Category: Sunday

After almost a quarter of a century of running and occasionally stumbling, one can safely conclude that party politics and some variant of democratic rule have come to stay in Nigeria. One may demur at calling it a full blown democracy. But then as we have stated repeatedly in this column, there is no ideal democracy anywhere in the world; only approximations and proximate practice depending on how far a society has evolved away from authoritarian and unaccountable rule.

  This limitation notwithstanding, only the starry-eyed adventurer would imagine at this stage that a military solution is the answer to the country’s problems. Given the configuration of the country, the days of military coups in Nigeria appear to be over, except as a prelude to an unwieldy disintegration of the nation. This is perhaps the most signal achievement of the post-military dispensation.

 This past week, the apex court of the land settled the gubernatorial sweepstakes in Osun State in favour of the opposition PDP and its candidate, the ever gyrating and compulsively acrobatic Nurudeen Jackson Adeleke, making him the second person from his family to have ruled the state since its creation some thirty two years ago.

 The judgment demonstrated considerable circumspection, wisdom and statesmanlike sagacity. The Supreme Court seemed to have been nettled by recent criticism of some of its controversial decisions. This time around, the apex court appears to have jettisoned a reliance of technicalities to arrive at a credible approximation of substantive justice. In doing so, the court seems to have returned to the path of constitutionalism as taken by some of its fabled forebears.

 Only a supremely obtuse Supreme Court would refuse to monitor closely and acutely the situation on ground and the balance of electoral forces, or would attempt to play ostrich to the prevalent mood and sentiments of the voters. This is often a recipe for chaos and anarchy. Rather than deliberately courting disorder, judicial adjudication of disputed elections should be about returning peace to the street and helping the nation to find political equilibrium.

  It can be argued that for its abiding sanctity and institutional legitimacy, the court, particularly the apex court, should never be turned into a theatre for popular frivolities or ethnic grandstanding by political psychotics and other social deviants who can never find peace in a multi-ethnic society bristling with mutually antagonistic forces. But by the same token, going to court should not be turned into a legal euphemism for going to court injustice. 

The judgment of the Supreme Court on Osun should be seen as the “coup de grace”. Already virtually annihilated by the PDP steamroller in a core Yoruba state where it held sway with hegemonic relish a short while earlier, it would have been a miracle for an APC government to survive in such a hostile environment without a resort to political jiggery-pokery.

  As we have seen in Nigeria, this is a ploy that often comes with its own terrifying prospects and hazards for the survival of democracy. It is unfortunate that this should be happening in a state hitherto regarded as a bastion of progressive politics. The Adeleke clan are themselves cut from this progressive loin.

  Only God knows what their illustrious progenitor would be thinking in his grave. The ruling party went to the election badly divided and bitterly polarized. To be sure, a sophisticated electorate can actually vote in different ways on the same party and in the same election. But this time around, the rout of the APC is too compelling for such electoral nitpicking and erudite hairsplitting. The party should now go back to the drawing board to see where the rains started pounding it.

  It will be recalled that Oyo State, another core Yoruba state, had earlier given Seyi Makinde an emphatic return ticket to the gubernatorial lodge in Agodi. So overwhelming was his victory and so compelling was the bravura performance that even his opponents rose stoutly to congratulate him in a matter of days after the polls. This is as it should be.

  Makinde has been playing some astute and brave politics. He has shown himself a master trapeze artist of the political tightrope. The Yoruba political illuminati may pretend not to be watching and evaluating the performance of their sons and daughters in the field of high-wire politics. But they are actually and acutely monitoring developments. As they say, when a person is sent on a slave mission, he is expected to deliver with the aplomb and nobility of the freeborn.

   With this development, the PDP has punched a massive hole in the heart of the APC electoral suzerainty in the old western region.  With Ogun state already trapped by an adversarial pincer movement emanating from Ibikunle Amosun’s Owu redoubt and from some confederate elements in the Ogun East Senatorial district, this is going to present some political difficulties going forward for the president-elect.

