The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • Arms and the nation

    Arms and the nation

    Democracy and the spectre of remilitarisation

    After almost three decades of uninterrupted peace and tranquility, post-military democracy in Nigeria has entered an interesting phase. What with the uncovering of a plot by some military personnel to forcibly terminate the civilian administration in the country in a bloodfest that would have made the first military uprising in the country look like a Christmas carol. The whole plot was beginning to be enveloped in a fictional halo with initial vehement denial followed by protracted silence and an eerie make belief that all was well.

     That was until the gory details began to seep into the public domain. But having escaped the worst of the devil’s scenarios, this is where utmost caution and maximum circumspection are also required. As the dragnet seems to spread hauling in more influential suspects and the hitherto unknown depth of the plot comes to worrisome focus, the government will need all the tact and wisdom it could muster to manage the fall-out and possible international backlash.

       Obviously miffed and displeased that men under his command could contemplate such a dastardly act not to talk of putting him near the top of the list of principal targets, the former Chief of Defence Staff now Minister of Defence, General Christopher Musa, has been making apocalyptic statements about the wages of military rebellion. This is injudicious and akin to prejudging the outcome of the trial. It should be noted that this is the first time in the history of the country that a public military arraignment for coup-plotting will be taking place under the auspices of a civilian administration. Complications and legal entanglement loom, so is mismanagement of critical information.

       In retrospect, perhaps it was a tad optimistic and probably naïve to imagine that we have permanently seen off the back of military interlopers in our political process. Having battled them to terminal weariness and institutional exhaustion, many had hope that this would be enough to deter the military class from ever contemplating a disruption of the country’s political progress again. Although they had been forced to retreat to the barracks with their tail between their legs, suffering heavy blows to their prestige and professional standing in the society, it was not enough to prevent their heirs from dreaming of la gloire. Their forebears having tasted sour grapes, the children’s teeth are permanently set at the edge. Whatever the terrible casualties and the threat of summary execution, coup-making is the occupational opium of a particular class of soldiers particularly on the West African sub-continent. The reasons are both historical and sociological.

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      Arms and their bearers with their monopoly of the instrument of violence and coercion are fundamental and instrumental to the maintenance and perpetuation of the state and its principal institutions, whether modern, traditional or ancient. It is said that the state began when traditional marauders offered protection to those they have oppressed and terrorized in exchange for certain privileges. With that human society evolved apace and division of labour took root with the former tormentors maintaining internal order while warding off external predators. This is the origin of states, empires and nations.

    No matter the evolutionary trajectory of different segments of human society and whatever its colouration or incarnation, the role of the state as the prime custodian and monopolist of power and coaxed cooperation appears sacrosanct and often seems divinely ordained. The centrality of arms and their bearers to this arrangement cannot be overemphasized. This centrality looms even larger in all its patriarchal and authoritarian essence in nations where there is no elite consensus, where the instruments of governance are weak and enfeebled by human and political frailties, where the authority and legitimacy of the democratic order are vanishing and where the state itself has become a macabre joke as a result of the activities of non-state and anti-state actors. This is where and when the bearers of arms could turn their weapons on the state and the society at large.

     This centrality of arms and their bearers appears to be the bane of most postcolonial nations inaugurated by colonial force of arms, particularly on the West African subcontinent where you have coup-prone and coup-ridden nations struggling with existential traumas as a result of the inability of the political elite to reorganize and reinvent the scrambled pieces left behind for them by departing colonial masters. By its classic definition, a coup d’etat is a seminal rupture, a violent abridgement; an abrogation and decapitation of the state by force of arms. In West Africa, only Senegal and Cameroons- in spite of its doddering and amnesiac leader- have been spared the irruption of post-independence military violence. The rest have at one time or the other come under the hammer of armed rule. As we speak, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad and Gabon are under one form of military rule or the other, with Benin Republic recently close to toppling over.

       It is an intriguing irony that Nigeria, the jewel in the crown of a Black Renaissance, has been spared the best and worst of military rule. The best of military rule occurs when the military, despite its fundamental illegitimacy, acts as a modernizing and catalyzing agent spurring the nation to momentous infrastructural heights and accelerated economic development which in turn facilitates the emergence of a buoyant and economically independent political society which is the bedrock of national stability and a sine qua non for democratic advancement in any nation. This was what seemed to have happened in Indonesia, Turkey , Egypt and in Ghana and Rwanda to a lesser extent.

        The worst of military rule occurs when army dominion mutates or ossifies into a privatized kleptocracy under a leader and his gang which shuts out the prospects of genuine egalitarian development and economic progress. The nation reels from abject poverty and the whimsical cruelties of absolutist rule. It is a double jeopardy, neither democracy nor development. Yet if Nigeria seems to miss out on its visionary military messiah who would have gifted the country with landmark political reconfiguration and accelerated economic growth, the centrifugal forces and micro-pluralism of power centres that gives the country a negative equilibrium that has also made it impossible for a brutal despot to last for long.

       The bitter and protracted struggle of the Nigerian people which eventually saw off military rule attests to this capacity for heroic resistance.  As the history of the First Republic and the aborted Babangida Transition  also attest, whenever the injury and casus belli are located in the most politically conscious and advanced sectors of the multi-national society, one can be sure that something will give eventually. Elementary political wisdom suggests that one does not toy or tangle with the tail of the cobra for trifles.

      It is perhaps this capacity for resistance and innate abhorrence of tyranny that has bred a certain complacency and languid somnolence in the Fourth Republic. In our collective innocence, we might have come to the idyllic conclusion that military irruption after twenty seven years of uninterrupted civilian rule has become a terminal aberration. In any case, the country has become so radically reconfigured, its military installations so decentralized and the communication network so devolved that no reasonable or rational soldier will attempt any “I Brigadier Konkobilo” fancy stuff without contemplating the grave and suicidal consequences of such infantile folly. This is why the news of the putative putsch must have jolted many. But we have forgotten that every Rome must produce its own barbarians and that eternal vigilance is the price of democratic freedom.

     Perhaps institutional memory might be of some help. Whether seen or unseen, whether active or inactive, the military have always loomed large in the post-independence political imaginary of the nation. Military gossip has it that General Mohammadu Buhari, in his customary self-righteousness, used to privately dismiss and sneer at his military nemesis and bête noire, General Ibrahim Babangida, as one of those politicized soldiers he did not wish to have anything to do with. Perhaps Buhari was referring to Babangida’s cosmopolitan suavity and his urban ubiquity which did not conform with his (Buhari’s) rigid model of the puritanical officer. Yet on balance and in the final analysis, no officer has proved more dangerously politicized than the general from Daura. 

      Before the first coup,  military life was shrouded in secrecy, stealth and remote inaccessibility. The barracks were off-limit and off-bounds to those who had no business there. Military ranks elicited generalized awe but they made no sense to the wider public. As a youth, the writer remembers a rare and iconic picture of Brigadier Julius Ademulegun flanked by two other military top guns splashed on the front page of the Daily Times in late 1964. Yours sincerely then asked his father whether the man was the head of his organization, by which one meant the Boys’ Brigade. The old man screamed in consternation at the impertinence. “Come and hear this boy ooo!!! Don’t you know that these are the people who can scatter the country?” 

