“I watched President Tinubu in Ijebu Ode and Abeokuta last week. His movement suggested a sure-footed somebody. I watched him and wondered if he knew that tying the nuptial knots with one’s favourite lady is not the sole objective of marriage. He needs to be told that what makes the seas is more than sea water. Getting the presidency, complete with its power and glory, is not the end; making it work for the comfort of the people is. The eight million plus people who voted for him in February and the remaining millions on the street are dying slowly of hardship made worse by his recent policies. He withdrew petrol subsidy and is proud of it; he should be proud of enacting counter-policies that will deaden the pains. After all, when he was young and struggling, did he not join his folks to say that the one who knows how to eat isin must also know how to pluck out the death in its eyes?”

Immediate past Kaduna State governor, Nasir El-Rufai, recently waxed proverbial and made a Facebook post which sounded like a loud complaint: “The axe forgets but the tree remembers…They are the axe. We are the trees. We have long memories. God Bless Nigeria. Amen.” El-Rufai made that sour post on June 13, 2023 – about three weeks ago. It sounded very ominous and sparked a feeling of deja vu. I read his post again, especially the two sentences: “They are the axe. We are the trees.” I felt like asking El-Rufai: who are the ‘they’ assailing innocent trees with their axes; and who are the ‘we’ – the victim-trees with ‘long memories’? But then, I could see that the message was his most popular social media post in recent times, attracting more than ten thousand likes and almost three thousand comments. Some of the commenters threw it back at the former governor. They said he was the axe and should stop acting the victim. One comment reads: “You are the axe here, Mallam. We, the citizens, are the trees. We’ll never forget.” And another: “We will remember; we will tell our children the stories when the time is right.” What stories?

El-Rufai described what he wrote as an African proverb. He may be correct. But where I come from, we say songs always presage rebellion (orin níí síwájú òtè, owó genge níí síwájú ijó). Nineteenth century American author, abolitionist and statesman, Frederick Douglass, said a variant of this: “The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion.” I think Nigeria should ask brilliant El-Rufai to explain what he meant and who wronged his “we”. If he says it is a harmless promise, a warning to his allies, then we may ask: what sort of man removes a fly from his friend’s forehead with a hatchet?

Beyond El-Rufai’s proverbs, I also like his choice of quotes. Take his Thomas Friedman quote of 15 October, 2022: “….sometimes the news is in the noise, in what is being said and shouted, and sometimes the news is in the silence, in what isn’t being said at all.” I would recommend that quotation to every person in government today who goes about sleeping because the traumatized hungry street is not saying anything. Think of everything that has happened in the last one month. Our government has removed fuel subsidy. The effects have been immediate in ruination and teeth gnashing. My problem here is not just petrol subsidy removal. How about where the gains will go? The gains will very likely feed the greed of the power elite or the elite will tell us there has been no gain yet; that we should, like Animal Farm’s Boxer, work harder and stop whining.

El-Rufai’s proverb says the tree does not forget what the axe does. Is that really true? If it is, why then does the tree continue to empower the axe with the comfort of wooden handles to wreak more havoc? Before our very eyes, we saw how perfect acts of acquiescence in the Orwellian Animal Farm wrecked the years from 2015 to 2023. A reenactment of same is afoot. Every squeal of disapproval from young porkers today attracts nauseating bleating from the sheep of the farm; the dogs of Napoleon, with menacing growls, tell their mates in hunger that the leader does right always. We are not complaining. We take anything our government offers; even when it offers nothing, we take and clap. “When Napoleon begins executing other animals, Boxer can only say, ‘I would not have believed that such things could happen on our farm. It must be due to some fault in ourselves. The solution, as I see it, is to work harder.’”

They are the axe, we are the tree. The people are increasingly made the fodder for the Knight’s horse, his charger. The government is celebrating a crash in demand for petrol as an achievement. They call it life style change; the poor call it trekking, suffering and sweating. Where are Tinubu’s policies against the rich? Installmental death of the poor is afoot. The elite applaud appropriate pricing of petrol. But the poor wears that shoe, he feels the pain. Petrol marketers have served us another notice of misery. They said from this month, because of the realities of the new FX policy, they may start selling petrol for N700 per litre. If and whenever that happens, the people will most likely ask if this democracy is really about them. That will be very dangerous. Again, Fredrick Douglass warned: “Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”

