Monday Lines 1
Nigerians when they cry, even the bereaved gets scared. Because they are an impossible people; everything divides them. The Iranian crisis is the latest divider. I see Trump supporters across the Middle Belt and the South. I read anger across parts of Nigeria’s Muslim North. Some who once applauded the brutal, deadly suppression of Shiites in Kaduna (even unleashing street mobs on their corpses) now rage that the arch-enemy has killed a Shiite supreme leader in Iran.
Hubris sits in the house as ‘Stand Straight,’ while its servant walks the world as ‘The Unbending.’ Imperfect translation of a perfect Yoruba saying. But that is the simple story of America and Iran — of Donald Trump and Ali Khamenei — and the collision of pride that has brought the world to the perilous moment which started on Saturday.
The war that began on Saturday was unnecessary and avoidable. Pride and prejudice bear much of the blame. Where courtiers and kings are consumed by hubris, war becomes inevitable.
Fruit and root are inseparable. Modern Iran did not emerge in a vacuum; its identity is deeply rooted in imperial self-importance. Iran’s ancestors believed that they were a special creation; their descendants say they must stand in all places and at all times on their own terms. That explains Iranian policies marked by defiance, pride, and an unbending resolve.
A little history here. Today’s Iranians descend from a king who once tried to punish the sea.
King Xerxes’s father, Darius I, was a great king. He died, his son took over and promised himself that he was going to do what his father could not do.
In 480 BCE, Xerxes prepared to invade Greece with imperial confidence. He cut a canal through the Mount Athos isthmus and ordered pontoon bridges across the body of water called the Hellespont. Ask Geography and the maps. I did: Hellespont is today’s Dardanelles, a narrow strait in north-western Turkey, linking the Aegean to the Black Sea via the Sea of Marmara and the Bosporus. It is the natural boundary between Europe and Asia.
Xerxes built his bridges and was happy. He boasted that he was invincible and taunted Greece with a waiting defeat. Then the unexpected happened. A storm wrecked the bridges. The historian, Herodotus, wrote that when Xerxes saw what remained of his impregnable bridges, he flew into a rage and famously ordered that the sea be “punished” with 300 lashes and chains. A king lashing at nature itself for defying his will.
Oxford classicist, E. R. Dodds, defined hubris as “arrogance in word or deed or even thought.” It is that fatal overreach, the belief that power can bend even the elements, that shaped Xerxes’s campaign which ended in shame, defeat and disgrace.
Hubris, history warns, does not respect time or geography.
Today, centuries later, the excesses of antiquity reverberate in the geopolitics of a restless region. And this is not just about Iran and its leadership; it is also about the leadership of the US and Israel, its 51st state.
In June last year, after the 12-day war with Israel, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said his country emerged victorious over Israel and “delivered a slap to America’s face.” Khamenei said that the US “achieved no gains from this war.” He told the world that America came into the fight because “it felt that if it did not intervene, the (Israeli) regime would be utterly destroyed.” He spoke with his full balls.
“Have more than you show; speak less than you know” is a famous maxim delivered by the Fool in Shakespeare’s King Lear (Act 1, Scene 4). The character urges restraint, humility, and strategic silence. The Iranian leader did not benefit from that counsel from Shakespeare’s Fool. This past weekend, Iranian state media confirmed that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been killed in a joint U.S.-Israeli operation.
May our enemies not catch up with us.
Iran prepared for war at night but war sauntered in and conquered it in daytime. In the Ayatollah’s death we see a modern echo of the lethal arrogance that has courted ruin before: pride and overreach wreaking the unraveling not just of regimes, but of nations. So, what next? Analysts say that whether Iran stabilises under an interim council and new leadership, or slides into deeper conflict and chaos, will depend on forces far beyond Tehran — and far beyond the ambitions of any one man.
When the elephant dies, the forest slips into silence. Iran has entered a 40-day period of national mourning. What happened to that country has been described as the most devastating attack on that soil in decades. Across the nation, grief mingles with fear as the country confronts a fraught leadership transition and the looming shadow of further conflict.
