Category: Sunday

All over the world and in nations whether civilized or civilizing, there is a crisis of rising expectations which has impacted negatively on the public perception of governments and the whole idea of governance itself. In the heaving and surging tide of cynicism and skepticism, people question the inherent capacity of governments to better the lot of the people they are supposed to govern.

Citizens also express doubt about the conceptual possibilities of maximum satisfaction based on the timely delivery of all deliverables on which modern governance itself is anchored. In some extreme instances, it has led to some fringe groups demanding for the total eradication of government or the abolition of the tax regime with the war-cry: No Tax is the best Tax. At best, this is the well-paved boulevard to anarchy and chaos.

Yet, there is a sense in which this profound disappointment and dissatisfaction with modern governance is rooted in an equally profound paradox: The paradox of progress. The rise in public consciousness and the liberalization of education which can be linked to the advent of Liberal Democracy and the age of Enlightenment have led to a growing skepticism and a healthy cynicism about human ability to rule over other humans in a way that would have been unthinkable in earlier epochs of absolute monarchs.

Nevertheless, given the spate of political distemper and economic underperformance particularly in postcolonial societies where the natural process of political evolution was suborned by colonial intervention, the question now being asked in different quarters is whether liberal democracy and the whole concept of modern governance have taken on more than they can ever deliver or whether they are in fact suitable for societies with different pre-colonial trajectories. 

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Whatever one can make of these agitations, the blunt truth is that not many people believe in government or invest much hope on them to do the needful anymore. Not even the great democracies of the west that have shaped the narrative of human progress and emancipation are spared the turbulence of doubt and despair.

Take as an example, the case of Great Britain, our former colonial masters. After a string of competent but hardly inspiring leaders, the nation is poised to give the Conservative Party a resounding shellacking in the coming general elections. Led by the frugally efficient, coldly effectual but insubstantial Rishi Sunak, the party has struggled through three prime ministers in a matter of months and now appears to be at the end of its tether with a resurgent Labour Party snagging at its heels. The British public always appears to wait for an electable, socially pukka Labour Party leader before giving the conservatives a massive slap down.

In the United States of America, the situation is even more precarious. The two main parties appear to have exhausted their political and historical possibilities. But the nation as a whole seems unwilling to embrace the third option. That would be a bridge too far for its conservative, radically modified and manipulated palate. So come November, the manic, maniacally divisive and hysterically manipulative Donald Trump may prevail, opening the door to an apocalyptic nightmare.

In other major western democracies of Western Europe rightwing phalanxes of ethnic irredentism are mounting a siege on centralist and left of center ruling coalitions. There is a surge of the old, unyielding ultra-right in France which is quite alarming in its scope and baneful intensity. Russia under Vladimir Putin has become a bastion of reactionary hyper-Slavic nationalism bent on putting other civilizations to sword. Before our very eyes, Israel has become the greatest threat to world peace and territorial equilibrium in the Middle East. 

If gold can rust, one can imagine the condition of iron. It is perhaps in post-colonial Africa that the distrust of politics and politicians has taken an extreme dimension. Popular contempt for politics finds outlets in military coups, the ousting of hegemonic cartels, civil unrests, violent protests, labour lock-outs, ethnic insurrections, religious upheavals targeting the state, economic warfare against the nation and generalized insecurity.

This conundrum of progress without happiness or satisfaction has led religious scholars and developmental scientists to wonder aloud whether the whole idea of total government or governance which satisfies all human yearnings and aspirations is not an evolutionary overreach for the human species given the stage and state humans have reached at a particular period.

In a multi-ethnic country like Nigeria, seething with tension and the bitter polarization of the political elite along regional and cultural lines, the circumstances are particularly dire with an implosion often not very far away. This is even more so in the aftermath of a contentious presidential election and the inability of the ruling group to secure an elite consensus for its programmes and in the face of a countervailing elite faction that is unrelenting in its bitter opposition to every step taken by the government.

Such is the disharmonious and fraught atmosphere that no measure taken by government enjoys universal applause. In the event, some of the solutions canvassed by various stakeholders for overcoming the impasse reflect the urgency of the situation. While some urge a return to the more representative and less costly parliamentary system, others canvass for the retention of the presidential system under a reconfigured and radically restructured country in which no overbearing Caudillo prevails at the center.

Yet for some nothing less than the dissolution of the country and its reworking into a loose association of independent states will do. A recent entrant into the coliseum is the former Head of State, General Olusegun Obasanjo, who has turned round to condemn the whole idea of Liberal Democracy as being inappropriate for non-western countries emerging from traditional societies. As usual, Obasanjo, compulsively conspiratorial as ever, may be stalking a different horse.

