In 1969, legendary Yoruba Sakara music lord, Yusuff Olatunji, serenaded and celebrated the sterling qualities of the Seriki of Egbaland, Chief Abdul-Wahab Amódemájá, who held an Egba high-ranking military-derived civil title. In his Volume 3 album entitled Amódemájá, using a twin engine of dense metaphor and vivid imagery, Olatunji advocated for the place of good people as templates of a good society. The man he called “Abudu Amodemaja” was his prime example. He sang: “If you behold some people gaily and expensively dressed, sitting in royal poise on elegantly embroidered horses, unbeknownst to an enraptured world taken in by these adornments, these men are merely decorated swindlers.” Olatunji’s raw Yoruba rendering was: “B’óo r’òmo elòmíìn l’órí esin, jìbìtì l’ó fi ñs’èsó.” The paradox of esin (horse) and èsó (adornments), set against jìbìtì (swindle), was a potent literary tool this Sakara legend deployed to teach the virtues of the noble citizen.
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Are there still good people in Nigeria? Are there good people in Nigerian politics? Can they be found anywhere in Nigerian government circles?
Yusuff Olatunji sang this song barely nine years into the Nigerian post-colony. It was an era when personal honour was paramount, and dishonourable people were treated as social rejects and villains. Olatunji himself had carved a remarkable niche in the social cosmos. A musical hippopotamus, his feat in popularising traditional Yoruba music across Nigeria and the West African coast was adjudged legendary. Deploying profound poetic lyrics, philosophical reflections on existential matters, and a mastery of the single-headed frame drum called the Sakara, Olatunji denounced societal ills, while celebrating impeccable character.
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Amodemaja was equally known by the moniker, “A. B. Council” due to his massive influence in First Republic’s Abeokuta Council local administration. Musicians of the era took turns celebrating this incredibly influential powerhouse of Egbaland. Yet, Amodemaja was a prominent Ogboni secret society leader for whom the edan – a sacred, highly revered pair of cast brass/bronze figures clipped by an iron chain that served as membership emblem and spiritual authority in the indigenous Yoruba Ogboni society – was his bond. In an emerging post-colony where Christianity and Islam had colonised the religious consciousness of the people, how did that society reconcile this complex reality?
Amodemaja spent a lengthy period as the Adelé Oba (Regent) of Egbaland before the coronation of Oba Oyebade Lipede as the ninth Alake of Egbaland. His character must have been the reason why, when he passed in the late 1970s, his death caused a seismic rupture in the social fabric of Egbaland. Indescribably hurt by the shock of his passage, his fellow Egba son and Apala music spellbinder, Ayinla Omowura, composed an evergreen tribute in his honour. In it, Omowura deconstructed death as a “disheveled idiot with ugly, black, and dilating eyes” for its audacity in stealing the crème de la crème of society. Suddenly, as Omowura sang, the cadence of his drums shifted. His drummers masterfully infused the solemn, heavy rhythmic beats of the Ogboni traditional dance into their drumming. It was a final salute to a man for whom neither the Bible nor the Quran, but the cylindrical edan, was his bond – a tribute that led critics to submit that Omowura himself was likely an initiate.
Forgive the digression. The offering today is not music, traditional worship, or a tribute to departed heroes. It is politics – raw Nigerian politics in its most roiling, unfiltered form. The focus today is the dwindling values of Nigerian politics and politicians, alongside the elaborate swindle racket that governance in the country has become.
Look around you today. Even before they officially mount campaign podiums, Nigerian politicians have begun regaling us with grand promises. In real terms, these are simply an assortment of lies in which they do not believe and which will never materialise.
What is the precise place of lies in Nigerian governance? A vast body of literature exists on lying as a political weapon. The Nigerian electorate should, as usual, prepare to be treated to a confetti of falsehoods as we travel the 2027 election road. Worldwide, debates on social and political lies continue to engage public discourse. Are political lies symptoms of a systemic cancer, or are they mere political sports that should be excused? In the 2022 Annual Billy Dudley Memorial Lecture he delivered, Professor JAA Ayoade, dwelt extensively on this phenomenon. It is a paper that remains an essential reading.
