Category: Columnists

Preamble

Let me start today with a Qur’anic admonition which I have frequently quoted in this column but which has consistently meant nothing to the rulers of Nigeria. It goes thus: “…Beware of a calamity that may descend not only on the perpetrators of injustice amongst you (but also on the innocent ones); and be warned that Allah’s retribution can be very severe on the unjust…” Q. 8:25.   

History is an invisible teacher. It teaches the experience of the past to the inexperienced people of the present with a view to guarding them towards a safe future. Some people perceive history as the best teacher because it warns against the vanity of human wishes as much as it encourages the emulation of impeccable exemplariness of the past. Others call it a bad teacher because it does not practically enforce its teachings by preventing its supposed students from falling into the quagmire of life.

From whatever angle it is observed, however, history remains the undisputable teacher of all teachers which can be described in any way by anybody depending on the side of the divide to which each observer belongs. Thus, for as long as human beings remain in existence, passing through the coast of history will never cease to serve a meal of lesson.

Recently, Libya, a onetime Italian colony in North Africa, stood out as a bastion from where the smoke of history was oozing out into the firmament of Africa and the Middle East for misguided rulers to inhale some scents of experience from. Of all the Arab countries that recently engulfed in political turmoil, perhaps the least expected to join the fray was Libya. And that assertion would have become an axiom if the 69 year old despot of that country had heeded the warning of history coming from the neighbouring Tunisia.

There had been a general but erroneous belief that the trend of the ongoing revolts in the Arab world started with the fall of the imperial monarch, of Iran (Muhammad Pahlavi ) who styled himself the Shah n Shah (King of Kings). Iran is though situated in the Middle East, she is not an Arab country.

The truth is that the Arab revolts actually began two years earlier (1977) in Egypt. It was called ‘Egyptian Bread Riots’.

The two day riots of January 18 and 19, 1977 were a spontaneous reaction by hundreds of thousands of peasants to the removal of state subsidies on foodstuffs as recommended by the World Bank and the International Monetary Funds (IMF). The then Egyptian President, Anwar Sadat, had, in response to IMF’s recommendation, increased the price of a loaf of bread by just one Piaster (an equivalence of one Nigerian Kobo). The implementation of that policy was the height of insensitivity, on the part the government, to the murderous plight of the masses at that time.

By the time the dust settled, about 79 people had been shrouded for burial while over 800 others became patients in the casualty sections of many Hospitals in the country. The riots ended only with the reversal of that obnoxious policy and the restoration of the removed subsidies. That singular incident, added to the general discontent in the land hitherto caused by the evident class dichotomy, eventually led to the assassination of President Sadat three years later.

From thence, Egyptians became conscious that the only language understandable to their government was violent revolt. Thus, in 1986, barely six years after the death of Sadat and the assumption of office as President by Hosni Mubarak, another major riot broke out in Egypt.

On February 25, 1986, about 17000 Egyptian conscripts of the Central Security Forces (CSF) otherwise known as Egyptian Para-military Force staged a violent protest in and around Cairo city destroying two major Hotels and targeting the property of the upper and the middle classes. The riots caused by a peddled rumour that the government had decided to increase the then two year compulsory national service to three years without any commensurate remuneration lasted three days with official casualty figure put at 107. Over 2000 people were said to be terribly wounded.

Unlike Sadat who quickly reversed his foodstuff subsidy policy, the only lesson which Hosni Mubarak seemed to have learnt from Sadat’s experience was the use of force. Ever since, Egypt had become a delicate gun powder waiting to explode at anytime as the nation’s youths had become so restively radicalized that taming with mere appeal was impossible. If there was any surprise about the recent Egyptian revolution that ended Mubarak’s 32 year regime with ignominy therefore, it was its delay till that time.       

With the Iranian and the Egyptian experience, one would expect the other rulers in the Middle East region as well as Africa to learn a lesson. But as a Yoruba adage goes,” a dog destined to die in perdition will never respond to the whistle of the hunter”.

In Tunisia, the protests leading to the flight of the tyrannical President Zain El-Abidine Ben Ali to Saudi Arabia were instigated by the gruesomely symbolic suicide of one Mohammed Bouazizi on December 17, 2013. The 25 year old College graduate had used his University degree as collateral to obtain a bank loan with which he ventured into trading in grotesque having realized the futility of looking for job in a country where about 14% of the populace was unemployed. But unexpectedly, his wares were confiscated by government officials for not obtaining official permit to sell farm products. In reaction, the young man concluded that his country didn’t need him after all and he decided to commit suicide by setting himself ablaze.

Efforts to rescue him proved abortive as he died in a Hospital a couple of days thereafter.

