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Category: Sunday

Who is afraid of the cost of change? 2

Unless there is an immediate revolution in the country’s judicial culture, citizens may be in a better position to support the government in ending or arresting corruption in the country than a judiciary that is already infected by the virus of Nigeria Factor.

We need more support; it is about Nigeria, not an individual, the fight against corruption is for everybody, from the media we have to go to the grassroots, we will take it to children in the schools; we have to tell the children that corruption is bad, tell them why there is no chair in the classroom…. We will sensitise everybody to the evil of corruption. We need to let people know that corruption is bad, because some people don’t seem to know.—Ibrahim Magu, EFCC Chairman

Last week, this column called on those holding the levers of power to get ready to deal with the cost of change. The column argued that if the current administration is to arrest corruption, it must address the two types of corruption: the act of plundering nation’s resources and a governance culture that makes citizens feel that the wealth of the nation belongs only to the few with access to political and bureaucratic power. It concluded that fighting corruption effectively will require not just the willingness of judges to serve the cause of justice, but also mobilisation of citizens to stand up to defend their patrimony through use of citizens’ sovereignty to call promoters and defenders of corruption and undue privilege for political officers to order. It also asked President Buhari to insist that his ministers declare their assets. Today’s piece will focus on the role of citizens in a democracy and the responsibility of people in power to encourage citizens to have a stake in the way they are governed. It will argue that both citizens and democratic governments in the country need to cooperate more than they are doing, if corruption is to be removed from the country’s governance culture.

Born and raised mostly in the era of military dictatorship with no clearly defined mission for sustainable democracy and national development, a huge number of active citizens in the voting age today have grown to see themselves not as part of the governance process. The alienation of citizens at the instance of military governments continued into the few years of democratic governance since independence. The alienation reached its peak during the last administration, which essentially appropriated the state and its resources with a show of impunity that finally angered the citizens to the point of voting out a party self-referenced as the largest political party in Africa destined to rule without interruption for at least 65 years.

In a way, the vote for Buhari and his manifesto of change marked the beginning of citizen dis-alienation. But the effective use of citizens’ votes to change a government they did not feel comfortable with does not amount to full acceptance of citizens’ role in a democracy. Apart from electoral democracy which gives citizens the opportunity to choose or replace governments that rule them, citizens are expected in democratic cultures to see themselves in post-election times as stakeholders whose main responsibilities are to participate in policy debates, petition the government, and protest against public policies whenever they feel the need to do so. The old aphorisms: “A people get the government they deserve” and “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” all illustrate the role of citizens in shaping the way their nation is governed, especially the readiness on the part of their rulers to see governance as a life-enhancing endeavour that expects people in government to commit to accountability and transparency in governance.

For long in our country’s frequently broken journey to democratic governance, most citizens have come to see politicians and government as overlords. In addition, when vocational civil society organisations mushroomed in the country during the era of military dictatorship, many citizens saw civil society as separate from the citizenry. This perception has been traced to the fact that most civil society organisations came into being and remain in existence through funding by former colonial powers and their collaborators. Many observers also believe that many civil society organisations, like other segments of the Nigerian polity and society, had been infected and degraded by the culture of corruption in ascendancy from decade to decade.

As this column observed last week, President Buhari’s call on citizens and the judiciary to play the roles allotted to them in a democracy enthusiastically and effectively remains one of the most profound statements from the presidency in respect of consolidating and sustaining democracy in the country. Undoubtedly, there have been similar statements in respect of democracy in the past, but it is salutary that such statement came this time from a man whose personal integrity had contributed noticeably to the success of an opposition party to unseat a political party ‘destined’ in the words of its leaders to rule Nigeria continuously for close to three quarters of a century. But the president’s encouragement of citizens to be vigilant beyond electoral democracy must have raised citizens’ expectations about the future of democracy and development in the country. However, for the president’s statement to have a lasting impact, it must be backed by programmatic commitment at every level of government to stimulating citizens to get fully engaged in the war against corruption, a political and social vice that is inimical to the thriving of democracy and development in the country.

Unless there is an immediate revolution in the country’s judicial culture, citizens may be in a better position to support the government in ending or arresting corruption in the country than a judiciary that is already infected by the virus of Nigeria Factor. Like all aspects of the polity, the judiciary may need the type of re-orientation that other corruption-prone institutions in the polity require, for it to play a proper role in the fight against corruption. Building trust between the government and the electorate is the most important thing needed to reinforce the fight against corruption. It is perhaps easy for corrupt people to fight back and dirty as they seem to be doing already. Corrupt people in government, banks, and other resource-rich institutions are likely to have enough resources to purchase corrupt professionals in all spheres of life but they may not be able to have enough stolen money to spare for buying the conscience of most citizens.

The fight against corruption and for amelioration of governance in the country (now coded as Change) needs citizens’ support more than that of any other institution inherited from decades of venality in governance. The managers of Buhari’s manifesto of change need to interact more respectfully with citizens than the governments in the past. They need to be honest with citizens and provide them with information about forces that are working to prevent change in all forms. For example, it should not be easier for the government’s media aides to identify names of police officers who take N100 bribe on the street than it should be to provide meaningful information about those who stole over one trillion naira from the state. The news about 55 individuals-former ministers, governors, bank officers, etc— is not helpful so far. WHO as one of the mandatory five Ws and one H of news reporting is the first thing to be established before an event is turned into a news story. There is no excuse for government to forget to give citizens the names of the 55 individuals that had wrecked the economy.

If the manifesto of change is not to be rubbished by desperate members of the country’s venal elite, President Buhari needs to initiate programmes that can enhance participatory democracy by encouraging public debate and hearings on important policy initiatives, including bringing some matters directly before citizens in a referendum. Citizens feel the presence of governments all over the world through interaction with the public service. As of now, public service still acts as an agency to deny service rather than one to provide public goods and services to citizens. Making government agencies responsive to citizens is one way for the regime of change to establish trust with citizens to the point that they would take the risk of engaging forces that are hostile to good governance. It is after citizens are sure that those in power are serious about improving the institutions created to serve them that they too will “do the needful” to protect the machine of change.

Citizens on their part need not feel overwhelmed by the noise of anti-change media warriors or by the power at the disposal of those they had elected. For example, as bad as the current constitution is, it provides citizens the right to recall elected officials when they feel this is necessary. Citizens need to be vigilant if they want change. They must realise that the power of example evident in Presidential Buhari’s personal life may not be enough to sustain a regime of change. Other branches of government, especially the houses of elected lawmakers require close scrutiny at all times. Like the president, the lawmakers need to be made accountable to those that elected them. When any lawmaker acts in a way that undermines citizens’ interests, citizens should not forget that they too have the power to recall irresponsible lawmakers.