International money lenders are also the axe here. They insist that there are too many trees in our forest. They cut, trim and prune life and living out of our lives. It is as if they do not care if the human ecosystem is destroyed and our forest becomes a desert. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are happy and dancing that Tinubu did well by carrying out what they called bold reforms. But most developed countries subsidise energy. Indeed, there is a report that German Finance Minister, Christian Lindner, last November made plans for his country to spend €83.3 billion ($83.4 billion) on gas and electricity subsidies this year. Bloomberg, which published the report in November 2022, said it got it from a document it obtained from the ministry. Germany does that as we speak and it is not alone here. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated that consumption subsidies for fossil fuels doubled in 2022 to $1 trillion globally. A March 2023 report by Reuters said estimated oil subsidies in the US are as high as $50 billion per annum. No government in America has been able to stop it as part of the country’s transition to clean energy to tackle climate change. “Even with a commanding Democratic majority in the Senate in Obama’s first six years in office, he was unable to kill the subsidies. For many governments, keeping consumer energy prices affordable is the top priority. That’s why numerous countries, ranging from Japan to Brazil, last year imposed or increased subsidies to cushion consumers from skyrocketing prices,” the Reuters report said.

I have not heard the IMF and the World Bank tell those powerful countries that it was wrong to keep fuel prices low with subsidies. But at the launch of the Nigeria Development Update for June 2023 in Abuja last week, Alex Sienaert, chief economist at World Bank Nigeria, applauded Nigeria and its Tinubu. He said “the recently undertaken PMS subsidy and FX reforms are historic.” He said our country will make savings of N3.9 trillion in 2023 alone and that the action had stopped “Nigeria from going over a fiscal cliff and sets the stage for a new, upward Investment, growth, and development trajectory.” Then, he warned that “headline inflation is expected to rise…to 25 percent in 2023.” He added that if there were no buffers to cushion the impact of these reforms, over 7.1 million Nigerians would be further thrown into the poverty net. Ari Aisen, resident representative of the IMF in Nigeria, at the same event, said the reforms were long overdue. If you complain as I do about the effects, the IMF man had a response: it is natural that the policies have some side effects. “We have seen inflation already high and it is likely to increase further…” I read the IMF man and wondered if he did not know that many of the urban and rural poor have been made to believe that the spike in petrol price is just for some time. We need someone to tell the hopeful to tighten their seat belts because this láálá that has gone up isn’t going to come down to earth again.

Tinubu has been too much of a critic to fail in providing better life for the people. If he fails (we his friends say God forbid), he will be fed what he and his group regularly fed presidents who came before him. He will be introduced to the court hall where Thomas Rymer’s poetic justice is libatory wine, the undying gavel that “seeks to give to each what is owed.”

Inscrutable fate has heaved Tinubu onto power. Critics sometimes find themselves on the throne. When they do, they very often, because of their enormous street sense, get overconfident and take the people for granted; and, when they do this, they fail and fall and their enemies proceed to rejoice over them. I cite an example. Dr. Kofi Busia was one of the key opposition leaders whose criticisms provided the military the needed axe to sack Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, in 1966. Busia later got elected and sworn in as Prime Minister on October 1, 1969 and hit the ground running. Within the first six weeks of his Prime ministership, he promulgated the Aliens Compliance Order of 18 November, 1969 under which he chased an estimated 191,000 Nigerians and thousands of other nationals out of Ghana. His domestic economic policies were harsh and largely ineffective in making life better for the people of Ghana. He did everything he did to please the “international community” and made sure he was a friend of America and, unlike Nkrumah, supported Big Brother “on all procedural votes.” The American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a declassified November 3, 1971 memo to the White House noted with applause that Busia’s policies had “earned him the respect and support of the World Bank, the IMF, etc…” The CIA noted in particular that “Busia has followed highly moderate policies, adopted two straight austerity budgets, and refused to renege on the inherited debts. As a result, he is subject to a good deal of domestic pressure and the success of Ghana’s experiment with responsible democratic government is in doubt…” As correctly read by the CIA, Busia soon suffered a fate similar to Nkrumah’s – his ‘friends’ booted him out of office in January 1972, two months, 10 days after that memo was written. Almost immediately after the putsch, exiled Nkrumah fired what he called “a letter of consolation” to the fallen Busia, his former arch critic.