  But Tinubu is a man of extraordinary political dexterity and sagacity who thrives best when under political pressure. It would have been strange and unusual if his acute and well-placed strategic antenna has not picked the landmines. It was precisely this and the constant taunts and jibes from elements of the northern political mafia that goaded Obasanjo into committing the electoral heist of 2003 and the forcible subjugation of his own region which signposted the decline of his political fortunes.

 From this, it can be seen that the demons confronting party formation in contemporary Nigeria are wholly within, powered by their own internal contradictions, particularly their mode of leadership recruitment and the perverse patterns of patronage and preferment which can be likened to a bastard feudalism unknown anywhere in contemporary political practice.

  Consequently, there is an ideological and structural meltdown everywhere. This is why it has been possible for a leading candidate in an ultra -right wing party to duck out of the party presidential primary only to emerge hours later as the presidential candidate of a purportedly leftwing party with which he had no prior organic connection or evident ideological kinship.

Yet despite this counterrevolutionary heist, there are millions of compatriots, including the supposedly enlightened, who look at this as the moment of revolutionary rupture with the old order. Surely, what is known in theory of knowledge as coupoure epistemologique is driven by more earth-shattering forces rather than a fellow who reminds one of the famous quip about the banality of evil.

   Going by the same logic, this is why it is also possible for a ruling party to throw all kinds of imaginable and unimaginable obstacles across the path of its leading candidate just to prevent him from prevailing and only to enthusiastically embrace the same candidate after he had miraculously triumphed as if nothing has happened. Just like that, as the immortal Fela would put it. This descent into what feels and looks like the realm of political phantasmagoria is a direct reflection of the contradictions at play.

 As a result of this strange political drama, the discerning observer would have noticed two intriguing developments. First is the sheer loss of ideological exuberance in contemporary Nigerian politics despite all the uproar. Either among old tested political buffs or newly arrived greenhorns, a sober pragmatism is the name of the game. The current commotion about zoning is a quarrel about patronage and not about principles.

 No one is willing to take any risk or act outside the script. Yet it should be obvious that in a mortally conflicted society, politics can do with a dose of idealism. It is axiomatic that without the injection of visionary idealism, no meaningful development can take place in any society. The triumph of transactional politics and of the commodification and commercialization of politics leads to a steady erosion of popular faith in the redemptive and ameliorative prospects of politics.

  The loss of faith in politics eventuates in apathy, withdrawal from public space by the people and abdication of civic responsibility. More ominously, it makes citizens very vulnerable to political conmen, spiritual quacks and violent religionists who promise them life more abundant and plutocratic wealth provided they become willing dupes and witless executioners.

  This weaponization of disorder and hunger in the land by politicians, clergymen and sectarian insurrectionists, bears only evil fruits as it leads to state atrophy or relentless attempts to bring the nation to its heel by armed confrontation. Once the platform of politics as the supreme arbiter of elite competition collapses, the highway to Khartoum or Mogadishu opens up.

  In the light of the above, enlightened self-interest demands that the political class takes a harder look at the code and conduct of politics in the Fourth Republic. The last election shows how prone a dysfunctional political society is always to a universal eruption of discontent and seething anger, an unstructured “revolution” which would have been met by a “structured” counter-revolutionary uprising. This in turn could have put paid to the nation as a uniform “non-negotiable” entity.

  Had the whole thing not been marred by an opportunistic switch of platform in the very last minute, had the leading lights been at it for much longer and in a calm, deliberate, painstaking and pan-Nigerian manner, had the movement been purged of its dangerous religious gaming and primordial excrescences, the outcome could have been very different. Even at that, it was a close-run thing.

But a serious nation cannot continue to run on luck forever. Something must give at some point. This is why it behooves on the political class to take a wholesale and holistic evaluation of the problems and prospects of party formation in the Fourth Republic. Since the collapse of the Second Republic at the tail end of 1983, we have never had political parties with firm ideological orientation, except the two state parties foisted on the nation by General Ibrahim Babangida famously dismissed by Chief Antony Enahoro as “government parastatals”.

  In the event, the Uromi sage was proved right as it was the principal members of the “left of centre party” that led the phalanx of treachery and perfidy that torpedoed MKO’s historic mandate.  So much then for a progressive and “left of centre” party. By the time they finished with the nation, there was nothing left of the centre except the humongous carcass of General Babangida’s chicanery.

