Kunle Akogun
17 November 2008
opinion
Lagos — Listening to the inaugural speech of Comrade-Governor Adams Aliu Oshiomhole last Wednesday, I had a strange inexplicable feeling that the new Edo State governor needs our prayers rather than the wild jubilation that greeted his well-deserved mandate recovery.
While I admired his powerful oratory, an obvious reflection of the aluta spirit of his labour unionism days, I felt some queer pity for the man who is arguably the only governor in the country in whom so much confidence is reposed and on whom so much expectation is placed that there will be no excuse for non-performance.
That was the same way I felt on November 5 when virtually every adult alive in the world was falling over one another in hailing the electoral victory of Barack Hussein Obama in the US presidential election as if his path to the White House and hopeful four-year sojourn in the oval office is paved with scented roses.
Truth is the duo of Obama and Oshiomhole have a heavy burden to discharge if they would not become as speedily unpopular as their meteoric rise to a fame that goes beyond their respective immediate environments.
The election of the duo is a loud statement in the ability of an ideal political system to redress age-long injustices. While in the US, Obama's election marked what some people choose to call the "formal end of slavery" some 200 years after its constitutional abolition, Oshiomhole's story in Edo State, Nigeria, marked the abolition of one of the various electoral frauds that hallmarked the 2007 general elections in the country.
Obama and Oshiomhole share some uniqueness. Both are enigmatic personalities that rarely happen on political spheres in bourgeois-dominated terrains. The one, a minority African-American who not many people gave any chance of scaling his party's nomination hurdle, the other, a mere labour unionist who is a most unlikely winner of even a party primary election in Nigeria given the huge expenses that go into it, let alone winning a gubernatorial election.
To be sure, the two are immensely popular, judging by the worldwide jubilation for Obama and the nationwide accolade received by Oshiomhole. But beyond their popularity and wide endorsements, the duo will be perpetually haunted, in office, by the burden of service delivery. For, too many expectations now hang on their necks from various interest groups and socio-political tendencies. How quick they are able to shake off their rather pretentious images - of labour activism (Oshiomhole) and demagogic populism (Obama) - and settle down to the reality of realpolitik, where popularity is measured by performance rather than populist oratorical flamboyance, will to a large extent determine their continuous relevance in the reckoning of perceptive members of their respective societies.
Although I believe in the ability of the duo to deliver on their respective electioneering campaign promises, I like to distinguish between an antecedent in labour activism or senatorial eleganceand the challenges of governance. That is why I refuse to be a blind, unthinking optimist who sees the election of Obama as an end in itself or the emergence of Oshiomhole as an automatic elixir for all Edo's problems.
To me, it takes much more than the mere ascension of the duo to forge the needed change in their respective societies. It takes the audacity of commitment to professed goals and stated missions for uhuru to come. And like Obama said in his acceptance speech, the two leaders should not recline to complacency as to see their victories as the only change they seek. They should see their emergence as the required chance to make that needed change in the lives of their peoples and even those of others outside their shores who are bound, one way or the other, to be affected by their policy actions and inactions.
Thus, Obama is not yet my hero until he is able to effect a change in the gory image of an America as a global bully that rides roughshod on lesser countries and defies at will UN's resolutions in an arrogant exhibition of brute force. Obama is not yet my hero until he leads America to a sensible and amicable resolution of the vexed Middle East impasse, which the US helped to create and nurture by its ever-partisan support for the Zionist excesses of Israel.
Obama is not yet my hero until he is able to wean the US from its hypocritical tendency of professing and acclaiming democracy at home but supporting and promoting autocracy and oppression abroad, a country that is perpetually belligerent in the belief that it is the only unchallengeable super power. The US President-elect is not yet my hero until he announces an immediate withdrawal of American troops from Iraq and restore to the Iraqis their democratic rights to determine their country's destiny themselves. But I am afraid he may never be my hero because the mere contemplation of these lines of action is to pitch Obama against the powerful American establishment, which may signal the prelude to his presidential undoing. The implication of my fear is that Obama will do none of these things in the spirit of maintaining the American status quo.
In the same vein, for Oshiomhole, it's not yet uhuru until he detaches himself from the business-as-usual style of leadership that is the bane of Nigerian politics. For instance, will the comrade-governor continue using siren to terrorise hapless Edo citizens and run them out of the road anytime he is passing bye? Will he continue drawing from the non-accountable security vote? Will he allow his wife to make a fetish of the Office of the First Lady with all its flamboyance and attendant wastage of public funds on frivolities like most of her colleagues all over the country?
Will our comrade-governor be a refreshingly different breed from the packs? Will he, like Gani Fawehinmi (SAN) charged him, be able to give maximum joy and happiness to the vast majority of Edo people? Will he fulfil the hopes of many Nigerians in his ability, going by his labour unionist antecedents, to live up to his preachments and always act in the people's interests? Indeed, Oshiomhole has a burden to discharge. And he should mark it: half measure will not do, but full value. For, he will be judged by the same standard he used to set for other leaders when he was a labour unionist.
Zealots as School Heads
Recent events at the College of Legal Studies, Yola, are as unfortunate as they are foreboding. The tertiary institution was in the news recently over the gale of suspensions and expulsions that swept through its students population not as a result of their involvement in examination malpractices nor cultism nor any gross misconduct but because a religious zealot who goes by the name of school administrator thought some of them engaged in acts that ruffled his religious sensibilities.
The College's Provost, Musa Yahaya Nuhu was reported to have been incensed by a scene of hugging students and cross necklace for which he considered summary rustication the appropriate sanction. Nuhu had suspended three final year students, for one semester, for allegedly hugging one another in apparent joyous banter after an examination. He also suspended another student for wearing a necklace embossed with the sign of a cross. All these he did unilaterally without going through any disciplinary committee. And when some students protested this ill-considered suspension before the state House of Assembly, the Provost summarily expelled nine of them.
The Provost's action is condemnable as it is a dangerous gamble with the country's delicate religious balance. To be sure, Mallam Nuhu is stoking the dimming embers of religious intolerance. And when it finally bellows, not even the provost can predict the extent to which the conflagration could burn.
For God's sake, this is a public tertiary institution and not a seminary or madrasat. Also, most of the students there are grown-ups who know what is good for themselves. The fact that the students come from varied religious and social backgrounds makes the Provost's attempt to force his belief system on them an odious exercise.
However, Nuhu is not alone in this attempt by public school heads to use their position for proselytisation. Thus, as one condemns Nuhu for his violent reaction to the cross-necklace wearing and hugging students, one also flays Christian school heads that bar their Muslim students from wearing the smart hijab and even caps on their premises. We should allow our students the freedom to dress in the best way dictated by their religious beliefs, especially in public schools.
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