Oh boy, oh boy! We know that this is a period of collective tragedy but one single political tragedy diminishes all of us. Has anything been heard about the black box of the flight Gulak 101? It reportedly took off from Abuja in heavy weather and made an emergency landing in Uyo as a result of political turbulence. The plane was said to have developed technical hitches. Thereafter, the lone occupant was also said to have developed itches and rashes as a result of political rashness. The plane was last seen limping and listless as it flew into the clouds. It was reported that all efforts to plead for a soft landing from the tower in Abuja fell on presidential deaf ears. This is not a case of a Bermuda Triangle. It is Ahmed Gulak who has fallen into his own archipelago.
Category: Tatalo Alamu
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The Dervish on the Savannah River
These are desperate times in Nigeria. The Boko Haram sect has abducted its way to international notoriety, focusing global klieg light on the nation and our national deficiencies. While the offer of international assistance in tracking the abducted girls must be applauded and appreciated, Nigerians must now appreciate that the initiative in confronting this local mutant of global terror has slipped from our hands. Before our eyes, Nigeria has become an international front in the latest confrontation between contending notions of human progress.
The implications for our military establishment and sacred national data are better imagined. But we need not worry or mourn. A feckless nation will always come to grievous harm. Two of the lessons we must learn as a building block for the future is the need for quality surveillance of our territorial space and the fact that intelligence gathering is a proactive business rather than a reactive affair. Given the repeated signals, Nigeria ought to have established a Federal Bureau of Counter-terrorist Intelligence a long time ago. It is this unit, rather than the police or the military, that should be the public face of the fight against terrorism.
Great nations thrive not just on the cutting edge sophistication of their technological eavesdropping but on the quality of their human intelligence. It was just a little over a decade ago that snooper met the Sultan of Savannah River in the house of a mutual friend in Savannah, Georgia. He was a former top official of the State Department, an Arabist to be specific.
But he seemed to have quarreled with his bosses and left in a huff. As a leisurely pastime which then became a full preoccupation, he had taken to sailing from New York in his specially kitted boat all the way down to Miami and then back to New York all year round. It was a weird form of self-exile and internal deportation.
It was on one of this to and fro, this nautical gallivanting, that our man chose to make a detour at the mouth of the Savannah River to visit an old friend , a fellow American and professorial colleague of yours sincerely. It was the same route that the youthful Brigadier James Oglethorpe had taken almost four hundred years earlier to found Savannah City and claim the whole of Georgia for King George and the Earl of Chatham.
He was dressed in a snow white jalabiya. Dignified and good looking, the retired diplomat was an African American, but he could “pass”, to use an American lingo. There was something about him which reminded one of a ranking Brahmin of the Sudanese Arab master class. After decades of mixing it up with the Arabs, he had almost become one. One can imagine him taking an early morning stroll on the streets of Khartoum and Omdurman looking very much like an Arab nobleman. It was discovered that he spoke Arab, Bedouin and Wolof fluently. It was America at the summit of its power and glory.
The conversation ranged from the Mahdi uprising in Sudan, the repressed homosexuality of General Charles Gordon, a.k.a Chinese Gordon, and General Kitchener’s savage reprisal for the murder of the British general. At this point, yours sincerely longed for his great friend, Professor Hakeem Olumide Danmole, the notable Islamic scholar at the Lagos State University and one of the experts Nigeria sorely needs at this point. Quiet, well-born and well-bred, H.O.D will never thrust himself forward.
It was as if the fellow knew what one was thinking about. He committed a verbal indiscretion.
“I am surprised that you know so much about Sudan”, the retired diplomat noted with patrician bravura and a patronizing mien.
“To tell you the truth, I am also surprised that you know so much about Africa”, snooper shot back to his fiendishly gregarious laughter and good-natured bonhomie. Snooper decided to change the topic by asking him about the sad events of September 11th, 2001. It was still very fresh then.
“Don’t worry, America will find Osama even if it takes a decade. He will be located at least a thousand miles from his adoptive country and summarily dispatched”, he answered with a calm shrug.
It was when the conversation turned to Ibn Khaldun, the great Arab historian and philosopher, who anticipated Marx and Spengler in many respects, that the retired diplomat completely turned the table on yours sincerely. Everything snooper knew about the great historian had been self-taught. It shows the limits and limitations of what Karl Marx, in a famous polemic against Bakunin, called the “erudition of the self-taught”. Snooper had been pronouncing the name with a heavy “K” not knowing that the “K” was supposed to be silent.
“Oh you mean Ibn (K)Haldun”, the American corrected and then went on a long elaboration of the great man’s theory of Asabiya and the ascetic discipline and group cohesion that come naturally to people in climates of unremitting harshness like the desert. This Russian roulette has played out in the desert for centuries but the theory is generally applicable to human society as a whole. Then the old boy dropped his terminal bombshell.
