The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

Looking back and looking forward

This week as the unhinged Jonathan administration finally slipped its rational mooring with the armed invasion of the National Assembly, Nigerians must now brace themselves for the worst imaginable political catastrophe. There is a chilling feeling of Déjà vu abroad. The pictures are all too reminiscent of the 1962 bedlam in the Western Region House of Assembly. But while one event may resemble another distant event, you cannot step into the same river twice.

It beggars belief that there are some of our compatriots who are justifying and defending this wanton desecration of a very critical state institution. Patriotism is truly the refuge of scoundrels. This columnist is often amused when our ersatz patriots and emergency nationalists mount the rooftop to proclaim their love for the nation and its presiding eminence. Given the battles some of us have fought for this country, both against military and civilian despots, their delusional nuisance ought to be a source of wry bemusement. But sometimes, the joke is carried too far.

When many of us were battling to revalidate Jonathan’s legitimate claims to the presidency in the face of a desperate conspiracy by a feudal cabal, he had no ambassadors then. They were still in the diplomatic crèche for hustlers. Or more likely, they were studying the game as usual to see which way the gravy train was heading. But now that they have captured Goodluck, turning him into an ethnic and sub-regional president, it is good luck to all of them.

As part of a constant reality check, this column often takes a retrospective glance at the immediate past. The result can be sobering and profoundly therapeutic. It is an elixir for the soul in depressing and degrading times. You are aware that when everything has ended in an absolute disaster, little is worth salvaging in the eternal cycle of political stupidity. You can then be reconciled to reality under duress, apologies to Fredric Jameson, the great American literary theorist.

If Jonathan fails, it will not be from want of initial support from vital segments of the Nigerian civil and political society. It will be due entirely to his fundamental flaws of character. In the end, character is fate, as no one can escape the implacable consequences of their foibles. As the Greeks will say, call no man lucky until that day that he carries his luck to the grave.

As it is at the moment, nothing can be expected from Jonathan in terms of the fundamental political re-engineering of this structurally disfigured country; nothing in terms of a visionary developmental blueprint and nothing in terms of moving the nation away from endemic political paralysis. Once again, the nation walks the path of thunder.

In their tokenist trifling with harsh and bitter reality, Jonathan’s supporters may continue to point at kilometres of road constructed, stadia built, old rail wagons refurbished and new universities opened, forgetting that these are all ad hoc projects without any holistic integrative structure. In any case, even a third rate local government chairman with the same funding will not be jubilant about this.

With the benefit of hindsight, the Jonathan presidency represents the greatest frittering away of historic opportunities and possibilities for this nation. No other civilian ruler in the history of the country could be said to have acceded to power with such massive goodwill and a pan-Nigerian groundswell of hope and optimism. But in the end, no man can give what he doesn’t have. To have invested such hopes in the first instance in an untried and untested fellow is a prime example of the collective delusion and daydreaming to which Nigerians are particularly prone.

The Jonathan presidency has become a historic albatross for the nation. But like a misbegotten child mounted on its mother’s back and with the feet grating on the floor at the same time, it will require considerable tact and adroitness to set down if it is not to bring mother and child crashing to the ground.

This latest executive tragedy will not stop Nigerians from dreaming. It will not stop us from imagining a greater tomorrow in which this formidably gifted nation will take its rightful place in the comity of great nations. That greater tomorrow may appear like a forlorn dream in the distressing circumstances of the moment. But all great human achievements are products of imaginary projections. Nothing worthwhile can be achieved without visionary dreaming.

This morning, we republish a piece published three and a half years ago in 2011 when Goodluck Jonathan first acceded to the Nigerian presidency on his own steam. Our expectations have not been met and certain things have since happened to the fabled Nigerian military. The reader is invited to take an intellectual excursion to our immediate past with the columnist.

November 23, 2014
A dream for Nigeria

Snooper suspends all intellectual hostilities this morning to wish President Goodluck Jonathan well as he takes full charge as the third elected president of the Fourth Republic of Nigeria. This must be a moment of charity and sober reflection. Nigeria’s history has been a long nightmare punctuated by sleepwalking. This columnist is dreaming sweet dreams this morning and we urge Jonathan to become a visionary dreamer too, if he is to rescue Nigeria from the purgatory of damned nations. The odds may be stacked against him at this point but that is just the point about visionary imagining.

Without dreams, nations and people must perish. Without hope life is a sour and surly joke. But being optimistic about Nigeria carries extremely grave risks. It is a deeply compromising ritual. To start with, analytical integrity may have to be abandoned. Hard facts on the ground may have to be ignored. The logic of events will have to be sacrificed. Yet we must dream our way out of the current nightmare. It is not the failure of nations and state collapse that we must fear. It is the failure of national will.

This is why children and youths are the best nation builders. Because they carry no ancestral baggage of resentment, no evil memory of ancient tribal feuds, youths have a better capacity to dream and to will into existence a new society. But we are already beginning to poison that romantic well of national wellbeing. Our youths are gradually being sucked into a vortex of fear and trembling. The Other is hell. Ask prospective members of the National Youth Service Corps.

When he was asked why he remained defiantly at odds with the Italian state and cheerfully hopeful about the future despite bitter defeats, stunning reversals of gains, persistent harassments, incarcerations and the murder of his colleagues and comrades in arms, Antonio Gramsci retorted that it was due to optimism of the will and pessimism of the intellect. Optimism of the will is the ability to dare and dream ; the capacity for continuous exertion and permanent struggle for a better society even where the intellect tells you that it will all be to no avail in the end.

Gramsci should know. He was a human exemplar. The great Italian journalist and outstanding leftist theoretician lived life as pure hell. A hunchback wracked by every conceivable human affliction, the great man produced seminal works under intense pressure and suffering. Here was a man sent to life-long jail by Benito Mussolini, the late Italian dictator, with the war-cry: “We must prevent this brain from functioning for twenty years!” Although Gramsci perished in jail, it was from prison and under the most abysmal conditions that he wrote his best works. You can imprison a man but you can never imprison his mind.

Let us thank god for great mercies. Twelve years ago exactly today, the Nigerian military departed in a hail of controversy and ill-will. They turned out to be neither political nor economic messiahs. But they managed to hold the nation together in spite of themselves. It is still a tense and fraught unity with an American Nostradamus starring us in the face.

In many countries, the military often act as the human incarnation of the providential will that wields together the heterogeneous forces of a nascent nation, forging an organic community from disparate nationalities and in the process turning a nation in itself to a nation for itself. But in Nigeria, the military goofed catastrophically and it was only by a divine miracle and the legendary luck of Nigeria that the armed forces survived the ethnic and religious fissures that have polarised the larger Nigerian society.

