As I write this, I am listening to a line of the song of my favourite Jamaican reggae music superstar, Peter Tosh. It is a 1979 track entitled Jah Seh No, from his Mystic Man album. When life becomes too convoluted to comprehend; when it seems I am running mad, I run into Tosh’s embrace. But, running to Tosh for an embrace is problematic. Tosh himself was like a mad man. He was unconventional, an iconoclast who didn’t see life from the prism of the living. A devout adherent of the Rastafari faith, he was highly spiritual, was a poet, philosopher and a staunch defender of African rights.
At some point, life broke Tosh’s will, long before his assassination in Kingston, Jamaica on September 11, 1987, aged 42. It would appear that his musical preachment made little impact. He was repeatedly assaulted by Jamaican police and once had his skull cracked by them. The charge was his illiberal smoking of marijuana. So, in this track, Tosh bore his frustration with orthodoxy and the system thus: “Must Rastas bear this cross alone and all the heathens go free? Must Rastas live in misery and heathens in luxury? Must righteous live in pain and always put to shame? Must they be found guilty and always get the blame?”
Tosh’s Jamaica of 1979 bears similarities with today’s Nigeria. Jamaica wore, like an apron, significant economic instability. This led to intense poverty and inequality driven by global economic shocks, domestic policy choices, capital flight, and political violence. The aftermath was massive hopelessness.
The attendant hopelessness in Jamaica fired the muse of reggae musicians. They saw naked poverty as catalysts for their songs. For instance, in 1976, Maxwell Smith, known professionally as Max Romeo & The Upsetters Band, sang in Uptown Babies Don’t Cry, about a little lad hawking Kisko, a popular brand of ice pops, on Kingston streets and shouting “Kisko pops! Kisko pops!”. He also sang about another lad who, as Star newspaper vendor, shouted, “Star News, read the news!”. They were embroiled in existential survival, said Romeo, and “help(ing) mummy pay the fee, for little junior to go to school.” For Tosh, in his Get Up, Stand Up, Jamaicans must stand up for their rights while Bob, apparently frustrated by the system, in Time Will Tell, sang confidently that ”Jah would never give the power to a baldhead to come crucify the dread.”
But the Jamaican governmental and political leadership, epitomized by Edward Seaga and Michael Manley, kept on taking advantage of the people’s hopelessness. While Seaga was of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), Manley was of the People’s National Party (PNP), the two political parties being Jamaica’s dominant rivals. JLP and PNP represented contrasting ideologies of conservative and socialist ideological leanings. In the 1970s and 80s, they were both often embroiled in fierce, violent contests, with economic and social instability being the cause of their intense political rivalry. The parties were associated with organized crime, and each deployed local gangs for intimidation of voters. It was so bad that in 1978, amidst political turmoil and a day after he himself escaped death, having been shot inside his Tuff Gong Studio, Marley organized the One Love Peace Concert where, on stage, he held the hands of Manley and Seaga, while singing the famous “One love…” song.
Nigeria of today is yesterday’s Jamaican mirror on the wall. The hopelessness in the land has the capacity to break the most impregnable will. Everything seems to be upside down. Seaga and Manley are replicated in Bola Tinubu and Abubakar Atiku. Or Peter Obi and other scavengers for power.
Everything is shrouded in a fog. Hope of retrieval of country from the jaws of political carnivores and harlots recedes by the day. This year, prelude to election year, will even be worse. Foes will stab friends and friends will stab foes, not in the back, but in their very before. War has begun, says So-kple-So. That line reminds me of Ghanaian Akan poet, Kojo Senanu’s poem, “My Song Burst” in the A Selection of African Poetry, authored by him and Theo Vincent, which recited that Akan war song.
Physical or psychological repression is writ large here. Impunity reigns like a malevolent incubus. Those are actually not the ailment. The disease is the Nigerian people. The way Nigerians’ minds have become warped, significantly captured and compartmentalized into a binary, is mind-boggling. Never have Nigerians’ minds operated in a gross profile as this. Tribe, religion, political parties determine where everyone stands. No one sees rot and maggots but opportunities. Everyone is running a rat race to take a bite of Nigeria’s carrion. Our sense of judgment has been significantly recalibrated. When I read comments by some otherwise knowledgeable and brilliant people on visible rots in the polity, I feel I am falling into depression. Yet, a part of me warns not to take Nigeria seriously. If you run mad and then die, Nigerians would piss on your graveside.