January 24, 2016
Re: Pastor Tunde Bakare’s roadmap to a successful change

Finally, the bullet that finally knocked off the pastor’s request/demand was the recommendation that additional states be created when any suggestion, worthy of any consideration at all, should have canvassed confederation, and a return to the old regions, or something similar, which would then act as the federating units

“INEC was not truthful on this point. INEC knew that a supplementary election was unnecessary in the circumstances. The electoral body was, and is still, in possession of records which show that in the affected 91 polling units, there were only 38,000 permanent voters cards (PVCs) issued. Of that figure, only 25,000 collected the cards. And at the November 21, 2015 election, only 19,000 persons were accredited in the affected units. The margin of win by Audu/Faleke ticket would, undoubtedly, have accommodated any of these figures with Audu/Faleke still leading by majority of votes. It can, therefore, be rightly concluded that the phony supplementary election was falsely devised to hoodwink the people of Kogi State and play the script of some powerful political interests at the expense of the will of the people of Kogi” – Olarinde Yesufu, a legal analyst, writing on the topic: Kogi – Inaugurating Bello as governor will be unconstitutional in The Nation of 21st Jan, 2015.

It goes without saying that the above epigram does not speak to today’s topic but it galls to high heavens reading the very pedestrian argument of Dr Oluwayomi David Atte, a University of Ibadan- trained development scholar you’d expect to be much more liberated, trying to justify INEC’s premeditated, but thoroughly illogical declaration of the Kogi governorship election as inconclusive, on the laughable excuse that Faleke is not known in Kogi. Even if this outlandish claim were true, and not merely playing to the ‘come and chop’ tradition of most Kogi State politicians always talking from both sides of their mouths, where was he when Faleke emerged the deputy gubernatorial candidate to Prince Audu? Does he know better than the late Audu who, with considerable justification, can be described as the godfather of Kogi politics far ahead of the likes of Idris or the simple hearted Wada? Was Atte away on Mars or where can we locate his objection to that selection if he wants to be taken serious? Of course, he must have been too patronising of Prince Audu to have the liver to complain. It’s a shame that the likes of Atte, Clarence Obafemi and Dino Melaye, have, with their volte face, further demonstrated how effete the average Kogi politician, many of who were implicated in Obasanjo’s shoot down of a decent Chief Sunday Awoniyi who, it was, who first described PDP as an aggregation of very venal people, is. It is obvious to the unbiased that INEC was arms twisted to do what it did as the same thing happened in the last Bayelsa election without any such unreasonable decision. One can only hope that APC will not, by its own hands, snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It is germane to mention that in the case between Wada, Faleke and INEC, the trial judge specifically said that its decision had nothing to do with INEC’s failure to declare the election result or on the substitution of candidates.

With all due respect to their eminences, Bishop Matthew Kukah of the Sokoto Catholic Diocese and Pastor Bakare of The Latter Rain Assembly, it can be safely concluded that the way they venerate, and purvey, elements of former President Goodluck Jonathan’s recondite policies and actions in office, can only be a consequence of our Lord’s teachings about the Christian love. “And one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning together, and perceiving that he had answered them well asked him: which is the first commandment of all?” To which Jesus answered: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord. And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and with thy entire mind and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this: thou shall love thy neighbour as thyself”. “There is none other commandment greater than these” – Mark 12: 28-31. While Bishop Kukah has severally exonerated the former president on all he did in office, Pastor Bakare, like most members of his core group in the Jonathan National Conference of 2014, has continued to present the recommendations of that talkshop as a silver bullet to all of Nigeria’s problems regardless of its dramatic, but shadowy origins, its skewed membership and the fact that neither the president nor his political party, the PDP, considered it important enough to be made a campaign issue.

The pastor has again come out calling on his friend, President Mohammadu Buhari, to adopt the conference decisions as the way forward for Nigeria, conveniently forgetting that despite the president’s party giving the confab a wide berth, Nigerians in their millions, still voted him as their president while sending Goodluck Jonathan out of office. If only for this, I expect Pastor Bakare to understand that Nigerians know exactly what they want.

The pastor hoisted his latest call on the following grounds:

(1) That promise of true federalism is contained in Article 14 of the Nigerian Charter for National Reconciliation and Integration, which was unanimously adopted and signed by the delegates to the 2014 National Conference;

(2) That although the report may have been produced under a PDP government but it is not a PDP document. It is a Nigerian people’s document;

(3) That it will be comparable to Buhari’s adoption of some of Jonathan’s policies, e.g the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System, IPPIS and the Treasury Single Account, TSA, and,

(4) That the need for diversification also brings to the fore the question of viability of states in relation to the need for economies of scale.

Let me now take them serially:

As implied in Chief Obafemi Awolowo reference to Thesis and antithesis at the UPN 1983 congress in Abeokuta, Ogun State, a critical analysis of Pastor Bakare’s grounds renders his plea dead on arrival. Concerning no.1, the pastor cannot in all honesty claim that the recommendations of a politically- manipulated national conference can, in any way, be superior to the tomes patriotic Nigerians have, in the past, came up with after some sober interrogation of our multifarious problems as a country. That of Obasanjo was a gem until inordinate ambition killed it.

It is in his no.2 argument that Pastor Bakare very, uncharacteristically, missed it. How really pan-Nigerian was the Jonathan conference? In the certainty that he knows all about that conference, let me remind him and inform Nigerians of the following: the Jonathan Conference was borne out of crass political opportunism. It was not only initiated, but kick started and controlled, throughout, by Afenifere, aided by those they selected from other parts of the country. They actually corruptly interfered with some state nominations. In the specific case of Ekiti, Chief Deji Fasuan, nominated by the governor, Dr Kayode Fayemi, as the state’s leader, was substituted by them and their traditional ally, my friend, Dr Kunle Olajide, brought in. I am not sure Senator Durojaiye, very experienced as he is, did not suffer the same fate. I knew, as a matter of fact, that Dr Fayemi, visited President Jonathan to protest this callous infraction but to no avail. It was under this crass manipulation that Ogun State came to have the highest number of delegates, countrywide, at 19. They donated a member of their group to kick start the entire process and were, in fact, not far from its very leadership. They then proceeded to include all manner of organisations whose delegates’ selection they influenced. So, Pastor Bakare, how truly pan-Nigerian was the Jonathan conference?

Concerning no.3, I expect that if nobody knows it at all, Pastor Bakare should know that these and other adopted policies were neither the ideas nor the outcome of cheap political opportunism but programmes which emerged after long and thorough interrogations by appropriately qualified professional appointees of government who not only have the expertise but are most likely to have seen them in practice in the civilised world. They were not constructed as some deu ex machina aimed at freeing some people from any political Siberia.

Finally, the bullet that finally knocked off the pastor’s request/demand was the recommendation that additional states be created when any suggestion, worthy of any consideration at all, should have canvassed confederation, and a return to the old regions, or something similar, which would then act as the federating units. Without a shred of doubt, restructuring Nigeria is an urgent desideratum, but certainly not on the model arrived at the Jonathan National Conference.

January 24, 2016
These senators, again!

Rather than kill Nigerians with tax that may end up being embezzled again, senators should think outside of the box to make up for revenue shortfall

I felt so sad when on Friday I saw the headline in one of the dailies: “2016 Budget: Senators seek heavy taxation of Nigerians”. The senators’ argument is that since the government’s revenue projection on the2016 budget is being threatened by plummeting crude oil prices, it is better to augment the shortfall with taxation instead of borrowing as proposed by the Federal Government. Crude prices have dropped from the $38 per barrel adopted in the budget to about $27. We do not know if this would further plummet. So, there is sense in looking for a way to augment the shortfall. But, is taxation the answer? No, especially given the reasons by Senator Olusola Adeyeye, the chief whip, who led the debate on the matter.

