The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • What are you reading, please?

    Reading maketh a man. Books are the fertilising manure for the inner landscape of humanity. Just as a modern society cannot make much progress without requisite knowledge production, a person who has forsworn reading cannot make much progress in the development of the thinking faculty and the rational facilities that come with this. This is what separates humankind from the lower animals.

    Increasingly, this is turning out to be the epoch of “bukuru” people. Our apian and simian cousins are also very smart and sometimes profoundly cunning, but the very idea of signifying monkeys and reading apes is a violent oxymoron. This is the bane of many of those who aspire to lead us in the millennium of increasingly sophisticated knowledge production. The rise of counter-hegemonic knowledge often makes our rulers very ordinary and sometimes downright stupid.

    Thanks to the internet revolution, the reading and learning process has undergone some radical and even revolutionary restructuring. Nowadays, you can read whole books and articles on the net. But there is still no substitute for the solid tome in front of you with the raw smell of its powerful currency. There is an orgiastic dimension to the opening of a new book with its hint of conquest and power acquisition. In the copious mating of minds, certain authors and writers become lifelong lovers.

    Snooper reads books as if there is no tomorrow, and with a punitive passion. It must be confessed that sometimes, a lot of these books are mnemonically stolen from libraries and bookshops, so to say, by standing for hours and absorbing their essential content. This was a habit acquired from desperate youth which has refused to go away. There used to be a legendary professor of Physics at Ife who was so poor as a youth that he acquired his tertiary degree by going to the library and directly downloading the abstruse and impossible equations into his brains.

    Yours sincerely is currently reading two books. Frank Kokori’s memoir on the express orders of Aremo Olusegun Osoba, and a beautiful twin-tome from Chuka Momah, one of Nigeria’s greatest sports writers ever. There will be more on these books in this column. In the last 12 months, Snooper has read the memoir of Justice Somolu, Ambassador Oladapo Fafowora, Smolette Alamu, Chief Akindele and the war memoir of General Alabi-Isama among others.

    In Pa Akindele’s memoirs, the most hilarious but chilling moment came when the tempestuous and irascible Brigadier Murtala Mohammed blitzed into his office service pistol blazing. Without any formality, Mohammed warned the old man that he would shoot him anytime he had the temerity to query his memo again. Akindele wondered whether if his military commission had come through, Mohammed would have had the audacity to threaten his superior officer. As head of state, the general later duly apologised to the old man.

    Such are the joys of reading. If we are ever to achieve our potential as a country, we must bring back the old Public Library system in its modern incarnation. As usual, the proactive Lagos State government is already taking some steps in this direction.

  • The progress of former progressives

    The progress of former progressives

    It is one of the great paradoxes of Nigerian history that the most vicious and venal reactionaries are often former progressives. Given the enormous damage they subsequently cause to the progressive cause, the question must now be asked as to whether they were ever progressive at all in the first instance or mere ideological choir boys chanting what they hardly understood or barely believed in.

    Some of them may even be innocent victims of political disorientation or mere wannabes looking for a political platform to actualise their legitimate ambition. Or in some extreme cases, this crisis of ideological orientation can be traced to the political equivalent of gender confusion or some more profound case of genital conflation which produces political hermaphrodites.

    As it is now being revealed in the twilight of their political career, it is even possible that a few of our progressive avatars were nominal conservatives who cheated demystification by sheer good luck. Rather than hurling insults and invectives at each other, it may be better to understudy the very notion of progressive politics in order to lay bare the structure of contradictions that power politics at any given time and place and the radical restructuring of the status quo which happens to be the hallmark of progressive politics.

    It may well be that we have all along been confusing an abiding preference for modernity and modernisation which is the default temperament of the majority of the Yoruba people as well as the template for their pre-colonial and post-colonial politics with progressive ideology which is marked by a clear and intellectually sustained preference for the radical reorganisation of the existing order.

    To say that the Yoruba are naturally progressive because of their instinctive preference for modernity and the modernisation project may well be true. But it does not exhaust the possibilities of the term. In the same individual, the same people and the same society, the conservative may well coexist and cohere with the progressive until a defining crisis forces one tendency to supplant the other. .

    As we have seen in the case of Dubai, Singapore and the Asian Tigers, it is quite possible for great modernising drives to be sustained by or anchored on conservative politics which is suspicious of the radically disruptive. Yet by creating a potent and prosperous middle class, these conservative societies have already provided the future nursery beds of radical discontent with the existing status quo.

    With the resounding victory of Governor Rauf Aregbesola in the Osun gubernatorial election, a new vista has opened up in the perpetual struggle between progressives and former progressives in the old western region of Nigeria. It was a major political rout and electoral shellacking of the Yoruba conservatives and sundry mainstream apostles of federal power.

    Yet some rabid ideologues of the right and their ethnic carrion feeder collaborators are already insinuating that having captured forty two per cent of the total votes cast, the PDP is clearly ascendant in this heartland of Yoruba progressive politics. They have conveniently forgotten that this was the same state they claimed to have legitimately ruled between 2003 and 2010 when they were dislodged by judicial justice. What happened to that majority of their imaginary hallucinations?

    In the 2011 elections, Aregbesola completely cleaned out the entire state in a brilliant display of total politics. Was it possible to proceed from nothing to this electoral substantiality?  It is obvious that this is all part of the anticipatory approval of the looming electoral heist their principal is preparing to foist on the entire nation come 2015. The PDP has been hoisted by the petard of its own lies and electoral chicaneries.

    For Aregbesola, it has been a close shave indeed, but they have not managed to touch his shrubby beard. That magical goatee should be preserved for posterity and in the interest of electoral sanity in Nigeria. Having captured the old Ondo province, had the PDP succeeded in overrunning Osun State through its blatant intimidation and electoral cajolery, it would have been a straight dash to the sea through Oyo and Ogun..