But we cannot blame a river for being sluggish and tardy in midstream without looking at its origin. The Nigerian military began as an instrument of colonial pacification; an armed will of the metropolitan imperium. And for most of its post-colonial existence, the Nigerian military lived up to its billing as an army of occupation without an ennobling vision of a just and humane society or an enabling visionary for that matter.

Yet in just twelve years of depoliticisation and re-professionalisation, we have seen how a professional military can act as a stabilising bedrock of the nation and of the political order, despite the suicidal antics of an errant political class. We salute the gallant men and women of our armed forces for this recovery of initiative and for their rediscovery of the ethos of the modern army. Had it been the army of yore, the past two years would have been sorely tempting indeed. Happy indeed is the land without the need for a military hero.

Goodluck is lucky. He is beginning his real presidency on this happy augury of a military safely ensconced in the barracks. Secure in the knowledge that the military threat has receded, Jonathan ought to have his mind free for the great feats of social engineering required to return this country to the path of sanity and rationality. But he remains gaffe-prone and susceptible to unforced errors of political judgement which may prove fatal in the long run.

Like all responsible electorates all over the civilised world, Nigerians must brace for the consequences of their choice. In the long run, the Jonathan presidency may be more important in terms of its profound symbolism than in terms of real achievement. While many Nigerians had thought that the social question of justice and accountability should be superior to the political question of regional hegemony and monopoly of power, the overwhelming majority of Nigerians had thought otherwise. For them, it is more important to lay down the rule once and for all that the Nigerian presidency is accessible to and attainable by all qualified Nigerians irrespective of origins or ethnic affiliation.

For many Nigerians, then, the Jonathan presidency represents the first real people driven power shift in the country as distinct from the cartel-driven “army arrangement” that brought Obasanjo and Shagari to civilian power. But Jonathan is not his own creation and the myth of the “shoeless” boy who made the Nigerian presidency does not even begin to address the problems of power disequilibrium in Nigeria. Neither does his belonging to a minority among a minority group scratch the surface of the national question. A wound does not heal by merely clearing the pus of dereliction. It is just the beginning of the healing process.

Yet the way history often unfolds in a neat and exacting symmetry defies human understanding. Exactly forty five years ago today, a monolithic north exploded in response to what it saw as the challenge of the five majors and the chain of events that brought General Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi to power. At this very moment forty five years after, the core hegemonists of the north are seething with anger and bitterness over the chain of events or what they believe to be the chain of conspiracy which has robbed one of their own of the presidential slot.

It is to be stressed that neither Aguiyi-Ironsi nor Goodluck Jonathan initially sought to rule Nigeria. Both are beneficiaries of extra-human and cosmic forces precipitating sharp historical detours: the one profiting from a mutiny he knew nothing about but which decapitated civilian rule; the other a beneficiary of a biological accident which altered the power equations. But no man has ever been known to throw away a juicy piece of federalist morsel. Ironsi made hay by attempting to bring Nigeria under his unitarist anti-federalist jackboot. Jonathan has consolidated his grip in an election which has further exposed the hideous wounds and fault lines of the nation.

As it was in May 1966, so it appears to be in May 2011. But if history repeats itself, it is not always under the same circumstances. Today, the northern core hegemonists are without their middle belt satraps, their eastern mercenary class of power profiteers, their Yoruba collaborators, their riverine subalterns and the military card they are wont to press into service when the going gets stormy. However, there are new kids on the bloc.

The immiseration and de-industrialisation of the north under the watch of its own military and civilian scions has dramatically expanded the vast underclass of ill-educated rabble and casual riff-raff ready to be pressed into murderous service at short notice. With their burning resentment now framed as a political jihad against their local oppressors and now framed as a religious project against an “infidel” state the stage is set for a genocidal explosion on a truly industrial scale.

What this means is that under Goodluck Jonathan, Nigeria has slipped into a perilous conjuncture which requires brilliant statesmanship and extraordinarily creative political engineering. Like Ironsi, Jonathan may be ill-equipped for the job at hand. He may not have the wherewithal to deal with what is clearly an emergency situation. But unlike Ironsi, if anything untoward were to happen to Jonathan, the apocalyptic meltdown and descent into hell would be such that 1966 Nigeria and 1994 Rwanda would be a child’s play.

This is not just another political game. We have arrived at the limbo between death and resurrection. It is the luminous zone of childlike reverie and collective daydreaming. In their dream, most Nigerians will vote for resurrection. Let Jonathan join in the dreaming too. It is a dream for Nigeria, a dream for Africa and a dream for the entire Black race. The alternative is a nightmare that is too cataclysmic to imagine.

First published in May, 2011.

November 23, 2014
Political War-games in Nigeria

The Helium Balloon from Hargeisa

Last Tuesday, one of the worst kept secrets in the history of Nigerian politics became public property. After months of intense preparations marked by guile and dissembling , as well as the saturation bombing of public consciousness by his storm troopers, Dr Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan finally made it known to the Nigerian public his intention to vie for the highest office in the land once more.

Many discerning observers of Nigeria’s colourfully chaotic political opera have hinted that right from his early days in office, Jonathan, either through one elongation scheme or the other, or through some more brazen self-perpetuating scams, has never hidden his obsession with ruling Nigeria for as long as it is possible. For him, longevity in office seems to be all that matters and not actual achievement. But this needs not delay us.

A man cannot be hanged on the basis of ambition however overweening and ignoble. In any case , there may be compelling ethnic, religious and regional justifications for turning the Nigerian president, an otherwise meek and amiable fellow to his admirers, to such a polarizing and divisive figure at this particular conjuncture of Nigeria’s history. Jonathan will not be the first person to rule Nigeria in extremity.

Ruling a nation in extremity and utter adversity often has its historical justification and logic. According to Lenin who claimed to have learnt the argumentative dimension of the tactic from Machiavelli, if somebody bends a stick utterly in the wrong direction, you do not achieve equity by straightening it but by bending it utterly in the other direction. Equity can then be arrived at after arduous negotiations and intricate deal making. This is the dangerous and intriguing conjuncture that has come upon us in Nigeria.

It has been a colourful pageant of political intrigues at the Eagles Square in Abuja; a moveable feast of state intimidation; a bazaar of Byzantine plots and furtive blackmail. The political pantomime might have come straight out of Dr Caligari’s cinematography. All the usual suspects who have laid Nigeria low were either lurking in the background or cavorting in the foreground. They are what the French call pompier pyromanes, those who set off fires in order to show their skills at putting them off. This time, the fire may well consume them.

