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Tag: Dan Amor

  • Sylva’s New Year message: A deconstruction – By Dan Amor

    Sylva’s New Year message: A deconstruction – By Dan Amor

    By Dan Amor

    “Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life and have manned themselves to face it.” – EMERSON

    He is practically the only cabinet minister currently who released a New Year message to Nigerians for 2022. This symbolizes the fact that he has been anointed or programmed for a very plum job with a national emblem come 2023. Not a handful of Nigerians, except the discerning minds who could read between the lines, would appreciate the philosophy behind this ennobling move. H. E. Timipreye Marlin Sylva, former Governor of Bayelsa State and current Minister of State for Petroleum Resources is an impatient and combative man, who feels simply and cares deeply. He is a romantic and a realist, and he is also prudent, expedient, demanding and ambitious. Consequently, he decided to address Nigerians because, as a humanist, he feels their pains as a people.

    A textual analysis of his brief message to Nigerians attests to this. Yet, despite the incipient degeneracy of politics in Nigeria, despite the fact that political debate or argumentation has been reduced to intrigues, backstabbing and subterfuge, and development is often seen in the dividing line between savagery and barbarism, Sylva’s New Year release to Nigerians was a soothing balm. With a combination of logic, philosophical and religious underpinnings, Sylva appealed to the spirit and inner promptings of Nigerians to love their country and hope for a better tomorrow. From his days as a member of the Rivers State House of Assembly (1992-1993), to the time he was a Special Assistant to Chief Edmund Daukoru , the then Minister of State for Petroleum under Chief Olusegun Obasanjo and when he became Governor of Bayelsa State (2008-2012), Sylva has brought uncommon insights into governance.

    Yet the insights he brought to politics – insights earned in a labour of experience and self education, has led him to see power not as an end in itself but as the means of redeeming the powerless. Timi Sylva’s New Year message of hope to the common Nigerians, the desolate and the disinherited may appear common. It is more! In the message, Sylva acknowledges that his principal, President Muhammadu Buhari has tried and is still trying to extricate Nigerians from this maze of social conflicts. But the problems of the poor and downtrodden about which he cares so much remain. The passage of time, the knowledge of consequences, the illumination of hindsight, his forecast that the economy would boom, the rise of new preoccupations – all give problems of the past new form and perplexity. Nigerians have agreed to flow with this man who has seen sorrow, bewilderment, fury and fright in their faces, and has promised them hope.

    Yet Sylva’s conventional religious faith, as gleaned from his release pales next to our serene inexhaustible piety. In his New Year message to Nigerians, Sylva said the citizens needed to continue to think positively of a better Nigeria, adding that the present Buhari administration would do its best to ensure that things continued to get better for the citizenry. “2022 is going to be a good year for Nigeria. Things have started shaping up and with our collective support and prayers, we will achieve the Nigeria of our dream. This is not the time to despair but to rekindle our hope of a great and prosperous Nigeria. Just like the Israelites, with God on our side, we will certainly rise from the ashes to zenith of prosperity”, Sylva said. He notes:”when the Israelites were exiled in Babylon, they kept hope alive and turned to God and God answered their prayers and they were liberated. As a people, we need to sincerely turn to God to answer our prayers and heal our land.” He is a Christian who is also invariably using his message to remind Nigerians that 2023 is the time for the country to vote a Christian to be the next president of this secular state. Anyone who says the contrary is working against natural justice and popular aspiration.

    While wishing every Nigerian a prosperous 2022, the minister says: “This is going to be a great year for Nigeria in the oil and gas sector of the economy. With the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA), Nigeria has set the stage for increase investments in the sector. We now have a law that governs the sector and create confidence in the minds of potential investors and I’m confident that we will make unprecedented progress in the coming years.” Yet much of the significant critical issues in the choice of materials for the presidency as far as the All Progressives Congress (APC) is concerned would most likely be centred on the pedigrees of the aspirants. When they become candidates, the issue of which party each candidate represents does not really count much. In fact, Timi Sylva indubitably represents a bold testimony to the emerging trend of enthroning young and brilliant people at the apogee of political leadership across the world. Talking about young, good-looking, brilliant and adequately educated people in leadership positions?

