Nigerians, Beware Of Beauty Pageants!

By Uche Ezechukwu

I was billed to officiate at a beauty pageant-cum award giving ceremony, last Friday at Owerri, as keynote speaker. I had written what I considered a good speech and had got an expert to translate it into Igbo, as the entire proceedings at the Asa Igbo pageant would be in Igbo language. It was that refreshing departure from the norm, as well as the assurance by the organizers that it was not going to be like the run-of the mill pageants, about which I had since become suspicious, that had made me to agree to participate fully.

*Chidinma Okeke

I did not only agree to participate but had also made this newspaper, whose editorial board I chair, to throw its weight behind the planning and execution of the event with publicity. We had publicized and popularized the event as professionally as we could. We were convinced that we were supporting a good course, because the Asa Igbo pageant would be an occasion to glorify and promote Igbo language, values and culture.

The paper I prepared was directed at that noble theme. I had since started frowning at the promotion of female cleavages and nudity as signifying beauty. Hence, in the eyes of the different organizers of beauty pageants in the West and which has been copied line, hook and sinker by Nigerian organizers like Ben Bruce and co., the most beautiful maidens are those that flaunt their feminine attributes best and most alluringly before male audiences and judges and most audaciously. As a typical African, this definition of ‘beauty’ appears very defective to me, because in our African milieu, the beauty of a woman, especially the nubile female, is defined more by inside, unseen values than by the outward attributes which can be cosmetically achieved.

In the other words, many of the Miss This; Miss That which most of our beauty pageants have been turning out might, in fact, be painted sepulchers with stinking inside attributes, which to the ordinary African, does not constitute the beauty of a woman.

The organizers of the Asa Igbo pageant had assured us that they had the same lofty objectives as I was espousing when I first discussed with Mike Akabueze, the president of the Asa Igbo Foundation, as a condition for agreeing to the partnership with The Authority. They had assured me that their beauty queen would be one that could stand out any day as the ambassador of Igbo beauty as defined by Igbo culture and philosophy. I was completely bought over and made up my mind to deliver a paper that would add some colour to the event. The title of my paper was: The Woman as the Glory of Her Society, which I would have delivered in Igbo as: Nwanyi bu Ugo Mba.

General Aguiyi-Ironsi: 50 Years After…

By Uche Ezechukwu

Next Friday, July 29th, will mark the golden jubilee milestone in Nigeria’s bloody history. That was the day in 1966, when Nigeria’s first military head of state, Major General Johnson Thomas Ummunnakwe Aguiyi-Ironsi, was abducted and killed by officers led by the then Majors Theophilus Danjuma and Murtala Muhammed, in what was known as the counter to the first ever military coup in the country that had taken place on January 15th of the same year.

*Gen Ironsi 

During the January 15 coup, top political leaders, predominantly from the Northern and the Western parts of the country were slain by the young ambitious military officers. Incidentally, apart from Colonel Arthur Unegbe, who was the quartermaster-general of the army, no other person from the East was killed in a putsch that severed off the top echelon of the political and military leadership from the North. In that coup, both the powerful premier of the North, Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sarduana of Sokoto, who was the leader of the ruling NPC was slain. So also was Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, the prime minister of Nigeria. Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola, the premier of Western Nigeria and the ally of the NPC was also slain; so was Sir Festus Okotie Eboh, the minister of finance. Topmost Northern military officer Brigadier Maimalari was also killed. 

Incidentally, no politician of Eastern Region origin was killed. The powerful Dr Michael Okpara, the premier of Eastern Nigeria and Chief Dennis Osadebey who was the NCNC premier of Mid-West region, and an Igbo from Asaba, were not killed. Of course, President Nnamdi Azikiwe, who was out of the country at the time, on a medical tour, was also not touched. Even though it would appear as a convenient after-thought explanation to say that the fact that all those Igbo people were spared was not quite planned but was an error of fate.

For one thing, the soldiers sent to Ikoyi to arrest and kill the chief of army staff, Aguiyi-Ironsi, could not meet him at home as he had gone to a party aboard a naval ship at the Marina, Lagos, and had learnt of the on-going coup there. From there, he had found his way to Obalende and Ikeja, where he organised some loyal troops to foil the coup in Lagos. It was also Lt. Col. Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, the commander of the Fifth Battalion at Kano that foiled the coup in the North.