Senator Adeyeye wants us to return to the days of old when every adult was taxed. He says we should bring ingenuity to this. I do not know what that means because, even in those days, many people had rough encounters with the tax collectors. Things are harder now. How many adults have regular incomes that can be taxed now? There are no more farmers in the farms as ‘King’ Sunny Ade sang; as the child of the farmer of old has brought his father to the city to have a taste of the allures of city life.

Senator Adeyeye added that: “Text messages cost N3.81 a page; if we add just N1 to a page of text message and we say that money belongs to government, we will make billions”. Apparently Senator Adeyeye and his colleagues must think Nigerians have short memory to have made such suggestion. The truth of the matter is that successive governments have made so much money off the people that we cannot even keep track off, hence some unscrupulous persons have taken advantage of this to enrich themselves, illegally. Even with specific reference to the telecoms sector, each of the initial operators paid money for their licences which the government promised would be reinvested into the sector. Was that promise fulfilled?

The same goes for toll gates on our roads which the senator wants us to bring back. He said “we must install tolls on roads; but that is not enough: across the world when you park at any airport, you pay per hour; we must do what the rest of the world does”. Good talk. But which of these roads have we not travelled before? Once upon a time we had toll gates on some of our major highways but then, President Olusegun Obasanjo woke up one day to scrap them, citing corruption as reason why they had to go, instead of dealing with the problem. I admire Senator Adeyeye’s suggestion that we should “do what the rest of the world does”. Another good talk; but can we? Where else in the world that the senators are talking about that people would have money to buy arms to fight insurgency and that money would be shared and there would not be outrage? In Nigeria, some people are romanticising rule of law in a matter as grievous as this; a thing many elite thieves in this country had exploited to delay, if not permanently escape justice in the past. The senators should lead the way in making Nigeria do what civilised countries do.

Perhaps the most laughable, even if annoying of the senators’ suggestions is that worker’s allowances must be taxed. “We must begin to tax allowances”, Adeyeye said, adding once again, for effect and rather to boot, that “Nigeria is the only country that shelters the bulk of the earnings of its workers and call them allowances”. And then asked, rather rhetorically: “You don’t want your allowances taxed?” a question he also answered himself, rather arrogantly and, if I may add, annoyingly: “They will be taxed because they MUST be taxed”. I wonder who made Senator Adeyeye judge over his own cause. This is the same National Assembly that was ignored by the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) on tariff increase and did nothing, now boasting that workers’ allowances “must” be taxed.

Whatever gave them the impression that Nigerians can be slapped left, right and centre without expecting a reply. How much tax do the senators and National Assembly members themselves pay? I am not talking of what is in their so-called pay slips which a former House of Representatives speaker once displayed with glee when he visited this newspaper a few years ago; but when we quickly reminded him that we were not talking about his official earnings but the innumerable allowances not reflected in the pay slip, the gap-toothed speaker simply smiled and that marked the end of the story. If the senators must be told, elected people have a responsibility to protect the interest of the electorate. Where they cannot, they should leave the people as they met them rather than add more to their yokes. Honestly, the senators have stirred the hornet’s nest and I wonder what the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) is waiting for.

Instead of first ensuring that we get what has been stolen from our very important thieves (VITs), we are talking as if we simply woke up overnight to realise that the country is broke and that the average Nigerian is the cause and should therefore cough up more money for the thieves to share again. If we must tell ourselves some home truths, the senators were part of the people that led this country to where it is today; not the hapless Nigerians that they want to tax out of existence. Some of them have always been recycled and have been senators since God-knows-when; so, such people cannot exonerate themselves from some of the problems over which they are seeking to make Nigerians the beasts of burden. If the Senate, as the upper legislative chamber had played its role as it should, some of the revelations we are having today about the arms fund scandal, which, for me is just a preamble of things to come, would have been detected by the law makers and checked before they became the festering sore that they have become.

Anyway, may be the senators have a point in asking Nigerians to bear the shortfall in the budget. The people seemed to have accepted their fate with equanimity. Since they won the gold medal of being the ‘happiest people on earth’ a few years back, they have remained their perpetual happy selves, unperturbed by anything. Nothing shocks them again. Lai Mohammed, information minister, was so worried last week that everybody has been going about his or her duty in the country as if nothing happened despite his disclosure that only about 55 Nigerians stole N1.4trillion in eight years. When you have such people to govern, the temptation is to continue pounding them until they show physical resistance. But this is dangerous.

Our legislators should realise that when a goat is pushed to the wall, it fights back. The lawmakers should remember that taxation is one of the ways to easily make people angry, especially when it becomes excessive. They should remember the many protests that it had caused in the past, as in the case of the Abeokuta women’s protest which culminated in the abdication of the Alake on January 3, 1949. “As a matter of fact, not a few persons have argued that Nigerians are complacent even in the midst of massive looting of the treasury because the money being stolen is OUR money. They argue that when they steal MY money, Nigerians would be roused from their complacency.

The scripture enjoins us to rend our hearts and not our garments; it is our lawmakers that ought to shed weight. Their case is like the pastor who is getting fatter and yet advising his church members on the need to go lean. The senators are the ones who work on part time for four years and yet collect severance package that people at their level in the civil service look forward to in their entire life in service. I do not know any other country where casual workers get so handsomely rewarded.

These senators must think outside of the box and use their good offices to get money for the country, instead of insulting our sensibilities. Our problem is corruption and not inadequate taxation. As a matter of fact, if there is problem with taxation, it has to do more with the rich who know how to evade taxes. I would have loved to see our senators come up with legislation/s that would protect the average Nigerian from people who cannot live without stealing oxygen from the public till.

They have to be careful though not to take Nigerians for granted beyond their coping capacity. Once that coping capacity breaks down, anything can happen. The senators should not allow Nigerians to see the upper chamber as a symbol of legislative tyranny and insensitivity.

January 24, 2016
A milestone and a millstone

Some mothers do have them indeed. But just as it is in the human family, so it is in the comity of nations. There are nations and there are nations. Just as Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist, said of the human family, we can now extend to the nation: all happy nations are the same, every unhappy nation is unhappy in its own way. If Nigeria is compared with its neighbours, particularly Ghana and the Republic of Benin, but unlike Togo which shares the genes of perpetual and pathological unhappiness with Nigeria, this historical truism is even more obvious.

Last week, Boni Yayi, the Beninois president, came to bid his Nigerian counterpart a rousing and moving farewell having completed the second term of a maximum two term presidency. As usual, the outgoing president of Benin was urbane, exquisitely polite, charmingly diffident, pleasantly remote and courteously self-effacing. Having served his nation and people to the best of his ability, Monsieur Yayi will now retreat to the shadows of stellar statesmanship, unlike Nigeria’s meddlesome and quarrelsome former rulers.

In another Francophone African country, Senegal to be precise, another epic milestone quietly passed. Monsieur Macky Sall, the president, dramatically announced the reduction of the presidential term of seven years to five famously noting that it was not the length of tenure that matters but the institutionalization of certain elite behavioral pattern. Modelled after the French Gaullist monarchical model, the Senegalese presidential system has finally shaken off the yoke of colonial paternalistic rule.

