The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

Inferno and the filmmaker

What a grisly birthday present! In August this year, Ola Balogun, the notable Nigerian filmmaker, visual artist, dramatist and culture impresario, will turn seventy. Penultimate Thursday, Ola Balogun lost everything he has acquired in life to a terrible inferno which consumed everything in sight until it was put down.

I use the phrase “put down” and not “put out” advisedly. In our part of the world, wild fires are like mad dogs. Everybody runs away from them if they have the chance. They range and roam with volcanic gusto until a combination rudimentary technology and sheer primitive prowess knock them out. Then everybody goes home to await the next mad dog.

Such is the fate of societies trapped between the ancient order and modernity. Modernity will bring the consumer goods and all the trappings of occidental and oriental civilizations. But you cannot rent fire-fighting equipments and fire-fighters from America. In the absence of these, all the emblems and totems of civilization, all the gadgets acquired from other people’s technological labours, are mere ephemeralities awaiting the ultimate consumer. It is known as uninsurable goods and goodies.

There are periods in a nation’s life when the personal tragedy is indistinguishable from the public tragedy, when indeed the private tragedy of the exceptional individual is a profound metaphor for the collective tragedy of human existence in the society. Take another look at the picture of the bewildered and stoically bemused filmmaker of impeccable upper class breeding amidst the rubble and horrific carnage of what used to be his adored home and you may well be looking at the last snapshot of the old Nigerian middle class or what the French call the “haute culture”.

In its classical epoch before the barbarians overwhelmed the barricades, Ola Balogun’s father, an Aba-based Yoruba lawyer, was part of it all, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Zik, Francis Akanu Ibiam, Eyo Ita, the Adeniyi-Jones and many other members of the emergent illuminati that birthed around the Enugu-Aba-Port Harcourt and Calabar axis. Just as the middle ground has disappeared from Nigerian politics, the middle class, the cultural, spiritual, political and economic backbone of any civilized society, has also vanished from the Nigerian horizon.

It is perhaps profoundly symptomatic of this loss that the values of Calvinist thrift, restraint, delayed gratification, liberality and tolerance with which the European and American bourgeois classes powered modernity and rapid development in its classical epoch have also disappeared from Nigeria. The old African jungle with its commodious capacity for the re-absorption of the absconding has reclaimed its own.

It is a tragedy that has been long in coming. Rues Ola Balogun: “Everything is gone now-my books, films and other belongings. Although I still have some of my books in Paris, France. I have not lived in Paris for many years now. My family is over there. Meanwhile, this is a rented accommodation, which I have occupied for more than 10 years now”.

Ask yourself what an internationally acclaimed filmmaker was doing in rented quarters and you are beginning to fumble with the firmly shut lid of a national scandal. How many retired professors can boast of having their own houses? As to the cause of the fire, Balogun was even more ironically revealing of the state of the nation and the collapse of its old middle class: “I can’t say I saw the start of the fire. There was no light before I slept and I put on my generator. Suddenly, I noticed that my generator went off by itself at about 1.30 am, but I didn’t come out for security reasons”.

This is the image of a global citizen stranded by patriotic choice, a gifted and sensitive soul marooned; a cosmopolitan intellectual trapped in the punishing hell of a retarded post-colonial state. In the darkest moment of tormenting private loss, of strenuous intellectual and creative labour summarily eviscerated, Balogun must have wondered what made him stick to his beloved fatherland in spite of the ominous signals of distress.

But it was not always like this. In the not too distant past, there was another country. The mind rolls back to Ife at the turn of the seventies. Anybody associated with the old University of Ife at the turn of the seventies, particularly the ancient Faculty of Arts, must remember a tall stripling young man fabulously attired in native fabric of francophone pedigree and his enchantingly exotic wife.

Impeccably mannered and impressively credentialed, Ola Balogun had returned home after degrees from Dakar and Paris to contribute his own quota to the development of the fatherland. The great university at Ife was the place to be at that particular time. There was the aroma of human distinction and future greatness in the air. Mesmerising exotica abounded. Ola Balogun together with the likes of Ulli Beer, Professor Feuser, the Heywoods, the Euba couple was part of the charmed circle of learning and culture. There was also the recently departed Jeffrey S. Gruber who had studied Linguistics at MIT and was rumoured to be a protégé of the old MIT hell-raiser, Noam Chomsky. It was a magic mountain.

Forty five years down the line, both mountain and magic had disappeared as if toppled by an erupting volcano. But no matter what the ruins of a great architecture must remain. A few months back, as Snooper was traipsing and trampling around the Ikeja supermarket hub like a footloose flaneur, the eyes suddenly fell on a gentleman of unmistakable distinction quietly sipping his afternoon tea while browsing through some newspapers in cheery solitude.

It could have been a Parisean café in the glorious era of Jean-Paul Sartre and his companion, collaborator and confidante, Simone de Beauvoir. But this was a small cramped coffee shop on the upper stairs of Goddy’s Supermarket in Ikeja. Consumed by his own company, it seemed that the gentleman sipping his tea was bent on avoiding eye contact with everybody. But there was something about him and the aura of solitary politeness which increased one’s fascination. Then he made a slip by briefly looking up, or it may be that the intense gaze penetrated his chilly armour. It was Ola Balogun.

“Dr Ola Balogun, I must presume”, Snooper opened with a famous gambit of colonial interlopers. He smiled back, the hesitant and polite smile of the wellborn and well bred before inviting yours sincerely to a vacant seat near him. We had barely finished exchanging pleasantries about the good old days when an animated discussion about the state of the nation ensued.

Like all concerned patriots, the famed filmmaker was disturbed and distressed about the state of the nation and how things could have been allowed to degenerate to this level where everything seemed to have gone to the dogs. He was quietly vehement but soft spoken. He did not seek to impress or to castigate unwholesomely. There was something about him which reminded one of the Etonian charms and diffidence of the old public school boy. From his travels, he has acquired the cosmopolitan savvy of the global denizen. But he also communicated a calm fortitude and stoic endurance.

What particularly irked and riled Balogun was the virtual collapse of the middle class culture which supported and valorised the creative industry and artistic production in the country. The half a million readers that bought Gbolabo Ogunsanwo’s Sunday Times in the mid-seventies have all vanished into thin air. Even the down market Onitsha market literature has disappeared. In contemporary Onitsha market, you can see sweaty musclemen physically lugging expired freezers and other monstrous looking contraptions. It is not a scene for effete literati.

But what was clear that afternoon was that despite the parlous state of the nation, the likes of Ola Balogun refused to be fazed or daunted. He kept coming up with schemes to revive the reading culture and the revival of an active intellectual class which will spearhead and pioneer the rebirth of the nation. He had many names ready and already penciled down. His quiet enthusiasm was to say the least quite infectious.

If he is not persuaded to leave the country as a result of traumatic loss, Balogun may yet live to witness that glorious dawn of a renascent Nigeria and its resurgent middle class. But it is going to be a lot of hard work and imaginative thinking. As they say in American boxing parlance, the Nigerian middle class has taken a bad beat.

The middle class is the most vital and vibrant stratum of any society. It is a historical truism and not a curse that any society that tries to wipe out its middle class will know neither peace nor stability. This is because it has removed the buffer that prevents the filthy rich from coming to direct collision with the filthy poor. Those who will redeem Nigeria have their work cut out for them. For now, there is going to be a helluva hollerin and hammerin in the land. May the notable filmmaker find the strength and fortitude to bear his huge loss.