 As a conservative establishment, the military are not institutionally equipped to furnish postcolonial nations with authentic, ideologically motivated left of centre parties. This is akin to shooting themselves in the foot. Twice in the history of Nigeria, in 1979 and 1999— and that is discounting General Babangida’s fabled fiasco— the military imposed broad-based pan-Nigerian parties on the nation requiring considerable elite consensus and conciliation. That was the NPN and the PDP. No one could fault their choice as it was in line with their training and elitist vision of the country.

  Unfortunately and as a result of this ideological lacuna which privileges booty-sharing as the precondition for national stability rather than accelerated economic development, the two state parties soon dissolved into a bazaar of open larceny which led to their collapse under the weight of their own iniquities and contradictions.

  But we cannot continue to blame the military in perpetuity. They have done their bit and have left the scene. In fairness to their heirs, they have been on their best behavior for almost a quarter of a century. It is now left to the extant party formation to take an inward look, particularly with regards to party registration from the grassroots level, the distribution of patronage and the vexed issue of leadership recruitment.

This column joins the civilized world and millions of musical enthusiasts and aficionados of stirring melody in wishing the late master crooner, screen idol, philanthropist and indefatigable campaigner for civil rights, Harry Belafonte, a warm, rousing and hearty farewell. Born on the first day of March, 1927, the great crooner died on April 25th. The musical word has been in mourning ever since.

  It has been a Jamaican farewell to a Jamaican original: warm, pulsating, heartfelt and shot through with a cheery insouciance which the great crooner himself would have lustily applauded. You may leave Kingston, but Kingston never leaves you. Born in New York the son of Jamaican immigrants, Harry Belafonte never forgot his Jamaican roots. He was to parlay the Caribbean riches and magical allure to his first ground-breaking album which became the first solo LP to sell over a million copies.

  That was in 1956 and the album was appropriately named Calypso, a mellifluous medley of Caribbean concoctions. The young man seemed to have distilled the experience of a decade-long sojourn in Jamaica living with one of his grandparents into the stuff of memorable and enchanting melody. A new musical icon has arrived on the global scene.

  After that stirring debut, nothing really could stop him. And he looked every inch the part. Tall, exotically handsome, magnificently well built, exuding confidence and an artless bravura, Harry Belafonte quickly became a global heartthrob with a cult following among teenagers in many countries. An older friend of the columnist who was in secondary school in the fifties spoke of desperate attempts to emulate his unique hair cut which always ended in tears at barbers shops. It was his natural hair line.

Yours sincerely discovered that one was not the only one to marvel at the source of Belafonte’s arresting looks. One had fingered a eugenically auspicious Caribbean potpourri of Indian, African and native genes. The reality is even more interesting. On both sides, he was the product of mixed racial unions. His mother was of Scottish and Afro-Jamaican lineage while his father was the child of an Afro-Jamaican mother and a Sephardic Jew of Dutch extraction.

  With his natural assets, it was almost inevitable that Belafonte would find his way to big-time film-acting. With his great friend, Sydney Poitiers, Belafonte had tried his hand at play acting earlier before the release of his chart-bursting album. The critical consensus was that Belafonte was not a great actor. Here, the plane seemed to have overshot the runway. It takes more than good looks and screen presence to be a great actor. Belafonte seems to have accepted the verdict with grace and equanimity.

This notwithstanding, it is perhaps as a campaigner for civil rights and champion of Black emancipation in a fraught and socially convulsed period of American history that this great son of Africa and America would be best remembered. Harry Belafonte took great personal and professional risks. He could not be fazed by the prospects of being blacklisted which eventually came.

Belafonte befriended and collaborated with Martin Luther King and was a famous feature of some of those epic marches for freedom without caring whose horse is gored. He took on some of the notable figures of contemporary American history without flinching and with remarkable aplomb. This was the finest moment of this son of Jamaican immigrants. May his great soul rest in peace.

May Day in Sudan

Africa is once again the epicentre of global developments. As usual it is not as an active participant but as a passive and inert repository, a cannon fodder of historical struggle, which perhaps explains the apocalypse in Sudan and why things have taken a violent horrific colouration. With the developments in Sudan, it is tempting to conclude that the more the old international order changeth, the more the universal verities remain the same.