Ambition outran prudence when Xerxes crossed into Greece in 480 BCE. I can say the same of Iran of 2026 and its fight with the United States, a confrontation of pride and peril.
Old Persia is modern Iran. For centuries the world used the name ‘Persia’, they insisted that their country was Iran. In the twentieth century, Iranians successfully got the country to be known and called Iran — the name their ancestors gave them and which they used for themselves. That shift was more than semantic; it reflected the nation’s long memory and deep sense of identity. Today, that identity is being threshed in an arena of pride, where heavyweights pound each other with deathly blows.
Khamenei’s three-plus decades in power were marked by internal repression, mass protests violently suppressed, and decades of confrontation with Western powers over Iran’s nuclear programme and regional influence. His leadership was never just about Tehran; it helped shape the geopolitical contest across the Middle East, backing proxy networks and challenging U.S. and Israeli interests. Now, an era has ended.
It is a war about armament and disarmament. The West, particularly America, the police of the world, said Iran was desperately involved in a nuclear weapon programme. Of course, it cannot be allowed to enter that premier league; only privileged initiates play on that field.
I have heard questions such as: If others have nuclear weapons, why can’t Iran? That is the rational question that can only be asked in a world competing on a level playing field. It is worse for Iran now that a pretender to Christianity occupies the White House.
I am alluding to what end-time interpreters call Iran’s role in the final days. Some argue that hardliners are moving from geopolitics into theology, treating apocalyptic texts literally and geopolitically rather than symbolically. They take their lessons from 20th-century writers like Christian Zionist and dispensationalist Hal Lindsey, author of ‘The Late Great Planet Earth’ (1970), and from later U.S. prophecy teachers.
I asked and was told that scripture and scholars of Ezekiel 38–39 suggest modern Iran (ancient Persia or Elam) will join a coalition, which will include Russia, Sudan and others, in an assault on Israel during the Great Tribulation. And they believe that if they do not move now, the tribulation they dread will be here and now.
They see Persia’s enduring presence in the region, from Babylonian conquest to the Medo-Persian Empire and through the New Testament era, as reinforcing its prophetic significance. Complicating matters, Iran and its current leadership are mostly Shia Muslim, whose doctrine holds that the Hidden Imam, or Mahdi, will return at the end of time, preceded by major turmoil in the region.
When a people carry the weight of such spiritually foreboding significance, the possession of nuclear weapons becomes an even more dangerous proposition. Especially in a Trump era ruled by hubris, superstition and conspiracy theories.
It is a messy affair. As Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman observe in ‘A Perfect Mess’, a little disorder can make systems not weaker but stronger, more adaptable, more resilient, and, paradoxically, more effective. Perhaps Iran, and indeed the world, needs this current madness: the chaos, the overreach, the collisions of ambition and belief, to build a sane world. Maybe (and I mean, maybe) the very disorder we dread is the teacher we cannot ignore.
The death of the Ayatollah ended an era, but the war is far from over, and may not end soon. History shows these people do not fight, lose and go home — witness the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. Go further back and the record is just as telling: the Greco-Persian Wars, a series of conflicts between the Greek city-states and the Persian Empire, lasted roughly 50 years, from 499 BCE to 449 BCE.
The world should brace for a long engagement of missiles, warships, and warplanes, with all the social, political, and economic disruptions that follow. Nigeria, in particular, must remain vigilant.
Because of who the killers of the Iranian leaders are, I fear complications in areas and regions that shed blood when the victim sheds mere tears. The anger in northern Nigeria is not confined to Nigeria; it echoes across sympathetic corridors stretching from the Sahel to the streets of the Middle East. We need to be very careful. Localising the conflict here will be an ill wind.
To underscore vigilance and the lesson of caution, I anchor all this on what the mother bird tells her chick: a storm will not kill a bird if it listens to the precautions the storm teaches. An expanded conflict may push humanity toward the very precipice it has long struggled to avoid. It can.
Monday Lines 2
PDP, APC are mere jerseys
Journalist arrived at the Government House with a proverb on his tongue.
“Your Excellency,” he began after the courtesies, notebook open, “in Yoruba, there is a word: Apanimáyọdà.”