The Jonathan declaration was a carefully coordinated and clinically choreographed affair. Before then, and despite a subsisting ban on political campaigning, his voluble assault troops had subjected the whole country to carpet bombardment with subliminal messages extolling the superhuman virtues of their avatar. No weapon was considered too crude and nothing was sacred and inviolable, not even the execrable and egregious comparison of their master to world-historical leaders who have been of great benefit to their society and humanity at large. In their wanton crudity, they conflated epochs and rammed together societies with dissimilar synchronic manifestations.

But even they in their heart of heart know that this is going to be a very hard sell; a lie that flies in the face of the ugly and damning facts. Unfortunately when they finish with Jonathan, they will move on to the next game as if nothing has happened, leaving the poor man and his core supporters in the lurch. It is the seller who must beware in this instance. The doctrine of mercantile necessity is an equal opportunity employer. In Yoruba feudal parlance, whether a brand sells or not, the branded serf must receive his full wages.

In the event, and despite the glitzy razzmatazz , the Jonathan declaration was a damp squib. There was something surreally obscene about it all. It was all eerily disturbing. You had to pinch yourself to ascertain that this was actually happening. It was an absolute disaster. The last rampart of reason has deserted the ascendant faction of the Nigerian ruling.

It was not just the callous insensitivity of it all, it was the brutal disregard for the sanctity of human life. A day before this event, almost fifty students from the Government Science Secondary School in Potiskum were blasted to eternity by a suicide bomber. It was a scene of carnage and apocalyptic horror. Brave newspapers splashed the pictures of the mayhem along the pictures of the Nigerian ruling class wining and dining in nearby Abuja at Jonathan’s declaration.

There was not even a minute’s silence for the peaceful repose of the slain. That would have detracted from the boisterous chest beating and the orgy of self-congratulations. What will the international community think about us? Something must be driving the Jonathan crowd to this merciless and senseless disdain for the cultural and political sensitivities of a significant section of the country.

Even before the Potiskum massacre, we were still looking for the Chibok girls. The post-abduction drama has been as horrid as the actual abduction. Hundreds of pupils have been slaughtered. Thousands of citizens have been killed by the Boko Haram insurgents. Ranking military officers have been seen in videos as they were about to be summarily beheaded. What was known initially as a rag-tag militia has now transformed into a full blown army that has become a terror to the Nigerian military, outwitting and outgunning them at will. As we speak, and with a huge swathe of the nation held by the insurgents, Nigeria is effectively partitioned. Whatever remains is facing slow economic strangulation.

Unless there is some mass neurosis abroad, there is something strangely incompatible and in fact deeply incongruous about a presidential declaration of democratic ambition in a country that is at the losing end of a war with a non-state army. A state of emergency and/or a Government of National Emergency are more rational probabilities. In more civilized climes, a president who has led his country into a losing war and with such dismal incompetence will not dare show his face in public not to talk of capering and cantering at the instance of a hollow orchestra.

It is very unlikely that President Jonathan will dare campaign in the areas he has treated with such devilry and insensitive disdain, and that is if they are still part of the nation by the time of the election and have not been steamrolled by the Boko Haram blitzkrieg. Yet it is also obvious that no amount of mathematical and legal legerdemain can make him president of Nigeria based on his obvious popularity and acceptance in both the South South and South East.

It would be politically foolish and obtuse to the bargain to ever imagine that Jonathan and his strategists are unwise enough not to realize his electoral limitations at this crucial moment. If that is so, it brings us to the central thesis of this piece. Jonathan and his handlers may very well not be preparing for an electoral competition but for a physical conquest in the guise of a democratic quest.

This is war-gaming at its most perilous and devastating in the post-colonial polity. It is not about democracy at all. Recent acts of commission and omission by the Jonathan administration suggest that it may be the least interested in deepening the democratic process. Rather, this is a project of brutal domination and decimation barely disguised in electoral garb. If the northerners like, let them continue to kill themselves.

Electorally speaking, the less the merrier. If the north likes, let it disintegrate and scatter to the winds. They are more useful voting with their feet. They are no polling booths in refugee camps. If the Boko Haram religious thugs like, let them conquer the whole territory and give the people a new nationality as long as they leave the rest intact.

As we have said, Jonathan is not the first person to rule Nigeria in extremity. In a sense, Jonathan represents the final nemesis of the old northern Nigeria feudal power masters. Watching their historic rump these days, disheveled and disoriented, with their tail between their legs and in involuntary obeisance to the merciless logic of modernity, one cannot prevent a wry grin. After this conjuncture, it is historically impossible for anyone to go back to ruling Nigeria along the old lines. Those elements in the South West scare-mongering about the old north are merely flogging a dead horse.

All those who have tried to rule Nigeria in extremity and in stark disregard of its cultural sensitivities have always met their legendary comeuppance. This may be due to the great mythical spirit of the largest congregation of black souls. Or it may be due to the great irrational dynamics of the post-colonial polity itself in which redoubtable contradictions tend to cancel themselves out on the way to a grand new synthesis.

The sociological explanation may well be that in war-gaming, you can only focus on your own game. But other games are simultaneously going on. There are other gamers who may appear in paradoxical complicity but whose interests are not coterminous to or contiguous with yours. For example, if General Mohammadu Buhari were to win the presidential election next year, a swift reconquest of the Boko Haram territory may well be beyond his military ken. Having naturalized and entrenched themselves with the help of rogue Islamic brotherhoods, the Boko Haram by then may well be seeking a definition of borders and other protocols of effective partition.

This past week, the Nigerian Ambassador to the US cried out to the world about the uncooperative attitude of the US authorities in assisting Nigeria in procuring arms to defend the territorial integrity of the nation. Adefuye is a tame and temperate fellow not given to speaking out of turn. But the seemingly lax, laggard and lackadaisical attitude of the US authorities tells its own story, and the joke is on us. Could it be that the western authorities have given up on Nigeria as a viable nation? Are they trying to save us from ourselves and from needless and heedless bloodletting? It is very curious that the Americans would appear to turn their gaze away from a fast expanding Islamic enclave of prehistoric brutality deep in the Sahel.

We may as well be witnessing the endgame of the Lugardian state which itself is a trope for colonial nation-building. The American prediction about the unraveling of Nigeria as we know it may well be upon us and with chilling precision. While they are helping to re-impose state formations in Somali almost twenty five years later, there is an enclave known as Somaliland with capital in Hargeisa which declared itself independent of the parent nation in the turmoil of war. It is not recognized by anybody yet, but it has all the trappings of a stable, orderly and well-run country. The puffed up pomposities in Abuja last Tuesday may well herald the helium balloon from Hargeisa.