    There is no doubt that brains and looks appear to be the unassailable clinchers these days as far as elections are concerned. In fact, the advanced democracies of the world discovered this mystery at the dusk of the twentieth century. In the United States of America (USA), for instance, brains and looks did earn the Democratic Party a rare two-term spell under the youthful personage, then, of the ever voluble, hand-pumping and telegenic Oxford-trained lawyer, Bill Clinton. Even in Great Britain, the electorate, in May 1997, demonstrated a certain unabashed bias for yapper, dapper looks, with all the histrionic gestures and dramatic turns of phrases, when they elected Tony Blair of the New Labour, another Oxford-trained lawyer, then 43, as Prime Minister.

    He was the youngest in 187 years. Consequently, the dourness of the British political landscape was dramatically but pleasurably transformed. To be candid, Blair did not only puncture, he also destroyed the veneer of cerebral vacuity and humourlessness his predecessor, John Major, had unrepentantly imposed on the British public all through his dull and trepidated reign. The all-rounded cerebral assiduity and political dazzles of Bill Clinton on the American political scene during his two-term Presidency is well known to all and sundry. And when Tony Blair was asked his priorities as leader of the New Labour, he said, number one, Education; number two, Education and number three, Education. This was when Great Britain was 500 years old as the bastion of democracy which had colonized many countries of the world.

    Also, Barack Obama’s audacious political savvy as the first Black American president of the United States, is a pointer to what age and brain can do in modern political leadership. It is against this sparkling backdrop that many Nigerians got electrified or even seduced when they read Timi Sylva’s 2022 New Year message to Nigerians. Given his age (he was born in 1964) and brilliant pedigree, it is not a surprise that the rare gallantry displayed by the ebullient and hardworking minister has marked him out as one who would painstakingly work for the country and its peoples. Coming from the effeteness of a polity cast rather in a fossilized mould, the wily and deftly calculating man in his prime has assiduously and tenaciously worked his way around his mission by ensuring that he finishes clean in his area of assignment. The number of revolutionary achievements recorded in the oil and gas sector under his supervision, is second to none. The passage of the Petroleum Industry Bill into an Act of Parliament, after more than two decades in the National Assembly, is worthy of commendation.

    Debonair, urbane, calm, calculative and compositely brilliant, Sylva is one of the tribunes of his generation whose political philosophy is people-centred. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist and poet, who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century, has said in the opening quote, great men and nations have not been boasters or buffoons, but people who appreciate the enormity of the problems of their age and position themselves strategically to proffer solutions to them. Sylva does not make a noise. But he has been studying the problems and challenges of his country and how to solve them.

    Yet, when the time comes, Nigerians would ask and would be told in detail: who is Timipreye Sylva? Where is he coming from? What does he want? How do we deconstruct an alloy out of common properties? What makes Sylva so people-friendly that only a few antagonise him? The alloying of two distinct entities into a new compound requires an account of the materials used, but merely to enable the location of common properties that facilitate the making of the alloy. To attempt a critical articulation of answers to the above posers, we must eschew bitterness and primordial sentiments and probe into the personality under review. Time will tell!

  • Ige: 20 years without justice – By DAN AMOR

    Ige: 20 years without justice – By DAN AMOR

    By DAN AMOR

    A calculated insult and the guilt preceded his death, stealing from the actual murder all its potential impact and drama. There never was a crime more dramatically rehearsed, and the tale only provides it could not have been otherwise. Yet there were no clues to be uncovered, no enigmas to be revealed; for this was a murder almost predicted like its predecessors.

    When yours sincerely flew into Nigeria from Israel in December 2001, the first vulgar odour that polluted the Nigerian air was the news of the assassination of Chief Bola Ige. I met him physically for the first time on March 12, 1997 at the Faculty of Arts Quadrangle of the University of Ibadan on the occasion of the 50th birthday anniversary of Prof. Niyi Osundare, then head of the Department of English of the university. I had known the orator beyond reputation for just four years and he instantly became my hero until his painful exit.

    As a principled and astute politician, even though he agreed to serve in former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s cabinet, Chief Ige (Cicero Oke) did not preach to Nigerians. But he provoked questions and left us in no doubt as to where he stood. He shared none of the current tastes for blurred conflicts, ambiguous characters and equivocal opinions. Nor was he disdainful of strong dramatic situations building up for firm climaxes. From the critic’s point of view, the plot of Ige’s senseless murder in its high velocity treachery, summarizes modern Nigeria in one word: “shame”.

