Category: Tatalo Alamu

(A treatise on political absurdism)

In Samuel Beckett’s modernist classic, Waiting for Godot,  waiting for the mysterious magician of salvation is a timeless and fruitless venture. Everybody knows in their heart of heart that Godot will not come. Yet they are all compelled to wait. The alternative is too bleak to contemplate, for it simply means that in a thoroughly blighted world, there is even no hope for hoping.  Things had fallen completely apart. The centre was no longer holding.

Waiting for Godot is a deeply unoptimistic play about the human condition. It is a vision of human society rent asunder; of the universe as a moral void brimming with cosmic futility. There are no heroes, only antiheroes who have forsworn any heroic gesture. Unlike the more expansive canvas of earlier theatre, the modernist canvas of the Absurd is stripped bare. There are no rhetorical flourishes. The cast is pared down to a minimal and minimalist three who babble unintelligible nonsense.  In order to relieve the boredom and sheer ennui of waiting for Godot, the audience is compelled, like the captive victims of an ancient mariner, to make sense of utter nonsense; of relentless and unremitting fatuity.

Samuel Beckett, together with Eugene Ionesco and Franz Kafka, could be described as the classic literary figures of the Age of Anxiety in which the values that undergirded human societies appear to have collapsed and the old God seemed to have disappeared completely. In his post-prison incarnation, Soyinka, philosophically speaking,  came very close to this frame of mind, particularly in Madmen and Specialists.

These writers do not even pretend to offer hope to stricken humanity. According to Ionesco, everybody must lift themselves up by the bootstraps or fall into the yawning pit. Several times, it has been hinted that Godot himself is a trope for a God that had disappeared forever. There is no paddy for jungle, as they say.

As this column never tires of explaining, there are times when literature imitates life in its haunting and unforgettable realism. But there are also times when life imitates literature in its grand fictional sweep. There is a lot about contemporary Nigerian political life to remind one of the Theatre of the Absurd.  Just as the Theatre of the Absurd mirrors a world that has gone out of joints, a world in which God has disappeared and societal values have collapsed, The Theatre of Political Absurdism  is a reflection of a society in which all the institutions girding political norms have collapsed and people are subject to the whims and caprices of individuals without the moral and intellectual capacity for leadership.

It is a minimal and minimalist society.  Just as everything is pared down to the minimum in the Theatre of the Absurd, in the State of Political Absurdism everything is also pared down and the state is stripped of all resources including human assets. It is the age of minimal generals, minimal statesmen, minimal politicians, minimal philosophers, minimal economists and minimal clerisy. Mediocrity is magnified while real virtue comes miniaturized.

In order not to further inflame political passions, it is important to reach beyond surface manifestations to get at the root and latent contents of contemporary political developments in Nigeria. By so doing, we may strip ourselves and a sadistic post-colonial state of any illusions about its ameliorative possibilities under current circumstances and conditions. Subsequently, we may be persuaded to come to terms with the harsh verdict that what the situation demands is radical surgery rather than cosmetic scaling.

If we are looking for evidence of state infirmity and its attendant political pathologies, we may have to look no further than the dramatic postponement of elections by a whole and walloping six weeks. Now let us be fair to all parties concerned. Election dates are not cast in stone and marble, but only up to a point. Shifting election dates particularly when the security situation is dire and darkly portentous is the right and rational thing to do.

But the shift ought to have been arrived at through elite consensus and an agreement by all parties involved.  What makes the current postponement most galling and odious is that it was surreptitiously effected by a faction of the contending political elite and slammed down on the nation by despotic fiat. It is akin to the referee in a boxing match physically restraining one of the combatants while sanctimoniously asking them to get on with the fight. We all know where this kind of officiating has taken the country before.

In a truly functioning democratic set-up, it is inconceivable that a coterie of military officers and security kingpins, acting in concert with the presidency and a failed hegemonic party, could ignore the Council of State, the highest advisory organ in the nation, only to proceed to arm-twist the nation’s electoral Czar into supporting a predetermined agenda. It was a sad day for political sanity in Nigeria and a triumph for political absurdity. On this Council of State are at least four former military heads of state. If serving military hierarchs could hold their former commanders in such spiteful contempt, one must wonder what the immediate future portends.

Readers of this column would have noticed its deep reverence and admiration for the Nigerian military, no matter its human errors of judgement and lapses of the past. Although a creation of colonial subjugation, the army is the first and last national institution standing. No efforts must be spared to save it from itself and from the current beneficiaries of institutional disorder.