November 16, 2014
An evening with Macmillan

To the magnificent Agip Recital Hall, Muson Centre Onikan penultimate Thursday for the annual literary event of the Macmillan Publishers with the long-missing Okon Anthony Okon in riotous tow. As the Christmas season finally unfolds, snooper was in fine fettle and preppy spirit. Despite advancing years and the ravages of the soul by the post-colonial pandemic, there is still nothing as exhilarating as the Christmas season. In the event, it turned out to be a celebration of everything that is noble and ennobling about the Nigerian project.

It was Harold Macmillan, the famed scion of the great publishing house, who once famously told his British compatriots that they had never had it so good. With a rising tide of prosperity, with many households owning a car, a fridge and a television set for the first time, it was too good to be true. Coming in the second decade after the most destructive war in human history, it was a remarkable feat of social engineering pioneered by the leftwing government of Clement Atlee and consolidated by the conservative interlude of Churchill, the ill-stared Anthony Eden later Lord Curzon and Macmillan.

It was a moveable literary feast. Snooper has not had it so good in a long time. It was the night when old literary gurus and the aficionados of high culture interfaced with the younger avatars. The chairman of the Macmillan Literary Event Committee, Mrs Francesca Yetunde Emanuel, was at her energetic and indefatigable best. As painstaking and meticulous as ever, Mama FYE sat behind a desk meant for ushers personally ticking off the attendance register.

Known behind her back in her Civil Service days as General Franco, mama does not take hostages when roused from her upper class splendour and serendipity. At eighty one, the iconic first female permanent secretary in the Federal Civil Service and gifted actress continues to defy the odds of gravity and age with her dazzling appearance. Little wonder then that the evening was a marvel of artistic delight and tightly controlled timing.

As soon as we reached the premises, Okon began his rabid commentaries. He had been complaining that he had not been paid for supplying a container of “human and woman being” for Jonathan’s presidential declaration. Very soon and to Snooper’s chagrin, the mad boy began introducing himself to everybody in sight as Mr Ebola whereupon they all recoiled in fright and horror. A punitive eye-whip could no longer do the trick. The rogue was brimming with malice and malign humour. Very soon, Okon collared one of the female ushers and demanded from her where he could get good snuff. Snooper quickly disappeared into the crowd of distinguished Nigerians.

It was an excellent outing for the Macmillan people. The Ben Tomoloju troupe did not disappoint with its searing critique of the Nigerian political condition. The chairman of the Company, Bode Emanuel Esq, gave a rousing speech which showcased the triumph of human will over adversities. The guest of honour, Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo ,delivered an inspirational address which warmed the heart and spirit. The evening concluded with dinner at the adjoining La Scala restaurant. Once again, “General Franco” was on patrol to make sure that nobody sat in the wrong place.

November 16, 2014
The Twenty Seventh October of Blaise Compaore

There is a cruel and neat symmetry to events unfolding Burkina Faso. It speaks to the paradoxes of people’s uprising in Africa and elsewhere else, and the virtual impossibility of having a popular revolution in the very society that appears to need it most. In all probability, the more harshly authoritarian a society is the less likely it is to have a revolution leading to immediate and automatic democratic emancipation of the people.

In Burkina Faso, it all began in October and has ended in late October. If one were to put a sheen of revolutionary optimism on this, one can as well say that it all cruelly terminated in October 27 years ago but has resumed in another October 27 years after.

It was on October 15, 27 years ago that Blaise Compaore cruelly terminated the quaint revolutionary experimentation of his bosom friend, Thomas Sankara, in a broad daylight putsch the like of which had never been seen in Africa. At the end of it all, the Ouagadougou Presidential Palace was a site of Homeric bloodletting. Several officers and many socialist cadres lay dead. Sankara himself, sensing the end, had brushed aside all efforts to shield him and the proud descendant of Mossi warriors had gone out to meet his assailants with service pistol blazing.

It is the heroic people of Burkina Faso themselves who have found a name for their revolutionary uprising against a consummate tyrant. They have named their own version of the Arab Spring after a local bird. The Lwili is the common name for bird in the Moore language that is most widely spoken in Burkina Faso. But in the past fortnight, the bird has been invested with the mythical aura of a voice that cannot be caged by a monstrous despot. Maya Angelou would be smiling. Twenty seven years after, the Burkinabes have found their voice again. It is the return of the repressed.

But we must caution incurable revolutionary romantics against false hopes and futile optimism. The original Sankara revolution was not the product of a popular uprising. Sankara himself was hardly a natural democrat. Belonging to the most elite and elitist of military formations, he merely enlisted the people in his revolutionary project. It was a drama of military giants; a bye product of an intense power struggle among the old Upper Volta military aristocracy. Once in power, Sankara knew where he wanted to take his people and nation, no matter the objective material and historical circumstances.

It would seem in retrospect that Sankara deliberately courted revolutionary martyrdom. There was something about him which hinted at the holy martyr. For him, the life of the individual leader does not really matter as long as he could cultivate the cult of heroic example. His was a fundamental intellectual assault on the bastion of military reaction and authoritarian privileges; and on the cherished ideals of African post-colonial armies originating from colonial rapine and predation.

They all noted. Calm, cool, intensely cerebral and immensely self-possessed, Sankara was a master of the soaring revolutionary rhetoric which did not take hostages whether old imperialist or new internal colonialist. In a moment of exasperation and frustration, Francois Mitterand, the late French president, wryly described him as a cutting edge that cuts too sharply.

Thomas Sankara was arguably the greatest son of Burkina Faso and one of the greatest sons of Africa ever. He gave his people a new name, a new identity and helped them to find their voice. It was too good to be true. The Burkinabe leader became a revolutionary poster boy for good governance and accountability all over the continent. Sharp, witty, quick on his feet and eternally swapped in paratroopers’ combat fatigues, Sankara was a walking reproach to the corrupt and dissolute post-colonial military oligarchy that held post-colonial Africa by the jugular.

The good people of Africa noted. There was something mesmerising and electrifying about this new type of military rule. On a typical weekend, the Burkinabe leader could be seen in shirt and shorts personally coating the walls of the presidential villa. He had openly boasted that all his worldly possessions, including an old fridge, could be packed into the boot of his old Renault jalopy.

Panache and self-assurance, intellectual rigour and revolutionary asceticism is not the kind of combination expected of an African leader, particularly in the nascent epoch of global capitalism. The noose began to tighten round Sankara internationally, continentally and nationally. From Equatorial Guinea to Zaire, military despots dominant on the continent saw him as a dangerous advertisement for a more humane mode of governance and a source of inspiration to revolutionary wannabes in the post-colonial military.

