The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • The master and the Maracana

    The master and the Maracana

    Once again, the fourth June is here with us and there is excitement in the air.  Every four years in the month of June, global attention is riveted on the round puffery leather stuff that soccer sorcerers stroke and push round the field in a bid to outwit each other. The Mundial is the greatest sporting extravaganza in the history of friendly competition.  Yet it has once led to an actual shooting war in Latin America, and in Brazil this year it may herald the eruption of uncivil hostilities.

    But it is just as well that this year’s edition is taking place in the greatest footballing nation the world has seen, and in the greatest human monument ever built for the game: The iconic Maracana Stadium in Rio de Janeiro. As far as eerie symbolism goes, nothing can beat that. We live in a world where symbols mock cymbals and associated ramparts.

    Football has become a global opiate. It has virtually replaced religion as the opium of the people. For the gifted poor, it has also become a Baghdad flying carpet to stupendous wealth. Ask the new generation of Third World soccer Mafiosi who have played their way to magical riches.

    But it is also the case that football is the talisman of incompetent rulers, particularly in blighted and benighted Africa where human condition has deteriorated so sharply in the past quarter of a century. It seems that the more underdeveloped a country is, the more overdeveloped its football is. Once the Green Eagles are playing, and playing very well, Nigerians are willing to suspend hostilities, their endemic animosities and mutual loathing.

    It often comes to point when patriotic activists secretly pray that the Eagles would lose so that we can get on with the serious business of storming the Bastille once and for all. In 1985, General Muhammadu Buhari suspended his annual leave in order to welcome home the victorious younger eagles, One still recalls the youthful General Gowon donning jerseys with the green Eagles after their continental triumph in 1973. Apart from the military, football is the glue that binds the nation together.

    There is one fabled genius who will be absent for the first time when the soccer fiesta opens in Brazil in a few days time. He is Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian master fabulist and one of the greatest novelists of all time who shed mortality for immortality a few weeks ago. But what has football got to do with writing? Plenty. When they reach the rarefied summit of human ingenuity, there is something absolutely magical about great soccer and great writing.

    Soccer is poetry wrought with the legs. At its most sublime moment, the master cadences of soccer, its finely calibrated momentum, the sheer bravura of its melody and the dazzling symphony reminds one of the greatest instances of prose writing. It is like watching a world-historic orchestra and having an orgasm. On that astral plane of human genius, there is nothing to separate great artistry, and there is no point setting up a division of labour.

    In novel after novel of stupendous beauty and extravagant lyrical power, the late Colombian wizard took us on a magical excursion of a fictional world in which myth and magic collide with modern science. Yet that was also the grim reality of Latin America. With its rich overlay and interweaving tapestry of native Indian and imported African cultures leavened by hegemonic western civilisation, Marquez’s Macondo could well be any Latin American country. The historic lot fell on the great Colombian to produce the most heady cocktail from this discordant witches’ brew.

    The irony of it all is that the real Brazil in all its contemporary chaotic splendour could well have been one of Marquez great fictional creations, minus the crazed Caudillos. Remote in the extreme, sprawling, far-flung and always with more than a generous hint of dark and anarchic possibilities, it is in Brazil that the collision of native Indian and African cultures with western civilisation has produced the world first soccer superpower.

    It is not surprising that the creative genius unleashed by this collision of cultural altars in Brazil should find its ultimate expression in the game of soccer. With his lithe and supple physique which can defy gravity in endless acrobatic possibilities, the typical Brazilian footballing prodigy often reminds one of a combination of barmy ballet and mad matador.

    There is also a hint of the joyously possessed Yoruba bata dancer and of the jaguar in the Amazon jungle. The names, at once outlandish and alluring, are altogether a different ball game. Garincha, Tastao, Pele, Revelino, Zico, Junior, Socrates, Eder, Rivaldo, Romario sound so delicious in their mellifluous musicality. Across the globe, they have spawned wild imitators. Sani Abacha, Nigeria’s former maximum ruler, was known as Obe the Pele in his football playing days.

    But of late, the magic has begun to wane. The hosting of the world cup has also coincided with huge social eruptions in Brazil. It would appear that while the people do not mind the soccer, the sex and the samba, they would want more of the science and social engineering which translate into life more abundant and the uplift of more people out of the poverty trap. Brazilians are discovering that no country has ever lived on soccer. Protests are erupting everywhere.

    Brazil will need all its luck to keep the hounds at bay. The Maracana stadium has been a site of a great national tragedy once before. That was 64 years ago when the Uruguayan national team unexpectedly piped Brazil at the world cup final sending the entire country down a spiral of mourning and wailing. If the masses storm the Maracana this time around, the Columbian master novelist, a great friend of the poor, would be chuckling to himself in his grave. Not even the greatest Latin American novelist could have come up with such a weird plot. Life is a great novel indeed.

  • Four years later, still at the mercy of Lionel Messi

    The modern game of soccer has a canny way of imitating politics. What with its offside traps, its sudden deaths, its professional fouls, penalty-inducing dives and injury time simulation of death. Like liberty-watch, football is a game of eternal vigilance. The exceptional footballer is often a great political general: technically accomplished, tactically sound and strategically alert. Bill Shankly, the great Liverpudlian coach, once noted: “Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it’s much more serious than that.”

    As an equal opportunity theorist, Snooper has been pondering the great interface, the organic connection, between a nation and its footballing fortunes ever since Henry Kissinger made the connection between football and national character. But national character, like culture, is not a fixed and permanent affair. After Paolo Rossi taught them a memorable lesson in 1982, the Brazilians have since learnt the hard way. But not so the Nigerians. In any society where a culture of impunity prevails, it is almost likely going to be reproduced in the sphere of soccer. No lesson is learnt because no lesson has been taught.

    We are still on the connection between national pride and soccer. When Brian Clough, a.k.a Cloughie, the great coach of the fabled Nottingham Forest club, was asked in 1982 why he was so cocksure that England would demolish West Germany in the world cup duel, he retorted that England had already beaten Germany twice. The whisky-besotted hell-raiser was not referring to football games. He was darkly hinting at the two world wars in which the less fancied English took the Germans to the cleaners. In the event, it was the Germans that sent the British packing.

    It was not until four years later, and at the next World Cup final in 1986, that Brian Clough, the super-English patriot, would meet his nemesis in the department of rabid nationalism. It was the legendary Argentinean soccer genius, Diego Amanda Maradona. When he was asked which of his two famous goals against England gave him the greater pleasure, you would have thought that the impish urchin from the slums of Buenos Aires will plump for the second which till date remains the purest expression of soccer genius on display. But the crazy one went for the first, on the grounds that scoring the goal was akin to picking the pocket of the plodding and clueless English.