Cheeky, old Nkrumah wrote salt right into the injury of smarting Busia who had just fallen from power. A few lines from his three-page letter here: “I am sure that you realise that those who criticise other people without bothering to assign good reasons for their criticisms eventually end up as victims of their own circumstances. You will also appreciate the fact that those who sow a wind reap a whirlwind, and after you have finished spoiling other people, you will be surprised to find out that you have spoilt yourself.”

I watched President Tinubu in Ijebu Ode and Abeokuta last week. His movement suggested a sure-footed somebody. I watched him and wondered if he knew that tying the nuptial knots with one’s favourite lady is not the sole objective of marriage. He needs to be told that what makes the seas is more than sea water. Getting the presidency, complete with its power and glory, is not the end; making it work for the comfort of the people is. The eight million plus people who voted for him in February and the remaining millions on the street are dying slowly of hardship made worse by his recent policies. He withdrew petrol subsidy and is proud of it; he should be proud of enacting counter-policies that will deaden the pains. After all, when he was young and struggling, did he not join his folks to say that the one who knows how to eat isin must also know how to pluck out the death in its eyes?

It was John Maynard Keynes, the British economist who, in his 1923 publication, ‘A Tract on Monetary Reform’, famously said: “But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task, if in the tempestuous seasons they can only tell us, that when the storm is long past, the ocean is flat again.”

While the length of what constitutes the ‘long run’ will remain contentious, to say that the impact of an economic policy will be beneficial “in the long run”, presupposes that enduring current hardship is a necessary condition for the promised prosperity to occur. It also assumes that the sustenance of those policies and maintaining every other factor in the equation constant until the ‘long run’ is reached are necessary conditions for the supposed benefits of those policies to crystallize. Economists call this ‘ceteris paribus’ (all things being equal). The problem here is not just that all things are rarely equal but also that many people may not survive what is supposed to be the short term adverse impacts of those policies.

President Tinubu’s declaration on the day of his inauguration that “subsidy is gone” has been widely held as a bold initiative by many analysts. However, it remains debatable whether the manner in which the fuel subsidy was removed was the best for the economy. Again, owing largely to a belief that the fuel subsidy regime was mired in unbridled corruption, there seems to be an uncritical consensus that fuel subsidy must go in its entirety. The three leading Presidential candidates in the 25 February 2023 presidential election –  Tinubu, Atiku and Obi –  promised to remove the subsidy.

Several arguments have been advanced on why the fuel subsidy must go:

One, is that fuel subsidy benefits primarily (if not exclusively) the rich who, we are told, maintain a retinue of SUVs and other fuel-guzzling vehicles. The truth is that in our generator dependent economy, those likely to be most adversely affected by the removal of fuel subsidies are not the very poor but business owners (who run their businesses mostly on generators and create most of the jobs in the economy) as well as the employed members of the Middle Class (who are the most productive segment of the society and who necessarily need to commute to their places of work and maintain their Middle class life style in the face of galloping inflation). Also to be severely affected are those in the informal sectors of the economy either as petty business people or as artisans. It can be argued that in Nigeria the very poor are mostly subsistent farmers who live in the rural areas. While they will also certainly be impacted negatively by the removal of subsidy on Premium Motor Spirits, it can be argued that since they do not rely substantially on public transportation to go to their farms or on purchases from the markets for their social reproduction, the impact of removing subsidies on them may not be as harsh as it is on other segments of the population.

Two, following the wrong assumption that those defined as the poor would be the most adversely affected by the impact of removing fuel subsidy is an equally misleading belief that the impact of removal of fuel subsidy can be ameliorated through targeted cash transfers of $800m loan from the World Bank to the very poor. We are told that under the proposed cash transfer scheme, the ‘poorest households’ will each receive the sum of N5000 per month over six months. Experiences from the Buhari government’s cash transfer schemes (including its ‘Trader moni’) however show that such alleged cash transfers were largely a scam. Apart from the fact that it is often an opportunity for the administrators of such schemes to populate the lists with ghost people or favoured names from politicians, even if the very poor are well targeted and located, there is the question of what difference a paltry sum of N5000 per month can make to a household’s standard of living, given the galloping inflation. Besides, there is the related question of what happens to those households after the six-months the targeted transfers are supposed to last. Would such households be automatically lifted from poverty or will the sudden withdrawal of the monthly N5000 stipend (which they will have become used to) actually worsen their standard of living beyond what it was before the start of the cash transfer? I believe the proposed $800m World Bank loan to be used for such targeted cash transfer would be more impactful if they are geared at producing at least 1000 viable small businesses in each of the 36 states of the federation as well as in supporting existing businesses and providing public transportation systems across the country. The country needs to evolve a sustainable welfare programme for the poor and the aged instead of using them as pawns to make us feel good and empathetic.