Piqued by that sad incident, the public reaction to his death was unimaginably spontaneous. Violence erupted across cities and towns as already aggrieved youths trooped to the streets burning whatever could be burnt and maiming whoever could be captured among government agents. The demand was no longer for reforms but for the removal of the President. By that time, the President though tried to address some of the issues against which complaints were made his action had become too late to yield any sensible result. Thus, when the coming signals were no longer positive he knew that the die had been cast and decided to flee the country thereby ending his 24 year old regime with historic ignominy.

The case of Bouazizi who set himself ablaze and was posthumously pronounced a martyr as well as the father of the revolution was just an atom in the complex story of longstanding discontent in Tunisia. There were many other cases of the like but three main factors can be said to be the immediate precipitates of the Tunisian revolution. These were corruption, unemployment and insensitive affluence publicly displayed by government officials.

While all these were going on in Tunisia and Egypt, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s impression was that the Presidents in both countries were mere jellies who could hardly manage their matrimonial homes. It was far from his imagination that the surging political tsunami sweeping across the Arab world like a hurricane could come near Libya let alone consume him.

After 42 years of unbridled despotism, Gaddafi inadvertently reopened the film of Pharaoh’s history for the modern world to behold. Like Saddam before him, he lost all that he lived for including most of his children.

The story of the Tunisian, the Egyptian and the Libyan revolutions, cannot be relayed in isolation. There are many more of the like as Syria and Yemen soon followed suit.

If the hanged President Saddam Hussein of Iraq had not met his doom in the hands of his imperial friends turned enemies, he would have probably met a similar waterloo in the hands of his own people just like Gaddafi.

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In virtually all the Arab countries, education is free from the primary school to the University. There is no problem of electricity, water, roads, rail system, food and housing. The only two areas in which the people of those countries were encountering problem with their governments were unemployment and freedom to participate in governance.  And for those two reasons, an un-foretold tsunami swept the length and breadth of what is called the Arab world.

The Moroccan Monarch, his Jordanian colleague as well as the Algerian President were only lucky to have heeded the warning tune of that tsunami in time thereby escaping its consequences. The lesson they learned from the experiences of their colleagues in the neighbouring countries served them in good stead and they survived the unprecedented calamity. Otherwise, they would have ended up like Libya’s Gaddafi or Egypt’s Mubarak.

Here in Nigeria, which of the above named infrastructures was made available despite the enormous material resources with which the country is naturally endowed? Rather than utilize those resources to boost the general standard of living and thereby uplift the status of the country, the priority of our government in the past 16 years was to squeeze the citizenry dry through a monstrous corruption and callous removal of a non-existing subsidy on oil. And that was in addition to the spiral increase of tariff on electricity consumption in anticipation of an imaginary stability of power. At a stage, every Nigerian driving a vehicle was forced to buy new number plates that cost about N30000 in replacement of the old one on their cars. In any civilized country, such obnoxious policy would have constituted an act of barbarity. But in Nigeria, that was the government’s way of generating funds for its officials to embezzle with impunity.

While the Tunisians became restive over 14% unemployment figure, Nigerians were proudly grappling with about 72% of unemployment rate even as the government kept drumming loudly the tune of becoming one of the 20 most economically viable countries in the world. What a grand self-deception? 

The warning here is for the doubting ‘Thomases’ who are still in the dream land in Nigeria and the rest of Africa to open their eyes and clearly see the vanity of human wishes in the cited Arab nations. Such tendentious talks like: “IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE IN NIGERIA”, as the outgoing Senate President was severally quoted as saying, only belongs to primordial men who still live in the primordial time. To avoid becoming like flies dying in the bottle of wine, men of reason had better learn from the experiences of others before some others begin to learn from their own experiences.

Justice is fundamentally sacrosanct in the reckoning of Allah. Where you have people who are educated enough to know their right; where you have people who are conscious of their common affinity and are ready to assert it; where you have people who believe in God and His capability to impose justice where none exists, let no one think that such people can be exploited indefinitely. Those in power in Nigeria who think they can live perpetually on injustice should remember that the likes of Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and Hosni Mubarak never thought that nemesis could afflict them one day. Their episodes are now part of history. Prophet Noah (Nuhu) never prayed for the destruction of his nation and people even after 950 years of preaching to the deaf. His prayer only came when, one day, a small child carried on the shoulder of his father asked for a stone to be thrown at him (Nuhu) just as most people in the nation had done for the past 950 years. The Prophet’s conclusion was that even the great grand children of that generation would continue atrocities in the land and remain hostile to God just like their parents. Thus, when he prayed for their destruction, it was divinely accepted with ‘automatic alacrity’.  The rest is history. Let those who refuse to learn from ancient history try to learn from the recent one. To be forewarned is to be forearmed. A word is enough for the wise.