      A few months after, the military did scatter the country. Unfortunately, the brigadier was among the prime casualties and up till this moment, his body and that of Latifa, his spouse, have not been found. Gleanings from credible intelligence sources of the period suggest that it was not the first time elements in the army had canvassed for a forcible take-over of the country. In 1964 during a brief constitutional crisis when the president, Nnamdi Azikiwe, declined to call on the prime minister, Abubakar Tafawa-Balewa, to constitute a new cabinet on the grounds of the widespread irregularities that characterized the elections, it was reported that a group of officers approached Zik to endorse a forcible termination of the government. But the shrewd and wily Owelle of Onitsha demurred. He was possibly aware of the extant balance of force and the fact that he did not have the constitutional right to deploy troops. When the military eventually struck a year and a few months after, Zik was at sea undertaking a luxury cruise in the Caribbean.

        Even then, had the democratic tradition and culture been stronger and more vibrant and had the fragile elite consensus held together in the face of crisis and uncertainty, the rump of Balewa’s cabinet as led by the then Senate President Nwafor Orizu would have fought off the minatory intimidation and blackmailing antics of General Aguiyi-Ironsi. But holding each other in bitter distrust and resentment, they caved in, ushering their country through the dark passage of hell. Judging by current development, it would seem that the political class in Nigeria have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.

  • Enter the new sawdust Caesars

    Enter the new sawdust Caesars

    Exactly sixty years after, the old military demon has returned to haunt the nation, after three republics including one that died in vitro and after twenty six years of interrupted civilian governance the longest by any stretch in the history of the country. But it will be extremely naïve to think that two different eras are the same in historic import. You cannot step into the same river twice.  No two historical epochs can be more different and dissimilar in nature and texture than the three-region Nigeria of 1966 and the thirty-six state nation of 2026.

    This being the first time in the history of the country that a full court martial is taking place under a civil administration, it is a totally uncharted territory for country and people. Consequently, it is mandatory that certain factors and indicators are closely monitored. For example, it is curious that for a politically conscious people, the reaction of the people to the coup plot and its sanguinary remit has been tepid and apathetic suggesting a dissociation of civic consciousness or a disavowal of politics that is as ominous as it is worrisome in import. It is just possible that the full depth of the plot has not been plumbed and the inauguration of a military tribunal or the process of trial may activate a sleeper-cell already embedded. This may lead to unintended consequences. It is these factors we enumerate below as a memory guide to those who will be taking the important decisions.

    1 International hostility to the trial itself no matter the merits and compelling nature of the evidence.

    2 World opinion unlikely to endorse any attempt to carry out death sentences on the grounds of humanitarian concern.

    3 Having allowed itself to be sucked into the vortex of ethnicity and partisanship, the military has lost its aura of veneration and respectability. More importantly, the armed forces have lost their monopoly of the instruments of violence and subjugation unlike what obtained in the First Republic. With so many armed non-state combatants joining the fray, one can only be sure of the beginning of a conflict of this nature and not its end.

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    4 The nation itself is bleeding on all fronts from insurgencies to insurrections and murderous banditry and is unlikely to accommodate any further bloodshed without something tipping. With the parlous economic condition of the populace, massive anti-state disinformation and the fact that some segments have been openly calling for military intervention, the nation is even more polarized and bitterly divided than it was in 1966.

    5 The law of unintended consequences which makes it difficult or impossible to foreclose possible outcomes to any course of action.

    If an audit of the foregoing is taken, it will be seen why the circumstances demand caution and utmost circumspection. We should not be goaded into a further destabilization of an already stressed military through an open-ended inquisition. As it is, Nigeria may not be a target of deliberate international hostility but a victim of a multi-national struggle for its precious resources. Those currently probing its soft underbelly will be happy if the bogus label of a functioning and vibrant nation-state is removed so that they can go straight for the resources, just as they have done in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Libya, the Congo and lately Sudan. Going forward, President Tinubu has shown himself a master of intrigues and political levitation. Given the volatile circumstances, he will do well to add the genius for military machinations to his remit.

  • In memory of memory

    In memory of memory

    • The long passage to eternity

    From birth to death, human existence is one drama after another. Life is perpetual theatre. Many have even stretched this to conception itself and the very act of consecrating life. Imagine how many doughty fighters fell in the very struggle to overwhelm and overpower a single egg before one nuclear warhead finally succeeds in breaching the fortress of creation, leaving the others to perish in a watery tomb, unsung and unmourn, a mere surplus to requirement. It is an oceanic plenitude, a mammoth graveyard which is also the fountain of life. As long as humans are around, there will always be surplus troops available for the project. Life and death can be very wasteful.

      In circumstances of extreme scarcity or forced cohabitation brought about by geopolitical upheavals, different human races have been known to mix and interbreed. In the Caribbean, the Indians, having been transported across more than half of the globe as an indentured workforce, began coupling and interbreeding with Black slaves and other aboriginal entities to stave off the possibility of extinction. The same thing happened in South Africa. In old Sierra-Leone, freed Black slaves who had chosen to be offloaded on the African coast, were allowed to bring their white mistresses whose conditions were no less appalling than the dire circumstances of their spouses. Simon Schama, the great Dutch historian, is an invaluable and unrivalled authority on this development.

     In Brazil, Angola, Mozambique and their other colonial possessions, the Portuguese, whose level of civilization at that point in time was only marginally superior to those they have suppressed by gunpowder, began procreating and breeding among the indigenous people on an industrial scale producing a hybrid of mestizos in the process. The Spaniards did the same thing by force and by fire in Latin America. Henan Cortes, the famed Spanish conquistador, already boasted of a native mistress, a slave interpreter, who was accused of betraying the secret of the people to the invaders. Love does not brook any obstacle or objection to self-satisfaction. It must be added that recent historical excavations suggest a more nuanced conclusion.

    The human capacity for self-magnification and hence self-actualization is the source of our strength. This is what has allowed the human species to leap beyond our animal cousins and to overwhelm other rival hominids in the struggle for power and earthly possessions. It is what Obafemi Awolowo, the great Nigerian philosopher, has called mental magnitude. Any race that does not possess mental magnitude is doomed to a life of failure and stagnation. Mental magnitude is what allows humankind to dream big and to find the will and capacity to bring these dreams to fruition. This is what is behind the growth of civilizations, of big cities, great scientific advancements, outlandish strides in communication, medical feats that banish superstitious imbecilities and a prodigious intellectual self-awareness which nudge humanity to a higher telos but which also deceives humankind into believing that they are actually greater than what they truly are.

      To dream at such level requires great brains. The secret of human success and triumphs is our brains. But great brains also require constant nurturing, constant nourishment and constant cultivation which lead to self-modulation, self-modifications and self-corrections. The lack and loss of memory is the Achilles’ heel of modern civilization and is at the root of our contemporary tribulations as memory is politicized by both ideologues of the extreme right with their bogus nationalism and xenophobia and the extreme left with their hallucinations about a coming commune. The more things change, the more they don’t change. This epoch is beginning to feel very much like the prelude to the Second World War as men without capacity for global memory and without the ability for ironic self-reflection seize control of some apex countries and begin to push the human race towards a date with Armageddon.

