Akinyemi Onigbinde’s manifesto of a stubborn goat

In the last few weeks, I have had the privilege of luxuriating in the compilation of Professor Akinyemi Onigbinde’s seminal thoughts on the rulership – and, I dare say, ruining – of our beloved country, Nigeria.

Curiously entitled: “The Manifesto of a Stubborn Goat, A Citizen’s Engagement With Nigeria”, the thoughts are some of the various essays of the eminent academic and public intellectual that were published in different media outlets in the last three decades.

Apparently to spare me the agony of affirming that the more things change in the country, the more they remain the same, the essayist granted me access to Volume Two only. Whoever has had access to the first volume must be going through the same discomfort that I have been subjected to since I started reading the compilation.

That other person, or persons, will raise the same question as I have done, that: If our leaders –  from the Shehu Shagari administration in the Second Republic, to the military juntas and their subsequent civilian counterparts in the relay race to the economic and social damnation of the country –  have had access to such sublime treatises, why is the country still in the woods?

In 147,207 words, strewn across 396 pages and seven chapters, Onigbinde is as acerbic and unsparing as the occasions demand. Leafing through the pages, the reader will come to one ineluctable conclusion: Nigeria is at its current sorry pass, not for want of critical guidance over the years but, clearly, as a consequence of its leaders’ refusal to heed wise counsel, year after year, and decade after decade.

Onigbinde, a Philosophy teacher has over the years committed an egregious “offence” – in the fashion of the self-styled former military-President Ibrahim Babangida – by teaching what he was not paid to! He went beyond that, the “stubborn goat” carried his advocacy beyond the walls of the classroom to the society at large.

At various times, he has been a member and columnist with several newspapers, and Editorial Board chairman of some other.

Both in class and on the pages of newspapers, and lately in social media, the essayist remains unbowed and unsparing in drawing attention to the ills of the society and pointing out the way forward for the country.

The “Stubborn Goat” is an appellation that he earned from his loving but exasperated mother, Titilola Ayoka, who always wondered why her son, even at a tender age in Iwaya, Yaba, Lagos, where he grew up, would rather accept punishment than watch fellow kids suffer injustice. It is a trait that Prof. Onigbinde has carried on to this day. In the compilation, the reader is confronted with the thoughts of a public intellectual who takes no sides in political discuss other than that of truth as he sees it.

On the much-touted anti-graft war of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) compared to that of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) from which it wrested power in 2015, Onigbinde says:

“If Nigeria, under (the) PDP administration, was deemed to be ‘fantastically corrupt’, the Nigerian State under (the) APC has been corruption-personified, both in its politics and in its handling of our finances.”

If that was hard-hitting on both parties, Onigbinde has harsher words for leaders across parties at the sub-national level. He writes: “Nigeria is a huge paradox. It defies easy categorization. And, by and large, a dialogue with Motherland is never a pleasant encounter.”

The compilation starts in Chapter 1, with an allegory of public transportation to describe the country. It is entitled: “At The Sentinel … A Government By Conductors”. The driver is giddy, the conductors are fully intoxicated, the road is ridden with pot-holes, and the vehicle is decrepit. Law enforcement agents who are on the road to maintain sanity are faced with existential problems. The resultant crash of the vehicle, with its human content is predictable. Somebody has to summon the courage to put a halt to the journey, to save humanity and the big nation called Nigeria.

A university teacher for decades, Onigbinde is perhaps at his best elements when discussing issues around education. In a country where members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) are near-permanently at loggerheads with government over adequate funding, with both parties often removing the gloves and engaging in bloody fights. It is little wonder that the essayist is on the side of his colleagues. Interestingly, he does not pull punches even with Vice Chancellors, many of whom he says are more interested in personal gains than the common good.

His words:

“For years we have refused to see the average Nigerian Vice Chancellor as a Trojan horse. To be clear, the average Vice-Chancellor, under the present anti-intellectual dispensation, is a careerist, a social climber who sees the office not as a call to duty for the benefit of the academia, but as a ladder to more juicy government patronages. Therefore, to expect an incumbent to defend intellectual integrity based on some assumed time-hallowed tradition is to misread his own unhidden agenda.”