Yet, how do you explain to the sorrowing Northerners that the coup, whose victims were unfortunately very lopsided at the expense of the North, was not a plot by the Igbo officers in the military? After all, on the list of the coup plotters was mostly Igbo, even as its two leaders, Majors Emmanuel ifeajuna and Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu, as well as the other majors and officers were majorly Igbo. It hardly mattered that officers from all over the country including Major Ademoyega, Oyewole, Banjo, etc, were among the ring leaders of the coup. Neither, did it matter at those testy times that the coup plotters had planned to go to Calabar Prison, release Chief Obafemi Awolowo, who was serving a life–term for treason, and make him the prime minister. It also did not matter that Nzeogwu whose mother was Tiv and who was very angry over the military campaigns in Tivland in 1965, was only Igbo by name.

The Return Of The Bakassi Boys

By Uche Ezechukwu

The late Chief Stephen Osita Osadebe, in one of his indelible songs, allud-ed to Ndigbo and their resilience, thus: “they will never tire from running if their enemies do not tire from pursuing them”. This summarises why the Igbo Nation will never stop improvising to survive and stay ahead of those who they feel, do not wish them well. That is basically the story of the Bakassi Boys, the veritable children of circumstances, which the ebullient governor of Abia State, Dr Victor Okezie Ikpeazu, announced last week, was being re-invented in his state to save the day for his state, the way they did between 1999 and 2001.

Most Nigerians only got to hear of the Bakassi Boys as from the late 2000, when it became a most unorthodox and unusual crime fighting outfit in Anambra State, especially when it became an object of great controversy and jousting between the government of Dr Chinwoke Mbadinuju and that of President Olusegun Obasanjo, at the centre. Obasanjo had vowed to uproot the outfit by all means – and in fact did so eventually – after it had completely de-railed in its initial objectives, and had become a Frankenstein monster, which started gobbling the people it had set out to protect. It is significant that Dr Ikpeazu, an ‘Aba boy’, has decided to resurrect the Bakassi Boys, in what he must have seen as a last resort, just in the same way that Aba traders had decided to create the original Bakassi Boys in 1998, when they had been confronted with an unusual level of criminality, and when the constituted authority had pretended an unusual incapacity to act. The governor obviously knows how the Bakassi Boys were founded by shoe makers and other dexterous Aba artisans whose thriving businesses were being laid waste by criminal syndicates of robbers, kidnappers and cultist, broadly described as Maffs, just as the herdsmen are today laying waste the means of livelihood of the rural farmers.

 As it happened in the late 1990s, the SAP economic policy of the Ibrahim Babangida had turned out to be a great blessing in disguise for Igbo business-men and artisans, for whom it offered a wonderful opportunity to dip deep into their homebred talents to innovate and produce. Two groups of businesses – the leather workers and tailors – had benefitted most, as they systematically bettered and perfected their trades and targeted the ex-port market.

 Aba tailors and shoe makers had always been good, but they became even better when greater opportunities beckoned with the export market that existed for them all over Africa, the Middle Belt and Asia. The shoe makers would make good shoes and stamp Made in Italy or Made in Spain on them and offloaded them on Lebanese and other middlemen and women that inundated Aba to evacuate the products. Aba became the veritable Taiwan of Africa, as other Nigerian artisans, who were not doing as well elsewhere, relocated to Aba, in order to enjoy the boom that was taking place.

Many people who resided in Aba did not fully appreciate what was happening around them, as they were not enjoying the enhanced products that were being churned out around them. One young man from my village who had graduated in Biochemistry from UNN had become a tailor in Aba, and had once made a suit, gratis for me, but could no longer have the time to make more for my friends or members of my family, as his time was completely taken up with meeting-up with orders from his outlets in UAE and Europe. 

Buhari, President Of Criminals?

By Uche Ezechukwu

My people, the Igbo, claim that no mat­ter how well a mad man had been ad­judged cured of his mental ill­ness, he must, from time to time, wink and mutter to himself. While meditating on, and read­ing the many comments on the latest verbal flagellation of Nige­rians by – who else – their presi­dent, I started thinking that this proverb can be creatively applied to the case of Nigeria’s current helmsman and his regular talk-down on Nigeria.

*President Buhari 

I remember vividly in 1984 or so, when the gifted musical ac­tivist, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, re­leased that song, in which he described as ‘animal talk’, the tendency of the Buhari adminis­tration to routinely castigate and write off Nigerians, at every drop of the hat. The indefatigable Fela, like most other Nigerians at that time, were angry that Buhari had ruled all Nigerians as lacking in discipline, and had gone ahead herding them in the queues, with horsewhips, like herds of cattle. If Nigerians had been pained, they had mostly borne their pain with equanimity, as not many people had the courage – or fool­hardiness – to complain openly, as Fela had done.