    Walter Benjamin, the Jewish-German philosopher and cultural critic of note, was a political mystic far ahead of his time. He was neither fooled by the modern pyramids springing up all over Europe and particularly in the wonder continent-country behemoth known as America, nor was he dazed or dazzled by the glittering monuments and the outstanding technological savvy behind it all. It was a sign that modernity had come into its own and the human race was on top of his brief. He was far more interested in providing a balance sheet of the immense toil and the unspeakable horrors and human suffering behind it all. He had noted cryptically that “there is no record of civilization that is not at the same time a record of barbarity”.                  

       In 1940 as Adolf Hitler bared his fangs, Walter Benjamin fled his beloved homeland hoping to reach the safety of America. But it was not to be. He was stopped at the French-Spanish border on the grounds of insufficient documentation. Facing sure death, if he was deported back to Germany, Benjamin promptly committed suicide. Miguel De Unamuno, the great Spanish writer and philosopher, who had famously noted that under tyranny men seek liberty and under liberty they seek tyranny was only luckier by a stretch. No two individuals could be more dissimilar, intellectually, spiritually and ideologically.  But both were united by their passion for freedom and abhorrence of fascism.

    After a cat and mouse game, Unamuno finally came under the crosshair of the fascist inquisition. In a rousing speech at the University of Salamanca where he was rector, Unamuno denounced fascism and its attempt to turn everybody into a cripple morally and intellectually. It was a brave thing to do. Sitting testily among the guests was a favorite Franco general who had lost an eye and one arm in great partisan exertions. “Death to life!” the warrior spat out. Only the fear of an international uproar prevented Unamuno from being summarily executed. He was placed under house arrest from where he died two months later on the last day of 1936.  

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        President Donald Trump is a man without any capacity for self-reflection and a sense of momentous irony. As his self-described “armada” rumbles towards Persian waters in all its Pericles-like might and omnipotence one cannot but feel a sense of Deja vu. From the old Greek empire, through  the Roman and Persian civilizations to modern day and technological wonders like the American super fleet, this has always been how military wizardry decoupled from common sense and political wisdom sometimes eventuate in civilizational overreach.  In any society, whenever the aggregate of common sense and political wisdom is outstripped and put in its place by the hubris and self-endorsing narcissism of those whom the leadership lottery has thrown up, such a society has reached the optimal limits of its possibilities.

    In our modern world and although it is often in denial, America is about the only proper empire we have known in the real sense of the world. There are empires and there are empires. The American empire did not truly come into its own until its primogenitor, the British Empire, went into terminal decline. If we are to put a date to it, the America empire which had been threatening since the mid-nineteenth century did not achieve global hegemony and unrivalled dominion until the end of the Second World War when it stamped out the German and Japanese threat. The Soviet Union fell later to a combination of economic and military blackmail and intimidation. Now, after only eighty years of supremacy the empire appears to be creaking at the joints in a way that suggests that the end might be approaching or not very far away.

    The question to ask for the sake of elucidation and global enlightenment. Why do some empires, that is discounting differences in epochs, seem to do better in empire maintenance than others? The Greek and Roman empires lasted centuries. The Persians did not lag very far behind in empire sustenance. Because of sheer longevity the British boasted that theirs was an empire on which the sun never set. Even some ancient African empires seemed to go on forever.  Among other factors, the loss and lack of memory, particularly institutional memory, triggers a process of internal decaying which eventuates in  fracturing and fragmentation. This is as true of empires as it is of nations whether colonial or postcolonial.

    The maintenance and sustenance of political and institutional memory is one of the principal functions of the state whether in traditional or modern society. If you forget where you are coming from, you cannot remember where you are going. To maintain political memory a society requires constant remembrances, constant reminders and the ceaseless production of organic intellectuals. Organic intellectuals are accessories of the deep state. They supply the narrative glue that binds the society together. Organic philosophers are not products of colonial school but of society. Products of colonial education, unless they commit class seppuku, can only serve as functionaries of the postcolonial state. This is the rationale and raison d’etre of their educational grooming.

    Socrates did not go to school. But he was an organic intellectual of the ancient Greek state. When he was asked to drink the hemlock for being a corrupter of youths, he knew his tormentors and interlocutors were wrong. But to disobey would have meant to demystify the ancient Greek state in all its sanctity, superiority and supremacy. Socrates died to preserve the sanctity of state and empire. The Deep State was very deep indeed. Despite constant warfare and strife, the empires of yore took their time coming together. Unlike the modern epoch, with its geopolitical sieges and constant ideological pressures, there was plenty of “time”. 

     The current turmoil and fissures with their overlay of resentments, bitterness and abiding biases smouldering just below the surface show just how far America is from being a truly organic society. Despite its fundamental cohesion, the timeliness and orderliness of its electoral procedure and the political genius of its founding fathers, America remains a postcolonial nation of implanted and transplanted nationalities clumsily clobbered together suffering from a collective loss of memory about how they got to where they are, the stellar antecedents of the nation, and where they are going from there.

       Whether this collective loss of memory is a temporary aberration remains to be seen. It is too early to count America out. But it shows how all nations are vulnerable to geopolitical pressures and seismic shifts of identity occasioned by ruptures. However, if there is anything worse than lack or loss of national memory, it is its substitution with politicized memory.

  • The return of the man from Taki

    The return of the man from Taki

    Omo won ni Taki, oyinbo ara Ijeru

    Idera to wo le e oo

    Oba ma ma je ko o pofo oooo

    Ernest Tunde Nightingale’s praise song of Yomi Akintola

    This is the bane of a postcolonial nation like Nigeria. To be sure, there is always a tinge of politicization about memorializing. But where it becomes the be-all and end-all of everything, it portends a grave danger to the health and existence of the nation since it relies on fabrication and the fictionalization of reality. In a fractured and fissured nation, it is a political weapon of choice. Not even the dead are safe. Nothing is sacred or sacrosanct; no gallery of national heroes however flawed or canvas of avatars and iconic martyrs of the ceaseless struggles for national redemption. It is a dark panorama of rogues and timeless villains. But since it lashes out in all directions, since everybody is game, it makes the business of building a national consensus which is very critical to resolving the foundational impasse almost impossible.

     Last week as the nation marked the sixtieth anniversary of the military upheaval that torpedoed the First Republic, the consensus is that the intervention was not in the best interest of national cohesion and accelerated economic development. Violent animus is not a strategy. May be if we had had a group of military interventionists who were more clear-headed, more strategically accomplished and more ideologically focused, the conclusion would have been different. No one would have argued that Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Muammar Ghadaffi and J.J Rawlings did not make a difference to the fortunes of their respective countries.

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      But it seems time is the greatest enemy of ancient wounds and ancestral memory. Like the grim curator of a full cemetery of horrors, time wears and grinds out the bones of old animus without which there can be no room left for fresh animosities. Last week, it was obvious that while old rancor and the Maginot Line of impregnable divisions subsist in some quarters, majority of Nigerians are gradually coming to terms with their wounds and the trauma of loss. There have been some significant plays of political signifiers across rigid binary divisions. The landmark presidential tribute paid to Chief S.L Akintola by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu at a conference in honour of the late premier of the old west in Ibadan last week was a classic example of pan-national consensus seeking. Akintola himself is beginning to shed the toga of a political ogre, revealing a man of profound wit, warmth, learning and personal compassion. This would have been unthinkable in the climate of hysteria and hate following his assassination sixty years earlier. Time is the ultimate antidote to politicized memory and adjuster of traumatic loss.

