fast. Rather than slip into prostitution, I will encourage every Titilayo, Bola, and Ndidi to take the plunge and embrace a plan B. People need to take hard decision and forget the idea of redemption through Nigerian democracy. I will say it again, tell those back home to take the risk and get out. With luck, the war against that country called Nigeria may be won”.

This piece was first published in January 2009. 12 years after its publication, all the fatalities that had wobbled Nigeria’s aspiration to greatness are still there and getting worse.

Nnamdi Kanu: Perpetual War for Biafran Homeland

By Taju Tijani

On Sunday, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu was flown, handcuff in hand, from Czech Republic back to Nigeria to face charges against the Nigerian State. The glibly happy Minister of Justice and Attorney General of the Federation, the clown called Abubakar Malami will be expecting his enemy to be begging for mercy. Dear Lord! The framed charges against him include terrorism, incitement to violence, treason, and murder. The recent N100million bounty on Kanu’s head was too tempting not to see massive scavenging for the loot. Fellow Ndigbos in collaboration with INTERPOL betrayed him into the baying hyena looking for his scalp. Sunday will remain a sad day for millions of IPOBians who would now have to grapple with the aftershock of his capture. Whether Nnamdi Kanu will be martyred for the IPOB cause or not, time will tell.

However, we have a fascist dictator in Nigeria masquerading as a democrat. We have a contrarian oppressor whose daily reflex is military diktat as opposed to democratic norms. The piece below was written in 2016. Enjoy.

The Indigenous People of Biafra, popularly known as IPOB, is moving away from its fringe habitation in Nigeria and morphing into an international anarchic organization in its aggressive dream for Biafran homeland. This militant movement of nascent self-determination which regrouped after the aftermath of the old Biafran valorous mythology, represents the conjunction of the unfinished turbulent events of our civil war and the continued reaffirmation of radical Ndigbo for a Biafran paradise. Today, IPOBians in the diaspora are in a desperate and dangerous race to recapture a Biafran homeland by any means necessary.

The global resurgence of IPOB agitations for a sovereign Biafran motherland represents a failure of all the past emotional paean to reconciliation and integration of the Igbo nation immediately after the civil war. Therefore, caught in a time capsule, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu defiantly announced a collective Igbo frustration and the need to exorcise the humiliation of the past while making a preparation for a new Igbo homeland. There are troubling kernels of questions to be answered. Is IPOB pre-emptive global amalgam of coalition of forces symbols of hope, freedom, and eventual independence for the Ndigbo?
Can we regard IPOB diaspora mobilisations of clannish solidarity as durable political strategy designed to reinforce their allegiance to a separate Igbo identity? Is IPOB perpetual wars on both domestic and foreign front symbols of their collective disaffection with their massive exclusion and marginalization in the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari?

Quite frankly, the Fulani cabal that run Nigeria are averse to active agitators who are politically enlightened. They prefer compliant idiots and passive zombies. President Muhammadu Buhari knows that there are workable alternatives to our forced unity, but he must work assiduously to hide that truth. Consider the deepest agitation of Boko Haram. The Revolution Now movement. The Biafran/IPOBians. The Omo Oduduwa. The Niger Deltans. It is one direction: separate destiny!

The rising cry for autonomy, dissolution, regionalism, separateness, or independence are our best hope of meeting the developmental aspirations of our people. IPOB, Oduduwa and the Ijaw’s strident agitations for self-determination are the answers to Fulani overpowering dominance of other nationalities.  This is the crisis of political disengagement in an unwieldy federal structure. Our unity does not encourage mass access to politics except for a stupendously rich few.

Where the Yoruba are passive and cautionary, the IPOBians believe in their invincibility in war. Here, one can detect a bewildering political hyperbole that seems to come so naturally to an average warring Biafran that is fast becoming a neurosis for the tribe. Chief Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, of blessed memory, created that warrior illusion and the embers of that warring myth are yet to die in the imagination of an average Ndigbo. Yes, the Igbo are courageous and valiant tribe, but must those shining attributes continue to intoxicate the mind of younger generation of IPOBians so forcefully as to lead them to the trenches of Mazi Kanu in his revolutionary awakening?

On the other hand, we must admit that the IPOB hubris and the energetic clamour for a Biafran homeland exemplify the fragile nature of our unity as a nation and exposes the complex and uneasy bonding of different tribes into a contraption called Nigeria, where we eye one another with fatal hatred and uneasy jealousy. It is these mutual tribal dissonances that allows IPOB to proclaim, with eloquent voices, the virtues of a future Republic of Biafra. Biafrans are saying that the enforced ache of unity must be separated by force and not by peaceful means.

On the balance of futuristic projection, we can affirm that IPOB is mapping a new trajectory for all competing nationalities in Nigeria by calling on them to stand up and fight and destroy the yoke of Fulani bondage that had kept Nigeria in perpetual darkness since our independence. IPOBians are saying that as long as we continue to collude in the manufactured consensus of Fulani capricious diktat without challenge or meaningful dissent, then the constituent nationalities that make up Nigeria will forever remained subjected to arbitrary injustice, tyranny, harassment, exploitation, irrelevance, backwardness, castration, poverty and frustration.