“It is the spirit of Asabiya and its ascetic discipline which allowed the semi-nomad Uthman Dan Fodio and his group to overcome and overpower the corrupt and indolent Habe ruling dynasty. But it is the law of nature that when nomadic people settle in the city and begin to taste its forbidden fruits, they lose the plot completely. Dan Fodio himself hinted at this. Unless your country takes great modernizing strides in the nearest future another group from the fringes of the desert will try to take out the old caste. If you factor in other contradictions, particularly a restive South, Sudan will be a child’s play.”
Goodbye Savannah and welcome Sambisa Forest.
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Underground in my fatherland
On Thursday, 30th January, 1997, I received a plaintive letter from my sister that our mother was at the gate of final transition. For close to a decade, she had battled with various ailments, each leaving her increasingly frail and fragile-looking. But she was a tough cookie. She hung on like a proud boxer unwilling to kiss the canvas even after cruel punishment. Now judging by the tone of the letter, she was about to conclude her earthly labours.
It was a cold and blustery mid-winter morning in Birmingham. I had been told that after she was able to establish that I had gone into political exile with no hope of returning shortly, her health took a nosedive. She became inconsolable. She clung to life with the forlorn hope of being able to clasp her son to her withered bosom just one more time. But now, the biological clock was outpacing the clock of hope and other bodily organs. It was all a heroic gesture of maternal futility.
There was a special bond between this mother and her son, forged in adversity and the relentless civil war of polygamy and its associated malignancies. But looking back, this one was a polygamy so sophisticated and subtle even at that time that it must be considered to be at the cutting edge of the industry. At the crowning point of its domestic grandeur, it came with a cook who later rose to the upper echelons of the Nigerian Customs Service.
Mama had spent about two decades looking for a child. When all hopes appeared to have evaporated, the heavenly floodgate suddenly opened resulting in four births in a remarkable spate of five years. There was myself followed by a stillbirth which mama thought was the handiwork of Action Group devils, and a set of twins. One of the twins, a male child, died before he was two. One could still remember lying beside the stilled tiny corpse before they came to take the poor boy away forever. Benson was a beautiful boy.
I immediately began making preparations from exile to visit Nigeria. I was determined to give the old lady a farewell hug, and nothing was going to stop me. It was the high noon of tyranny. The reigning military tyrant appeared to have struck fear into the heart of everybody, and all appeared quiet on the home front. A sullen silence presaging a fierce thunderstorm had descended on the nation. Everybody one broached the idea of going to Nigeria to thought it was either mad or suicidal or both. I was advised to perish the thought. It was just too dangerous. But I wasn’t going to have any of that.
It was not mad; neither was it suicidal. It was based on some cold calculations. But in the post-colonial polity, there is always a ring of irrationality to the most rational-seeming decision. The past is not an infallible guide of the future. Based on my political hunch, I came to the conclusion that something would have to give by or before the 1st of October, 1998.
If I were to be captured or abducted by state agents, I would have to be released as part of a general amnesty for political hostages and detainees by that day when Nigeria must return to full blown civilian rule. If a more terrible fate were to befall one, one would only have predeceased his mother by a matter of weeks or days. Once I came to the conclusion that neither risk was too grave to take for mama, nothing was going to stop me from going to Nigeria.
I arrived in exile in November1995 in a rather recondite and roundabout manner. I did not choose exile. It was exile that chose me. I had left Nigeria for the US with some colleagues to participate in a USAID-sponsored International Exchange Program for Scholars. But shortly after departure, my premises were forcibly taken over by security people. It was the culmination of a tense battle of will and wits lasting almost two years. What I thought was going to be a two-week stay in America turned into 12 full years of peripatetic wandering as a migrant intellectual worker and traveling theorist in some of the metropolitan capitals of the world.
Of the tense battle of wits and will with a military despotism gone haywire, three incidents stood out. In the evening of Friday, August 26th 1994 while returning from a short trip abroad, I was waylaid by armed hoodlums on my way from the Murtala Mohammed International Airport. It was about seven p-m. As the vehicle conveying me was about to negotiate the Portland Cement exit unto Ikorodu Road, a nondescript car flew past us and immediately blocked the exit. Another blocked our retreat.
Just as we began wondering what was going on, three gun-toting thugs scrambled out and ordered us to lie flat on the main Ikorodu Road. My cousin ,who had come for me, and his son who was at the back of the car, jumped out and quickly obeyed. But I refused probably too disoriented by fatigue to fully comprehend what was going on and the dangers inherent in foolish heroism.
The lead hoodlum yelled at me and ordered me to remove my jacket. I quickly complied. It was as if he knew where my vital documents were, because he threw the jacket at the back of the car. By now, all the approaching vehicles were quickly turning back, creating total chaos on Ikorodu Road. Within seconds, the hoodlums drove the car into a back alley and disappeared forever. All my earthly possessions and the manuscript of a new work were gone.