  Unfolding realities may force new events to take on a new garb, but it is a garment made from the old fabric. The Berlin Conference of 1884/1885 and the partitioning of Africa were leavened by an ideological and economic commonality of purpose among the contending western powers which made things to appear quite benign.

   It was this benign avarice and covetousness which allowed them to postpone global confrontation for another thirty years until the Germans broke ranks.  This time around, the veil is torn off revealing barefaced international roguery and the shambolic, sclerotic hulk of colonial nation-states imposed on the benighted continent.

   Nobody is asking aggrieved members of the Nigerian political elite not to complain about the irregularities and electoral malfeasance they perceive as characterizing the conduct of the last elections. This is how democracy has been deepened in Nigeria in almost a quarter of a century after the military departed the scene. The problem is that many of those who are shouting the loudest this time around have also been the prime beneficiaries of electoral heists in the past.

  Consequently, it behooves on genuine Nigerian patriots to know exactly how much legitimate pressure  can be piled on struggling democracies without something giving. Already burdened by weak legitimacy, deficit credibility and lack of elite conciliation, there is a limit to the pressure fragile democracies can take before things tip over into anarchy and normlessness.

  To starry-eyed idealists in the comfort of their home or the breezy television pundits ventilating in the air-conditioned ambience of television studios all this might sound like sterile hogwash, but those who have taken part in actual struggles against tyranny and autocracy know that it is always a close-run affair full of unintended consequences and unanticipated detours.

   Modern nations are a permanent process of organic memory bristling with shared tribulations and communal triumphs. The foundational problem with struggling democracies in Africa, particularly in a country like Nigeria, is the absence of a social contract between the ruled and the rulers which commits the ruling elite to a programme of continuous political reforms and economic development.

 This kind of social contract, often unwritten, cannot be procured through endless constitutional tinkering but on the field of permanent struggle for political emancipation, bloody toil and ceaseless human exertion. This is part of what constitutes the holistic myth of national becoming; a veritable reservoir of sacred facts and fanciful evocations.

  Unfortunately, the fractious nature of colonially-induced countries, the mutual unintelligibility of countervailing cultures and the sheer ethnic and religious polarities, make concerted efforts for political and economic freedom a very tall order indeed.

  The gridlock is unimaginable, like an articulated vehicle with the wheels facing different directions. The din and the commotion from grating and grinding drown out everything.  Without some heroic pulling away from the abyss, the nation-state paradigm in Africa is at the end of its tether.

  Since nature abhors a vacuum, no one is sure of the kind of hybrid mutations or genetic monstrosities that are in the offing. The international community seems to tire of the nation-state and its depredations in Africa and are probably preparing for some endgame. Unable to handle the Pandora box put in place by their colonial forbears, they have decided to find a way round the beached whale.

   This past week, while a section of the Nigerian political elite was still bickering and threatening fire and brimstone over the outcome of the last presidential election, America quietly announced a new multi-billion programme of “mutual cooperation” with African nations for the joint explorations of rare metals that abound on the stricken continent.

  Now, the real battle has been joined and the final scramble for Africa is well underway. It promises to make the Berlin conference of 1884/1885 the child’s play it really was. The velvet gloves might have come off. There may be no point in pretending any further about the benignity of the global order. Rather than lying waste in primeval forests and fever-compliant jungles, these precious metals can be used for startling technological advances and enhanced human prosperity in advanced societies. 

 It will be recalled that France, China, Russia, North Korea and a host of sundry international non-state actors are already involved in extractive predation in many parts of Africa, particularly in Zambia, DRC, Sudan, Niger and Mali. Charles Taylor has done his bit after carving out a huge swathe that hugged Sierra Leone and Liberia. Not even Nigeria is exempt from these extractive depredations.

  Recently, the youthful Burkinabe military ruler bemoaned the fact that since the French left his country has lost about forty percent of its original size to rampaging marauders.  The Tuareg dominated, Sahelian northern part of Mali is also virtually decoupled from the Malian state. There are enclaves in the vast, chaotic Democratic Republic of Congo that are military prefectures. Central African Republic limps on after a savage civil war has devastated the entire country.