Three, it is unfortunate that an uncritical consensus seems to have been built around the very fallacious notion that subsidies are bad and distorts everything in the economy. The truth is that virtually all successful economies in the world today, even the most capitalistic and free market-oriented, employ various forms of subsidies to support segments of their society. For instance, figures from Hinrich Foundation, an Asia-based philanthropic organization that works to advance sustainable global trade, show that 54 OECD countries and 12 emerging economies provide over US$700 billion each year in some form of support to their agricultural sector alone.  In 2020, for example the USA federal government made $45.7 billion direct payments to farmers—a record-high amount due to pandemic assistance.  During the same pandemic, other subsidies (or palliatives) were provided to both citizens and businesses. In the United Kingdom, grants statistics showed that around £258bn was spent on subsidies in 2020/21, representing about 23 percent of all spending. In 2021/22, the country provided the sum of £1.65bn as direct subsidies to farmers in line with the figures set out in the country’s Agricultural Transition Plan. In China, estimates by South China Morning Post showed that more than 3,000 listed Chinese companies received the government’s industrial subsidies in 2020 which had a combined value of 22.6 billion yuan (US$3.5 billion). The government needs to maintain a level of sustainable subsidy on both fuel and fertilizer because their benefits will cascade throughout the country’s entire value chain.

Four, as the Tinubu government is hailed by the World Bank and several analysts for its supposed bold economic reforms, we should be careful that we are not being railroaded to our past of the IMF/World Bank-supported structural adjustment policies of the 1980s and 1990s which completely emasculated the country’s middle class and destroyed businesses. We must ask ourselves critical questions as we march forward to that inglorious past: How many African countries actually prospered from the ubiquitous structural adjustment policies of the 1980s and 1990s which were hailed by the two Bretton Woods institutions as the magic elixir that would solve all of the continent’s development challenges? The prescriptions of the two Bretton Woods’ then as of now remain unchanged – remove subsidies, liberalize trade, devalue (or float your currency) and generally roll back the state so that market forces will be the ultimate determinant of how values are allocated. Remarkably after these policies failed, the same institutions shifted support to other mantras – ‘bringing back the state’ (read: ‘good governance’), then to ‘build strong institutions, not strong men’ and promoting ‘democracy’ and other mantras. Typically, when these policies fail – as they often do – the same institutions will blame it either on non-sustainability of its recommended policies or at best start promoting a new mantra.

Adibe is Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Nasarawa State University, Keffi and Extraordinary Professor of Government Studies at North Western University, Mafikeng South Africa. He is also the founder of Adonis & Abbey Publishers and can be reached at 0705 807 8841(Text or WhatsApp only).

I had written and “kept this article in view” to adopt a well-known phrase in the nation’s bureaucracy. This was until I read the respected scholar, theorist, polemicist and journalist, Chidi Amuta’s piece: ‘Tinubu should avoid Wike’s and Buhari-era parade of rank incompetence’ recently published in USAfrica. Amuta’s typically well-worded, pungent and enlightening piece, convinced me to dust up my essay and align myself with his thoughts.

I’ve been Amuta’s admirer for the better part of the past four decades. This was before I was fortuitously joined with him in the Yemi Ogunbiyi dispensation in the good old Daily Times. He was up there chairing the editorial board of the organisation while younger elements like us honed our craft as interrogators and writers in different beats and departments.

Nigerians and the world at large continue to anticipate, with bated breaths, judicial pronouncements on the multivalent controversies devolving from the recent general elections. The polls have been broadly adjudged as having been heavily soiled in the oil and grease of sleaze and phenomenal compromise.

Aggrieved parties are variously seeking adjudication by the courts in the land. Bola Ahmed Tinubu who was inaugurated as the fifth president of the Fourth Republic on Monday, May 29, 2023, has since set out to work. He has made some appointments and commissioned inquests into the endeavours of a number of public officers he inherited from the predecessor government.

Godwin Emefiele, former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, (CBN), had become a virtual “traditional ruler” in his position. He was appointed in the twilight of the Goodluck Jonathan presidency and was retained all through the tepid eight-year Muhammadu Buhari era. On his part, the youthful Abdulrasheed Bawa, former chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), is vacationing in the executive suites of the Department of State Services (DSS). More contemporaneously, Tinubu has sacked the boards of several public institutions, many of which were the automated teller machines (ATMs) of some erstwhile godfather public officers.