    For the former pickpocket and denizen of the Argentinean underground, it was no doubt an enriching experience and one made infinitely more satisfying by the way and manner the Brits had trounced and humiliated Argentina during the Falkland War. You can win the actual war by military hook and political crook, but you can be defeated and outclassed in the soccer war. Till date, and in a spirit of comfortable national delusion, the Argentines still refer to the Falkland Island as the Malvinas.

    As history evolves, totems of national prestige and feel good often change and today the god of soccer has replaced the old god of nationalism which stalked and abraded Europe in the early twentieth century. Soccer is now the opium of nations, particularly underdeveloped nations. In Latin America, nations have actually gone to wars over soccer. In Nigeria, children do not remember Obafemi Awolowo as a hero or role model, but they worship “Oba-goal” Martins.

    The Americans have a great but troubling reply for their country’s seeming underperformance in the soccer department. The nation, they argue, cannot afford to have poor and underprivileged children practising soccer on the vast beaches when they should be in school. Neither can they afford potential real estate in the inner city converted to instant soccer fields. The vast sandy beaches and open ruins of the inner city are nursery beds for future footballing geniuses but they are also epicentres of disequilibrium and dysfunction.

    Unhappy indeed is the land that needs soccer heroes. For the past six weeks, Nigerians have worked themselves into a state of frenzy about how to stop Lionel Messi, the pint-sized Argentinean football prodigy, from inflicting maximum damage on the national psyche when the two soccer-crazy nations clash in the forthcoming final in South Africa.

    Smallish, sharp and built like an eel, Messi is the ultimate nightmare for the opposing player. Nimble of feet and supple of body, Messi glides effortlessly through defence ramparts like a fish in clotted ocean often leaving his opponents in humiliating and embarrassing circumstances. How to stop Messi has become a national obsession. Nigeria, it seems, is at the mercy of the merciless Messi.

    Messi has already stopped Nigeria once in the final of the FIFA junior world cup a few years back. In full flight, Messi resembles a play station, according to Arsene Wenger, the cerebral coach of Arsenal, after watching the ruthless runt single-handedly destroy his hapless team in a one-sided encounter a few weeks back. Messi punishes every single mistake with cruel precision. Give him half a chance and he converts. Run into him in the box with clumsy resolve and it is a penalty. Tackle him in frustration and the exit tunnel beckons.

    Anybody thinking that these are ordinary games is not conversant with zodiac signs and the science of political astrology.  Like great football teams, nations rise and fall following certain astral signs and signal occurrences in the universe. It was on November 25, 1953 that the magical Magyars, the great Hungarian football team, finally put an end to the English boast that because they gave football to the world, they were still the incomparable masters. Ferencs Puskas, a.k.a the galloping major, Kocsis , Nandor Hidegkuti, the unmarkable, deep lying attacker, and co made a mincemeat of the English.

    It is a cruel and exacting irony that the Green Eagles should lock horns with the Argentines on June 12, 2010. June 12 again?  That is not a date to be toyed with. It resonates and rubs the Nigerian psyche the wrong way. It was the day the modern Nigeria nation snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Whoever gave the Green Eagles that date is either a master of sly symbolism or a bearer of metaphysical portents. Iran, the other nation that toyed with that date, is still busy clearing hostile crowds from the streets almost a year after.

    But it is not as if Lionel Messi and the Argentineans cannot be stopped. Once again, it is the Italians who show the way. The Italians play highly technical and tactically proficient football. By resorting to structural and spatial marking, Inter-Milan were able to put Messi literally in his place a few weeks back. It was not a question of arduous man to man marking but of an intelligent cluster which unfurls like a well-primed fishing net trapping Messi in a seamless web of limbs as he begins his approach to the eighteen.

    Famously, Marco Tardelli, a principal architect of the glorious Italian winning squad of 1982, once noted of Maradona’s spectacular run on the English flat-footed defence which culminated in the most spectacular goal ever seen in a world cup. “If Diego had started that run in an Italian league, he would have ended it in a hospital”.

    In other words, if Maradona had managed to evade the close attention of Tardelli himself, he would almost certainly have run into the robust, hospital-friendly tackle of Franco Baresi or Antonio Cabrini; or the stretcher-inducing brutish double stud of the hugely misnamed Claudio Gentille, or the hard-hitting brace of Giuseppe Bergomi, an Italian of Libyan extraction. If all else fails, the final solution would have been left to Papa Dino Zoff, the forty two year keeper-slugger, who would have matched Maradona altitude for altitude and criminal attitude for criminal attitude.

    So let us thank god for small mercies and the Italians for little Messi. Perhaps a short spell in Italy before the commencement of hostilities would do the eagles a world of good. It has also been duly noted that since Lionel Messi does not attain his sublime club form while playing for nation, Maradona should be put on retainership by the eagles. The Italians also know one or two things about match-fixing, after all the great Paolo Rossi himself would end his career in disgrace as a result of match-fixing.

    He was known to have rued that everything was alright as long as he was allowed to score a couple of goals.  If all this should fail, then Monrovia beckons. The only African player who seemed to have actually prospered in the Italian league is the Liberian libero, George Weah, who went on to become a World Footballer of the year. Perhaps Weah should be contacted to serve as ancillary coach for the eagles.

    If a country cannot produce the political genius that will solve its problems, or the soccer prodigies that will lift its spirit and pride, then humiliation in both theatres of human exertion is inevitable. When the Americans allegedly proposed to Golda Meir that America and Israel should exchange two of their most famous generals, the Yankees went ahead to name two of modern Israeli’s most illustrious warlords. Feeling short changed, the great woman famously retorted: “In that case, we shall have General Electric and General Motors.”  The Americans duly withdrew.  Whether in football or politics, it is all about human capital.

    First published in June 2010 on the eve of the World Cup in South Africa)

  • In memory, and for memory

    In memory, and for memory

    (On the passing of Yoruba Paterfamilias)

    Once again, the Yoruba people have been thrown into a state of joyous mourning, if ever there could be such an oxymoron. They are mourning the passing of some of their most respected and revered fathers who recently joined the ancestors. But at the same time, they are celebrating the lifetime achievements of these Yoruba avatars, and the honour and respect they have brought to their ethnic group and their nation.

    The grim reaper has been busily at work. One after the other, the old men have been falling, like the last lap of honour after a great race. At the last count, there were five of them who had bid the nation a final farewell, and in quick succession, too. When shall we see the likes of these great men again?  When shall the Yoruba race be host to such exemplary individuals who made a shinning difference to their community and country at large?

