I ALMOST did not want to believe that former Governor of Jigawa State, Sule Lamido, had said what he was reported to have said recently on the Hausa Service of the BBC; and which was something to the effect that ‘much worse than the like of the evil of Boko Haram, he (Lamido) was prepared to work with any evil, including from the bottomless pit of hell- if it would lead to unseating Buhari’s government and the APC’.

Meaning that in the efforts to remove a corrective APC government from power, and –by implication- to return PDP to the rudder of our national affairs, no means is illegitimate. Or better still ‘any means is legitimate’ -including (and I hope Lamido does not mean) unleashing carnage worse than the like visited on us by the dreaded Boko Haram insurgency.

*Sule Lamido

And to think that many of us in fact in the past pilloried Atiku for telling Jonathan that ‘those who make peaceful change impossible, make violent change inevitable’ –which I think is soundly altruistic. Or to think also that many of us insulted Obasanjo for describing the 2007 Presidential election as a ‘do-or-die’ affair –which I think it was, figuratively-speaking. And now this by my good friend Lamido. In fact, I was wondering, if as they say that this Machiavellic doctrine about ‘the end justifying the means’ is usually the rallying call either of true revolutionaries or of self-serving brigands, how do I condemn or justify it if I do not give my readers a peep into two previous pieces I have written on this –should I say- continuously mutating gadfly friend of mine, Lamido?

‘LAMIDO, OUR LAMIDO’ was the second of these pieces, and it summarises all that you should know, on the Lamido temperament:

‘Lamido, Our Lamido

Five years ago I had wondered what exactly it was that they were doing to my good friend Lamido. This was in an interrogative piece I had titled “What Are They Doing To My Friend Lamido?” (MY TAKE Column, Peoples Daily Newspaper, 10/29/10). I had noticed, like many who cared about the Lamido political brand, that the then Jigawa State Governor was fast becoming less and less ideologically inclined to the radix (Roman for roots) of his NEPU/PRP ancestry; and that in fact he was fast getting more and more enamoured of –or should we say consumed by- the wave of self aggrandising retrogressive politics of impunity and arbitrariness promoted over the years, by an ‘occupation’ party, his PDP which, for sixteen years, had conquered and despoiled Nigeria.

I recalled that way back in 1994, during my regularly-out-of-job-Concord days and as a pariah pro-June Twelve journalist, Dr. Babangida Aliyu’s office then as Director Maritime Authority was my occasional laze-about sanctuary where at least I was sure of a solid meal, often a thank-you tip for visiting and always, as with Talba, a large dose of fawning jest bordering most times on the vulgar or on the profane. Much later as Abacha’s fangs got more rabid and his notoriously ruthless CSO Hamza Al Mustapha ran out of patience with the harangues of my weekly African Concord Magazine covers on his reclusive, bespectacled  dictator-boss, I was soon to be clamped into detention for the next one year. And Lamido, -then also on a metaphorical eye-ball-to-eye-ball with Abacha-, was one of few gutsy politician-friends of the embattled media whose empathy with my fate brought to Abuja from Dutse as he planned, I was told, to go to Minna to console my grieving family on my incarceration.

But as fate would have it, poor Sule Lamido himself, I was told after my release, was also arrested as he arrived Abuja; just as his charismatic political alter ego, the late Abubakar Rimi, who, too, had been at daggers-drawn politically, with the Abachas. And whereas I benefited from the intervention of the Late Pope John Paul and got freed barely a month to Abacha’s sudden demise, Lamido and the rest of the political detainees regained their freedom only with the coming in of Abdulsalam Abubakar. And so by the logic more of ‘cause and effect’ than by fatuous fatalism, I felt that my incarceration –whether remotely or by direct nexus-, was what exposed Sule Lamido to the long arms of Abacha’s law. He probably would not have been arrested if he hadn’t come to Abuja en route to Minna.

Again when in 1999 Lamido became Obasanjo’s Foreign Affairs Minister -and even though by sheer unforeseen circumstance I did not get to work with him as we both envisaged-, we had always connected on the one object of our common interest -the North; so that when in 2002 I wrote the widely-published ‘The North: Let  the Truth be Told’ and it tasted like sour grapes on the tongues of many Northerners, the late MD Yusuf and Sule Lamido were among the few who had personally assured me that the piece, chastising as it was of the North, was a patriotic endeavor. And whereas MD Yusuf attempted unsuccessfully to get ACF extract from it a workable agenda for the North, Lamido invited me to his Foreign Affairs office promising to commit time and resources -in and out of political office- so we could do a tag-team to sustain an undercover business of telling bitter truth to the North by exposing, for redress, the region’s less than comely looks in the political and socio-economic mirrors of those bygone times! And so I was never one to doubt Lamido’s love either for the North or in deed for Nigeria. On the contrary I was a living witness to the personal demonstration of Lamido’s characteristically-NEPU-PRP passion for ‘people and country’. Nor was I to deny Lamido’s penchant for truth and his stand always on principles no matter whose ox was gored.