  • At bay in Kurmin Wali

    At bay in Kurmin Wali

    Ungoverned and ungovernable spaces proliferate in some dark axis of lawlessness in the nation. This is in spite of the bravest efforts of the security forces and the proactive onslaught of the new Minister of Defence, General Christopher Musa, who has declared war on terrorism and its sponsors. Once again, the authorities have been embarrassed by a brazen act of state-baiting. It took the law enforcement agencies almost two days to acknowledge that the latest incident of mass abduction actually took place. This was after a spate of denials during which time they gave a firm rebuff to enquiries suggesting that something nasty and unpleasant had taken place in the arid, dusty bowels of Kurmin Wali in the Kajuru Local Government Council of Kaduna State. Tired and miffed by it all, the police and the local authorities had apparently decided to take up residence in a Cuckoo land of fiction and eerie denial. They finally caved in to overwhelming reality when denying the obvious was no longer profitable or honorable.

        One can understand and appreciate the fear and apprehension of the local authorities and the security agencies. But this could not have been the way to go, particularly given the scale and magnitude of the mass abduction and the fact that in a globalized world, news, particularly bad news, tends to travel with supersonic speed and far and wide, too. By Tuesday, international media agencies were already beaming images of the terrible mass eviction. The few solitary livestock remaining, particularly the heedless hens and stranded dogs, trembled in fright as they wandered aimlessly about as if humanity had become the greatest enemy of domestic animals.

        The terrorists struck while church service was in progress. Nothing could have been more helpful to the narrative of religious persecution.  They had broken through the massive iron bar put in place by terrified worshippers as they barricaded themselves in. They then proceeded to herd the worshippers out of the premises to join others from adjoining churches. From there, they were marched out, irrespective of age, sex and health, through a dusty track that led out to the fearsome forest. For a country which had become the cynosure of the whole world because of deepening cultural schisms and orchestrated religious altercations, a country that has come under the crosshairs of Donald Trump’s evangelical expedition, this must be as concerning as it can get. It appears that if care is not taken, some people are bent on making the entire nation not just ungovernable but practically unlivable.

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      By Wednesday afternoon, Al-Jazeera, through its intrepid correspondent, was already beaming horrific images from the site and scene of carnage and economic castration. It was a classic abode of the wretched of the earth; a haunting snapshot of the last vestiges of a misbegotten feudal civilization. Cowering and shivering with fright and premonition, the few remaining habitants had gathered their miserable belongings together, ready to flee but with nowhere to go. They let it be known that the last school in the area closed shop several years earlier. No police outpost, no health facilities, no government presence. The dazed and distraught villagers claimed that they had earlier sighted the terrorists openly marching up and down the entire village before they struck. There were no authorities to report to, or to alert.

      This is where the idea of “ungoverned” space began to assume a dark, ironic hue. It is the state that has evaporated. There are ungoverned spaces because there are ungovernable governments. In a classic instance of what is known as chutzpah, the bandits are demanding from the villagers nineteen motor cycles they claimed to have lost or misplaced in previous raids and a tidy sum as reparation. Where are these miserable people going to get the money? Obviously they have been paying ransom through their nose. Chutzpah is when a man murders his own parents only to inform the court that he ought to be set free on the grounds that he was an orphan.

    We must pity our friend, Uba Sani, the governor of Kaduna State, who has shown more compassion and considerable emotional intelligence in administering the affairs of this amorphous conurbation bristling with geopolitical tensions, ethnic polarizations and religious disharmonies. Just as the story of the mass-abduction was unfolding, Sani’s political adversaries opened another political front for him by circulating a fake memo purportedly broadening and widening the succession base of the Zazzau emirate by prising it away from Fulani domination. It doesn’t get more explosively regicidal than that, and it shows the extent of the ethnic, religious and cultural fracture in the state.

      The Kurmin Wali abduction has returned the issue of terror-containment and the implications for the nation to the front burner. Curiously but hardly assuring is Governor Uba Sani’s assertion that the abducted would regain their freedom in due course thus inadvertently letting slip a pattern of abduction and ransom payment almost inevitably followed by more abduction. This is a pattern that cannot be sustained given the growing international encirclement of the nation’s ethnic and religious categories and the ultimate threat to food security in a situation where farmers can no longer go to their farm. With the oil market about to be saturated by Venezuelan oil as instigated by Donald Trump, government revenues will dip further putting grave pressure on the ability of government to finance its budget.

      Despite General Musa’s vehement denunciations and his brave attempts to walk his talk about not giving any quarters to terrorists, there is still a dichotomy, a wild oscillation between outright kinetic approach and the non-kinetic approach which favours negotiations and quiet ransom. We have not heard the last from the agents of appeasement. What appears to be a decisive victory for the adherents of kinetic approach which culminated in General Musa’s recall after being dropped as Chief of Defence Staff to serve as Minister of Defence after his predecessor was shunted aside may not be what it seems. It is a mere reshuffling of the sitting arrangement to placate certain power sectors who might have been unsettled by the mode and manner of the removal of the former military brass hat. A power struggle subsists. Musa may huff and puff, but the real locus of power and troops deployment lies somewhere else.

       The buck stops at the table of the president, and it is a very tough call indeed. Tinubu has to combine statecraft with political sagacity and the wily management of electoral fortunes, particularly in an electoral season where nothing is guaranteed and where the path to a second term is strewn with so many political landmines despite the hegemonic domination of the ruling party and its octopoidal reach and range. By popular consensus, Tinubu is an unrivalled political strategist, past master in the art of wheeling and dealing and a clinical finisher when it comes to the defenestration of opponents.

       But nowhere has it been said that the former Lagos State Governor is a military genius and an enabler of stunning defeats on the field of battle. Only few men in human history have been able to combine the two outstanding gifts of military genius and political prodigy. The greatest military commanders have been known to trip over elementary political calculations while the greatest political geniuses often wilt at the prospects of massive bloodletting.  From all appearances,  Tinubu  is a man who abhors sectarian violence in all its manifestations and  recoils at the prospects of mindless bigotry. Going forward, this politicized sensitivity and reluctance to engage in violent confrontation may well turn out a major handicap as he squares up to those whose agenda is to torment and brutalize the nation into submission to their antediluvian vision of human society.

    The brutal irony of postcolonial Africa, particularly its traumatised and embattled multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-economic conflations where the personalization of power is the norm, is that we often ask and expect our rulers to be everything at once. Sometimes, it is the rulers themselves who insist on being everything. This is what has made the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia and Libya to topple over into actual military confrontation.

       In post-military Nigeria, despite the fact that General Obasanjo did very well in the remit of demilitarization handed over to him by his subordinates  it was when going forward to deepening and expanding the democratic space that the Owu-born warrior came a sad cropper. Till date the baleful overcast of Obasanjo’s anti-democratic debacle still hangs over the nation. If only the poor man had limited himself to one eventful, nation-shaking term which forbidding symbolic aura would still have been with us as veritable lodestar. Trying to cover his track, he committed more grievous infractions. His loss of prestige and sacral respectability is also the nation’s loss.

      President Tinubu will do very well to take some historical lessons to heart.  This is a different order of battle from the immediate post-military epoch. The master-drummers below the reef and the puppeteers orchestrating the spate of terrorism and abductions in the north of the nation will soon appear in the horizon to name their price. If the president succumbs to their blackmail, they would have succeeded in making the country ungovernable and probably unlivable. But it will be foolish to imagine that they will stop until something gives, having succeeded in blackmailing the nation by their malevolent antics. This is because there is an inflationary dynamic to the logic of terrorism and hostage-taking. The more you give in, the more it demands until there is nothing to give again.