    The youngest of them was the legal luminary, G.O.K Ajayi , who was buried at Ijebu Ode on Thursday on what should have been his eighty third birthday. Next was the urbane and quietly cultivated Sir Michael Otedola, a former governor of Lagos state, who was interred in his idyllic village of Odoragunse on Friday. Then there was Chief Degun, the distinguished civil servant.  After them the duo of the nonagenarian OtunbaO.A  Osibogun and the centenarian Professor C.O Taiwo.

    In Godwin Olusegun Kolawole Ajayi, you had the exemplary legal genius who deployed his formidable forensic endowment in the service of progressive social engineering. In Chief Degun, you had the quintessential technocrat and unblemished public servant who joined others in laying the foundation of Yoruba bureaucratic modernity. In Otunba Osibogun you had the exemplary community leader who left his society much better than he met it.

    In the refined and ever urbane Sir Michael you had a man of amazing grace and courtly civility who retreated in retirement behind a wall of statesmanlike rectitude and almost prudish decorum. In Pa Oledele Taiwo, you had a man who refused to deploy his outstanding intellect for selfish personal gains.  They no longer come like these avatars.

    Of all these titans, it was perhaps G.O.K  Ajayi who struck the cord of affection and wild adulation with the Yoruba public imagination. Yet he was ever so retreating, so self-effacing and so modest. He was a star lawyer in every material respect. He brought class, elegance and a natural distinction to bear on the profession. With his quiet imperial carriage and aristocratic bearing, there was something about the man which reminded one of an ancient Roman proconsul. He looked noble and acted like a nobility.

    His dazzling gifts could have propelled him to the highest echelon of politics. Yet he shunned partisan politics like a plague. After the epic battle to restore Chief Ajasin’s stolen mandate, snooper recalled the great man warding off with a polite but firmly disobliging frown the mob that wanted to carry him shoulder-high.  He had merely done his duty to his profession, his community and country at large. It was time to go home. Thirty one years after, G.O.K has truly gone home to join his ancestors but the Yoruba people would not be in a hurry to forget this man particularly when recalling their electoral traumas in the hands of a diseased Nigerian post-colonial state.

    Yours sincerely attended Professor Taiwo’s final burial rites in his Oru Ijebu homestead. It was like the departure of a major royalty. The crowd would have been unprecedented for that rural community. From Ijebu Igbo through Oru and on to Ago Iwoye and Ilishan, the entire Ijebu outpost rose as one to give their departing illustrious son a resounding send off. The reception that followed interment would have made even a bi-centennial egungun cringe in envy.

    Yet, It says something about the seemingly Sisyphean fate of Nigeria that after contributing so much to the development and upliftment of their fatherland these titans should depart at a time of great stress and strain for the nation. Nigeria is in desperate straits. The omens are not too good. The tumult and turbulence arising from the abduction of the Chibok girls is merely a sub-text for something far more threatening. These are mere symptoms of a deeper national malaise, an organic crisis of the state in which the main actors appear perplexed and disoriented, in which the very structure of the state is in danger of being overwhelmed by forces of adversity.

    As we have had cause to note once or twice in this column, an organic crisis of the state occurs when the ruling class fails in a fundamental national project. It may be failure to safeguard the territorial integrity of the nation, leading to widespread insurrection. It may be due to failure to sustain or valorize democracy leading to a situation of anarchy and disorder. It may arise from the endemic inability of government to satisfy the basic yearnings of the populace for food, shelter and transportation manifesting in widespread discontent and edgy distemper. It may also arise from the inability of the state to protect the citizens and the failure of the army to uphold the territorial sanctity of the nation.

    To be sure and to be fair, this organic crisis of the state preceded the Jonathan administration. In a sense, it can actually be argued that Jonathan himself is a product and manifestation of the crisis. To be precise, Jonathan himself looked originally like a polytechnic pawn on the vast chessboard  of political intrigues. It is therefore no surprise that under him the organic crisis has worsened to include all the major indices of state failure.

    As usual with every major crisis of the state in post-independence Nigeria, the Yoruba have been caught in a double-bind in this one as well. It reflects a deep ambivalence about a Nigerian project that has turned into a horrific human abattoir; a roiling hell on earth. Going forward and oscillating between a rationally conservative Pentheus and a radically idealistic Prometheus, the Yoruba character as it has evolved over a thousand years of empire-building and empire-dismantling is also marked by a deep ambiguity.

    It is this ambiguity which is often a source of deep frustration and perplexity for their ethnic cohabitants in the Nigerian nation-space . It often leads to charges of double-dealing and perfidy. Historical evolution often determines national character.  For example, as empire builders themselves, the conserving and conservative aspects of the Yoruba character may lead to the conclusion that not everything about empires is evil and abhorrent. It is not impossible that the Yoruba aristocracy nurse a deep fascination and even respect for the Hausa/Fulani power masters and their hankering after order, stability and societal coherence.

    But the obverse of the coin is that the libertarian and forward looking side to the Yoruba nature also harbours a deep admiration and approval of the fiercely republican ethos and the revolutionary dynamism of the Igbo society. No society can progress without its revolutionary firecrackers. Where the Yoruba seem to part way with the Fulani oligarchy is in the stagnant and stagnating vision of human society which abhors inevitable change and the transition to modernity. It is sheer bunkum to imagine that some group of people are pre-ordained to be slaves. On the other hand, the Yoruba will balk and shudder at the radical disorder, the anarchic steamrolling, the sheer human wastage and perpetual convulsion of the Igbo permanent revolution.

    It will be stupid in the extreme to argue for the superiority of one social model over another. Such analysis always comes with a freight of primordial prejudice. Nevertheless, it is often crucial and even critical to isolate these traits with as much analytical integrity as possible with a view to throwing light on the social contradictions that drive contemporary Nigeria. Had these major nationalities been independent nations, they would have found within themselves the inner strength and internal resources to overcome these internal contradictions.

    For example, the flame throwing Yoruba dissidents of the First Republic had virtually succeeded in overthrowing their local tormentors but for the Federal might which kept the local tyranny going. But flame throwing was not nearly going to be enough to throw off their tormentors hiding under the federal might. It would require the radical republican daredevilry and fire power of mid-ranking Igbo officers whose worldview could not abide stability and order anchored on feudal injustice.

    Yet a few months later when the Igbo leadership wanted to bid a precipitate goodbye to Nigeria, Chief Awolowo demurred. It was either out of the Yoruba traditional fear of the unknown or fear of radical anarchy precipitated by a revolutionary rupturing of the old order. This tact and restraint when the chips are down and the temple is terminally threatened, the measured discerning to know when to pull the plug on the rampaging mob, is what many neutral observers see as a reflection of Yoruba political sophistication. Others not so sanguine are not impressed. They see it as evidence of rank dishonesty.