And this was why after reading his fiercely anti-zoning and patronisingly pro-Jonathan angst in the papers preparatory to the 2011 election, I could not help but ask: ‘What are they doing to my friend Lamido?’ The Lamido I knew who never shied from telling truth to power even when he was not himself invested with power; the matador-Lamido who took the fight to the bull and who was never fazed by the harangue of political reactionaries; ironically this same sagacious, fiery gadfly who had the ocular temerity to stand eyeball-to-eyeball with Abacha, all too suddenly, this same Lamido became so cowardly (?) he could not afford to be eyeball even to NAVEL with the inept  Jonathan. It was amazing to me that against a clueless, corrupt and ethno-religiously divisive Jonathan. Lamido -who once told the great IBB at the peak of his ‘emperorship’ to ‘go to hell’- suddenly not only lost all moral, ethical and ideological vigor, but had also gained the less than savory ‘timidity’ to cheaply deploy his gift of the garb and his acerbic ‘tongue’ to the promotion of the political mediocrity called Jonathan who, in normal democratic climes, should not hold my friend’s brief case at a party caucus!

In defense of party

And as if merely being in an insensately thieving and retrogressive PDP was not ideologically de-flowering enough for a man of the calibre of Lamido, hitherto respected as one of the ‘last few men standing’ for the NEPU/PRP legacy, my friend Sule was to become even more catholic than the Pope in his defense of the so called ‘fortunes’ of PDP -a political party whose retrogressive ways were the exact antitheses of the principles that Lamido once proudly represented, and personified. In the build-up to the 2011 presidential election Lamido was quoted as saying that what he saw in the Jonathan-Sambo ticket was the Yar adua-Jonathan “PDP victory of 2007”, and which he said was a “win” already in the kitty which the Party “must” rise to “defend”. And it sounded like a declaration of victory even before the contest -which to me was no less inciting than Obasanjo announcing that ‘the next election would be do or die’. Lamido’s queer logic was: since PDP had won the presidential election of 2007, PDP ‘MUST’ win the presidential election in 2011. Which is worse than Rose Kennedy’s warped dynastic logic that “Now that Bobby has been assassinated, Teddy MUST run for the Presidency”.

And the very week Lamido tried illogically to justify anticipatory electoral victory for Jonathan on the altar of Yar adua’s past triumph, my senior colleague Mohammed Haruna in his Daily Trust Column titled ‘Leadership according to E.K. Clark’, was also pulling punches against another Jonathan’s ‘gani-kasheni’ (diehard) –the muckraking nonagenarian E.K. Clark- on another question of logic. Mohammed Haruna’s jab came after Clark had published a diatribe against Adamu Chiroma and in which he made an un-clerkly equation of electoral antecedent -ironically which Jonathan hadn’t then- with democratic merit. Clark, instead of propagating the ‘ability’ of his ward, Jonathan, to deliver if elected, was boasting about the ‘electability’ of Jonathan, citing the ‘divine’ and the ‘providential’ as proof. In truth PDP was  merely hoping to reap from our ethno-religious and geo-political fault lines to get Jonathan elected. And Mohammed Haruna was lampooning Clark’s elevation of ‘electability’ over and above ‘ability’; which I also saw as a befitting retort to Lamido’s call for the ‘defense’ of an anticipatory victory ages before the election. Concerning 2011 election, Clark and my friend Lamido had one thing in common: they both had scant regard for the electoral free will of the people; they believed that Jonathan ‘MUST’ be elected.

As far as Clark was concerned PDP deserved re-election not because PDP had performed to earn re-election, but because Nigerians were politically obligated to vote Jonathan having come from the South-South. This crooked logic not only sacrificed electoral merit on the altar of primordial interest, it in fact completely obviated the need for the conduct of the 2011 presidential elections. If Clark insisted that Jonathan ‘MUST’ be elected in 2011 and Lamido believed the election had already been won and was only to be ‘defended’ at all cost, we might simply have appointed Jonathan President and save the nation not only time, money and energy but maybe even avoid the bad blood usually attendant to electioneering campaigns.

Lamido temperament

By the way, eventually the Jonathan-Sambo ticket was sold on the fraudulent claims of the omens of good luck, providence and divine ordination rather than on the franchise of democratic merit. My friend Lamido knew very well that Jonathan’s candidature could never fly on the wings of democratic merit. And so the veiled invocation of Obasanjo’s ‘do-or-die’ which resonated in Lamido’s desperate call for the ‘defense’ of a victory that was yet to be secured, to me was the lowest my friend Lamido had sunk –ideologically- and the farthest he had drifted from the noble path of the NEPU-PRP tradition that sired him. This conquer-despoil-and-defend kind of PDP mentality supported by my friend Lamido, in the service of a grossly under-performing party the PDP and for the benefit of an inept, clueless and obscenely corrupt Jonathan was all too politically condescending for a man of the calibre of my friend Lamido. And it was this condescension really, not so much the allegation that he had corruptly enriched himself, that has continued to perplex me about the Lamido temperament.

But what can I do? He is still my friend, Lamido, our Lamido! And I must pray that whatever it is that they have done to him, he should soon come out of it.