It was the same Macky Sall who upon coming to power in a landmark election in which the ruling party was humiliatingly defeated, dramatically abolished the Senegalese senate, noting that it was an absolute waste of the nation’s time and resources. Heavens did not fall. In fact the people applauded. It is not by accident that the widest and longest boulevard in Dakar, the Senegalese capital, bears the name of the nation’s most revered and iconic intellectual avatar, Cheikh Anta Diop.

A nation that has no institutionalized memory will have no memorable monuments to inspire it or galvanize its people in moments of stress. In retrospect, it would appear that the energies released by the dramatic sacking of the Kerekou dictatorship by the Constituent Assembly of Benin in 1990 and events surrounding the deposition of both Presidents Abdu Diouf and Abdoulaye Wade in Senegal have continued to galvanize the two nations towards genuine emancipation .

By contrast, this past week Nigeria also celebrated a milestone. That is the fiftieth anniversary of the military coup that ousted the founding civilian administration. It was so to say a jubilee of infamy which traumatized the nation and bitterly polarized the political elite along ethnic, regional and cultural fault lines. As far as milestones go, this one has become a millennial millstone around the neck of the nation with anguished cries from the graves and from dazed family survivors crying for justice.

Fortuitously or otherwise, fifty years after the original coupists stridently highlighted the ills of the country that they had hoped to eradicate by force and bloodshed, we have in place another government trying to confront the advanced manifestations of those grave nation-threatening ailments. Nigeria has been stolen blind by its leading citizens. There is no name for what has gone on other than organized state banditry. Nowhere in the world has this kind of feeding frenzy occurred, this Gadarene rush on the exchequer, without provoking a popular uprising.

This past week in a historic appearance at The Nation newspaper premises, Ibrahim Mustafa Magu, the boss of EFCC, noted that there is no morning he prepares to go to work without shedding tears for a nation so badly defiled by its own children. Magu’s quiet, unruffled mien masks a chilling resolve and a ruthless capacity for maximum psychological offensive.

It will be interesting how this confrontation with Nigeria’s band of looters shapes up in the coming months. Never in the history of humanity has a country been so serially gang-raped by its own denizens. The Ottoman Turks had a unique coinage for the plunder and rapine that followed brutal conquest . We have to find our own word for this millennial mayhem.

Such as been the historic heist and the colossal scale of thieving in all its bizarre manifestations that we may at some point of restitution have to invite the world’s leading clinical authorities to come and adjudge on the psychiatric status of some of these fiscal psychopaths. The stealing without compunction suggests a systemic collapse that has no equivalent in contemporary human history.

Yet despite the wholesale crime against humanity, it is obvious that the Nigerian political elite are badly polarized and bitterly divided about what course of action to take against the looters. While the generality of the Nigerian masses seem affronted and on the same page with the Buhari administration, a significant section of the elite appears to demure, citing the authoritarian excesses of the president, the flagrant disobedience of the rule of law and growing contempt for constituted judicial authority.

Their argument is interesting and points at the ideological occlusion which occurs when a ruling class has its back to the world and the masses are roused to fury and pitiless vengeance. Fighting corruption is okay but it must be institutionalized and legally routinized otherwise it may slide into arbitrary tyranny and a thirst for vendetta and vengeance masquerading as public good and order.

Rather than coming up with a holistic legally foolproof conceptual framework for combating corruption and official malfeasance, they aver, General Buhari is on an exhibitionist and messianic circus show which will come to naught. In extremis, they even argue that it may eventually be shown that despite his famous aversion for graft, Buhari himself exists in a state of antagonistic but paradoxical complicity with corruption.

The main argument of those who urge for a draconian settlement of accounts with all those responsible for the economic adversity of the nation irrespective of the rule of law and legal niceties is this: what level of civility and civilized conduct must one extend to people who have been so uncivil and uncivilized in their economic brutalization of their own people, people who have caused the nation so much trauma by sending thousands to their untimely death, people who have been responsible for the untimely deaths of thousands of gallant servicemen who were sent to warfronts without adequate weapons or means of defending themselves against an incredibly savage enemy?

The nation must not press its luck any further. For so long this country has camped at the edge of the abyss and has flirted with suicide that it is a miracle that it has survived intact. With this level of the bestialization of the armed forces and the traumatization of the citizenry it is a tribute to the residual discipline of the armed forces as well as the residual fatality of the people that major mutinies and popular revolts have not broken out.

But we must not tempt fate any further. All those responsible for these crimes against humanity must be severely punished as a warning and as a timely reminder for succeeding generations. Men are hanged not because horses are stolen but so that horses may not be stolen. The rule of law must never be equated with the reign of lawlessness. You cannot violate the Lockean covenant between the ruled and their rulers only to seek refuge in the rule of law.

With the history of revolutionary upheavals in their societies weighing upon their mind, ruling classes in advanced nations shy away from this nasty conundrum by sacrificing those who have desecrated the land for the very sake of the survival of their class. From time to time and ever so often, an admiral is quartered to encourage the others, as an English wag famously noted.

But in doing this, we must be mindful of the larger picture. It has been noted that the strength of every revolutionary upheaval is also its weakness: the thirst for social justice is also accompanied by the passion for social vengeance. While the one is noble and uplifting, the other often degenerates into mean vendetta and sheer bloodlust. We call on President Buhari to manage the mass hysteria unleashed by this consuming national tragedy with some rectitude and restraint so as not to appear to be personally fanning the embers of mass-hate and discord.

With the humungous number of culprits, it should be clear that we are dealing with a systemic collapse of societal values far more dangerous than individual aberrations. As Durkheim famously noted, whenever a social phenomenon is explained by a psychological category, we may be sure that the explanation is false.

Even if he spends the next ten years on this, such is the mammoth pan-Nigerian scale of the economic infraction that the retired general from Daura may not be able to bring all the looters to book. This is where a theoretically integrative and holistic conceptual framework for dealing with this national emergency is imperative.

In addition to jailing looters and seizing their loots, President Buhari should immediately inaugurate a National Restitution Commission comprising of eminent Nigerians of proven integrity and soundness of mind that will undertake a comprehensive inquiry of what went wrong and how to prevent a future reoccurrence of this national tragedy.

January 24, 2016
Kogi bites the wrong bullet on inauguration

The headline of this piece is used guardedly in the sense that the ordinary Kogite is understandably not part of the charade of Wednesday’s inauguration of Yahaya Bello as the new Governor of Kogi State. As far as a large faction of the All Progressives Congress (APC) is concerned, both at the national and state levels, it is a pleasant duty to get Alhaji Bello, alias Fairplus, inaugurated as governor. The plot to make him inherit a victory that was not vacant, nor his, was hatched not by the governor-elect himself, but by a handful of men in Abuja who seemed to know more than the rest of Nigeria how the future would look like. Alhaji Bello is merely a pawn; he will remain a pawn until the courts put paid to his pretentiousness.

But on inauguration day, Wednesday, the new governor will give a speech eulogising democracy and promising the starving and tormented indigenes of the state salvation from want, oppression, mediocrity and stagnation orchestrated by the departing Governor Idris Wada. The new governor will not talk about justice, fairness and equity, nor make any allusion to the distinguishing properties of personal character and integrity. Not being a deep person, nor yet a man of great character, he will be silent on the characteristics of a patriot. Alhaji Bello will muddle through on inauguration day with commonplace triteness and piffle.