The APC governor smiled faintly. “The one who kills without unsheathing a sword.”
“Exactly,” the journalist said. “A + pa + ni + má + yọ + idà—the agent who destroys without drawing blood. No blade flashes, yet the opponent falls. I remembered that word when the president said last Wednesday while breaking fast with senators that he was accused of killing opposition whereas he had no gun; that he was not coercing defections to the APC. Yet governors, senators, state lawmakers keep crossing over. No shots fired. Still, the opposition dissolves, like salt in the rain.”
The governor leaned back, untroubled. “You are suggesting invisible warfare?”
“I am asking,” the journalist replied carefully, “whether power sometimes operates without fingerprints.”
The governor folded his arms. “Power always operates without fingerprints. The visible hand is rarely the decisive one.”
“But isn’t that precisely the fear?” the journalist pressed. “That opposition parties are collapsing not by open contest but by quiet orchestration?”
“Huh.”
“Your Excellency,” the journalist continued, “governors are defecting one by one. Adamawa yesterday. Another rumoured tomorrow. It feels like that nursery rhyme: ‘ten green bottles hanging on the wall.’ Igo mewa l’ara ogiri…”
The governor smiled faintly. “And if one green bottle should accidentally fall…”
“There’ll be nine green bottles hanging on the wall,” the journalist completed.
Then continued: “Except in this case, the bottles are opposition governors. And they are all almost gone. One by one, they’re rolling into the ruling party.” The journalist pauses, then leaned closer. “It is like the children’s game. Ten green bottles hanging on a wall. Each time the verse says, ‘And if one green bottle should accidentally fall,’ the children point to the next one to drop. One by one, they fall, until none remains. Here, each defection triggers the next. The circle keeps spinning, hands linked, until the last green remains, unsure if it is safe.”
Governor smiled. Coughed gently. “Fortunately, this is not an interview. We are just having a conversation.”
“Yes.” The journalist responded, flipped a page in his notebook. “Still, Your Excellency, people are shocked at how easily politicians change parties like panties. Yesterday PDP. Today APC. Tomorrow, who knows?”
The governor’s lips curved. “My friend, you call it party, we call it platform. Besides, PDP and APC are mere jerseys.”
“Jerseys?”
“Yes. Colours. Emblems. In football, the striker kisses one badge today and another tomorrow. Their fans follow them. Jerseys change. The pitch remains. The league continues. The goalposts do not move.”
“That sounds cynical.”
“It sounds experienced,” the governor corrected. “Have you heard of Sebastián Abreu?”
“The Uruguayan who played everywhere?”
“Thirty-one clubs,” the governor nodded. “A world record. They called him El Loco, restless like crazy. He wore every colour imaginable, from Nacional to River Plate, San Lorenzo, Botafogo and beyond. Yet he remained a professional. Did the ball reject him because he changed shirts?”
“But football is commerce,” the journalist insisted. “Politics is trust.”
The governor smiled wider. “And you think football is only romance? Ask Neymar. Every transfer shattered a record, from Santos FC to FC Barcelona, then to Paris Saint-Germain, Al Hilal, and in 2025, he was back to Santos. As he moved, the fees rose. The loyalty followed valuation.”
“So, politicians are commodities?”
“Politicians,” the governor said evenly, “are survivors.”
He paused, then added, “In politics, rigidity is fatal. Ask Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran. He woke up a human being on Saturday, before dusk, he had become a body, lifeless. If he was not rigid, he would not have died before his time. Flexible branches endure the storm.”
The journalist did not smile. “One moral philosophy also warns: What one uses to destroy a neighbour may return as an instrument of one’s undoing.”
The governor nodded slowly. “True. A roof strengthened with stolen thatch will leak.”
“Then doesn’t the Apanimáyọdà risk eventual unravelling?”
“Perhaps,” the governor conceded. “But that will be after the next meal. And, remember: not every bloodless victory is illegitimate. There is invisible power that preserves order, and there is invisible power that corrodes it. History decides which is which.”
“And the voters?”
