It was Enoch Powell, Colin Powell’s great namesake, who famously observed that all political careers end in failure. To be sure, the late British politician from the West Midlands who became a professor at the age of twenty five did all his best to undo himself in politics.

He courted and cultivated failure with a cruel assiduity that suggested a pact with political suicide. He took extreme positions in a country whose politics is calibrated on moderation and permanent fudge. In the temperate climate of liberality and order, the likely lads and the gentleman who will succeed in politics must wear their hats and opinions lightly.

But last week as Colin Powell succumbed to Covid-19 complications, it would appear that the maxim of his British namesake has come to stand the test of time. The tributes came in equal measures as the diatribes.

Many were so offended by Colin Powell’s complicity in America’s military debacle that they became downright offensive themselves. Some dismissed him as a typical house nigger, lacking in character and cujones when and where it mattered most. It was as if the old wizard from the British Midlands and Birmingham backyard was up to stir things up a bit. Call no political career glorious until the day it ends in glittering obituaries.

Born to Jamaican immigrant parents, Colin Powell was a shining example and classic manifestation of the American dream. The essence of that dream is for talent, hard work and gritty determination to take a person to the highest position in the land without having to cringe or beg his way to stardom. Being of lowly station in origin should not debar or prevent a person from aspiring to the highest office in the land.

Colin Powell was an African American of many firsts. He was the first person of colour to serve as the chairman of the Joint Service Chiefs, the first to serve as National Security Adviser, the first to be appointed Secretary of State and only the second to reach the hallowed rank of a four-star general. He was by all accounts an outstanding military officer and a gifted administrator.

There was a lot about Colin Powell which recall Dwight Eisenhower, another much decorated war time four-star general who went on to become the president of America. Powell’s open genial features spoke to a genuine kindness and compassion which appealed to juniors and subordinates alike while his calm discipline, unaffected sense of gratitude and unalloyed loyalty would have warmed the hearts of his seniors and military superiors.

He was made for the army while the army seemed to have been made for him. He had no hesitations or reservations whatsoever in joining the army in 1958 upon graduating at the age of twenty one having served as a student cadet with distinction. As he himself was to put it, it was military uniform that gave a distinctive feature and form to what would have been an indistinctive mild-mannered personality.

The military institution swallows up such individuals just as they deeply imbibe and internalize its dominant ethos and worldview. Colin Powell was the quintessential system man. He was not a great disruptor or innovator of genius. Neither was he a military philosopher nor a thinker of note. If he was he could not have risen very far. It is able and competent middlers who stabilize the system and give it its backbone.

In many respects, Colin Powell’s career mirrors the trajectory of his beloved nation in all its outstanding strengths and tragic failings. They have led to the current debacle of the greatest military power the world has seen since the Roman Empire. America was not founded as a warrior-nation but it browbeat itself into becoming one with dire repercussions.

American founding fathers were intellectual mandarins and visionary idealists who thought they were creating a new type of nation-state away from the ashes of feudal Europe. But the intellectual hubris which saw to the creation of this unique nation mutated very soon into a political hubris which made military hubris almost inevitable.

Powered by messianic self-belief and notions of American Exceptionalism which liberated the native genius of people experiencing the exhilarating tonic of untrammelled freedom for the first time, this land of boundless possibilities and immense natural resources carried everything before it in a seemingly unstoppable momentum.

After defeating Great Britain in a revolutionary war of independence, America browbeat the French into relinquishing their North American holding and then expelled the Mexicans from Texas before delivering the sucker punch by overrunning Mexico itself. Meanwhile the Spaniards were humiliated out of Cuba and the Philippines seized from them in a one-sided encounter.

Commodore Perry’s submarine fleet bobbed up on Japanese shores all the way from the west coast of America forcing the outraged oriental islanders into compulsory trading. The Japanese were later to retaliate by obliterating the American naval base in Pearl Harbour at the onset of the Second World War.

America’s rampart and relentless militarism carried everything before it from the nineteenth century up till the middle of the last century. After the Second World War, America emerged as the undisputed master of the world and the greatest military power that has been thrown up in the crucible of western hegemony and domination of the world for almost five centuries.

This was the extant global balance of power by the mid-twentieth century despite the growling and rumbling of a Soviet bear that had smashed its way to the gates of Berlin to terminate Adolf Hitler’s genocidal hallucinations about a so called Aryan racial superiority over the rest of humanity.

But soon thereafter, the wheels began to come off the American locomotive. Other nations and people with alternative histories, alternative cultures and emerging alternative paradigms of war began to tug at the beard of the American lion in a global duel unto death which was to reshape the contours of human history.