The injustice perpetrated in Kogi State will remain an albatross around the necks of the APC and the electoral body, INEC. INEC did not need to get a brief or advice from the Attorney General. They nonetheless stifled their conscience and embraced the Justice minister’s illogic. A big faction in the APC did not need to play politics with the Kogi election by plotting an electoral stalemate in a display of brazen power play within the party. But they did, for in their opinion, the consequences of the injustice of today are tolerable to the humiliation and diminution they claim they would suffer should Kogi fall under the wing of someone outside their inner circle.

After the courts will have done justice and reversed the nonsense hatched in the state in last year’s Kogi governorship election, the APC will still be left with its fratricidal factions, and the wounds caused by the machinations in the party will take a long time to heal. The injury is deep and gangrenous. It is clear that those who thought the APC was the harbinger of a truly national and liberal politics are gravely mistaken. The party has not overcome the bitter, divisive and parochial politics of the past, the kind that undermined previous republics and set one schizoid ethnic group against another. It is to the eternal dishonour of Kogi State that on its land were fired the first shots in the futile war projected to limit the growth, spread and endurance of the APC as a national party, in creed and ideology.

January 24, 2016
Celebration as personal and collective rededication: self-reflexive meditations on “BJ@70”

Esu sleeps in the courtyard; the courtyard is too small for him. Esu sleeps in the bedroom; the bedroom is still too small for him. Esu sleeps inside the kernel of a palm nut; now he has room large enough in which to sleep.

First of all, I must acknowledge my profoundly humbling and pleasing delight, for nothing prepared me for the scale and the depth of the outpouring of good wishes and tributes. Though I normally never celebrate my birthdays, the only one I’d ever celebrated – my 60th – had not prepared me at all for this second one, my 70th. I suppose that this was why it took me quite some time to absorb the meanings behind my surprise and my delight. But once I did so, I allowed myself to carefully register and store in my consciousness and memory these meanings for I know only too well that by this time next week, all the wishes and tributes will be over and life for me will resume its normal course…

I don’t know if all celebrations qualify for this particular “meaning”, but I know now that birthday anniversaries constitute a personal and collective rededication to the small and great values that sustain life and at least for a while keep the worst of its fears, anxieties and terrors at bay. This is true as much for he or she that is honoured as for those bestowing the honour.For in sum, this is what both the celebration itself and those that organize and participate in it are saying: for as long as the celebration lasts, we will concentrate only on the achievements, the good qualities, the things considered admirable or memorable in the life and person of the honoured one. In other words, this is what the community of friends, family, acquaintances and sundry well wishers are saying to the one honoured:we are not only happy that you are (still) alive, we hope that henceforth it is all the things we consider wonderful and special about you that we will experience from you; and for our part, we shall rededicate ourselves to reciprocating all the pleasing and wonderful things that we have experienced from you in the course of your life.

I think that this mutual pact is the ritual side of birthday celebrations. The essence of social and cultural rituals is the fact that it is an emotional or psychic passage through which all those who participate in it come out renewed and made stronger in the bonds that both connect them and make life potentially richer for them. If that is the case, what I and those who have participated one way or another in this thing that was dubbed “BJ@70” is a ritual process in the most profound meanings of the phenomenon. At Ibadan on January 5 in my beloved alma mater, the University of Ibadan, this ritual process reached its climactic, numinous moment when Kongi presented me with some gifts whose meanings were at the same time deeply symbolic and transcendently generous; at Ife-Ife on January 21, at the equally beloved institution where I became the kind of teacher and person I had always tried to become – the Obafemi Awolowo University – the ritual climax came with the entrancing performance of dance, singing and oral poetry by the schoolchildren of the Sunshine Nursery and Primary and Primary School, Ile-Ife…

I acknowledge and accept the implications and demands of this mutual pact of rededication. After all, these past few weeks I have been the chief celebrant and communicant at this ritual process of “BJ@70” events. In this present context of these first or initial reflections after the events, I cannot, indeed should not name all those who made this possible because as the list is very long, I am sure to leave out some names. Moreover, there will be time enough to express my thanks and appreciations all around.Nonetheless, at the very least I can say to them – I thank you; I hear you; I cherish your affection and I am deeply humbled by the honour you have bestowed on me. I shall try to live up to your expectations and prayers – to the extent that some of your wishes lie in my power and willingness to meet, while some could be said to be subject to happenstance and ayanmoare subject to the benevolence of forces beyond my control…

This talk of ayanmo or fate will no doubt surprise many reading this piece, definitely many among my readers who know of my intellectual adherence to the historical materialist view of human life and the history of our species. For this reason, I admit that I have invoked the principle of ayanmo in these reflections quite deliberately. I do not know what my ultimate fate or ayanmo is and quite frankly and sincerely, I neither worry nor think much about it. This is not only because ayanmo seems to have such fascination, such grip on people because its power lies in the fact that it rather unfairly has the last word on human life after a person has died and has no say in the matter anymore, but also because ayanmo is very often extended to aspects of personal and collective human life for which it has nothing of value to add and from which, in my opinion, it should be rigorously excluded. For instance, it is not our collective fate or ayanmo as a people, as a nation, to be so badly and heartlessly governed that in a land blessed with vast human and natural resources, seven out of every ten Nigerians live below the poverty line, with specters of bleak and insecure futures staring at the vast majority of our young people, the largest and fastest growing demographic group in our society…

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – —

The deepest intimations of celebration as collective rededication to sustaining human life in and with justice, peace and dignity that I have had at the “BJ@70” events have all come from this radical anti-ayanmo dimension of my philosophical beliefs and – I hope – of my work as a teacher and activist. Against the discursive backdrop of this assertion, let me now admit that nothing has pleased and deeply inspired me more at the events in Ibadan and Ife marking my 70th birthday celebrations than the acknowledgement of this dimension of my life, my work, my person. Let me restate this carefully: for all of my adult intellectual, professional and activist life, I have been motivated by this belief that there is absolutely nothing in our destiny, in our ayanmo that condemns us to being ruled by drove after drove of looters, with their entrenched ramparts of legal and juridical self-protection from justice and the anger of the people. I knew that many who read this column know and appreciate this aspect of my work but it has been enormously pleasing and humbling for me for this fact to be acknowledged and publicly expressed by my teachers, colleagues, friends, family and students.