That was the night General Sani Abacha finally bared his fangs. It was the beginning of a reign of terror that would last another four years. By some curious coincident, another set of state hoodlums invaded Gani Fawehinmi’s Chambers across the road and mercilessly hacked down his security guards. In Yaba, Commodore Dan Suleiman’s house was firebombed the same evening. The horror movie which was to culminate in General Abacha’s mysterious passage and Abiola’s equally mysterious death in detention had commenced in earnest.
For what seemed an eternity, I had stood on the Ikorodu Road, gazing at the sky and too stunned to make sense of what had just transpired. When I left London earlier that morning, it was a glorious late summer day. I had left the north London flat of a friend, Sola Fawehinmi, a.k.a Professor Jouls, full of spirit and optimism. A friend of ours, a zestful and humorous Ibo chap, had given me money and a beautiful bottle of perfume for his wife, a top immigration official. All that had disappeared together with my three suitcases in the night of tropical distemper.
By now, harsh reality shocked me out of the futile reverie. I quickly realised that my cousin who would shortly thereafter become a Professor of Psychology and his son were still lying on the road. I yelled at them to get up. We began trekking towards the Yaba Police Station like some vagabond wayfarers. It took us another hour or so to arrive at the Police Station, looking thoroughly disheveled and disoriented. Time had become completely irrelevant.
Every society gets its just deserts. It is the iron law of social retribution. You cannot plant cassava and expect to harvest yam. The police are human too, and they did not come from Mars. In times of universal perversity, the police become universal perverts. The entire station reeked of the foul odour of cheap tobacco, illicit gin, stale fecals and fulsome fornication. Some of the policemen looked like hardened criminals and justly so. It was hard to tell who was who. These were hard men and women, cynical and gritty to boot.
In such fluid and flux circumstances where the lawful agents cannot be separated from the agents of unlawfulness, complainants suddenly become suspects and suspects suddenly become complainants. As they sized us up in a psychological battle of street stamina for which one had no energy or appetite, one was half hoping that one was not about to move from Gatwick to Golgotha in one single day. The cramped cage bristling with armour and ill humour was grimly symbolic of the nation itself.
Luckily this particular night, the police people appeared to be stalking some bigger games. After establishing our status and identity, an absent-minded officer in ragged slippers was asked to take our statement. He did this with a contemptuous frown which occasionally gave way to a senseless snigger. After this, an officer in mufti ordered us to be on our way with the stern warning to avoid Atan Cemetery if we still valued our life.
It was not yet the time of mobile phones. There begun another long and weary trudge to the University of Lagos. We had arrived well past midnight, looking like deserters from some Somali militia. Later in the afternoon, Segun Odegbami, the ace striker and former captain of the Green Eagles, drove one to his local tailor to have one kitted out. I was in the same dress for the next three days. The University of Lagos was also to become the abode of the fugitive and the internally displaced for the next two weeks.
It was around this time that I became closely acquainted with the late Peter Alexander Ashikiwe Adione-Egom, famously known as the Motor Park economist. The gifted and impossible Cambridge and Arhus-trained anthropologist and classical economist was also at this point in time slumming it out at the University of Lagos Guesthouse in a solitary bunker which looked like the bedroom of Kafka’s metamorphosis.
A wasted genius who seemed to have turned his back on the Nigerian society, Ashikiwe, later known as Peter Egom, was better trained and better talented than most of Nigeria’s fabled official economists and could cut through their inanities with a single devastating sentence. A product of Kings College where he was classmate of the celebrated and much lamented Stanley Macebuh, Ashikiwe was also a superb athlete. He could walk the entire length of Lagos by sunrise before returning to hunt for breakfast.
I quickly recognised a kindred soul who had been done in by the evil system. At this point in time, his presence around University of Lagos was beginning to raise some dust of suspicion and unease. Many simply couldn’t understand what he was doing there and why he was living in a bunker with so many rich and influential friends. In a leap of imaginative malice, it was concluded that he was probably infiltrated into the university community by some security organisations bent on bringing the citadel of learning to heel.
But he was just among many gifted Nigerians who have volunteered for internal self-deportation. There are many of these Nigerian geniuses who have turned their back on the society in a gesture of self-immolation and social suicide. At that point in time, Ashikiwe, who loved to regale people about how he was chased out of a famously leftwing Department of Economics in East Africa for his militantly unorthodox economics, could not be bothered about social trappings. He believed only in the aristocracy of the intellect. As far as he was concerned, money was mere fiction.
The problem was that it was this “fiction” that must procure breakfast. You cannot walk into a restaurant proclaiming fiction as your currency. That would be what Samir Amin, the great Egyptian Marxist economist, called unequal exchange. In deference to this alimentary logic, the great hell-raiser would arrive at the Boys Quarters where one was holing up every morning, screaming the nonsensical appellation he had picked up from motor park conductors: “Baba Egunje, baba egunje!!” It was a signal to begin the daily forage.
