By Festus Adedayo
Last Monday, as noiselessly as a phantom, President Bola Tinubu brought home his strange friend. While an Igbo proverb says the footsteps of a man cannot create a stampede, Alexander Zingman, the president’s Belarusian friend’s sloppy footsteps created more than a stampede. It was as though the great South African poet, Mazisi Kunene’s lines were being chanted to scare us. They reverberated round the length and breadth of Nigeria. “The madman has entered our house with violence/Defiling our sacred grounds/…Bending down our high priests with iron…” Kunene wrote. We could have kept silent at the appearance of the man who entered our own house. It should be the High Priest’s wahala that a stranger could bend him so shamelessly. After all, Yoruba say, a mother who gives birth to a demonic child (Omo òràn) has the sole burden of backing her imp.
In Abuja, at the official inauguration of 2000 tractors for distribution nationwide by his administration, Tinubu openly acknowledged the contractor who handled the tractor purchase, Zingman, as his former schoolmate at the Chicago State University (CSU). “Alex was my very good neighbour and schoolmate in Chicago. Never did we dream that I would become President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and Alex, a successful businessman from Belarus—working together to promote the prosperity of our two countries. I believe our university will be very proud that we are doing this here today,” he said.
Oh, Chicago, again!
By the way, you don’t know the Ìkéèmù? You probably then wouldn’t know the Afó’kéèmù. The Ìkéèmù is one of the relics of traditional Yoruba society that didn’t survive into the now. Its most relatable equivalent is the western society’s pitcher. Ìkéèmù is a broken pottery crushed and reused into a container for drawing water from the pot. However, while the pitcher has a lip or spout and a handle, the Ìkéèmù doesn’t. Virtually all homes which owned a central clay pot, reputed to be an ancient water cooling technology, had the Ìkéèmù for drawing its water. Many epigrammatic imagery got made to support this African pitcher. Two of such were projected in two songs of Yoruba Apala music singer, Ayinla Omowura. One was in an elegy to the fallen Nigerian Head of State, General Murtala Muhammed and the other, a tribute to Shuaib Ayinde Bakare, a Juju musician who was murdered on October 1, 1972. Muhammed had fallen to the irreverent bullets of Colonel Bukar Suka Dimka and his coup-plotters on February 13, 1976.
In a tear-inducing dirge garnished with Abeokuta, Egba dialect, Omowura mourned Muhammed with an infectious solemnity.“General, (Balogun) fare thee well,” he sang. “We can only meet when we chance into your lookalike or in the dream. Even one on horseback cannot now outpace you in your race to the hereafter.” The musician then veered into lamentation. Wickedness had taken over the face of the earth, he wailed. It had so flourished that the wicked (Ìkà) never wish that the one who shoulders a heavy load ever gets respite from their heavy laden. Regardless of their wishes, however, sang Omowura, one’s destiny (orí) will always intervene. Now deploying the Ìkéèmù imagery to ram home his message, Omowura wondered why the world is so implacable that, the normal routine of fetching water to drink from the pot with the Ìkéèmù and dropping it on the pot’s small lid at the completion of the task, attracts the world’s frown. “Ayé ò fé ká mu’mi, k’á sò’kéèmù sí’lè, l’ayé fi ńjo mí l’ójú”, he lamented. Omowura compared General Muhammed’s gruelling fate in the hands of unknown assailants to the above fate of this traditional pitcher, the Ìkéèmù.
The singer was not done with the pitcher imagery. In an earlier immediate post-civil war album he did, rather than use the Ìkéèmù, Omowura chose to deploy same image of a cup, with a different but deeper name, “Ìmumi.” At the murder of his musical contemporary, Ayinde Bakare, Omowura did another very moving elegy for this Lafiaji, Lagos-born talented musician. Murdered by a God-knows-who, Bakare’s headless corpse was discovered by the Lagos State government inside the lagoon after days of search. He was subsequently given anonymous burial by the state. However, his name, ‘Bakare’, inscribed on his arm at birth, alerted the search party when it stumbled on it inside government’s hospital file. Bakare’s remains were eventually exhumed and properly reburied by his contemporaries like Sunny Ade, Ebenezer Obey, IK Dairo and Adeolu Akinsanya, alias Baba Ètò. In his elegy to the departed Bakare, Omowura also wondered why the people of the world always want to break one’s pitcher, an imagery for existence. He sang this as, “Ìmumi èdá l’ayé ńfé fó…” He however besought God never to allow them.