       A gifted nation like this, which is supposed to be the Mecca and magnetic hub for the Black race, cannot just continue to exist on paper. It must be made to mean something. The powers that be must brace up for confrontation with the demons confronting the nation. This insurgency in the north has gone on for too long and has already consumed some of the best flowers of the nation. A situation in which non-state actors and anti-state urchins hold the country to ransom for decades can no longer be treated as a normal occurrence or as a passing fancy. 

      The president must put in place an emergency advisory council comprising of retired war veterans, masters of asymmetrical warfare and experts in jungle neutralization in order to halt the drift into anarchy and anomie. We can seek international assistance. On the political front, this may well be the time to set in motion the convocation of a conference seeking a confederal consensus for the nation which will allow the various components to work out their internal contradictions to their satisfaction. This is the only way sanity can be re-imposed on the current dysfunctional bricolage.  

  • The Battle of Agindingbi

    The Battle of Agindingbi

    Okon falls to Mama Igosun

    It was the longest day, and the cannons of Kiriji were already booming. Even before commencing on the great march on Mama Igosun’s redoubt, Okon was already dreaming of sweet victory and sweeter revenge. “I go tie up dem Yoruba witch as dem dey do for Akwa Ibom. Dem small children go pepper am and im go confess. Dem go know say na dem yeye Yoruba people dey trouble dis kontri. After dat na dem OPC house I go head make I go finish dat were man who come beat Okon just like dat”.

     After Okon was forcibly dislodged from the house in a civil commotion that lasted a whole day, he had taken up residence with Baba Lekki who promised him a medical concoction that would make him invisible to any human-being.  But the crazy boy still had his doubts about Baba Lekki and his bogus charm. As he evaded Baba’s lunging walking stick, Okon suddenly rounded on the old crook.

       “Baba as una dey chase me, dat means you dey see me? So when dem medicine go start work, abi na Yoruba wayo?” Okon demanded.

        “Na by remote control I go trigger am. I get dem remote control from dem Agbanrere (Giraffe) neck and dem buffalo horn”, Baba replied.

         “So, how one go know say one don become spirit?” Okon pressed.

         “When you hit dem LASTMA people and dem no reply”, Baba answered.

     “Baba  wetin if dem charm no work?”, Okon asked the ageing scoundrel.

          “Foolish boy, he come be like the case of dem apprentice pilot who dey ask him oga wetin go happen if parachute no open. Na dat one dem dey call jumping to conclusion”, Baba Lekki retorted with a sinister smile.

         “Baba, walahi, if dis yeye juju no work, as you come draw blood from my head, naim I go draw blood from una mouth”, Okon snarled as Baba Lekki tried to hush him away. By now, Okon knew he was on his own. But he was determined to press his luck.  Very soon, Okon arrived at the sight of an uncompleted building that had just collapsed. It was a scene out of the apocalypse. While people were wailing, open looting was also going on. His sense of natural dignity and justice affronted, Okon blocked the path of a neer do well. “No be dem dead people property you dey thief so?” Okon demanded. Before the mammoth urchin could give a reply, Okon dealt him a resounding slap on the face.

       “Allah wa kabr, awon omo ogun orun dide”, the illiterate vagabond screamed and fled.

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       By now, Okon had arrived around the neighborhood. He was now convinced that the charm was working and that he was truly invisible and invincible. Earlier, he had accosted a policeman who was openly taking bribe and dealt him a blow to the plexus. The rogue cop fled screaming “Chineke dem ghost from Atan don destroy me”.

        But the first sign that all might not go well on the home front came soon. There was Mama Igosun dressed like a local hunter swigging directly from a bottle of Seaman’s schnapps even as she swung to a 1930 classic by Denge in honour of one Maggie Macaulay.

    As Okon made to sweep past her thinking that all this was an elaborate bluff, the Amazon blocked his path and stated cursing his ancestors.

        “Ekolo, abi wetin you call yourself, you no dey greet your mother for dem village?” she hollered as she tried to collar Okon.

         “Move”, Okon thundered as he sidestepped. Mama Igosun was so taken aback by the vehemence and ferocity that she tripped and fell. Okon rushed towards her room.

        “Hen hen, o ti lo gbagbara, abi?” the old woman screamed as she sprang after Okon. Overconfidence overtook the crazy boy. Before he could look back, the irate woman dealt him a blow on the back with a frying pan.  The effect of the blow was electric. Okon wound up like a stung millipede and upon recovering his senses, he took to his heels with Mama Igosun in hot pursuit.

    An old classic republished by popular demand.

  • On the evolving nature of elite consensus

    On the evolving nature of elite consensus

    • Clarifications, elaborations and amplifications

    The Return of the Man from Birmingham

    THIS is supposed to be a commemorative piece.  Next week, it will be exactly fifty five years that is February, 1971, since yours sincerely published his first op-ed piece in a major Nigerian newspaper while still a teenager and a staffer with the Nigerian Tribune, then based at Pa Aminu’s house at Adeoyo, Ibadan. University education at the then University of Ife commenced later in the year in October.  Titled Enoch Powell and the Coloured Immigrants, the piece was submitted to the Features Editor of The Nigerian Tribune,  Mr Fola Oredoyin, who later in 1979 ended up in the Lagos State House of Assembly while his boss, the Editor in Chief, Alhaji Lateef Jakande, ended up in the gubernatorial mansion. A man of pure and noble heart, Oredoyin immediately published the piece in the features page while hinting the editor, Mr Olukayode Bakre, that his wonder-boy had done it again. In effect, this would mean a lifetime spent at the barricades of the mind in addition to other dangerous political sorties.

     But this is not so much a commemoration of a personal benchmark, as significant as that is, but a moment of bemused introspection about the changing or evolving nature of  the phenomenon of elite consensus. The concept of elite consensus is not original to the author. It was first noticed in the works of some leading scholars of Scandinavian and northern European politics while the author was a researcher in the Netherlands at the tail end of the nineties.

    Readers of this column and some other writings by the writer would have noticed a scholarly obsession with the concept, particularly as it pertains to the postcolonial nations of Africa with Nigeria as primal focus of attention. Having  closely studied what they observed as the virtually intractable and “pillarised” differences among the political elite of these Nordic countries, the scholars came to the conclusion that only skillful negotiations and “pacted” deals could have allowed the nations to transit to meaningful and impactful democratic order.

    Without this elite consensus, elections are national fiascos foretold. We can then imagine the prospects for real and meaningful democratic order in a postcolonial Africa with its multiethnic armada, its cultural and religious polarizations and fractious political elite. An observer of the just concluded elections in Uganda noted with wry submission to fate that the country has had nine head of state since independence but none has ever handed over power to his successor. Yoweri Kaguta Museveni has been at it for a whopping forty years.

          Theories of dynamic human interaction and political culture evolve not from scholars’ studies and closet libraries but by closely observing the dialectical collision and collusion of contending and countervailing actions in the theatre of politics as factions slug it out on a daily basis bending or altering concepts and received notions to human will in the process. This is where our Powell article assumes a significant analytical dimension for our troubled world and the whole notion of elite consensus. The only thing its youthful author recalls at this moment is the ringing phrase “resultantly negrophobist”as a sophomoric dismissal of Enoch Powell’s outlandish rant.

