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Let us get down to
the main course rather than nibble around the delicacy of starters.
That climate talk shop in Cancun, Mexico was actually about the
everlasting subject of global poverty. The Conference of the Parties,
like its predecessors in Copenhagen and elsewhere, is an annual
extravaganza of serious-minded scientists and politicians, inquisitive
civil society, but also a motley crew of colourful conference tourists
and shopaholics. Cancun strove to construct durable shock absorbers for
the poor to cope with the rough ride on the bumpy, climate dirt track.
Their vehicle is named “adaptation”. The clarion call is now clearly to
focus on solutions. Most delegates from Africa, in total disregard of
the transnational mantra to promote, “popular participation and
empowerment,” or the concepts of a “global village,” were the wealthy
of their continent. Nigeria set a good example for other African
nations by taking some local government representatives in its bloated
contingent. But the legendary corruption at the local governance level
in our country cancels out the good and insightful intentions.

There are folks
preaching that the evil effects of global warming are neutral and
affect all strata of humankind the same way. This is false! The point
to worry about is not so much over the physical processes, but about
the social and economic impact, which is why the poor are particularly
vulnerable and imperiled.

If international
development statistics are correct, then anyone walking a
hypothetically representative transect in Nigeria should encounter 70
people living below two US dollars a day in every 100. It is a high
strike rate, and these impoverished fellow citizens live in darkness
and ignorance of global warming. Rural people are aware of consequences
and symptoms of climate change, but where clinical history is unknown,
do not expect diagnosis, innovation and curative measures to follow.

UN politics around
climate change remains somewhat cynical — the rich mitigate by cutting
emissions, the poor adapt to the evils of climate change. To
paraphrase, at climate change conferences, the industrial nations and
major culprits of global warming are brusquely instructed to reduce
their carbon dioxide emissions to stipulated levels in marked-out
periods. Poor countries may continue warming up the earth quietly, as
they industrialize, but will be encouraged through financial injections
from the rich for adaptation to climate change impacts.

Help your poor

Adaptation is
strewn with dangers, and we’ve got to monitor a likely pattern in
Nigeria where the concept could easily result in “adaptation funds”
vanishing into foreign accounts of corrupt elite. The fate of poor
Nigerians is then forgotten under the excuse that they are illiterate
and difficult. It is imperative that the masses are better informed
over climate change adaptation processes and politics now. The mistake
must not be made to package solutions and arrive at villages for the
start of so-called “pilot projects”. Kanayo Nwanze, director of the
International Fund for Agricultural Development, IFAD in Rome recently
made an unforgettable statement in Abuja.

“No country develops the other for it,” he said.

You do not hear that sort of message from Africans working for
international donor agencies, at least not in public. Mr. Nwanze said
it loud and clear in the presence of both bilateral and multilateral
donors, some of whom nodded in agreement. Nigeria does not receive as
much foreign development assistance as Ghana, Tanzania, Mozambique or
Mali. I recall Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala saying this was not a bad thing. You
couldn’t agree with her more. The world expects Nigeria, the “giant of
Africa” to do more for its poor people and stop begging for development
aid.

Just as there are
no perfect elections anywhere, there are also no perfect candidates.
The choice of the electorate is usually an aggregate perception of the
value of the candidates’ personalities, manifestoes, visions and
programmes to their interests. These interests could be economic,
political, social or even religious.

I still do not
understand whose or what interest Olusegun Obasanjo, former military
head of state and two term civilian President of Nigeria, was promoting
when he said in Harare, during a meeting of the Commonwealth, that the
late M.K.O. Abiola was not the messiah that Nigeria needed. Since then
not many Nigerians have forgiven OBJ for that remark uttered in the
heat of the struggle for the revalidation of June 12, 1993 elections.
In addition to the burden of misgiving over his perceived role in
denying Chief Obafemi Awolowo victory at the 1979 presidential
elections, Obasanjo has continued to carry the cross of that Freudian
slip, especially among the Yorubas, till today.

Since
independence, most political actors, have tried to position themselves
in the court of public opinion as the much awaited messiah Nigeria
desperately needs. They present themselves as saints even when we know
that for many of them even hell would consider their sins too hot to
handle. They promise from the ridiculous to the irritable just to curry
the affection and votes of the Nigerian electorate.

Usually, their
much copied political manifestoes, have never failed to promise
Nigerians all the goodness of heaven and beyond, yet our situation has
only continued to deteriorate. And with another general election around
the corner, Nigerians are being daily barraged by a deluge of political
talk leaving many wondering whether there will ever be a realistic walk
in the direction of the Promised Land and towards fulfilling our
bestowed potential.

