Rivers crisis: Osundare writes new CP

Niyi Osundare

Professor of English Language at the University of New Orleans, Niyi Osundare, has urged the newly-appointed Commissioner of Police in Rivers State, Mr. Tunde Ogunsakin, to discharge his duty without fear or favour.

In a letter dated February 8, 2014, Osundare advised Ogunsakin, a fellow native of Ikere-Ekiti, Ekiti State, to beware of what he described as the Nigerian factor, especially in the context of the political crisis that Rivers State has witnessed in recent times.

Osundare said, “Please, be careful of the incubus called the Nigerian factor. Never forget to think about life after power after office. Remember the town from which you come.”

He noted in the “letter to the Editor” that many sons and daughters of Ikere-Ekiti  had been sending him (CP) different kinds of congratulatory messages.

But, according to the renowned scholar and poet, some of those messages were merely sentimental.

Osundare added, “Many Ikere-Ekiti sons and daughters  have greeted with a generous outpouring of congratulatory messages,  the just-announced posting of Mr. Ogunsakin as Commissioner of Police in Rivers State.  That’s how it should be. But many of these messages, in the main, have been full of hackneyed prayers and sentimental greetings. These are not enough.

“Let us all wake up to the fact that Mr. Ogunsakin’s posting is not just another routine arrangement. He is being sent to a virtual battleground in a state where a costly, but absolutely unnecessary, war has been waged for the past many months, a senseless war that has shown no signs of abating.”

According to him, Ogunsakin needs courage, wisdom, hindsight and foresight to succeed in his new assignment.

“You don’t require a soothsayer to tell you that, from the way things are going, the fate of Nigeria’s present democracy may well depend upon how  the delicate war in Rivers State is handled. We are seeing in this state the acts of arrant stupidity, intolerance, and misuse of the so-called federal might that have been the bane of Nigeria’s several unsuccessful attempts at democracy. Once again, the monster is at our door. But as usual, we do not seem to see it.

Osundare told the police boss, “Remember the town from which you come.”

Interestingly, many followers of Osundare’s poetry will remember that apart from occasionally writing to the editor, he also makes use of letters as a literary technique in some of his poems. In his Songs of the Season, for instance, a poem he dedicates to the late freedom fighter, Chief Gani Fawehinmi, is titled Letter to Gani Fawehinmi. In the piece, he salutes the courage of the human rights champion who was, by the 1980s/90s, when the book was published, under incarceration by the military.
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