Therefore, IPOB is fighting a perpetual war with the Fulani internal overlords and their Ndigbo collaborators by carpet bombing their fortresses with drums of resistance, agitations, and global protests. In their daily action, the diaspora IPOBians are reinforcing a painfully obvious reality that change, freedom and liberty cannot take place in Nigeria without a combination of unrests, revolution, fights, bullying, resistance, rascality, and war. Their mission is seen as a life-or-death fight to the finish against a system that had dissembled other nationalities and reduced them to second class citizens in a fictive ‘One Nigeria’ of Fulani hegemony, domination, brutality, and arrogance of power.

Of a truth, agitation will remain a part of the democratic process. Legitimate protests oil democracy and align it toward justice, fairness, and equity. Nations break up when there is unequal partnership. Kosovo ceded from Serbia. Yugoslavia broke up. Scottish has had a referendum to exit from the United Kingdom. Southern Sudan is today a sovereign nation. The fault line of every human is to yearn for freedom and IPOB in its combative posturing is manifesting this trait with valorous determination.

Whether we like it or not, self-determination of the nationalities is the politics of the future and the cure for the haemorrhaging nature of our unity. Self-determination by the nationalities will encourage bolder innovations, common touch, faster community and grassroots development, homogeneity and less hidebound than one Nigeria of disparage interests, desperation, dominance, injustice, and oppression. Oduduwa Republic is on standby. Biafra is on standby. Boko Haram republic is on standby. Niger Delta republic is on standby.

What is still raw in IPOB’s soul was the murderous suppression of its members during the Umuahia, September 2017 military operation called, Python Dance. IPOB then accused all the South East governors of complicity in the killings of IPOBians by federal forces.
Since Nigeria is covenanted to democratic ideals, President Buhari must handle agitations, protests and dissentions with a democratic spirit, patience, tact and high diplomacy before Nigeria snowballs into bloodbaths. Omoyele Sowore should be released as a gesture of new democratic paradigm. Arguably, all the incongruous social and political aberrations in Nigeria do not encourage oneness but a determined and urgent separation of destinies from the centre.

In fact, unity is promoted by the most unhinged Northerners to further their dominance and advantage in all areas of national assignments. Northerners are overrepresented in all the juicy and important posts in this country. Also, the ongoing narrative among Southern Nigerians is that the weaponisation of Northern Fulani herdsmen against the Nigerian state has become so normal, that, a new nadir was recently reached, howbeit brazenly, when President Buhari mooted the idea of RUGA – the seizure of fertile land for cattle colony!

What we have seen through the repelled RUGA policy was the final provocation in the pantomime of our forced unity and the exposure of President Muhammadu Buhari as a dangerous, devious, and tribally driven leader on a mission to open more tribal fissures among southern states that opposed his colonialism project, aptly called RUGA. In the eyes of our tiny slave masters, Nigeria should remain a ‘mugudom’ where the genuine aspirations of 200 million people for freedom is forever denied by clowns who could not survive if we go our separate ways.

In the face of all these national shenanigans, IPOB must go on a global mutiny and vigorously project a spirit of ownership of Ndigbo land, oneness, respect, dignity, and rights.  We may all view their modus operandi outside the shores of Nigeria as eccentric, rascally and confrontational, but there is no doubt that their spin, message, sound bites and call to arm are all resonating in the pliable minds of sympathetic, young generation of Ndigbo who, someday, dream of Republic of Biafra.

Diesel Power: How Otedola Brought Down the House of Lawan

By Taju Tijani

This piece was first published in June 2012. Nine years later the central actor – Farouk Lawan – was this week at the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) High Court in Apo, Abuja, sentenced to seven years imprisonment for taking bribes while serving as the chairman of the defunct House of Representatives ad-hoc committee investigating the fraud around fuel subsidy regime in 2012. Angela Otaluka, the trial judge, handed down the verdict in a hours-long verdict on Tuesday. She found the former legislator guilty of all the three counts of bribery.

“When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die.”

That was Jean- Paul Sartre’s summation in ‘The Devil and the Good Lord.’ Nigerians found themselves embroiled in yet another chapter of an endless, vexatious, and scandalous war. The war against greed. The war against this nation’s untreatable sickness. The war against aggressive hyper-corruption. Yes, we may all be delirious with perfunctory rage, disappointment, and hopeless inaction, but Nigerians have their odd way of coping with official injustice and corruption.

Yes, we may complain in a wearyingly Pavlovian manner that Nigeria’s democracy is a hostage to corruption, but where are the bravehearts to rescue us from the captivity of plunderers. Diesel Femi Otedola is a fully signed up rich man. He has power, prosperity, and prestige. He epitomises the bottom-line, our cravings and the very opium of a Nigerian dream: being wealthy. His resume is not exactly the iconic rags to riches narrative. Dad once governed Lagos State. He began his rise to stardom early. At work, at play and at prayer he talked diesel. He charted that destiny with a single-minded purpose. Sell or die became his mantra. That is the acronym for diesel. Sell or die backward is diesel! Eureka!

Diesel Otedola is the kind of Homo erectus we love to adulate, glorify, and celebrate in our classrooms, business discussions, the Internet, homes and even amid enlightened, robust discourse. This tall, young, dark, handsome man is among Nigeria’s wealthiest 100. From childhood, the Nigerian society has bred into his bones its own belief in social and political mobility.