The irony is that
Jews waited for a messiah for thousands of years and when He finally
came, they could not recognise Him, instead, they crucified Him. Ours
is a bigger irony because it appears many Nigerians are in quandary
over our expectations for the right leadership in our country. Our high
rate of illiteracy, falling education standards, monetisation of our
politics, poor access to genuine information services, endemic poverty,
general moral bankruptcy, ethnicity and religious bigotry have only
further blurred our perception of a people oriented leadership
succession. These indices of national failure also bedevil the quest by
honest Nigerian youths and women for a meaningful stake in the
governance process.

Our expectations
in a political messiah, must be realistic, that is, if we really need a
messiah to fix Nigeria. The kind of leader Nigeria needs at this
critical period of her national life is not just one who will provide
another set of disjointed social amenities and brandish same as if
he/she is doing Nigerians a favour. We need a leader who will re-enact
the Nigerian dream, the dream of all humanity, which the Americans
summarized thus the “self-evident truth that all men were created
equal, that they were endowed by their creator with certain inalienable
rights, that among these are rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness”.

In a country where
the value of human life is becoming cheaper than tissue paper, we need
a leader whose passion, commitment and allegiance is with the Nigerian
people and who has the managerial acumen to judiciously supervise the
rebuilding of this realm from the devastation inflicted on her by the
years of locusts and caterpillars. He/she must have sufficient capacity
to deliver to Nigerians their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness by sincerely pursuing: establishing the rule of law as a
way of life; rebuilding our public institutions; re-industrialising our
economy; revamping dilapidated physical infrastructures and
re-engineering the social fabric that holds us as one secure, peaceful
and united entity.

That, is my definition of the messiah Nigeria needs after the 2011 general elections at all tiers of government.

Fortunately for
us, Nigeria is blessed with many women and men who possess very bright
ideas, managerial astuteness, vision, foresight, patriotism, integrity
of character and a record of brilliant performance in private and/or
public service. These noble minds can easily steer the ship of state to
berth at this minimum and even beyond.

My fear is that as long as these men and women do not command
stupendous wealth, or belong to the proper ethnic and religious groups,
their chances of emerging as leaders in our corridors of power are
highly limited: that is the nemesis of progressive leadership
succession in Nigeria. Yet, we all celebrated the emergence of Barack
Obama as the first black American President of the United States. If he
were a Nigerian would he achieve such feat? Those who want to be called
mothers must be ready for the travail of the labour room. Are we?

Men like him do not
die, I insist. To live in the hearts of those who love you, they say,
is not to die. And to be fortunate enough to enjoy, post-demise, a
perpetuation of the conditions that sustained your earthly dominion, is
never to die.

In Adedibu’s case, what, are these ‘conditions’?

Poverty, for one –
the kind of poverty that made it possible for a man to become a
near-deity simply by feeding hundreds of people every day, with –
amala! Yes, amala, alongside its for-better-for-worse consort, gbegiri.
It was said that it cost Adedibu half a million naira a day, to
discharge this responsibility; this passionate commitment to the
banishment of widespread hunger. Why teach a man to fish when you can
teach him how amala goes with fish?

At half a million
naira a day, we are talking of a mere two hundred million naira every
year. (Add a little more to cover the cash handouts for which Adedibu
was famous). The calculators must be busy in Ibadan, as claimants to
the Lamidi Adedibu throne finalise their budgets for 2011. (How much, I
ask, is three, or even four hundred million naira, in these times when
ordinary deputy directors in the Federal Civil Service have twice as
much sitting idly in their personal bank accounts?) Closely following
poverty is politics. As long as elections need to be secured, and votes
captured with minimal opposition, there will be vacancies for more
Adedibus. As long as INEC’s data-capture machines (six of which were
“installed” in Adedibu’s Molete compound during the 2007 elections)
retain their hunger for invented and magically conjured votes, Adedibu
cannot just die like that.

And then there is
the media. Whatever else might be said and debated about Adedibu, that
he sold newspapers is not a point of controversy. Adedibu was the
quintessential journalist’s delight. If you looked at it in a
particular way, you might be justified to say that a part of the
Adedibu myth was engineered in newsrooms across the country.

The weekend papers
especially loved him No one answered journalists’ questions like Baba
Adedibu. He said it as he felt and saw it. Prophet, warlord, historian,
king, entertainer, political strategist, and sound-bite expert rolled
into one, he was the kind of man you never wanted to stop listening to.
For him, battles were not to be cowardly fought behind closed doors;
anger was never to be mellowed into conspiratorial whispering.

