Immediately it is understood that the G2 political and power architectures of Nigeria are, as designed by the Yoruba and the North, then ole Joe’s claim that what Bola Tinubu did, could not be done by any Eastern Governor washes color.
hotographically, no politicians in the East can fix the Tinubu magic. But counterfactually, the question is to be asked: could Tinubu if he were an Eastern post-civil war governor have been able to do all he did? The obvious answer is no. Tinubu’s political prowess, not talents, to have meaning must be linked to the G2 structure, its platform resources, including its veto powers, immunities and the empire state that Gowon and his sage protocolled.
Thus, the rebellion of the prince, the iwarefa, is not to be equated with the rebellion of the ogbonis or the politically minoritized, the excluded. Space will not allow us but if you assayed the words of Chief, Dr. General, retired, author, diplomat Olusegun Obasanjo, who was a vizier-dictator, an ogboni-iwarefa [an unlikely combination, but ole Joe things happen], you can mark and track these assumptions. Obasanjo’s rebuttals on the Achebe’s There was a Country, showed their hands so much. Here the signals are beneath the eye of the camera, but may be spotted by the eye-brainbox composite.
And ole Joe writes: ‘In the struggle for June 12, Abiola was put in detention, and his wife killed. Several Yoruba people were in detention and some hounded abroad. Abiola was eventually killed. But did the Yoruba go to war or resort to self-determination? No, they did not. They fought back using common sense and the power of ideas.’
Well, what one can say that ole Joe who is a brilliant engineer by training, is treating human time, historical time, as Newtonian constant, not even an Einsteinian variable. He has shown incapacity to adjust for the differing references of the events and groups at work and play. Yet, every modern historian knows that given a constant environment, and an event, E, that happened at a time, T1, and that the exact event is repeated at time T2, that mechanically the same event happened twice. But in historical accounting they are completely different events. The reason is why man is classified as Homo sapiens; a creation and creator of cultures. Ole Joe ronu.
Now how could he even equate the alleged denial of Abiola’s spurious mandate with the heartless, Nazi-like mass murder, pogrom, genocide, Gowon and goons planned, visited, orchestrated, engineered and or inherited against the Igbo?
It was Professor Wole Soyinka who once canvassed the line of thought, that the Igbo should not have gone to war since it was apparent – a historical lie- they would lose. And that was during the burial of his friend Professor Chinua Achebe. And Joe has fallen under the spell of the wise fable weaver and dramatist, but poor and wrongly briefed historian. The truth is that the Igbo did not go to war. We signed a treaty and Gowon, fickle and faithless, even over his own signatures, reneged and brought war to us. If Igbokwe is too young to know these things, well, let him now grow up. And as Mother A’Endu has admonished, men grow up by knowing the truth, and not by knowing or enduring the years. Space will not allow but we hope to treat this in full form in some other medium.
This leads to the rather curious photographic claim that ‘Yoruba proudly told the powers that be that you can only be the Head of State in Nigeria through two methods: either through an election or through a successful coup d’état.’ And we have heard a northerner, Umaru Dikko, we believe, claim that the preponderance of northern coup makers is because of their courage. Both Ole Joe’s and Dikko’s are shit talk and almost that smelly.
The composite fact is that there has only be two [successful]coups in Nigeria. The first coup is the Nzeogwu coup which lasted or lapsed in Ironsi. The next and only other coup is the counter coup which Gowon supervised, designed, executed and or inherited. Space will not let us marshal data and facts but the details are sufficiently in the open. After the Gowon counter coup Nigerian military was turned into a wholly northern Nigerian military. And the northerners are using it as their mad man’s theory, a political veto in renegotiating a Nigeria as federal republic of northern Nigeria – see Buhari’s ancient regime appointments for instance.
Now even if you didn’t want to inquire into the building block facts, the implications confirm this. If it is courage that the northerners have it would have manifested in their other lives and sectors of their lives. But it is clear that the northerners having distinguished themselves as prolific and plural coup makers have no matching achievements over and above others, otherwise. This is in counter-distinction to the historical experiences around the world. And examples abound. By the time the Athenians led the world in martial courage, in lockstep they also led the world in mathematics, in ship building, in poetry, in astronomy and in history making. By the time it was the Romans they led the known world in law, in engineering and administration. And when the Brits came in they gave us Newton, Adam Smith and Maxwell, amongst others. Now it is the Americans who hold the eagle feather in martial courage and it shows in all other areas: jeans making, rock music, computers, drones, going to the moon, and television.