    It is a classic conundrum. Since they know how much it takes and costs to conjure order and stability in any society, natural empire builders can never be natural revolutionaries. No one can accuse Awolowo and his lieutenants of political cowardice. They were very clear in their mind about the radical frontiers of human endeavour to be traversed in the Yoruba march to full modernity. Yet It is also the law of nature and logic of human evolution that in any society at a given point, the most radical segment and most natural agents of change are those with little or nothing to lose.

    This classic conundrum and historic ding-dong in which conservative fear of the unknown mixes with radical optimism about the future has shaped and framed  the nature and terms of Yoruba engagement with Nigerian post-Independence politics. By paradoxical default, it is what has ensured a measure of stability for Nigeria and boosted its chances of survival. In times of stress, the howls of secession may loudly emanate from certain Yoruba trenches, but it is also the very moment the hegemonic political leadership of the race act in concert with others to find a way forward for the nation.

    In coming months as the crisis of the state deepens, the Yoruba political leadership will be forced by historical pressures to take some decisive steps which may well affect the stability and continued survival of the Nigerian nation. For example, it is well known that the dominant faction of the Yoruba leadership has been trying to forge a fraught alliance with the core north in order to heave the country forward.

    But it is becoming clearer by the day that the forces of entrenched status quo in the old north are bent on frustrating this alliance by insisting it is either their way or the highway. With its political back to the wall, the old north is in no political shape to give preconditions or to suborn attempts to craft a consensus from contending contraries. The west has nothing to seriously gain from this alliance. It is borne of the typical Yoruba obsession that this nation can still be fixed. But if the west were to pull out of the alliance, it will leave the road very clear for the return of the inept and clueless PDP piranhas. Whether the country can then survive another four years of such rule is another matter.

    From a different perspective, is also clear that the few patriots who went to the so called National Conference with the forlorn hope of radically restructuring Nigeria have had their balls smashed by the forces of entrenched status quo. It is now clear that if Nigeria is ever going to be genuinely restructured it is not going to be at a tea party. With the hope of radical restructuring dashed and the door of political redemption closed, the continuous slide into anarchy and anomie now appear to be irreversible. The Yoruba mob is already abroad. The nostrils pick the familiar smell of Mushin circa 1965 with much trepidation. There may just be a new Omo Pupa around the corner. Oh Yello!!!!

    It is just as well that these Yoruba exemplars have gone to join their ancestors. They have made their mark. Only a glutton for punishment would insist on living longer with such grim conditionalities. It is well. Goodnight sirs.

  • The shoes of the fisherman

    Oh boy, oh boy!!! We have noted several times in this column of life becoming a poor version of literature. But we are happy to report that it is not always a one-way traffic. There are times when it is the turn of life to imitate literature. Thus does the whirligig of time brings its own sweet revenge, as William Shakespeare would put it.

    Has anybody on these shores ever watched the 1968 film of the above title? Or better still has anybody read the  1963 novel of the same name by the Australian novelist, Moris West? It is a gripping read. The film version which begins with an apocalyptic scene of atomic destruction has the great actor, Anthony Quinn in toweringly magisterial form.

    The Shoes of the Fisherman chronicles the incredible rise to global prominence and papal stardom of Kiril Lakota, the Metropolitan Archbishop of Lvov. After twenty years as a prisoner in a Siberian labour camp, he is suddenly and dramatically released like a terminal virus on the world by his former jailer who had become the premier of the Soviet Union. There begun an incredible series of events. Lakota was sent to Rome where he was immediately raised to the cardinalate by the elderly Pope Pius X111. Lakota is unsure of himself and very much aware of his own modest talents begged to be given “a simple mission with simple people”. The pope was adamant, insisting that he should immediately proceed to take his cardinal vow.

    Thereafter, the frail pontiff suddenly collapses and dies. In the race to choose the new pope, Cardinal Lakota began participating as an obscure and barely distinguished elector. This led to a deadlock in which the two leading candidates or papabili simply eliminated each other in a progressive politics of exhaustion. After seven dead heats, it was one of the two, Cardinal Rinaldi,  who broke the deadlock by suggesting that Cardinal Lakota should be elected pope as a compromise candidate. This suggestion received popular acclamation after the cardinals interviewed Lakota and were bowled over by his touching humility and amazing simplicity. Lakota becomes Pope Kiril.

    Sounds very familiar? Well. Snooper cannot claim credits when life imitates literature. In any case, has it not been said that the meek shall inherit the earth? Talent is not a talisman. The greatest genius may well be the person who is able to hide his genius. In Nigeria from Tafawa-Balewa, Shehu Shagari, Obasanjo, Yar’Adua and now Jonathan anybody who shows active interest in the presidency will never be allowed to get there. He will be lucky if his head is not used to smash the coconut of fortunes for others. Don’t ask how the novel ends. Go and read it.

  • Request for further futurologists

    Request for further futurologists

    Strange things are happening all over Nigeria which make reality a very poor cousin and copy of the most outlandish of fictional creations. It has been said that in times of great national stress and severe disruption of accustomed experience, reality often takes on outsize wings turning life itself into a strange and surreal phantom; a paradise of illusionists. As Macbeth’s witches were known to have asked of themselves: when shall we three meet again?

    It is the time of thunder and political hurly-burly .Shakespeare’s fabled wingless birds have finally berthed on Nigeria’s troubled shores. The end of times often comes with its own otherworldly messengers. On Wednesday, a strange woman who claimed to be a bird was apprehended by residents of Ajegunle in Lagos. According to the old woman, her flight plan back to Ibadan was disrupted by the sudden return of daylight which forced her to abort the flight and crash land.

    The newspaper which reported the strange incident was so sure that this was a case of bird turned into human that it captioned its story: Bird turns to old woman in Lagos. It was no exaggeration. The woman looked like an old flying mammal with the avian features of a wizened owl plucked to the earth by the sheer gravity of advanced age. The forest of Fife has finally arrived in Nigeria.

    In the same year that Scotland is about to take a decision about being forcibly embedded in a union of kingdoms for four hundred years, it is left to our political star-gazers to decode this grave omen and visitation for our troubled nation. The great owl of Ibadan has begun her flight.

    As a native insurance against natural and man-made adversities, every nation must have its own great owls and soothsayers. They must divine and define the future with its potholes and landmines. The ancient Roman Empire was crawling with these masters of the arcane art of political sorcery.

    Sometimes, the predictions were simple and straightforward; sometimes they were so recondite and Janus-faced, so riddled with impossible contradictions, that they do not lend themselves to easy resolutions. They would require another avatar of the trade to decode. As Karl Marx famously noted, the owl of Minerva always begins its flight after the event.  If ever there is medicine after death!