He has been taught that wealth attracts positive attention, universal respect, unmerited privileges, consideration, affection, friendship, and congratulation from the president.

Expectedly, Diesel Otedola has been pulling off uncanny feat of ambidexterity. On one hand, he is a diesel oligarch. As an oilman, he has been oiling the palms of politicians who may want to build a barricade against his graceless monopoly of the diesel business in Nigeria. He has been using his money to swoon off politicians to perpetual slumber.

He has been throwing away his dollars to switch off searchlights into his oil wells. Even Jonathan, the president of Nigeria, recognises the raw awe of his wealth. He courted the rich wisdom of Otedola during his campaign for the presidency. He also lapped up his dollars. In a nation like Nigeria, Diesel Otedola had to unfurl the ambidextrous talent of a calculating business mogul.

Then an upstart politician came into the loop. This nation brought Lawan from the soul killing obscurity and poverty of Boko Harammed Kano into political prominence. The artless simplicity of a baby-faced Farouk Lawan captivated the nation. He epitomises the bootstrap values of a promising son rising through diligence, integrity and hardwork. His flamboyant personality and soft voice charmed us. He charmed the House of Rep.

But the furnaces in which true leadership will be tried, tested, purified, and emerged triumphant is on the way. Suddenly, the petrol subsidy agitation began to animate the polity. A contemptuous rather than contrite Jonathan removed the subsidy on petrol. In that chill of despair when the spirit of most Nigerians has sunk below zero, calamity Jonathan pilled on more calamities.

Why the subsidy was removed is still beyond our mortal ken to understand. With the flourish and grace of a knight in shining armour, Lawan was elected the chair of an ad-hoc committee to probe the subsidy palaver. He rode in with the majestic hauteur of a man of integrity. He never knew that he faced the deadly hubris of high expectations. To assure the nation, he began with a hounding, persecuting and patriotic pitch.

The subsidy probe became his most splenetic lamentations as a politician. We extended our gesture of gratitude to his dogged patriotism. We thanked him for his fierce loyalty to the poor people of Nigeria. We declared him a hero for his stubborn refusal to accept bribe from rich and powerful marketers with hell bent reflexes to hijack the outcome of the subsidy findings.

However, the prophets could not discern that our diminutive, artless angel called Lawan is a fake. He is the deceiving devil manifesting as an angel of light and delight. He will soon disappoint. He will soon be swoon off into political death by a rich oil magnate. Otedola’s diesel will soon burn down the house of Lawan. It will be a slow, grisly, and greasy burning. The very character of a burning diesel!

All along Lawan was thought to be sharing in our pain and soothing us with hope. Nobody knew he was hiding behind a fictional cut-out. His ugly vice has been putting on a mask. A mask of dogged pretence! He has unmasked himself as part of the upstarts frequently usurping the highest places of trust in our democracy. The story of Lawan’s bribery indiscretion, like the slyness of a pick pocket is more deadly than the audacity of an armed robber. With almost manic steeplechase, he phoned Diesel Otedola 16 times to pay illegal money. His excessive uncivil zeal is far more gruesome than a Sophoclean tragedy.

With Lawan, there is no escaping such swings from adulation to despair, hope to sadness, expectation to ruin and prominence to oblivion. He has again proved to be a victim of his heritage and breeding. Our common heritage and breeding in Nigeria are corruption and looting. From the low born to the high born, we all share deep fondness for corruption and its romantic trappings.

Too many Nigerian politicians are being gibbeted up as common criminals because of the steadfast temptation of collecting easy money. They are being gibbeted up as enemies of our democracy because of their consuming, primordial catfight to pillage this nation’s resources and share the plunder. Diesel Otedola’s revelation of Lawan’s diurnal and nocturnal predatory instinct for easy dollar is a testament to the disdainful kind of politicians we breed in Nigeria.

It is a testament to an average politician’s aversion to probity, integrity, and public accountability. The evil effect of this is clear. The war against official corruption has remained, essentially, an impotent gesture in the hands of the very enemies of this nation masquerading as patriots of the realm – the politicians!

Diesel Otedola may have delighted us with a historical corruption scoop; he may have raised our eternal vigilance on politicians, but our collective triumph and vindication will be Lawan’s speedy resignation, persecution, and conviction for accepting bribe. Soon, the incriminating voice recording and marked notes lodged with the Police and EFCC will take on wings. The romantic rogues in both the pay of our Police, House of Rep and EFCC will subvert the course of justice. The probe panel will do another Lawanesque. Members will begin to pursue bribe both diurnally and nocturnally from the arraigned criminal – dishonourable Farouk Lawan. Read that with unpartisan passion.

All over again, we will exhibit to the world that we live in a cancerous, corrupting nation that is in the throes of a raw cry for massive bloody implosion. How much long can we continue to be amused by our corruption and the absconding, untouchable political scoundrels who sit in Aso Rock, National Assembly, and the House of Rep? Who will reclaim our convoluted, corrupting, and diluted democracy that hinges so much on corruption than the good of the public? These are my $500,000 questions.