In exercise of the approval of the national assembly enabling him to appoint 20 special advisers, Tinubu has named occupants of some of the advisory portfolios. One could almost close his eyes and list some of them who have been Tinubu’s henchmen for decades now. Dele Alake and Wale Edun were bound to be insiders in a Tinubu superstructure, any day. A secretary to the government of the federation, (SGF), the very experienced George Akume, a retired bureaucrat and former governor of Benue state; a chief of staff (COS), Femi Gbajabiamila, a long-serving federal parliamentarian, and a national security adviser, (NSA), Nuhu Ribadu have also been named. New heads of the nation’s defence and security forces have been appointed, among others, following a holistic sweep of those inherited from the preceding government.

Since Tinubu was pronounced “President in-waiting,” immediate past governor of Rivers state, Nyesom Ezenwo Wike, has raised executive genuflection and unabashed mendicancy to Olympian levels. You should have witnessed his unashamed kowtowing and grovelling before Tinubu when he, Wike, dragged the new helmsman to Port Harcourt, capital of Rivers state, even before the new president was inaugurated to commission a project executed by his erstwhile government. His jokes on that occasion were off-key, his laughter thoroughly mistimed. There was no concealment of his covetousness for accommodation in the evolving governance scheme. This is a man who spent all the initial 24 years of the Fourth Republic, hopping from one political office to another. This was climaxed with an eight-year stint as chief executive of perhaps Nigeria’s second-richest state.

At the height of his “power and glory,” buoyed by two government-owned jets at his beck and call, Wike reportedly boasted to many of his audiences that on no account does he pass the night in Abuja. In the aftermath of Tinubu’s inauguration, however, Wike has relocated wholly to the nation’s capital, sleeping and waking up in Abuja every day. He has reportedly been hopping from the State House to the federal parliament, and gatecrashing into the hotel rooms and homes of associates of the new president. He has become a very regular caller in Aso Villa, a veritable janitor actually. Who says a novel janitorial schedule cannot be created for him in the State House scheme by the way? Within Tinubu’s first 10 days in Aso Villa, Wike visited him three times! His carriage indeed, has been like that of a sole sponsor of the 2023 general elections, who is demanding mega returns on investment! Recall he loves to sing Nkem Owoh’s song, agreement is agreement.

Wike, the husky-voiced sea lion of the creeks of the Niger Delta, has rapidly transmogrified into a vulnerable pussy cat. He now has to ride on the backs of third parties to access the seat of power. When he is not on the tails of Seyi Makinde, governor of Oyo state, and his colleague in the G-5, he is tagging along with his former foes like Dave Umahi. And this is all in the bid to gain access to the highly restricted State House. He marched with his G-5 allies to visit the president days into the new administration, barely seeking the second opinion of his mirror. This was before he turned out oddly in a group photograph of his G-5 and the president. The miscued buttoning of his suit was the stuff of media jokes and jabs for several days!

Wike “forcefully herded” the new president of the senate, Godswill Akpabio, and a host of other dignitaries and national figures to his local church in Obio-Akpo local government area of Rivers state a fortnight ago. They attended a simulated “thanksgiving service” in his honour. It was a programme which he put up to reassure himself, and flaunt before his kinsmen, the fact that he was still a big player on the national political podium. At that event, Wike attempted to impugn the integrity of the local chapter of the PDP. He alluded to a “poisoning” at the state secretariat of the PDP years ago, which allegedly threatened his vital organs. Surprisingly, in Wike’s several media appearances many of which he held in the gardens of Brick House, Government House in Port Harcourt, no allusion has ever been made to this incident.

Unknown to him, however, he opened himself up to further public derision. Phrank Shaibu, a media aide to Atiku Abubakar, spontaneously reminded Wike that the phantom affliction of his “kidney and lungs,” if it ever happened, was a product of career alcoholism. Shaibu reminded Wike that he, Wike, had earlier publicly admitted to starting off his day every day by gulping bottles of “40-year aged” vintage whisky! The shelf price of one bottle of Wike’s favourite daily “morning tonic”, by the way, is about N10 million! The last time I checked, no vice chancellor in any public Nigerian university, no professor, earns N1 million as their total pay package in a month. There may be exceptions though, probably a handful whose professorial chairs are being generously sustained by affluent instituting bodies or well-endowed individuals. Yet, these intellectuals are the bastions of very engaging knowledge production and impartation for national and global development.