    Yet there are futurologists and there are futurologists. Certain inevitabilities are so obvious that they do not require the gift of prophecy to foretell. As the spirit of Enlightenment enabled humanity to banish mythology as the cornerstone of human development, as scientific knowledge equipped humankind to gain mastery over nature and his own nature, scientific political predictions began to rob unscientific prophecy of its divine aura.

    In the ceaseless flow of history, empires rise and fall, just as nations are finite possibilities. The carefree notion prevalent among the idle Nigerian political elite that this nation is God’s own creation inoculated against the virus of self-destruction is about to be subjected to its most severe test. The events of the past six weeks are so mindboggling and so confounding that one began to long for those ancient witches and futurologists.

    Like a typically Nigerian witches’ brew, the positives mix with the ultra-negative. In the same month that a rebasing of the Nigerian economy showcased the stupendous possibilities of national development, in the same month that the nation successfully hosted the World Economic Forum, and in the same month that we are about to mark fifteen years of uninterrupted civil rule, the longest in the history of the nation, the dark underside of Nigeria as a great empire of evil and injustice is now beamed on a daily basis to the global community.

    The Nigerian Inquisition is being globally televised. It is the television equivalent of saturation bombing. Something must tell us that all of this cannot be for nothing. After the amnesia-inducing fumes have cleared, we may discover that we have a practically non-existent country, apologies to the impudent American senator. In the light of these developments we must now begin to think the unthinkable: is Nigeria sleepwalking its way to a choreographed and clinical self-destruction?

    Just in case we missed the import of recent developments, it is important to recap. Last week, the eagles finally landed. American troops established their formal presence at the southernmost tip of Chad, which is just as well as saying they arrived on the northernmost tip of Nigeria. It may be an arid no man’s land. But it is a defining moment for Nigeria and its traumatized nationhood.

    Let us be honest with ourselves. Somehow in the national imagination and the creative scenarios of national salvation, the arrival of American marines has been a recurring motif and sure trope. Yet six weeks ago despite the Boko Haram carnage and the mindless destructiveness of the sect, this visitation would appear remote and farfetched. Now the unbelievable and implausible have become reality.

    The Americans cannot be unaware of Uncle Sam security franchise which put 2015 as the terminal life expectation of the Nigerian nation. As thinking soldiers, they would have been briefed. It is all too chillingly coincidental. America surely knows how to pick its spot and time too. Nigeria is at the nadir of its fortunes both in terms of its military capacity to defend the territorial integrity of the nation and the state capacity to protect its citizens from falling into harm’s way. The nation-space is swarming with alien troops even as its airspace drones with state of the art surveillance planes. It amounts to the electronic undressing of a whole nation.

    America’s resolve to rescue the abducted Nigerian girls may well lead to a horrid denouement in the next few days or weeks, that is if something goes wrong with timing or if an already tense and desperate sect leadership is panicked into precipitate action. Once America sustains any casualty from what is supposed to be a rag tag force of religious renegades, it becomes a question of national pride and pulling back becomes very difficult indeed.

    Even if that were not to be case, the spot where America has placed its hat in the ring is likely to become an expanded front, stretching from Niger to Somalia, taking in CAR, Sudan and Kenya in a new confrontation between Islamic radicalism and the forces of western secularism. Given its ever-widening regional fault lines and growing religious polarizations, an unstable and destabilized Nigeria might have been sucked into the vortex of an international conflict as an expendable pawn.

    But you must also give this to the Americans. They know how to smell an impending humanitarian catastrophe from thousands of miles away. In those days, they routinely invaded Haiti whenever things threatened to get out of hand. Otherwise, Haitians would invade America. It is called immigration control at source. The collapse of Nigeria would lead to a refugee crisis on an apocalyptic scale, with the human trail stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean.

    It will therefore be foolish to imagine that America is in this solely for humanitarian purposes or because they love the face of Nigerians. There is a utilitarian hard nose to even the most seemingly casual of American interventions which seeks to place American interest above everything else. If your national interests coincide, fine. Only a foolish country would risk the life and limb of its finest soldiers in some quixotic bid to save an under-performing African nation.

    Whichever way one views this, this is not the finest moment for Nigeria. Perhaps the greatest casualty of this national tragedy is the Nigerian military which is being exposed on a daily basis as an overrated and incompetent dinosaur. The Nigerian military is being forced to eat the humble and humiliating pie with every sordid revelation of internal corruption and cleavages along the national fault lines. If left unchecked, this could lead to an apocalyptic unraveling which would make Rwanda a child’s play. The mutiny in Maiduguri is a dark pointer in very ominous direction.

    Despite its past mistakes and its limitations as a modern fighting force, Nigerians retain a residual affection and respect for their military. Even at the nadir of its fortunes when its dominant officer corps turned the entire nation into political football, the army still boasted of a hard core of patriotic officers who stood their ground against this unworthy politicization of the military. It is a particularly sad irony that an army that had distinguished itself in peacekeeping abroad should now meet its Waterloo at home in the hands of a rag tag militia.

    This is a teachable moment for the Nigerian armed forces. The military is paying for the errancy of its forebears and their misadventure in power. At the end of the greatest political disaster to befall the military, no lesson was learnt and no restitution was made to the nation. Once you paper over cracks, the cracks will appear somewhere else eventually. The culture of impunity and lack of accountability does not end with a formal surrender of power by the military. The virus is merely transferred to its own internal operations. It is this virus that has now publicly hobbled and humiliated the Nigeria military.

    For the sake of the nation, we must hope that the military hierarchy will now learn the appropriate lessons. If only this can be said of the Nigerian political class, we shall not be needing any more futurologists in the nearest future.

  • The transformation is televised

    Patriotism is indeed the last refuge of political scoundrels. Whilst we are still on the subject of the epochal crisis rocking Nigeria, has anybody been following the antics of a group of self-styled patriots and intellectual carrion feeders who go by the name of Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria, whatever that means? Sounds more like the infamous Association for Better Nigeria (ABN) and the infamous Dr Aitkins in felonious concert with the author and authority himself, Authur Francis Nzeribe.

    Something new always comes out of Nigeria. This is the first time in the history of this noble concept that transformation is being televised and trivialized, and by “ambassadors”, too. Transformation has become a tea party. Rather than rolling up their intellectual sleeves to furnish Jonathan with a position paper on the manifest inadequacies of his underperforming government, they have taken to flights of fancy and abuse of platform.

    One would have thought that this empty and pretentious lot would have come up with a rigorous explanation of how transformation can even be whispered in the context of inefficiency, outlandish corruption, a culture of in your face impunity, lack of accountability, sensational stealing of public funds and cosmic incompetence. Instead they have taken to familiar grandstanding, working themselves into a froth with meretricious bunkum. It doesn’t add up, or let us say that it adds up only in their personal bank accounts.