That was the exact amount of money taken by a deadly Judas Farouk Lawan to betray his conscience. The dirty money he collected to betray our trust and our nation. The whole saga has its own quintessential moment. Revenge, they say, is a dish best served cold. Vengeful Diesel Otedola marinated Lawan’s cold dish with a borrowing from James Hardly Chase’s thriller – screw the dumb with marked dollars.

Chinweizu: Yoruba Must Banish Fulani to Shariyaland

By Taju Tijani

Prof. Chinweizu Ibekwe, known mononymously as Chinweizu, is a deconstructed anti-continentalism pan-Africanist who once championed the concept of Black Power Pan-Africanism as the best option for black Africans to organise themselves. He is a critic, essayist, poet, and journalist.

In 2013, he detonated a series of highly acclaimed polemical essays on the Fulani caliphate and their obsession for power, privilege, and their own Sharia homeland. Every line of this percipient genius has morphed into a self-fulfilling prophecy with the election of President Muhammadu Buhari.

Chinweizu’s relentless passion for self-determination among the constituting nations of this federation is today’s unfolding reality. Here is my clinical dissection of his literary firework. This was published in 2013, but eight years later, Nigeria has rumbled into the cacophony of self-determination as imagined by Chinweizu. Enjoy:

Chinweizu’s flawless polemicisation of the caliphate internal colonisation and total subjugation of Nigeria is bound to trigger stirring intellectual debate among old and new light in the struggle to deconstruct the destiny of a tottering Nigeria from the abhorrent hands of arrogant Hausa/Fulani entrenched cabal. Each magisterial rendering of the serialised “Caliphate Colonialism – The taproot of the trouble with Nigeria” is like the work of a social thinking philosopher carefully deploying hounding history, research, and the fierce urgency of now to demand collective action that would lead to liberation from the yoke of caliphate slavery as permanently decreed by Northern slave masters.

Chinweizu sounds like a literary fusilier at war with our preponderance imbalance of power that had favoured the north since the birth of this nation. The stridency of Chinweizu’s prognosis is a wakeup call to all Southern somnambulists still blinded by fatal blinkers of unity in a nation of extreme political injustice and bitter, feudal-driven federal partisanship. His exhaustive collage of Southern political subjection by Northerners and the eternal Dan Fodio-driven agenda of born-to-rule are enough fodder to magnify a collective sense of immediate outrage, anger, indignation, and the need for an urgent structural retooling of a lopsided federal Nigeria. His fixated, unrelenting, charging subtext is starkly this: Yoruba, Ibo and the minorities are the ordained subordinate partners to a dominant, pompous, contemptuous Hausa/Fulani cabal bent on perpetuating Dan-Fodio’s megalomaniac doctrine of Hausa/Fulani master race.

His plain-speaking advocacy with its furious cadence has become the only momentary truth allowed to stand in the Nigerian’s space of political flattery, lies, sycophancy and chicanery. His irreverent political views are timely, urgent, earnest, fervent and prophetic. His unbounded literary credentials allow him to judge critically the political soul, social anomie, economic genocide, tribal betrayal, theocratic fundamentalism, and cultural myopia of the Nigerian condition. Chinweizu has not betrayed the root of his antecedent as an adversarial intellectual from the dawn of his famous literary fireworks with Wole Soyinka to today’s critical self-examination of the Nigerian state. His thorough grasp of our political deceit and descent allows him to offer fresh warning to Northern bravados together with their Boko Haram foot soldiers that we are now ready more than ever before to assert sectional autonomy from the unending internal colonialism of Shariyalanders.

Chinweizu’s argument, in summary, seems to recast the popular thinking that our society is seething with revolutionary discontent, resentment and possible implosion at the callous and rapacious seizure of southern oil wells by cruel, cabalistic, and imperial northern hegemony. Further, there is a charge that Southerners themselves are somnambulists because of our current level of political stupor which is encouraging a re-northernisation of our polity as we are seeing in the thunderous pronouncements of Abubakar Atiku, Mohammadu Buhari, Lawal Kaita, Bala N’Allah, Junaid Mohammed and other caliphate die hards scattered across the Dan Fodio desert landscape.

The proof of Chinweizu’s genius is better tested than idealised. Speak to any Nigeria about our leadership problem, corruption, and the burden of Hausa/Fulani parasitic lordship of this nation; you will be amazed how quickly his punch lines are breathlessly true. There is something cutting edge in Chinweizu’s forensic examination of the Nigerian narrative that makes his “Caliphate Colonialism – The taproot of the trouble with Nigeria” a document of travail, tribulation, and tragedy. Chinweizu’s opening of the roof of our deformed political arrangement contains so many hits of oxygenated political bombasts, threats, and arrogance from the narrow minds of Hausa/Fulani people.

Sample this ancient arrogance of Sir Ahmadu Bello: “The new nation called Nigeria should be an estate of our great grandfather Othman Dan Fodio. We must ruthlessly prevent a change of power. We use the minorities in the north as willing tools and the south as a conquered territory and never allow them to rule over us and never allow them to have control over their future.” – Parrot Newspaper October 12, 1960.