    In his epic novel, ‘SHAME’ (1983), Salman Rushdie, the Indian born controversial English writer, paints the picture of a disconcerting political hallucination in Pakistan, which he calls “Peccavistan” – existing fictionally as a slight angle to reality. The major thrust of the novel is that the shame or shamelessness of its characters returns to haunt them. Yet the recurrent theme is that there are things that cannot be said, things that can’t be permitted to be true, in a tragic situation. To this end, fiction and politics ultimately become identical or rather analogous. That so banal and damaging an emotion could have been so manifestly created from within the Yoruba nation itself, was a ringing surprise to us keen observers of that macabre drama. But the truth or falsehood of the accusation or counter-accusation is not of the first importance.

    The critical issue that must enlist our concern here is Nigeria’s sick criminal justice system and the poverty of integrity of its police force. Twenty odd years after the well-planned assassination of the Chief Law Officer of the world’s largest black nation (Chief Bola Ige was Minister of Justice and Attorney General of the Federation when he was killed), his killers are still walking the streets of our cities without challenge. In short, twenty years after, no justice for the Justice Minister. In this sense, Nigeria is back in mediaeval times. The Orwellian qualities and nightmarish implications of the investigations make one sick since the whole exercise is as absurd as it is puerile.

    Only in Nigeria that a patriotic, brilliant and hardworking lawyer who turned in a prime suspect to the police for prosecution, be arrested and arranged by the same police before a court of law just to engage our false sense of judgement. Did the police not declare Fryo wanted in connection with Chief Ige’s murder? Only in Nigeria would a prime suspect in such a heinous crime be declared winner, released from detention and sworn in as Senator of the Federal Republic in an electoral contest for which he did not even campaign.

    The senseless and cowardly assassination of Chief Ige therefore serves to reassert the vulnerability of men and women and to poignantly underline their impotence. For, it is a well known fact that the vulture that eats the flesh of its neighbour knows what awaits it at death, as even the eyes that weep still see. To portray a credible part of moral degeneration is deadly enough in itself; yet, to do so in a dimension and style requiring undiminished pity is to court disaster. The attempt would be brash even in fiction or epic, with all of their additional resources for portraying subtle changes and for building sympathy.

    Little do we know that because we lack the intellectual precision and moral discipline to dissect with admirable lucidity and illuminating temper, the insularity and complexity of our turbulent society, we have resorted to primordial solutions to our national problems. Our recent experience in the hands of the military is replete with the shameful fact that almost two-thirds of our men and women of conscience and nobility of outlook or high integrity were either murdered or banished into exile in foreign lands and the rest condemned like guinea-pigs to a life of forced idleness in our stinking, unhygienic prisons and police cells.

    If we detest our memory of the unparalleled crudity of that dark era, what do we say of the murderous clouds hanging ominously over the entire nation in a so-called democratic dispensation? The truth is that Nigeria is still detained in the past. For the police not to have unraveled the enigma embedded in the mockery killing of the Attorney General and Justice Minister of the federation, twenty years after, shows that nothing has changed. From Dele Giwa, Chiefs Mashal Harry, A. K. Dikibo, Funso Williams, Mr. Abayomi Ogundeji, the Igwe couple, etcetera, the story remains the same: fate makes everything invisible and works its inexorable course. Remember the story of the emperor who wore no clothes? Only the innocent saw that he was naked.

    Why waste our time asking who killed Chief Bola Ige while the obvious question should be: why was Chief Bola Ige killed? It is patiently disastrous that our integrity as a nation has been consumed by a democracy gone mad. And if we are to grasp reality in the face of madness, it is the reality of Ige’s death that we must grasp. But this is one reality that sears us whenever we attempt to comprehend it, and so we try, by the use of our superficial investigations, to prove that the reality does not exist, despite our emphatically underlined knowledge to the contrary.

    We watch humanity grotesquely tormented, cruelly and with mockery impaled. Nearly all the characters suffer some form of crude indignity in the course of the tragedy. Yet, indeed, the overriding critical problem in this matter is the conspiracy of silence among the people of Nigeria. In spite of our pretensions, Ige’s death confronts us like a raw, fresh wound where our every instinct calls for a thorough examination. This problem, moreover, is as much one of political will and courage than of dramatic effect.