First were the Chinese and their notion of human waves assault which almost steamrolled the Americans out of the Korean Peninsula. With their surplus production of men, if not of munitions at that point in their history, the Chinese launched themselves against the American troops with a suicidal ferocity which stunned everybody.

It was to lead to a hastily negotiated armistice and the partitioning of Korea into North and South Korea. It also led to a famous tiff between America’s most decorated combatant general and the American president which led to an inglorious recall of the old warhorse. General Douglas MacArthur never forgave President Harry Truman.

But that was small beer. The tiff signposted the beginning of the fierce struggle between the right wing hegemonic military industrial complex and an emerging left of centre coagulation to rein in America’s macho militarism and warmongering bellicosity.

Yet a little over a decade after escaping what could have been a major military disaster, America found itself embroiled in Vietnam and Indochina again in an ideological offensive against rampart communism. It was to end in another catastrophe in 1975 with American troops escaping the Vietcong insurgents by the skin of their teeth.

This was what set the stage and template for what a notable American political scientist was to characterize as a clash of civilization in which America found itself confronted by a virulent version of Islam which is as uncompromising as it is unforgiving. All this, it must be said, in addition to residual communism and the regnant hyper-Slavic nationalism in Russia.

This was the dominant rubric that prepared the ground for America’s humiliating exit from Afghanistan. Along the way was the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the botched attempt to rescue American hostages in Teheran, the mayhem in Mogadishu and the infamous 9/11 2001 attack on American soil which left a scene of apocalyptic destruction.

Colin Powell was an all-time American hero. But he is seen by many of his compatriots and elsewhere else as being complicit in the historic setup which lured America to wage futile and senseless wars against enemies with a countervailing civilization, an organic culture all of their own and a storied history which does not brook interference from hostile foreign entities.

His eloquent testimony at the UN backing the spurious claims of non-existent weapons of mass destruction is known to have tilted scale in favour of serial wars which have ended in defeat and demystification for his beloved country.

Powell was found wanting when and where it mattered most and when he could have used his massive prestige and universal adoration to prevent his country from sliding into self-destructive wars. Famously, Dick Cheney, just before Powell’s testimony, was known to have told the son of Jamaican immigrants that since his approval ratings were very high, he could afford to come down a few notches.

A generous and gracious man, Powell was known to have later rued his involvement in the whole disaster calling it a blot on his record. Yet in retrospect, there was little a systems man could do to effect fundamental changes in the same system that made him and that became the leitmotif and rationale of his whole existence.  You cannot give what you don’t have.

With internal upheavals fuelled by centuries of institutionalized inequities coupling with an external military fiasco, what America needs now are visionary statesmen and out of the box thinkers at par with their founding fathers who will reset and recalibrate the country.

Not only that, they will have to align it with modern realities and in particular the place of the America nation in a post-imperial global order. It is hard to take but the harder fact is that the world is a-changing. You cannot demobilize a new day. Colin Powell has given his best to his country. Let him now depart in peace.

And still on the American debacle….

Dear readers, it is curious how history sometimes endorses or mocks the efforts of humanity. Twelve years ago as the Obama ascendancy took hold of the entire American landscape, yours sincerely penned a piece while watching the Obama inauguration from the ringside.

Titled A Day in the life of America, it was an attempt to examine the prospects of genuine changes in America brought about by the Obama presidency in all its grim possibilities. This morning we bring you an excerpt from the essay as a companion to the above piece. It is quite intriguing that twelve years after a version of the concluding sentence found its way into President Joe Biden’s inaugural address. But that is a minor matter compared to the problems facing a great country.

All nations are artificial constructs, counterfeit contraptions arbitrarily slammed on a territorial space by the imperial will of a mighty few. The United States of America is no exception to this iron law of modern nationhood. The modern history of America itself bespeaks a constant and occasionally violent struggle to impose order and cohesion on an increasingly unwieldy and dramatically shifting territorial space.

Empires, kingdoms and fiefdoms are nothing but signifiers of space delineation at specific historical conjunctures, subject to change and terminal duress. What is permanent are the human communities so arbitrarily marked by the human will to power.

In this Homeric battlefield, some nations have turned out to be more cohesive and coherent than others. If the nation is an expression of the imperial will of the few, it takes the collective heroic will of the many to turn it into a national community of organic principles.

A nation that has not transcended its inchoate origins to become a national community of shared values and common destiny remains what the revered Obafemi Awolowo has called a mere geographical expression or a congregation of mutually antagonistic armed camps permanently at war with themselves.

