Category: Sunday

In a significant pushback by the forces of civil and political society against a brutal and obdurate postcolonial military state, Admiral Augustus Aikhomu, General Babangida’s deputy and Vice-Chairman of the Armed Forces Ruling Council, once famously rued that nothing the government did seem to impress the adamant opposition that appeared so cohesive and unrelenting in its criticism and adversarial postures. “Honestly, one just has to continue doing what one feels is right and good for the nation without minding what they feel or say”, thus mournfully concluded the gruff elderly sailor from the old Edo Division. This was after opposition forces had made a short shrift of his attempts to confuse the nation by making a dubious distinction between “misapplication of funds” and “misappropriation of national resources” in a case of crass corruption and abuse of office involving a state governor.

 Shortly thereafter as the battle between democratic forces shaped up into an epic showdown which would culminate in the annulment of the freest and fairest election in the history of the nation and its tragic aftermath, General Ibrahim Babangida, the old Minna fox and master of dribbling incursions into enemy eighteen, showed up on national television after a meeting of the ruling council to brief the nation about the outcome of the council’s deliberations. Wearing a gloomy visage of contrived frustration, Babangida informed his compatriots that a pressing item on the agenda was to discuss whether to hand over the government to civil society forces who thought they knew how to govern the country better. It was a tense and testy moment for the nation. When pressed further, Babangida retorted ruefully and adamantly that it was the truth. It was a military blackmail from the pit of hell. Whoever heard of a military cabal suddenly hand over power to its civilian adversaries without some bloody encounters?  The military would later hand over power, but no longer in circumstances of their choice or in condition of their provenance.

  Almost four decades  and a spate of communal upheavals , abortive military putsch, religion-based insurrections and nation-wide protests against the economic distress of the nation, the battle of will and wits between voices and forces of democratic pluralism and the Nigerian post-military state continues in several guises. It is to the credit of the prodemocracy forces that despite heavy casualties, the military finally retreated to the barracks. But as it is to be expected of a society transiting to political modernity, vestiges of military-inspired political autocracy and traditional authoritarianism remain. In postcolonial societies, the reorientation of political consciousness is always the hardest task, requiring deliberate cultivation and acculturation. Swelling the ranks of the ruling dominant party with stragglers and defectors and other political destitute does not lead to a new political culture. It is like working to answer; a reenactment of the old feudalist ethos in modern politics which always leads a nation to peril as it has happened twice in Nigeria’s history. This is why the debate about whether Nigeria is about to become a one-party state is a non-event; a non sequitur, the reverse gear of genuine and authentic elite consensus.

   Unfortunately, punditry and informed commentary in Nigeria is often taken over by those who seem to lack fundamental capacity for rigorous thinking and the scholastic training for formal argumentation and systematized thought-processing which you found in intellectuals and politicians of an earlier epoch many of who did not even attend universities as well as in their tested well-trained bureaucrats. Instead of marshaling their points and laying out their argument in a sober and polished manner all you find is arid emoting and political incivilities which grate on the well-bred but which may sound to them like poetic eureka. While we are all at it, what is more unfortunate is that history and events do not wait for any society to solve its national problems or resolve its crippling contradictions.

 Otherwise, why has contested sovereignty become the norm in several African countries despite the drive towards further democratization in the last three decades? In these postcolonial countries, overwhelmed sovereignty, partial sovereignty, negotiated sovereignty, partial territoriality and contested state identity have been the order of day with asymmetrical warfare and occasional symmetrical set-pieces that have brought the postcolonial state in Africa to utter ruin and disrepute. In many of these countries, ungoverned and ungovernable spaces surpass the writ of formal governance. In South Sudan, the protagonists are on the verge of returning to the killing fields of equatorial torpor despite a subsisting power-sharing arrangement.

  Sudan is effectively partitioned as the RUF establishes formal state presence in Western Darfur after two years of horrific bloodletting. An armed critique of the befuddled gerontocracy that has ruled Cameroon since 1981 is ongoing in the English-speaking Western region of the country. The state in the Democratic Republic of Congo is effectively defunct. In Nigeria despite the advent of democracy, particularly after the summary execution of the Boko Haram sect leader in 2009, the group mutated into several murderous factions and armed affiliates that have put the fear of the Lord into everybody, particularly along the Katsina-Zamfara corridor. The Benue-Plateau axis is on the boil again while the east erupts periodically in sectarian violence.