Now, let us hear Lawal Kaita: “We hear rumours all over that Jonathan is planning to contest in 2015. Well, the north is going to be prepared if the country remains one. That is, if the country remains one, we are going to fight for it. If not, everybody can go his way.” The North is determined, if that happens, to make the country ungovernable for President Jonathan or any other Southerner who finds his way to the seat of power on the platform of the PDP against the principle of the party’s zoning policy”. That aside, more worrisome is the genocide-driven tendency of caliphate politicians as publicly calibrated by Bala N’Allah, “We can do away with 20 million militants for the rest 120 million Nigerians to live.” — The Guardian, May 28, 2009.

Most of the quoted lionised Caliphate statements are relics of the colonialist triumphalism orthodoxy of myths, lies and sophistries which adjudged the Hausa/Fulani as Nigeria’s Aryan race divinely endowed for leadership compared to the southerners who were perceived as burden bearers and servants of Dan Fodio’s scion. We must thank the British imperialists who sowed the seed of our future dismemberment.

However, in any struggle, there is a defining moment. In any sudden assault for radical redirection, something big must snap inside the rank of the followership brigade. In any tectonic political shift that may lead to national renewal or resurrection, there is always an intellectual intervention to galvanise and act as the catalysing agency to accelerate a new order. We are at the staging post of a Machiavellian moment – a moment when public necessity demands actions that run apposite private ethics, social norms, culture, and even religious values. It was Niccolo Machiavelli’s “The Prince” that laid the principle of the moral world of politics and the difference between private conscience and the demands of public action. It was Machiavelli who said that evil deeds cease to be evil if urgent public interest makes them necessary.

The interplay of our monetised politics, the corruption that sustains it, southern marginalisation, tribal hierarchy, and religious intolerance of the Hausa/ Fulani sharia overlords have all combined to make our democracy a shame both within and to the outside world. Yes, Dede Chinweizu may place the taproot of the trouble with Nigeria squarely on the historical deformity of our national structure and the excessive allowance the North had enjoyed since our independence, we should however not ignore other contested variables like Southern collaboration, our disunity, greed, cowardice, sycophancy, and our predilection to trust Hausa/Fulani more than we trust our own.

An example is the Bola Tinubu (Yoruba) recent gospel journey of political atonement to the North. Chinweizu answers this absurdity eloquently. “Bola Tinubu and the ACN should not make the mistake of assisting Buhari and his CPC to come to power. However well any nationality thinks it has done under Caliphate colonialism, it stands to do much better after we jointly free ourselves from these arrogant caliphate parasites, that is to say, after the Caliphate’s lion’s share of the national cake is taken from them and redistributed.” On this very sentiment, I stand. And to lace icing on Tinubu’s cake, Chinweizu offers Yoruba a path of honour.

“They should (the Yoruba) revive Awo’s self-determination option by convening the SNC-EN to formally dissolve this disastrous Nigerian union. In my estimation, Oodualand is today the best-organized and most advanced of the three emerging nations of the future. Hence, they should naturally take the lead if President Jonathan does not. They deserve the honour of leading the others.”

Mum is the word here. As said elsewhere, this ongoing national conference is the last ritual for a wobbled federal structure before its burial. The predictable outcome of the exercise – celebration of separateness – would either make Dede Chinweizu a fearless prophet or a twisted intellectual nihilist if Nigeria still stands as one indivisible nation by December 31, 2014.

Postscript: Yes, Chinweizu predicted our dissolution in 2014, but the Yoruba political support for the current enfant terrible Muhammadu Buhari delayed that implosion. In all Chinweizu’s effusive sectional patriotism, the subtext is this: Yoruba must banish Fulani to Shariyaland. Or something urgent must catalyse freedom through the ongoing self-determination struggle. However, Chinweizu should be ready for his glad cry of prophetic triumphalism when Yoruba and Biafran Republics eventually emerged as Africa’s newest nations anytime soon.

Garba Shehu, Caliphate Pantami and Cancel Culture: An Open Debate

By Taju Tijani

The past is never dead. It is not even past – William Faulkner

Isa Pantami the Minister of Communication and Digital Economy is a major-leaguer in President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration. He is an Islamic fundamentalist gatekeeper. He is an advocate of millenarian Islamism who hawks inspiration to disaffected young and old Muslims to launch string of attacks on unbelievers and earn places in paradise with seven virgins. Pantami nihilistic propaganda against infidels and his right-wing Islamic jihadism has the support of his authoritarian boss, President Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria’s most unrepentant sectional leader.

Pantami, who, in earlier incarnation, went by nom de guerre Sheikh Ali Ibrahim, Shaykh Isa Ali Pantami, was a hate speech merchant, member of Al Shabab, lover of Salafist Islamic terrorism, Osama Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, Taliban, ISIS and ISWAP. He was a sociopath who, like Dracula, used to love seeing the blood of infidels being drained through stabbing and dismemberment. He was psychopathic and no doubt his incendiary Jihadist sermons may have been responsible for the demonisation and death of Christians in the past.