The point is that Wike desperately needs a new official address. He cannot conceive of existence in anonymity, away from the razzmatazz and klieg lights of the public environment. Not after being over-pampered at our collective expense for a whopping 24 years! He is enamoured by having aides and officials fawning and shuffling around him. He loves to stand behind the lectern and rehash Timaya’s popular song, “as e dey pain dem, e dey sweet us“. He loves to hop and prance before excitable audiences. He will not be able to do all of that as a private citizen. Wike has estranged himself from the political class in Rivers state on account of his weird specie of leadership, he doesn’t have many friends back home.

Wike loves the allure of power. During his cross-country consultations ahead of the PDP presidential primary last year, Wike’s sole sing-song was: “Give me that power, just give it to me and see what I will do with it”. His advocacy and solicitation bore no references to a broad vision, a mission statement, or a manifesto. He only wanted power to transit from Rivers state-owned airplanes, to those of the federal government as president. His “matter-of-life-and-death” solicitation for engagement in government, will avail him leverage with instruments of state with which to hound his adversaries. Hasn’t it become clear the under-the-table liaison between top government functionaries and military commanders in the procurement of personnel for illegal election duties, especially under the watch of the spectacularly indolent President Muhammadu Buhari? These are some of the privileges public office Nigerian-style, confers on officials.

Wike’s colleagues are winding down and resting after giving some of their perspiration to national service, over the years. Immediate past Works and Housing Minister, Babatunde Fashola, hinted months ago that he urgently needed to return home to be “president” of his family. He marked his diamond birthday ceremony as a private citizen just days ago. After a breathtaking 20 years of public service at the highest levels, he wants to take a deserved holiday, except if the current president needs him for a specific task. Since he left office 16 years ago, Donald Duke, arguably one of the star boys of the Fourth Republic, has been very actively engaged in other productive ventures outside Government House. He has been sharing his aggregated experiences and inspiring others. Coincidentally, Fashola and Duke are attorneys like Wike.

Tinubu should help Wike to save himself, from himself. He should be detailed without further delay to a health farm to begin the imperative process of rejuvenation, regeneration and reinvigoration. He has lost the chubby cheeks characteristic of his visage, just months back. There will always be opportunities for service to the nation in a lifetime. He should step aside so that new talent and competencies can be discovered in his state. Tinubu an elder himself, agba, as we say in Yoruba, knows that the rascal procured with just the smell of mint-fresh currency notes to incinerate his father’s home, will be amenable to bringing down his neighbour’s with enhanced incentive. That should inform the rules of engagement with this prospective “janitor of Aso Villa.”

Olusunle (PhD), a poet, journalist, scholar and author is a member of the Nigerian Guild of Editors (NGE)

Ezomo Anthony Aleogho Ayaoghena Dokpesi loved the gazebo in his beautiful Abuja residence. It is made of big rafters and roofed with thatch. A gazebo like the one in Dokpesi’s vast compound is a small building in a house that affords a wide view of the surrounding areas. He ate suya, groundnut and roasted fish. He drank and relaxed there. He loved choice wines and champagne. The workaholic found great pleasure in unwinding at the gazebo by hosting family members, friends, associates and loved ones there. No one was left out. He would sing and dance. Sunny Ade’s music was his favourite. He would laugh. Nay, guffaw.

It was a place for us to taunt and tease each other – me jokingly calling him “my son and my boy whom I paid his school fees, trained and married for with my hard-earned money”. He derisively, but jokingly, telling me “You baga; you bush boy who would shiver before me and could not even dare enter my lush office or room in the 80s”. All and everyone present would laugh. We usually cracked their ribs with such nostalgic jokes.

So, coming to the gazebo on that June 16, 2023, for “A Night with Ezomo @ The Gazebo”, was particularly traumatic for me. I could not dance or sing. I was completely numb. I was transfixed like an insect rendered immobile by some powerful chemicals. So, was it really true the Oghierumhoa of Weppa Wanno Kingdom and Araba of Oshoroland would not get up from somewhere to dance with us? Just anywhere from the shadows? Where was he? I looked around. Imagine for a moment, the scene of a helpless and hapless child looking around for his mother. Dokpesi was nowhere. I broke down. I cried like a baby. Uncontrollably. Publicly. I was inconsolable. I had no shame. Shame? Ha, I conquered it there and then. Reason vacated its seat. Emotions took over. I was broken. Other attendees came to my aid. But not so fast.