For Buhari in those days, that horrendous indiscipline, against which he inaugurated the elabo­rate ‘War Against Indiscipline’ (WAI) was so pervasive that it even included saying anything that caused embarrassment – even it was true – to those in authority. Nduka Irabor and Tunde Thompson, The Guardian journalists that got imprisoned for doing their job, will forever, remain the living icons of the intolerance of the era of General Buhari’s first coming.

While Buhari prosecuted his quixotic battles against indis­cipline in 1984 and 1985, there were many people, in and outside Nigeria that had pooh-poohed the whole exercise as hypocriti­cal, arguing that the take-over of an elected government with the force of arms was, perhaps, the gravest form of indiscipline. Even if Nigerians had reluctantly ignored that fact, it was diffi­cult to excuse the fact that his ADC’s father was allowed to pass through the Customs gridlock at the Lagos airport, which was as narrow as the ‘eye of a needle’ with 53 suitcases of ‘whatever’, unsearched, when the coun­try’s entry points were under a vice-like lock, as the nation was embarking on the issuance of new currency notes. After that 53-suitcase saga, Buhari’s WAI campaign became less worthy than the paper on which it was scripted.

No matter how much Muham­madu Buhari has tried since his return to seek power under the democratic dispensation to prove that he has metamor­phosed into a born-again demo­crat, the vestiges of his past dis­dain for the people, has stuck out like a sore thumb. President Buhari has hardly stopped looking down on everybody else, in the typical manner of the military that had been inherited from colonial masters, on the people as mere subjects – idle civilians. He still sees himself as a koboko-wielding soldier, looking down on the rest of us, idle civilians, and wishing to ‘double’ all of us with a frog-jump.

Even though he is doing his honest and transparent best to bring succour to the nation eco­nomically by trying to convince foreigners to come and invest in our country, Buhari has proved to be the worst enemy of that possibility, because as Nigeria’s best and number one salesper­son, he has always presented his country and his people as those that should not be touched with a ten metre pole. Because Nigerians are corrupt, robbers, fraud­sters, cutthroats and other manners of criminals, with which foreign prisons are inundated, why would anybody bring his money and business here, only to be pillaged and out-foxed? After all, they were warned by – who else – their president himself!

Kachikwu As Scapegoat Of Tinubu's Frustration

By Uche Ezechukwu

The mantra of ‘change’, mouthed by the All Progressive Congress (APC) during the electoral campaigns was so appealing at the time to Nigerians, such that when they ushered Muhammadu Buhari into office by voting out Goodluck Jonathan, hope became the most abundant commodity in Nigeria. When APC promised that they were going to recreate for Nigerians a heaven on earth, they were believed and trusted, especially as that ‘change promise’ was being steered by a man that was reputed to be a man of truth. 

*Bola Tinubu and President Buhari 

For a country that places little premium on competence and proven track record, not much thought was extended on Buhari’s ability to understand, not to talk of being able to confront the complex demands of modern-day issues. Even those who had queried his intellectual capacity to face up to those modern-day challenges were shouted down. Nigerians wanted their man; they got him. Ten months into President Muhammadu Buhari’s APC administration, it has become obvious, even to the APC bosses themselves, that talk is cheap, and that as the saying goes here in Nigeria, ‘khaki no be leather’. 

One does not have to be ‘a wailer’ to see and accept that nothing is working in today’s Nigeria or that the government is at sea over where next to turn. In the beginning, every bend on the road was blamed on the outgone administration of President Jonathan as well as on the 16-year reign of the PDP, which in any case, was made up of most of today’s top-hats in the APC. The over-lapping messages of the campaign period had continued to work for the APC during the early months of the administration, but it could definitely not last forever. Propaganda, though effective on the short run, has a very quick expiry date. The APC’s campaign excuses and the blaming game days have also elapsed…perhaps permanently.

For instance, there was no way the Buhari administration could continue to blame Goodluck Jonathan for the president’s inability to pick ministers for six whole months; nor could the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) be blamed for having anything to do with the fact that when PMB eventually did pick his ministers, they were mostly lack-lustre and lacking in pedigree, accounting for the fact that the cabinet does not have one single person whose voice commands authority in the field of economic management. Many have wondered if the problem with the embarrassingly low quality of Buhari’s team is the lack of the ability, ab initio, of the president to distinguish copper from gold.

Yet, there are many other informed observers who believe, like an article of faith, that the problem with the inertia of the current cabinet members who have definitely not performed, might not be in their personal lack of capacity, but rather, in the absence of a definite roadmap, as it is widely alleged that no minister can as much as sharpen a pencil without the president’s say-so. Which should not be a surprise, as, after all, over 90 per cent of them were picked not on their individual merit as proven performers, but rather because they were cronies of either Buhari or Ahmed Tinubu, the ‘owner’ of the other half of the party that brought the votes and the cash.