Back from a series of serials to turbulence (I)

This is why I have missed intervening, or expressing much direly needed responses to matters that have recently routed the calm waters of our society—the grieving matters of death of very eminent persons on our land, either through nature’s undeniable and inexorable e beckoning like the passing of the political juggernaut of Kwara, Dr Olusola […]

This is why I have missed intervening, or expressing much direly needed responses to matters that have recently routed the calm waters of our society—the grieving matters of death of very eminent persons on our land, either through nature’s undeniable and inexorable e beckoning like the passing of the political juggernaut of Kwara, Dr Olusola Saraki, the ‘paramount’ ruler of the old and new Kwara. Dr. Olusola Saraki was a political mystique about whom death was simply inconceivable, and who recently gave up the entire political realm and landscape after bestriding the turf for nearly four, scarcely interrupted, decades (asides the brief feather-ruffling by the Admiralty personnel, Lawal, former Governor, who deployed his incumbency to give his ‘godfather’ a disturbing spell of a run for his money and the crowning struggle with his heir apparent, Bukola, who insisted that the governance of Kwara State was not a dynastic  affair! I miss employing this little space to say goodnight to this political chieftain who was one of the most consistent and enduring political practitioners in Nigeria’s history—Senator Olusola Saraki.

In the same vein, I could not shower encomiums on Justice Kayode Eso, one of the most resourceful men ever to have mounted the judicial bench of our nation. What made this an even more painful loss for me is my failure to adapt his work—The Mystery Gun Man: History. Politics. Power—Play.  Justice, into a staged play, as I promised both the late legal luminary and my friend, Muyiwa Awodiya, who wrote the Foreword, that I would. This book is an eloquent testimony of the literary prowess of Justice Eso, an aspect of his numerous creative competencies that were hardly acknowledged. The book eloquently captures three perspectives of Justice Eso’s enviable personality—his impeccable integrity, his granitic courage and his vast literariness. All these three features he shares with his younger friend and the subject of prosecution, Wole Soyinka. The book, The Mystery Gunman, was Justice Eso’s inimitable candid, imaginative and historical account of the story of his presiding experience as judge of the case of the much –vouched political action of Wole Soyinka, who was alleged to have stopped the broadcast, at gun point, of the Acceptance Speech of the late Ladoke Akintola, as Premier of Western Region, and substituted with his own radical, denunciatory speech, at a radio station in Ibadan. Against all intimidation, subtle harassment and blackmail by the powers-that-be, Justice Eso held his ground and pronounced a no-case verdict on the side of Wole Soyinka. This act of unbridled courage and indomitable fairness is a quality of the character of Justice Eso that ramifies his entire life as an eminent jurist, patriot and virtuous citizen of this troubled nation. Most people have written about the landmark contribution of the eminent jurist to legal scholarship and the democratic culture and history of Nigeria.

Not much has been written about Justice Eso’s grasp of the interplay of literature and politics. Not many, not even literary purists, have demonstrated the inimitable grasp of literature across space, age and time as did Justice Eso, to the extent that it could be said, with little fear of contradiction, that his life and experience evince the inextricability of justice, literature and democracy to the extent that the decision to make literature a compulsory requisite for law studies must have taken its clue and justification from the work of Justice Eso. From classical authors to contemporary writers—Aristophanes, Shakespeare, John Donne, Browning, Eliot, Dickens and to Achebe and Soyinka, Justice Eso anchors the search for social justice and humane existence on the lessons of great literature. The literary world will miss Justice Eso as much as the legal globe.

How else could one record the miss-out from the much-need discourse engagement in the series of controversial politics in high places among the men of power of our country on the issue of insurrection, insurgency and terrorism, including the anomic streak of kidnapping that have seized the fabric of our nation’s polity than the disquieting outing of the President and his men against the unexpected outburst of his erstwhile boss and ‘sponsor’, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, over the state of insecurity of our country. This ‘fall-out’ between ‘father’ and ‘son’ is best captured by T.S.Eliot’s graphic quip about history’s many cunning passages. It was a palpable challenge of inaction against the President by the Ota Chief, whom, it is well known, is a benefactor of Goodluck Jonathan. This challenge, to which the President spared no space and time, not only to rebut but to lend ample credence to the public suspicion of an unsavoury mutual disaffection gathering storm between the duo and which has managed to heat up the national tempo. What became most startling is the manner of intervention by the dove-like, praying general Gowon. None of these exchanges and reactions has been able to stem the anomic state of the nation, featuring the insurgency and terrorism that the Boko Haram phenomenon has unleashed on the northern part of country, with the bell tolling, in part, on the mindless murder of General Shuwa, the veteran war commander in the Nigerian civil war as well as the audacious invasion of Jaji!