Oluyinka Olujimi

Onigbinde is not done. He wonders at the readiness of many Vice Chancellors to throw their colleagues under the bus to please military rulers and politicians at different times.

His words:

“If we sound rather spiteful, witness the post-ASUU-FG encounter scenarios in some of our universities across the land. While the logic of the situation dictated sober reflection, a rapprochement and realignment of forces to pick up the pieces and build from the ruins of seven months war of attrition, some of our Vice-Chancellors chose to play Dracula, carrying out a mopping-up operation against shell-shocked colleagues. With refracted binoculars, they sought to fish out imaginary enemy hide-outs. Taking advantage of the disorganised retreat of the embattled dons, and operating from an assumed position of strength, they drove home their victory.”

Chapter Two, is entitled “Dialogue With Fatherland,” and opens with “Shehu Shagari’s Verbal Accident”. Here, Onigbinde  dissects the former ruler who is largely believed to have set the tone for Nigeria’s descent into economic and political anomie during the Second Republic that was mercifully brought to an end by the repressive duo of Muhammadu Buhari and Tunde Idiagbon. He regards as “insulting” an attempt by Shagari “to absolve himself from the blame of the disastrous Second Republic.” He adds: “As a country, we have the capacity, as it has always been demonstrated to a fault, to forgive those who can be seen to have wronged us, more so, when such people show remorse or can be perceived to be genuinely ignorant of the magnitude of their ‘misbehavior’ in public life. But this amnesty should never be mistaken for amnesia.”

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo is lacerated in several pages of the compilation, a treatment of which Buhari, Goodluck Jonathan and the incumbent President Bola Ahmed Tinubu also got generous doses.

As the Buhari civilian administration engaged Obasanjo in verbal warfare, Onigbinde was unmoved by arguments on either side. In an opinion he penned to remind Nigerians of the flirtatious mutual dance when it was convenient for both camps to kick the then President Jonathan out of power, he urged the people to remember that they were birds of a feather. His words:

“The Buharists, self-appointed defenders of iniquities and clannishness of a stone-age despot, celebrated Obasanjo’s letters when the self-serving former President was in support of their course, as ‘Navigator’ of their ill-fated ocean-liner to be launched at sea by a most incompetent sailor. Now, to the Buharists, and his permanent ‘hailers’, Olusegun Obasanjo is no longer ‘courageous’, a tag the former military head of state, and a war hero was tagged when Muhammadu Buhari, along with his fellow hypocrites went to solicit for the support of the former president while incubating their political party.”

Not to be mistaken as offering any support for Obasanjo, Onigbinde quickly adds: “Thus, while Obasanjo was right, with respect to the issues raised in his letter to Buhari, the former president only played, once again, his opportunistic, tactical approach in political relevance by plagiarizing on other peoples ‘original works’. Due credit must be accorded the serially abused, and insulted army of ‘wailers’ who endured those ‘inverted logic’ of ‘hailers’ rationalization of Buhari’s glaring incompetence as Nigeria’s president.”

The book also, however, includes significant human angle essays, like: Kunle Ajibade: “The Coup Plotter”, EndSARS And Our Veterans, Dele Farotimi: The Big Man Syndrome And The Nigerian Slave Mentality,   Lamentation For Tanimola, At A Summit With My Friends – Mufutau, in Ijebu-Igbo, and Musiliu, in Ibadan, The Abortion Debate, Siding With Olikoye Ransome-Kuti. The list is almost endless.

The topics are varied and strategically, I believe, not arranged in a chronological order. The reader only needs to open to a page, any page, and be arrested by the depths of the issues discussed. That adds to the enigmatic compilation which the public should look forward to devouring.

Set to be unveiled in Ibadan, Oyo State, on Monday January 26, the “Manifesto” will be a part of activities marking the 70th birthday of the eminent essayist.

…Olujimi, a journalist and lawyer, lives in Texas, USA