February 1, 2015
Doyin Abiola @ 70

Her lithe, slim and petite build belie her true age. But believe it or not, Dr Doyinsola Abiola , the first female Managing Director of a newspaper conglomerate in Nigeria, turns seventy this week. Snooper celebrates a great friend of column and columnist. In this age of frauds and other psychotic poseurs, it is a thing of joy to celebrate our true heroes and authentic icons.

This talented and exceptionally endowed woman is one of the finest products of the old Nigerian middle class. Educated in the best schools in Nigeria and abroad, this pioneering newspaper dowager has done her country proud in many respects. As a Visiting Scholar and travelling theorist, Snooper remembers being taken to the office of Professor Molefi Kete Asante at the State University of New York at Buffalo in the summer of 1982. Conspicuously displayed on the shelf of the notable African American scholar was the Ph.D thesis of his former ward, Doyin Aboaba. Needless to add that yours sincerely spent the afternoon devouring the thesis.

As a youth, one of Doyin’s fondest memories as revealed to Snooper was watching her father, a top class civil servant of the old school, playing lawn tennis with the movers and shakers of colonial and post-independence Nigeria. This was when the civil servant was a really civil and civilised servant. Mother was a doting and devoted full time housewife. From her parents, Doyin learnt the middle class habits of restraint, soberness and Calvinist prudence in everything.

But there is also a warrior’s streak lurking somewhere. On her father side, the former Managing Director of the Concord stable is descended from a proud lineage of redoubtable Egba warriors, one of her ancestors actually reaching the pinnacle of his career as the Balogun of the old Egba army. From them, Doyin must have taken her fierce determination, rugged streak of independence, indomitable courage in the face of overwhelming odds and ability to fight her own corners and battles with weapons of choice. God will help anybody who mistakes her quiet mien for docility or her natural placidity for timidity.

In some other societies more appreciative of exceptionally endowed women with leadership traits, she would have been a natural leader. But we live in a patriarchal male-ordered society where men confuse gender with inherent greatness and masculinity with sagacity and perspicuity. A bundle of talents herself, Doyin took her time to nurture and cultivate talents from their nursery beds to full maturation. There is a whole generation of contemporary Nigerian journalists who would forever be grateful to her for discovering them and allowing them to come into their own.

Ever since her husband’s political martyrdom, Doyinsola Abiola has led a life of pious rectitude and exemplary public decorum. She has proudly and stoutly avoided anything that would bring her illustrious husband’s name into obloquy and public ridicule. The redoubtable MKO must be nodding gratefully in his grave. In keeping with her determination to stay out of the limelight and avoid all public display of vanity, Doyin Abiola quietly slipped out of the country a few weeks back together with her children and grandchildren. Here is wishing the great dame many happy returns wherever she may be.

February 1, 2015
The lineage of political failure

After sixteen years of unbroken and uninterrupted respite during which it operated the longest stretch of civil rule in the country, the Nigerian political class has reverted to its default crisis mode; its nation-threatening and polity-disabling habitus. The fire this time is so huge in its prospects, so damning in its incendiary possibilities that care must be taken lest it consumes the entire nation.

Like the French “pompier pyromane”, the Nigerian political class often take a perverted delight in setting fire to the house and then seeing to how best to put it out. They arrange for fire and then organize a ceasefire. While donning the toga of statesmen, they propose anticipatory truces even when they are furtively complicit with the shameless status quo. But then there are certain conflagrations which surpass the expectations and modest talents of their originators. Such fires tend to consume innocent victims as well as perverted pyromaniacs.

To be sure, crises and conflicts are the motors that power societies as humankind evolve away from the state of nature. Even if it is not a product of some profound crisis which fractured the old arrangement, a nation must encounter crises as it faces fresh and novel political possibilities. To overcome the crippling conflicts, it is then left to human ingenuity to adapt to novel situations and unforeseen circumstances.

But there are crises and there are crises. In many modern societies, periodic conflicts often erupt as a result of the inevitable struggle for power among factions of a political class whose worldview and notions of the nation are not essentially dissimilar. In such circumstances, an organic community requires only minor adjustments, minor compromises and elementary statecraft before such crises are resolved in the greater national interest.

However in inorganic nations where disparate pre-colonial nationalities still habour and nurture fundamentally incompatible notions of the nation and indeed of the societies, crises of political succession often tend to degenerate into nation-threatening conflicts with the capacity to throw the entire nation back into a state of nature. In a situation such as obtains in contemporary Nigeria, a fundamental organogram of the nation which stringently stipulates national destiny and charter is imperative and inevitable. Something cannot be built on nothing.

The inability of Nigeria to evolve into an organic nation is at the root of the violent struggles for political succession that we have witnessed since independence and even before it. Such has been the fate of the Nigerian state in its pre-military, military and neo-military incarnations. In the current conjuncture, the inability of the traditional hegemonic blocs to impose a solution -however transient–on the crisis such as has been the case in the first, second and military Third republic suggests the lurking presence of a third hegemonic force which is still inchoate and incoherent.

However that may be, what remains to be seen is whether this third force, a chaotic combination of the dominant, residual and emergent tendencies, will come into rampart hegemony through elections, a future national conference, elite pacts or even revolutionary upheavals which may unfortunately eventuate in the chaotic dismemberment of the country. It is morning yet on creation day.

What is not in doubt is the fact that as the presidential election shapes up and enters the last four weeks, Nigeria itself has entered uncharted waters. Never in the recent history of the nation have we witnessed such a violent political distemper, such a foul, no-hold barred campaign, such volcanic presidential eruptions on the hustings and such apocalyptic muckraking. Even by the dismal standards of Nigerian electoral process, this is quite a new low.

To search for a passable comparison, we must reach back to the unedifying last days of the First and Second Republics. In the certificate controversy, the military have intervened in a way and manner that suggests a deep fracture in that surviving national institution. In raiding the offices of the opposition, the security services have also weighed in in such an unprofessional manner that suggests the thorough tarnishing of reputation reminiscent of the old NSO. The judiciary is probably waiting in the wing to deliver the coup de grace.

These unusual palpitations suggest that Nigeria is on the cusp of momentous change. Such changes are usually presaged by titanic eruptions of passions and by radical and revolutionary convulsions that obliterate old fault lines of ethnicity, religion and region even as they substitute new ones. Old habits may die hard, but there is a fat lady already singing in the distance.

We ought to remind ourselves that this national passion play is being enacted against a background of outlandish and unprecedented corruption, vile looting of the national treasury, political anomie, religious disorientation in which the nation has come under the spiritual hegemony of spiritually damaged people, and a virtual balkanization of the nation by an insurgency which eternally taunts and humiliates our once proud military machine.

This is where comparison might be dangerous. It was certainly not this bad during the First Republic. Nzeogwu’s war cry was against ten-percenters. Now, we have ninety-percenters. But that was also a very different country. There has been a huge demographic shift in favour of young people. The old population of Nigeria has been purged and culled both by natural adversity and by the man-made calamity of evil governance. Change is being driven by explosion in human consciousness and technological innovations which have revolutionized communication and the radical interface of the global community.