Read Also: Tinubu receives special envoy of Qatari Amir at State House

  One can imagine the ruinous impact of these multiple and multi-dimensional conflicts on the nation’s food security which is critical to the mood of any nation and the government’s drive to reset the economy which is critical to national wellbeing. Nobody will come to our aid. The Americans who came in the early days of the Boko Haram left in a huff, citing the possibility of compromised intelligence and security concerns. As it has turned out, there were too many rogue elements in the field including Americans themselves. This is what happens when a nation’s internal demons lead it to become a prey for international gaming. In retrospect, the global shenanigans surrounding the emergence of these shadowy and virulent sects might have signposted the decaying of the old international order and the drastic reset America is currently undergoing in the hands of Donald Trump.

Apocalypse now, or the Pope of Good Hope?

May we all live in interesting times, the wily and eternally inscrutable Chinese people admonish. We surely live in interesting and unpredictable times. The world is passing through a period of strife and stress in which there is a radical discontinuity between the certainties of the past and the wild implausibility of the present, or between the events of the past and the eventualities of the present. The current epoch is marked by a convergence of conflicts and conflagrations which leaves no part of the globe untouched. With its fulcrum unhinged, the world thrashes about in different directions like a beached behemoth that has reached the end of the road, spreading fear and panic everywhere. Meanwhile, as Israel pounds everything in sight into submission, the old map of the Middle East is being forcibly redrawn before our very eyes with the old powers too tired and enfeebled to do anything about it.

  The 1948 conflict over the establishment of a Jewish State, the 1956 Suez Canal conflagration, the 1967 war and the 1973 Yom Kippur confrontation, though of a savage and brutal nature was over in a matter of days. But the current Gaza expedition which was triggered by Hamas’ palpable indiscretion has lasted almost two years with an inch by inch high-tech annihilation of Gaza Strip by Israel. Before our very eyes, Israel has transformed from a war-prone nation to the first modern war state and colonizing imperium.  The old western power masters in their wisdom must be wondering if they didn’t lower the Israeli cat too early among the Arab and Persian pigeons. That is if they do not have their own internal demons to contend with.

  For a long time, attention has been focused on the Westphalia nation-states and the struggling paradigm of nations they have spawned particularly in the Third World and in the so called Second World. But with the continuing chaos in post-colonial Africa, the fiasco in the western world and the horrendous melee in the Middle East, attention is now shifting back to the State Question, that is the nature of the institutions and the quality of the manpower assembled to preside over the affairs of humanity and the equitable distribution of its resources. The reaction to this epochal crisis of the state has been as intriguing as it is interesting.

  While Africa in the main remains trapped by the institutional paralysis and structural disequilibrium that have made it impossible for its talented First Eleven to come to power and governance, many nations in Europe and Asia have gone back to the drawing board to rediscover its most gifted elite-class. While a “colonial” nation like Canada has set formal politics aside to hand over the reins of power to an Harvard and Oxford-trained, intellectually gifted economist and technocrat, America, the founding nation of liberal democracy, has allowed the ball to slip from its sight and with that the American political mob has finally elected its own leader. With Donald Trump famously and sacrilegiously donning the episcopal mantle of the pope after the burial of the globally revered pontiff, we may be witnessing the final funeral rites of liberal democracy as we know it. Now that we have an American-born pope, Donald Trump will soon realize that the joke is on him.

  How did humanity come to this sorry pass? Is humankind not a victim of its own amazing successes as it evolved away from the Hobbesian state of nature to acquire the trappings of a modern society? Our species has chalked up amazing successes on the road to the modern society, making it to surpass anything that has been before or is likely to come after even with the discovery of “life” in outer spaces. But we must always bear in mind that this ascendancy was achieved at the cost of momentous brutality and utmost cruel exertion. To secure a breathing space, our species had to hunt down and drive into extinction lesser and weaker hominids until the world was made safe for primitive humanity to roam about freely about in search of its own destiny. As Charles Darwin brilliantly demonstrated, survival of the fittest is the first principle of evolution of the human organism. Every ascendant civilization is built on the ashes and massive destruction of earlier civilizations. Every preeminent nation and its people have put other eminent nations and their people to sword. There is a Viking in every one of us. This is unfortunately what is playing out between Israel and its neighbors with the world looking askance in spite of the horrific carnage.