    Like his illustrious warrior forebears did in 1840 at the Jalumi battle, Aregbesola has managed to turn the tide against federal invaders. Like all those who have tried to turn Yorubaland into a theatre of war using Yoruba renegades, Jonathan will learn his lesson the hard way. By trying once again to humiliate the Yoruba people and rob them of their electoral preference, the federal authorities have roused a slumbering bear. The magnitude of Aregbesola’s victory will appear in bold relief as we slouch towards 2015. We may yet have to thank the federal authorities.

    Before taking a look at the immediate future and its portents, we have chosen to take a retrospective glance at the immediate past by republishing an article which first appeared on this page about four years ago.

  • History 101 for political renegades

    As the progressive forces look set to reclaim their traditional political redoubt of the old west, one can feel a mood of upbeat defiance and rugged optimism sweeping through the region. There is a sense in which it feels like the end of another inglorious era in Yoruba politics or what is known by the fastidious French as a fin de siece.

    But since history is full of paradoxes, it also feels like just the end of a particular beginning rather than the beginning of a particular end.  In this modern equivalent of the War of the Roses, a battle is only the culmination of an engagement between opposing forces and not necessarily the end of hostilities. It is a small arc within a wider arc of history in a long revolution full of stunning victories and equally daring retreats.

    Although ideologically and intellectually vanquished, the Yoruba reactionaries may yet regroup under the federal might with a new retrogressive war-cry, but that is if the federal might itself were to remain federal or mighty. There is a time for everything and nothing remains forever, not even oppression which often has to change its hue in order to accommodate new realities.

    All of which is to say that it doesn’t really matter which way the Osun Tribunal proceeds. All over the political ramparts of the old west, the forces of retrogression and their mongrel offspring have their back to the wall. The entire region is in ferment. The fat lady is walking towards the stage with roly-poly assurance.

    If it pleases their lordships, they may choose to prolong the misery of a government and party in total disarray by a few months. It simply means the end will be even more cataclysmic. And who can query their wisdom? It was the great Mike Tyson who wryly noted that he knew of certain blows that can make a heavyweight boxer crash to the canvas many cynical minutes after delivery. Let it be with the mainstream adventurers in the old west.

    But for this politically turbulent region, an epoch also seems to be coming to an end. Just as oppression changes colour, the forces of resistance also undergo critical transformation in terms of engagement and in terms of the men and material they have been saddled with. Adjustments have to be made to accommodate new developments. Since you cannot step into the same battlefield twice, you cannot also fight new battles with old weapons and strategies.

    In the event, this is the first time you have in power in several parts of the old west people who are not direct disciples of Obafemi Awolowo but who seem to buy into the progressive ideals and ideology dominant in the region. Twenty three years after the demise of the late sage and with a new generation of voters who grew up without his overpowering aura, it may no longer be enough to swear by the old man’s name, or to appeal to him directly.

    But as the old political wizard from Ikenne recedes into the background, we must still pity the mainstreamers. They seem to have read their history books upside down, that is if they ever completed a history book in the first instance. When Zik urged the late Sardauna of Sokoto that they should forget their differences, the great grandson of Othman Dan Fodio famously retorted that it was more important that they should understand their differences.  This is the ideological and intellectual tragedy of our modern day mainstreamers.

    A gifted and outstanding political strategist, the scion of the Sokoto caliphate never surrendered his semi-theocratic vision of the modern nation-state to any mainstream. It is a troubling and unviable proposition all right, but the great man never wavered in his granite determination to remould modern Nigeria as a semi-feudal fiefdom. All he did was to identify acolytes and collaborators all over the country willing to subscribe to this quaint and anomalous notion of the modern state.

    This was no political crime. He had the force of history and political culture to back him. He was even willing to surrender the levers of the state and their immense leverages to non-native believers. After all, Saladin, the great Islamic conqueror and ruler, was of Kurdish extraction. Abubakar Tafawa-Balewa himself belonged to an endangered minority ethnic group from the old Bauchi province.

    The problem, then, is not the mainstream but what you bring to the mainstream. If you surrender your own political and cultural dominant for a mess of federal pottage, it is your business. Obafemi Awolowo, the Sardauna’s greatest political adversary, despite being co-opted to the mainstream at a time of grave national crisis, never surrendered his unflinching belief in the destiny of Nigeria as a progressive modern nation-state based on  rationality and order.

    In book after book and tract after tract, the Ikenne titan railed and rallied against feudalism as a homophobic nuisance and the greatest threat to national aspiration. The feudal mindset was a veritable obstacle to the development of mental magnitude and the emancipation of human-kind as a free autonomous rational being capable of taking his destiny into his own hand.

    Just like his arch-rival, the Sardauna, Awolowo was stubbornly unyielding and unwilling to surrender his vision of Nigeria as a progressive, genuinely federated modern nation-state. If his antagonists were willing to cooperate with him and allow him to move the nation forward by moulding it along his visionary ethos for the benefit of everybody so be it. If not, tough luck to Nigeria.

    It was a collision of altars and of mutually contradictory and savagely antagonistic worldviews. But Awolowo did not just emerge from nowhere. He was at once a product and great beneficiary of what is known as the political unconscious of his Yoruba people, their progressive libertarian outlook and their fiercely robust sense of self-worth.

    It is to be noted that those progressives who jumped into the mainstream without their battlements and order of battle always come back in political body bags. On the other hand an early mainstreamer like MKO Abiola who finally saw through the charade and chicanery was also brought back home in a body bag. It may have to do with an ancestral curse, but it also has to do with the political consequences of surrendering the initiative to the adversary.