The reasons given for the postponement would have made Samuel Beckett, the master of Absurdist formulations, wince and grimace in ironic admiration. It is a litany of shameless bêtise which has brought the nation further international ridicule and global obloquy. It is not the first time the military have given a timeline for crushing the Boko Haram menace. If the military kingpins are now buoyed up by the arrival of international troops on Nigeria’s sacred and sacrosanct territory, it is an admission that the once almighty Nigerian army could no longer pass muster.

On the objective plane, the real effect of the postponement will be to give the ruling party a momentous boost in the war of attrition with its main rival. It is the politics of exhaustion. Given its limited resources, it is difficult to see how the opposition can keep up the campaign for another four weeks with the same verve and vigour. Somebody may yet make a fatal campaign slip. The punitive physical regimen may occasion a catastrophic clanger. The dangerous interval may become a ruinous interlude as extra-constitutional forces sniff a stalemate. It is akin to shifting polling posts at the eleventh hour which could induce messianic hallucinations in a few.

As if by some poetic justice, the stated reasons for the postponement are beginning to explode in the face of those who gave them. A week after the postponement, and going by their own logic, the security situation has worsened considerably. Only this can explain the brazen intimidation, the psychological destabilization and the military siege on the residence of main opposition leaders. Bourdillon is now synonymous with Boko Haram. It reminds one of an American general in Catch 22 who stated bluntly to his military subordinates that his major objective was not how to finish off the Japanese but how to neutralize his main military rival.

No matter the angelic mien, the sweet boyish smiles, the dissimulating panache, the serpentine charms and base low-minded cunning, Goodluck Jonathan should know by now that except with his hard core supporters, he has exhausted his credit and stock of goodwill with most Nigerians. For a man who started out with such a huge swell of pan-Nigerian good will and affection, this is the real tragedy of his tenure. No matter what he says or does not say, he will come across as a master-dissembler, a Machiavellian zero-summer who does not give a damn about the fate of the country he owes so much.

For veterans of what has now become a permanent struggle against evil governance in post-independence Nigeria, you can always tell when a ruler has offended the deep sensibility of Nigerians, when he has injured their sense of fairness and what is right. You always know when majority of Nigerians have crossed The Rubicon. That hour is now at hand. How many more times can the day of judgement be postponed? The answer no longer resides with the Nigerian political elite. It is now in the seething streets.

As for Attahiru Jega, it is now most unlikely that he will finish his tenure without some tarnishing of reputation and besmirching of hard earned integrity. He will be in distinguished company. The Nigerian electoral throne is the graveyard of reputations. The stakes are so high, and when mud is thrown so hard some of it is bound to stick.  A man of Jega’s stoic and saturnine temperament would have been quietly affronted by the ferocity and velocity of the allegations hurled at him, particularly by wild old men who have no further reputation to protect.

To be sure, there is a school of thought which holds that Jega’s languid and lackadaisical hauteur is particularly ill-suited for a job which requires constant staginess and some showmanship. This is neither here nor there. There can be no doubt that in moments of grave crisis, Jega’s  unruffled self-assurance can be quite becalming for a nation constantly on edge.

But to appropriate Durkheim, whenever a sociological phenomenon is explained away by a psychological parameter, we can be sure that the explanation is false. The problem about our electoral system is not about the personality type of the chairman of the commission but of a background institutional crisis which will not ignore us however much we choose to ignore it. There is a touch of poetic irony to Jega’s current difficulties which ought to teach our political elite some hard lessons about the dangers of political opportunism.

It will be recalled that Jega himself had been part of the Uwais Panel on electoral reform. It was a public inquest into the worst electoral calamity visited on the country. One of the cardinal recommendations of that panel was that the presidency should be stripped of its power to nominate and appoint the chairman of the electoral commission. The responsibility should go to a Judicial Council.

The recommendation had hardly been submitted when Jega was appointed the chairman of the commission and he gladly accepted. It was a strategic gambit on the part of the ruling class which immediately squashed and squelched any possibility of a comprehensive electoral reform. Jega did not deem it fit to explain why he took the job against the recommendation of his own committee.

But there will always be a return of the repressed. It is this lingering institutional hiatus that has caught up with Jega with presidential interlopers swarming and calling for his head in very humiliating circumstances even as some of his shameless professional colleagues intrigue for the same thankless job..

We can continue to wait for Godot, but Godot will not come. This is why civilized societies give primacy to building strong and durable institutions rather than building the cult of strong, authoritarian personalities. The absence of the institutions we don’t build will eventually destroy the egoistic personalities we build.  The theatre of political absurdity is not a funny place at all. Unhappy is the nation without visionary institution builders.

