Greek philosopher, Socrates, may be the most famous Western figure of his time to have swallowed the poisonous plant’s juice called hemlock. But, Africa, too had its. As he was sentenced to death in 399 BCE, Socrates was forced to drink this poisonous plant secretion which causes muscular paralysis, leading to respiratory failure. As he lay dying, having swallowed his own hemlock kept in a calabash bowl, the tragic life of Kurunmi, 19th century Yoruba military general and Yoruba race’s 10th Aare Ona Kakanfo, stands as a huge lesson for contemporary leaders. Though Kurunmi learned the lesson too late, its precepts are that, through decisions or indecision, leaders lead their people to avoidable bloodshed
For Nigerian political leaders, the wailing regret of their actions and the consequences may be loud. As loud as they may seem, they are synonymous with the proverbial wails of the killed and grilled Okete, the pouched rat. As Bola Tinubu, the latest version of Aso Rock dwellers, seeks solace from an impending Donald Trump shellacking, the rat stands as symbolism of leadership in Nigeria in the last 26 years. While alive, Okete countermanded every counsel for him to be circumspect. He condemned it as possessing nil substance. At death, however, hoisted up on the grilling fire gauze by the woman who hangs venison for sale, Okete raised his hands up in a post-mortem surrender.
If irascible Donald Trump eventually attacks Nigeria as he has been roaring to do in the past one week or thereabout, Nigerians have their leaders of the 4th Republic to blame. If this happens, one historical narrative often deployed as a fitting recollection of such invasion is the story of Kurunmi, one of the governors of the Alaafin of Oyo, Oba Atiba. He was domiciled in Ijaiye. Kurunmi’s point of departure from Alaafin Atiba was the monarch’s decision to tamper with the ancient constitution which proclaims that the crown prince of the empire must die with his father, the Alaafin. By shielding Prince Adelu from death, Kurunmi was furious with the Alaafin.
In the infamous Ijaiye war with Ibadan, Kurunmi lost all. His warlords’ stubborn insistence on crossing River Ose was one of the first steps to spell a monumental disaster for the Ijaiye warriors. They all perished inside the river. Kurunmi lost Iwawun which came to him as a chilling news. The generalissimo was contemptuous of Ibadan’s military might, having earlier defeated the people in the battle of Odogido. He derogatorily called Ibadan “bush goats” and “horses full of muscles, small in sense.” The Basorun Ogunmola warriors had to fight to the last pint of their blood to reclaim their pride. In the process, they demonstrated to Kurunmi that they had huge sense and possessed sterner military prowess.
As he mobilised to fight Ibadan, Kurunmi sent emissaries far and wide to seek support for his war campaign. He got the buy-in of the Egba tribe, among others. On one of such expeditions, Ibadan waylaid his emissaries to the Emir of Ilorin and killed 19 of them. By the time the battle ended, Ijaiye suffered such huge fatalities that is today a legend in defeats in warfare. Five of Kurunmi’s children were killed by Ibadan, including Arawole, his son, whose decapitated and blood-enveloped head, when presented to him in Ijaiye, unmistakably told Kurunmi that the battle was indeed over.
When the poison’s pang meandered through his entrails with deathly searing pain, Kurunmi cursed his remaining generals, Mosadiwin and Abogunrin. The curse would assume its potency, he pronounced, if they did not inter him immediately but allow “my body stay(s) here for the vultures of Ibadan to peck at… if my skull serves as drinking cup for Adelu.” His last words as he committed suicide, was, “When a leader of men has led his people to disaster, and what remains of his present life is but a shadow of his proud past, then it is time to be leader no more.”
So many historical accounts of Kurunmi’s reign revealed his kind of leadership. Richard Henry Stone, an American representative of the Southern Baptist convention on a missionary expedition to Africa in the 19th century did this. In a chapter in his biography entitled In Africa’s Forest and Jungle or Six Years Among the Yorubans he dedicated a chapter to Kurunmi which he entitled ‘An African despot.’ In it, he wrote of his encounter with this dreaded military general thus: “He was haughty, despotic, ambitious and cruel… he was also firm, just and reasonable on most occasions. I never saw better order anywhere than I saw in Ejahyay (Ijaiye) while Areh (Aare) was its ruler. But he was a bloody usurper. When he was a young man, he was a notorious free-booter and slave hunter. With a number of followers, who had attached themselves to his fortunes, he would go out from Ejahyay into some distant province on predatory excursions. By kidnapping in the farms and by plundering caravans, he became rich and powerful.”