       But who on earth is Enoch Powell? And why is his unquiet ghost disturbing the peace of the world from the Warwickshire cemetery where his illustrious bones are interred? As a person, Powell was as distinguished as they come. He was MP for Smethwick in Birmingham in the sixties. By consensus, the Midland politician with the manic glint of a possessed shaman, is regarded as the most cerebrally outstanding and intellectually gifted person to have sat in the House of Commons in the last century. He was as brilliant as they come. Having taken a Double Starred First at Trinity College, Cambridge, he was named a full professor of Greek at the University of Sidney in Australia by the age of twenty five and had ended the Second World War as a Brigadier in the British Army. A sympathetic and perceptive observer rued that Enoch Powell wasted his exceptional talents on politics.

        Where fame crosses into infamy and renown dips into notoriety is easy to plot in this instance.  On April 20, 1968 Powell delivered a speech which has turned out to be as historic as it is a landmark intervention in modern British politics. Dispensing with customary niceties, polite formalities, coded etiquette and the British admonition that a gentleman must wear his hat and opinion lightly, Powell tore into the heart of British post-war elite consensus by dismissing the whole notion of unchecked immigration by coloured people and the idea of integrated racial harmony in a society whose culture immigrants can never imbibe as a derisive hoax and a clear and present danger to the health of the nation. Deploying his immense erudition and unrivalled mastery of Classics, Powell dropped an apocalyptic bombshell: if the rot was not immediately arrested, Britain would soon resemble a River Tiber foaming with blood.

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    Retribution was swift and exemplary. Edward Heath dismissed him from his post as Shadow Cabinet. Speaking invitations were summarily cancelled. Polite circles began avoiding him. He had infracted against the cardinal canons of British post-war settlement: no part of the society must be made to feel unwanted or unappreciated however small and whatever may be the race, colour or creed. That is an invitation to anarchy and social conflagration. The British learnt their lesson the hard way in bloody confrontations in their colonies. Fighting alongside their old colonial tormentors had also shown the natives that there are no superior races where suffering and pains are concerned, and a baronetcy is no armour against bullets.

       The snag in this ruling class social engineering is that a survey of the time put the percentage of those who privately agreed with Powell’s gloomy prognostications at sixty which amounted to a dire forewarning of what the future held in store. Just around the corner lay Margaret Thatcher’s brutal rightwing intervention which felt like social Darwinism on steroids. While Enoch Powell did not believe so much in ideology as the driving principle of politics and human interaction, the puritanical daughter of a Methodist alderman was an astringent cold warrior who believed everyone could be pigeon-holed with ideological labels.  This obsession with endless labeling powered by a deeply suspicious and polarizing mindset eventually led Thatcher to a political overreach. She bluntly declared that there was no such thing as society. This finally set the alarm bell ringing in Tory circuits particularly among the storied grandees who clung to the old liberal consensus like a waning talisman.

      At that point in time, we were still far from the consequences of Margaret Thatcher’s open heart surgeries on the British patient, but not very far in real time. Enoch Powell’s Tiber was welling up with its gory contents but not about to overwhelm its banks. It will take the failure of Tony Blair’s anodyne, a mere leftwing sheen and gloss on Thatcherite Darwinism, and a series of incompetent and dismally limited Tory leaders hovering over the patient as if it is a fascinating cadaver, to tip the scale. This is not discounting unfavourable global developments particularly the resurgence of an economically buoyant China, Russia’s geopolitical malevolence, the rise of xenophobic nationalism and authoritarian populism all over Europe and America and what appears to be the fundamental inability of the British political class to reset the nation’s economic categories in the face of growing international encirclement. Britain has been living on borrowed times and borrowed largesse. The creditors have arrived. Harold Macmillan’s patrician ululations to his country people that they had never had it so good was predicated on an economic delusion without any foundation in reality and real time production.

        Now, the man from Birmingham is back with an ear-splitting bang. Almost sixty years after his hair-raising prediction, Enoch Powell is moving to the centre stage of British politics once again after being banished to the margins. His prediction is about to come to pass but not in the way he himself could have foretold. People make predictions based on their own prejudices and the colouring of their imagination. And they come to pass not in the way they could have imagined. This is due to the cunning of history. Unless there is an apocalyptic meltdown, the streets of Britain are unlikely to foam with blood. But never in the postwar history of Britain has there been such open xenophobia, such foul and sullen distemper in the streets with the fabric of elite consensus completely rent asunder.

      The circumstances of an enfeebled and exhausted lapsed empire unable to come to terms with its own historic superannuation which made Enoch Powell to issue his tempestuous edict have now manifested in the fullness of time. From the margins of elite disavowal, Nigel Farage and his Reform UK party have happened upon the funeral rites with the proboscis relentlessly probing and devouring the grisly entrails of the Conservative Party. Appropriately too, and with superb dark humour, the Conservative Party has gone ahead to enlist the services of a Black woman originating from Lagos to preside over the rituals of passage. Let no one deny that Kemi Badenock is doing very well. It was not for nothing that her father, a noted physician, was known as Iwosan, or healer. Enoch Powell who saw no difference between the two parties and who quit his party for the Ulster Unionist Party will purr with satisfaction wherever he is.

       It is a collapse of the elite consensus which has held Britain together since the end of the Second World War.  No one can be sure of what will replace it. This is what happens when political elites, within the limits and limitations of their talents and endowments, are overwhelmed by historical circumstances beyond their remit. It will be foolish and feckless to count out this great and gifted country, despite all its foibles and historical peccadilloes. No nation is perfect. Those of us who consider ourselves as avid Anglophiles will be rooting for its revival and rejuvenation. For now, the old order is gone. It will take a new generation of gifted and visionary political actors to put a new deal together based on extant realities.

       There is a signal lesson here for the elites of postcolonial Africa. As we have seen from the above, forging national consensus is not a tea party. Political elites who have not reached a national consensus on the shared destiny of their nation cannot be expected to achieve the level of critical unanimity to effect a positive change when it comes to the political and economic direction of their nation. This is the consuming tragedy of many contemporary African nations.

  • Under the boots of Jack

    Under the boots of Jack

    To the iconic Muson Hall, Onikan last Thursday for the much heralded unveiling of Ayo Opadokun’s book, The Gun Hegemony. A big scary word, hegemony gives the uninitiated some jitters, just like the Yoruba word, egeremiti, which could well be a scare word which announces its intimidating intent by sheer onomatopoeic intensity. Hegemony is one of those useful Greek words which have found their way into the modern English language to elaborate on the concept of human domination by dominant or hegemonic groups that exert their dominion over others by sheer force and/or pleasant persuasion. Just because you are scared of the word doesn’t spare you the spell of its pervasive invasions.

      This morning, the atmosphere was redolent of human distinction and respectability. They had all come to honour and pay their respect to a man who was a known face of popular resistance to military dictatorship and the struggle to rid Nigeria of despotic rule which high noon was the annulment of the freest and fairest presidential election in the history of the country and its disastrous aftermath. Captains of industry, moguls of the press, barons of solid capital, scions of old money, illustrious royalty, masters of political brinkmanship, emergent plutocrats, former governors, old ministers, top international diplomats, brave journalists of the old barricades, warriors of the protracted siege against the military/feudal complex, former freedom fighters now lapsed into sedate respectability and unreconstructed anti-military stalwarts who had come to hang their old tormentors.