The second encounter in the spiral of strange events that led to exile was even more devastating and potentially life-threatening. Sometimes in May 1995, Karl Maier, in the course of writing his celebrated book, This House Has Fallen, was brought to Ife by Seye Kehinde to have an intellectual interaction with me. We spent the whole afternoon in my house, discussing issues and lamenting the fate of the nation.
But all hell was let loose shortly after they left to return to Lagos. It was dusk. Suddenly fire and brimstone erupted. Some gunslingers who had taken up position unleashed a fierce fusillade . It was obvious that these were no ordinary gunmen. They were using tracer bullets which lit up the entire vicinity in a weird pyrotechnic of violence and mayhem. For about 15 minutes of continuous bombardment, one lay flat on the floor hoping that it was all a nasty dream.
Then there was a lull which seemed to have lasted an eternity. One could hear some people in low conversation arguing among themselves. They were not sure of their quarry. After this, the bombardment moved to two houses away. It was the premises of the urbane and cultured Professor Aduayi. At this point, one managed to crawl out of the house. After the smoke cleared, it was discovered that the professor’s wife had been wounded in the hand.
By this time, some concerned members of the university community who had been attracted by the crackling gunfire began converging on the scene. One or two of them carried weapons. Among the early callers was the then Vice Chancellor, Professor Wale Omole, and there was the inevitable activist and radical humanist Professor Toye Olorode who had dared a purported dismissal by his former teacher, Professor Aliyu Fafunwa, and had triumphed. There was also Professor Yomi Durotoye who was cradling a loaded assault rifle. But by then, the hoodlums had made good their escape.
Author’s note
The above are excerpts from the recently concluded, Underground in My Fatherland, a story of love, devotion and affection for one’s mother. These are very dark days indeed in Nigeria. The tragedy of state collapse mixes with the baleful comedy of failed and incompetent leaders dancing on the grave of Nigeria. We bring forward these excerpts in order to draw attention to all that is noble and ennobling about Nigeria, and to summon the spirit of heroic resistance with which Nigerians overcame collective tragedy in the past. It is a form of national therapy. If we were to concentrate on what is going on, it would be nothing but a grotesque statistics of death; “a catalogue of cadavers”— to quote Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the late Columbian master fabulist, who shed mortality for immortality last week. In a manner of speaking, the entire story is an ironic tribute and backhanded compliment to one of the greatest novelists of all time. In the nearest future, this column will pay the late master his proper dues. But for now, criticism, as Karl Marx would put it, is not just a passion of the mind but the mind of passion itself.
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The endgame of the Lugardian state
The funeral pyre has been aglow in Nigeria this past week. It portends the end of the Lugardian state as bequeathed by our colonial conquerors and as perfected by their neo-military inheritors and successors. Three incidents will suffice to illustrate this dire development for the Nigerian nation. Not surprisingly, they all have to do with the ongoing armed critique of the state and nation by the Boko Haram insurgency.
First was the abominable slaughter of scores of early morning commuters in broad daylight by the sect in Abuja, the capital city of the nation. This was followed by the wholesale abduction of hundreds of students from a secondary school in Yobe State after which they were herded into waiting buses for onward transportation to the dreaded Sambisa forest. Without mincing words, this is arguably the most alarming case of hostage taking in the history of contemporary warfare.
Last Wednesday, the super mullahs finally arrived at the supermarket, or almost. Lagos was gripped by fear and panic. There were unsubstantiated rumours that the dreaded nihilists were on their way to put the greatest conglomeration of Black people on earth to sword. This is as close to hell as it can get.
Earlier, and in order to ratchet up the psychological offensive, the insurgents had issued a statement that they were already in Abuja. After the apparently well-coordinated Nyanya bombing, no one could pooh-pooh the claim as fanciful boasting. The Nigerian post-colonial state is on its way to becoming a historic casualty.
A palpable fear enveloped everywhere. Maximum security was deployed. If the sect had Lagos within their rifle sight, then all is lost. Yours sincerely was caught up in the weird drama. Something will have to give eventually. Not even during the darkest moments of the civil war were state security forces subjected to this kind of nettling humiliation.
Force — raw, unadulterated violence— has been the organising principle and coordinating co-efficient of the stentorian state. It was not without some historic justification. The main rationale was that since human beings are no angels, it was the bounden duty of the state to rein in the wilder and more anarchic impulses of people in order for meaningful progress and development to take place.
This was the kind of menacing, authoritarian state bequeathed to an African continent already suffused with traditional tyranny. In the Congo, the state was known as Bula Matari, or the crusher of rocks. It crushed a lot of human rocks. From King Leopold who cut off their hand and limbs to Mobutu who smashed their brains and equally stole them blind, it was merely an exchange of monkeys for baboons. Ditto for all the colonial overseas possessions.
You cannot give what you don’t have. In Western Europe, the old stentorian state ruled the roost for a long time. For centuries, the English state brooked no opposition or dissent until they started lobbing off the head of their kings. In France, Louis famously proclaimed himself as the state until the people asserted their supreme sovereignty in an orgy of violence.