   Of all these continental tragedies, it is the grim nightmare unfolding in Sudan that concentrates the mind. Sudan is another word for black. But it is now a compelling metaphor for all that has gone wrong with postcolonial Africa, particularly the utter despoliation of a nation and its humongous resources by a disparate rabble of military renegades. 

  It was not always like this. Sudan was a compelling racial melting pot, a modern Mesopotamia of sorts where oriental, Arab, western and indigenous people merged and meshed. Although there was always a whiff of Arab overlordism and its hegemonic culture, much of this has been diluted and degraded by centuries of marriage and interracial mixing.

   Khartoum itself was a vibrant city, hosting many cultures with many aspiring pilgrims of Nigerian extraction stranded by choice either en route to Mecca or en route from the Holy City. There are cross-cultural references to Yoruba people in the novel, Season of Migration to the North by the Sudanese writer, Tayeb Sallin.

  The country also boasted of a robust Communist Party which was wiped out to the last man in an abortive uprising against General Jaffar Muhammad el-Nimeiry in 1971. But if anyone had doubts that Sudan had come into its own, the heroic uprising by the generality of the people against the cruel and predatory rule of General Hassan el-Bashir proved the point.

  That was only four years ago. Now, after three weeks of savage fighting Khartoum has been reduced to a vast crater with the odour of death and decomposition thick in the air. If anyone thought that heaving off the culturally and religiously incompatible southern loop of the country would bring peace, the reality is far more depressing.

   Unfinished business looms large in the fractured country. This week, one of the belligerents, Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo, aka Hemedti, let it be known that it was about time that people from the neglected and war-torn Darfur region of western Sudan take over power in the beleaguered country. This introduces a class and ethnic equation simmering just below the surface into an already combustible situation.

  Dagolo comes from a minority Chadian-Arab clan straddling Sudan and Chad who are despised and regarded as lowly and inferior by the more cultivated and cosmopolitan Arabised gentry of the twin-city of Khartoum and Omdurman. Hemedti has made fabulous wealth from his past infractions and has vast international connections.

   And he is not a hammock-bound commander. If he prevails, it will lead to seismic upheaval which will convulse the entire region with the defeated national army dissolving into urban banditry. If he loses, there is every likelihood that the rump of his militia will head for Darfur to begin a separatist insurrection.

Either way, it is apocalypse on the lower Nile. It is a tragedy already foretold even if inadvertently by outlandish fictional imagination. In his celebrated evocation of rapine and plunder in colonial Africa, titled The Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s narrator spoke of an encounter with the European enforcer deep in his lair in the wild ravines of Belgian Congo.

  Simply known as the manager of the interior, our man was so well-dressed and lavishly appointed that he could have been acting a major part in a film. But he was in fact superintending the most brutal and systematic despoliation of a people known to modern history. In his efforts to cream off the natural resources of this absurdly endowed region of Africa, Leopold, the German-born king of Belgium, killed, maimed and heaved off the arms and limbs of a whopping third of the indigenous population.

Almost two hundred years after, another manager of the interior came in the guise of Joseph Mobutu, a former pickpocket from the Equatorial forest of Gbadolite who had been recruited into the Belgian colonial army on the strength of his native intelligence and innate capacity for brutal exertions. Ever nattily dressed and impressively decked out in his trademark Fez cap and leopard hide cane, Mobutu could well have been an African prototype of the old colonial manager as he surveyed the ruins of his country from the balcony of one of his remote palaces deep in the Congolese jungle.

   Almost thirty years after Mobutu was driven out of the place, a properly functioning state is still a shaky proposition with vast ungovernable spaces interspersed with “free states” of lawless anomie. Countless civil wars later, the Democratic Republic of Congo hosts several contending armies of occupation. Extractive predation remains the order of the day with the state and other “free leasers” as active participants while a military prefecture rules the eastern tip of the country.

 Just as King Leopold and his agents by passed or simply ignored the traditional state structures they met on ground in the old Congo, the new managers of the African interior are most likely going to ignore the vastly diminished and attenuated relic of the postcolonial state on ground. This is going to be a state worse than formal colonization which flaunted some obligations.

