How Nations Miss Their Flights
Nothing in human experience can be more exciting and exhilarating than suddenly beholding from the skies, the dazzling arrays of planes and aircrafts below as your own began its final approach at a major international airport. This was the experience last Thursday morning at London’s Heathrow Airport as the sleek Air-France jet descended on the English skies from the French side of the Channel. This morning, the typically British weather, at first blurry and bleary-eyed, began to show some signs of cheeriness and gaiety. A few of the planes were gliding and sliding into position and formation ready to vanish into the clouds. Most were nestling in supine splendor primed and poised to display their awesome capacity for superhuman speed and velocity at short notice. Daedalus and Icarus would be proud of human achievement and the strides humanity has taken in its heroic efforts to take to the sky, unlike the father-son experiment which ended in a huge fiasco a long time ago.
In the over fifty years’ experience of watching planes come and go, one had become an addict of plane-spotting. The obsession had led one to become a denizen of airport hotels all over the world. The closer the airport is to actual plane landing and taking off, the better. The best in this regard is the defunct Hilton Hotel just outside JFK Airport in Jamaica, New York, before it was parceled out and turned into luxury apartments. From the vantage point of its Executive Lounge on the twelfth floor, you could watch as aircrafts come and go and contemplate planes parked with orderly precision in endless rows like monster-birds in a historical formation. These different planes, in their glamour and prestige, advertise the wellbeing and continuous viability of their owner nations. As such, they are projections of what is known as soft power, the capacity to convince and influence without resorting to naked force or raw coercion.
As planes of all colour and hues came into view this morning at Heathrow, you came to the conclusion that this is like a congregation of nations. Apart from the big hitters such as America, Britain, Germany, France, Canada, Holland, Japan, Australia and the emergent Arab economic powerhouses of Saudi, Qatar and UAE, you had planes from Argentina, Brazil, Austria, Italy, Malta, Norway, Sweden, Cyprus, Finland, Iceland, China, South Korea, Ireland and Russia. The negligible African presence is made up of Rwanda, Kenya, South Africa, Ethiopia, Morocco, Ghana and Egypt. The rest of the continent is an ominous void. You ask the Ghanaian driver who came to pick you up why Terminal Four at Heathrow Airport appears to be less busy than the others and he looked at you with diffident surprise. “Ha, sir, that may be true, but you wait until Air Indian arrives and all hell is let loose with all kinds”, he noted with a wry grin and then became glum and uncommunicative again, as if he was not the one you just heard. It is a strategy of survival and every wise soul in a foreign clime knows when to shut their trap, particularly in a period of hysterical nationalism and colour-combing.
The mood this morning darkened into sombre despondency. It is more like looking down below in anger. It is said that birds of the same feather flock together. But it can also be established that birds or nations of the same plumage bandy together. You see, all happy nations are the same, but every unhappy nation is unhappy in its own uniquely unhappy way. You suddenly realized that your beloved country, Nigeria, is nowhere to be found in this glittering commonwealth of nations, this assemblage of flying nations in their glorious plumes. The metaphor of a grounded bird is very appropriate. Nigeria has lost its capacity to take to the sky. It has winged itself with its clumpy mass hugging the bare earth, unable to fly or even walk. It has become the proverbial edun arinle, a species of monkey that has lost its aerial mobility and capacity for energetic acrobatics which now consoles itself by hurling stones at its more fortunate siblings on tree branches.
You had left home in anger and a near-fatal weariness of the soul as members of the fractious and unproductive political class bicker endlessly about who will rule Nigeria in two years’ time even as the nation shows early warning signals of expiring from the stress and trauma of serial gang-raping. They are too far gone for the murderous absurdity to be apparent to them. Too much politics ruins a nation. What the nation needs is a moratorium on politics which will allow it to deal with its hobbling contradictions. If this is not done in circumstances of peaceful abeyance of partisan politics, it will be done in conditions of total state enervation by converging forces of economic, political, social and spiritual bankruptcy.
But as the siege-smart Arabs will gladly let you know, to flee your fate is to rush to find it. If you think that you have safely absconded from the political horror show at home, the first rush of foreign air confronts you with the tragedy of aborted hope and unfulfilled expectations that has become an integral item of your baggage. If you are too tired and drowsy to take in Charles De Gaulle Airport in its heady magnificence and sheer class, Heathrow is like history that will not let you be however much you try to evade or avoid it. The planes of Heathrow drop on you like a bomb the stark truth of state failure and national incapacitation. In Nigeria, ethnicity is so weaponized by the ruling elites that it becomes the most veritable instrument of checkmating the state and curtailing national development. It is perhaps only in Nigeria that ethnic cohorts of a former top official being tried for corrupt self-enrichment and criminal embezzlement of state funds will besiege the court and cause the termination of further proceedings. All the major ethnic groups deploy weapons of choice which includes ethnic violence against the state, economic terrorism against the nation and the mobilization of cultural and intellectual resources against both the state and the nation.
Since the postcolonial state is seen by ruling classes as a hostile alien construct which must be invaded and destroyed rather than a mechanism for resolving ethnic conflicts and elite disputes arising from the distribution of resources, the void arising is taken over by multifarious clashes and polarizations with the apex conflict being about who presides over the distribution of national resources at a particular time and for how long. The forces that drive the conflict also make sure that there is no recourse to egalitarian distribution or inclusive governance, a situation which fuels further clamours and attempts to derail the ruling group. It is a war of all against all with no end in sight until a dominant warlord emerges who forcibly puts an end to the crisis by imposing his own solution. This is what has happened in Cote D’Ivoire as Alisane Quattara is poised to win his fourth term and all is quiet on the Cocody front, after partitioning and civil war; just as it happened earlier in Uganda in 1986, Congo Brazzaville in 1997 and Rwanda in 1994 after genocide.
A nation’s external borders are never fixed and unalterable if its normative and ethical boundaries remain loose and alterable. This is the problem with inauthentic and inorganic African nations whose normative boundaries are marked by lack of fixity and rigid rules of engagement or what can be called an absence of founding values and charter of association. Because of this fundamental lack of a primal organogram, there is a reign of economic and political injustice in most of these countries which makes them permanent preys and habitual hostages to instability. Hence, the constant cries for an urgent resolution of the National Question and convocation of a national conference either sovereign or non-sovereign. The snag here is the permanent lack of elite unanimity with those sections of the elite holding the wrong end of the stick being loudest in condemnation but going into complicit quietude once the balance of power alters. As it has happened with many African countries that we enumerated above, there is no exceptionalism driving political evolution in Nigeria and the situation remains very vulnerable to the emergence of a supreme law-giver after all elite passion might have been spent.
Going back to our plane-spotting, it is noteworthy that up till the last minute of the last administration, the incumbent Minister of Aviation was reassuring his compatriots that a wholly owned indigenous national carrier was on the cards and that planes from its hangars were about to materialize out of the skies like those wonder birds out of Heathrow Airport last Thursday. In an exemplary feat of congenital crookedness, an aircraft belonging to Ethiopian Airlines was hurriedly rented and painted in Nigerian colours just to sustain and feed the illusion of Nigerians eagerly awaiting the dawn of a new national carrier. It was a gargantuan scam shot through with bizarre idiocies that could only be contemplated by a member of a privileged clan that had lost all sense of proportion and propriety. When the same minister was brought to court for other indiscretions, he was hugged and mobbed by his admiring and adulating ethnic cohorts obviously ready for any emergency. This is what happens to nations without normative and ethical boundaries. And reprieve will not come from the skies. Only planes from well-organized countries do. Last Thursday, Nigeria was not at Heathrow.