In Germany, the deposition of King Wihelm in 1914 marked the end of the old authoritarian state. For 40 years, General Frank Franco ruled Spain with an iron grip until biological coup d’etat intervened. So did Antonio Salazar in Portugal until the soldiers who bore brunt of the colonial wars in Africa began to abandon the shrine.
In Greece as late as the seventies, some deluded colonels seized power but were eventually overwhelmed and punished for their temerity. In Latin America, the same wave of popular uprisings ended authoritarian rule rooted in the Iberian model, most notably in Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela and Chile.
Nothing lasts forever in human affairs. As societies progress, as new technologies develop, and as the clamour for more popular participation in governance increases, there usually comes a time when the aggregate of the means of violence and disruption available to certain non-state sectors equals or even surpasses the coordinates of violence and coercion available to the state.
Wise states, reading the handwriting on the wall, normally divest themselves of a substantial part of their capacity for the production of violence, opting for more refined forms of coercion and compliance. In such circumstances, certain societal institutions such as the school, the family, the media and even religion serve as ideological sectors of the state providing both blackmail and subtle intimidation at the intellectual, spiritual and psychological levels.
This is the norm in civilised societies. These social institutions constitute the first bulwark in the defence of the state against hostility and adversity. A lot depends on the intellectual cadres where and when it comes to humanising the state and making it amenable to the real needs of the people.
But when an ethically and politically bankrupt state decides to meet force with force and violence with violence, it may eventually be overwhelmed and subdued, giving rise to a radical reconstitution of the state or the nation or both simultaneously. If we were running a serious government with a homogeneous and organic vision of the country and its destiny, there ought not to have been a serious Boko Haram threat in the first instance.
But no country can escape the iron law of retribution. It is not by accident that the best run nations on the African continent such as Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, Rwanda and now Cote D’Ivoire are nations where the state had once been subdued by hostile forces. Nigeria may yet undergo a revolution by default if the Boko Haram scourge leads to a significant deterioration of the security situation.
The problem with the Boko Haram insurgency is that it does not seek a radical and drastic reconstitution of the old Lugardian state but a radical Islamisation of the nation failing which a forcible partitioning will do. Except in a few aberrational enclaves, theocracy is incompatible with the paradigm or raison d’etre of the modern nation-state.
The Boko Haram insurgency may yet achieve its objective by default if its current siege on Nigeria leads to a fracturing of the military along religious, regional and ethnic lines, or if its campaign is brought home to the south of the nation. Even more so than in Western nations, the military remains the glue binding together the creaking joints of the old state in Nigeria. If it comes unstuck, Rwanda would be a child’s play.
On the other hand, if the sect were to hit a major objective in a densely populated megalopolis like Lagos, we might as well say goodbye to Nigeria as we know it. Our situation is far more precarious than we can imagine. Having proved themselves to be an extremely bloodthirsty and bloody minded group, we can as well conclude that if the Boko Haram group are not looking in this direction at the moment, it is not because of caution or restraint but because it has not put its logistics together.
This is why the events of last Wednesday even as they turned out to be a hoax should be an appropriate reminder of how little time we have left. The Nigerian political elite must put on their thinking cap. The nation is closer to the brink than we can ever imagine. This is not the time for inflammatory rhetoric, or for dangerous insinuations that polarise the nation further. Some endgame is here with us.
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You may set forth at dawn
So it is then that it no longer matters how early you set forth these days. Death and disaster are permanently lurking on the Road. They have become twin-companions of the commuter. Like Siamese twins, they are irreversibly conjoined by nature. Only modern medical wizardry attempts to separate them, and it is always an extremely risky operation. Whatever colonial fate and nature have joined together, let no man put asunder.
In the event, it is only those who are extremely lucky who reach their final destination. Otherwise, you are destined to become part of some grim statistics of death and involuntary disappearance. The old African travel advisory about setting forth at dawn which signposts the welcoming allure and invigorating breath of early morning no longer makes sense. It was meant for another age.
But being a creature of ancient habits, snooper always likes to set forth at dawn. Last Wednesday was no exception. One had set forth from Lagos at dawn hoping to reach Ogbomosho by noon for the investiture of the former governor of Lagos State, Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu, as the Chancellor of the Ladoke Akintola University.
So it was that very early in the morning, one had arrived at the new outskirts of Lagos, which is actually situated in Ogun State. Lagos is a mega-state megalopolis which keeps developing new skirts and outskirts like a rapidly mutating wonder child and to the dismay and chagrin of topographic seamstresses. Like a massive whale in dread of being beached, the city has been thrashing out in all directions including towards the Atlantic Ocean itself.