During the Ladoja
days he openly admitted to hijacking government vehicles and attacking
government property, and he didn’t mince words in speaking of his
entitlement to a generous chunk of the monthly allocation of Oyo State.

Our newspapers are
certainly not the only ones missing Adedibu. Even you and I, ordinary
amala-or-akpu-or-tuwo-loving citizens ever in need of swashbuckling
narratives to make up for the quiet desperation of our lives, miss him
too. Remember that his disciples were mostly ordinary people: fathers,
husbands, wives, mothers, children, students (pupils even), traders,
civil servants, bus drivers, and lots more.

For some time their
faces must have been turned to the skies, hands waving bye-bye to the
“Master” perhaps even disbelieving his “demise.” But not for long: life
has had to go on. Hunger has no pause button; the recurring cycle of
school fees will search in vain for a ‘slow-motion’ option. And now
elections are here again, and political opponents’ campaign billboards
wait patiently to be turned into firewood. Who will assuage the hunger,
pay the fees, give orders to hack down the billboards?

There are therefore
vacancies, in Oyo State, even in the entire South West, for new and
improved Adedibus; men (and maybe women) of unflagging commitment to
the ideals and principles that Baba left behind. They are needed to
ensure that the region is not left, ahem, at the mercy of rapscallions
(a more interesting synonym of ‘rascal’).

In April we will
witness the first governorship election in Oyo State since the demise
of the great man, godfather of godfathers, one to whom even Emperor
Olusegun Obasanjo paid obeisance. Adedibu, magic-fingered midwife who
never failed to ‘deliver’ electoral victory. Only then, April that is,
will we know if Adedibu is truly dead and gone to his grave.

In the meantime, we
have a special service announcement – a campaign message – from the
PDP, where Adedibu served out his final years faithfully as “garrison
commander.” Governorship flag bearer Adebayo Alao-Akala, seeking an
unprecedented second-term (no Oyo governor has ever got a second term)
wants us to think of oyato-ism, that his special brand of governance
(to whose creation Adedibu contributed significantly), and “Imagine
Another Four Years!” I think I can. Can you?

This is a modified version of an article originally written and published in 2008, as “Adedibu is not dead”

The Nigerian media
has no sense of humour. It does not recognise a joke when it sees one.
It is too straitjacketed in its story selection and analysis. It needs
a makeover if it is not to bore the nation to death.

At a time the
country requires a healthy dose of laughter, the media riles us with
inanities. Once upon a time a former head of state (as he then was) put
up a sign on his farm that dogs and journalists were not welcome there.
The media took it to heart, whining that the general was equating them
with dogs. Who does not know journalists are dogs, after all they call
themselves watchdogs of society? What does a dog do other than watch
its owner’s interests? Why should the farmer open his barns to dogs
that would not welcome his interests?

The other day when
some northern elders decided to field a former vice president as their
northern consensus candidate for the presidency of Nigeria without the
consensus of other Nigerians, this former HOS and former president of
Nigeria, indeed, the ex VP’s principal, owner of the naughty farm
signpost, reacted humorously to the choice, uttering his famous lines:
“I dey laugh o.”

What did the media
do? They went to town, claiming the former president was mocking his
former deputy. What did they expect him to do? Cry? If he had done so,
they would have complained he didn’t wish his former deputy well.

Even the former
VP’s minders didn’t catch the joke. They derided the old man that if he
had died in jail where the dark goggled one sent him, there would have
been nothing for him to laugh about. That sent the news hounds on a
wild trail, celebrating the insipid utterance.

If they were
steeped in the traditional mores of our people, they would have known
that when a matter beggars belief laughter is the best antidote.

The latest fixation
is with our man lucky enough to be running for the highest office in
the land. They say he called the opposition rascals. They say his
utterance was un-presidential. They say his prolonged struggle with the
former vice president, the zoning evangelist anointed by the northern
elders, had taken its toll on him and affected his speech, and he had
started abusing people he could hardly look in the eye a few months
ago.

One party even
tried to drag the former president, the chicken farmer, into it. You
see, he was on the campaign podium with the campaigning president and
he was adjudged guilty of corrupting the campaigning president’s
speech. Are they saying the campaigning president cannot pick his own
words? A man who has just won his party’s nomination against grave
opposition is an excited person, who can seek recourse in malapropism
as he mistakes rascal for radical?

The man had simply
said: “We (read PDP) must take over all the states in the South West.
The zone is too important to be left in the hands of rascals”. Is the
South West not important? Yes, it is. Does the PDP currently control
the entire South West? No. Of the six states that make up the
geopolitical zone, the Action Congress of Nigeria controls Lagos,
Ekiti, and Osun, that is fifty percent. The Labour party controls one,
Ondo State, leaving the president’s Peoples Democratic Party in charge
of two, Oyo and Ogun; that is thirty three percent. Is the South West
in the hands of rascals? What manner of rascals?

