Monday morning on the pulpit can be very surreal. Today’s lesson is from Camara Laye’s ‘A Dream of Africa‘, a 1966 novel of prophecy, the black man and his future. A young man called Fatoman returns for a two-week vacation in Guinea after six years of exile in Paris. He returns to a country whose idea of mystery and power “are no longer to be found where they used to be”; a nation badly fissured by violent partisan politics.
Crestfallen, he goes to his goldsmith father who has lost his trade to wooden objects that lack spirits. Fatoman’s father gives him a sacred white ball of cowrie shells. Father tells son: “Put that inside your pillow-case tonight and ask God yourself to enlighten you about the future of our native land.”
Then he sleeps and in an all-night dream, the young man finds himself in prison. He sees what eyes see but the mouth fears to utter. But no word is too big that a knife is needed to slice it. Fatoman wakes up the following morning and tells his father what he saw: “I saw a people in rags and tatters, a people starving to death, a people who lived in an immense courtyard surrounded by a high wall, a wall as high as the sky. In that prison, force was the only law; or rather I should say, there was no law at all. The people were punished and sentenced without trial. It was terrible, because those people were the people of Guinea, the people of Africa!”
Dreams are dangerous, especially when told to the winds. Camara Laye would later die in exile in 1980, another writer punished by history for seeing too much and saying too much. Writers have always been prophets; knowingly or unknowingly, their words often hit the bull’s eye beyond boundaries. The people in the dream are not merely Guineans. Looking at what democracy has done to us, I say they are Nigerians.
Everyone is in a cage built by democracy and democrats. The ruling party has cells for its various inmates. There is hardly any escaping the wall. The warders are the big boys; strong, scented soil men.
The ruling party and the opposition are a consortium of prisons where ambitions are either consummated or cremated. Watch the party primaries across all platforms that are permitted to live.
Yet, the real war will be fought beyond party walls. Southern Nigeria is not prepared for a northern president so soon after Muhammadu Buhari’s eight years. This month and the next will test the tendons of this nation. The party called NDC fired the opening shot two days ago. At the weekend, it played the North-South game of thrones; it zoned the presidency to the South for four years only.
My Igbo friends spent the whole of the weekend celebrating the NDC decision. They thought and still think the NDC ticket is already Peter Obi’s. But the NDC belongs to an Ijaw man who acquired it for a purpose. Goodluck Jonathan is an Ijaw man. Watch him. He is consulting towards 2027. The NDC belongs to his brother, and all politics is local.
American journalist, Chris Matthews, wrote ‘All Politics Is Local’. He said he had the good fortune to be present in November 1989 as the Berlin Wall was being torn down. While there, he interviewed a young East German:
“What is freedom?” he asked the young man.
“Talking to you,” the East German said without pause. “Two weeks ago I couldn’t do it.”
To the ‘imprisoned’, talking to a journalist was the very definition of ‘freedom.’ But the same question was answered differently by several people the journalist interviewed.
So, because all politics is local, regime campaigners asked me to support President Bola Tinubu for re-election. I asked them to tell me why I should. They said it was because he was my brother. I asked them to ask my brother why his first term closed its eyes to the very bad roads to his brother’s state. They said bad roads were not enough to deny one’s daughter the blessing of bosomy beads. They invoked the idi bebere chant of waists and coral beads. They said they would not use my reason to decide where to cast their votes.
I told them that what I want from democracy is not necessarily what they want from it. That is why boys of the same mother do not contribute money to marry one wife.
You cannot wax imperial and expect the street to hail you. Small matters matter as much as big things in politics. The one who attends to basic things about the people gets the basic attention from them. In the 1970s, one U.S. senator cultivated the image of being “every bit… solicitous…” For the sake of politics and power, with him, “no chore was too small… If you took out a pencil, he’d sharpen it.”
Tinubu started his presidency spending heavily on projects that pleased his friends’ fancy while neglecting the backyard of his poor relations. As road users groaned on broken federal roads in the South West, he committed unimaginably vast resources to his Coastal Road. I once called it a road from somewhere to nowhere. That is what the road means to people where I live and where I work. You cannot take all the money to the coast and expect applause from the hinterland. There is no monkey in Idanre again.
But two weeks ago, politics appeared to have given the strong man a change of heart. He presided over a meeting of his cabinet and awarded road contracts that may give the face of his regime a well-done political makeup. He remembered home.
Consider the geography of the approvals. Dualisation of the Ibadan–Ijebu-Ode Road, stretching 56 kilometres at a cost of N295 billion; the Osogbo–Akoda–Gbongan Road, 59.2 kilometres for N101 billion; and the Osogbo–Iwo–Ibadan Road. All in the South West. Other zones, East and North, got theirs. Like Thomas O’Neill, the 47th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Tinubu is translating a national contest “to the local, retail level.”
Presidents do not need roads; they fly. Which is why we must thank the eagle for remembering creations without wings. We thank those around him who reminded him that those roads exist. We only plead that these awards do not end as weightless paper roads designed as vote-catchers. They will indeed be weightless if they are not done before the elections, or they are started and abandoned after the elections.
An epochal governorship election will hold in Osun State in August this year. The incumbent, Ademola Adeleke, is recontesting and remains deeply rooted on the ground. It will take more than federal might to uproot him. In Oyo State, the incumbent governor, Seyi Makinde, has the state firmly in his grip; he is reportedly eyeing the president’s seat. Both governors are widely celebrated as high performers who belong to opposition parties. For the president’s party to make real impact here, therefore, it must have real positive things to show the people. It is not too late to do so.
Which is why the contracts came at the right time. So, on paper, Tinubu’s contract approvals are infrastructure decisions—big, bold and long overdue. But in substance, they form a carefully plotted map of political warfare. When a government suddenly remembers roads that years of power ignored, it is not governance speaking; it is politics, with timing as its loudest voice. It is the language of a second-term conversation, spoken in concrete and kilometres. Yet, we say thank you. But please, do the work beyond the announcement.
This moment will be read beyond asphalt and contracts. Would these last-minute contracts have been awarded if everyone had migrated into the president’s lair? Politicians often take for granted those they consider their property. Like dogs, they would sleep themselves into death were it not for the fleas of defeat that keep buzzing, threatening to bite.
So, we must keep flashing our voter cards as potential red cards. Sometimes, it works.
In December 1927, Catherine Mitchell Taliaferro asked, “To vote or not to vote?” She ended her piece with a warning that still resonates: “No one ever cleaned a house by deserting it to insects and vermin.”
Taliaferro’s warning was simple: democracies decay when citizens surrender the public space to predators. Nigeria now enters a season in which power will test institutions, friendships and even nerves. From now till January next year, the dreams in Nigeria’s nights will be of wars and rumours of wars.
But is it all gloom without hope of redemption? I go back to Camara Laye’s Fatoman who tells his father: “I also dreamed of a Lion, a great Black Lion, who saved us, who brought back prosperity to us, and who made all peoples his friends.”
Also published in the Nigerian Tribune on Monday, 11 May, 2026).