Around Ìkéèmù were conjured many other epigrammatic myths, lore, wise-sayings and practices. For instance, woe betides the child who breaks this traditional pitcher. On top of being demonized for this malfeasance, the pitcher-breaker is continuously made the butt of inelegant descriptions at home. No matter how long after the Ìkéèmù had been broken, the ‘sin’ of the child’s temerity of breaking the family pitcher is exhumed and referenced, either in momentary jokes, for attribution or as reminder of how not to maltreat family property. The ceaseless reference to this pitcher-breaking infraction birthed the aphorism, “Enu kìí sìn l’ára afó’kéèmù . The most similar repetitive conjuration of the sin of the breaker of the pitcher can be found in Wole Soyinka or John Pepper Clark’s Abiku poems. They both treat the concept of irritating repetition. For Soyinka, the resembling line is, “I am Abiku, calling for the first/And repeated time” while Pepper-Clark’s is “Coming and going these several seasons/Do you stay on baobab tree?” The two poems are both dismissive of the Yoruba Abiku mythical child who is possessed by the stubborn spirit of dying and rebirth in its mother’s womb, in a continuous process.
The greatest calamity that could befall a communication team of a politically exposed person is to have a flippant boss. Immediately after his unconscionable remark at the commissioning of the 2000 tractors, Tinubu’s communication team must have been hit by a seismic upheaval equivalent in proportion to the Hiroshima and Nagazaki bomb. At that event, apparently feeling the need to bolster the narrative that he indeed possessed the highly-disputed CSU certificate, Tinubu flippantly descended into a needless Zingman narrative. In the process, he did his disputatious certificate reputation another fatal blow.
In 2023, in an operation similar to Donald Trump’s Midnight Hammer strikes on Iran, fearless Nigerian journalist, David Hundeyin, bombed the Tinubu’s nuclear sites bunker. The bunker was where he hid the facts and fictions of his CSU certificate. Hundeyin bombed Tinubu’s bunkers with equivalents of America’s B-2 bombers and cruise missiles. His aim was to penetrate the secrets therein. Thereafter, all went quiet on the home front as the Tinubu camp claimed the bombers merely scratched the surface of his nukes. However, last week, the president’s penchant for superlatives exhumed the Chicago certificate corpse buried in a shallow grave. His self-thrown bomb hit his guarded nukes sight. By this, the president and his certificate, the latter of which has been in the news since 2000 when the scandal broke, became the center of discourse again. This is making it the proverbial pitcher-breaker, the Afo’kéèmù, whose sin is subject of repeated innuendos, mockeries and discussions.
Doubtless, we live in a world that reggae music superstar, Bob Marley, described as “light as feather and heavy as lead”. Immediately the president mentioned Zingman as his friend, national curiosity over this strange man inflated like a penny balloon. Zingman’s dossier became a hot search sport. In a jiffy, his resume was on the radar and his details landed on the palms of every Nigerian. In May 2023, Kenyans were similarly upbeat about Zingman. This was when his name was announced as delegation of the country’s Minister of Commerce’s visit to Quatar. He and another Belarusian buddy of his, Oleg Vodchits, were listed as “advisers for the Gulf countries” to the Kenyan minister event. Aged 56 in 2023, Vodchits was 36 at the time. More than this, Kenyans’ check revealed that the duo had earlier been detained for two weeks in the DR Congo on allegation of ties with war-veteran, Joseph Kabila.
Other information revealed that Zingman had close ties to Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, one of the most despotic leaders in Europe. Through this tie, he strikes quid pro quo deals with tremendous backing of Lukashenko. After a state visit by Lukashenko, Zingman once landed a $66 million contract in Zimbabwe for the supply of about 3,500 tractors. Vodchits, his ally’s photo-op with the Zambian president, with both men holding wine glasses in a scintillating manner, drew flak from Zambians. This was after investigations revealed that official corruption deals might have been the twine binding them together. Reports also had it that Zingman has close ties to top officials in about a dozen African and Middle Eastern countries. When the Pandora Papers were released on October 3, 2021 by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), Zingman’s name was linked to documents which alleged that he and an unnamed partner made use of offshore shell companies to hide their interests in a Zimbabwean gold deal.