    Whether we believe it or not, our lives and freedom are hostages of our limited knowledge of the day after, the waywardness of chance and the decaying of our national institutions. It is only in fighting for others that we can circumvent these limitations. President Muhammadu Buhari was said to have promised to revisit these cases of high profile killings. More than five years after his promise, nothing has been heard from the presidency. Can anyone get justice in this country? Why was Chief Bola Ige killed?

  • 2021: The common man as my man of the year – By Dan Amor

    2021: The common man as my man of the year – By Dan Amor

    By DAN AMOR

    Undoubtedly, the story of the attendant significance of the average Nigerian – the man in the street popularly known as the “Common Man” has largely been underreported while that of his poverty has largely been exaggerated. Like the proverbial monk walking in the rain with a leaking, or even no umbrella at all, the common man in Nigeria is the symbol of the enduring failure of the Nigerian Dream. Yet, the common man has survived, all the same. Since, in any society, labourers, artisans, peasants, low income earners, etcetera, constitute the majority and also produce the wealth of the nation, there is a sense in which these people are seen as the true heroes and heroines whose needs or interests must occupy the pride of place on the scale of preference of society. But it is a measure of the ineptitude, incompetence, greed, and sheer lack of the capacity for decorum of the Nigerian governing elite that this fundamental contradiction has to be brought before them. I don’t know about you, for you are entitled to your own opinion. As for this column, the Common Man is the Man Of The Year 2021. He is worthy of our celebration.

    Nigeria as a nation entered into the year 2021 on January 1 on the cusp of uncertainties and anxiety in the wake of the worst economic recession so far experienced in the annals of the nation and the disturbing magnitude of the Covid 19 pandemic which started ravaging the human race since November 2019. If truly the Nigerian poor now speak with one voice, it is certainly the evidence of hunger and poverty in their lives and daily existence. In the Second Quarter of the year, the recession graduated into a depression. From the First Quarter of 2021, hunger became the greatest teacher in the land. Many Nigerians severely beaten by the prevailing realities, now started chaining their gallons of fuel, the minute and miserable type of generating sets known in local parlance as ‘I better pass my neighbour’, their pots of soup and other essential commodities in the house to their legs to guard against theft while sleeping. This is because these items are now targets by those who can no longer afford them in their homes. The stealing of pots of soup is now a common experience in most Nigerian neighborhourhoods due to the prevalence of austerity or recession in the country.

    Indeed, the common man has been at the receiving end of all the blunders and the executive delinquencies going on in this country. It is incredible but true that certain categories of Nigerians have had to sell some of their children into slavery and the proceeds used to feed the rest at home. The common man has gone through an indefinite period of self denial just for the privileged few in positions of authority to feed fat at his own expense. This is the true meaning of recession. Despite this, Government is still very comfortable with its shameless policy of poor baiting. The news trending all over the country has it that a company owned by the former Secretary to the Government of the Federation, David Lawal claimed that it spent over N200million to clear grasses at the various Internally Displaced Persons camps in the North East. This is more so as hundreds of trailer loads of relief materials for these unfortunate Nigerians are being diverted by those we all know are driving the Change Agenda of President Muhammadu Buhari. It is an evil day! Corruption is no longer corruption; it is correction by the saints hacking around the president’s court. And like a mediaeval bear, the common man is tied to a stake and subjected to all kinds of insults and indignities by those who should know better.

    In spite of the fact that the idle, gluttonous governing elite have stolen and are still stealing the national patrimony into their private pockets, the common man still buys from the same market with them. As social parasites, the rich and privileged, without shame or remorse, are emigrating in droves to the most unlikely places, in search of easy money and leisure. On the other hand, the poor have no other home except the shanty, slum settlements, the urban blight and ghettos scattered all over the urban centres across the country. These poor Nigerians still make use of bucket latrines or still defecate openly in bushes around their settlements and drink from well and mud water in the overcrowded ‘face-me-I-face-you’ homes without electricity. But the rich are indeed, completely different animals. They are a socially unique species, who evolve strong strategies for ensuring dominance and submission. You need to observe carefully their flourishes of display behavior , the intricate dynamics of their pecking order, as well as their unorthodox mating practices.