How did we then get into this sorry pass in which the aggregate consciousness of the political class seems to lag behind the aggregate consciousness of the national multitude in its seething resentment and sullen animosity waiting for a spark to explode in our collective face? In order to get out of the Byzantine maze of horror and the continuing wastage of our people on an industrial scale, we must go back to where the rains started beating us. To trace this lineage of political failure is to go back to the origins of the Fourth Republic and even farther beyond.

January 25, 2015
The Fourth Republic in Crisis

The Fourth Republic, or what we have somewhere else proposed as the Obasanjo Settlement, was tailor-made for a military strongman in civilian garb. It ought to be remembered that the military was never really conquered or subjugated by the NADECO rebellion. But it was clear that that the military had also exhausted their political and historical possibilities. Staying on would have been too costly and prohibitive and might have resulted in the eventual disintegration of the country.

In order to withdraw from the scene with some dignity and with a semblance of honour and integrity, the military needed one of their own who would not allow the profession to be disgraced and hounded out of power, just like that. Better still if such a person had the political and moral authority of personal suffering and was a pan-Nigerian nationalist who was not sold on the political whimsies of his ethnic constituency.

Obasanjo, the old Owu-born General who had been freshly sprung from Abacha’s humiliating dungeon, fitted the bill perfectly. He was one of their own who was not one of their own. As for the military ploy of looking for a compliant Yoruba who could pass, it exploded in their face as the Yoruba people saw through the gambit and roundly rejected their own.

But to the extent that they also gave peace a chance and did not immediately commence another round of customary aluta or resort to their legendary war of legal nerves and attrition, the military gambit could be said to have succeeded in a circuitous manner. Whatever its worth, this was some elite pacting and consensus at work.

However that may be, there was still a major problem. What made an Obasanjo, with his autocratic temperament and authoritarian outlook, a brilliant and sure bet for the project of demilitarization also made him particularly unsuitable for deepening the democratization process, more so in a nation emerging from the trauma of military despotism. Whether he likes to acknowledge it or not, Obasanjo’s self-succession and succession plots were a classic study in vengeance as statecraft. It has landed Nigeria in hot water.

The Fourth Republic has become a nightmare of lost opportunities. Obasanjo’s policy of vengeful exclusion and the narrow social base of leadership recruitment in the country have led to the denial of public space to vibrant and visionary people who could have made sterling contribution to the rapid development and transformation of Nigeria. The result is the dramatic decline in the quality of leadership and poor governance that we are witnessing at the federal level and in most states of the federation.

In order to sustain the illusion of order, ruling classes need an order of illusions. The disillusioned Nigerian populace appears to have seen through the grand chicanery, the illusionist fantasia, the buffooning pantomime, the mystifying fog of incompetence and brutish insensitivity. As a result of this, the government has come under severe pressure from the margins, from below and from the aggrieved factions of the factionalized and fractured elite. Government has lost its magic.

Elites mediate between the state and direct mob control. In the traditional bastions of liberal democracy, elections are elite-driven mechanisms for effecting changes in leadership if and at when due. The elites retain the initiative to supervise the election and to superintend the outcome, based on elite consensus and cohesion. But where the angry multitude take direct charge of their destiny based on their perception of the moral and political collapse of the ruling class, the elite lose the power and capacity to superintend the outcome of elections.

Hence, the foul and nasty atmosphere of rancor and disaffection currently subsisting in the country as elections approach. Hence, the imminent unraveling of the Fourth Republic. Hence, the looming apocalyptic meltdown of a nation that has consistently flirted with suicide ever since its emergence as a test tube baby of the colonial laboratory. The veil has been torn off and the aura of authority, power and prestige badly eroded. The Nigerian masses have sniffed blood.

The calls for a shift or postponement of the elections such as credited to Sambo Dasuki in faraway Chatham House in London will not do. It is nothing but an imaginary resolution of a concrete political conundrum. Even if the elections are postponed for a year, the current foul atmosphere will still prevail as long as there is no demobilization of an already embedded and actively engaged mob. To do this, you need a degree of elite consensus and cohesion—- a circuitous no-brainer in the current circumstances.

When you are faced with an impossible political conundrum, you reach for a paradox as a way out. As conceived by its military progenitors, the Fourth Republic has reached the end of its tethers. Only a massive transfusion of fresh blood and an injection of a new vision of the nation such as can come from counter-hegemonic forces and bearers of an antagonistic logic fundamentally at variance with the current status quo can rescue the tottering republic.

Whether the ascendant faction of the Nigerian ruling class will allow constitutional change through peaceful election remains to be seen. The stiff and ever stiffening local body language and the stalling and stonewalling from Chatham House do not indicate a willingness to submit to the supreme will of the electorate.

Yet when all is said, it is clear that a drastic change in governance paradigm in this much abused country cannot be postponed for much longer. It will be a typically Nigerian irony if the man who will clear the cobwebs and lay the foundation of genuine democracy, who will retrieve our lost girls and territory while institutionalizing accountable governance through devolution of power from the centre turns out to be another retired military strongman waiting in the wings for electoral clearance.

No sane man has been known to argue with an earthquake. With the benefit of hindsight and in the absence of a strong, united, unified and countervailing nationalist political class which is the evil legacy colonial rule, the Fourth Republic is a military transition in progress from full military rule through some neo-military hybrid to a possible culmination in true civil rule, after the epoch of hybridization. This is the bane of all authoritarian societies in a state of traumatic transition to some form of modernity.

The nearest examples of this kind of transition that come to mind are the far eastern countries, particularly South Korea which for a period was also under the spell and scourge of retired generals. But then, South Korea is a racially, culturally and religiously homogeneous country. Its ancient ruling caste stoutly withstood the ravages of Japanese colonization.

Pity then the poor young man from Otuoke who was plucked as a callow apprentice by a deluded past master of political intrigues and thrown into a seething cauldron of ethnic, religious and regional animosities without a compass or a road map. So far, Jonathan has shown neither the granite strength of character, the psychological stamina and the gaming cosmopolitanism to rein in the fierce centrifugal forces nor the stirring helmsmanship to navigate a turbulent ocean brimming with sharks and piranhas.

The events in his own imploding party show how far President Goodluck Jonathan has lost the plot. What remains is for him to negotiate a safe passage out of power with some honour but certainly not through the postponement of election or some other constitutional and extra-constitutional mischief which may well backfire. The omens are dire indeed.

January 25, 2015
The concept of permanent liberation

Just as eternal vigilance is the price to pay for continuous liberty, the concept of permanent liberation advances the thesis that permanent liberation battles is the price to pay for living in a post-colonial country. One struggle for liberation and freedom commences as soon another terminates. It is a state of permanent warfare as battles succeed battles in a roiling cauldron of continuous strife and contention. No man is tailor-made for permanent warfare. Even the greatest of warriors often falter or lose their nerves. In a state of permanent warfare, you need permanent moral clarity and consistent focus in order not to join the wrong battle formation.

It has been said that people fight for a cause only to find that what they have fought for is not what has supplanted the old order. It is then often left to others to fight on. But when the same struggle for liberation and freedom resumes in a new guise with the old demon wearing a new face, some old warriors, out of sheer historical exhaustion and loss of the acuity of vision, are wrong-footed into joining the wrong battle formation against the immanent will of their own people. This is just as some regnant forces of the discredited old order suddenly found themselves as part of the ascendant winning coalition.