What is now imperative for humankind is to find a way to further civilize itself and humanize the historical process through a benevolent State that drives the human propensity for plunder and predatory carnage underground into the abject cellars of wild hominids from which it evolved. Based on the massive evidence before us, religion and pious worship can no longer do the magic. We hesitate to say that religion has become part of the problem.

  The discovery of the state in the evolution of humankind and society is a startling innovation of political genius which laid the foundation for the emergence of the post-hunter-gatherer society and a more orderly and standardized commune with division of labour taking deep roots. This was the embryonic origins of modern civilization as we know it. But over succeeding millennia and centuries as human society grew more complex as a result of human genius for innovation, the state grew more powerful and overarching , often attempting to invade and regularize all aspects of human behavior. This has led to powerful pushbacks from forces of civil and political societies often eventuating in massacres, pogroms, epic slave revolts such as we had in the old Roman Empire and revolutions such as have occurred in the US, France, Russia, China, Cuba etc. These epochal events which led to the overthrow and extirpation of the old ruling classes and ancien regime and the inauguration of new ruling classes often lead to deep changes in state and the nation. But in almost all of them the deep foundations of authoritarian tyranny and repressive severity remain with the state. The traditional family structure with its autocratic patriarch and implacable law-giver projects onto the state the subliminal anxieties of humanity.

   The human organism with its complex motivations and impulses so countervailing even in the same person that it is beyond belief is not an easy person to rule or to suborn. Even the illiterate masses have ideas of their own and rightly so. In some quarters, it is asserted that if humankind were to be angels, there would be no need for government. In its efforts to stay one foot ahead of the masses and to put the gilded throne beyond the reach of the furious mob and mutinous multitude, the state develops exotic and quixotic ideas of its own. In the early twentieth century, in their response to the global economic crisis, some western countries adopted an ideology which seeks a total control of politics, the economy and society through relentless mobilization and appeal to crude nationalism. It all ended in a historic fiasco with Spain still managing the politically ruinous consequences up till this moment while the Italians personally accounted for their leader, Benito Mussolini and his mistress. Hitler committed suicide.

Read Also: The party athwart the movement: why socialist political parties perform so woefully in elections in postcolonial Nigeria

In post-independence Africa, many of the leaders and founding fathers of their nations sought to impose a one-party state on their nations as a way of containing the centrifugal forces in the seething, multi-ethnic and multi-religious furnaces they inherited from the colonial rule. But it was to no avail as the experiment dissolved into ugly ethnic confrontation and violent military upheavals. In the few African countries that survived the blitz, such as Senegal and Tanzania, it was because their founding fathers were wise enough to leave behind a structure open enough for countervailing succession. In Nigeria, the political tension, military coups and an eventual confrontation between forces of civil and political society and brutal military rule which ended with the soldiers retreating to the barracks.

Unfortunately and despite the euphoria, it would appear that the vestigial structure of a repressive military state which blitzed the Nigerian landscape and sent the whole nation into a terroristic tremor remains undisturbed.  Despite the advent of open and competitive democracy and the ongoing reset of the economic categories of the nation, the unresolved questions have led to contested sovereignty on many fronts and open challenges to the authority and legitimacy of the state in multiple theatres of conflicts across the nation.

   The solution lies in a reinvention of the postcolonial state in Nigeria which will strengthen the capacity of the armed forces to deal with local and international emergences, push for a more inclusive governance and a structured egalitarian distribution of national resources across board, address the problem of corruption which has pushed the nation and its armed forces to the edge of the abyss and lay the foundation of a new beginning. In doing this, it must also attempt to dredge and drain the deep well of national resentments against the state. This is no doubt a huge task but the earlier we began to face the real issues the better.