Just imagine how Lagos would look like in another 40 years. Fifty years earlier, Agege was an ancient town completely severed from contemporary Lagos. It was the last outpost of hinterland Yoruba culture and civilisation. To your adolescent earlobes, the language of the local people seemed strange and intriguing. It was Yoruba all right, but what kind of Yoruba was this, you wondered then. Even Oshodi was an isolated rural farmland with a solitary train station brimming with farm produce freshly disgorged by the Idogo train which was a proverbial byword for slow motion.
A nasty traffic tailspin at Ojodu Berger forced one out of the early morning reverie about the old colony. But miraculously and mysteriously, it evaporated like a ghost just like it had built up. This is part of the great wonders of contemporary Lagos. You always find nothing at the end of every traffic build up. Don’t ask any question, just get on with it.
Very soon, as the countryside began to open up, you lapsed into another memorable reverie. April is the most beautiful month in Nigeria. The entire countryside is draped in stupendous greenery, the colour of renewal. The landscape is one vast evergreen ocean. The early rains have come, and the long siege of drought and harmattan is giving way to the bounteous wonders of nature. The nostrils are filled with the becalming and herbal smell of fresh earth.
It is in April that Mother Nature’s astonishing gifts to Nigeria are in full parade. It is an embarrassment of riches. Only very few countries combine within their territorial space the mangrove swamp of the delta with the arid severity of the Sahel. With such extremities of climate, Nigeria should be one of the natural food baskets of the world. Sadly, 54 years after independence, Nigeria remains unable to achieve self-sufficiency in food productions. In one of the greatest scandals of the modern nation-state, many Nigerians still go hungry.
As a full treatment and therapy for the institutional decay of contemporary Nigeria, Snooper often escapes into the countryside. Anybody who has journeyed across the English countryside with its verdant green, its rolling hills and fully mechanised farming must appreciate this wonderful joy of nature as it is made to work for humankind. It is what the singer Tom Jones called the green, green grass of home, and it rises to meet you as you approach either Heathrow or Gatwick for landing.
It was mid April, and the countryside was beginning to sing again. Lagos-Ibadan Express Way remains a long scene out of a horror movie. But once you are out of the Bedlam of the Bible Belt and its assortment of religious curios, once you negotiate the old tyranny of the trailer tailspin at Ogere which has now been subdued, thanks to Ibikunle Amosun, the grandeur and beauty of the countryside loom large overwhelming you with its perfumed presence.
You begin to smell the countryside in all its vast and variegated verities. You can sniff the earthy odour of the cricket, the sharp, pungent stench of a certain species of dung beetle, the fragrance of early mango and the lavender of wild flowers. At a point, you are overpowered by the wonderful aroma of fresh palm wine. Why have Nigerians been presented with such a beautiful country with unlimited possibilities? Nigeria ought to be the magnetic hub for the transformation of the entire continent.
The story is told of how some disaffected nationals of other African countries made a representation to God complaining about the unfair advantages granted to Nigeria in terms of national resources and agricultural potential. The good Lord was said to have looked at his interlocutors without blinking. He was then known to have observed: “As for Nigeria, you wait until you see the kind of people I will put there”.
Shortly after Ogere, the drama began with a plaintive phone call from a friend in Lagos. “Where are you?” the frantic caller began. Before one could answer, the caller dropped the bombshell. “Whereever you may be, make sure you don’t venture near Lagos-Ibadan Express Way. Boko Haram has invaded. They are approaching Lagos.”
“I am in Ogere, and there is nothing like that”, Snooper answered. The phone dropped with an ominous clatter on the floor. It sounded like a death sentence. A few minutes later, there was a more frantic text announcing that the Boko Haram people had killed several commuters and were matching on Lagos. It was all too reminiscent of Ore during the civil war.
An eerie silence descended on the normally bustling Express Way. Vehicular movement suddenly dwindled. After a quick evaluation, yours sincerely came to a decision. It was better to continue than to turn back. It was a nerve-wracking moment. Snooper began imagining the hordes of the merciless swarming all over the car that had been brought to a forcible halt before setting it ablaze. Having escaped the fangs of the Nigerian state several times, martyrdom from an unlikely source now beckoned.
It was the longest 20 minutes ever. Very soon, the ungainly profile of the Ibadan metropolis appeared in bold relief. There was no Boko Hram in sight. But if this was a glimpse of the looming apocalypse, something urgent needs to be done to rescue Nigeria from this political and religious quagmire. Goodluck Jonathan and the political class should stop playing politics with the fate of an endangered country. It is time for an urgent bipartisan summit on the state of the nation.
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Martyrs arising
This morning, this column suspends all intellectual hostilities to wish our compatriots a happy and prosperous Easter. There is time for everything; a time to curse and a time to cry; a time to hiss and a time to sing. The Easter season is the season of resurrection, of spring and amazing renewal for humanity and nature alike. It takes a divine and peculiar miracle for humans to resurrect. But unlike living organisms, dead nations do resurrect.