    If anybody calls the Yoruba republican monarchists, he would not be wide of the mark. This apparent contradiction would probably have been resolved in favour of full modernity or some compromised variant had they been allowed to follow the trajectory of their own history without colonial irruption.

    For two centuries before colonial conquest, the Yoruba had been locked in a battle of wits and will with their kingship institution, relentlessly subverting the system from within through periodic eruptions of rebellions and civil disobedience. By this they had hoped to tame and domesticate the institution by curing it of its grosser and more tyrannical absurdities. Some of their subversive lyrics and wittily profane proverbs attest to this battle royale.

    In the old Oyo Empire, a tyrannical Basorun Gaa was eventually subdued and summarily incinerated by an angry mob. After the old empire fell to Fulani incursion, the former prince Atiba who had converted the old Ago hamlet to a new Oyo was openly mocked, disdained and treated as a powerless feudal dinosaur by a succession of Ibadan warlords. The same fate was reserved for his successors. An “empire” without an army was a huge joke indeed.

    Meanwhile as the  Ibadan army went about establishing its suzerainty and hegemony over the rest of Yorubaland, it was also resisted and undermined militarily and politically from within. After Owu was defeated and sacked, old antagonisms culminated in the Ijaiye war with Kurunmi who was originally from a village near Ogbomosho squaring it up with the Ibadan generalissimos in a bitter military duel which reverberated throughout the region .

    Yet this was the same Ibadan army that stood between the Yoruba and Fulani subjugation. In the meantime, the Ijebu and the Egba armies made sure that they were frustrated in their territorial ambition by standing between them and the sea from where they could have obtained more deadly ordnance. The Ibadan army eventually met its Waterloo when the Ekiti people chose confrontation and rebellion rather than acquiesce to tyranny and feudal servitude.

    In Awolowo this healthy rebelliousness, stubborn self-will and fiercely independent outlook seemed to have crystallised in the way it normally happens when there is a total convergence between public destiny and the private destiny of the exceptional individual. Journeys end in lovers’ meeting, as Shakespeare famously noted.  Awolowo could not have imposed the feudalism and prebendalism of mainstreaming on his own people without falling on his political sword. That would have amounted to a historic retrogression and a negation of the gains of two hundred years of struggle. In times of stress, an organic nationality must throw up its own organic standard bearer.

    Those who have attempted to drag the Yoruba people into the mainstream of greed, opportunism, power pragmatism and its buccaneers’ ethos must now realise their historic folly. Judging from the irascible mien, the gloomy grimace of their current principal and the frozen, death-like grin of their minions, they seem to realise that the game has reached injury time. It is time indeed for restitution.

     

    First published in 2010.

  • A Day at the Jalumin Front

    A Day at the Jalumin Front

    Blessed is the land where every old battle is not fought anew. Even warriors get weary. Nevertheless, you must set forth much earlier than dawn. Like an army of the night, you must move in the dead of the night. This meant that by 3 am in the morning, yours sincerely was already rumbling around the living room. It was a most punishing schedule, having gone to bed only two hours earlier in a life of endless intellectual disputations. Old Socrates who fell by the hemlock must be smirking somewhere.

    But this is not a scholar’s fare. Isaac Deutscher has famously warned the unarmed intellectual prophet to beware. Except as a mere suicidal flourish, you cannot fling out a pen against a hooded hoodlum armed with the inevitable A.K Kalashnikov, unless the pen also doubles as a potent grenade that is. Jalumin was where and when the Ibadan Army literally and figuratively turned the tide against the relentlessly advancing Fulani Jihadist cavalry. It translates roughly into a watery peril or drowning perish.

    Almost a century and half later, it was as if the Jalumin War was being re-enacted in the same Yoruba territory and preternaturally around the same spot. Oh Osogbo, the land of pristine dye! History repeats itself indeed. By a strange coincidence, one of the major protagonists, Rauf Adebisi Aregbesola, always reminds one of an ancient Yoruba generalissimo.

    With his gutsy fearlessness, his strategic brilliance, his extreme personal discipline and self-punishing willpower, Aregbesola could easily have passed for a major warrior in the Yoruba seventy five years of solitude and wars. But there is also an incredible playfulness and boyish humour about him which recall the zestful, witty and irreverent Basorun Ogunmola.

    Perhaps owing to its military provenance and its domestication and habituation of the military wing of the ruling class in professional politics, the Fourth Republic is a classic enactment of politics as the continuation of war by other means. The military tactics and strategies of ambush, deception, camouflage, surprise, stealth, siege and other complicated offensives have become standard fare. Politics is war. It is not a proposition for the fainthearted. It has been boon to soldiers in politics and other minatory musclemen.

    As you set out very early on the Lagos Ibadan Express road, you remember that almost everybody you spoke to had warned you to avoid Osun State, particularly on the D-Day.  The D-Day was the day of the advertised mega-rally of the APC. Federal troops had arrived ahead of the looming confrontation. They were not lurking with intent. It was an open display of federal might. The atmosphere was pregnant with mayhem and foreboding.

    Even some of your own relations had pleaded that you should avoid the Jalumin perimeter in particular and the whole environment in general. The entire place was crawling with armed men in mufti who had been ordered to deal with any interloper. A few days earlier, one received a frantic phone call from a notable professor at Ife who noted that he had just counted a fifty nine vehicle convoy snaking into town with masked men shooting wildly.

    It doesn’t get more threatening. The siege on Osun from a distance was even more comprehensive and threatening than the one that ensnared and felled Ekiti. But it is always better to stand up for something even if you are wrong than to fall for anything. In the current delirium of treachery, the whirlpool of opportunism and self-abasement, it is more honourable to stick to some ideals as a strategic imperative even when you find yourself with some strange bedfellows.

