By Sola Ebiseni

For those of us who attended Awolowo’s Local Authority Primary School, public secondary schools and universities spared us the hassles of looking for our classmates or at the mercy of some double-speaking foreign school authorities. During our primary school at Ado-Odo our favourite in the songs of praise by the Seventh-day Adventist song-writer, Franklin E. Belden (1858-1945) was: “Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh, Shadows of the evening steal across the sky”.

The meaning meant nothing else to us than that we were homebound. To me, this joy was always short-lived, as we were soon rattled by the sound of the bell in our large family calling for morning prayers at 6.00 am. Nothing was more disturbing of the sweet morning sleep than my mother’s deliberate loud songs of wa s’adura ooro, kunle k’a gbadura, adura, adura ni opa Kristiani, Lati b’Olorun rin. (Come to the Morning Prayer, Come let us kneel and pray; Prayer is the Christian pilgrim’s staff). Thereafter, you were on the way grudgingly back to the same school you happily exited yesterday. 

The routine of life is in like manner as all summarised by Solomon, the great wisest King, who wielded absolute monarchical powers, fought no war unlike his father and predecessor, David. He was wealthy in all things opposite gender. Yet in the fullness of times he realised all was vanity as one generation passeth away and another cometh. “All things”, he said, “are full of labour; man cannot utter, all things are full of labour; man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing”. Truly, if eyes were ever satisfied with seeing, his eyes ought not have continued beholding the beauty of women until he reached a thousand three hundred, still counting.

Even Heraclitus, great philosopher who insisted that nothing but change is permanent soon realised that what appeared to him and humanity as change is actually the recycling of the elements because “the same amount of matter exists before and after the change” – none is created or destroyed in what Antoine Lavoisier, centuries later in 1789 called “the law of veneration of mass”. Let me not be misunderstood that change is not real, for it is endemic in human existence, either by evolution or revolution whirling ceaselessly and inevitably. It is what we make of the change we so much desire or seek to control. David and Solomon might be equal wizards in knowledge and philosophy, just like Orunmila, David is remembered as the patriarch in whose star all Jewish are today symbolised and identified.

The 2023 Presidential election has now been officially declared closed with the Supreme Court judgment. The “victor” cannot rejoice not so much about the court verdict but because the power they so much coveted has virtually become an albatross on the neck of the people. What is the essence of power that leaves the people grunting. In Bayelsa, Timipre Sylva and APC stand disqualified for the November 11 gubernatorial election by the court having spent five years as elected Governor and sworn into same office twice. The possibility of Sylva winning and spending additional four years would have given him more than the maximum eight years permissible by the Constitution. Pronto, INEC has complied. Neighbouring Rivers State is boiling; the facts are just emerging but this conflagration is coming too early and already assuming dangerous ethnic colourations.  

In Kogi State, we wait to see the political magic of Yahya Bello still holding the central lever of power in his Central Senatorial District after his uneventful eight years. He may be banking on having even a slight edge in a four-some contest of APC, PDP, Labour and SDP. No prediction intended. Ondo, my Ondo (apology to my aburo Eni Akinsola) already in a conundrum is hastening past a quagmire to a cul-de-sac. The antidote of apology for an undefined offence which didn’t work in Edo State also met with a disaster in Akure or Ibadan between governors and deputies.  

So exasperated are Nigerians in this unending drama of the absurd that eggheads, led by my brother and friend, Professor Femi Mimiko, are  postulating possible scrapping of the number two position. This same 11th just before the ides of November is the date of Imo State gubernatorial election just as Kogi and Bayelsa states. I do not want to play Artemidorous for the fate of Ceaser; after all, it is not exactly the ides of the month and the Supreme Court may not exactly have the courage or meanness of Cassius. 

My thesis in all of these is that all these struggles will become yesterday and men of power will become ex-this, ex-that and that is even if death the necessary and ultimate end tarries. The verdict of posterity may not be about the muscles you flex but how much is humanity positively touched. I am proud being part of a team of legacies in my state which declared that pregnancy would no longer be a death sentence as women needed not have money to deliver safely in Mother and Child Hospitals specially created for them; market women, who constitute the bulwark of our informal economy, no longer ply their trades in muddy and dilapidated makeshift stalls but provided all amenities anyone may decently expect in a work environment throughout the state, while the security of their children were guaranteed in free luxury buses to and from schools.

I was saddled with the care of the environment and it was a big task pleasing a boss who is allergic to filth and in love with trees. It is no time for manifestos yet, but it was the beauty of the Iroko years navigating smooth 27 kilometres dual carriage road to the airport, donning our landscape with the now much sought The Dome for local and national events and the first of its kind University of Medical Sciences. 

Let me just tarry to recall my recent visit to my second state, place of my birth and early education, Ado-Odo, Ogun State, the cradle of Awori history. It is the second half of the Ado-Odo/Otta Local Government which enjoying the economies of scale being inseparable extension of Lagos with industries therein located, is the bedrock of the economy of Ogun State providing revenues unrivalled even by contributions from the federation account. 

These geese that lay the golden egg, falls within the Ogun West Senatorial District, with its vast land from Agbara, Sango  in Ado-Odo/Otta in the west through Owode and the head town of Ilaro in Yewa South to the extreme north east in Joga Orile, Iboro and Imasai in Yewa north, thence back through Ajilete, Oke-Odan, Idogo to Idiroko. My mother, now about 90 still very beautiful, was raised at Ajilete and Idogo and won’t till now cease the story of her childhood. 

Even as a child, I remembered with nostalgia, as we used to canoe from Ado-Odo through Ijako, Isagbo Ere, Isagbo Oke, Owo, bursting into the lagoon at Soki and Ere to the Agbalata market in Badagry, sandwiched in Awori, Egun and Anago tongues. The several communities in Imeko Afon and Ipokia local governments filled me with memories. I grabbed the several books of Emeritus Professor Asiwaju on geography and border studies, particularly with reference to the old Ketu kingdom balkanised between imperial Britain and France in the artificial boundaries of Nigeria and Benin Republic. 

I wasn’t quite happy that the road we were taught in school in the 1970s as major and Trunk A from Badagry through Ado-Odo to Owode is in deplorable state. Shouldn’t it be fixed without the excuse that it is a Federal Road, so that we could say to someone: Kíì tí gbé o, and he could proudly say ó gbée re o.

Nigeria, we hail thee.

*Ebiseni  is the Secretary General, Afenifere and South West Coordinator OBIDATTI Campaigns.