In its one hundred years of existence, this nation has suffered too much. There have been too many strife, bloodshed and mayhems. The killing and mutual elimination have been on an industrial scale. It has been a blood-splattered canvas; a killing field on an Olympian scale. If we were to resurrect all those who have died, all those who have been sacrificed at the shrine of modern Nigeria, what an endless cortege of misery and suffering!! !
Only this week in Abuja, a city willed into existence from virgin forests by the ingenuity and imagination of some visionary compatriots, hundreds were bombed out of existence. In the same week, a hundred and twenty female students were abducted from their school in the dead of the night by gunmen who herded them into waiting buses. It doesn’t get more eerily unsettling.
In Africa, only two countries, the Congo and Sudan, can be said to have suffered more than Nigeria. But there is suffering and there is suffering. There is quantitative suffering and there is qualitative suffering. These three African countries are distinguished by their humongous sizes. Perhaps in the post-colonial condition “big” is the beginning of trouble. Yet after the forcible partitioning of Sudan, South Sudan has dissolved into a nasty civil war. The nightmare of colonial cartography survives radical surgery.
We cannot continue to blame the colonialists for our woes. You cannot give what you don’t have. Based on their history, the British have been compulsory unitarists, privileging and placing premium and priority on order over justice. From its time as a Roman colony, through waves of Viking invasions and the Norman Conquest, the isle has been a potpourri of immigrants. There was always a need for a harsh central authority no matter how bloody-minded to ward off anarchy and weld the human amalgam together. This is the colonial bequeathal to Africa.
This morning in the spirit of Easter celebration, we take an unusual look at the amalgamation not as a political tragedy but as a classic love story. Love and loving are classic human attributes transcending race, religion and creed. Jesus Christ, the man we celebrate this morning, was a great revolutionary, just like Prophet Mohammed. In the two avatars, radical nobility of nature takes a quantum leap forward. Jesus had a special place in his heart for women, just as Mohammed codified the humane treatment of women as a cornerstone of Islamic philosophy. Reading through the following may soften our heart towards Lord Lugard. He was human after all, and a gallant and chivalrous lover to the bargain.
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Love in the tropics of malaria
There was something of the tropics about Fredrick John Dealtry Lugard. Despite his ice-cool exterior and glacial temperament, there was an underlying fire, a capacity for fury and vengefulness which was quite tropical in nature. Lugard also had a capacity for torrid, equatorial passion in the amatorial sense which would be considered in the west as a sign of the emotional incontinence that Africans are particularly prone. Despite being a British warlord, Lugard was in every sense of the word Othello’s compatriot.
Fredrick was a child of the tropics. He was born in the tropics, in Madras, India. He was the son of a British clergyman and his third wife. But he was raised in Britain and eventually enrolled at the Sandhurst Royal Military Academy. After commissioning, he was posted to the East Norfolk Regiment and from there to the second battalion in India. The tropics had reclaimed its own. It was from the orient that Lugard was to first contract the malaria that plagued him for the rest of his life and which became worse as Africa added its own vicious variety.
The fateful conjoining with the tropics and its colonial history was to alter the fundamental trajectory and course of Lugard’s life. But in retrospect, it did not affect his substantial destiny. This is the way fate sometimes plays poker with human destiny. In any case, there is malaria and there is malaria. There is also emotional malaria, which sends the afflicted to the pitch of fevered delirium.
In India, the young officer fell hopelessly and fecklessly in love with a married woman. It was the height of indiscretion. The ensuing furor was to destroy what was a promising military career. Normally high-strung, it was believed that it was at this point that Lugard suffered an emotional and nervous breakdown. In a feat of self-obliteration partly to redress the shame of an aborted career and partly to satisfy his love of high-risk adventure on behalf of the crown, the future ruler of Nigeria journeyed to East Africa to join the battle against predominantly Arab slave raiders.
The year following his arrival in Africa, Lugard was severely wounded while leading a charge against the stockade of a slave raider very close to Lake Nyasa. For days, Lugard hovered between life and death. It was probably at that point that he experienced a radical epiphany. He found his life’s purpose. He was not going to be a regular British officer periodically called out to defend the interests of empire. But he was going to spend the rest of his life fighting for and securing the interests of the royal majesty in Africa and the Far East.
It was actually on his second tour of what was to become Nigeria that Lugard was named High Commissioner for the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria. Even by then, the Madras-born soldier had become something of a legend in colonial military history. In several campaigns, he had distinguished himself for exceptional valour and his fabled contempt for personal safety. Often hopelessly outnumbered by the swarming natives, Lugard’s military maxim seemed to have been never to spare a maxim or show mercy when you needed to be merciless.
The African campaigns—or punitive expeditions properly speaking—were marked by such savagery and brutality that they marked Lugard in turn for the rest of his life. Apart from having been severely wounded in Zanzibar, Lugard also had a poisoned arrow stuck on his forehead from northern Nigeria. Nobody is sure of how this impacted on Lugard’s mental and psychological state. But gone forever was the callow officer of the Indian Second Batallion, or the youthful inexperienced lover.