Once the organic principles that bind a nation together evolve, it is the constant battle to reaffirm these core principles that shape and frame the evolution of the nation. The founding fathers of America envisaged a nation of freeborn where all are equal before the law. But the ink had hardly dried on this noble declaration before America reverted to the default setting of a savage slave plantation.

It is in the nature of human societies for noble ideals to be corrupted. The chief culprits are often the visioners themselves. What is important is not the corruption of ideals or their progressive desiccation but the innate capacity of each society to summon the will and the inner resources of strength to challenge the decimation of its core principles. This is the road to renewal and self-validation.

It is this battle for the soul of a nation, for its core values that the world has just witnessed in America. With the election of Barack Obama, America has once again demonstrated an amazing capacity for self-renewal which should be the envy of the rest of the world. It has not been easy for this change to come, and it has taken decades of blood, sweat and tears.

Freighted with several contending and mutually contradictory notions of what is good for the nation and society, America has been a natural candidate for a deadlocked existence and the inevitable paralysis of the collective will. But once in a while in every society, an extraordinary figure of charisma and vision often emerges to break the deadlock and defreeze the frozen dialectic of history once again. In Barack Obama, the gifted son of an absconding African immigrant, America appears to have found such a person.

It is too early to say whether the old stalemating demons will not return to hobble Mr Obama’s presidency. Many an American presidency had started on such a glorious note only to come spectacularly unstuck. Defeated, demoralised but not completely demobilised, the old warmongers and petrified foes of progress are still lurking with intent. In Obama’s case, youthful idealism and visionary vigour may well be a stuff that will not endure, as Shakespeare famously noted.

But if Obama’s extraordinary campaign and the swift and surefootedness of his opening move on the political chessboard are anything to go by, the omens are very reassuring indeed. Obama has shown a precocious understanding of the dilemmas and uncertainties that face his beloved country. He has shown an unusual empathy for the tragic emptiness of contemporary American society and the ultimate futility of the rampart militarism of its super-security state.

The comparison with old Abe Lincoln may not be farfetched after all, and it is one that Obama himself seems to deliberately invite. The gangling and inexperienced Lincoln also won a gruelling campaign against better fancied opponents and went on to become arguably America’s greatest president till date. Lincoln went ahead to build bridges and to invite his implacable political adversaries like William Seward to the cabinet.

Obama has done exactly the same thing, drawing sustenance from his opponents’ strength while building bridges of goodwill and genuine fellowship across a bitterly polarised polity. While his Republican opponents ran a divisive, partisan campaign and politicised everything under the sun, Obama chose to remain wisely above the murky fray coming across in the process as the healer and statesman America needs at this particular moment of its history.

The mammoth crowd that witnessed the coronation of an American of African extraction is unprecedented in human memory. It was a carnival-like atmosphere of human regeneration. Something is astir in God’s own country. In transforming itself, America may yet help to transform the rest of the world. It will do so by the might of its example and not by the example of its might.

• First published in January, 2009

In retrospect, it could not have been otherwise. The man who was handpicked by his military colleagues to lead the nation after the military exhausted its historic possibilities was a former military head of state, a retired general with an authoritarian cast of temperament who viewed everywhere as a garrison to be dominated and subjected to discipline and order.

He was also a much respected global citizen who had begun to see himself as larger than life. To make matters worse, General Obasanjo himself was a victim of military intrigues and Machiavellian conspiracies which saw him briefly sentenced to death by his former subordinates only later to be commuted to life imprisonment. There was abiding trauma somewhere.

Obasanjo’s brief from his former junior colleagues was to hold the nation together at all costs and to prevent it from fracturing in the hands of its fractious political elite even if it means dragging it from the brink with a brinksmanship all of its own. It could not have been his fault if he inserted a messianic self-help into the clause and the project. It all came with the territory, after all those who put him there cannot be accused of being entirely altruistic.

To his credit, Obasanjo and his kitchen cabinet had within a very short time achieved a brilliant feat of demilitarization which is unequalled in the annals of military disengagement in postcolonial Africa. Within a very short time, Obasanjo was able to return the country to international respectability and global prestige from hitherto pariah status. The economy was also beginning to show a bounce.

The vainglory and messianic self-righteousness notwithstanding,  such a person can be excused if he began to see himself as God’s specially anointed with a divine mandate to treat the territory handed over to him as he deemed fit. He can treat the inhabitants with brusque disdain and all adolescent effusions from the other arms of government as evidence of judicial and legislative rascality which must not be condoned.

This was the situation that set the template for the inevitable confrontation between Nnamani’s fifth senate and the Obasanjo presidency. Before we come to this, it is appropriate to say a few words about the concept of institution and institution-building .Contrary to received notions in some quarters, there is no egg and chicken paradox about the notion of institutions and strong men. Please note that by this I do not mean strongmen as they have come to be known in Africa and the remaining enclaves of authoritarian one-man rule in the world.