Many times, I have toyed with the option of abandoning this thankless ritual of column-writing which I began in 1998. Since then, all Nigerian governments, without exception, beginning with that of the dreaded Gen Sani Abacha, Abdulsalam Abubakar, Olusegun Obasanjo, Umaru Yar’Adua, Goodluck Jonathan, Muhammadu Buhari and of course, the present one, got the flipsides of my pen. It is a killing weekly ritual for which you are insulted for daring to have a voice. Maybe I could find sanity in silence and abandonment of my voice? After all, Reno Omokri and Daniel Bwala have found redefinition in becoming the biblical Lot’s wife. But, rather than freeze, these apostates have become ambassadors of majesty and cash. But my mind tells me I would face hell on earth and would even not rest in peace. But the truth is, where I stand has potentials of running me mad. Permit me to be immodest, those who know me know I have an ecumenical spirit that cannot hurt a fly. But when I sit behind my laptop, I am like a possessed Yoruba deity of small-pox called Sonpona. Chaos, otherwise known as upside-down, which Fela said has its meaning too, is meaningless to me. Everywhere I turn, I see chaos and my head spins, threatening to explode. Even when I cannot totally extricate myself from the rot in the land, I am grieved like a pall-bearer. Yet, another part of me tells me that order and chaos are Siamese, built into a profile by the Omnipotent.
As 2025 spun into oblivion, I stood to make a New Year resolution. But before I did this, I checked the literature of resolutions It offers no comfort. Over a century ago, specifically on January 1, 1887, Rudyard Kipling, English journalist and novelist, attempted to drill into the philosophy of resolutions. In a timeless poem which explored the human desire to make New Year resolutions and the failure that attends it, he gave a tribe of New Year resolution makers a short-lived hope. He did this in a poem he entitled Little-Known Poem on New Year’s Resolutions. Billions of people in the world make resolutions on New Year’s Day. But, said Kipling, there are trials and tribulations in resolutions. In seven short stanzas, Kipling took readers on a journey. He begins by listing vices he wants to give up. They hung on him like an apparition. Chief among the vices were alcohol, gambling, flirting, and smoking. But in each of the stanzas, as he proposes a resolution, he proposes contra sentences that nullify the resolutions and even justifying their reversals.
In the first stanza of his poem, for instance, he wrote, “I am resolved throughout the year/To lay my vices on the shelf/A godly, sober course to steer/And love my neighbors as myself”. He however quickly gives a counter: “Excepting always two or three/Whom I detest as they hate me.” In the fifth stanza, he chooses to say bye to philandering. “I am resolved—to flirt no more/It leads to strife and tribulation/Not that I used to flirt before/But as a bar against temptation”. Then he quickly repudiates the vow. “Here I except”, he said, the flirting with whom he said was “Perfectly Platonic flames.”
In Kipling’s poem, you will see the universality of the dilemma of New Year resolutions. When he wriggled towards the end of the poem, Kipling agrees that in a New year resolution, he was building an impossible wall. So he ends the poem by saying, “I am resolved—that vows like these/Though lightly made, are hard to keep/Wherefore I’ll take them by degrees/Lest my back-slidings make me weep./One vow a year will see me through/and I’ll begin with Number Two.”
Matthew Wills, in his Why New Years Falls on January 1st: Why do we celebrate the beginning of the New Year on the first of January?, took the world on a journey on the frivolities of January 1st. Julius Caesar, he said, is why. The eponymous Julian calendar, said Matthew, began in Mensis Ianuarius (or Januarius) 45B.C.. The month of January, he further reminded us, is named after the Roman god called Janus. Janus is a god who had two faces. While one faces the future, the other faces the past. Janus was however perceived, according to Wills, as “the god of beginnings, endings, and transitions, or, more prosaically, doors and passageways.”
Not long after, the world saw inadequacies in the Julian calendar. From the 16th century, it replaced it with the reformed Gregorian calendar. From the 16th century, it replaces it with the reformed Gregorian calendar. Said Matthew, in ancient times, March 1st marked the beginning of the year. In the Middle Ages, March 25th, which was the Annunciation in the Christian ecclesiastical calendar, contended with that date. It was believed that this date marked the anniversary of the day the world got created. For Americans, however, March was a month of significance. It used to be the month Americans inaugurated their presidents. For them, March 4, the day the Constitution which replaced the Articles of Confederation as law, was the beginning of a new political season. In 1933, the 20th Amendment had to swing inauguration date backwards to January 21st.