    Snooper finds their adverts canvassing and campaigning for Jonathan amidst a monumental crisis of the state particularly offensive and an assault on good taste and common sense. What type of transformation agenda would further seek to inflame passions at this fragile moment? At this moment when Jonathan needs to rally the entire country behind him, they are busy fanning the embers of discord and disaffection. At a time when an entire nation is traumatized by the Chibok tragedy, telling Jonathan on television prime time that those who are for him are so much more than those against him is particularly callous and polarizing.

    I had been told that an ambassador is somebody paid to lie for his country abroad. But it appears that this new set of “ambassadors” are paid to lie for their principal principally at home. If this is how serious countries set about transformation, Lee Kuan Yuan , Monhatir Mohammed and Pandit Nehru would be squirming wherever they are. Snooper is bothered about why this kind of national scam appears to be particularly attractive to a particular section of the national intelligentsia. But this is a story for another day.

    As profiteers of power and parasites of national misery, let our ambassadors go and enjoy their loot. Nobody is grudging them their good luck. A fool and his money will sooner be parted. And money no dey smell, even where it is procured in the most putrid of circumstances. But our friends must remember that you cannot purchase happiness with the proceeds of other people’s misery and unhappiness. Let them ask their forebears who walked the same path to perdition.

  • The Tragic Presidency

    The Tragic Presidency

    Like a badly damaged second hand tape, the Jonathan presidency is unraveling before our very eyes, reeling its way into a tangled mass of confusion. It is not a funny sight, more so since Goodluck Jonathan started out with an outpouring of genuine national good will. All that has disappeared now, leaving in its wake angry nationals and affronted citizens. Increasingly, Jonathan himself is looking like a tragic figure but without the elemental force of personality, the grand passions and the towering pathos of those titans of historical tragedy.

    Of late, he has been showing some irritability and testy distemper which sit oddly with the carefully cultivated and calibrated image of a man of Olympian equanimity and profound self-possession. Manipulated by his own manipulations and by the mannequins of power and state marionettes surrounding him, he is beginning to imagine himself as a victim of some apocalyptic conspiracy on a national and international scale.

    The past fortnight must have been a nightmare. History moves like a cattle rustler: silently, secretively and with much stealth. Six weeks ago, no one could have imagined  Chibok and the Bring Back our Girls Campaign. But now they are with us, and the venom and international outpouring of grief have exposed the septic underbelly of the Jonathan presidency. It is unlikely to survive the opprobrium. When all is quiet, it shall be said that at a time of grave national emergency, Jonathan dithered and dissimulated when he ought to have acted with swift expediency and compassion for the victims.

    But let no one rejoice. This is a collective tragedy. It is a collective tragedy because Jonathan is a product of our collective imagination. In rooting for him, we plumbed for youth and national idealism at the expense of experience and granite integrity. It was a defining moment in our national history. For once, most Nigerians spoke with one voice, which was that there must be no ethnic bar or barrier preventing any Nigerian from aspiring to the highest office in the land. The Nigerian presidency is not the perpetual birthright of any religious cabal or ethnic conclave however self-regarding or self-perpetuating.

    Yet as Shakespeare famously noted, youth is a stuff that will not endure. Neither is national idealism particularly when not leavened by pragmatic expediency. Jonathan may well be a mess. But he is not just his own mess. He is our mess. We must bear this in mind as we contemplate the tragic mess of the Jonathan presidency. Going forward, we must focus on the ball and not be distracted by attractive but meretricious ephemerality. This is the only way to learn the correct lesson from the tragedy unfolding.

    Jonathan’s die-hard apologists are wont to see an ethnic conspiracy in even the most innocuous of criticisms. But they have forgotten that the Jonathan presidency is itself a product of a grand pan-ethnic conspiracy. They often point out that some people had vowed to make Nigeria ungovernable if a “foreigner” should come to power. But no one can be forced to stumble unless such a person is already predisposed to wobbling.  In any case, it is a reflection of Jonathan’s miserable gifts as a leader of a complex multi-ethnic nation if he is unable to hold together the pan-ethnic alliance that propel him to power in the first instance. People make history but never under the circumstances of their choice.

    But as usual, we may be looking for the wrong lesson in the right place. The presidency of any nation is a perpetual work in progress. A particular president needs not be a great person or a great president. It is in the nature of human folly and modern anxiety that we expect too much from a president without factoring into the equation the circumstances of presidential progeny. If only when the time comes, and very soon, too, Jonathan will bid goodbye to the presidency with the same courtesy, civility and decorum with which he acceded in the first instance, history will give him a grudging applause. This is a glorious legacy that will survive the current appalling mess.

    But if he were to plunge a country that he owes so much into a terminal civil war in a futile bid to hold on to power, he stands the chance of entering the history books as the worst ruler in Nigeria’s blighted history. Even a poor ruler must have a sense of an ending, or he may invite a terrible tragedy on himself and his nation. That end appears to be in sight for the tragic presidency of Dr Goodluck Jonathan.

    This morning, in order to arrive at a correct perspective of what is going on, we publish excerpts from two old pieces which welcomed Jonathan’s ascendancy but which also foreshadowed its tragic trajectory. The one hailed his surefootedness in negotiating the political landmines while the other compared him with President Gerald Ford. Perhaps it will help Jonathan’s most rabid propagandists to regain their balance and sense of perspective.

  • The Amazing Dr Jonathan…

    The Amazing Dr Jonathan…

    Like a trapeze artist of extraordinary facility, but more often like a motorised robot with a programmed destination, Dr Goodluck Ebele Jonathan has finally arrived at the pinnacle of power in Nigeria without fuss and with less fanfare. It is the stuff of tantalising fables. It is absolutely stunning. Even by the standards of political magic in post-colonial Africa, there seems to be an ultimate sorcerer’s apprentice at work here.

    Less than twelve years ago, Nigeria’s new leader was a pliant and self-effacing lecturer in Fisheries in the provincial state of Bayelsa. But less than eleven years after he became deputy governor, a series of astonishing gravity-defying stunts has catapulted him to the highest office in the land. It is a dizzying rise, to say the least. With the possible exception of General Obasanjo, no other Nigerian political figure could be said to be more adept at being at the right place at the right time.

    There have been persistent rumours that Goodluck’s name is also a talisman to that effect. Goodluck has been very lucky indeed. But it would be sheer folly and political imbecility to reduce this man’s spectacular ascendancy to sheer luck. In politics, opportunities are one thing, being able to profit maximally from them is another matter. Jonathan combines great guile with boyish coyness; grim survivalist instincts with a feigned cluelessness; calculating conviviality with wary alertness; and a meek and inoffensive demeanour with a ferocious focus on the bigger picture.