The above earlier excerpts were the result of a literary, though fictional re-calibration of what was left of the true but tragic life of Kurunmi, one of Yorubaland’s most famous war generals. Written by Professor Ola Rotimi in his epic drama, Kurunmi, Rotimi also characterised Kurunmi as a great military leader and war general whose fatal ending came as a result of a leadership Achilles’ heel. It is, taking others for granted. Like many contemporary leaders, Kurunmi faced internal strife within Ijaiye and external threats from imperial powers who wanted him subjugated. The rampaging Fulani forces were one of them. Alaafin Atiba too barely tolerated him. Rotimi used this play to showcase Kurunmi’s martial prowess in the face of attacks and how the conflict within the Oyo empire eventually consumed him.
In the days of yore, in centuries that preceded the advent of colonial rule, vile comments against a people, the type of which was recently credited to American president, Donald Trump, were enough to provoke a war. Kurunmi said as much against the Ibadan and provoked their anger. “Bush goats” and “horses full of muscles, small in sense” were as villainous as “the now disgraced country” of Trump’s description of Nigeria. The disgrace isn’t that it was coming from the leader of another country; the disgrace is that Nigerian leaders are actually disgraceful. They are the proverbial self-advertising ripe fruits of an orange tree who invite stones and wood-pummeling on the mother tree. From Olusegun Obasanjo, to Umaru Yar’Adua, Goodluck Jonathan, Muhammadu Buhari and now to Bola Tinubu, Nigerian leaders of the Fourth Republic have left their food plates unwashed and have invited Trump, the green fly, to feast on their failures.
When Boko Haram insurgency began under Modu Ali Sheriff as governor of Borno State, Obasanjo was in the saddle. While holding court in Maiduguri, on July 28, 2002, Mohammed Yusuf, founder of the dreaded Islamist organisation and its spiritual leader, got surrounded by Nigerian military troops. They enveloped the sect members and arrested Yusuf two days after. Captured by the military in that expedition, Yusuf was taken to custody of the police where, for fear that he could name his sponsors in government, Yusuf was summarily executed outside of the police headquarters. Later on, some aides of the Governor Sheriff, and even the governor himself, were alleged to be in cahoots with Yusuf. Rather than decisively stamp his feet on this potentially viral cells of an affliction, President Obasanjo would rather order the rout of Odi and Zaki Biam.
I was one of the reporters who covered the blood-curdling news of the amputation of Jangebe, the first victim of the politicisation of Islam, in Gusau, Zamfara State in 1999. On October 27 of that year, Ahmed Sani Yerima, as governor, dared Obasanjo and introduced the Sharia law. The eleven other states in northern Nigeria who parade majority Muslim populations, immediately followed suit, regardless of the stipulations of the Nigerian constitution which stated that Nigeria is not a religious state. Obasanjo had the renown of the warrior, Morilewa who Odolaye Aremu sang his panegyrics as “Òtagììrì p’egbèje ènìyàn” – one who, with the clinical sprint of a tiger, eliminates 140 people at a go.
In this instance, however, because he wanted to be politically correct and didn’t want to hurt the north, Obasanjo became too feeble to stop the north. There were vehement protests everywhere against the move, including riots, leading to several deaths. Yet, Obasanjo was too busy demolishing towns where policemen and soldiers got killed to bother about this stoked national fire.
Yes, since 1960, there had been calls for Northern Nigeria to return to the Sharia, which is a way of life of Muslims. Reference was made to its seamless practice in the Sokoto Caliphate and Kanem-Bornu empire before the British colonial rule of the 19th and 20th centuries. Yes, this empire prospered tremendously under Sharia and the people wanted a return to “the glory of former times”. Were southern Nigeria to seek a return to “the old glory” of the buoyant Oyo empire, it could also have advocated for this movement backwards to move forward. Moving backwards to the Oyo empire would have meant a wholesale reproduction of the draconian laws and the barbaric precepts of kings seizing women that caught their fancies, which were not in consonance with modernity. Beheading of opponents to the king’s command would also have come with the broth. However, since the introduction of the criminal Sharia laws into the penal laws of the 12 northern states in 2000, Northern Nigeria has remained backward, more existentially challenged ever, while its political leaders use Sharia as a draw-card for votes.
Boko Haram indeed sidled into Nigeria under the veil of Islam. On July 26, 2009, under Yar’Adua, this Islamist group launched an attack on a police station in Bauchi State where over 50 people were killed and hundreds injured. The firefight had erupted when 70 members of the Islamist sect, armed with grenades and small arms, launched an offensive.
Under Jonathan, who literally threw his hands up in surrender, and Buhari, whose amorphous anger against the Islamist group was undisguisable, the insurgents became such a hydra whose taming was a huge challenge.
Now, Nigeria has come to the valley of decision. An untrained child would receive cudgel training outside their father’s compound. Donald Trump has come with his disgraceful cudgel for Nigeria. As usual, Nigerians are hiding behind a finger. The almost 26 years of leadership hypocrisy, politicising of faith, ineptitude, abetment of mass killings of Nigerians, all in the name of looking good in the sight of northern voters, have come full throttle. It reminds me of Peter Tosh, the iconoclast Jamaican reggae musician, warning, in his No Way track, that, “Nobody feel no way/It’s coming close to payday I say…/Everyman get paid a quota’s work this day/Can I plant peas and reap rice/Can I plant cocoa and reap yam/Can I plant turnip and reap tomato/Can I plant breadfruit and reap potato?”