While January 1 is the Christian calendar, some other parts of the world obey it in the breach. For the Jews, New Year is Rosh Hashanah, the Middle Eastern agricultural cycle. In the Muslim world, the New Year, called Raʼs as-Sanah al-Hijrīyah, is the beginning of the year. It falls on the first day of Muharram, the first month of the lunar Islamic calendar, which marks the start of the Hijri year. It began in 622 CE with Prophet Muhammad’s migration (Hijra) from Mecca to Medina.
Among the Yoruba, just like Jews’, the agricultural season marks the beginning of the year. For them, the newness of a year is defined by their philosophy of time, which they also approximated in the saying, the next season is here so, don’t eat your yam seedling, “Àmódún ò jìnnà, má jẹ isu èèbù rẹ”. Season and time, to the Yoruba, are expressed in an embodiment of words like àkόkὸ (time around), ìgbà (season) and àsìkò (specific season) which they most times deploy interchangeably. The people also have sayings which speak to their conception of time. For instance, late professor of philosophy and my teacher at the University of Lagos, Sophie Oluwole, in one of her works, “The Labyrinth Conception of Time as Basis of Yoruba View of Development” published in Studies in Intercultural Philosophy (1997) cited Yoruba saying to illustrate this. “Tí wón bá ńpa òní, kí òla tèlé won kí ó lo wò bí won o ti sin ín (when today is being killed, tomorrow’s attendance at the murder scene is necessary so that it could see where the corpse of today is buried and for it to know how it too would be interred). The two other Yoruba sayings Oluwole cited to illustrate time and season are, one: “ogbón odún ni, wèrè èèmí ni” (this year’s wisdom is next year’s folly) and “Ìgbà ò lo bí òréré, ayé ò lo bí òpá ìbon” (a life span cannot exist ad infinitum; it is not vertical, and is unlike the straightness of the barrel of a gun).
These were all I reflected upon as I proposed to make a 2026 Resolution. The self-imposed road of a columnist I tread is a lonely, hard road strewn with briers and thorns. I remember the sermon of another Jamaican reggae great, Jimmy Cliff. It is a hard road to travel and a rough road to walk, he counseled. Many times, you are lonely, dejected and rejected on this road. You open your mouth to speak but wordless words ooze therefrom. Just as Tosh lamented in his “Must Rastas bear this cross alone and all the heathens go free?” volunteering anti-establishment opinion is like carrying a cross. Many atimes, I am inundated by family and friends to turn apostate of my belief. They fear death or state castration. Can’t the world see? Don’t they see the pains, grits and uncertainty on this road? Don’t they know that there is lushness, flourish and plenty on the other side? If I neglected these for a carapace-hard travel, I thought I would be hailed. No. Why is one who chose this lonely road the demon? And those who sup in the bowl of destruction heroes? Why? No response. Only echo of my own silent voice.
In this dejection, Audre Geraldine Lorde came to my rescue. Lorde was an American professor, philosopher, feminist, poet and rights activist. She was also a self-described Black lesbian. Lorde got romantically involved with Mildred Thompson, American sculptor, painter and lesbian she met in Nigeria during FESTAC 77. In a paper she delivered at the Modern Language Association’s “Lesbian and Literature Panel,” Chicago, Illinois, December 28, 1977 with the title, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, Lorde gave insight into the pains she encountered on account of her beliefs: “I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.”
It could also mean pain or death but she said, “learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength” and that “I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken.” Gradually, said Lorde, “I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, my silences had not protected me.” She died of liver cancer in 1995.
Yes, this is a rough, lonely road. It could be excruciating when you see friends, especially ones in government, desert you because they don’t want to associate with you. You walk alone like a deranged alchemist. Some even ask why, with your endowment and ascription, you live comparatively like a pauper. Your views are criminalized. Where you stand is not popular. But both madman Peter Tosh and lesbian Audre Geraldine Lorde give the will to trudge on in the New Year, regardless. Lorde was loud in my head with her admonition. After her initial apprehension of a mastectomy resulting from a breast cancer, she said: “I was going to die, sooner or later… My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you…. What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear.”
There and then, I made a bold vow, a New Year resolution: I will continue to speak truth to power.