The people treat the former oppressors turned new liberators with wary regard. Thanks but no thanks. The rogue liberators would soon be back to their old ways when the cannons boom once again, and very soon too. As for the old liberators turned new oppressors, they are treated with instant excommunication and prompt expulsion from the Order of Political Saints. It is a cruel, harsh and unforgiving world. There are no come back kids here. The political galleria is full of walking corpses and numerous casualties; former heroes who have been expelled from the Procession of Holy Patriots.

This is probably an old society’s way of transposing its old values to a new society. But it is just as well. It may well be because nothing lasts in the tropics. Things grow so fast and die so fast. And when they die, they decompose so fast, that you begin to wonder if they ever lived. That is the nature of the tropics. Nothing is permanent, not human institutions, or artifices for reining in the wilder impulses of humankind. In the sultry heat, even the nation-state itself is permanently on the boil.

Revolutions revolve. One liberation struggle is quickly succeeded by another. Just when you think you have got rid of a band of oppressors, new oppressors emerge in the sizzling cauldron. And in the combustible contradictions, old oppressors transform into iconic arrowheads of the new struggle.

By the same token, some icons of the old struggle caught in the maddening tempo of events, the shifting and swirling political gyrations, suddenly become villains of the new struggle. It takes more than moral clarity, political sophistication and analytical prowess to be on the right side of history in the permanent shuffling and shuttling. It takes divine luck.

Yet it does not take a diviner to conclude that the forthcoming elections are a watershed for post-independence Nigeria. What was seen a few months ago as a routine contest between a superbly well-entrenched even if under-achieving and under-performing government and a disorganized and desultory opposition has now shaped into an epic power struggle the like of which has never been seen on these shores. There is a mysterious will to this election, a metaphysical potency to its gathering hurly-burly which cannot be lightly ignored. Needless to add that it will determine the fate and destiny of Nigeria.

Despite the numerous battles, the wars of liberation in modern Nigeria can be grouped under three broad rubrics, namely: The war of national liberation against colonial oppression; second, the war against internal colonization and military occupation of Nigeria; lastly the war against the combined forces of ascendant ethnic and neo-military power formations bent on keeping Nigeria in political slavery and economic servitude which is currently joined.

With retrospective clarity, it can now be seen that the battle of the Victorian Lagos Press against the various colonial administrations, particularly the journalistic slugfest between these illustrious Nigerian patriots and the Lugard family, the Aba Women Uprising, the various ethnic revolts, political trials and numerous workers’ strikes were all part of an uncoordinated war of national liberation.

Similarly, the ethnic rebellion against internal colonization in the old Western region which culminated in the First Coup, the Tivi uprising in the Middle Belt, the Civil War, the Zango Kataf riots, the Ogoni Rebellion, the Orkar military mutiny and the protracted and bitter struggle for the de-annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election were all part of a costly war against internal colonization and military despotism in Nigeria. Of all of them, it was only the June 12 contention which had a pan-Nigerian template that spawned an international wing.

It is also worthy of note that in the history of Nigeria, this is the first election that is going to be entirely issue-driven, even where dominant ethnic and religious preferences cannot be discounted or ignored. While virtually all the other elections have been more or else ethnic referendum fought under some ideological or political occlusions, the veil seems to have come off this time. This is ironically because it is also the first time in Nigeria that elections are being entirely driven by the will of the people. The role of the political elite in the deployment of ethnicity and religion as instruments of political negotiations can no longer swept under the carpet.

The coming elections will be fought on three main planks, namely (1) the validation of the sovereign electoral will of the Nigerian people. It is on this that all the other planks rest (2) The issue of corruption and its multiplier effect on the national climate (3) The stunting of certain vital national institutions, namely the military as seen in the Boko Haram fiasco, the judiciary as manifested in sheer corruption and unwarranted government interference and the failure of the political class to modernize Nigeria.

The election is not about ideological proclivity or political refinement, pressing as those may be to the political sophisticates. The election is mainly about the first principle of nationhood which is the inalienable sovereignty of the electorate and whether the people have the right to choose or change their government if and as when they deem appropriate.

It has been possible to mess up Nigeria this far because the rulers believe that the electorate have no say in elections. The fundamental and overwhelming revolutionary imperative of our time is to return power and sovereign will to the Nigerian people. All other things can then follow. Being mass-driven, this is an election of limited political vision but unlimited strategic clarity.

It is that unlimited strategic clarity which informs the alliance between the dominant political tendency in the South West and the core north which has produced the APC in the face of present odds and past prejudices. Political impurities often have their strategic value. In the June 12 presidential election and the struggle to terminate military despotism in Nigeria, Abiola, a friend and creation of the military, brought rightwing resources to bear on an essentially rightwing venture.

In the current conjuncture, the APC with its slew of recuperating feudalists, former authoritarian strongmen and republican royalists has brought immense rightwing resources of fabulous wealth, visibility and connection to bear on what is particularly a leftwing project: the authentication of the Nigerian electorate. What bullet could not achieve, the ballot may yet achieve. Help always comes for Nigeria from the most unlikely of sources.

As we have said, the concept of permanent liberation requires permanent struggle. To be sure, the emerging two-party structure in Nigeria is adversely weighed down by its freight of political misfits, frauds and nonentities. In all probability, and if the law of permanent liberation subsists, the battle for the ideological refinement and political redefining of the parties will commence as soon as the current battle for popular supremacy terminates. In that forthcoming shakedown, the current victors will get their own comeuppance if they fail to read the tea leaves or could not find the moral clarity and altruistic strength of character to handle unaccustomed change.

Such inability to deal with sudden, unexpected changes coming from unexpected quarters has been the great tragedy of the surviving barons of the old Yoruba political establishment who are bent on a mission of final self-immolation. Even for the stoutest and most valiant of men, it is not easy to be in a permanent theatre of war and roiling contention and still maintain one’s alertness and strategic foresight. But they should learn from history.

A quick glance at the turbulent pageantry of Yoruba history and modern mythology might suffice. Nobody ever remembers the earlier sterling contributions of Aare Afonja to Oyo Empire, or the fact that the self-willed generalissimo and prince thought he was actually attempting to lay the foundation of a formidable new empire out of the wreckage of the old in contempt and defiance of a succession of effete and clueless Alaafins.

There were many Lagosian grandees of Yoruba extraction who got swept out of historical contention simply because they could not understand or align themselves with the strange new doctrine of Yoruba self-determination as advocated by a man they despised as an upstart from the Ijebu interior, just as there were many authentic heroes of the Action Group struggle of the fifties that fell by the wayside simply because they could not read the Awo-SLA feud of the early sixties correctly.

In 1993, a few avatars of the Action Group/ UPN struggle against internal colonialism in the First and Second Republics who allowed legitimate grudges and grievances against Abiola on account of his past perfidies to condition their attitude to the annulment suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of history from which they have never recovered. In 2015, those who are allowing ancient grudges and ancestral animosities to becloud their political judgement may also find themselves trapped in the abyss of historical infamy from which there may be no escape or recovery.

The graveyard is filled with the bones of indispensable men indeed. The Yoruba pitch for an alliance to win power at the centre is not incompatible with defending core Yoruba interests while advancing national interests. Attack is often the best form of defence, more so in a colonial cage of chaotic contraries. The old strategy of waiting for the enemy to come for you in your own territory was the product of a siege mentality, a Laager mindset or what the Americans call the habit of circling the wagons.