Now, Nigeria has come to the valley of decision. An untrained child would receive cudgel training outside their father’s compound. Donald Trump has come with his disgraceful cudgel for Nigeria. As usual, Nigerians are hiding behind a finger. The almost 26 years of leadership hypocrisy, politicising of faith, ineptitude, abetment of mass killings of Nigerians, all in the name of looking good in the sight of northern voters, have come full throttle.
Nigeria planted breadfruit over the past 26 years and desires to reap potato. The world endured the nuisance of our leaders for decades; it waited with bated breath to see whether renaissance would come from within. Now, a Sheriff for whom scruple, precis and diplomatese and the concept of national sovereignty are balderdash, is in the saddle. You may dislike the gruff of Trump as I do; in his CPC tag on Nigeria, you may see through a veil of seeking to please his American evangelicals and harvesting support at home, amid a shutdown of American government. However, you cannot denounce Trump’s statistics that brim with blood of our innocent compatriots. Their only crime was being Nigerians practising their faith.
In my piece entitled Ted Cruz’s genocide, blasphemy and Ida the slave boy (October 26, 2025) I laid bare the crux of Ted Cruz’s matter. The world cannot stand successive Nigerian governments’ hypocrisy any longer. Citizens have resigned themselves to their fates in the hands of their oppressive leaders. In the north, faiths other than Islam cannot be practised without fear. In the name of blasphemy, many have had their heads decapitated and burnt. In the words of Catholic Bishop of Sokoto, Mathew Hassan-Kukah in Lagos on Friday, “If Nigeria does not kill the dragon of religious extremism, it will be only a matter of time before we become a larger Gaza. Supremacists who hide under religion must have no place in our social and political life. The time to deal with this problem is now. The place to start is here.”
But, supremacists flourish like cedars of Lebanon here. The first thing to do is to face the fact that, the forefathers of insecurity in Nigeria – banditry, Fulani herdsmen, kidnapping etc – are Boko Haram and ISWAP. They kill, maim and destroy churches and mosques, in the name of a religion. Yes, we should agree that they are ill-informed and unrepresentative of what Islam, the religion of peace, truly stands for. But, with the genealogy of Boko Haram and ISWAP that we know, it will then be very disingenuous and hypocritical to claim that the killings in Nigeria’s northern states are in equal proportion of both Christian and Muslim adherents.
In the figures they gave of casualty of Boko Haram and ISWAP’s genocidal rout, Trump, Cruz and others spearheading this genocide claim on Nigerian Christians cannot be wrong. They may be wrong on the functionality that the grim statistics serve for them. If and when the Islamists strike, not only do they shout “Allahu Akbar,” a census of opinions of victims in northern Nigeria would reveal that their killings tilt more towards Christians and the Kafir Muslims who the insurgents see as no better than Christians.
I believe Tinubu can rout the Islamists. He stands at a tangential point to do this due to his syncretist background of being both Christian and Muslim, by birth and marriage. Trump’s irascibility is a wake-up call on Aso Rock. It is also a blessing to Nigeria. We don’t want America to storm Nigeria with her missiles. We want Trump to make Tinubu bend over backwards to smoke out those bloodsucking animals and their apologists off our land. Tinubu can do it if he blinds his eyes to the enticing pie of a second term re-election. To do this, he must heed the clarion call in the Ola Rotimi proverb which says that, “When an elder sees a mudskipper, he must not afterwards say it was a crocodile”.
Tinubu must first dismantle the tyrannical walls of political Sharia in Northern Nigeria. In doing this, he will be calling the mudskipper its real names. Then, he should flush out bloated vermin military generals who sell arms to Boko Haram and their allies in barracks who warehouse Intel reports for sale. Since we began voting trillions of Naira for fighting insurgency, military Generals and their civilian allies have stolen billions of our national patrimony yearly. I am sure America has their dossiers. She should smoke them out. America must then banish their feet from her precious soil where they love to move their blood-encrusted heists. It is in this that Trump can “attack fast, vicious, and sweet”. It will hit the insurgents hard, thereby bringing peace to the “cherished Christians”.
Lastly, I love a tweet on X last week credited to military General, Ibrahim Babangida. He wrote: “During our time in the Nigerian Military, we don’t (sic) negotiate with terrorists or offer any form of amnesty to radical groups. Those who pose(d) a significant threat (were) scheduled for court to see the judge, while those who pose(d) a much more dangerous (threat) are (sic) scheduled to see God.” It is high time the Tinubu government applied the same military strategy.