In the national frenzy to situate Tinubu’s most recent strange friend, respected online newspaper, TheCable’s Fact Check burst the bubble. Its forensic scan put a lie to the president’s claim that “Alex was my very good neighbour and schoolmate in Chicago.” Born on November 26, 1966 in Minsk, Belarus, not only will Zingman be 59 years old by November 2025, he attended University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC), United States, from 1991 to 1995, two decades after the president left university. More instructively, while Zingman attended UIC, Tinubu claimed he attended the CSU in 1979. So, why did Tinubu conflate the universities? Was this a deliberate lie, misrepresentation, falsification of fact or fabrication of relationship; what Yoruba call “tan’ná w’ébí”? What ulterior motive was that lie put to? Was the president genuinely misled about Zingman; or was the untruth made in the quest to further make the corpse of his CSU claim walk? Or, is the president suffering from momentary amnesia? Or, is such barefaced lying the way of life of the man who is our president? The whole Zingman episode stinks and, in the words of Olatunji Dare, gets “curiouser and curiouser”.
If you saw how fluidly Zingman genuflected on that day, smiling from ear to ear like a lost tabby, your hunch should tell you that something was just not right. As Tinubu bathed him with unearned encomiums, the Belarusian twiddled his frame like a tadpole which my people call légbénlègbé. Anyone familiar with the dramatics of Smart Alecs would see something similar in the Belarusian’s mannerism. My take is that, Alec has spent considerable time studying the psyche of African leaders. He found out that grovelling, pandering to their vanity, is the key that unlocks their country’s vaults. It is opaque characters, with heavy roaches in their wardrobes, that African leaders find convenient to deal with. Another hunch I have is that Zingman, hunting for scandals as ladder into the hearts of African leaders, found Tinubu’s Achilles heel to be that he needed foreign validation for his unending Afó’kéèmù Chicago University scandal. Smart Alec then opted to feed the president the bait of his attendance of same university with him. The president would be just too eager to award a multi-million dollar contract to a fawner.
The need for interrogation of this obvious ad-lib presidential lie got further compounded. TheCable Fact Check’s methodic drilling then revealed that, not only didn’t both men – Tinubu and Zingman – never attended same university, the period of their attendance of university was decades apart. Zingman must have been about eleven years old at the time Tinubu enrolled at the CSI in 1977 and age 13 at the time of his graduation. Zingman’s profile even further indicated that he hadn’t moved to the US as at the time Tinubu was a student of CSU.
Nigerians should be genuinely bothered about Tinubu’s new strange friend. Such serpentine associations raise questions about the boundaries between personal and public interests. Tinubu is however not alone in acquisition of questionable friends and associates. Slovak Prime Minister, Robert Fico’s relationship with Marian Kocner similarly raised eyebrows. The question on the lips of Slovanians was why Fico would get involved with Kocner, a businessman notorious for several high-profile corruption scandals. Fico’s government was embroiled in scalding criticisms over its handling of corruption cases with his relationship with Kocner as a bad advertisement. The same moral measure was used to weigh former Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych’s relationship with Oleksandr Yanukovych. Yanukovych’s son, Oleksandr’s had already acquired a notorious renown for living a lavish lifestyle and was implicated in several corruption scandals. These examples not only illustrate the complex tar-brushing relationships that could exist between world leaders and their associates, they often point at off-the-table dubious deals.
An ancient English aphorism argues that, when you show me your friend, I will tell you who you are. When the Nigerian president has as friend a Zingman, with such a disputatious past and present, it tells onlookers not to look too far to see who he himself is. The Zingman pattern of sidling into African presidents was replayed prior to now. First Lady, Oluremi Tinubu had reportedly visited Lukashenko on a shuttle diplomacy in 2023 to express appreciation to the Belarusian president for scholarships awarded to Nigerian students on her “Renewed Hope Initiative” programme. Thereafter, the contract, running into millions of dollars, was awarded to Zingman’s firm for supply of 2000 tractors.
My advice to our president is to heed the imperishable advice of American performer, actor and humorous social commentator, William Rogers (November 4, 1879 – August 15, 1935). Rogers’ words to him is, ‘When you find yourself in a hole, quit digging.’ It is obvious that, on the matter of his CSU certificate, against Rogers’ counsel, the president is trapped inside a deep trench and is yet digging. It not only makes him susceptible to unconscionable scammers, makes him vulnerable to baits, the type he just swallowed, it ensures he is vulnerable in all material particular.