Since Nigeria has fallen disastrously into the hands of terrorists and bandits sympathiser, any wonder then why Buhari has been shutting down our universal cry to sack Pantami. We are ignored not because of what we say but because we oppose rabid Fulanisation of a secular entity called Nigeria. While Nigeria is on the verge of implosion under extreme Fulani Islamic cultural apparatus, nothing is offered to calm our collective fear for the coming whirlwind and implosion. Rather, Buhari has been deploying identitarian Fulani/Islamic political impunity to rebuff our olive branch for alternatives to breakdown, partition, and possible war.

Northern cultural institutions have been known to appropriate Islam for persecution, jihad, and political conquest/power. The force of Islamism has today leveraged the North from oligarchy to hegemony. The North’s Islamic cultural identification has been used as ideological war against the Southerners. Majority of us are being cancelled because of our opposition to Buhari’s obsession for a Caliphate nation.

It is therefore logical for a Jihadist ideologue like Pantami who embraces an undying allegiance to Islamic stratification that holds the infidels (Christians) in contempt, derision, oppression, and if need be, elimination to be a perfect Minister in Buhari’s Fulani administration. Pantami is kept in his position to be used to subvert our democracy using the shady-driven NIN data exercise that is already mired in ethnocentric controversy.

What with the faintheartedness and cuddly manner Buhari has been prosecuting the war on Boko Haram, banditry, Fulani kidnappers and Fulani herder’s terrorism across Nigeria? To date, Buhari has given amnesty to more than 6,000 Fulani terrorists and in the last 6 years more Nigerians have been displaced, more soldiers killed, and banditry has gone ahead to blight the travel, economic and social architecture of this country.

In a nation where Fulani supremacy now rules our politics, a dry-drunk Islamic fundamentalist sympathiser like Garba Shehu, Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, must have a voice. Increasingly, this chap has been infantilising the Abuja media high command with series of gaffes, missteps, somersaults, overzealousness, indefensible statements, and blind obduracy to reasoned engagement with the Nigerian shrinking intellectual spaces. Shehu has been going for both our jugular and capillaries each time we draw attention to his master’s transgression of the letter and spirit of our federalism through his rabid nepotism. Shehu has been offloading soundbites to cancel everybody out.

Today Aso Rock has become a crime scene where Isa Pantami, a hardcore terrorist sympathiser, is among the inner circle of the matador of Abuja – President Muhammadu Buhari. And Shehu the expert gas lighter is out detonating attention-grabbing clutter straight from his warped mind. He is forever returning to that Orwellian way that seeks to erase or invert reality. On Pantami, he has demonstrated yet another staggering ignorance of the kind of enlightened audiences he serves.

To Shehu, Pantami’s travails may be a product of Southern jealousy and envy. In the era of post-truth, probably Southern pundits, columnists, writers, and conscientious Nigerians asking for Pantami’s removal are all victims of lethal ignorance of what to expect when a nation is captured by a Jihad-loving Fulani-in-Chief.

In other word, Shehu is reinforcing the canon through his defence of Pantami that Nigeria has entered an age in which thoughtful reasoning, informed judgments and critical thought must be attacked by the attack dogs surrounding Buhari – from the zealots inhabiting Miyatti Allah to the various ranks of rabble rousers called Northern elders’ associations.

For Shehu to regard all the critical voices calling for Pantami’s removal as nothing but “cancel campaign” shows the muck we are in and the ongoing moral opprobrium of Fulani exceptionalism when they are in public office. For the record, cancel culture is the practice of withdrawing support for (cancelling) public figures for saying or doing something objectionable, disgraceful, shaming, and offensive – whether in the past or present! Therefore, there is no conflation of interest between deplatforming and cancelling a person like Pantami who once engaged in controversial, hateful and martyrdom speeches.

Thinking Nigerians from David Hundeyin, Farooq Kperogi who happened to be Pantami’s buddy have given the Minister a fair trial in the public court and found him guilty. The general consensus is that it is morally indefensible and internationally damaging to have an ex-militant and extremist jihadist sympathiser sit on Nigeria data mining office as a Minster and drawing public salary from the contributions of Christians he once swore to kill. The same government that summarily cancelled Kemi Adeosun, Onnoghen, Oyo-Ita and Obono-Obla, not out of political correctness, but for political necessity, now finds itself developing cold feet in the case of a more worrisome moral conundrum.

It is Buhari who introduced right wing, nepotistic, Fulani Islamic politics with its regressive cultural apparatus that is the problem of this country. His speedy cancellation of the named Southerners above shows that there is no fair and open discourse on cancel culture in this country. Under Buhari’s sectional dictatorship, Southerners have been victims of termination, dismissal, erasure, and cancellations than Northerners.

Donning the mantle of a defender, Shehu said, “Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Isa Pantami, is currently subject to a “cancel campaign” instigated by those who seek his removal. They do not really care what he may or may not have said some twenty years ago: that is merely the instrument they are using to attempt to “cancel” him. But they will not profit should he be stopped from making decisions that improve the lives of everyday Nigerians.”

Shehu’s complaint about a “cancel campaign” could therefore be a pretext to deplore the indignity of anyone criticising Buhari’s failed leadership especially if the critics are Southern Nigerians.

It is shamefully obvious that Shehu is falling on herd immunity for Pantami. Shehu is completely consumed with great apprehension as the cancel mob are calling out Pantami to resign for the offensive religious messages he once authored.