  Some West African countries are already prone to this territorial meltdown. This is why Nigeria with all its current democratic imperfections and structural blemishes must not be allowed to go under. With Congo and Sudan out on a limb and with Ethiopia tottering on the edge as a result of a protracted inter-ethnic melee, Nigeria remains the only country with the size, the resources and the prodigious human endowment to lead an African pushback against a new wave of colonization. 

 But Nigeria ails grievously: politically, socially, economically and spiritually with the Sudanese symptoms slowly surfacing. This is why a lot will depend on what happens in the coming months.

Okon falls to Mama Igosun

It was the longest day, and the cannons of Kiriji were already booming. Even before commencing on the great march on Mama Igosun’s redoubt, Okon was already dreaming of sweet victory and sweeter revenge. “I go tie up dem Yoruba witch as dem dey do for Akwa Ibom. Dem small children go pepper am and im go confess. Dem go know say na dem yeye Yoruba people dey trouble dis kontri. After dat na dem OPC house I go head make I go finish dat were man who come beat Okon just like dat”.

   After Okon was forcibly dislodged from the house in a civil commotion that lasted a whole day, he had taken up residence with Baba Lekki who promised him a medical concoction that would make him invisible to any human-being.  But the crazy boy still had his doubts about Baba Lekki and his bogus charm. As he evaded Baba’s lunging walking stick, Okon suddenly rounded on the old crook.

   “Baba as una dey chase me, dat means you dey see me? So when dem medicine go start work, abi na Yoruba wayo?” Okon demanded.

    “Na by remote control I go trigger am. I get dem remote control from dem Agbanrere (Giraffe) neck and dem buffalo horn”, Baba replied.

     “So, how one go know say one don become spirit?” Okon pressed.

     “When you hit dem LASTMA people and dem no reply”, Baba answered.

      “Baba  wetin if dem charm no work?”, Okon asked the ageing scoundrel.

      “Foolish boy, he come be like the case of dem apprentice pilot who dey ask him oga wetin go happen if parachute no open. Na dat one dem dey call jumping to conclusion”, Baba Lekki retorted with a sinister smile.

     “Baba, walahi, if dis yeye juju no work, as you come draw blood from my head, naim I go draw blood from una mouth”, Okon snarled as Baba Lekki tried to hush him away. By now, Okon knew he was on his own. But he was determined to press his luck.  Very soon, Okon arrived at the sight of an uncompleted building that had just collapsed. It was a scene out of the apocalypse. While people were wailing, open looting was also going on. His sense of natural dignity and justice affronted, Okon blocked the path of a neer do well. “No be dem dead people property you dey thief so?” Okon demanded. Before the mammoth urchin could give a reply, Okon dealt him a resounding slap on the face.

   “Allah wa kabr, awon omo ogun orun dide”, the illiterate vagabond screamed and fled.

   By now, Okon had arrived around the neighborhood. He was now convinced that the charm was working and that he was truly invisible and invincible. Earlier, he had accosted a policeman who was openly taking bribe and dealt him a blow to the plexus. The rogue cop fled screaming “Chineke dem ghost from Atan don destroy me”.

    But the first sign that all might not go well on the home front came soon. There was Mama Igosun dressed like a local hunter swigging directly from a bottle of Seaman’s schnapps even as she swung to a 1930 classic by Denge in honour of one Maggie Macaulay.

As Okon made to sweep past her thinking that all this was an elaborate bluff, the Amazon blocked his path and stated cursing his ancestors.

    “Ekolo, abi wetin you call yourself, you no dey greet your mother for dem village?” she hollered as she tried to collar Okon.

     “Move”, Okon thundered as he sidestepped. Mama Igosun was so taken aback by the vehemence and ferocity that she tripped and fell. Okon rushed towards her room.

    “Hen hen, o ti lo gbagbara, abi?” the old woman screamed as she sprang after Okon. Overconfidence overtook the crazy boy. Before he could look back, the irate woman dealt him a blow on the back with a frying pan.  The effect of the blow was electric. Okon wound up like a stung millipede and upon recovering his senses, he took to his heels with Mama Igosun in hot pursuit.