So if the north had genuine courage where are the independent indicators to so prove? Where are the signs and where are the wonders? And there are none. And this barrenness is pregnant with meanings, including why and how we are undeveloped and indeed undevelopable. And it also self-suggests that the courage of the northern man is rigged and rigged in. Great and creative courage cannot serve only in coup making and collapse in other areas. This is proof if proof is needed that the Yoruba and the North never won the Biafra-Nigerian war. The British, the Americans did, and bequeathed victory to them, perhaps in error. And it is the British and Americans that are keeping us together today. If they want us apart, it won’t take a day longer. Igbokwe ronu, it is not enough to be camera or APC-eyed.
Now what happened if ole Joe cared to know is that Nigeria is so militarily configured today that only the north can do coups, accounting for their bestselling coups numbers. So, the Yoruba can’t do coups in present Nigeria because they, like the rest, are garrisoned peoples, by the very powers they helped to create. Professor Akinyemi confesses it, even if mutedly. And it must be put on record that the elections Obasanjo won as president were instigated and procured by northerners, and in highly structured circumstances. The only election Obasanjo and therefore, the Yoruba, using Joe’s accounting conventions], could have won on their own template was the third term. And they failed in it woefully.
Now this brings us to the claim and or supposition, forged and false, that the South-West are particularly gifted types in strategy. Nothing, repeat nothing, could be furtherer from the facts as they are on the ground.
The point is insistent and clear, there are no historical data and or facts to prove the mythology is fact. For emphasis, considering their historical-junctions roles, it can be stated without fear of any contradiction that their two most prominent strategists have performed sub-optimally in the power game. Both Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Senator Bola Tinubu (even as he is still work in progress) have not registered any superior returns on investments, politically, to their divide. Their balance sheets as are, are full of bad and doubtful debts, apparently not recovered, not recoverable. They have given the most only for others, to reap the reward. The planned and promoted accidents of Dogara and Saraki, Buhari’s current Nigeria for northern-Nigeria-only appointments, as well as the famous judge’s my hands are tied, are just balance sheet evidence of poor entrepreneurial power trade amongst others.
On the national scale they are yet to reap as dominant players with the dignity of the lion in his mane, as territorial overlords. So where is the strategy genius that makes of them the power moguls that are attributed to them? Where are their seigniorage profits, not as ogboni, but as iwarefas?
As to why the Igbo are jumping ship, perhaps, the very examples of these great Yoruba sons are models. At least it is on records as follows: Chief Awolowo, apparently an avowed federalist gave and submitted himself severally, under the UPN banners, to seek unitary presidential powers, under a concocted unitary constitution. And Tinubu who once led the charge for true federalism is now in a Siamese marriage with the most brazen unitarists Nigeria ever produced. So if these two can swing the pendulum for power, why is good ole Joe prohibiting others from riding APC jackpot from PDP poor house? In the event he misses it the big idea is that Nigeria is a game. Nigeria is not a mission. And the joke is on he who deludes or is deluded Naija is any other than a quarry, a fallen elephant. But lest we are counted in, we at the Turf Game, are really out and happily so. The point is that we vegetarians, we don’t do coke or suffer the carnivore’s dilemma.
Perhaps the biggest issue is to ask why is ole Joe into these slips, into these errors? Our conjecture is as follows. It is the tragedy of confounding victory with innocence, triumph with genius. But life is a lot more complex. If ole Joe continues in his way, he inadvertently is committing the worst error of logic. It is the ‘fallen angel’ status of allowing one’s psychology of defeat, to morph into a defeat of psychology. It is this that leads one to the Stockholm syndrome, of a man cooperating with and even loving the hangmen who have come for his head. Good ole Joe ronu.
Finally it is time to warn. Ole Joe victory is not scripture, is not scriptural. Ole Joe, Caesar hanged Christ, but it is Christ, not Caesar, that reigns. Luckily for Joe, being Igbo is a genetic and even more so, a cultural, a sociological, and thus a choice phenomenon. If ole Joe wills to cull himself out of being Igbo, we will reassure him that the gates of heaven will erupt in rejoicing. It will thus leave a lean and more evolved strain, the new elects. And like the Israelis, an ‘islet’ peoples surrounded by the ‘archipelago of Arabs’, we will successfully defend the hearths of our fatherland. Thus ole Joe you might just as well degrade, transfigure into Ogboni, Arewa, or Egbesu Nigerian, and Igbo won’t miss you. Meanwhile, we are and remain ofo na ogu to the glorious end. Ole Joe, Mother A’Endu is with us and blesses us, why then dare we be afraid of men, whether they come in the guise of war mongers, murderers, assassins and or hirers of assassins! Ahiazuwa.
SUN
END
Wow. Reading this was a colossal waste of time. The author attempts to utilise what start out as interesting allegorical tools, but the logic of his arguments invariably fall apart.
He complains twice of having insufficient space to address a key point but in one of his shorter paragraphs elsewhere, wastes that same resource using 40% more words than required to make his most germane point.
If your ideas have merit then express them clearly, stop obfuscating or get comfortable with remaining irrelevant.