Today, there is palpable anger in the land. The rising tide of fury and discontent is such that one is afraid things might topple over at short notice. This morning, this column drops all pretences to partisanship to urge Mallam Umaru Yar’Adua to summon as a matter of national emergency a summit of all political parties and principal power players to deliberate on the political and economic catastrophes threatening the nation on all fronts.
The Nigerian ruling class has proved time and time again that rational calculations and enlightened self-interest are not its particular forte. But there are enough danger signals in the polity to give the jitters to even the most obdurate and obtuse of political elites. We are not even talking of regime collapse or violent change but something more fundamental and nation-threatening.
Once again, the danger signals are flashing. Despite the hype and hoopla about amnesty and the pacification of the tribes of the lower Niger, it is obvious that the elite consensus which formed the bedrock and the political basis of the Obasanjo Settlement of 1999 has completely collapsed. As it happened in 1965, 1983 and 1993, a nasty spirit of vengeance and resentment has descended on the land. You can feel the fury in the air. You watch the angry, sullen crowds roiling in the bitter, homicidal rage of dispossession and you feel it is only a question of time before Mr kum arrives from Cambodia.
Never in the history of this country has there been so much murderous hatred for public officials as we are now witnessing. The surface below ordinary polite conversations is seething with rage and resentment. Let no one deceive himself. There is no discrimination or differentiation of culpability, no refinement of malice in this mass categorization of the Nigerian political elite as an abominable breed. Everybody who is well-off or appears to be well-heeled is summarily blacklisted. Your eventual executor may well be your houseboy or a member of the domestic staff.
Yet because the Nigerian political elite have lost so much authority and ethical legitimacy, this bleak fury in the land cannot be channeled for the revolutionary transformation of the nation. For the same reason, neither can it be canalized for higher political purpose. So, what we have is raw , untrammeled rage which is neither transformative nor infused by a nobility of purpose. When the dam of this unstructured, freewheeling and deregulated anger breaks, it is going to be a messy and bloody anarchy the like of which no one has seen before.
This no-hold-barred distemper speaks to the temper of the times. But more than that, they speak to a total disconnect between the aspirations of the generality of the Yoruba people and many of those parading themselves as their leaders. You could almost feel it in the marrow that if these disillusioned and distraught people should lay their hands on their so called leaders after law and order has broken down, it is going to be mayhem day indeed.
But it is not only in the west that you have this ferment, this burgeoning social rebellion. In the east, the normless political theatre and perpetually unprincipled leadership has turned the place into a vast coliseum of unhinged gladiators baying for blood. The north is also raring to go. A few weeks ago, snooper attended the inaugural launch of the Sardauna Foundation in Kaduna. Practically all the former heads of state with the exception of General Mohamadu Buhari were booed by an irate mob at the mere mentioning of their name. Mr Kum is surely on the way.
But who is Mr Kum anyway? Kum, or kum, kum is a Cambodian word or concept for disproportionate revenge. Although emanating from a particular Cambodian mindset for restoring parity of cruelty, it also has universal applications. There is a Mr Kum in every one of us. Even the normally sedate Yoruba people have a saying that if a hen overturns one’s charm potion, one must break its egg. That is kum for you. However, it is when kum is collectivized, when anger is nationalized or resentment ethnicised that things turn genocidal.
Although kum is designed to restore parity and salvage some honour, the parity is such that it often turns out to be a final solution. The response is always disproportionate to the original offense because you want to render the other party permanently combat-ineffective so that he will never be in a position to inflict further harm on you. Rather than being an eye for an eye, kum is a head for an eye. Sometimes the urge to vengeance is driven by such ferocity, such savagery that entire families are exterminated up till the seventh generation.
Anthropologists studying the cultural parameters which predispose humanity to genocidal tsunamis point at the moment when the object of hatred ceases to be a human and becomes a symbol, a trope, an animal, insect or a non-person. When Franz Kafka famously wrote a novel in which a man suddenly wakes up to discover that he had become an insect many people thought the disturbed and neurotic writer was exercising his right to creative lunacy. But given what Hitler would later do to the Jews, it turned out to be a haunting prophecy. It surely takes the downward declassification of humans for murder to proceed on such an industrial scale. In Rwanda, the genocidal war-cry was “kill the uyensi”. Kill the cockroach. Once humans become insects, they are like flies in the hands of wanton boys and men.
It is profoundly ironic that we should be talking about kum thirty years after the Pol Pot regime was driven out of the Cambodian capital by Vietnamese troops. Arguably the most pathologically callous regime ever visited on mankind in the modern epoch, the Khmer Rouge killed about one seventh of the Cambodian population before being driven out. A regimen of deliberate and systematic elimination of perceived opponents became state policy. Violence, pure violence, became the organizing principle. Thousands perished of hunger. Many expired like animals in unimaginably filthy conditions. Such was the abominable scale of human extermination that at a point bullets were considered too expensive to be wasted on human vermin. Those to be executed had to make do with being clubbed to death or by having their skulls cracked .
Even the tough and battle-hardened Vietnamese communist regime to the north was appalled by this abysmal human cruelty. When the victorious Khmer army finally entered the Cambodian capital in April 1975 after years of battling the corrupt American backed government of Lon Nol, they swiftly emptied the city of its inhabitants and sent the populace to the country side to farm. The same process was repeated across the country. Many died of sheer exhaustion. The social ranking was forcibly and summarily reversed and former masters became servants. It was an apocalyptic glimpse into Dante’s inferno.
But it all boils down to kum. It is a truism that social brutalization begets physical brutality. Although totally disproportionate, the Khmer Rouge were responding to years of cruel suppression and the social cruelties inflicted on the Cambodian society by a corrupt and decadent political elite. When kum arrives, the social structure for containing anger and resentment simply disappears. The mad man has begun to consume the flies consuming him. It is no surprise that thirty years after, the brutal Pol Pot regime still has its partisans and admirers in Cambodia who believe that they did what had to be done.
Years after the parity of barbarity might have been restored, the social wounds refuse to heal and a society is permanently at war with itself. This is the problem with kum and the basis of the clear and present dangers Nigeria faces from an imminent social implosion. Forget about amnesty and all the post-amnesty pizzazz for now. As it is currently configured, Nigeria faces Mr kum on several fronts. First, are revenge-seeking minority groups responding to social deprivation and environmental degradation. Second are parity-seeking majority groups seeking to exclude their excluders. Third are terminated power blocs seeking to terminate their terminators.
But by far the most potent and potentially annihilating threat faced by Nigeria today is the adamantine class divide which has seen to millions wallowing in hunger and biblical misery while a few make away openly with the national patrimony. The polity roils with rage and discontent. The smouldering resentment across ethnic, regional and religious divide threatens to engulf the entire country.
Let us end by paraphrasing Leon Trotsky in a moment of radical depression. “As socialists we seek a socialist world not because we believe that man will be happier—such claims are best left to dictators….But we believe that the moral imperative in life is to raise the human condition even if this means no more than that the current farce and monstrosity has proceeded to tragedy itself” .
It is not a revolution we must fear. It is Mr Kum.
- First published in 2009.