Only those who have failed or refused to come to terms with the emergent realities of the post-colonial polity can still be sold on this ancient strategy. In the long run the Yoruba nation and Nigeria at large may yet have to thank those political wizards responsible for this remarkable rupture of customary political praxis and its radical epiphany of fresh possibilities

January 18, 2015
The funeral of an elephant

The sight of the PDP unraveling , coming apart at the seams with spectacular aplomb, must fill one with pity and terror. How did the largest party in Africa come to this sorry pass? Yet it is a well-known historical fact that hubris affects not only human beings but human institutions and political contraptions as well. This, surely, cannot be the same party destined to rule for the next sixty years, according to one of its summarily defenestrated chieftains. Conceived as a broad-based pan-Nigerian caucus to free the nation from military bondage, the PDP has become a fascist terror machine from which the entire nation is seeking liberation.

Those who refuse to learn their history are condemned to repeat the lesson. We have been through this route before. In the Second Republic, the late Umaru Dikko, confusing the monstrous amalgam of placemen and party hacks that his party was to Hitler’s NAZI, boasted that the NPN would rule for a whole millennium, in short an African Third Reich. But shortly thereafter, a gunslide replaced the NPN’s dubious landslide, to put things in General Theophilus Danjuma’s memorable phraseology.

To be sure, these two gentlemen were no idle prattlers. They had the fact to back up their controversial claims -or so it seemed. When Vincent Ogbuluafor was making his canonical declaration from the throne, the PDP stood supreme with the opposition in total disarray and reeling from the hammer blow of the rampart and rampaging party. At the time Umaru Dikko was boasting about the bearish strength and virtual invincibility of his party, Chief Awolowo’s UPN had just been handed one of the worst and most humbling electoral whipping of the century.

January 18, 2015
The falcon turns on the falconer

Turning and turning in the ever widening gyre, the falcon finally rounds on the old falconer. It is a scary scenario. When W.B Yeats, the great Irish poet and statesman, penned his famous poem of anarchy and the dissolution of the old order from which our own Chinua Achebe took the title of his most famous novel, he could not have had Nigeria in mind.

As a matter of fact, the proud Irish genius was ruing the dire consequences of English colonialist disruption in his own homeland. The damning ironical similarities could not have escaped a master of sublime irony like the late Chinua Achebe. As it was in colonial Ireland, so it is turning out to be in post-colonial Nigeria.

The rift between former President Olusegun Obasanjo and his former protégé and current president, Goodluck Jonathan, is slowly and inexorably assuming the proportions of a great Shakespearean tragedy. This past week, Jonathan, in a breach of presidential protocols and etiquette, dismissed his tormentor and benefactor in very unsavoury terms. Judging by Jonathan’s moody and irascible mien at the opening of his presidential campaign in Lagos, this ferocious reprisal appeared to be a mere opening salvo.

In fairness to President Goodluck Jonathan, there ought to be a threshold for presidential patience and punishment absorption. For weeks General Obasanjo, a grandmaster of the war of punitive attrition and psychological destabilization, has had the full measure of his man, peppering him with vicious jabs while baiting him to exhaustion like a bear at bay.

But we must learn to separate the message from the messenger. The way out of the unseemly rumpus between political father and his estranged son on whom he has showered undue and promiscuous preferment is to locate it within the crisis of political leadership in a post-colonial polity teeming with ethnic and religious contraries.

The colonial authorities, in a bid to retain the political initiatives, deliberately foisted a weak and divided political class on their conquered territories. Whereas different regional factions of the nascent Nigerian nation did not formally come together until the end of the forties, the army in whatever rudimentary form has been in existence even before the amalgamation. With its residual discipline and organizational cohesion, the military is thus the most organic national institution created by the colonialists capable of throwing up messianic nationalists at short notice.

The bigger the colonial head, the bigger the post-colonial headache. In a post-colonial nation brimming with pre-colonial nationalities of unyielding vibrancy and resistant modes of religious, economic and political productions, the post-independence army is usually the most privileged institution with the capacity to produce unifying figures of nationalist fervour whatever their personal deficiencies and lack of adequate mental preparations. In other words, it is a fake and cruel cue that comes with the peculiar flavour of perfidious Albions.

Yet whatever our umbrage at the ugly and nasty turn of events, we must give this to our ancient generals. Obasanjo is possessed by the abiding and resilient hubris that comes with this historically determined military messianism. It is this hubris that has propelled the crusty warlord, ahead of most of his colleagues and contemporaries, to the dizzying heights of a post-colonial society rigged against rationality and order. But it has also seen him at least on one occasion plummeting to the nadir of his fortunes.

It may be a question of personal vanity or extreme narcissism. But when it works, it works very well for the old Owu warrior. But the problem is why the general always ends up at daggers drawn with his own political creations. From Alhaji Aliyu Shehu Shagari whom he singlehandedly and craftily imposed on the nation and who was later to bitterly resent Obasanjo lecturing him on the politics that he claimed to have learnt while the general was still a mere school boy , through Umaru Yar’Adua whom he recklessly and single-mindedly foisted on the nation in a grotesquely rigged election, and now to Goodluck Jonathan, a test tube baby of his political laboratory, Obasanjo has always ended up in mortal conflict with his own.

In all probability, Obasanjo, blinded by hatred and personal aversion for his fellow Yoruba man, never studied the confidential files on Alhaji Shehu Shagari to determine his suitability for the mental rigour and discipline of presidential office. The same can be said of the bizarre political engineering which led him to plump for the medically challenged younger brother of his beloved and loyal former second in command against more compelling and competitive rival claims. In the case of Goodluck Jonathan, it would seem that a meek and compliant mien was all that mattered to the patronizing and paternalistic general rather than preparation, temperamental suitability and adequate mental magnitude for the daunting task.

But whether we like Obasanjo or not and whether we are sold on what he has to say or not, what cannot be denied or taken away from him is the fact that his harsh and unflattering criticisms of his own creations and former military subordinates often resonate with, and are in complete alignment with, the dominant mood of the nation at their particular moment. This was the case with his merciless pillorying of General Ibrahim Babangida and General Sani Abacha as well as his devastating endgame savaging of Alhaji Shagari, Umaru Yar’Adua and now Goodluck Jonathan.

It has been said that a man can make for himself a throne of bayonets, but whether he will be able to sit in it is another matter. Yet by some paradoxical logic, Obasanjo stands head and shoulder above his fellow colleagues and members of the Nigerian caste of retired rulers in his inability to sleep with evil even when it is a product of his own devilish imagination. While others, probably in deference to the ancient code of feudal nobility, maintain the sealed lips of complicity with the ascendant status quo, not so the rampaging and rambunctious general.

This is why Obasanjo’s interventions, however self-serving and apparently disruptive of order and peace, also come with the hallo of profound patriotism and game-changing possibilities. Given what is known as the cunning of history, what is currently working out may well be a case of the iron law of nemesis and the logic of creative destruction.

This is where Obasanjo, like everyone else in this hour of grave national crisis, also needs help. A pandemic crisis is an equal opportunity employer which does not discriminate against anybody. After surveying the ruined tapestry of his gargantuan appetite for mischief and diabolic scheming, General Simon Bolivar, the great Latin American icon and liberator, was known to have rued to himself: “How am I ever going to get out of this labyrinth?”

