Ayo Olukotun is a genial, robustly built man, his manner radiating both love of life and mental alertness, of significantly mature age yet physically and mentally vibrant.
-- His essays make clear why he is or was the Oba (Dr.) Sikiru Adetona Professor of Governance at the Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago-Iwoye and is now a director at the institute named after the professorship.
His writing is deeply insightful and emotionally restrained, polite and circumspect while being incisive, in the best tradition of ivory tower scholarship in which the thinker surveys history from the towers of thought located in the castle of reason, analysing the unfolding landscape of events from within the capacious power of potently coordinated wealth of knowledge.
That combination of detachment and analytical power make Olukotun's essays a rich historical resource in relation to the current crisis of identity Nigeria is going through under the Buhari govt.
He has no political axe to grind, no agenda to promote. He is simply committed to observation, analysis and recommendation.
In his essays one may observe a growing reaalistion of the magnitude of the crisis, a gradually developing awareness that may be seen as paralleling the slowly awakening shock of Southern Nigerian intelligentsia that they are in the midst of an ethnic supremacist war, something they were not able to imagine even though all the signs had been pointing to that slowly simmering reality that erupted into prominence with the active connivance of the Buhari govt.
From writer Wole Soyinka, an enabler of the Buhari ascension, to Ayo Olukotun, even though I am not aware of Olukotun's political history, the story is similar.
I apologise to Olukotun if I misrepresent the history of his writing on Nigeria in what follows.
Civilised people, whose only fault, as with Soyinka, is that they saw themselves as participating in politics by helping to elect a person whose terrorist enabling credentials are central to his political appeal in his home region, or not looking closely at his history, or ignoring the facts of what they saw, or chose to be optimistic in the face of stark reality, are now beginning to see that they made themselves and those whom they represent sheep for devouring by a ravenous wolf whose life mission is at last being achieved with the help they gave him to get to where he is.
What do these intelligentsia now do?
They allowed themselves to refuse to recognise the magnitude of the problem as long as those suffering it are far from them, as they may have thought.
Massacres escalated in the Middle Belt, openly justified by the spokesmen of the killers, whom the govt not only did not question, but supported by blaming the victims, and offering the killers billions of the country's money,. importing grass for their cows and tried to make laws allowing them to settle everywhere in the country with govt aid.
The Southern intelligentsia made some vigorous sounds and went back to relax.
The carnage moved to the South East. That was far away and the SE intelligentsia don't seem too vocal to me. The SW group of Soyinka, Olukotun etc did not seem to make much sound on that region's problems, if any. The SE is another constituency, perhaps.
Then the SW began to roil with kidnappings, killings and recently massacre, by the same people.
The SW intelligentsia began to wake up.
The problem began to grow into octups proportions as kidnapping of school children in the North West and North East became the norm as Sheikh Gumi became an ambassador for the criminals, telling us of their grievances, as parents paid out hundreds of millions of naira for their children's return even as some of those children were killed and the news media gave only the most basic reporting of these horrors, perhaps a form of self censorship in the face of govt's benignity towards the culprits who are openly running a terrorist business within a paralell govt with the fed govt or as a part of that govt, to all intents and purposes.
Yet, we shall all wake up tomorrow morning, bathe and go to work like people living in a normal environment.
Are the killers striking in Ibadan, Lagos, Enugu, Abuja or Benin?
No.
It's yet only in odd places like Igangan in the SW, or similar obscure places in the SE that they strike while the massacres in the Middle Belt are like news from another, though nearby country.
The wise thing is for the whole country to stop working and demand fundamental change.
But the Northern Muslims suffer from the illusion that the criminals are part of their own ethno-religious identity.
They also think they as a people will be disempowered by fundamental change in Nigerian govt and politics, having swallowed the fiction that the success of their politicians in controlling the body politic is equivalent to their own success.
Southern politicians are politely trying to assert themselves even as wolves are eating those they are supposed to lead.
Southern intelligentsia are largely confused. How can a civilised person agree to recognise that some of his neighbors are cannibals even as they openly feed on others?
He struggles hard to deny what he can see and responds with polite analysis, calling for the enablers of the cannibals to stop the feeding.
Thanks
Toyin
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