    Ideals last, but strange companies do not. Water must eventually find its level. This is the only way to institutionalise choice based on conviction and politics based on principles and ideological clarity. The transition from an authoritarian society to a truly modern polity is not a tea party. Long after the wayfarers have fallen by the wayside, long after the acrobats have completed their final somersault, the men and women of true conviction will still be standing.

    Yet after all has been said, the question still needs to be asked as to why the Nigerian post-colonial state is so prone and vulnerable to closure. Every ascendant group with its handful of collaborators recruited from all over the country simply barricade themselves in while the feeding frenzy is going on. Meanwhile, those who have been excluded pull and tug at the foundation until the temple comes crashing with a resounding bang.

    The origin of the nation itself in colonial predation and rapine is a major drawback. Despite the veneer of a civilising mission, the colonialists did not pretend that they had risked blood and limb in Africa for the pleasure and pastime of the conquered natives. As part of the decolonising project the colonial state ought to have witnessed a fundamental rebirth and humanisation to make it amenable to the hopes and aspirations of the captive populace. But what it witnessed was a mere indigenisation.

    The second drawback is the uneven level of consciousness and political development among the various constituting units which has made it impossible for a genuine national dialogue about the way forward several decades after the departure of the colonial masters. Ancient prejudices and ancestral horrors of past persecution hold sway making it impossible for core values that drive a modern nation to crystallise.

    In the event, every ascendant group tries to fill the void by imposing the inner core values of their ethnic formation even where these values are incompatible with the basic notions of modern nationhood. Like a restive horse, those at the receiving end of malignant federal power chafe and kick up a lot of dust.

    Despite this background of tumult and turbulence, all was quiet on the Lagos to Ibadan Express this early Tuesday morning. It had been drizzling all through, making everywhere wet and soggy. But there was an eerie calm and quiet everywhere. The traffic snafu occasioned by the ongoing rehabilitation of this principal arterial passage of the nation has been reduced to two major spots. It was early August. The corn was out, and so were the corn people.

    Very soon, you were passing through the ancient warrior city of Ibadan, The peculiar mess had largely disappeared. This metropolitan coliseum of urban affrays and equal opportunity mayhem was witnessing a massive transformation. The current dominant party in the west is not a congregation of saints. But judging by their urban renewal programmes and massive rural transformation, the west will not be in a hurry to forget them.

    Just as you descend the leafy escarpment of suburban Ibadan around the old Egbeda town into the precincts of Osun state, you began to pick the scent of battle. The bridge over the famed Osun river was in view just before the river began snaking its way through the massive Area Five forest reservation around Oke Alaguntan, through Mokore in Ijebu Igbo territory and onward to the Lagos lagoon.

    During the Yoruba mfecane, this was the backyard and backdoor route the Owu people took to their present domain after a protracted siege led to their eventual dislodgment from their homestead. In the fifties, elephants from the reservations were occasionally sighted drinking and clowning by the bank of the river. It was the same vegetation belt that straddles the other side of the river and what is known as Igbo Elerin. (The forest of elephants) If you are an ancient big game hunter, the colonial demarcation of territory only existed in the colonial imagination.

    By now, you have crossed the Osun bridge into Osun State proper, and political strife was no longer in the imagination but a concrete and throbbing reality. A huge poster of a smiling Aregbesola welcomed you to this volatile political nerve centre of the Yoruba people. Aregbesola’s billboard was closely followed by another huge banner, this time of his main rival, Iyiola Omisore, bearing the apocalyptic appellation of Atari Ajanaku or the skull of the elephant.

    It had begun to drizzle rather heavily and the elephants are in a mortal clinch. You must pity the grass and the grass root. Police presence became obtrusive and rather invasive.  Heavily armed and stern-looking, the state enforcers motioned to you to advance to be recognised and then glumly waved you on. It was all very professional, but you would rather they had been looking for Malam Shekau..

    By the time you got to the Gbongan junction, the rains had gone completely berserk, drooling endlessly as it drilled the ground without mercy. Muddy floods took over the Bye pass under construction as vehicular movements splurged to a halt in the sea of dirt and murk. Will this historic deluge do it for you and the mega rally?  Not on its life, you swore in fury and frustration.

    Almost one hour and barely one kilometre after, one began to think the unthinkable. There was a huge back pile of stalled vehicles and tempers began to flare.At some point  near the old Ejemu village, the makeshift bridge appeared to have disappeared in a muddy pool. Since this was also Snooper’s territory, one began to wonder whether the rogue PDP had enlisted the services of crack rainmakers nearby, after all, all is fair in political warfare.

    Since turning back was virtually impossible, one was minded at this point to make a detour at Sekona and on to General Akinrinade’s Yakoyo fortress for an early meal of pounded yam and quails. Or one could veer off into Tonkere and then exit into the Ife suburb through the old OAU Agric farm. In an earlier incarnation, this was the preferred NADECO Highway of Unife Student union stalwarts retreating from fierce teargas.

    But perish the devilish thought. The sky lifted miraculously, and so did the muddy pool. Nothing was now standing between one and Osogbo, except heavy security presence. There is light indeed at the end of the tunnel. Osogbo was in a carnival-like mood. It was as if the entire town had risen in honour of the presiding governor.  Young men, old men; women and old wenches, they were all fiercely brandishing brooms. And they were singing and dancing in defiant scorn of the establishment. Let no one make any mistake about this. These people will protect their vote.

    It was impossible to reach the stadium. After almost two hours of trying, one gave up, jumped out of the car and started trekking towards the stadium. Even by the standards of mega rallies, the crowd was unprecedented, spilling in every direction. After being repeatedly roughed up and serially elbowed in the hurly burly, one began inching his way back to the main road.