It is of course not enough to be radically anti-ayanmo in our thoughts, feelings and actions as citizens, activists, progressives, patriots; we must tirelessly organize and strategize to find the best means available to us for wresting control of our lives and our natural resources from the looters and their minions. In this regard, I must here make a special declaration. Here it is: I never personally mark my birthdays because I am quite frankly not sentimental about the matter at all. In the two times when my birthday anniversary has been celebrated – my 60th ten years ago and now my 70th – it has been others who have taken up the initiative and the burden of making them happen. During that earlier 60th birthday celebration ten years ago, my anti-ayanmo and Talakawa liberation philosophy and activism did not go unrecognized, but neither were they made central and defining to the celebrations as in the more recent “BJ@70” events. I am not only deeply gratified by this, I in fact take it as a portent: the forces of progress, justice, peace, unity and dignity for the vast majority of the peoples of our country, our continent and the world are massing in their hundreds of millions, their billions to take their destiny in their own hands. This is the dimension of rededication that has been most present in my mind and my projections beyond the aftermath of the recent celebrations. With all the eloquence I can muster, I wish to state here that the celebration of one life, or of one’s life can only and truly be an act of rededication if the one becomes the many, if beyond the person, beyond individual merit or achievement, there is cause for collective liberation from the forces that degrade and impoverish human life in our society and in our world…

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In the epigraph to this piece, these reflections, Esu, the trickster god finds capacious space in which to sleep not in the vastness of a courtyard or a bedroom but in the more infinitesimally small space of the kernel of a palm. This riddle, this enigma is easily explained: in the kernel in which Esu sleeps, his being will be sown in new spaces in which they will bear fruit and multiply. All who are fortunate enough to have their one single, individual life celebrated communally must hope that their beings, their life’s work will find the kernel in which to bear new fruit across diverse times and spaces.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

January 24, 2016
The Nigerian Legionnaire’s apotheosis

This is not about the dreaded Legionnaire’s Disease. That will be like counting fingers before a man afflicted with leprosy. Nigeria may be buffeted by sundry human and non-human plagues but there is always a ray of hope and a window of opportunity to showcase our national strengths in depth. To whom much is given, much ought to be expected. There are many Nigerians whose forefathers served the colonial empire’s mighty army with devotion and distinction. Please step forward, dear descendants of the Nigerian Legionnaires.

It is said that old soldiers never die, they simply fade way with time. But what about very old soldiers? They tend to disappear in a blaze of glory and martial pomp. Snooper remembers with affection an old uncle who returned to the village as a hero after seeing action with the British Imperial Army in the Burma sector of the great war. Every evening, the old man would gather youths together to tell them outlandish tales of superlative human heroism in the snake-infested ravines of Rangoon.

It all looked like scenes from an Arabian night entertainment. In one fearful instance, the old man told his audience of how in the thick jungle of Burma, he was once bitten by a mighty python which had tried to swallow him after felling him with a mighty flick of its tail. With sure death starring him in the face, the old soldier bit the python back whereupon the vicious monster gave a fearsome human yell and slid off.

This surreal salad of martial derrin’ do in some strange land was grist to the mill of a budding novelist. But oh boy, oh boy, how many people saw the fetching picture of the ancient Nigerian legionnaire resplendent in uniform as the old soldier recently paid homage to the Emir of Bauchi? It was an iconic snapshot of undying love and affection for a great profession.

And snooper was told a story by a top retired military officer who should know about the late Brigadier Usman, the founding military governor of the then North Eastern state. The son of an old legionnaire who had seen action in the Far East, the old boy told his father that since his son was by the grace of God the new ruler of the place, he would find it very embarrassing to take his own father’s salute at the annual Legionnaire’s parade.

On this particular occasion when General Yakubu Gowon was visiting, the military governor pleaded tearfully with his father not to show up at the parade ground so as not to embarrass his son and the visiting Commander in chief. The ancient legionnaire pretended to have agreed with his son. But on the stroke of the hour, the old soldier slipped his mooring and headed for the parade ground.

To Brigadier Usman’s eternal consternation, he had barely introduced three legionnaires to General Gowon when his own father appeared in bold relief resplendent in uniform and martial glory. The ground almost gave way under the Brigadier but the good soldier that he was, he quickly recovered his poise. Very shortly, it was his father’s turn.

“Sir, Corporal Usman of Burma Rifles”, the old soldier had saluted Gowon in stiff attention. As they made for the next legionnaire, the Brigadier chuckled to the ever amiable general. “Sir, that was my father, you know”, whereupon the ever charming and unfailingly polite Yakubu Gowon went back to give the old soldier a big hug.

God bless our legionnaires, and here is wishing the ancient men of arms many more years of superior health.

January 24, 2016
LUTH Diary: The man died

Last week, I wrote about my two weeks experience at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH) while on admission. Many readers were shocked by some of the issues I briefly highlighted in my piece.

“You mean you have to pay as much as N50,000 to be admitted into the emergency ward in a government-owned hospital? How about those who cannot afford to pay?” I was asked.

My answer is that those who can’t pay and even those who can afford to should pray not to fall sick to warrant being admitted in the hospital.

Weeks after being discharged, I am still trying hard to put behind me some of the experiences I had, and witnessed during my stay. I tried to keep a diary but most times, I was too weak to be the journalist I would have loved to be at such moments. In this follow-up piece, I, however, try to recollect some of unforgettable instances.

Interestingly, one of the reasons I was eager to be discharged, even when my doctor felt I should stay back a few more days, was to get away from the harrowing experience of coping with heat and mosquito bites in the night.

Although the structure of the hospital ward provided for cross ventilation and there are a few fans in some sections, the heat in the night could sometimes be unbearable. Some patients had to bring their fans. Mine was disallowed because it was said to look like an air conditioner and not the usual old type which could be assumed to be owned by the hospital.

The hospital has no provision for mosquito nets, but the nurses and other medical staff are usually gracious enough to help fix the net in the night and remove it in the morning. Patients have to buy the net or allow themselves to be devoured by the mosquitoes, thus complicating their health condition. Even with the net, one was not spared mosquito bites.

I give kudos to the staff responsible for cleaning the wards and the toilets. They diligently did at regular intervals but the patients have to contribute cleaning materials since hospital authorities do not provide what is required.

Part of the trauma one is exposed to in the hospital is the condition of some other patients, especially if your case is not as serious as theirs. Most nights, one could hardly sleep as one or two other patients would shout all night in agony and call for help which sometimes the nurses could not provide.

Some had situations that made it impossible for them to go to the toilet on their own and they had to be cleaned up whenever necessary by their relatives who also assisted in many other ways to make up for other support services the hospital does not provide.

After seeing what wives of some of the men in my ward had to endure, my son told me he now understands what the part of the marriage vows ‘in sickness and health’ means.

Perhaps the most traumatic of the hospital experiences is when one of your co-patients ‘packs up’, like some nurses prefer to put it. I remember a particular midnight when two nurses desperately tried to save the life of a patient whose condition suddenly deteriorated. They ran up and down to get drugs and made several calls for a doctor to attend to the situation, but the man died.

January 24, 2016
Now that kidnapping is a growing trade…

I am just wondering why we would whisper about kidnappers instead of pouncing on them and checking their brains. I think there should be some police inquiry into our own cowardly brains.

A story was told some weeks ago of how someone travelling in a car through a town in Kogi State found himself stopped by some gang or the other. The gang was courteous to him. They told him not to panic; they were not armed robbers, just kidnappers. And they took him away. According to the story, his family and associates had to ransom him with the sum of N1m or so. You can best imagine if his family could not lay hands on that sum.

Three things immediately struck me in that story. The first is the scary fact that freedom is costly. Can you just put a price on your being able to do your most hateful activity (going to work), visit your favourite restaurant (for your favourite meal) and receive your visitors (even if they are your enemies) in perfect freedom? I cannot put a price on the freedom I have to beg, coax or cajole my car to start in the morning. Come to think of it, I have never really appreciated the freedom I have to take my pittance to the market to haggle, sweet-talk or even quarrel my way through the stall-keepers to get something, no matter how small, to feed the family with. And there I was, thinking that not having enough money to do all the things I want to do was the costliest thing on earth; I now know that not having the freedom to not do them can be costlier. Get my drift? Most especially, not having the freedom to ‘go’ (you know where) without someone’s permission or without being watched is unthinkable!