Some of them equally broke down and joined me in letting out pent-up emotions. Sen Kassim Oyofo, Lina Okakpu, Mina Horsfall, Barr Ter, Vera Ovhighie, and others who were consoling me joined. They themselves wept like babies. Oh death, where is thy sting? You shameless death that wears a hideous monstrous visage, why are you so cruel, so unfeeling? I wiped my tears. I left for my nearby home in distress. Like a rain-beaten chicken. I left the Gazebo Mystique.

Then, this write-up was finally triggered when a friend and kinsman based in Atlanta, USA, Alily Akhigbe, sent me Ezomo’s outing and speech during the DAAR Communications 4th Award night in December 2021. Just one and a half years ago! I listened to it. Carefully. He was speaking as if he were still alive. Powerful. Boisterous. Effervescent. Brutally frank, as ever. Luminous. Bubbling with the “sap of life like a yam tendril in the rainy season,” as Chinua Achebe once called it in “Things Fall Apart”.

He narrated how I rained blows on him physically at a meeting with a consortium of banks at Marina in Lagos when he had broken down and cried. The government had engineered the banks to take over DAAR over its debts, many of which were not even due for payment. He had wept. He narrated how I descended on him publicly, there and then, raining blows on him, telling him he had committed no crime by borrowing money to run DAAR Communications. He looked at me like a child unto his mother, wiped his eyes and steadied himself for the remaining portion of the meeting. We won at the end of the day.

Successive governments never relented in trying to kill his entrepreneurial and political spirit. They all failed. Woefully. I won virtually all his and DAAR’s cases up to the Supreme Court. Kanu Agabi, SAN, also led me to defeat the government in the criminal charges of alleged embezzlement of security funds against him. We won at the Federal High Court (Tsoho CJ) and the Court of Appeal. He was completely discharged and acquitted. So, Dokpesi died without any blemish. He was given a clean judicial and moral bill of health by all courts in Nigeria.

Dokpesi’s humility which he wore like a second skin was infectious, as he bowed for me, every and anyone at the award night, where I was given the “Legal Icon” award. So, watching this video, I again broke down. Even now, I am still crying. Ha, Ezomo, why? But, why? Adieu. Farewell, Iyokpamhe.

Compatriots, let us not mourn, but celebrate this African Octopoidal septuagenarian; this legend; this colossus. It was Calpurnia, wife of Julius Caesar, in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, who, while begging her husband not to venture out on the Ides of March (the day he was later assassinated), made the following memorable speech: “When beggars die, there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of Princes”. High Chief Anthony Aleogho Dokpesi, OFR, easily fits into this narrative.

Surely, in Dokpesi’s transition, comets were seen. Because he was a prince of peace, even the heavens blazed forth his death.

He also fits into Julius Caesar’s own reply: “Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once”.

I will end this tribute by quoting Mark Anthony in the same Williams Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar when he said of Brutus: “His life was gentle and the elements so mixed in him that nature might stand up and say to the world, “this was a man”.

In the words of 1 Corinthians 15:55. “O death, where is your sting? O grave, where is your victory?” Haruk Murakami (a contemporary Japanese writer) was right when he said: “Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it”. He was probably right, for Aleogho merely transmitted from mortality to immortality.

Let me tell you how the host of heaven now sees Dokpesi. They are in the words of Max Lucado (a Christian preacher and author): “We see a hearse; we think sorrow. We see a grave; we think despair. We hear of a death; we think of a loss. Not so in heaven when heaven sees a breathless body, it sees the vacated cocoon and the liberated butterfly”. Thus, Dokpesi vacated his worldly cocoon of mortality and got liberated like a butterfly into God’s bosom of immortality. Know ye today that what we owe Dokpesi is not to mourn him, but to keep his memory alive. For, as George Eliot, a famous English author most aptly put it: “Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them”.

Ezomo Dokpesi, we will never forget you. You will forever live in our hearts. Be happy with the Lord till we meet on resurrection day to part no more.

For his very large Ezomo Dokpesi clan that he left behind; his teeming friends, admirers, associates and loved ones across the world, may the good Lord give you the heart and fortitude to bear this irreparable demise of our dear father, brother, friend and compatriot.

Adieu Iyokpamhe. Farewell Ikuekhiamhe. Goodbye humanist. Okiakhue, Agene 1.