Nigeria’s burgeoning cancel culture is growing partly because of people like Pantami who would rather grandstand on wobbly and self-justifying reasons of his continued relevance than exit with integrity and courage. A cancel campaign deals mainly and calls out those who have done wrong. Society cancels and erases a whole raft of ethical revulsions that fall short of acceptable public conduct whether committed in the past, now or the future.

In lionizing Pantami, Shehu ignores moral politics, offering instead a paranoid spin about how indispensable Pantami is. However, cancel culture believes in the expendability and discardability of human beings. Shehu condemns cancel culture because to him it is an assault on norms, privileges, and Fulani exceptionalism.

Cancel campaign is asking that morality, exemplary leadership, integrity, and honour should inform our politics and not duplicitous whitewash of untouchable St. Pantami whose blood curdling romance with terrorists in the past or now warrants this nation’s demand for his resignation, cancellation, erasure, sacking, termination, and summary dismissal.

In his Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It is not even past. All of us labour in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.” The historical fact that Pantami once abetted, supported, and encouraged terrorism martyrdom can never be erased from memory. So Pantami’s past is never dead. It is alive in the many toxic and highly inflammable Jihadist audios circulating on social media. It is Buhari’s primordial Fulani nepotism that merely shrinks back from denouncing a man of monstrous criminal history. Pantami should go. He should self-cancel today!

Danladi Umar: Fulani Exceptionalism and The Doctrine of Master Race

By Taju Tijani

As Fulani exceptionalism becomes entrenched at the highest levels of power and in the public imagination, their excesses are becoming a national disgrace of a morbid phenomenon that must be questioned and interrogated. The ugly pattern of disgusting display of animal rage from the privileged against the less fortunate Nigerians is becoming negatively Orwellian among some elected public servants. As the boundaries of the unthinkable become normalized, we are now witnessing that power corrupts; but absolute, unhinged, and brazen power corrupts absolutely. Public decorum, dignity and humility has now been supplanted by a recourse to zoological behaviour from some of our supposed setters of national etiquette and acceptable decorum.

No idea has played a more seminal role in the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari than the Fulani doctrine of divine election, or born to rule, or being chosen. Since this doctrine is the cornerstone of his Fulanisation agenda, an average Fulani now considers himself privileged, fit only for the highest position in the land, above the law, recklessly violent, commanding, unrepentant and dismissive of all mitigation for equity, fairness, and justice.

The vision of reconstituting Nigeria as Fulani homeland has never been easy.   There is always a nostalgic revival of hallucinatory effusion of Sir Ahmadu Bello, the late Sardana of Sokoto, when, in a rush of morbid profanity said, “The new nation called Nigeria should be an estate of our great grandfather, Uthman Dan Fodio. We must ruthlessly prevent a change of power. We use the minorities of the North as willing tools and the South as conquered territory and never allow them to rule over us, and never allow them to have control over their future.”

Till date, successive Fulani Nigerian leaders have been reviving this memory of divine mandate, myths, lies and delusions. It continues to inspire hope of establishing a feudal Fulani nation on a scale that their ancestors could not attain in ancient times. In as much as it appeared utopian, even quixotic when it was first proposed, it has continued to offer a Nietzschean challenge to carve a feudal-theocratic-Fulani state out of Nigeria, and in the process, change a destiny of nomadic cattle herding existence into a permanent homeland.

The animating power of Buharigarchy as constituted, watered, and manured is the violent demolition of federalism, the malevolent desecration of national character and the total appropriation of virtually all important public posts to Northerners. Muhammadu Buhari’s illogical aim is to circle the wagons around himself and create a Fulani echo chamber where the voices of Southerners are no longer heard in Nigeria’s national life. His panic to create an unadulterated, exclusionary Fulani government has now brought Nigeria to a cliff edge of catastrophe, confusion, tribal division, violence, and endemic incompetence.  

Fulani embrace of lawlessness, violence, abuse of office, arrogance, misuse of the Nigerian security forces and having a square peg in round hole, could not be more explicit than the vulgar outrage of our prosecutorial time lord called Justice Danladi Umar, Chairman of the Code of Conduct Tribunal. On Monday 29 March 2021, the CCT chairman dropped all known elitist civility by slapping, kicking, beating and karating a commoner called Clement Sargwak in that famous Abuja haunt of the rich – the Banex Plaza! What was remarkable was the geo-ethnicization of Sargwak as “Biafran Boy” – an unwarranted, unjustified, and thoroughly prejudicial attempt to demonise Ndigbo as the powerless others.

You may recall that On May 11, 2019, in the same precinct of Banex Plaza, Senator Elisha Abbo, the misogynist from Adamawa, repeatedly assaulted Osimibibra Warmate. Before the klieg light of a stunned world, Abbo violated Ms Warmate’s human rights. There was a mass outrage against abominable Abbo who brought incipient dishonour to senatorial privilege. What is blighting the judicial landscape is the organic conflict in the dispensation of justice in Nigeria and the ongoing bastardisation of our legal canon where there is one rule for the rich and another rule for the poor.