While Obasanjo’s misgivings often resonate with the ascendant mood of the nation, his preferred solutions are almost always at variance with the mood of the country. During the June 12 crisis, Obasanjo was known to be openly rooting for an interim government while insinuating that MKO Abiola was not the messiah Nigeria was waiting for. This was after fourteen million Nigerians have voted with a whopping nine million rooting for the martyred business mogul.

Given his essentially authoritarian cast of mind and anti-democratic temperament, Obasanjo is often led to despotic “solutions” which often compound the national crisis rather than ameliorate it. Already, there are whispers and in fact open canvassing for an interim national government. The more things change, the more they tend to remain the same. But it is impossible to step into the same river twice. The Nigeria of 2015 is not the Nigeria of 1993. Too much murky water has passed under the bridge and for one there is a dramatic upsurge of painful awareness in the post-military polity.

Let us get this clear. After the bungled and deliberately mismanaged Constitutional Conference, the Nigerian ruling class lost the last opportunity of imposing a solution from above on the crisis both in the interim and in the long run. Constitutional Conferences are elite driven mechanisms for imposing nationalist solutions on a national crisis which require elite discipline and cohesion. This was precisely what was lacking in the last shambolic outing at Abuja.

To be sure, and as this column has stated ad nauseam, elections, particularly in a country hobbled by the trauma of abiding ethnic, religious, regional and economic polarities, do not resolve the national question. In fact, they tend to worsen and exacerbate it. As we have seen in the case of Kenya, Cote D’Ivoire and also Nigeria, elections tend to tip fragile and unstable nations over the abyss into conflagration and civil wars.

But we cannot terminate a full pregnancy without the gravest danger to both mother and baby, just as you cannot abort a flight after the plane has reached a certain critical momentum without crew and passengers being imperilled. Having boxed ourselves into a corner, we must now go on with the election willy-nilly. It is no longer an elite-driven initiative. The Nigerian multitude having been critically engaged in the electoral process, they can no longer be easily disengaged without dire consequences. There is no way the elections can now be postponed without playing into the hands of extra-constitutional forces already on the prowl.

Without any doubt, the nation is trapped between the devil and the deep blue seas. There is no easy way out. The gravest danger of the next few weeks is the fact that with the hounds of national distemper and disaffection relentlessly baiting and chafing at him, an exhausted and disoriented President Jonathan might be miscued into reaching for his own extra-constitutional “final solution” which may then topple the nation into the yawning abyss of anarchy and millennial mayhem. This nation has once again arrived at a critical conjuncture. May the legendary luck of Nigeria save us once again.

January 11, 2015
Samuel Goldwyn re-membered
And whilst we are still on the subject of increasing political desperation and unease in the land, it is meet to report that all has been very well in the field of semantic infelicities and linguistic howlers. It is an embarrassment of malapropist riches and verbal indelicacies. Were Kingsley Ozumba Mbadiwe, the great exponent of felicitous infelicities, to be alive—to appropriate Samuel Goldwyn— he would be turning in his grave.

Nigeria seems to be blessed with an abundance and endless supply of politicians with a colourful turn of phrase and capacity for mangling syntax and muddling up meaning. President Jonathan seems to be well ahead of the pack in this department. What with his memorable dismissal this past week of his former benefactor turned major political adversary as a motor pack tout pretending to be a statesman. Phew!!!!

We will leave the collection of the golden gems of Jonathanisms to future academic researchers, as advised by a famed columnist. But it is not only Nigerian politicians who have a capacity for creative misprision bordering on linguistic genius. Snooper remembers his mechanic at the great university for culture and learning telling him that he did not come to work because he came down with a bad case of “He-fever”. When he was pressed, he replied in the vernacular that he had “ako iba”. In order to capture the vicious ferocity of this type of fever, the Yoruba decided to masculinize its deranging capacity. Our man then took it upon himself to find an adequate English expression.

But who was Samuel Goldwyn? Goldwyn was an Eastern European immigrant who arrived in America shoeless, penniless and unable to speak a word of English to boot. But by dint of hard work and sheer force of personality, he went on to become fabulously rich and about the most famous and influential of American film moguls in the last century. Many believed that his linguistic contretemps and verbal howitzers hid great wit and a lacerating intelligence. Goldwyn himself put things classically when he noted that “If I appear confused, it is because I am thinking”.

Snooper will leave the readers this morning with a few of this great man’s remarkable contributions to English language. Welcome to golden goldwynisms.

1. Please include me out of that one.

2. A verbal agreement is not worth the paper on which it is written.

3. I don’t think anyone should write their autobiography until after they are dead.

4. A hospital is no place to be sick.

5. It’s absolutely impossible, but it has possibilities.

6. Don’t pay any attention to the critics-don’t even ignore them.
1. Charlie Chaplin, a bosom friend and great crony of Samuel Goldwyn, has been known to confess in private that he mischievously made up some of these famous sayings only to attribute them to his friend. Well, please include snooper out of that one.
January 11, 2015
Pawns and powerbrokers

The Nigerian hegemonic blocs are on the move again. Since they wear the mask of power and bear the powerful aura of some ancient masks, hegemonic power blocs move in a mysterious and confounding manner. What you sight is not what you actually see and what they say is not what you hear. Only the masters know what the masters are thinking. It is a duel of giants.

Nevertheless, some significant movements of chips have occurred on the chessboard. There are many reasons for the oddity of the knight’s move, says a famous Russian literary theorist and grandmaster. Some of these may be mere ruses or tactical feints before a major engagement; their import may lie in what they seek to hide rather than what they try to show. However that may be, there are major declarations of intent which cannot but fascinate the astute game watcher as the year 2015 finally unfolds.

Despite the aroma of great expectations, there is something eerily subdued about this new year and its opening gambit. There is a strange calm abroad, despite the unnerving feeling that we have come to the end of an era. The French, with their fastidious elegance, call it “fin de siecle “. It is more like a watershed, when the world as we have known it has ceased to make sense; when change, imminent and momentous, has become the overriding imperative for continuous survival. The noise of collapse, of the crumbling of the old order, is very much with us.

Yet the mood of the nation is sober, very sober and in fact sombre. Whether this is a historic decoy, some mass dissembling before an apocalyptic explosion, is hard to say. There is no premature celebration, no feckless jubilation or wild triumphalism. Like a man who has the full measure of a tough adversary, the Nigerian multitude are not about to start celebrating until the actual day of reckoning itself. And with each passing day, the hour inches closer.

Having long been pawns on the political chessboard of powerbrokers, the Nigerian multitude have learnt the bitter lesson of premature celebration. In the past, they as the electorate would vote only for the selectorate to select who will rule. Sometimes they would vote only for the selectorate to dismiss the whole thing as an exercise in nullity and futility. At some other points, the selectorate might ask them to choose between being kingmakers who must nominate a king chosen for them or canon fodders. With the rumours of an interim government thick in the air, the selectorate is not about to give up its sovereignty.

This is where and how something may eventually give in the next few weeks. The sullen mood of the nation is leavened by the optimism of the inevitability of change and buoyed by faith in the momentum for a drastic reorganization of the principles and paradigm of governance sweeping across the length and breadth of the nation. Nobody has been known to argue with an earthquake.