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      No one in the hall appeared more pleased by the distinguished crowd which included Femi Gbajabiamila, the Chief of Staff to the president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, than the man of the moment and author, Ayo Opadokun. He was effusive in his praise of his friends, comrades, associates, benefactors, rescuers, patrons and supporters including his beloved spouse.  Opadokun himself is quite a bundle. But he is a bundle to cherish in your corner of the ring. Brave, fearless and indomitable when going forward, his political and institutional memory is a tad short of staggering. He knows where all the dead bodies are buried and it will be a truly feckless fellow who chooses to mess around with him. As a Chinese proverb has it, if you tarry long enough by the bank of the river, the bodies of your enemies will wash by. In the jungle of Nigeria’s postcolonial politics, the Offa-born warrior-prince is an arch-survivalist.

      As speaker after speaker rose in fury to denounce military rule in all its infamy, its villainies and brutal decimation of the Nigerian dream this fine Thursday morning, you got a sense that they have come to bury Ceasar and not to praise him. Particularly outstanding  was Chief Emeka Anyaoku who gave a clinical analysis of why a new federalist constitution was an urgent imperative for the nation. Standing proudly erect and impressively alert a few days short of his ninety third year on earth, the former international diplomat has spent the better part of twenty six years since his retirement canvassing for a wholesale reconfiguration of the unitary arrangement that is at the heart of Nigeria’s endemic instability and political predicament. From the fiery denunciations and the enraptured approval of the audience, it was clear that the noise was not about to disappear.

       Here comes the sublime irony. Not all military interventions can be dismissed with a wave of the hand. In any case, hegemonies even of the gun cannot be sustained by force alone. They require intellectual rationalizations and philosophical fabrications to insinuate them into the popular consciousness. Soldiers alone do not construct the gun hegemony. They require intellectual ammunition and critical firepower from the political and intellectual class. We must be painfully honest with ourselves. There is no point hiding behind one finger. You cannot build something on nothing. Military intervention in Nigeria was probably inevitable; a disaster waiting to happen.  So was the gun hegemony. Had there been some national consensus following the military mutiny of 1966, the rump of Balewa’s cabinet would have withstood the attempt of General Aguiyi-Ironsi and his cohorts to subvert the constitution. But the famous owl of Minerva always begins its flight after the event.  

  • Extraordinary rendering in Caracas

    Extraordinary rendering in Caracas

    Global attention in the past week has riveted on developments in the beautiful Venezuelan capital of Caracas. It has been a surreal supercharged drama, the type normally reserved for enthralling science fiction. The entire world has been on edge, like the audience at a movie that has become too real for comfort. You have a feel that this is history as it has been, as it really is and as it is going to be. So get on with it. But you also begin to doubt the collective health of humanity.

      History is made by history-makers and not by those at the receiving end of historical developments; the passive receptacles who are nothing but canon fodders of human development. The Americans, astute choreographers of historical developments that they have proved to be, have even added a touch of eerie certitude to the extraordinary and outlandish development. It was exactly thirty five years since a former American minion, Manuel Noriega, was flushed out of the presidential precincts in Panama City before being taken into American custody after days of wondering in the same country he had ruled with iron severity.

    This time around, the Americans have even scaled up the chilling expertise in high-tech human vaporization. Whether we like the American rampart militarism or not, whether we admire Donald Trump’s manic war-mongering and malevolent exhibitionism , his obtuse insensitivity  to the plight of fellow humans, you have to go give something to  him and his compatriots. The military operation to capture Nicolas Maduro was a classic of its genre showcasing human military ingenuity and capacity for brutal violence at its summit. It was from start to finish, brilliantly coordinated, clinically executed and tellingly enacted, leaving no room for any margin of error.

      The Americans have been showing the world why they are emphatic and unquestionable masters of the universe and worthy successors to the mantle of the Roman Empire. It would have felt very good and immensely reassuring if our world were to be under the threat of an attack by some invaders from some outer planets. But we are not. We are our own worst enemies. Some twenty five years ago when the Americans blitzed their way through Saddam Hussein and his empire of venality, it was advanced by military experts that after America, the combined military might of the next twenty five countries could not approach the military dominion of the most successful country that the world has seen. The suspicion is that this disproportion would have increased ever since as an exhausted and historically superannuated Europe began to cynically offload its responsibility to defend itself on the American big brother which takes its divine mission, his manifest destiny and notion of American Exceptionalism to a new level.

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      So, before we begin to castigate the Americans for disturbing the peace of the world and for disrupting the extant global order, we must factor in the dereliction of duty and the sense of historic ennui and sheer fatigue, the disorienting weariness, that seem to have overtaken the lapsed empires of Europe. We can then ask the legitimate question as to whether the world has become a better place to live, whether there has been increased prosperity and whether the plight of humankind generally has become more humane under the aegis of America’s unexampled might and total dominion.

      But under a rightwing resurgence and the relentless hammer of a man with a ledger and balance sheet vision of history, the Americans are having none of that. We must first pay for past services and make arrangements to repair current debts. The world has taken America for a ride for a long time and this business of being your brother’s keeper only impoverishes Americans and set the citizens permanently on the boil while the Europeans go on their luxury holidays and the Africans wallow in their historic turpitude  underwritten by American generosity and compassion. Charity must return to the home of charity and in order to make America great again, the Father Christmas nonsense must stop. As Oscar Wilde famously admonishes, we must avoid the careless habits of accuracy. The need for America to continue to parade as the global policeman while also insisting that it is all done in the interest of America’s supremacy is the central contradiction of the Trump enterprise and will see to its eventual unraveling.

       Nevertheless, self-summoned duty has its summoned obligations. The concept of extraordinary rendition by which Nicolas Maduro, the ousted president of Venezuela and his wife, have found themselves in American custody this past week, is one of those unique American extralegal inventions which does not brook scrutiny because it has its foundation in the use of overwhelming force to arrive at predetermined and often illegal objectives. Redolent of brisk and extreme brutality in apprehending and transporting those on its wanted list of designated terrorists, It is America’s preferred mode of international abduction.  But as it becomes an omnibus dragnet snapping up high-profile global personalities including serving heads of sovereign nations, the threat to extant global order cannot be overemphasized.

       As America sets about establishing and projecting its bona fide as the undisputed master of the universe and its principal cop, the Treaty of Westphalia, the grundnorm of the modern nation-state paradigm, stands diminished and attenuated. After unending wars among the global principalities of the period, the treaty established the notion of sovereignty and territorial integrity based on dominated space rather than sphere of religion. Even then, succeeding global powers have often scoffed at the idea of sovereignty based on legal fiction rather than real power and authority.  Superior French artillery put paid to the idea of Italian city-states, just as the French themselves could arguably be called the first masters of extraordinary rendition as seen in the tragic abduction of the Haitian leader, Toussaint L’ Overture, and his subsequent death in French incarceration.