We have sailed into the harbour of Orwellian reign of injustice where your place in the pyramidal pole will determine the kind of justice you deserve, no matter the weight of the evidence against your abuser. This observable paradox could not be more on your face than the judgement of Magistrate Abdullahi Ilelah, who, in Zuba, Abuja, dismissed the assault case filed by the Nigerian Police against the misogynist senator called Elisha Abbo. The so called “Biafran boy”, Mr Clement Sargwak, will not get justice despite the graphic details of his assault captured on video. It is going to end up as same repetition of what is now becoming a conventional ritual of miscarriage of justice.  

What was at play in both instances was the raw display of exceptionalism in its cruellest form. Whenever we have a master race Fulani tribalist in power, whatever violent kerfuffle they unleashed, no court will convict them; no police will arrest them, no sanction will be imposed, no resignation will be allowed, and their permissive outrage must be tolerated with our resigned helplessness. The Fulani are now redrawing us all and making violence part of the Nigerian culture. Nothing could be more damning in the Western imagination than the zoological imagery of watching a Judge of Nigeria’s Code of Conduct Tribunal in a state of beastly violent assault on fellow Nigerian.

That is the gunk Nigerian society has sunk. Exceptionalism allowed the creation of Nigeria’s first government-backed, paramilitarised, and Sharia-driven outfit called Hisbah in Kano. But Amotekun in the South West was resisted to death. The ideology of supremacy has provided an average Fulani a fig leaf of legitimacy to control, dictate, threaten, and command. It has allowed them to brutalise, maim, and kill with impunity while the Nigerian police wilt with fear if the perpetrators happen to be Fulani. To the police, the victims are the perpetrators. Human rights abuses are justified under Fulani prerogative.

Iskilu Wakilu, the famous Igangan terrorist, invoked this doctrine of exceptionalism to unleash terror until he was caught by the courageous vigilantes of Oodua People’s Congress. It is the same belief in exceptionalism that allows Chairman of Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria (MACBAN,) Alhaji Muhammadu Kirowa, drives around Abuja like a warlord in a numberless SUV decked with its own gleaming crest of his association and complete with mobile police escort! United Kingdom has cattle breeders. But the permissible deviance of a primitive Kirowa will not be seen among more civilised British cattle breeders.

Identity Fulani politics, exceptionalism, master race doctrine and mass privileges among the Sahelian clan is paralysing, pulverising, and providing pretexts that is encouraging the violent cattle herdsmen to lay juridical claim to Yoruba lands in Western Nigeria. Fulani exceptionalism encourages the appropriation of other peoples’ land by driving them away through forceful occupation. It aims to obliterate the existence and hopes of other tribes.

 The vexatious trope that all lands in Nigeria are Fulani eternal inheritance presupposes that they could justify any theft of land grab by arguing that their action is not expropriation, but the restoration of stolen lands to their Fulani divine owners.

Today, the Dangote Refinery, situated close to the Lagos Atlantic is Fulani exceptionalism and the fulfilment of Ahmadu Bello’s dream of the Fulani dipping the Quaran in the Atlantic! Would the Fulani allow a Yoruba or Igbo build such a humungous and monopolistic project in the North?  

If the theft of Southern lands is justified through an archaic belief in exceptionalism and master race doctrine, then corruption and the emptying of the treasury by elected officials is also allowed under the ideologization of Fulani exceptionalism. Under extreme form of identitarian Fulani politics, a public office is a reward for the lifetime support of the official and his people to the services of the Fulani fiefdom. For instance, if a Southern Minister is appointed to administer the Customs or Aviation, the appointee can embezzle the funds of these ministries to the best of his ability and greed in return for his loyalty and total allegiance to the Fulani feudalism.

That is why our 1999 constitution legitimises and protects looting with an immunity clause that encourages a Governor to seize and loot state’s budgetary allocation so flagrantly and without any prosecution. Fulani exceptionalism encourages corruption to buy loyalty.

That is why Elisha Abbo and Danladi Umar could brutalise Nigerians are avoid prosecution. Fulani exceptionalism needs their loyalty. That is why APC Governors, Ministers, Senators and House of Rep members could embezzle any fund and walk about as free men. The Fulani hegemony needs their unquestioned loyalty. That is why our police officers will extort money at checkpoints and nothing will happen. The Fulani hegemony needs their loyalty.  That is why our politicians are prisoners to Fulani loyalty. That is why Bola Tinubu will rather betray his people than betray his Fulani benefactors. That is why Godswill Akpabio walks around free. The Fulani needs his loyalty and that of his people.

Official stealing in the nether Fulani world is the legitimate entitlement of the holder of the public office in accordance with doctrine of exceptionalism. That is why Muhammadu Buhari regarded the monumental looting of Sani Abacha as entitlement. That is why he defended him and absolved him of corruption.

As Fulani exceptionalism continues to be challenged across Nigeria, the ‘chosen people’ slowly but surely take on the hues of a ‘master race’. They begin to imagine that they have the power to legitimize their actions by merely willing them into existence. Fulani exceptionalism is then translated into Fulani superiority in all spheres of national life.

In conclusion, my deepest condolence goes to the untimely exit of Yinka Odumakin. He captivated me by his routine courage, tenacity, amiability, humility, and the undying desire to witness a properly restructured Nigerian entity defined by fairness, equity, justice, and prosperity for all the competing regions. Sleep well.