It is instructive to note that after Sankara was murdered by his friend, Nigeria openly threw protocol to the dustbin by immediately welcoming Compaore’s envoys, Captain Henri Zongo and Major Boukary Lingani. This was at the same time when the veteran African nationalist, Kenneth Kaunda, was firmly shutting the door of the Zambian nation against the miserable pair. Two years later in a classic instance of poetic justice, Compaore rounded up the two officers and had them summarily executed for plotting against him.

With such friends and “revolutionary comrades” as the military bastion of the “revolution”, Sankara needed no enemy outside the national borders. Yet he had plenty of them. It is noteworthy that shortly after the ouster of his friend, “Beautiful Blaise” announced a sweeping programme of “rectification” which was nothing but a sly shorthand for rolling back the populist contents of the Sankara revolution. Yet for about a week after the “rectification” began, Compaore could not face the people he had “rectified” even on television, citing a historic bout of malaria. Some malaria indeed!

For Sankara, the last straw was probably the seminal rift with Moamar Ghaddafi, the deposed Libyan despot. Despite his radical posturing, Ghaddafi was a pan-Arabic racist and equal opportunity anarchist who took a petulant childlike delight in destabilising Black African regimes irrespective of ideological colouration. Sankara stoutly refused to allow Charles Taylor, Ghadaffi’s protégé, an access through Burkina Faso to launch his war against his country. Two years after the overthrow of Sankara, Compaore granted Taylor free access through Burkina Faso. The rest is history.

But the old native bird of Burkina Faso is not through with us yet. Twenty seven years after Sankara’s assassination and as Compaore fled the capital, the ghost of Sankara returned to the Burkina Faso capital for unfinished business. It was a much storied ghost. Irate protesters against Compaore were seen carrying huge banners bearing the portrait of the noble and iconic paratrooper. It was a historic trope for a return match. Nothing could have been more deeply symbolic of what is known as the cunning of history.

It was also a defining moment in Burkina Faso history. Twenty seven years ago and the very day after the murder of Thomas Sankara, Ouagadougou residents began arriving at the hurried makeshift grave that was fingered as Thomas Sankara’s last resting place, laying wreathes and tearing at their own body in a gesture of profound grief. It soon became a holy site. Soldiers forcibly dispersed them and then hurriedly uprooted Sankara’s remains for forcible relocation to an unknown and unmarked grave.

Last week and twenty seven years after, the army in Burkina Faso was still struggling with the ghost of Sankara as they fired shots to prevent the people who have succeeded in banishing a murderous tyrant from entering the premises of the television station. With such a deeply entrenched counter-revolutionary army, a democratic revolution may well be impossible.

Who needs a revolution, anyway? Given the recent experience of the so called Arab Spring where a popular revolt has led to the paradoxical consolidation of a counter-revolutionary military oligarchy and Libya’s precipitate lurch into radical anarchy, the civil leaders of Burkina Faso may have to lower their sight and cure themselves of romantic revolutionary delusions.

The Burkinabe army is too deeply complicit in the Compaore era to play the role of a change-driven nationalist institution. It is its instincts as a veritable spoiler that will more likely gain ascendancy in the coming weeks and months. It is instructive that the first pretender to the throne that Compaore hurriedly vacated was his former ADC who had risen to become a general. The second was the second in command of his Praetorian guard.

But even a badly wounded and badly compromised army knows when it is in need of a signal retreat. What the people of Burkina Faso have gained from their heroic struggle is the right to freely choose their own leaders. Not even the army can stop that. Many of the young people who rose in furious protest had not known any other leader apart from Blaise Compaore. But they know their history, and they know that there was another man called Thomas Sankara.

Even more in death, Sankara has turned out to be the greatest nemesis of corrupt oligarchies. As the great man himself would say, not even the mightiest of armies can stop an idea whose time has come. It is that dictum that has just played out in the land of upright people. Thus as Shakespeare would say, the whirligig of time has brought its sweet revenge. On the twenty seventh October of Blaise Compaore, Thomas Sankara can rest in peace. Burkina Faso must now move on.

November 9, 2014
Caveat emptor……

Even in deep autumn, the human mind is a deep spring of eternal hope and possibilities. Some of these hopes may turn out to be quite delusional. But that is neither here nor there. It is impossible to get through life without a few illusions. Life itself may yet turn out to be a grand illusion. But you must get on with it, whether you like it or not.

It is good to be back to these labours. Like an ageing warrior, snooper often enjoys the din of contention; the agonistic rumble of the intellectual coliseum; the rude and irreverent jabs of mercenary commentators who have found ungainly employment on the internet. While there are blue and black collar jobs, the internet has now introduced the phenomenon of the yellow collar work force. Such are the contradictions of global capitalism.

It is meet, then, to report once again that the reports about the death of the column are widely exaggerated. Despite a well-advertised and well-displayed announcement of a richly deserved rest, the rumour mill still went into overdrive gear. Both column and columnist were reported to have folded up, to employ K.O Mbadiwe’s famous fatwa against an offending newspaper and its editor. One report was said to have sighted Snooper in purgatory observing miserable penance.

Among these unfounded rumours, Snooper’s favourite was the one which expansively noted that yours sincerely has sneaked out of both The Nation and the nation after a severe power struggle, with his tail between his legs and in fear of dear life. Oh dear!!! When Snooper complained to a friend, he shot back that given the engrossing turn of phrase, the fellow must be one of Snooper’s own boys. He was right.

Snooper solemnly apologises for inflicting some of these chaps on the national psyche. You can never predict how some of these things will turn out. When you are training intellectual rottweilers, you never know when one of them will turn round to bite you in gratitude. Some of these boys, having returned from the phoney Jonathan Conference empty-handed but with their pockets fully loaded, have taken up calumny as intellectual sports.

Meanwhile, Jonathan, a master of political ambush and crafty deception, has moved on to the real game in town, leaving them in the lurch. If they care to know, Snooper is acquainted with a veteran tailor in Agege who specialises in the radical restructuring of incontinent pockets. In local parlance, it is known as a double stitch up. Let’s meet at the engagingly named Pen Cinema around Orile.

So many things happened while the column was away. As they say, a week is a long time in both local and global politics. This past week, the brave and heroic people of Burkina Faso finally saw off their veteran tyrant, the execrable Blaise Compaore, a.k.a “ Beau Blaise”.

After his dismissal, the French-powered convoy was thought to be heading for the famous Po Garrison from whence in 1983 Compaore led his famous match on Ouagadougou to liberate his bosom friend, Thomas Sankara, from state detention. But the convoy made a detour and headed for Ivory Coast . A drawn , dazed and disoriented Compaore was later seen arriving at a plush hotel in the Ivorian capital as the curtain drew on his inglorious epoch.