    Worst of it all is the unprovoked and incessant killings of the common man all over Nigeria. Nigerian rich men are killed by accident but the common man is killed deliberately. The Chibok girls who were abducted since 2014 are all children of the poor who are used as Guinea pigs by politicians whereas the children of politicians are never seen anywhere. Of the over 14 million children who are dropped out of school, none is from a rich home. All the children of the rich including governors children are in private schools or are schooling abroad. Even those who give up their future to the service of terrorism, those who are given free guns and bombs to kill innocent people, are all children of the poor. Why are children of the poor used for political experimentation while children of the rich are in private schools or in Ivy-League universities abroad? In spite of the persistent holocaust and pornography of violence visited on the poor, they survive all the same.

    At a critical period in our national life when there is glaring scarcity of men and women of honour and high moral standing, it is therefore imperative that we note the untiring sacrifice of the man in the street whose love for the country is beyond easy question in the face of all odds. When the true story of the year of our Lord 2021 will be told; when the story is told of how the Nigerian poor became the ideal heroes of the Nigerian condition, in one of the most trying years in the history of the country, the common man will surely be remembered with immense retrospective gratitude. We are even short of words to describe the nobility of the common man. Daily pensioners who had served this nation meritoriously are shabbily treated even by a government that rode to power on the altar of a Change mantra, with some dying in queues, while waiting to collect just a bit of the huge arrears of their very meagre pensions. Is it not surprising therefore that the common man still survives the holocaust of this engulfing recession? He is this column’s ultimate hero and Man of the Year 2021.

     

    Amor, critic and journalist, lives in Abuja.

  • IBB And Recent Nigerian History, By DAN AMOR

    IBB And Recent Nigerian History, By DAN AMOR

    By DAN AMOR

    To live on this sinful earth for 80 years (whether it is original or official age) is no mean achievement, especially in these terrible times when conditions have sapped real life out of comparative existence leaving the average lifespan of a Nigerian at just 55. But here is General Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida (retd.) celebrating 80 years with pomp and pageantry in the midst of family members, friends, associates, former colleagues and country men and women. Since Tuesday August 17, his date of birth, Nigerians from all walks of life have paid tributes to this former military President, from varied perspectives.

    It is only natural that we greet such a human dynamo with overwhelming gusto. Happy 80th birthday anniversary to General Babangida. I have read big, meaty, skillfully conceived and carefully executed tributes to the gap-toothed former maximum ruler, constantly relating them to the larger story. Some have treated his story with compassion and with a critical probing pen and have achieved brilliantly their aim of following Babangida’s long journey out of the innocence of his turbulent years. Yet, since men must do their work in warmer temperatures, cold light may not be a sufficient condition for the study of men’s lives.

    Bookmakers call him the Maradona of Nigerian politics. For he dribbles with crafty fanaticism and zestful mien like the late legendary Argentine football star, Diego Armando Maradona. But in an interview with TELL Magazine, he called himself the “evil genius”, who thinks he is too smart and too intelligent not to indulge in the starry-eyed notion of self-immolation, since he is gifted with the machinations of evil. Yet, as a maximum sadist whose life thrives on the surreal or its fringes, Babangida the erstwhile dictator who ruled Nigeria for eight years still relishes controversy. In spite of his eight-year reign adjudged as having ended in a historic fiasco, the General is said to have rewritten recent Nigerian history even at 80. Read his elaborate interviews with the media and juxtapose them with what happened between 1985 and 1993, to understand our point of departure.

    This saga, verging on the bazaar, and which would have made Albert Camus, the celebrated modern master of the absurd genre, green with envy, should not astound Nigerians already shocked to the nerves by the sheer absurdity of these terrible times of Buhari’s mis-governance. Here is a gentleman whose eight year reign not only approximates to a plague and a scourge but is still being perceived as an incubus under which we are smarting. Indeed, in spite of the miasma he arouses, in spite of his widespread unpopularity, especially in the South West and in spite of the bitterness towards what most Nigerians see as his baleful legacy, Babangida who annulled the most placid election in the country’s annals has granted interviews to the media on his 80th birthday to rewrite Nigerian history in the evening of his life. Two factors are said to have spurred and galvanized his life. Astutely concerned about his place in history, the man who invented Nigeria’s adversity and barbarism in the face of growing global enlightenment, is ironically crusading for historical relocation but cannot own up to his immense atrocities. And this is not new.