    And lo, it was Aregbesola approaching. Heavily goggled,  he was perched atop a huge Gaiser- like vehicle as if he was descending from the clouds. This was magical reality at its political summit. The crowd swooned in affection and admiration. With his fancy footwork and dancing aplomb, Aregbesola is a master of the crowd;  an iron chancellor of the proletariat and urban hoi polloi. Whether he wins freely or is made to go under fraudulently, this is a particularly dangerous moment for the Yoruba plutocracy and its reactionary grandees who are stuck in a time-warp.

    As the convoy moved nearer, Aregbesola spotted yours sincerely where he was marooned among the roadside crowd like a footloose flaneur and beamed an ecstatic sign of victory. Sensing the presence of a ranking nobility of civilian unrest, the urban stalwarts immediately began clearing the path back to the stadium for a bemused Snooper. They were joined by some native drummers all the way from Gbongan.

    In the event, the actual rally was something of an anticlimax, despite the brilliant and stirring rhetoric and a splendid speech delivered in flawless vernacular by Olagunsoye Oyinlola. It will be strange if three former governors of this state and the incumbent turn out to be wrong. The good people of Osun state have already spoken with their feet. By yesterday, they would have done the same with their vote. It is a loud and insistent clamour for good and accountable governance over the chicaneries of belly politics. Let no one tamper with their vote. Let no one toy with the tail of a cobra. It has been quite a day at the Jalumin Front.

  • Ebola on my mind

    With Boko Haram rampaging in the north of the nation and the Ebola plague threatening to get a foothold in the south, the doomsday prediction about the Nubian’s last sigh is beginning to look like some divinely ordained soothsaying. No nation has been able to survive the impossible combination of natural and man-made calamities. If a nation must survive a plague, it must have good leaders and if a nation already suffers from a political plague it must not add a natural plague to its list of calamities.

    It was Manuel Castells, the great Spanish-American sociologist, who once dubbed AIDs, the Ebola virus, leprosy and other pestilential afflictions which have turned sub-Saharan Africa into a human hellhole as “epidemics of dereliction”. It is a haunting metaphor, and anybody who has seen how these scourges strip the human body of its last shred of honour and integrity must know what it means.

    But it does seem as if there are epidemics and there are epidemics. If natural epidemics waste the human body, what happens in a situation where the state is so stripped of its honour and integrity as to become an institutional derelict? An epidemic of state dereliction?  What then happen when in the same nation-space you have an epidemic of dereliction, that is natural calamity, combining with an epidemic of state dereliction, which is man-made catastrophe? Something new always comes out of Africa indeed.

  • Let the people be

    Let the people be

    History is what hurts. In the end, perhaps nothing can beat the profound wisdom of that pithy observation .The impersonal and unfathomable forces of history are such that they often mock our bravest and boldest attempts to alter the course and trajectory of events. What eventually confronts us may well be the very opposite of our wish and what we have willed into existence. Yet despots and dictators persist, thus accelerating the process that will end in the mutual ruination of the contending classes.

    When we rig elections, we alter the wishes and collective aspirations of the people. It is not only democracy and development that suffer collateral damage. The principal casualty is the insight we deny ourselves into the intriguing and perplexing dynamics of a fraught postcolonial society, the demographic shifts, the political turns and twist, and the emergent sociology of contending nationalities in a multi-national society.

    Of all the hostile take-over bids that we have witnessed in the history of the country, and in the history of overbearing federal administrations, none is as chilling and hair raising as the one currently unfurling in the South West of the nation. Despite the obvious friendliness and affability of the Yoruba people, there must be something about their political society which induces federal panic and irrational fright.

    Once again, it is the South West that is the target of this hostile take over bid. The omens are dire indeed. The paradox is baffling, and it speaks to the core contradiction of a bitterly polarised nation. In order to have elections, the entire region must be placed on a war footing. But we must take due historical cognisance of the grave import and the collective danger this rampart militarisation represents for the nation.

    In 1979 as soon as it became obvious even to the blind that the NPN roller coaster  was unstoppable , Professor Sam Aluko issued a statement which cut quickly to the chase. “In the unlikely event that the UPN does not win at the centre”, Aluko began and we now paraphrase, “the already elected UPN governors must henceforth concentrate their energies and talent on the states they had won in order to turn them into models of good governance which the rest of the country would find irresistible when the next election would be called in four years”.

    It was like dressing the likely in an unlikely garb. Aluko might have been indulging his streak of plucky and eccentric irreverence. The elections so far declared at that point showed the NPN in an unassailable lead. But the statement was also an ironic tribute to Aluko’s faith in the democratic destiny of the nation and in the rationality of the electoral process.

    With Awo firmly in charge, leadership by example became the credo and mantra of the UPN governors. Without an exception, they rolled up their sleeves and went to work. From the dashing and workaholic LKJ in Lagos State to the scholarly and methodical Ambrose Alli in the old Bendel, the UPN states rapidly seized the imagination of the nation as models of purposeful governance. Working with the same master plan and vision, they were a study in coherence and party cohesiveness.

    But rather than learning from this local model, the ruling NPN had other ideas. The very notion of purposeful governance in any enclave of the country showed them up as irresponsible buccaneers. And since they cannot build, they must disrupt and disorganise those who can. Two years into the return of democratic rule, they organised a banishment through impeachment for Balarabe Musa, the implacably radical governor of the old Kaduna State, who had been a thorn in their flesh.

    This turned out to be a mere dress rehearsal for something more potent and destabilising. By the time the 1983 elections came up, the NPN had perfected its hostile take-over bid of opposition stronghold. When the smoke cleared, they had made away with both Oyo and Ondo States in the very heartland of opposition supremacy. The violent upheaval and its poisonous effluence eventually led to a military take over. The country was back to square one.