All human societies build institutions to suit their needs and as a veritable compass to negotiate existential pressures. Institutions are products of leaders with the requisite strength of character and visionary selflessness to consider what is best for their society. They, the burgeoning institutions, in turn serve to modulate and modify the behaviour of errant and unstable leadership particularly in precarious existential circumstances.

For example when George Washington declined the invitation to rule America in perpetuity in close approximation of the same autocratic monarchy which had driven his forbears from feudal England, he was laying down the foundation of the modern American presidential system which has been the envy of the modern civilized world.

It takes granite determination and a radical envisioning of a new world order to do just that. Warts and all America is the better society for that noble gesture and an exemplar of liberal democracy for the modern world.

Read Also: Institution building in post-military Nigeria: The example of the Fifth Senate

Institutions are products of prodigious human endeavours, repeated gestures or what the French call, repete gestes, which are then burnt into human consciousness to become routinized and ritualized as accepted norms and conventional behaviour. Without such institutions which guide and rail-guard societal procedures, there can be no human civilization.

African societies have practised institution-building from time immemorial. The debate about whether Africa needs strong men or strong institutions is a mere signpost for the political epidemic of human dereliction imposed on Africa as a result of the colonial rupture that has brought African postcolonial societies into a state of historic disorientation and political schizophrenia.

The last point to note is that of the three arms of government, the legislature is the most ill-served by the phenomenon of military incursion into politics in Nigeria and elsewhere. While the executive and the judiciary survive military interregnum albeit in a hobbled and disfigured form, the legislature is summarily abrogated with its capacity for growth stunted and stultified.

This has had a telling effect on the legislature of the Fourth Republic. As we have seen with the case of Nnamani himself, the executive at both the national and sub-national levels exploit this inherent weakness and the lack of organic capacity for growth to play perfidious poker with the destiny of the nation.

As a result, political greenhorns are pushed into positions of legislative authority where their abysmal political and moral incontinence begin to show immediately. Worse still, untested political acolytes without any antecedents or storied lineage are crowded into the legislature where they act like political robots and neutered human cyborgs. The toll on the cherished tradition of continuity and the political evolution of the nation can be better imagined.

Given this background, it was clear that a thorough and diligent person like Nnamani would have his work cut out for him when he assumed the presidency of the Fifth Senate on the fifth day of April, 2005. Like many of his colleagues, Nnamani knew where the rains started beating the senate of the Fourth Republic. There was no need pretending any further. The fortunes of the senate of the Fourth Republic were at their lowest ebb and their public ratings very poor indeed.

Nnamani embarked on wholesale legislative reforms which involved massive housecleaning exercise and the clearing out of the cobwebs of corruption and legislative shenanigans. A legislative aide of the new senate helmsman who thought it was all a joke was summarily dismissed for illegal procurement of fertilizers using forged letter heads of the senate presidency.

The executive duly took notice. In an interactive session with President Obasanjo before the inevitable clinch, the retired General ,a past master of the art of psych-op, noted that Nnamani’s successful business background might help him, but it could also injure him. Obasanjo deliberately left the matter hanging, leaving the senate president to work out the double-edged praise in all its gnomic ambiguity.

Nnamani braced himself for the inevitable confrontation. It stole upon the senate like a thief in the night. Ever since the beginning of the Fourth Republic, there has been a clamour for the drastic amendment of the constitution bequeathed to the nation by the departing military oligarchy. Many dismissed it as unrepresentative of the genuine wishes and aspirations of Nigerians and unworthy of being called a genuine people’s constitution.

Rotimi Williams, the legal luminary, dismissed it as a constitution “which tells a lie against itself”. Itse Sagay, the noted Constitutional Law expert, slapped it down as a fraud. All over the nation, there were concerted efforts to join issues with the federal authorities. Most notable among these was the PRONACO movement led by the veteran nationalist and twice exiled activist-patriot, Anthony Enahoro which went ahead to hold its own alternative National Conference.

The federal authorities at first pooh-poohed the whole idea of a National Conference claiming that it is legally and politically impossible to have two sovereign authorities in a nation at the same time. The good people of Nigeria as a collective electorate had already delegated their sovereign authority to the elected ruling government. Beyond waiting for a new cycle of elections, there was nothing anybody could do about that.

However when the national clamour became impossible to ignore, the government, in a stunning volte face, suddenly reversed itself by convening what it called the National Political Reform Conference loading the 400 membership with its well-known acolytes and cohorts. It was an attempt by the Obasanjo presidency to kill two birds with one stone.