Lying, Ayoade noted, is “ubiquitous and prevalent in human society.” He defined a political lie as one “purposely constructed in the politician’s heart to deceive the public with a view to gaining and/or maintaining political power.” He observed further: “Studies say that Americans lie an average of 11 times per week. This is in contrast to Donald Trump, who, according to the Washington Post, logged 20,055 falsehoods in 1,207 days – an average of fifteen lies per day. The average politician, starting at age eighteen, would have lied 33,747 times by age seventy. At 30,000 false claims attributed to Trump in his four-year term, he told 88.9 per cent of the lies the average citizen would tell in fifty-three years.” This reality likely drove Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka to dub Nigeria “the Republic of Liars” in his 2015 work, InterInventions: Between Defective Memory and the Public Lie.
The maths above does not diminish the toxicity of political lies or the sheer scale on which politicians deploy them. The liar, Ayoade argued, “opts to lie because he calculates that the truth cannot deliver the expected reward to him in that particular case.” He cited Adolf Hitler, who concluded that “it is not truth that matters, but victory.” Ayoade set this side-by-side with former Aviation Minister Femi Fani-Kayode’s boast that he would rather die than defect to the APC. When Fani-Kayode eventually defected, he justified eating his words by stating, “There is no point having principles without power” – a sentiment echoed by American politician, Robert S Strauss, who famously remarked, “If you’re in politics, you’re a whore anyhow.
In Nigeria’s contemporary political landscape, the petroleum subsidy has become the lowest-hanging fruit of national mendacity. It is a convenient bait dangled like worms on fishing hooks to catch unsuspecting fish. Aware that the subsidy removal is the hemlock Nigerians have been forced to drink in 39 months under Bola Tinubu, with severe effects on their daily existence, politicians view it as the primary path into the electorate’s hearts. Both President Tinubu and former Vice President Atiku Abubakar have boarded this convenient vessel to secure prime space in the public consciousness. Yet, the truth remains that neither figure holds the masses as their main concern; the primary objective is the preservation of their elite status and personal political empires.
As the whistle blows for the commencement of the 2027 political campaigns, Nigerians are once again in for a seasonal roulette of tears, sorrow, and blood. It is a season of sabre-rattling, damaging rhetoric, and a dangerous descent into political anarchy. The dress rehearsals are already being served à la carte across the nation. Politicians are painting the dais red with do-or-die rhetoric. If I’m asked for examples, my response remains that once an okra farm is within reach, harvesting it before it becomes overripe need not be a complex enterprise. Yoruba say this as “Bí oko ò jìnnà, ilá ìí kó”.
One example holding Nigerians on tenterhooks is the ongoing drug allegation debate -a humiliating spectacle for the nation. It is humiliating because, regardless of guilt or innocence of the charge, it is a shame that a Nigerian president is subject of a drug inquisition. After all, Yoruba say if one does not walk in the manner of an Òkété, the African giant pouched rat, no one would offer one the rat’s palm kernel favourite meal.
The central dispute, whether evaluated in American court dockets or in the court of public opinion, centres on whether the Nigerian president was involved as a baron or courier of illicit narcotics. In recent statements, the Washington-based lobbying firm hired by Atiku Abubakar, Von Batten-Montague-York, claimed that FBI files link Tinubu to a criminal organisation smuggling heroin during the 1980s and 1990s. As the firm presses its claims, the presidency’s efforts to distance itself from the matter have only drawn more attention to the allegations. It then will seem that, the more it tries to pull its horse from this dirty manger, the more messy dung this heroine drama pelts on its face. The American lobbyists, in a most recent X post, claimed that Tinubu would face international embarrassment at the UN General Assembly. Looks like, in the hands of Atiku, our president is carrying on his head a faggot enveloped by a notorious beehive (ó ti ru igi oyin).
Through this evidentiary search — what some have termed “legal tourism” — Atiku Abubakar appears to be pursuing a Samson option: the total destruction of what he views as a political house of cards built by his former friend and ally.
Tinubu and Atiku, friends-turned-foes, risk treating the nation to an equivalent of a Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) — the Cold War military doctrine where a full-scale nuclear attack by one power guarantees complete annihilation for both sides. For both men, this dynamic represents a destructive equation. Francis Bacon’s reflection on friendship underlines the tragedy of this dispute: “Age appears to be best in four things: old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.” Even Yusuff Olatunji, in the album referenced earlier, sang that the deity in a friend’s house should not seek one’s ruination: “Òrìsà ilé òré eni, kò gbodò run ni.” Both gladiators seem deaf to that counsel.