    It may be useful to go further back in history. In 1954, the ruling Action Group lost the federal election in the region to the opposition NCNC party. The people of the region, particularly the urban denizens, fell for the hostile propaganda that the Action Group was there to deprive them of the proceeds of their punitive toil even as it imposed on the populace a taxation regimen of abundant misery and harsh exploitation. The anarchist credo was that no tax was the best taxation and the people fell for the seductive lore.

    The defeat turned out to be a blessing in disguise because it accurately mirrored the feeling of the people, whether justified or not. But rather than collapse in crushing defeat and rejection, the Action Group rolled up its sleeves and went back to explain itself and its programme in a more effective manner. Luckily for the party, the gains of its massive modernisation and transformational project had begun to trickle in. The West had never had it so good. The doubts evaporated and the party recorded a resounding victory in the next general election.

    But the ruling coalition could not abide the social engineering feats of its progressive rival. In what was to become a tested template for future counter-progressive operations, it engineered a fracturing of the Action Group early in 1962 and subsequently followed this up with a parliamentary putsch that saw the ruling party become an opposition in its own redoubt.

    The nature of political crime is such that you have to keep committing even more egregious crimes in order to cover up the original crime. Both the 1964 federal election and the 1965 regional election were so violently and intolerably rigged that it became obvious that the federal authorities had abandoned all pretences to electoral sanity. The sovereignty of the electorate became a sick joke; a solidarity of the disenfranchised.

    Unlike the refined vaporisations we are witnessing, the methods employed were so crude and primitive that the ritual of voting became a desecrated farce.  The West descended into an orgy of violence and anarchy. A violent military take over became virtually inevitable  The result is the complete decapitation of all political institutions in the nation whose telling effects can still be felt till date.

    Yet, it can be seen in retrospect that apart from institutionalising political corruption and imposing the selectorate on the electorate, the ultimate outcome of this culture of colossal rigging has been the enthronement of what was feared in a more potent and insidious manner. The annulment of the 1993 presidential election which was the hallmark of supersonic rigging led directly to the emergence of an Obasanjo who has proved more fatal to the old northern establishment in a way an Abiola presidency could never have, and circuitously to a Jonathan who may well provide the coup de grace.

    It has also removed from political contention the north’s ultimate political joker: the military party. Had an Abiola or an Awolowo in particular been allowed to rule, their rational humanism would have allowed a feudal North to deal with the consequences of deliberate underdevelopment in a more humane manner than the radical anarchy we are currently witnessing.

    Electoral irrationality produces political irrationality which in turn leads to a completely irrational society. Now the North is trapped between a Jonathan presidency with its legendary cultural insensitivities and a Buhari presidency which will put the fear of the lord into the North’s surviving feudal dinosaurs. Any wonder then that we still do not know our presidential flag bearers six months before a nation-defining presidential election?

    In 2003, the South West gave Obasanjo the tacit nod and acquiescence to do the needful in the region to retain the presidency but to leave the region alone to pursue its independent political fortunes. It was a sophisticated political message. But Obasanjo blatantly misread the small print to mean an endorsement of the electoral subjugation of the entire region. The irony was that had Obasanjo left the AD severely alone, it would have imploded from its own internal contradictions, being a motley assemblage of outpatient ideological schizophrenics and progressive reactionaries.

    But by biting more than he was asked to chew, Obasanjo gave fillip to the more organised elements of a dying organisation and a causus belli. With the obvious failure of his mainstream mantra, the region was up in arms against Obasanjo by the time of the 2007 election. This was ostentatiously rigged. It was Obasanjo’s parting shot of defiant contempt for his own people.

    But by the 2011 election, the entire region went after Obasanjo’s political jugular. Thus the fate that the proud and tenacious Owu warlord was trying to avoid, that of a two time leader of Nigeria without any political constituency, overtook him with iron severity even in his own backyard. What Shakespeare calls the whirligig of time has brought its own revenge.

    Let Jonathan ponder on the turbulent history of the country. Nigeria may be an impossible colonial contraption, but there are certain imponderable equations insinuated into its grand architecture which makes it impossible for a despot of any hue to hold sway for long. The ethnic alliances of today are not what they were in 1999, not in 1979 and certainly not in 1959. In January 1966, the entire Western Region lay blitzed and cowering under the onslaught of the federal might. But by October of that very year, it was the same West that was adjudicating between the North and its former collaborators and hatchet men.

    The president should learn from history if he does not want to imperil his own fortunes as well as the political fortunes of his people in a post-Jonathan polity. As we can see from the foregoing, rigging and hostile take over bids which amount to forcibly tampering with the destiny of a people have a way of returning the compliments in an even more devastating manner.

  • Okon submits application for paternity leave

    It has been raining cats and dogs in Lagos. The sky looks like a bereaved old woman who has wept herself into a wrinkled sunken mass. Whether this is a divine metaphor for the state of the nation or some apocalyptic forewarning, Snooper cannot say. Nature can also be profligate in its bounties. The rains are part of some ancient fertility rites, a boon for baby boomers, in  a manner of speaking.

    But you can trust the indefatigable Okon to cotton in on the act. On Saturday morning, instead of preparing early breakfast, the rogue Romeo barged in with a bulging file brimming with dog-eared receipts and assorted counterfeit bills. Before one could ask what he was up to, the crazy chap erupted.

    “Oga, since dem Fashola people don see reason, I wan apply for dem multiple paternity leave. I get dem four women who dey carry pikin for Okon”, the mad boy snorted.

    “Meaning what?” Snooper snapped.

    “Na dem papa born dem and na me give dem belle”, Okon retorted with a fiendish grin of self-satisfaction.

    “Okon, go away, you are a fool. The law recognises only monogamy”, snooper explained, suppressing his mirth.