    While the struggle for succession was on, Jonathan did not put a foot wrong or utter an inappropriate word. It was a chilling act of self-possession. It was probably not by happenstance that the former number two, like a lost kid, should wander back to his old seat on his first day in office as Acting President. It was a drama of fetching humility. The Acting President could have been acting. But it works. It cloaks Jonathan with an aura of child-like innocence even when the proverbial dagger is ready.

    When a man is this lucky, it will be petulant and churlish to begrudge him his luck. But we hope that Goodluck is lucky for Nigeria and not for himself alone.  The benevolent gods seem to have bestowed special favours on the fellow. They have cracked the palm kernel of good fortunes for him. The joke out there is that to be cursed with Goodluck as a deputy is not a laughing matter. It is not funny, and we hope that Goodluck does not turn out to be another curse on Nigeria.

    Despite his valiant beginning, the omens are not very reassuring. The proclamation that brought Dr Goodluck Jonathan to office can be faulted on the grounds of constitutionality. It is a fudge. But it is a typically Nigerian fudge brimming with creative deviousness and anarchic brio. There are whispers of a constitutional coup, if ever there could be such a daring oxymoron.

    Rather than being summarily impeached for violating his constitutional oath, President Yar’Adua has been left off without as much as a slap on the wrist. Baring a biological coup d’etat, the Katsina nobleman may yet return to office in triumph. Rather than being put in trial for serial disinformation and treasonable forgery his core supporters are being left off the hook. No member of the disgraced and discredited federal executive council has deemed it fit to resign for collectively insulting our intelligence. And where a clear case of presidential abduction seems to have been established, the perpetrators are being asked to take a bow and depart.

    The negative equilibrium which holds Nigeria together and which prevents a particular faction from gaining permanent ascendancy over the other factions is still very much in force. There is as yet no critical linkage between potent forces of civil society and equally progressive fractions of the state which could tip the balance in favour of a radical resolution of the Nigerian Question. Alas, as it was in the beginning, so has it been at the end of the beginning.

    Just as it was the case during the June 12 crisis, the Abacha Inquisition and General Obasanjo’s Third Term fiasco, valiant and patriotic protesters have protested and gone home while the power masters have once again pronounced. Everybody has done their duty to God and country. The protesting class has protested while the ruling class has ruled. If one were to put this in a cruel formula, there is a neat division of labour out there and professional underdogs must not aspire to become top dogs. This feudalisation of modern Nigeria is still very much a work in progress.

    Given this inauspicious background and his own insertion in the crucible of contending forces, it will be foolish to expect political miracles from Goodluck Jonathan. No man can be greater than the sum total of the contradictions that threw him up. Like the Shonekan interim contraption which strategically prevented back to back military rule while allowing the army to purge itself of contrary elements, the Jonathan interregnum is another holding device which allows the dominant faction of the ruling class to reorganise and to strategically reposition itself in time for elections next year, or this year as exigency and opportunism may dictate.

    In the light of this, anybody expecting Jonathan to touch such incendiary materials as genuine electoral reforms, fiscal federalism, political restructuring etc is living in a fool’s paradise. If absent-mindedness overwhelms him and he turns in the wrong direction, he will be met by a disobliging frown by those who have put him in the saddle. If a kind nudge is not enough, a rap in the knuckle will do. Or some non-elixir tea as a final solution.

    But contrary opportunities do abound. The main problem is the very platform that has thrown up Jonathan. As a party, the PDP has so badly mismanaged the country, so serially bungled the sanctity and integrity of the electoral process that it cannot hope to win any free and fair election in this country for the foreseeable future. If it were to rely on its customary miscreant tactics, then we will be looking at another doctrine of necessity in the coming months. To appropriate the Greek gods, let no man count himself lucky until he has carried his luck to the grave.  Good luck to Goodluck.

     

    First published in April, 2010.

     

  • The President from nowhere

    Gerald Ford is the perfect president from nowhere; a classic political and constitutional conundrum, and a major tribute to the lateral and vertical mobility available to virtually all Americans irrespective of race, region or religion. Although he was born in Omaha, in an area where his paternal forebears had settled, he moved on to Grand Rapids as a toddler and returned there after military service and law school. It was from here that he won elections to the congress several times as a progressive conservative even while having his immediate family roots in Omaha. In America, where you live and pay taxes is more important than where you were born.

    It is intriguing and interesting that Ford never returned to Grand Rapids after serving out his term as president. He relocated instead to Palm Springs, California. But his presidential library, which is usually a triumphant monument to the great homeboy, is split between two locations in Michigan State. It is this kind of cosmopolitan rootlessness which tears up rigid regional divisions and obliterates spatial distinctions based on autochthonous settlers’ syndrome which has made America a land of glorious opportunities and possibilities.

    Yet there was a time in the not too distant past when this kind of spatial mobility was possible in Nigeria. But that was before primitive accumulation became the prevalent ethos among Nigeria’s failed post-independence political elite and zoning became a concomitant do or die affair. When nation-building fails and the project of modernity collapses, zoning is effective as a primitive truce among hunter-gatherers on a feeding frenzy. You chop, I chop, shikena.

    But Gerald Ford was not even the man we thought he was. He had not always been Gerald Ford. He was born Leslie King Jr and was adopted by his stepfather shortly after his mother remarried a salesman called Gerald Ford. In a Nigeria without social and psychological safety nets, a man so critically hobbled at birth could not have gone very far. In later political life, if Gerald Ford had any faults, it was ironically his placid equanimity and calm composure.

    If these endearing traits carried him to the presidency of the most powerful nation on earth, they could not guarantee him re-election or a permanent place in the heart of his robust and rambunctious countrymen. It was an odyssey of good luck and great fortunes, but it is no substitute for canniness and “cujones”. Let Jonathan note as the sharks menacingly take up position.

    He was chosen as Vice President when Spiro Agnew, the artist of alliterative acrimony, went under in a scandal in 1973. When the gale of Watergate sank Richard Nixon in 1975, Gerald Ford stepped into the Oval Office, the only man to have achieved the feat of reaching the presidency from lowly congress. Some people are even luckier than Goodluck Jonathan.

    But luck can only carry one so far. The backlash against Ford began almost immediately. His pre-emptive pardoning of Richard Nixon who many Americans consider to be a psychotic political criminal deserving a long spell in jail was viewed by many as an act of presidential racketeering unworthy of the highest office in the land. To compound his problems, Ford, a supreme athlete in his prime, began physically and intellectually stumbling in full public glare. Among his unpardonable gaffes was the flat assertion that Poland was a free country even as it reeled under the communist jackboot. It was a bridge too far for the boy from Grand Rapids.