“They care about the bucks, and maybe access,” he replied. “They cheer for the goal, not the colour of the boot. I know one guy in Ibadan who named his son Lampard, another named his Fabregas. They followed their favourites as they moved across the field of play.” The governor said, adjusted his cufflinks. “In any case, it looks like Ibadan has revived PDP’s Lazarus. I think the party may be on its way back. So, your fear may be premature. But, come. Politics is movement.”
“So is gravity,” the journalist replied. “But when everyone gets packed into one vehicle, a simple accident imperils them all. Green bottles falling over green bottles makes shards of them all. We call what remains opalanba, danger to all.”
The governor looked at him sharply.
“You’ve been reading Achebe again.”
“Anthills of the Savannah,” the journalist nodded. “Chris is dying, he whispers ‘The Last Grin.’ But his girlfriend, Beatrice, puts the correct sound: ‘the last green.’ A private, homophone joke about ten green bottles. Three childhood friends—Sam, Chris, Ikem – who rose to power together. One by one, they fell. The last green was not a smile. It was a warning.”
“A warning against what?” the governor asked.
“Elitism. Isolation. Packing power too tightly at the top. When everyone important shares the same room, the same thinking, the same fear, the same ambition, one spark, or one crack cremates, or collapses the whole structure.”
The governor leaned back. “You assume unity equals fragility.”
“I’m suggesting concentration carries risk,” the journalist said. “If the Nigerian Governors Forum, for instance, becomes effectively of one party, where is the tension that keeps democracy elastic? Where is the internal friction that prevents complacency?”
“You speak as though opposition is a sacrament,” the governor replied calmly. “Governors move because they calculate interest, survival, alignment with federal power.”
“And if one green bottle should accidentally fall…”
“You make it sound like doom,” the governor interrupted. “Perhaps it is consolidation.”
“Consolidation for whom?” The journalist pressed. “The rhyme is playful, but Achebe turned it tragic. The ‘last green’ symbolised how a small ruling circle, detached from the people, became vulnerable to its own excess.”
The journalist cast a look at the governor and continued. “They move because they fear losing power, influence, maybe even freedom. People should live for something. During the First World War, the British wanted as many Africans as they could get to fight the Germans. Ibadan chiefs said no. The people backed them. But by August 1917, all the chiefs, except one, had defected to the British, betraying their leader, the Balogun. They were even made to write a petition calling their leader disloyal and seditious. The Balogun in the story did not defect, refused to, even under intense pressure from the government. He died with his honour intact. History is very kind to him. I read that in Toyin Falola’s ‘Ibadan’ on pages 562–564.” It is also in I.B. Akinyele’s ‘Iwe Itan Ibadan.’
“Was that chief the same person called Balogun Kobomoje?”
“No. Balogun Kobomoje’s real name was Balogun Ola Orowusi, a legendary warrior and leader in 19th-century Ibadan. He led Ibadan chiefs and people to resist colonial imposition and pressure. He also chose death instead of dishonour, and an appreciative people and history gave him the everlasting name, ‘Kobomoje’ – which roughly means ‘one who did not destroy his essence as a child of honour.’ The defecting governors today don’t care about honour, name, or legacy.”
“Today’s situation is different.”
“Really? And what makes it different?”
The governor was quiet for a moment.
“You fear a political monoculture,” he said at last.
“I fear a crowded vehicle crashing into a market,” the journalist answered. “When everyone squeezes into one bus because it seems fastest and safest, they forget that a single collision cracks the skulls of all passengers.”
“And what is the alternative? They have a vehicle, a bus, stuck on the highway. What is the alternative they have? To get stranded?” The governor asked.
“No,” the journalist said. “Repair, retrieve your own bus, fix it. Strong men reorganise their house when the storm gathers. Weak men run into another man’s house. Take King Shaka, the Zulu. At the height of his reign, he was surrounded by powerful neighbours and rising uncertainties. What did he do? He reorganised his house. He restructured authority. He forged discipline. History remembers him not because he fled into protection, but because he built protection.
The governor rose and walked toward the window. “You know,” he said softly, “defections are rarely about poetry. They are about budgets, influence, federal access.”
“And money, and power,” the journalist added.
“And power,” the governor conceded.
He turned back.