The odds lengthen dramatically against the Jonathan administration. With several critical pillars of political society demurring  and many major stakeholders deserting the ramparts of the faithful, the end may well be near for the biggest political rally in Africa. It is usually the case that it is the person most important to a pressing matter that is also particularly deaf to the warning rumblings.

Yet as the PDP unravels before our eyes, it is important to keep a sense of perspective about how we got to this perilous pass where Nigeria has become an international joke and a national scandal. Even the conservative but highly respected London-based The Economist magazine has now dismissed the Jonathan administration as belonging to a “discredited party” likely to be swept off by the irresistible momentum of the opposition.

Such has been the scale of the looting of the national patrimony, the brazenness of state larceny and the bizarre nature of in your face impunity, that the canopy of economic reform along neoliberal lines which made the Jonathan administration and its much hyped hustler economists very attractive to their metropolitan patrons has now collapsed. Like devils on the cross, these Breton Wood attack traders have now started noisily quarrelling among themselves.

When elite consensus breaks down this irretrievably and in so fundamental a manner that it questions the political, intellectual and spiritual competence of the ruling class all at once, it means that there is a fundamental disagreement about the sitting arrangement in the dining hall and about who gets what and at what time. Fortunately or unfortunately, the rupture of elite relations gives the rumbling multitude a window of opportunity to forcibly disrupt the entire proceedings. From that point on, the resolution of the crisis is no longer an entirely elite driven affair.

Goodluck Jonathan may have a point. Allowing the Niger-Delta militants to dip their hands into the national trough is a crude but telling means of pressing for immediate relief and righting a historic wrong. But by so doing, he externalizes an internal elite conflict in such a way that the elite become structurally impotent to deal with the crisis. Wise rulers always weigh both the long term and short term consequences of their action.

At three critical intersections in Nigeria’s post-independence existence, the masses have risen in a way that has threatened the fundamental structure of the nation. Between 1962 and 1965, the Yoruba underlings rose with such violence and mayhem that the multiplier effects eventually overwhelmed the entire Republic. So was the case in the Second and Third Republics when perceived injustice snowballed into a national conflagration.

But no two situations can be completely similar. In the First Republic, the absence of a potent civil society led to a direct collision of forces between an irate populace and the civil authorities in what is memorably remembered as “operation weti e”. In the Second Republic, the presence of a powerful military caste prevented a slide into anarchy and descent into ungovernable chaos.

In The Third Republic, an emergent and virile civil society cadre acted as a powerful countervailing force which prevented an enraged populace from coming into direct collision with the military authorities. In the Fourth Republic, this modulating civil society has largely disappeared having been compromised into historical oblivion as a result of its own shenanigans.

In a sense, then, the Third Republic can be regarded as the golden age of age of Nigerian generals, both serving as well as retired and the last snapshot of a military plutocracy just as it began its inevitable descent into decline and historic irrelevance. It acted with considerable professional concert in eventually arresting the political chicaneries of General Babangida. But by then it had already shot itself in the foot.

With the Fourth Republic, we are witnessing the whirlwind with the rise of an irregular army which threatens and humiliates the regular army such as we have seen with the Boko Haram insurgents as well as the empowerment of an outlaw band of ruffians and riffraff from the fringes of the society who now cock a snook at the old general caste.

Witness for example, General Theophilus Danjuma’s recent fulminations and the swift countermand by a whole gaggle of  Niger Delta  “generals”. If this was unthinkable in the eighties and nineties, then we must come to terms with the fact that we have arrived at an interesting conjuncture. A throne, as Napoleon once acidly noted, is only a bench covered with damask.

As things stand in the Fourth Republic, we might as well be witnessing the passing of an elephant. In Africa, it is said that the death of an elephant is an occasion to witness all manner of knives in action. By this time next week, or the next few weeks as may be contrived by the shifting of polling posts, the political landscape of the nation would have altered perhaps forever.  Having received an electoral shellacking in the hands of an angry and bitter populace, Jonathan could have become a lame duck ruler critically hobbled by loss and lack of popular acceptance for the remaining part of his tenure.

But if President Jonathan wins against the run of play, the upset victory is likely to upset the entire applecart, triggering off in the process a chain of reactions which is likely to end the Fourth Republic. In a polity dominated by the centrifugal forces of religion, region and tribe, no Head of state can survive for long without substantial elite approval. If on the other hand, the APC wins, the ascendancy of opposition elements may serve as an elixir prolonging the lifespan of the Fourth Republic. For the nation to survive, the PDP will have to die and be reinvented in a manner of speaking.