There is no equivalent in our history for what is about to take place: the imminent dethronement of the status quo managed and supervised by political society. Yet it is either Nigeria manages this transfer of power between two parties of the establishment or the nation should forget about democracy and even its own future feasibility. It is this possibility of the peaceful transfer of power between state parties that has brought peace and stability to hitherto fragile West African states such as Ivory Coast, Benin Republic, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Senegal. All those who stood in the way of the transition perished in the process.

It is a shame, a shock as well as a tribute to the fact that the nation is structurally rigged against philosophical rationality and political modernity that Nigeria has not been able to achieve this transfer of power at the federal level since independence. The First and Second Republics perished as a result of the intractable crises arising from disputes over elections. The Third Republic perished on the altar of state annulment of free and fair presidential elections. In the Fourth Republic, presidential elections have been routinely rigged while opposition parties remain disorganized, demoralized and completely disconnected from the people.

But this time around, bar one or two enclaves, the nation is astir in a way it has never been before. Loose wires seem to have connected at last. Irrespective of creed, region or religion, there is a pan-Nigerian awareness surging through the country that we cannot continue to be ruled like a Stone Age society. All over the country, people are saying enough is enough. Having been a toddler trundling on the floor like a monster child for fifty four years, it is time Nigeria got up or go under.

Despite the later romanticization, the 1993 uprising against military rule was not a nation-wide phenomenon but originally a localized revolt pioneered and powered by a section of the country with advanced political consciousness. It was a blessed historical coincidence that it also happened to be the very locality that produced the winner of the election.

The 1999 election was very much an army arrangement for disengagement. Subsequent presidential elections are internal personnel redistribution within the ruling party that have elicited a tame and trifling response from the populace apart from the brief inferno that the north witnessed in 2011.

The 2011 coalition of forces that swept Jonathan to power was truly historic and momentous. It bore all the imprimatur of cruel political engineering as well as exemplary power pragmatism. In a bid to consolidate his hold on power as well as to pay back both his northern accomplices who had turned their back while Abacha sent him to jail and the Yoruba Afenifere tendency that he treated with a mixture of fear and contempt, Obasanjo engineered a fracturing and fragmentation of the two hegemonic blocs.

The dominant rump of the northern hegemonic bloc which then comprised of serving governors and legislators, after some bear hugs from the EFCC, quietly lined up behind Goodluck Jonathan. The emergent dominant political tendency in the west also appeared to have done the same thing. With the South East and his native South South already in tow, it can be seen in retrospect that widespread irregularities notwithstanding, the outcome of the elections could not have been different.

Four years down the line, the coalition that brought Jonathan into his own has all but disintegrated, with the falconer no longer hearkening to the falconer. Jonathan’s hitherto massive support base has fizzled out with only the South East and his native South South holding out for him. But even in these former strongholds, there is widespread question mark over his competence and fitness to rule.

The old northern hegemonic bloc appears to have recovered its poise and passion for power. The entire north had become a hotbed of discontent and anti-Jonathan exertions. Unlike four years ago. Jonathan is unable to rein in the northern power cabal who now seem to have a full measure of their man.

To do that he would have needed the skills and wherewithal of the minatory farmer from Otta. But Obasanjo has since become one of Jonathan’s most ferocious critics, cold-bloodedly stripping Jonathan and his government of legitimacy like a hound baiting a bear to death. Yet this was the same Obasanjo who famously and publicly serenaded Jonathan to contest for the presidency only four years ago.

In retrospect, perhaps Jonathan’s most signal political failure was his inability to prevent his own party from fracturing and factionalizing. It was this that allowed the dissident and disaffected members to team up with General Buhari’s old CPC and the emergent dominant political tendency from the South West: the ACN. All of a sudden, and without any warning whatsoever, the opposition began to threaten the ruling party’s supremacy in both houses.

It was a historic reapproachment, a political truce between two bitterly opposed political tendencies and a coalition of seeming contraries the like of which has not been seen in the post-colonial history of the nation. But in politics as well as the life of a nation, all that is solid often melts into thin air. In critical times, there is sometimes a play of political irony across rigid binary lines. There are indeed no permanent fiends in politics.

The coalition has opened up new vistas of possibilities in the political annals of Nigeria. The attempt by the ruling party to miscue the new alliance into choosing a presidential flag bearer other than the fiery and implacable General Mohammadu Buhari only shows the historic desperation creeping into the federal camp. Thanks to the historic realignment of political forces, the possibility of change has begun to stare Nigerians in the face in a way that would have been impossible four years earlier given the fractious and factionalized nature of opposition politics in Nigeria.

There are hegemonic power blocs and there are hegemonic power blocs. While some wilt and fade in a matter of years, others seem to last forever due to their sheer resilience and ability to adapt to changing times and conditions. While some triumph over unrelenting political adversities by keeping their focus on the pursuit of power, others stumble and fold up as the pursuit of power is gradually blunted by the pursuit of food.

Alimentary logic of instant and immediate satiation replaces the elementary logic of endurance in the pursuit of higher and nobler goals. As it ever so happens in other theatres of human endeavour, the capacity for delayed gratification and wary generosity of spirit are the key to success in building hegemonic blocs.

Even by the notoriously unreliable and faithless standards of the Nigerian traditional political class five weeks to the election is too short a time to procure a new hegemonic bloc. The one that was about to coalesce around Goodluck Jonathan as the first truly modern and modernizing Nigerian president has disintegrated in an inferno of greed, corruption, appalling lack of sensitivity and ethnic sabre-rattling. Jonathan must be ruing the day he allowed thugs, aging delinquents and ravenous sharks to gain ascendancy in his administration.

But not to worry. There is magic and mystery in the air. Five weeks to election all is eerily quiet on the Nigerian front. There is no issue-related presidential rally in sight, not to talk of a presidential debate in the offing. Meanwhile, there are rumours of an interim government flying all over the places. From specially designated outlets, there are calls for the postponement of the elections, just as there are hints of looming apocalyptic violence. In what appears to be a nail on the coffin of the electoral fortunes of the Nigerian populace, INEC has openly pronounced its inability to conduct run-off elections. It doesn’t get more eerily unsettling.

All of which must suggest another looming confrontation between the Nigerian electorate and the Nigerian selectorate; between the powerbrokers and the long-suffering pawns of power and peons of powerlessness. As the nation-wide clamour for change reaches its crescendo, it is going to be a nasty confrontation indeed.

The more things change, the more they tend to remain the same. Twenty one years after June 12, 1993, another duel in the same guise is shaping up; a looming clash between free and fair elections and the sovereignty of the selectorate . But things do not always remain the same. In 1993, while the wish of the electorate triumphed, the will of the military oligarchy prevailed.

Yet in the current conjuncture, there are three significant departures from 1993. First, the military are no longer directly in power. Second, there is no overt American pressure on Goodluck Jonathan to do the needful. Thirdly, the potent civil society groups which acted as a modulating influence on the state and as a mediating factor in preventing a direct confrontation between power and the people have largely disappeared from the Nigerian landscape in a hail of controversy about their probity.

Unfortunately, there is no moral traction that can dissuade anybody bent on sabotaging the electoral will of the people. The meek and the weak are not blessed in this particular case, and neither will they inhabit the citadel of power. The only language power understands is countervailing power and the balance of terror. It is how these forces shape up in the next few weeks that will determine the fate of Nigeria.