    His numerous “settlement” schemes and the vending binge of public property at give-away prices to influential Nigerians are thought to be devices to buy over the people’s loyalty, lull and deaden their sense of outrage at his excesses and pave way for his perpetual domination of the political landscape. An index of his desire to govern in perpetuity is said to be the unusual umbrage the former military president took at a report filed to the erstwhile National Defense and Security Council, NDSC, by a former naval bigwig. The officer, along with other compliant generals who were shortly after General Sani Abacha’s demonic seizure of power, asked by the then NDSC members to feel the pulse of military officers in various formations and to find out whether continued military rule was desirable in the aftermath of Chief M.K.O. Abiola’s electoral victory. The conclave of educated military officers in Lagos was not only vehemently opposed to a continued military rule, it spoke in tones that verged on the unusually impudent.

    When asked about his assessment of the situation, the naval chieftain who led the group was said to have told General Babangida: “the boys are not only asking us to go, they are saying we should run!” A few days after, to his consternation, his retirement was announced on radio and television. When he sought to know what informed his precipitate retirement, General Babangida was reported to have said: “Well, you said the boys want us to run. Perhaps, it’s time you started.” So anguished at his failures was Babangida that he was reported to have broken down and wept, wondering ruefully at how history would view his tenure. This is exactly what has happened since last week.

    Twenty eight years after the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, Babangida still speaks in tongues and nobody understands his hyperbole. In fact, the late Prof. Omo Omoruyi, one of the intellectual jesters who authored the now infamous “stepping aside” speech is said to have mollified and assuaged the former dictator’s sense of grief almost to no avail. General Babangida is also concerned about how a successor to the coveted throne who is not amenable to him would view him. He is said to dread the prospects of the advent of a successor who would not want to do his bidding. His fear is that such a ruler would either lacerate his legacy or subject the inequities of his tenure to close scrutiny.

    Even while he feigned to be transiting to “democracy” under one of the costliest political transitions in the world, Babangida reportedly lured many a presidential candidate from his cocoon and provided him ready cash. He succeeded in doing this by giving the impression that a presidential ambition announced by such gentlemen would invest the transition programme with enough credibility. No sooner had such personages indicated serious commitment than he erected obstacles on their path. One of the most painful damages Babangida did to the corporate existence of Nigeria is taking the nation to the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) thus undermining the secular paradigm that undergird Nigeria from inception. It is this baleful legacy that General Muhammadu Buhari is capitalizing on to want to Islamize a country of diverse religions like Nigeria. Given the odds against him – the bitterness, the hatred and the disdain he inspires, it would seem that his attempt to rewrite Nigeria’s history, is akin to swimming against the tide. But Babangida still has supporters and a sturdy bulwark.

    He is said to be counting on his huge resources said to be in the region of billions in hard currency to draw support from Nigerians to rewrite our history. With such an outlay and with a generous budget against the backdrop of massive poverty among Nigerians, the General hopes to distribute his largesse (a tendency he is adept at) to curry the favour of Nigerians to agree with him to pave way for his son to join the reactionary faction of the ruling class and to become president much later. But Nigerians harbour no fear about Babangida’s enormous questionable wealth. They are no fools. They would be educated enough to collect back what was taken from their national treasury. Yet they are generally chattered at the sorry state in which the nation is today. Although Nigeria has been turned into a pariah state in which subsidized illiteracy is now part of an elaborate power game, Nigerians will no longer tolerate barely educated murderers to toy once more with the collective destiny of the nation.

    Babangida’s sundry excesses and the annulment of the June 12 presidential election, will continue to haunt him like ghouls in a nightmare. So also shall the ghosts of General Shehu Musa Yar’Adua who died like a rat in Abakaliki prison and Chief Abiola, who had been reduced to dust by the venomous conspiracy of the Evil Genius and his late Khalifa, General Abacha. But if he still doesn’t want to repent, as we have seen in his 80th anniversary interviews, since, as they say, all manner of knives are invited to an elephant’s funeral, let him continue. Babangida must know that without genuine expiation of sin, it is impossible to get atonement. Such are the intractable apologies for a man who had the rare opportunity to right all the wrongs of the country but failed to do so due largely to ethnic jingoism. There are the apologies a traumatized nation has to offer a man whose guile and cunning have triggered her agonizing trip to Golgotha.