In Nigeria, Brigadier Benjamin Adekunle, the gifted Civil War commander, passed on. Coming on the heels of his demise in saddening circumstances was the eightieth birthday celebration of his former Commander in Chief, General Yakubu Gowon. Gowon was the federal victor in the Nigerian civil war. But the clinking of champagne glasses had hardly subsided when the Boko Haram insurgents captured Mubi, the second city of Adamawa state and the economic nerve centre of the north east. Forty seven years after the commencement of the first civil war, a considerable swathe of the nation is now occupied by another rebel army.

Each of these momentous occurrences merits a separate column, and they shall be so treated in the coming weeks. Each of the events may appear vastly dissimilar to each other, but they are all profoundly related in a dialectical manner of speaking. They speak to the paradoxes and trajectory of political tyranny in post-colonial Africa and to the final working out of the contradictions of military messianism on the continent. But it is the developments in Burkina Faso that merit primacy of attention for the light they beam on a momentous epoch of traumatic transition for the continent.

November 9, 2014
A materialist reading of ideological suicide

As the virus of stomach infrastructure infects everything in the land, the word materialist itself may appear incapable of meaning no more than an addiction to gross material consumption; an obsession with mundane materiality as opposed to the finer and more refined aspects of existence. Materialism has damaged our social life beyond recognition. Tragically enough, even some of our most revered spiritual leaders are not exempt from this addiction to irrational material acquisition and gross consumption.

But as students of advance philosophy will attest, to conduct a materialist investigation is to deploy the principles and methodology of Historical and Dialectical Materialism in order to deepen our understanding of a specific occurrence, particularly the historical and material circumstances in which it takes place. On the other hand, ideological suicide occurs when people kill off their self-advertised convictions in a way and manner that suggest a new identity and the complete erasure of their former self.

Moral outrage and fiery denunciation of those who betray their self-stated political ideals may satisfy our anger but they can hardly yield insight into the way forward, or provide a practical roadmap for immediate action. The classic statement of materialist interrogation of history is Karl Marx observation that men make history, but not under the circumstances of their choice.

There is commotion and crisis everywhere you turn to in the political landscape of Nigeria. The permanent carpet crossing, the eternal to and fro has reached an epidemic proportion. This perpetual shuttle of refugees and politically displaced persons suggest an ideological neutering of the polity. All politicians appear the same, like cats in the night. The collateral damage has been prohibitive. There is a collapse of public trust in politics and politicians.

People no longer perceive politics and politicians as the route to social redemption. So far the biggest casualty in this refractive mirror of public perception is Malam Nuhu Ribadu. While not doubting his political courage, his quaint and quixotic notions of patriotism , this column has already expressed profound reservations about Ribadu’s intellectual and ideological solidity even while he was the presidential flag bearer of the ACN. We need not be further delayed.

Yet in a curious way, this apparent collapse of ideology as a weapon of social engineering and as an instrument for fashioning out political action may well be indicative of a tectonic shift in our polity which could have been rumbling below the surface for quite some time. But the world has never existed in a vacuum of ideas. The end of ideology as a means of social engineering may well signal the arrival of a new vista of ideological struggle.

The politics of the Fourth Republic and the Nigerian post-military society cannot be divorced from the politics of its military progenitors and their end of ideology bravura and triumphalism. Although very much their military superior, General Obasanjo is very much an ideological heir of his professional subordinates in every material respect. Perhaps smarting from the trauma of the civil war, the principal aim of the post-civil war military hierarchy has been to create huge pan-Nigerian parties capable of holding the nation together at all costs even at the expense of national development and rapid transformation.

They seem to have succeeded beyond their wildest dream, except that it is becoming impossible to hold the country together without accelerated economic development and genuine political transformation. The mass ideological suicide of so called progressives in the current republic attests to the success of this military formula. Both the PDP and the NPN were conceived as huge Pan-Nigerian bazaars and millennial political monopolies. The problem is that like the NPN before it was stopped in its track, the PDP is set to consume both itself and the nation.

If we cast our mind back to pre-Independence politics and the struggle for decolonization, we would find that there was no room for mass defections and the Russian roulette such as we are currently witnessing. Although there were regional differences as to the actual departure date of the colonial masters, it would have been political taboo for anybody to establish a political platform based on the project of continued colonial rule.

This ideological solidity and political coherence remained very much the name of the game in the First Republic even within the context of widening inter-party animosities. Those who defected from their parties did not have the courage or the political heart to join the hegemonic party. In the case of deserters from the Action Group after its crisis erupted in 1962, they could only manage a tense and edgy alliance with the NPC till the bitter end. After a futile rebellion, K.O Mbadiwe, a popular and charismatic politician, returned to the NCNC with his tail between his legs.

Although anchored on a regional platform and later on clear ideological differentiation along Socialist Democratic line, the most outstanding avatar of this politics of principles in the First and Second Republic was Obafemi Awolowo. Even when and while he sought alliances at the centre, Awolowo stubbornly refused to surrender the principles of his party, the Action Group. Throughout his distinguished political life, Awolowo sought and fought to prevent the homogenisation of the Nigerian political class. His thinking was that unless the Nigerian populace was presented with a clear and well-articulated alternative blueprint, the polity was doomed.

After the death of the Ikenne titan, the road was clear for succeeding military autocrats to engineer the destruction of the old regional platform that was the basis of pre-military politics. Responding to what they might have honestly and genuinely thought was a national emergency particularly after a costly civil war, the military sought to demobilise the old regional project. In this respect, the dissolution of the old regions and their balkanization into unviable states came in very handy.

Thus was born in its post-independence incarnation the unitarist and harshly centralising state, a final product of the military imaginary which began life in the colonial incubator and which haunts the Nigerian post-military polity till date. But even before Awolowo’s death, the private wall had already fissured. The 1983 UPN gubernatorial primaries witnessed startling defections to the ruling party. Before then, one of UPN’s serving senators also deserted to the ruling party.

This was something hitherto unheard of in an Awolowo party. The old man would have been pained to no end seeing some of his beloved and trusted lieutenants absconding. One of these had even written a book on the principles “Awoism”. To show the extent to which the new military class had penetrated Awolowo’s fortress even while alive, Chief Bola Ige was almost summarily expelled from the party for inviting a pariah like General Obasanjo to mediate in the dispute between him and his estranged deputy, the late Sunday Afolabi.

Famously moved by Alhaji Lateef Jakande in what has been dubbed the infamous Night of the Long Knives in Yola, 1983, the motion of expulsion was a foretaste and forerunner of the tragedy that was to befall Awolowo’s surviving discipleship. Exactly 10 years after, Jakande himself was excommunicated for joining the Abacha government.