Yet, this destructive chess game continues between men vying for the ultimate political prize. As this piece was about going to press, news filtered in that a regime fawner has called for an exhumation of Atiku’s 2006 indictment by the EFCC. He has thus issued a 14-day ultimatum to the EFCC to reopen and prosecute these historical corruption allegations against the Wazirin Adamawa.
Seasons of political campaigns in Nigeria remain seasons of vitriol and drama. Painfully, everyday citizens are regularly drawn into these partisan conflicts. To be fair to contemporary politicians, rhetoric, exaggeration, and underlying tension have long been part of the nation’s political lineage. Like Tinubu and Atiku, when the relationship between erstwhile friends, Western Region Leader Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Premier Chief S. L. Akintola, broke down irretrievably in the 1960s, the region was consumed by incendiary rhetoric. Campaign grounds became arenas of ethnic anxiety and personal insults, where hostility was openly weaponised.
As the 1964 general elections and the 1965 Western Regional elections approached, Premier Akintola formed an alliance with the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) led by the Sardauna of Sokoto, Ahmadu Bello called the NNDP. Action Group also aligned with Nnamdi Azikiwe’s NCNC to form UPGA. Akintola accused UPGA of facilitating an Eastern takeover of the West, using campaign tropes that framed the opposition as an ethnic vehicle designed to disenfranchise the Yoruba. He frequently repeated names like “Okafor” and “Okeke;” “Ikejiani” which he inflected to “Ekini-ani” to highlight claims of Igbo domination of western region civil service appointments. He used this logic to justify his alliance with the NPC. Conversely, UPGA labeled Akintola a feudal puppet and traitor who sold Yoruba to Hausa-Fulani hegemony.
Akintola, an orator par excellence, who used to be labeled by Adegoke Adelabu as “Osanyin Awolowo” – “Awo’s deity” due to his tiny voice like that of an Orisa deity – deployed the Yoruba language to great effect at campaign rallies. Veterans of that era recall that during campaigns in the Ekiti district – where Awolowo’s reputation was held in high regard – Akintola openly mocked the opposition’s emphasis on formal education. He joked that only in Ekiti could one find professors named after birds, playfully altering the name of the renowned economist, Professor Aluko, to “Professor Agbe and Professor Atioro.” In the Bendel area, he derided Awolowo’s prominent supporters like Dennis Osadebey, declaring: “Bí Òrìsà bá d’ébè, a ó f’òkò tu ká!” – meaning, even if a deity manifested as a farm mound, his party would level it with hoes.
In the Eastern region during the Second Republic, political contests were equally fierce. In old Anambra State, the primary struggle was between Jim Nwobodo of the NPP and Christian Chukwuma (C. C.) Onoh of the ruling NPN. As both sides competed, language became a central weapon. Campaign strategists satirized opponents using localized humor and wordplay. Nwobodo’s supporters mocked Onoh’s name through deliberate homophones, calling him ‘Onoh ono Okpa,’ meaning “Onoh who swallows Okpa,” – a popular, protein-rich traditional food pudding made from ground Bambara nuts – while Onoh’s camp portrayed their rival as desperate for political survival. Figures like Nnamdi Azikiwe were surrounded by elaborate political mythologies, with supporters attributing near-mystical resilience to him to rally voters.
When political engagement is reduced to manufactured promises, historical grudges, and calculated character assassination, governance loses its moral compass. Just as Yusuff Olatunji warned his listeners 57 years ago not to be deceived by the grand adornments of riders on horseback who conceal fraudulent intent, the contemporary electorate must learn to look past the elaborate pageantry of the political class.
Until citizens demand genuine integrity and accountability over strategic deception, the nation will remain trapped in a paradise built on falsehoods – a system where power is pursued as an end in itself, and public good remains a secondary consideration.