        In our era and in this particular conjuncture, however, no country has been more gung-ho in imposing its interests on the global order and more adept at projecting a rampart militarism and capacity for brutal preemption as the cornerstone of its foreign policy than the United States. Apart from capturing Nicolas Madura, Donald Trump has directly threatened Iran, Cuba, Colombia and has steamrolled even mighty Russia on the high seas aided by the British RAF. The American strongman has also resumed his psych-op and relentless baiting of Greenland asking the autonomous Arctic enclave to voluntarily relinquish sovereignty and surrender its age long autonomy. The danger in all this if care and caution are not taken and given Donald Trump’s combustible nature, is the possibility of a military overreach at some point which can have some apocalyptic consequences.

       Let us now bring in literature in service of troubled reality and life as science fiction. As I was about returning to Nigeria last week, my first daughter pressed into my hand as part of Christmas gift, a recently reissued edition of the magical masterpiece by the Columbia master, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The Autumn of the Patriarch is an unforgettable portrait of decaying splendour and splendid state paralysis enacted against the dismal background of an expiring Latin American despot holed up inside the presidential palace. It was a sumptuous feast of decadence and desuetude; a classic study in the epidemic of human dereliction. Huge vultures take position ready to feast on the remains of the dying emperor. The courtesans and couriers of power had all left, abandoning the old man to his fate.

    The irony of Marquez’s novel could not have been more pronounced when three days later the Americans staged the extraordinary rendition of Nicolas Maduro and his spouse from the Caracas presidential palace. As a result of what is known as biological coup d’etat, the aging autocrats who swarmed the president palaces of Latin America, the Trujillos, , the Somozas, the Stroessners, the Duvaliers, the Ugarte Pinochets etc when the novel was published fifty years earlier have all disappeared. Time is the ultimate master of tyrants. Rather than being an aging dictator, Maduro was a caudillo in his prime. It was obvious from the swamp of bandage that the spouse had to be physically restrained. And rather than having vultures swarming over, it is drones that seem to relish devouring fresh human flesh in real time.

       This is where this engrossing Venezuelan story finally turns on its head. What ought to be celebrated as a victory over communism gone rogue and liberation from the clutches of an antidemocratic fascist is fast transforming into a nationalist liberation struggle against foreign tyranny and a stirring rally for sovereignty. Extraordinary rendition has produced its own extraordinary rendition. With America hinting at full militarization and unwisely suggesting that its stay in the embattled country is unlikely to be a short an uneventful one, this is likely to provoke some ancient nationalist cadres in Venezuela to resuming what they know best: guerrilla sabotage. With Columbia actively hostile across a three-thousand miles border, we may be seeing another major American quagmire developing.

       A strong person without discretion is often likened to a weak, ineffectual protagonist. One of the most remarkable consequences of the abduction of Nicolas Maduro is the global pushback it has spawned against authoritarian rightwing politics even in the Trumpian homeland. The obvious retreat of President Trump from a precipitate military overwhelming of Venezuela and the attempt to woo the hard men of Colombia is coming when the horse of resurgent nationalism had already bolted from the stable. Either as collective entities or as individuals, both countries are likely to dissolve into chaos and civil war.

    Something is beginning to stir anew in humanity all over again.  This has laid the condition for the possibility of a new benign type of leftwing politics to act as countervailing rallying point against the global dominance of xenophobic populism and rightwing authoritarianism. It will not in the short run halt the rampaging momentum of Donald Trump’s Wehrmacht. But it is likely to contain its excesses in the long run for the benefit of humanity.

    Some new music is beginning to sound in the remote horizon. It is the time of extraordinary rendition. We may have to thank President Donald Trump for the lack of moral and political encumbrances which has allowed us to see the old global order for the unworthy charade it has become. But we can also see the limits of sledgehammer geopolitics in a world far more conflicted and convoluted than the time of Westphalia. It is time for a new global order.

  • Goodbye to the good doctor

    Goodbye to the good doctor

    The son of a master-fryer of akara balls does not want another master-fryer in business. (Omo alakara ko fe k’enikeji o din, Baba Yekemi) It is not often that you find a columnist paying respect and homage to another, particularly from the same newsgroup. Art is indeed a jealous master and writers can be a notoriously truculent and difficult brood. After paying copious tributes on this page to  Dr Femi Orebe on the occasion of his reaching the octogenarian benchmark, the autumnal Ekiti warrior waited patiently for yours sincerely until the actual reception before collaring the columnist. “You this chap, so you cannot even pay me a common tribute without abusing me, abi?” the great man rumbled with ominous conviviality. Yours sincerely took mental note of all the possible and potential headhunters in the hall.

      And while still talking about the tribe of celebrated pen-pushers and their infamous thin skin, it is meet to report that after a nasty tiff at a reception in the most rarified ambience of upper crust New York, Norman Mailer, the great novelist and celebrated hell-raiser, dumped the equally celebrated Gore Vidal on a pile of prime pancakes and Christmas decorations after a flurry of exploding punches. Mailer, a decorated boxer and World War Two hero, had little time for Vidal’s upper class pretensions. After being helped to his feet in all his Kilimanjaro-like heap, Vidal noted with aristocratic displeasure: “Words have failed Norman again”.

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    All this by way of tribute to a retiring fellow columnist on this newspaper who let it be known in a valedictory rally last Wednesday that his much cherished combo was calling it quit. Dr Tony Marinho, an illustrious scion of the illustrious Marinho clan, has been a tremendous asset to this newspaper right from inception. He was there from the word go even serving as a columnist on board of The Comet, the paper that transformed into The Nation. That is over twenty years of continuous exertions, relentlessly poleaxing the unjust, the unfair and the mindlessly incompetent while pointing the way to a better society. Before being publicly unveiled as a noted columnist, he had served as a member of the Anonymous Authors Association of Nigeria, his first letter to the editor having been published exactly fifty years ago  in 1976 while serving as a second set NYSC medical doctor.

       Dr Marinho writes with an “up and at ’em” gusto, a discernible British bull dog tenacity which leaves no stone unturned and no turn unstoned, as it was once famously noted. There is a stirring immediacy to the writing; a fierce sense of the urgency of now which makes the leisurely ambulatory gamboling of elderly stylists like yours sincerely a tad complacent and even faintly complicit. There is always something about the doctor which reminds one of the unforgettable poetic renditions of Simon and Garfunkel: The Boxer.

       It is therefore not surprising to learn that in his youth, Marinho had been an apprentice boxer in the Abalti Barracks gym of the iconic boxer, Hogan Kid Bassey, former World Heavyweight Champion. The lessons learnt and imbibed, particularly the minatory crouching gait reminiscent of Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart, the science of relentlessly advancing without being poleaxed by a sucker punch, would have stood the eminent medico in good stead in the modern coliseum of Nigeria. This was the calling of Medicine at its most medicinal. There are some physicians who happen to be true healers just as there are some natural healers who happen to be physicians. Given his moral clarity, his passionate adherence to simple and elementary decency, his noble altruism and abiding sense of obligation to the poor and needy, it was inevitable despite his obvious disdain for hustling and aversion for self-promotion that he would attract attention at the highest quarters.

    Legend has it that he was once offered appointment at the highest level of his calling. But when his questioning became too intrusive and invasive, it led to a protest by his mentor and potential benefactor, Professor Ladipo Akinkugbe, the imperious and aristocratic Ondo-born medical avatar, who wondered whether the young man was going for national service or national inquisition. The offer fell through. In the event, the nation’s loss was the gain of The Nation. But no matter the condition and circumstances, you cannot hide a star under a bushel. Marinho will be missed by his teeming readers and admirers. May his tribe continue to grow.