This was the beginning of the end of politics of principles based on clear ideological preference in Nigeria. The homogenization of the Nigerian political class which Awolowo feared and fought against seems to have come upon us with the force of a gale. In the dialectical maelstrom, what may warm the heart of certain Nigerian nationalists is the seeming collapse and death throes of the old regional politics. But it has come at a stiff nation-disabling price.

In a moment of sublime contempt, Anthony Enahoro, the departed great nationalist and foremost freedom fighter, once dismissed both the SDP and NRC as little better than government parastatals. As if to confirm the old man’s prescient hunch, the leadership of the SDP, acting out a military script, summarily traded away its party’s hard won presidential victory with enthusiasm and relish as if clear party lines existed only in the imagination of jaded Nigerians.

Five years and another military regime after, the late Chief Bola Ige caustically described Abacha’s five parties as the five fingers of the same leprous hand. Shortly before Abacha died in mysterious circumstances, the five parties were bandying together to proclaim the goggled one as their sole presidential candidate. It doesn’t get more politically homogenous and leprous to the bargain.

The current mass defections and borderless gallivanting among the political class may well signal the final death knell of ideological politics in contemporary Nigeria. To discerning Nigerians, there may not be much difference between the APC and the PDP. Sir Olaniwun Ajayi, the revered Afenifere patriarch, has dismissed both the PDP and APC as platforms of predation and primitive accumulation.

But given the flirtations of the Afenifere rump with the Labour Party which is nothing but the evil doppelganger of the PDP, and their covert complicity and collaboration with Jonathan’s statist agenda, we may well be witnessing the final working out of some ancient curse. When Chief Sunday Michael Afolabi famously told Chief Bola Ige to shut up and get on with the federal meal he had been invited to partake in, he might have thought he was making a brilliant point. For lending their talents to the statist chicanery so loathsome to their people’s federalist ambition, both men were later to give up the ghost in mysterious circumstances.

It is not surprising, then, that in all of this, it is the APC that is left clutching the wrong end of the stick. Already stuck at the zero ground level of low public esteem, the PDP has nothing to lose. The end of ideology is also an ideology of sorts and a viciously and virulently reactionary ideology at that. But it allows the ruling party to retain the initiative. In such circumstances, It will surely take the vigour and vibrancy of a mass movement allied with civil society groups and other professional organizations to unseat the PDP.

Like an overweight sprinter, the APC has been slow to get off the starting block. But in linking up at the centre, the party’s dominant old ACN faction might have left its western flank exposed. Huge internal fissures are showing up. With the tragic loss of Ekiti, its regionalist impetus is already in grave danger. If the party allows the PDP or any of its sleeping partners to poach another state in the old region, both the ideological and political planks of its regionalist agenda would have collapsed.

For a party that is hoping to distinguish itself with a genuinely transformational blueprint based on clearly differentiated principles, the current climate of mass defection and ideological suicide could not have been more ominous in terms of public and popular perception. Yet an even more cruel and tragic irony is playing out which portrays many of the party’s leading lights as unreconstructed products of military democracy. Rather than relying on mass recruitment of the electorate, the APC seems to be relying on the big men theory of African politics, a game that happens to be the founding template of the ruling party.

The likes of Nuhu Ribadu are nothing but small fry in this turbulent ocean of political betrayal. The hurricane of mass political suicide has finally berthed on our shores. The ideological neutering of a polity often results in the neutering of political strategy and methodology with all parties resorting to the same methods and measure. For a developing society, this is the real tragedy of the collapse of ideological politics. It is a one-party state by any other name with the parties no more than bickering factions of the same political monopoly.

But you cannot play poker with history for long, just as you cannot plant cassava and expect to harvest yam. Should the opposition groups falter in their bid to present Nigerians with a clear and well-articulated alternative blueprint, and should the ruling party continue to hold the nation to ransom in its current strangulating stasis and paralyzed inertia, we might just wake up one day to find that we are truly at the mercy of a social earthquake. In the history of human society and its political evolution, no party or politician has been known to defect from that one.

August 31, 2014
…..And a short goodbye from Snooper

Dear readers, it is time once again to say a short goodbye to our numerous fans and the critical admirers of this column. Since its debut in January 2007, this column has gone on leave only once. It has been almost eight years of continuous and killing exertions. It is now time to take a proper rest. After eight years of hammering away before the lucent screen , even the keyboard is beginning to play poker. There are times when you type in the last letter and then fall asleep on the keyboard only to find that the last letter had multiplied into eight screen pages of strange hieroglyphics which only the ancient Egyptians can decode. It is the Nubian’s nunc dimittis.

The columnist thanks the numerous readers who have kept him on his toes, particularly our old friends and colleagues in the global academy and the internet samurai who also occasionally come to blows among themselves. We may not always agree on the state of the nation or the way forward, but it has been one hell of an experience discovering how many people still care about the fate of this gifted country. May their tribe multiply. Bye for now.

August 31, 2014
Stellar in the time of Ebola

In the time of Ebola, there is something to be said about the quintessential Nigerian spirit after all. There are moments when a particular passage encapsulates all that is noble and heroic about a suffering society. Such has been the death from Ebola infection of Stella Folashade Ameyo Adadevoh. This is one death that shows how the human spirit can rise above its shabby surroundings into the stellar plane of astral possibilities. We shall be mourning this heroic doctor for a long time.

It has been noted that unhappy is the land without a hero. To this has been added the famous quip that it is the land in search of heroes that is unhappy indeed. However this may be, it must be noted that in this season of politicians without ideal or the stout convictions that power genuine politics, in this season of political harlots changing parties in a manner reminiscent of babies changing nappies, Nigeria may well need more heroes.

Dr Adadevoh was not even on duty on the fateful afternoon that brought the hapless Sawyer to our shores. But as the most senior doctor around, she had insisted on attending to the footloose Liberian. When he died, she had prevented his corpse from being transited through the same route of infamy and state dereliction which had seen him evade sanitary surveillance in two countries, Liberia and Nigeria respectively.

This would probably have triggered off a humanitarian catastrophe for Nigeria. By so doing and by sacrificing her own life in the process, Ms Stella Adadevoh probably prevented thousands of her compatriots from going under in a monstrous plague. It doesn’t get more stellar than that.

It is tempting to dismiss Mr Patrick Sawyer as a madman—as President Goodluck Jonathan did in a moment of angst and anger. But Sawyer is a prime parable for the post-colonial condition, an example of stricken humanity escaping from the concrete horrors of a diseased African nation in the post-colonial epoch. Under the tyranny of underdevelopment and Stone Age medical facilities, people must seek liberty. It is a pity that in seeking salvation, Mr Sawyer almost brought epidemic damnation on a whole nation.