Elegy for Dotun Oladipo
When his longtime associate and composer, Akanni Fatai (alias B’olodeoku), died in the late 1970s, the Apala music emperor, Ayinla Omowura, captured the shock in a tear-jerking elegy. He described the news of Fatai’s passage as “agbo-ju-’gba-nu” —news so rudely shocking that, upon hearing it, you instinctively throw away the calabash bowl in your hand.
The news of the death of my friend, Dotun Oladipo, reached me in the quiet of an early morning. Opening my phone to check the world’s daily anxieties on social media, I was struck by that same Ayinla’s agbo-ju-’gba-nu impulse, momentarily casting my device away like a leprous chattel.
Oladipo passed on Tuesday, 25 August at the age of 56. Only three weeks or so earlier, we had met at a gathering in Lagos. With the painful clarity of hindsight, how was I to know that as he walked up to exchange a warm, long-overdue pleasantry, Dotun was actually bidding me farewell?
Ever since the reality of his passage sank in, I have searched philosophical texts for explanation. I wanted something beyond run-of-the-mill theological interpretations —something activist, probing, and unconventional.
I first turned to the British sociologist Geoffrey Gorer. In his 1955 study, The Pornography of Death, Gorer argued that because modern society hides death from public view, our fascination with mortality manifests through “reprehensibly graphic and violent representations.” Yet, Gorer’s thesis offered no solace; it left me more bewildered than before.
Next, I sought refuge in Epicurus, who counseled against mourning because death, as the complete cessation of sensory consciousness, is “nothing to us.” Epicurus argued that while we exist, death is absent, and when death arrives, we no longer exist to feel it. Therefore, dreading a state which we cannot fathom or suffer is irrational.
Socrates took a similar view. He maintained that death is not to be feared. It arrives either as a peaceful, dreamless sleep or as a migration of the soul to another realm where one joins the great minds of history. His disciple, Plato, carried the thought further: the body is merely a prison for the immortal soul, and true philosophy is the lifelong practice of freeing that soul to contemplate eternal truths which death reveals.
For the Stoics — chief among them Seneca and Marcus Aurelius — a constant awareness of mortality was necessary to strip away life’s trivialities. The existentialist Martin Heidegger echoed this: knowing that life is finite and time bound should compel us to live authentically.
African cosmology, however, offers a fundamentally different perspective of death. It is never a terminal end. The deceased transitions into the realm of the “living-dead,” acquiring the status of ancestors who maintain an active, powerful relationship with the world they left behind.
In Yoruba thought, the physical (Ayé) and spiritual (Òrun) worlds are interconnected mirrors. To earn passage to the afterlife as a respected ancestor, one must hold a passport stamped by a life lived in service to others. Across the border in Benin Republic, death is seen as a loop where man sheds the garment of mortality to don the apparel of immortality, returning as the Egungun to bless the living.
Similarly, in Igbo cosmology, the lands of the living and the dead are Siamese twins; a righteous earthly existence is the prerequisite for ancestorhood. Among the Ga of Ghana, the BaManianga, a subgroup of the Kongo (Bakongo) ethnic group who primarily live in the southwestern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the Tshivenda, a distinct Bantu ethnic group living primarily in the northernmost Limpopo province of South Africa, near the border with Zimbabwe, Zulu of South Africa, as well as the Gikuyu and Nandi of Kenya, death is universally understood as a transition rather than an erasure.
Yet, despite this vast repository of philosophical and ancestral wisdom, none of these theories offers comfort or clarity for Dotun’s sudden exit. The question that continues to torment me remains simple and unanswered: why do good men die?
I met Dotun during his days at The PUNCH newspaper. A gentleman to the hilt, he possessed the rare selflessness of a man always ready to shoulder another person’s burden alongside his own.
To contemplate that the earth will open its audacious mouth to swallow such a good man is the ultimate testament to death’s cruel daring. I closed all textbooks, allowing the presence of a trickling tear violate the borders of my roving thoughts. Then, I tuned my device to listen to a sermon from the Apala music lord at the passage of Yusuff Olatunji . It sieved into my ears… “Gbere o, arin’ako, o d’oju ala o, eni g’esin o le e ba…” he sang — Never to be seen again, except a chance encounter with someone of similar bodily features, or in the dream; even a rider on a horse back cannot track him down!
Rest on, my good friend.
Festus Adedayo is an Ibadan-based journalist.
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