    When he was asked why he thought he was never an astonishing success as a politician despite having served in the White House, Gerald Ford replied that it was because he was disgustingly sane. In other words, bland sanity is no match for the quirky irrational genius of the exemplary politician. Among crazy people, abnormality is the template for normality.

    In the end, to be lucky is not always to be fortunate. When people are catapulted beyond their competence, they always end up stranded in the middle of nowhere. Gerald Ford came from nowhere and ended up nowhere, so to say. But it is a rousing American story; a Gatsbyian extravaganza of orgiastic possibilities in a land of ceaseless self-invention. It is a stunning parable for Nigeria.

     

    First published in 2010.

  • Sambisa and other Forests

    Sambisa and other Forests

    The heart of a de-civilized person is a jungle of violent impulses. The forest outside is a reflection of the forest within. There is a Sambisa Forest in every one of us. It is a metaphor for deformed and dehumanized humanity. The forest takes over every patch of land that is uncultured and uncultivated after some time. The jungle must reclaim its own. In order to endure, civilization must be kept in a state of constant cultivation.

    We have lost our civilization. This is why Nigeria is in desperate straits. No nation has ever been more profoundly unhappy in the real sense of absolute misery. There is a deep sadness everywhere. Savagery rules the land. Every day, we hear tales of unprecedented cruelty and sadistic behavior. Every day, we are regaled with acts of unimaginable barbarity.

    We cry for the abducted of Sambisa Forest. We moan at night for our defiled daughters. Anybody who has ever fathered a daughter must shudder at the plight of these girls. After a month in captivity, what will their sanitary state be like?  After four weeks in dazed detention, what is their psychological status? And now the dreaded question that torments one in the middle of the night: after four weeks with the hard men of this vile and vicious sect what else can one say about the virginal sanctity of these girls?

    It is a good therapy, then, to cry and wail and roll over ourselves on the streets. But much sooner than later, Nigerians will have to confront the demon within that has given rise to such a demonic society. The evil empire outside is but a reflection of the evil empire within. Sambisa Forest is the evil manifestation of the forest of a thousand devils that is the Nigerian project. Let us dwell on a few of these forests.

    The Boko Haram incubus did not suddenly jump on the stage from nowhere; neither did it come fully dressed. There had been frequent sightings and dress rehearsals in the Maitasine uprising in Kano, the Musa Makaniki revolt in Yola and the dramatic declaration of Sharia in some northern states that curiously coincided with the ascendancy of an admittedly bible-thumping Christian president from the South.

    In its purest and most classical sense, the Sharia regime is a more extreme and total version of Boko Haram. While Boko Haram denounces western education, Sharia anathematizes western culture and political civilization beginning with its legal foundation. Both are bound to come to violent collision with the secular state and the paradigm of the modern nation which are underwritten by western civilization and its triumph over competing modernities.  It is the military wing of this western civilization which conquered the Islamic conquerors of Northern Nigeria and forcibly brought them under the orbit of western political authority.

    There is a Sambisa Forest in the heart of an indigenous ruling class which allows the living condition of humanity to deteriorate to the feral subsistence and unremitting harshness such as we find in certain parts of the north. It is this poverty in extremis and its attendant hopelessness that fuel the hallucinatory delusions, the murderous, misguided and misdirected deviancy of the Boko Haram sect. Until this internal Sambisa forest is cleared of its malignancies, the external Sambisa Forest will remain as its necessary corollary and dialectical mirror image.

    The Northern Question is therefore an integral part of the National Question. The National Question has its social and geopolitical dimensions. On paper, political restructuring is easy. You can carve up a country into a thousand regions and prefectures. But how do we restructure the soul and mind of the contemporary Nigerian ruling class to make it amenable to the minimum standards of the political modernity that has been foisted on us? Can a ruler of Southern extraction have the temerity to disturb or disrupt the existing feudal relations of production in the core north without provoking a genocidal backlash?

    Whatever the current grandstanding by a doomed ruling elite, there is a Sambisa Forest in the heart of a ruling class which steals and cheats its way to obscene and indecent wealth and opulence while the rest of the country wallows in hunger, poverty and biblical misery. It is called government without governance; or the management of mismanagement.

    Now factor into this, the Sambisa Forest of pension thieves, the Sambisa Forest of fuel subsidy rogues, the Sambisa Forest of corrupt and untouchable ministers, the Sambisa Forest of religious charlatans of all creeds who feed on the misery of the disoriented populace, the Sambisa Forest of our elder “statesmen” who brought us to this sorry pass in the first instance, and the Sambisa Forest of economic cannibals in our midst, and you get a picture of a humongous monstrosity.  Let us by all means bring back our girls. But let them come back to another country. Otherwise, they will be abducted again.

    Last week, Balarabe Musa, the great Northern political savant and radical socialist, asked a vital and crucial national question to which no answers have been forthcoming. Why is it, Balarabe rued, that it is at this very time when we are said to be having a National Conference that our problems seem to be multiplying and atrocities against the nation seem to be proceeding apace? The answer is that we are not having any national conference.

    The great charade ongoing in Abuja is not designed to move the nation forward. It is nothing but a holding device; a talking contraption hastily and clumsily glued together to provide a strategic respite for Jonathan so as to allow him get back to the drawing board of his presidential preoccupation with ruling Nigeria until something gives. But as we have noted in this column, whatever respite gained will be transient and temporary as the old problems return with malignant vigour.

    If the gathering street demonstrations and the global attention being gradually focused on Nigeria are anything to go by, Jonathan will find himself and his presidency increasingly diminished and his remaining credibility and authority vastly eroded. There will come a time in the nearest future as the heat gets to the kitchen when a conclave of genuine Nigerian elders who have not sold their soul will pay him a crucial visit.

    Any national advantage and value that would have accrued from the National Conference appears to have been stymied and squashed between two antagonistic forces in a state of desperate and paradoxical complicity: the forces of the old status quo who want Nigeria to remain as it is in structural stasis and the forces of the new ascendancy who want Nigeria to roil in democratic deadlock until something gives.

    Taken together, the two forces constitute a structural and political Kilimanjaro for the nation. They have been carefully assembled by Jonathan and his men to make sure that nothing happens. The few voices of genuine patriotic concern have found themselves stranded by choice between the two reactionary behemoths. For some of them, this is a classic parable of how one can bring political peril on one’s self by the sheer irrational hatred of a particular individual.

    So as we gather on the streets demanding the return of our abducted daughters from the Sambisa Forest, let us also not forget how we got to this sorry pass where Nigeria has become an international poster boy for unspeakable evil. We must redeem ourselves first before the nation can be redeemed. There is a Sambisa Forest in virtually every one of us.