WHEN LATE CHIEF OBAFEMI AWOLOWO MADE A SIGN OF VICTORY IN THE MOON IN LAGOS

  I was around 9 years old then in Lagos, when I realized that if you gave men the chance; they can control your mind. It was sometime in 1979 - a little before the general elections that ushered in the 2^nd republic in Nigeria. I had never actually known what it was like before this period to be ruled by men who would be wearing the native Nigerian attires instead of military uniforms, I never believed that it was possible for men in civil attires to rule Nigeria even though my parents and my elder ones had shared an experience that confirmed that Nigeria had once been ruled by civilians, during the first republic. In fact, as our social studies book puts it, these civilian men and women were actually the ones who obtained our independence from Great Britain in 1960. So like many other Nigerians, I was very optimistic and enthusiastic to live the experience.

  My first real experience about the military rule in Nigeria and the manner in which they ascend to government had been very terrible; it traumatized me and many children of my generation at the time. As a child, our only yardstick for measuring good government was that when you asked your parents for money you wouldn´t get an excuse in return and that when they gave you the money which at that time was usually coin(s), it was always sufficient for you to buy yourself a pack full of candies and sometimes buy yourself a bottle of soft drink and still get back some change. And the Head of state we had at the time, at least the moment I began to understand my environment was General Murtala Mohammed, and at that period, the coin(s) my parents gave to me, were still very powerful, so I did not understand why a group of undesirable persons in the army led by one notorious Colonel Buka suka Dimka would kill a man who ensured that my father´s salary was constant, and by so doing that my demand for coin(s) was also constant. So, I have always hated military coups, because the moment General Murtala muhammed died in that botched coup of 13^th of February 1976 and General Olusegun Obasanjo, now retired, stepped into his shoes as Head of State I began to notice some changes in the economy of my house, the coin(s) became insufficient to satisfy my needs as a child.

  As a child then, like most children of my generation I was really ignorant and uninterested about the many technical economic innuendos that the so called economic experts talked about then and now. Our evaluation of the economy  like I said before was purely based on our direct personal experience with the economic situation in our homes; if papa´s salary was constant and sufficient to handle the many economic challenges we had at home and if mama made sufficient gains in her petty trade, then the economy was buoyant.  With the coming into power of retired Gen Olusegun Obasanjo, I began to observe that my father started complaining about constant cuts in his salaries, my mother too about how she no longer makes any gains in her petty trade and worst of all my own demand for coin(s) were no longer satisfied and even when they managed to come, they no longer had the buying powers they had under General Murtala Muhammed.

  So when General Olusegun Obasanjo subsequently announced that he would hand over power to a democratically elected government in 1979, our hopes brightened up again, moreover, when I realized that most of the men contesting in the election were the same whose photographs were all over my social studies textbook; the living legends, the heroes of our time and times gone by, among them Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe and a host of others.

    

  People had complained bitterly that the first coup d´etat in Nigeria and the fact that it quashed civilian rule in the country and gave room for the military to come to power with the consequencial 3 years civil war that came with it was really what dealt a devastating blow to the socio-economic and political growth of a nation which many saw at the time with a real potential and a credible possibility to rule the world or at least be among the greatest world economic powers.

  At that time and even now I did not know much about politics, my experience would mark my ideology concerning the game of politics even till date. Politics to me is a system of government characterized by lies and mostly empty promises which are never fulfilled. Those who play this game are called politicians; men and women who are often selfish but love to sell the false idea that they are concerned about the common good of all, then again comes the worst group; their supporters, a massive group of bamboozled disciples, who constantly and eternally appear to be under the influence of a spell or a hypnotization.

  I soon began to notice strange things in my community; some of the suspicious street urchins in my neighborhood returned sometimes with blood stained clothes from political rallies and sometimes with broken heads and badly bruised faces, suddenly, I began to observe with great awe how some known hoodlums in the community began to make huge sums of money from dubious relationships with some of the very notable politicians in the society. But I was still too small to directly link this to the political atmosphere that was brewing.

  I remember that before this period, when I was a little younger and always stared into the full moon in the dark nights of Lagos, I always appear to see the image of a man, breaking firewood with an axe and always believed that every other person saw the same thing until the supporters of the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo came up one night and started shouting that even the heavens have endorsed the presidency of the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, popularly called Awo by his teeming supporters, and that to show its support, the heavens have put the image of the Late Chief Obafemi Awolowo in the moon raising up his two fingers in a sign of victory. I remember staring so hard and so much that slowly, my firewood splitter that I had always seen inside the moon appeared to begin to transform into every other thing except Chief Obafemi Awolowo raising up two fingers in the sign of victory, but the clamor of Up Awo! all around me continued, I even received some knocks on the head from some grownups until I was forced to say that I had seen what they claimed they saw, they pointed at his peculiar pair of small-hole round glasses, his cap and even his agbada and to avoid another hard knock I nodded that I could see everything so clearly.

  Eventually the election came and went and rtd. Gen Olusegun Obasanjo and Chief Michael Ani, the then chairman of the Federal electoral commissions FEDECO, as it was known then, who were at the time the two key persons that wielded the power to decide on who was really the endorsed person to rule the nation appear not to have seen or accepted the heavens endorsement through a live moon coverage of the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, and instead endorsed an unknown former school teacher Alhaji Shehu Shagari as the President of the 2^nd republic of Nigeria.

  Even today, when I revisit my childhood days, particularly that electoral period and all that hype and great fallacy of the appearance in the moon of Chief Obafemi Awolowo with a victory sign, it becomes even more preposterous to see the length that men can go to always try to control the minds of others to satisfy their lust for power.