This cacophony of discordant voices reflects the very lack of elite unanimity which is critical in pushing the country in the direction of comprehensive political and economic reform. Not only that, it is an eye-opener to how a politically fissured and fractured nation can host enemy nationals, armed dissidents, spiritual saboteurs and economic felons among factions of the political class and all within the same violated and embattled nation space. Permanently working at cross-purpose, the nation itself is permanently on the boil.

In this toxic environment where there are no core national values or an overarching vision of the nation, anything goes. In the absence of any restraining factor, there is a desecration of the sacred ethos of politics and a devaluation of its ethics.

To fill the vacuum is what this writer once described as “the politics of anti-politics”, a regnant tragedy in which everything that does little credit to whatever is noble and uplifting about politics is in full public view. This is what is unfolding in Kogi and the Rivers State where all known rules of political engagements are spurned only to be replaced by a bizarre personalization of power.

When this writer first mooted the idea of the politics of anti-politics at the eighty fifth anniversary lecture of the Yoruba Tennis Club in September, 2001, twenty four years ago, it was to caution the nation against the authoritarian distemper and the lack of higher political sagacity that was beginning to threaten the foundation of post-military transition in Nigeria. Obasanjo, the man the soldiers had chosen to replace themselves, was beginning to show signs that he was still ill at ease with the democratic culture of give and take.

Even that early in the day, he had done his best to snuff life out of the opposition parties. The APP was mortally wounded and the AD was on life support machine. Afenifere was on its way to the political hospice. Having captured Gani Adams, Obasanjo promptly put him on trial for treason with the enthusiasm and ferocity of purpose he had not shown while handling those who declared Sharia space in a secular nation-state. Of course, the Yoruba people were having none of that and they made sure they besieged the court until the trial was adjourned sine die.

Yet a decade after this when the selfsame Gani Adams, now ennobled and empowered beyond his wildest imagination, attempted to corral the Yoruba people into supporting the Jonathan project, he was treated with the contempt and utter disdain reserved for bounders and cads as he marched up and down the streets of Lagos with his well-armed thugs.

A decade after this and a few weeks back, the Yoruba people treated with the same disdain a group of political adventurers who attempted to take over a radio station in Ibadan in a very quixotic and harebrained bid for secession. So far no notable Yoruba lobby or influential group has come to their aid.

Despite being at the intellectual vanguard of the clamour for the restructuring of the country, the Yoruba people are very subtle and sophisticated in their political offensives and can be very discerning and discriminating in the choices they make. To outsiders, this may appear as frustrating as it is disconcerting and concerning.

The post-colonial arcade remains a site of congregating ethnic neuroses in with each group try to outflank the other. In the endless war of manoeuvring and positioning , Yoruba may momentarily appear confused and disoriented , but that is precisely because they are instinctively feeling their way forward in a  jungle of dissociated sensibility where nothing is what it seems. It is the consensus that matters to them even when they get it tragically wrong. It will help them to beat a retreat.

Three months after the writer broached the concept of the politics of anti-politics in 2021, Bola Ige was brutally hacked down in the privacy of his bedroom. Almost a quarter of a century after, his killers have never been apprehended. Since then, more than two dozen speakers, deputy governors and governors have been removed from office either through judicial ruse or legislative chicanery.

This is the background to the contemporary turbulence in Nigerian politics and why there is an overcast of uncertainty. The initial errors of judgment of the new administration arising from enthusiasm and relish for novelty coupled with the inherited political dysfunction, the institutional disorder and the accumulated errancy of the political class have turned politics into an ignoble profession and cast a deep cloud over the survivability of the Fourth Republic.

As there can be no going backward, we have to keep pushing forward. Yet, it will be unwise to ever imagine that we can spin our way out of the deep political mess and fundamental developmental malaise afflicting the country, or to think that a mere resort to patriotic platitudes will do as the nation lurches from one difficulty to another. As we must have learnt from the sharp reversal of the fortunes of the national currency, even maintaining the old fiscal equilibrium is going to be quite a herculean task.

The fierce battle to defend the integrity of the naira which seems to have taken on a more strategic reticence has shown a nation at the mercy of economic miscreants, political saboteurs and an enemy clerisy bent on upending the state and the nation as we know it. If the current administration allows them to weaken its resolve, or if it decides to “play” with them as a result of pressures, then we are on the threshold of significant developments.

As the nation celebrates the twenty fifth anniversary of military departure and the onset of civil rule there is ground for cautious celebration and some sober reflections.