The greater pity is that despite the bravest efforts of Madam Eileen Sirleaf, Liberia is yet to return to its pre-military coup stability and prosperity. This is a lesson for Nigeria and other African countries that support and prop up sadistic tyrants without the mental magnitude to rule even a hamlet. In an increasingly globalised world in which time and space are virtually obliterated, those who sow the whirlwind must expect to reap its grim repercussions before the old African cock crows.

It is a cause for sober reflection that despite its parlous state, there are many African people and nations that still regard Nigeria as the medical and political Mecca of the Black race. The late Sawyer was one of these. Casting vituperative aspersions on him and his nation is particularly ungracious and graceless. To whom much is given, much is expected. It is like a delinquent elder brother crying that he did not choose to come first and therefore should not be held responsible for the fate of his younger siblings.

The Ebola virus was first discovered around the Congo River in the late seventies. Almost 40 years after, no African nation has taken the lead in cutting edge medical research to find a cure. The trail has only thrown up a long tapestry of quacks and medical mountebanks profiting from their people’s misery while pocketing international research grants.

In the case of Nigeria, this can only be so since a sizable number of its highly trained medical personnel had already absconded abroad, fleeing from the inferno of national ruination. In a show of diluted and adulterated sovereignty, we have been cadging and appealing to America and the international community to come to our aid and to release an experimental drug which is the product of arduous research and medical labour in other climes. What is the worth of the independence of all African nations?

The point to note is that until Nigeria and one or two African countries rise and rouse themselves to fulfil their manifest destiny as the medical, educational and technological hub of the continent, Africa will continue to be seen as the poster boy for all that is dark and disagreeable about humanity. On current showing, particularly given the dismal and dissolute nature of the Nigerian ruling class, that golden age of the Black person will continue to be a pipe dream.

But it is morning yet on creation day. The sterling example of Ameyo Adadevoh speaks to the glorious possibilities of the untapped heroic potentials and moral resources available to the crippled African nation once it gets its act together. There is a particularly poignant irony about her example coming at a time when the entire medical workforce of the nation has downed tools in agitation for better service condition and the government has as usual wielded the big axe by purporting to sack all of them.

In the old world of sturdy values and ordered societies, nobility was said to have its obligation. The late doctor belonged to the old Nigerian nobility. No one could have come from a more distinguished pedigree. Daughter of the notable physician Professor Adadevoh, great grand daughter of the illustrious Herbert Macaulay, the father of modern Nigerian nationalism, and great great grand daughter of the immortal Bishop Ajayi Crowther, she could not have been sired from a more illustrious lineage.

There cannot be a more appropriate time to ask whatever happened to the modern rationality-driven society these great men were trying build. The old bishop, after being miraculously reprieved from international slavery, went on to pioneer the translation of the bible into Yoruba language. With his fiery oratory and the irreverent aplomb with which he put the colonial masters in their place, Herbert Macaulay stirred the spirit of nationalism in the new nation.

All we have as cultural inheritance today is the vestigial remains of the great African society these illustrious visionaries were trying to build and the occasional heroic example of their solitary heirs. Having directly or indirectly experienced the tragedy of modern slavery, and having been rescued by total strangers, these men knew that in a rational, equity-driven society, the brotherhood of humankind is superior to the fraternity of tribal affiliation and primordial kinships.

There was a country indeed. But before our very eyes, Nigeria has descended into a whirlpool of savage irrationality with skull-grinding ritualists on the prowl, with eye-gouging kidnappers on the loose and with a particularly irresponsible political class pretending to order the affairs of the nation even as it sinks further into dismal despondency and Stone Age indignities.

All hope is not lost. The road to restitution may be long and arduous. But it can be reached by a determined society. Once again, it has taken the tragic heroism of an exemplary Nigerian to remind us of what it means to do our duty to the nation. This is one of those unique occasions that Goodluck Jonathan ought to have milked for its maximum symbolic possibilities and redemptive aura. He ought to have been nudged by his handlers to make a national broadcast as a tribute to heroic and paradigm-shifting courage.

At the very least, the late medical practitioner should be accorded befitting posthumous recognition. In death, she ought to be granted one of the nation’s highest honours. Thereafter, a befitting national medical institution should be named after her. This is the only way to secure a very shaky future and to guarantee that the labour of our heroes shall not be in vain. May the soul of this noble woman rest in perfect peace.

August 24, 2014
The Day of the Salamander

(An Afternoon with Emmanuel Ifeajuna)

A little over a fortnight ago while Snooper was traversing the length and breadth of Osun State, the mind went back to a remarkable incident which occurred in the historic junction town very close to Ife during the summer holiday of 1964.

These days, the ancient town centre has been bypassed by the dual carriage way linking Ibadan with Ilesha and on to Akure and Owo. But in those days, the old route cut through the heart of the town, or let us say that the town was built around this vital artery linking the west to the east. It used to be sheer pleasure watching the mammoth Gaiser vehicles and huge Armels coaches winging their way through town as they journeyed towards the bush meat resort of Agbanikaka and beyond. Among youthful holiday makers, vehicle-spotting was a delightful pastime.

It was at the town centre that a rousing tragic-comedy occurred just a little over 50 years ago. The town’s local enforcer, a burly scoundrel of a police inspector, had rammed his old, fuming banger into the backside of a gleaming, sporty car with a lone occupant. But rather than apologise, the rogue bully jumped out and started hurling insults and invectives on the owner of the car daring him to do his worst.

We all held our breath as the solitary driver took it all in the chin, with his chin resting on his palm in a gesture of calm affront and outrage. But after tiring of the man’s thuggish and drunken buffooneries, the lone driver quietly opened the door revealing a man of medium height, superbly athletic build and a curious air of authority. With jaunty steps, the man went to the boot of the car and brought out the ceremonial sword of the Nigerian Army.

“I am Captain Emmanuel Ifeajuna of the Nigerian Army. You will now behave yourself”, the man announced with a crisp clear cut intonation. The local bully neighed like a frightened horse even as his massive body lurched forward in drunken salute. Then he fell to the ground and started rolling on the floor wondering in hyperbolic vernacular whether he had not slaughtered himself.

The mystery officer took a look at the crumpled thug and shook his head in generous indignation. His eagle-eyed scanning must have convinced him that the damage to his car was negligible. With the same calm composure, he put his sword back in the boot and entered his car, driving off to spontaneous applause from the crowd.

The bully left town not long afterwards, but the balloon had suffered a fatal pin prick. As for the mystery captain, he was to enter national folklore a year and half later as one of the five majors that spearheaded the military mutiny of January, 15, 1966. Almost two years later, the flying Nigerian of the 1956 Commonwealth Games at Melbourne was dead, himself shot as a coup plotter in Biafra.

August 24, 2014