    “Oga dat one na burukutu law. I no dey do dem mahogany. Mahogany na hard wood. Okon dey fire only dem rubber bullet.” Okon sneered.

    “But still, four women in a row!! Okon, since when have you become a baby factory?” snooper asked in jest.

    “Ah oga, dat one I sabi well well”, Okon began with a satanic wink, “he get time like dat when I dey do night shift for dem baby factory for Oko Oba. One night dem come bring eleven girls from Abakaliki like dat and dem say make man start work. As I come dey drink paraga for manpower, dem mad ibo girl come seize dem bottle and come hammer Okon him head. Naim I come pick race like dem antelope for Itigidi. Dem ibo crooks still dey owe me for overtime, but I no fit go near dem place lailai”.

    “Case closed”, snooper crowed with a measure of satisfaction.

    “Ha, oga I hope dis dem paternity thin no be dem offside trap. You know dem Fashola boy na good footballer.”, Oko noted fearfully.

    “Why?” snooper demanded.

    “Becos dem never give me dem Certificate of Occupation for Shikira. I don waka sotey for Alausa, and na so so promise. If only I fit take dem Abakaliki girls there make dem teach dem sense”, Okon lamented. On that note, snooper quietly pushed out the crazy boy.

  • A gathering of crocodiles

    A gathering of crocodiles

    With the hosting of a foreign flag on what is supposed to be Nigerian soil in the little known northern town of Gamboa, and with the security forces showing little appetite for swiftly terminating the disgraceful affront, Nigeria is effectively partitioned. Whether we like to hear it or not, and whether we want it mentioned or not, a great horror movie is unfolding not just for Nigerians but the Black race as a whole. Yet like paralysed participants in the Cabinet of Dr Caligari, the German horror film, we appear too dazed and confounded to comprehend what is going on.

    To be sure, this is not the first time Nigeria would be so symbolically dismembered. The Biafran flag was hoisted on a larger swathe of the nation and for a longer period. But not with this kind of psychotic daring and in your face bravura. In any case, Biafra never left anybody in doubt about its intention to secede from Nigeria. It was a textbook secession. The hosting of the flag was the final act of formal consecration after the declaration of independence from Nigeria.

    As far as rituals of secession go, the leadership of Biafra adhered scrupulously and rigorously to internationally stipulated norms and independence was formally declared after a Consultative Assembly mandated the old eastern region leadership to lead its people out of Nigeria. Thus, the former Colonel Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, freshly cashiered from the Nigerian Army, became the leader of a new nation. The rest is history.

    In the case of the Boko Haram insurgency, a rag tag militia has now snowballed into a full blown military force that has gravely imperilled the territorial sanctity of Nigeria, and one that is bent on imposing its weird form of a theocratic state on a substantial swathe of the nation if not the entire country. There is no Northern Consultative Forum as such in sight. There are no Boko Haram officers to be dismissed as yet. The only thing we have going is President Jonathan’s offhand declaration that there are already Boko Haram cells in the sanctuary of his own administration.

    Yet the insurrectionist sect has succeeded beyond its wildest expectation, laying to waste and complete ruination the northernmost fringes of the nation. If the federal forces were to withdraw from this troubled and tormented region at this minute, we might as well say goodbye to Nigeria as we know it.

    In a development that points at some international conspiracy beyond the government’s tenuous grasp on reality, the murderous sect has the entire north within its rifle sight, and it seems able to strike at will any target of choice even in the federal capital of Abuja.  It is now beginning to probe the Southern underbelly of the nation in what promises to be an apocalyptic endgame for Nigeria. History has become a nightmare from which we are trying to wake up.

    At the purely symbolic level, the cost to the psyche of the nation and its fabled military has been quite prohibitive and out of proportion. The old northern establishment has had its totems and escutcheons of political and spiritual authority completely devastated and ground to dust. The state and its paraphernalia of authority and coercive disincentives have been shown to be incapable of protecting, not to talk of maintaining, the territorial integrity of the nation.

    At the last count, the Boko Haram sect has accounted for General Mohammed Shuwa, a civil war stalwart and one of the finest officers of the old Nigerian army. It has killed the Emir of Gwoza, with his fellow traditional travellers being lucky to escape after they were dramatically abducted in broad daylight.

    It almost succeeded in dispatching the late Emir of Kano, Ado Bayero, until natural death mercifully intervened. It has summarily liquidated scores of notable politicians and clerics. It has successfully cordoned off a huge chunk of the nation known as Sambisa Forest. Meanwhile, it continues to hold in maniacal custody dozens of female pupils summarily rounded up in the middle of the night from Chibok, despite all national and international entreaties.

    It has continued to cock a snook at the federal authorities, treating them with implacable contempt, even as it spurns all offers of negotiations. From its redoubt, it has continued to issue threats undermining the fundamental raison d’etre of the state. Perhaps as an uncoordinated response to its deep humiliation, the military are beginning to show a dangerous edginess and a nervous disregard for civil populace and its ranking authorities. For political astrologers reading the horoscope of impending national calamity, it doesn’t get more bothersome.

    Last Wednesday, the chicks came home to roost, or rather the crocodiles gathered once again on the banks of the River Kaduna. A desperate and determined suicide bomber almost succeeded in eliminating General Mohamadu Buhari, another civil war veteran, former military Head of state and persistent presidential hopeful, from the political equation. Looking at the scene of carnage and combustion, it feels more like Islamabad or Afghanistan than Nigeria.

    The horrific consequences of Buhari’s elimination and in Kaduna of all places are better left to the imagination. For the better part of the Fourth Republic, this formerly pleasant and placid former capital of the old north and administrative seat of Lord Lugard has known its fair share of sectarian and religious upheavals. A tense truce prevails, but the city remains effectively partitioned between a Muslim north and a Christian south.