The second is the scarier fact that some people have now decided to build their own industry using your freedom and my freedom as their raw material. It’s a vexing trade. I ask you, what is this world coming to that someone cannot build his industry around iron ore, coal, crude oil, tar, granite, marble, soil, yams, beans, flour, cow bones, etc., but must go after my freedom? The individual must be sick, I tell you. My worry now is that the number of those individuals is increasing alarmingly because incidences of kidnapping seem to be spreading. When someone said that kidnapping is presently the fastest growing industry in Nigeria, I said, ehn, all the while, I thought it was politics.

I tell you; it’s getting now that kidnappers should be taxed if we cannot send them to Hades. I told you a story I heard the other day about a man who put down a hefty amount of money at a launching. Everyone wondered where the money came from, until someone whispered, don’t you know he’s a kidnapper? I heard (don’t mind me, I am always hearing things!) the other day that someone was filling out a form and when he came to the column listing occupations, he was miffed to find that his had not been listed. He then complained to the official who asked him what his profession was, making ready to include it on the form. When the complainant replied ‘armed robbery’ boasting that he was even ready to pay tax, the official referred him to his immediate boss. I think I would do the same thing, coward that I am.

Third is the scariest fact that the state (and I mean the police) is just looking on as these things are happenings, doing little. Honestly, I find this baffling. The other day, I heard a news report on the radio that recounted how some vigilant people in a neighbourhood had apprehended a would-be kidnapper in the act of taking someone. Triumphant, the group had led the culprit to the police station to report the matter. Rather than investigate, however, the police were said to have informed the crowd that the culprit was a mad man and should be let go, and he was let go. I ask you!

As a matter of course, how many kidnappers have really been arraigned even in the face of overwhelming evidence? Very few; most appear to have got away with their loot, and have obviously trained others. Now, there are cells upon cells of this… this… horrible trade everywhere, even in the villages. In some Kogi State villages now, I hear that people don’t sleep with both eyes open anymore; they have now taken to shouting ‘My children are not rich, my children are not rich, don’t kidnap me, no one will pay you’ to passers-by. The reason is that many people are said to have been picked up from their homes, not by security men (then you know they are at least secure), but by fellow citizens who prefer not to work, yet want to have loads of money by depriving others of their freedom.

I think that was the thought behind a warning said to have been issued by the NUT. I heard a news item on the radio in which a functionary of the NUT was said to have issued a warning cry that kidnappers should no longer kidnap teachers; they would not get any money. Reason? Teachers are already living in penury from unpaid salaries and emoluments. I think this followed the story of a teacher who was kidnapped as he travelled to Abuja. I heard say that he was let go though when the abductors realised they had taken a teacher.

When I heard that news item, I immediately asked, should anyone be kidnapped at all, whether teacher or student or lawyer or physician or president or unemployed? What in heaven’s name has one’s profession got to do with one’s kidnap value? As a matter of fact, I did not know that anyone had kidnap value. I have tried to calculate my kidnap value as a freelance writer, and it is sadly not much; I guess I won’t even be worth the loaf of bread they will need to feed me with. Imagine that! What is this world coming to, that I can’t even command a handsome ransom with all my words, words, words?

Speaking of professional value; there was a time when doctors were being spirited away in Edo State by the minute and we all thought they were being taken away to help robbers with some medical problems. When it persisted, I honestly began to suspect that someone really had it bad to study medicine but failing to do so, had settled for just gazing at them. What better way than to kidnap them? Now, it’s sad to know that all this while, them kidnappers were really after the doctors’ supremo gelatos.

My worry now is that, for some unknown reasons, the once peaceful Kogi State seems to have become hot news, not just in the matter of the electoral confusion caused by a candidate’s sudden death but more now in the matter of people building an industry out of kidnapping. First, there was a justice who was kept against his will for many days by kidnappers until he was ransomed. Then there was the story recounted above, and many more. Now, I hear that even petty traders eking out a living among the rustics are made to part with their hard earned money to ransom their family members from the holds of these get-rich-quicks.

I know, people are kidnapped in different parts of this country for various reasons including instant money (it is no more in fashion to just ‘use people for money’) or being sold to be trafficked across the world. Busloads of people are said to be diverted to dens used by others for satanic rituals. I am just wondering why we would whisper about kidnappers instead of pouncing on them and checking their brains. I think there should be some police inquiry into our own cowardly brains.

January 24, 2016
Fifty years that shook the nation

(The end of the nation as empire paradigm)

Fifty years ago this week—on the fifteenth of January, 1966, to be precise— some mid-ranking officers rebelled against the military high command as well as the civilian authorities. Nigeria would never be the same again. Although the mutiny was swiftly put down, the damage had already been done. Shocked and demoralized by the extremely bloody nature of the uprising, the rump of the civilian administration quickly capitulated and handed over power to the military authorities that had quelled the rebellion.

On this transfer of power, there has been much controversy. Like all things Nigerian, the “truth” depends on which side you belong and through what prism one views the development. Suffice it to say that given the decapitation of civil order and the emergent power configuration, it could not have been otherwise. The political class was simply too demoralized, too disunited and too disoriented to weather the storm.

Fifty years on, it is a measure of the total dominance of the Nigerian political landscape by the military and the centrality of official arms to the fortunes of Nigeria that well into the Fourth Republic, two of the four presidents the country has had are retired generals and former military rulers. Military personnel have ruled Nigeria for the longest spell, 1966-1979 and 1983 till 1999— that is discounting the hybrid holding device of Ernest Shonekan which lasted for three months while the military reassembled its scrambled wits.

In the light of this, does it still make sense to regard military rule as an aberration or as an organic and integral part of a phase of national development and the evolution of the post-colonial state in African nations willed into existence by colonial force of arms? Could this be a case of their colonial fathers haven eaten sour grapes, their children’s teeth being set at the edge?

Nigeria was conjured into existence by imperialist fiat and the military will of an intrepid and enterprising colonial adventurer, Fredrick Lugard, who had already seen stirring action in East Africa and Hong Kong at the behest of her Imperial Majesty. Only few African nations so fashioned into existence have so far managed to survive the threat or actuality of military take over.

Given their structural misalignment at birth and the chaotic ethnic mix, the centrality of arms and the harshly centralizing imperative of all empires have been the dominant strand in the narrative of modern African nations. The empire manifesto is crisp and clear: It is better to have injustice than to have disorder. Let the new nations congeal and cohere around a master-nationality that has the organizing discipline and the military valour to whip the others into line and let them get on with it.

This is the way and will of empire and the greatest agglomeration of humanity that civilization has thrown up, not some wishy-washy sentiments about political self-determination and economic determinism: Greek, Roman, Islamic-Sunni, Ottoman Turks and latterly Russia, England, French and American. Disorderly and disorganized people are forcibly incorporated and harshly suppressed. As far this worldview is concerned, the threat to human evolution is not racial or ethnic injustice but disorder and chaos.