January 4, 2015
Don’t let them die

These are traumatic times for the nation. The country has been literally foaming in blood. We may have to reach back to the apogee of the In?a empire for the equivalent of such medieval bloodletting. The outgoing year is our own annus horribilis, no doubt about that. Before our eyes, Nigeria has become a legendary abattoir with the odour of gore and human dismemberment hanging heavily in the air. The only consolation is that if compulsory change does not come to these climes very soon, we can as well call in the receivers.

When a nation is in such historic distress, it can be assumed that its major institutions are also afflicted. An organic crisis of the state does not spare the vital organs of state. The army is the premier institutional bulwark of the state. If we say Nigeria is in traumatic distress, the trauma is writ large over the military in its operational and strategic capacity as well as its offensive and defensive capability.

Despite its return to strict professionalism and the enviable strides it has taken in the demilitarization of the polity, the Nigerian military has not been smelling of rose in recent times. The army has suffered a painful and tragic demystification. Once fabled and much respected for its peace-keeping prowess abroad, the Nigerian military has been humbled and taken to the cleaners by a hitherto rag-tag militia which has now acquired the offensive deadliness of a well-motivated fighting force.

Reader of this column would have noticed a reluctance to discuss military matters. This is because of the sensitive nature of national security and the territorial integrity of a nation, no matter who is in temporary power. But the military is subordinated to civil authorities because military matters are far too serious and important to be left to professional soldiers. As the modern world is proving, the armoury of knowledge is far superior to knowledge of armoury. The human brains carry the deadliest ordnance.

Yet as the last defender of the state and the ultimate bulwark against insecurity and anarchy, the military must be insured and insulated against petty partisan politics. A disgraced army is not only a danger unto itself but a grave danger to the nation. When the army ceases to exist as an effective fighting force, the nation itself ceases to exist as a viable proposition. This is why whatever its past misjudgment and its current misdemeanour, enlightened self-interest dictates an urgent engagement with the military in order to help them out of the current cul de sac.

There is opportunity in every crisis and there is no terrible situation without its redeeming features. It is just as well that the Boko Haram crisis remains within the ambit of an internal security operation rather than outright war against an external enemy. That notwithstanding, the fallout has been equally remarkable. At the last count, eighty officers and men of the army have been sentenced to death for mutiny. About two hundred enlisted men are in the dock awaiting trial and sentencing. It doesn’t get more grotesquely unsettling.

Let us be clear about something. There can be no question of condoning mutiny which is a grievous offence that undermines the cohesiveness and integrity of the army as an effective fighting force. In dire war situations, mutineers, deserters, cowards and other saboteurs are often rounded up and summarily shot without any recourse to legal acrobatics.

Yet the disproportionate number of culprits and the nature of insubordination in this case suggest something more fundamental than routine mutiny. Many of these men have been shouting from the rooftop that their real offence was to have the temerity to ask for better and more adequate weaponry to conduct a campaign against an enemy armed with modern and sophisticated ordnance. This effrontery has merely earned them an elongated charge sheet.

Last Friday, at a press briefing that was as bizarre as it was bristling with dark comedy, the military paraded an untagged colonel as a whistle-blowing suspect. Morale and discipline appeared to be at their lowest ebb. Even the most malignant enemy of the black race must be sad and sorry that this is happening to the army of the greatest conglomeration of black souls in the world.

All of which suggest that as usual we may be treating the symptom while ignoring the fundamental ailment. An internet cynic noted wryly that at this rate the army may as well end up putting a whole brigade on trial for mutiny. The sheer absurdity of the suggestion ought to alert us that we may actually be looking at something probably more sinister: a complete collapse of discipline and the fracturing of the army. Having fought a civil war without the army fracturing, the nation may well be suffering from the accumulated stress of partially resolved crises.

The ongoing armed critique of the nation and the state by the Boko Haram insurgency has exposed the grave flaws of both in a way that the civil war and the numerous coups and military uprisings never did. Coups and civil wars are endogamous crises of the state, internal disputes among state personnel who have gone to the same schools and learnt the same fighting strategy. The contradictions are not fundamental and are easily resolved.

Insurgency, on the other hand, particularly religious insurgency, is an exogamous crisis and an externally imposed confrontation with a different paradigm of engagement and a different order of battle. It is a duel unto death without any mediating or countervailing circumstances. The current crisis of the Nigerian military formations is a reflection of a more fundamental crisis of the Nigerian state and nation. Although the Boko Haram crisis could have been better handled, the ascendant generation of Nigerian military leadership cannot be held responsible for the Boko Haram insurgency.

Endogamous crises of the state, because they involve non-fundamental contradictions, are ironically a double-edged sword. Since they are easily resolved and without rigorous inquest and sufficient retribution they leave a trail of impunity and a culture of state promiscuity. For example, because they were still in passive power, the military got away with their misadventure in partisan politics without properly evaluating its short term and long term effect on the institution. Till date, no rigorous inquest was ever conducted into the real cause and consequences of the civil war.

It is the sins of omission and commission of their forebears that have caught up with the Nigerian military. When he was asked why the post-Saddam Iraqi army wilts so pathetically before the ferocious onslaught of the ISIS fighters , the American ambassador noted tersely that it was because they had nothing to fight for. Yet this was the fragment of the same army whose forebears fought the Iranians toe to toe in a seven year grudge match between the Shitte elite of Iran and the ascendant Sunni hegemonists of Iraq.

The reason for this contrasting attitude within what is supposed to be the same military formation is very simple. Under the tyrannical and cruelly whimsical Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi military had something to fight for. It could be a debased and authoritarian form of Iraqi nationalism but it worked. In the Iraq of post-American occupation, both nation and nationalism have disappeared leaving a volcanic landscape permanently irrigated by blood.

The failure of successive generations of Nigerian leaders to evolve a national ideology as a byproduct of forging the disparate nationalities into an organic community has now returned to haunt the military in its operative and strategic capacity. Simply put, the Nigeria army has nothing to fight for. All the great armies the world has seen, from the army of Alexander the great that swept all before it, the Tartan hordes of Genghis Khan, the human waves of Mao tse Tung, to the rugged Vietnamese insurgents of Ho Chi Minh, have always had something to fight for. For centuries, the political notion of American Exceptionalism powered its fighting forces.

Against the ferocious Boko Haram insurgents, it is the military’s residual fighting flair developed in the course of several international peace-keeping operations that has kept it going. It was the fighting spirit that produced the likes of the late, iconic Brigadier Maxwell Khobe whose heroic exploits in Sierra Leone have entered military legend and folklore. But it relied on individual talent rather than on solid tradition.

Needless to add they can only thrive and flourish within the context of conventional military operations against mainly conventional fighting forces and small time scoundrels. Against an unconventional fighting force with determination and a suicidal frame of mind, an ill-equipped and de-motivated army is bound to have its back to the wall. Only an army imbued with formidable nationalist zeal combined with superior knowledge and cutting edge technology can trump the wild and merciless fanaticism of a fighting outfit spurred by religious extremism.

The transformation of the Nigerian military into a modern and effective fighting force cannot be divorced from the transformation of the Nigerian nation itself to true political and economic modernity. We can have a debate about the principles and modalities as part of the current pitch for genuine change. Meanwhile and in the interest of concerned compatriots and posterity, the Nigerian army should immediately put on hold the impending judicial slaughter of its own. Nigeria has already witnessed too much bloodshed in the last few years. Please don’t let these men die.

December 28, 2014