The critical choice before Nigerians could not have been starker and more profoundly paradoxical. It is either regime change and the survival of the Fourth Republic or regime survival in a short run and the ultimate destruction of republic and the democratic process. Under the PDP, the shrine of Baal has exhausted its deadly propitiatory cocktail of bribery, blackmail, assassinations, electoral witchcraft, kleptocracy and other brazen crimes against humanity. Only a party that truly believes it would rule forever could have committed such heists without batting an eye. Now the chicks have come home to roost.

Never in the history of Nigeria has a federal election occasioned such rancor, nastiness and bitterness as we are currently witnessing. The stakes must be very high indeed. Yet there is not much difference in ideology and political outlook between the two major parties. The two are right of centre political machines poised and primed to capture power in civil contests which are wars by any other means. The hierarchy of both parties is brimming with political transvestites and other humongous hybrids who would be at home even in hell as long as opportunities abound. Asking for the ideology of such people is like asking for the driving license of an international smuggler.

Although the APC is more creative and pro-people, both parties tend to build from the top down to the bottom in a startling reversal of the normal order of human association. If the Nigerian people eventually decide to cast their vote overwhelmingly for APC, it is not because they hold it in special affection or regard but because they have come to the conclusion that a vote for APC is the most rational and expeditious way of seeing off the much hated and much contemned PDP.

But as if we have stated so often in this column, elite consensus cannot be built on election day or by some vainglorious pacts of friendship and fraternity publicly enacted as a pay as you go spectacle just before elections. Successful elections are products and outcomes of a priori elite consensus and pacted negotiations. Such consensus involves a play of social signifiers across rigid binary divisions; a political gamesmanship which does not recognize Maginot and Siegfried lines in politics.

As we have seen so often in post-colonial politics, elections are won and lost before actual elections. More often than not, the electoral winner is not the political victor. In 1993, Abiola won a presidential election but was prevented from claiming his political laurel and done to death to the bargain. But 2015 is not 1993. In 1993, despite the heroic stirring of civil and political society, the balance of force remained with the military oligarchy. Despite being historically exhausted, they were still able to dictate the pace and the eventual pact.

In 2015, 1993 looks so distant and remote. The power equation has changed. There are new kids in the coliseum. Having lost its old vitality and institutional charisma, the military has become a poor shadow of its former self. But something else has happened in the intervening sixteen years between the end of formal military rule and the reenactment of civil rule. It is the rise and decline of the PDP.

The PDP is a victim of its own success and excesses. Conceived by its military and civilian progenitors as a pan-Nigerian mega-party, the PDP at the height of its power and grandeur was arguably the most formidable political cartel in the history of Africa, with its machine greased and oiled by billions of petro-dollars. So successful and all-conquering was this post-amalgamation amalgam that the fear of many was that Nigeria has become a virtual one-party state.

But in a moment of hubris and power disorientation, the PDP handed the reins of its ascendancy to a political and power neophyte who in turn swiftly surrendered himself to the political and power neophytes who have seized the reins of dominancy in his ethnic formation but are visually incapable of seeing the bigger picture in a multi-national nation roiling with momentous contradictions. The result is the catastrophe that faces the nation.

How anybody could have made the elementary political miscalculation of handing over such vast powers to an untested and untutored Goodluck Jonathan remains one of the mysteries of collective political suicide in African history. But it speaks to the limits and limitations of power pragmatism, particularly the fact that organized conspiracies to capture power are also vulnerable to the power of other conspiracies.

For now, the PDP is down and out for the full count. If Nigeria’s legendary luck permits, it will disappear quietly in other to live and fight another day. If not things will turn nasty and scary. But if the APC does not want to be seen as just another more glamorous and attractive version of the PDP, it will have to look for ways of infusing its ethos with an emancipatory project meant for the amelioration of the terrible condition of Nigeria’s toiling people, irrespective of religion, region and ethnic classification.

Second, if it comes to power, the APC must profit from the tragedy of the PDP. Despite the razzmatazz of being a big umbrella for all Nigerians, the largest party in Africa had a very narrow social base for the recruitment of leadership cadre, hence its startling inability to appropriate the vast range of vibrant and visionary expertise available in Nigeria.

Under Jonathan’s insular provincialism,  the base shrunk further until it began to look like a narrow ethnic or  creek camarilla. To make a dent, the APC must move to broaden its leadership recruitment base. Luckily for the parties, there are some of its leaders who have demonstrated in the past a capacity to look for leadership materials beyond the narrow base of party affiliations. But such idiosyncratic hunches must now be structured and finessed into a Strategic Intervention Pool.

Nigeria is on the cusp of momentous events and it is good to be a witness to a year when decades may happen. Over to you then, Attahiru Jega—and that is whenever.