Obasanjo set an agenda for the conference highlighting areas that the delegates should debate. But he also controversially set the limits for its deliberation and by implication the end-result by pointing out areas he considered to be no go such as the oneness of the nation, its indivisibility as well as federalism and the presidential system. According to him, these are settled issues requiring no further ruminations or cogitations.

The sparks began to fly once the Constitution Amendment Bill was presented to the Senate on April 4, 2006. All in all, there were one hundred and sixteen clauses. But despite the laudable nature of most of the recommendations and their nation-invigorating potentials, there was a big elephant in the room. Surreptitiously smuggled into the proposed amendment was the poisoned chalice that was to become known as The Third Term Bill that canvassed further elongation of the two terms limit proposed by the Constitution for executive office holders.

This is how Nnamani himself described the strange manoeuvre on page 125 of this engrossing book.  “Then deep in the middle of these desired amendments to the 1999 Constitution, they buried the provision for a third term for the president. And they presented all the proposed amendments, including the third term amendment proposal as one bill”.

The ruse was not all that clever. It amounted to hiding behind one finger. When it was discovered the public became implacable. Many of the senators were livid. The very few among them who still defended the Third Term project could only do so furtively and not without casting anxious glances behind their own back. If the intention was honest and patriotic, why did they need to hide it?

After an exhaustive debate commencing a month later which began with whether the constitution should be amended in the first place, the senate voted overwhelmingly to reject the entire bill. In so doing, they also appeared regrettably to throw the baby out with the bath water. In such circumstances, there would have been no room for such political finesse as separation and unbundling of sub clauses. The circumstances were too dire and desperate.

The rejection of the third term agenda was a massive blow to its proponents. Many of them never recovered their bounce. Some of them went to their grave shunned and cold-shouldered as pariahs. For President Obasanjo it was a profound personal rebuff and a cataclysmic blow to his personal prestige and international standing.

From that time on and with the unfortunate and protracted dogfight with the Vice president compounding its fortunes and further eroding its public credibility, the Obasanjo presidency became a lame duck and Obasanjo himself a raging bull to be gently eased out of the room before doing further collateral damage to the nation .

Despite his repeated public denials and the fact that nothing could be directly traced to him, the evidence of the former president’s complicity in the Third Term fiasco was as overwhelming as it was damning. Like a relentless prosecutor of exemplary forensic skills, Nnamani focuses on the details from every conceivable angle stripping outright lies, dishonest denials and ingenious misrepresentations of facts from the body of evidence.

One cannot but feel sorry for the culprits. In a revealing postscript, Nnamani discloses how a call came through the secure line in his office shortly after the senate rejected the term elongation bid. It was from retired Major General Abdullahi Mohammed, President Obasanjo’s Chief of Staff. In a frantic tone laced with anxiety and apprehension, the retired general asked Senator Nnamani what he wanted him to tell Baba. “Tell him it is all over”, Nnamani bluntly responded. The game was up.

After nailing his quarry, Nnamani is generous enough to impute noble motives to some of the actors. A few of them genuinely believed that elongation of terms under the incumbent was the national panacea needed to guarantee peace, stability and progress. It did not occur to them that the listed benefits would become the most critically endangered by term elongation in a multi-ethnic nation roiled by religious, cultural and regional polarizations.

As for the principal actor, Nnamani notes Obasanjo prodigious capacity for hard work, his meticulous attention to details and his capacity to spot and nurture talents.  But he also surmises rightly that the authoritarian diktat of personalized rule cannot match the potentials of consensual politics in fragile democracies particularly in nations torn apart by ethnic strife and mutual misgivings. In the end, Obasanjo is a victim of his own messianic delusions.

It is a pity that all the other weighty considerations and well-judged ruminations in this memoir appear to have been overshadowed by the Third Term imbroglio. Fifteen years after, Nigeria is still haunted by the spectre of aborted constitutional reform conferences.

The recommendations of the last one ended on the desk of the former president staring him in the face until he was democratically deposed. It was said that it was because it did not quite serve his ploy for term extension. The Fourth Republic appears fated to the charade and chicanery of expensive national gatherings which raise the national hopes of rejuvenation only to dash them at the finishing line.

Senator Nnamani must be congratulated for the exhaustive research and diligent presentation of facts and events which went into putting this important memoir together. It is a seminal intervention in Nigeria’s political process and a must for everybody interested in how we got to where we are and the possible escape routes. I thank  you  all.

• Excerpts from review of STANDING STRONG presented in Abuja on October 21, 2021