In the event and given the turbulent ethnic, religious, cultural and regional configuration of Nigeria, something was bound to give eventually. Before the attempted putsch of January, 15, 1966, there were already murmurs and rumours of an impending collision of altars. In 1962, the opposition Action Group was accused of plotting to take over the federal administration by force of arms. Its leadership was promptly impounded and incarcerated.

During the brief constitutional crisis of 1964 following a badly rigged federal election, it was rumoured that a group of military officers had approached Zik to canvas for a military solution to the constitutional impasse. The federally engineered take- over of the western region during the infamous “weti e” uprising would be viewed by many as a prelude and precursor to a constitutional coup and a forcible suppression of the entire region. As the old west erupted in flames, rumours of an impending preemptive putsch by the federal authorities or a strike by dissident officers filled the airwaves.

When the real thing finally arrived in the dead of the night fifty years ago, it was to shed much blood without shedding any light on the crippling ailment. Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu, the de facto leader of the coup who announced the take over from the regional capital of Kaduna, was a charismatic and ascetic officer with considerable following but without any talent or appetite for political or ideological mobilization.

Not for him, a clear-headed analysis of Nigeria’s problems and national contradictions beyond a coup day hectoring and fierce denunciations. Not for him, a studious and painstaking attention to details; a rigorous strategic plan of action such as we had seen with Nasser’s Free Officers Movement and the youthful conspirators of Colonel Moammar Ghaddafi or the radical Dergue of Major Haile Mariame Mengistu.

If the troubled but disjointed and incoherent manuscript that survived Major Emmanuel Ifeajuna, the putative leader of the mutiny, was anything to go by, it was clear that rather than coming to redeem Nigeria, the plotters were motivated by pure anger and incandescent rage against the system and the need for a bloody settling of accounts. It was a typical Nigerian mess and a very bloodthirsty one at that.

The attempted coup was doomed and its fate sealed by the blatantly selective pattern of killing, the lopsided nature of the casualties and its sloppy disdain for the nation’s ethnic sensitivities. A return match appeared inevitable and it came in July 1966 in the guise of an even more savage reprisal coup. Nigeria had lost its political innocence forever. By July the following year, the nation was already roiling in a civil war which was to cost at least a million casualties and a still unresolved tension among the nation’s major ethnic nationalities.

More than a century after amalgamation, almost sixty years after independence and fifty years after the first coup, Nigeria is still battling with the founding demons of a multi-ethnic nation and centrifugal forces still threatening to tear it apart. If anything, the current agitations for a separatist Biafran state forty six years after the end of a costly civil war, no matter the real motive, is a troubling reminder of our failure at elite consensus and national integration. So is the fact that we have a government headed by a retired general battling to fix the nation and instill institutional sanity after a virtual systemic collapse.

It is indeed a reflection of the enormity of the crisis and a measure of our failure as a functioning nation that half a century after Nzeogwu famously denounced ten-percenters, Nigeria is currently battling 100-percenters who have taken the national exchequer to the cleaners. Perhaps for the first time in its history, the country is statutorily broke to the bargain.

In the light of all this, it is tempting to see the past fifty years and military intervention as a sheer waste of everybody’s time and a depressing epoch in a nation’s history. But this verdict does grievous injury to the long term perspective of history or what the French call la longue duree, a situation in which hopeless contradictions take time to work themselves out in the ceaseless march of history.

It is an engrossing historical irony but by keeping Nigerian one at all costs, the army has actually fulfilled its historical destiny which is in tandem with the founding colonial imaginary and a seeming justification of the centrality of arms in the fortunes of a turbulent conglomeration. But fifty years later as the nation is still held in the vice grip of a unitarist and harshly centralizing system, what lessons can we take from the turbulent past that can serve us as a guide and pathfinder to the immediate future?

For starters, while we are still busy killing and maiming each other, the empire model from which the colonial nation derives its organizing principles and dominant ruling motif has reached the utter limits of its political and historical possibilities in human evolution. The epoch of the nation as empire is fast receding into historical antiquity. In the last five hundred years or so, certain nations have acted as virtual empires, just as African colonial nations served as internally colonizing sub-empires in the context of multiple nationalities.

While it lasted, the modern empire paradigm did some good by forcibly incorporating disparate and different people and nationalities under the rubric of global capitalism. This was the iron law of globalization in the epoch of the capitalist restructuring of the international order beginning with the internationalization of the phenomenon of slavery and the subsequent economic enslavement of the Third World.

The collapse of actually existing socialist nations and the transformation of the global pecking order from a spatial category to a seemingly random and arbitrary congeries of leading nations are the mere working out of the finer details of the new logic of human development. With the unraveling of the Second World, there is no middle ground again. The Third World has invaded the First World while the First World has discovered new habitats in the old Third World.

Such has been the stupendous success of this finessing of the capitalist means and modes of production, the explosion of human developmental possibilities and capacity building and the sheer scale of new avenues of turning knowledge into wealth that the modern state has been forced to loosen its grip on the modern society. Nowadays, different sections of the same nation may look like totally different mini-nations virtually decoupled in texture and tempo.

This is the collective genius of a people at work, unlike statist imposed monolithic development which slams arbitrary “national” projects on constituting units without bothering about the internal configuration of the components. Without losing its proactive potency, the modern state has become a benign overseer.-

It is the rise of the multi-sectoral nation with the US, Canada, Australia, China/Hong Kong, UAE/Dubai as glittering exemplars. Except in Great Britain and Spain where ancestral feuds and old ethnic fault lines subsist, no one ever talks of the forcible split of these nations. The talk is of harnessing the individual strengths, energies and genius of the different components for the greater good of the nation.

With the passing of the nation as empire model and the forcible incorporation of the entire human civilization within the ambit of modern capitalism, it is no longer fashionable or even economically desirable to keep different nationalities together by force of arms. What works better is the appeal to human rationality and the superior economic argument stressing the advantage of hanging together.

Unfortunately without having consolidated the nation-state paradigm, most African nations are beginning to look like Rip van Winkles in the comity of modern nations with only industrial bloodshed and perpetual strife to show for their pains. The modern template is already there and it points at an increasing devolution of power and responsibility from the stifling and suffocating centre. There is no point in reinventing the wheel.

Let us restate this conundrum is baldly as possible. Those who created Nigeria the way it is have since moved on to higher glory. It is left to Nigerians to recreate their country the way it ought to be and for the maximum emancipation of the Black race. With the virtual abolition of time and space, with the advent of the virtual global trading of the internet revolution, there is no further need for huge mass markets and retailing outlets of Africa in their national actuality and raw physicality.

Africa’s most populous nation is in the fortuitous position to take the lead. While we must applaud the current heroic efforts in dealing with looters and instilling institutional sanity in the system, it will all amount to little if President Buhari does not take another look at the structural configuration of the nation with a view to liberating the diverse strengths, energies and genius of the people.

We commiserate with all those who have lost their loved one at the shrine of the nation in the last fifty years. But if we do not do the needful and urgently too, the historic wager is that we may spend the next fifty years still killing and maiming each other with nobody caring a hoot except western societies that will be bothered by the impact of the Biblical hordes of refugees trying to reach salvation in the new Noah’s Ark of humanity.

January 17, 2016