    In a clumsy and inarticulate manner, Kaduna mirrors the endemic fault lines of the nation itself, and its sorry and sordid history of elite-manipulated divisions. Yet it has not always been like this. In its heydays of glory, a breezy and cosmopolitan Kaduna that welcomed all and which served as the headquarters of the Nigerian military cum political complex and its emerging lions mirrored the strengths and possibilities of this gifted nation.

    Anybody who has spent his prime in Kaduna in the glorious seventies like this columnist, must know what we are talking about. It was pure bliss and blessing on the scale of the beatitude. As a fresh post Youth Corps graduate, Snooper spent a whole year in the cosy and plush ambience of Tourist Lodge  on Dawaki Road. The owner, Idris Morrow of the fabled Morrow bread, was as eccentric and impossibly kind as they come.

    Snooper recalls launching into a tirade in Yoruba language one afternoon about the quality of the food and the possible racket that was going on to the hearing of Idris Morrow. Alhaji Morrow sat glum, stony-faced and seemingly inattentive. At dinner later, Idris Morrow walked up to yours sincerely in his inimitable dancing gait.

    “Omo mi, se o ti jeun?” (My son, have you eaten?”) Idris Morrow asked with a furtive smile in Yoruba as Snooper froze in his seat . Idris Morrow then calmly sat down and explained that he was actually born in Lagos and had lived in Yaba. “The problem with you boys of nowadays is that you are impatient”, the old man concluded with a grinning flourish. Thereafter developed a father and son bonding with the great man initiating Snooper to the rarefied social circuits of the Kaduna power aristocracy. Every Saturday, our first port of call was at Mrs Akilu, the wife of the late respected technocrat.

    There is a sense in which it can be claimed that the history of modern Nigeria is irretrievably wedded to the history of Kaduna. It was from here that Lord Lugard proclaimed his famous and infamous Doctrine of Dual Mandate which forcibly grafted the new nation to the apron strings of the metropolitan order. It was also from here that the late Ahmadu Bello began his great feat of social engineering which saw to the emergence of a new northern political, military and technocrat elite which placed the north at premium political advantage.

    But it was from Kaduna again that Ahmadu Bello’s feat provoked its violent political antithesis when a group of impatient young majors rose in brisk fury and radical distemper to abridge the First Republic. Forty eight years after this set of crocodiles swam out of the River Kaduna to consume everything in sight, Nigeria has known neither peace nor durable progress. It has been forty eight years of solitude and still counting.

    It is just as well that this great city is named after the humongous crocodiles that once lazed away on its muddy bank. Only god knows what havoc these fellows must have cost the unwary natives. But their human incarnation have cost the nation even more. The Nigerian political elite are a bunch of crocodiles who cry while feasting on the entrails of the nation. But this meal cannot go on forever.

    Had General Buhari been killed last Wednesday, the crocodiles would have swum out of Kaduna river again in what might have become a Nigerian version of Hiroshima. We thank God for small mercies. But let this remind the political elite of how close we are to the precipice of no return. While the madmen in our midst only need to be lucky once, the nation has to keep being lucky.

    For the Daura-born general, it is a win-win situation. If the attempt on his life can be traced to the Boko Haram sect, it will from now on be extremely stupid and irresponsible for anybody to cast him in the satanic role of a fanatic and sympathiser. If on the other hand, the assassination bid can be traced to some other rogue elements, it may have the unintended consequences of softening Buhari’s image and solidifying many undecided Nigerians behind his cause.

    What the general should now do his to parlay his new found authority of personal  outrage into playing an even more constructive role in the rescue of the north from its self-inflicted wounds and the redemption of the nation from an own goal. He doesn’t have to be fixated on the presidency. What saved him from that mortal embrace may yet turn out to be a higher calling.

  • A wonderful day for a wonderful man

    To the lush and commodious bowels of Eko Hotel and Suites last Sunday for the seventieth birthday bash of our gifted senior friend, Chief Ajibola Ogunsola, immediate past Chairman of the Punch newspaper group and illustrious scion of the illustrious Ogunsola family of Ibadan.

    Snooper has rarely seen so many truly illustrious and distinguished Nigerians gather in honour of an exceptional citizen. The Nigerian illuminati have a way of honouring one of its favoured children who have done the nation very proud. After the death of his brother, Chief Moyo Aboderin, Ogunsola had taken the Punch group by the scruff of the neck from the brink of bankruptcy and looming receivership to the commanding heights of newsprint respectability.

    With the no-nonsense and implacably principled Ogunsola at the helm of affairs, the paper survived several military ambushes and unfriendly fire to become the voice of the voiceless in the struggle against military despotism in Nigeria. It was a daring and courageous thing to do, but then Ogunsola is from the city of fabled warriors.

    In the event, it was a moveable feast, straight out of the pages of The Great Gatsby but without the quirky histrionics of the great American fictional hero. Wit, raconteur, intellectual and celebrated agnostic, Ajibola is a man of refined taste and rarefied public school elegance. Nothing escapes his meticulous attention to details and the mathematical rigour of his scrutiny. But if you are able to survive the quiet but exacting interrogation of your credentials, you are likely to find just below the surface a man of immense kindness and memorable generosity of spirit. Here is wishing the chief many happy returns.

  • They will be singing for Rauf

    Snooper has just received a zodiac message on the morning of Aregbesola’s re-election. It is not going to be a close call. There is a vision of school pupils of all hue dancing and singing for Rauf. In the muffled din of celebration, the lyrics are unforgettable. It goes like this.

    Our egg is better than your corn

    The yolk will save us from your yoke

    The albumen will become a timeless album of the mind

    Which will remind us of the wasted years of our fathers

    The growing infrastructure of our brains

    Will forever mock the shrinking structure of your stomach.