“But remember this,” he said. “Ten green bottles fall because they are hanging loosely. Perhaps those moving believe they are securing themselves.”
“Or clustering themselves into a tighter, combustible formation,” the journalist replied.
Silence lingered between them.
“So,” the governor asked, almost gently, “in your reading of Achebe, what happens to the last green?”
“The last green smiles,” the journalist said. “But only because it does not yet know it is next.”
Outside, the political map was still changing colour. One by one.
The governor studied him for a moment. “You see danger. I see opportunity.”
“Opportunity?”
“Yes.” he said calmly. “Opportunity for renewal. Politicians, like moulting snakes, shed old skins. When a structure weakens, its members begin to drift. No gun is required to leave a sinking ship.”
“That was the president’s metaphor,” the journalist said. “But who drilled the holes?”
The governor chuckled softly. “Ah. Now we are in the territory of àṣẹ.”
He leaned forward. “Yoruba metaphysics teaches that power need not be noisy to be effective. A throne may be safe without a battle. An opponent may dismantle himself while you merely stand firm, watching. That does not make you an assassin.”
“Unless you engineered the dismantling.”
“Engineering is not always coercion,” the governor replied. “Sometimes it is persuasion. Sometimes it is patience.”
“Your Excellency, at this rate, the Nigerian Governors Forum will soon become a one-party forum.”
The governor smiled. “You journalists enjoy dramatic forecasts.”
“Is it a drama?” the journalist pressed. “Adamawa’s governor moved last Friday. The few remaining ones are not finding it funny. The map has changed colour faster than harmattan grass. Soon, there may be no meaningful opposition among governors.”
The governor adjusted his glasses. “Must there be opposition? Politics is dynamic.”
“That is a polite word for defection,” the journalist replied. “People voted along party lines. Now the lines are dissolving.”
“People voted for leadership,” the governor countered. “Parties are vehicles. When a vehicle breaks down, you don’t sit inside it out of sentiment, or stand helpless by the roadside. You step into one that moves.”
“And if everyone crowds into one vehicle?” the journalist asked. “Doesn’t that weaken democracy and endanger you people?”
The governor paused, studying the ceiling as though the answer were written there. “Endanger who? Governors? No. Not at all. We are players. In Yoruba, players are osere. The word also means actor. You are too serious with Nigeria. Take it easy, bros. Democracy is not sustained by the number of parties alone. It is sustained by performance, by institutions.”
“But the symbolism matters,” the journalist insisted. “Governance risks becoming an echo chamber. One party. One chorus. No dissent.”
The governor’s smile thinned. “You assume dissent disappears when people share a platform. It does not. It simply changes tone.”
“Or becomes private,” the journalist said quietly.
Silence hovered.
“Very soon,” the journalist continued, “we may read what Chinua Achebe calls the last grin—or is it the last green?”
The governor laughed softly. “Ah, Achebe.”
“Yes,” the journalist said. “That haunting image; the smile that lingers after something has been fundamentally altered. Is this what we are witnessing? The last grin of multiparty competition? Or the last green before everything fades into one colour?”
The governor leaned forward. “Sometimes alliances form because interests converge. Sometimes because survival demands it.”
“And sometimes because power attracts,” the journalist replied.
“That too,” the governor conceded. “Power has gravity.”
“But gravity can collapse a system into a single mass,” the journalist said. “Is that healthy?”
The governor folded his hands. “You are worried about monopoly. We are focused on stability.”
“History shows,” the journalist said carefully, “that when opposition thins, accountability follows it into exile.”
The governor stood, signalling the conversation’s end.
“You see an ending,” he said. “I see a transition.”
“And the grin?” the journalist asked, rising as well.
The governor walked him toward the door.
“My friend,” he said quietly, “in politics, the grin and the green often sound alike from a distance. It is only with time that you know which one you were hearing.”
The journalist closed his notebook gently. “So there are no permanent enemies?”
“In this league?” he said quietly. “There are only permanent interests.”
Outside, the journalist glanced back at the Government House. Dusk gathered over the House. The governor’s final words lingered like a proverb released into the wind: “Jerseys change. The league continues.”
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