Two of my
dictionaries describe a rascal as “a person who does things of which
you disapprove, but whom you still like”. A rascal could also be “a
dishonest or mischievous person”. So which one was the man who wants to
be elected president talking about: the likeable one, who irritates now
and then and is recognisable in every family and organisation or the
dishonest/mischievous one?

You see, the man
from the creeks, the one who became governor without being elected, and
also became president without being elected, the one who is struggling
to be elected into the highest political office for the first time, did
not mention any name. So why is the opposition so eager to appropriate
a name that may not be theirs?

The man, obviously,
did not go there to unfold a grand vision of governance; his mission
was to ruffle feathers, and serve notice the recent reverses in the law
courts did not mean all was lost. It was to rouse the sleeping warriors
to action and assure them that the federal might would be behind them
in the battle to defend their turf in Oyo and Ogun and contain the
expansion in Ondo, Ekiti and Osun States.

It was also to warn
the darling of the media in Lagos not to sit pretty. The Peoples
Deception Party wants Lagos badly. It is seen as Nigeria’s honey pot
that finances those acts of radicalism, sorry, rascality, of upturning
their hitherto carefully orchestrated plans to dominate the South West.
That’s why the Assemblage of Confused Nigerians and their friends in
the media are so angry with the president.

Never mind that
Valentine’s Day was two days ago, love is still very much in the air.
No better time for people to show love and for business to pick up than
the month of February after a January of surprises. You turn on the
news and you read the papers and everything, whether on local, state,
national, regional or international news has to do with politics and
its aftermath. So it is always so nice to get a distraction; an aside
from reality.

With every debate,
there are always two sides to the story. While January was the month of
break-ups and new beginnings, February can be seen as a month of
restoration or should I say, payback time. You have to love our girls.
They have dusted the dirt off their shoulders and some have gone as far
as indulging a full body makeover; hair, eyelashes, teeth, face, skin,
manicure, pedicure and even weight loss/gain. It is not just for
February 14, rather it is for the whole week and weekend. So no hiding
place for men who give the excuse of working late, as there is always
the weekend to spread some love and spend some money.

The truth is that
nobody wants to ‘roast’, especially with Valentine’s Day being on a
weekday. Everyone in the office will be eyeing each other’s goodies or
lack of goodies. Even in schools, the competition would be on all week.
“Oh my boyfriend just travelled to Lagos for the weekend and couldn’t
make in time on Monday. Don’t worry, he has promised to make it all up
to me once he gets in.” And be sure that the lady will bring the gifts
the next day to the office to show off and prove that the boyfriend was
indeed real and not a figment of her imagination.

But for those that
do not have boyfriends, husbands, sugar daddies and so on, desperate
times call for desperate measures! A scroll through the phone book
provides an endless list of possible alternatives. After selecting a
few of the ‘mugus’ and ‘magas’, a phone call is put through and then
comes the sexy voice, “Hey baby! How ya doing? I’ve really missed you.
I hope you are not too busy tonight. Why don’t you take me to Meridien
and be my Val.” If it is an equally roasting guy with some dough and in
search of action, he would probably reply. “Yes dear, I’ve really
missed you (even though they haven’t spoken since last October). Why
don’t you come by my place. I have a surprise waiting for you and then
we can go anywhere you want.”

If the girl is just
in search for the goodies rather than a good time, she would find ways
of getting out of the ‘meet-me-at-my-home’ part. The excuses will
start; traffic, house chores, work commitments, parents, illness and so
on. If none works, she would probably turn up at his place and tell him
straight on that she’s on her period, so nothing can happen. Now if he
is the kinky type, she’s in trouble. She better just say she is on the
path of celibacy.

The moral of the story is that it takes two to play the game; and by
the game, I am referring to this form of “coded prostitution”. Seasons
like Christmas, birthdays and Valentine’s Day. In fact anything to do
with gifts and we see a different shade of red come out. The one that
takes no prisoners and stops at nothing till it gets what it wants.
While one has no problems with reuniting with “lost” friends of the
opposite sex on such days, it is the motive behind it that gets me
going. Have we sunk so low that we throw all decorum into the marines
for a gift or booty call? There is life after Valentine’s Day and we
shall all live with the consequences of our actions. And if anyone was
thinking of making me their Val, a nice comment at the end of my piece
will do and perhaps a bunch of red roses too.