Margery Perhams description of Lugard is incredibly graphic and unforgettable: “Africa has marked him as her own: Tall, gaunt, angular, dark as a Spaniard, Lugard has the yellow skin, the hollowed cheeks, the sunken eyes, the indented temples which mark the man who has struggled for life with the fever-fiend.”
Perhams could as well have been describing a classic Byronic hero. There were also the dark Spanish looks and a hint of the ancient conquistador and his menacing machismo. But Lugard was not your typical garden variety Don Juan. Any hint of sensual frivolity had been savagely repressed, particularly after the Indian fiasco. Enveloped in a forbidding aura of testy reserve, Lugard never gave anything away.
Yet it was at this point in time that the invisible hand of fate summoned Lugard to what was perhaps his greatest campaign. Militarily and politically, he was already approaching the summit of his power and glory. But emotionally, he remained an Arctic tundra of frigid and frozen impulses. The conqueror of the lower and upper tribes of the Niger was ripe for conquest by love, by affection and by lifelong devotion and faithful collaboration. Romance beckoned…… in the tropics of fever.
Fiona Louise Shaw was born in 1852, six full years before Fredrick John Dealtry Lugard. She was the daughter of a British general of Irish extraction and a French mother. She was as beautiful as she was proud, imperious, fiercely independent and intellectually self-assured. In the history of British journalism, she was the first woman to have reached its stratospheric summit.
Margery Perhams description of this Amazon of the pen is equally gripping: “She looks what she is, a woman to go anywhere and do anything; the woman to write three columns of good copy for a newspaper on the back of a portmanteau in a desert.” Fiona Shaw was an original in every sense of the word. Like her husband to be, she did not take hostages or suffer fools gladly.
They first met in 1893 when they were both approaching midlife. Nothing came out of that encounter. But it was obvious that they shared a passion for the new British colonies of Africa, Nigeria in particular. It was Fiona Shaw who coined the new name for the British protectorates, although it can be argued that the name had been in private circulation among the Lagos coastal elite for some time. It is an irony of history that the same elite group would view the subsequent amalgamation of the protectorates with considerable dismay.
Fiona Shaw was at this time romantically involved with Sir George Goldie, the legendary helmsman of the Royal Niger Company. It was a doomed relationship. Goldie was a notorious womaniser and feckless rake. His brutal indiscretions led to Fiona’s emotional breakdown. It was at this point that Lugard stepped in like a shinning knight in armour. Even then, Fiona Shaw turned him down and only accepted his proposal the second time.
They married in Madeira in 1902 while Lugard was on a leave of absence from the Northern protectorate. Shaw fully supported Lugard’s proposals about the need for an amalgamation of the protectorates. The basic argument was that there was no need sending the surplus extracted from the South through taxation on liquor, railway and natural produce to Whitehall when the north remained virtually bankrupt.
The union seemed to have liberated Lugard’s political genius. This was Lugard at the summit of his political and administrative ingenuity: brilliantly gaming against Whitehall and frustrating its attempt to rein him in militarily; propping up belligerent subordinates like Abadie, the Colonial Resident of Zaria, against wiser and more restrained counsel from his more experienced lieutenants. An exasperated Whitehall mandarin actually whispered the word “coup” to describe Lugard’s adroit manoeuvres. The amalgamation was actually Nigeria’s first coup.
A vengeful Lugard was bent on putting the old north, particularly the emirate of Kano and the Sultanate, to sword: The emir of Kano for joyously welcoming the thuggish band that put Moloney to death in Keffi and the sultanate for the contumely of Sultan Abdu who had questioned his authority in a moment of frustration.
Military historians have suggested that the Emir of Kano was actually on his way to Sokoto with numerous supporters to commiserate with the new Sultan, Attahiru, over the death of his predecessor and to urge him to get the Fulani to flee en masse from the protectorate to escape the mighty wrath of the Raj. This strange movement provided Lugard with a casus belli. Lugard moved with swift and merciless precision. The Fulani hegemons were put to death. Men are killed not because horses are stolen, but so that horses will not be stolen. The sultanate had been pacified.
But nothing lasts for long in the tropics. Tropical fever set in. Fiona suffered an irreversible breakdown. She left never to come back, but remained in ceaseless correspondence with her beloved husband. It is a curious irony that Lugard who was to singlehandedly establish the University of Hong Kong and who also championed the cause of the sophisticated Chinese islanders would be so riled by the sophisticated and western-educated elite of Lagos. In correspondence with his wife, he noted of them:” I am not in sympathy with him. His loud and arrogant conceit are distasteful to me.”
The vengeful African tropics had left their indelible marks on the greatest colonial administrator of the last century. But when we hurt others, we also hurt ourselves. Unlike the Chinese who had five thousand years of fairly stable history behind them and who did not have to adopt a new culture and language, early educated African elite came a long way overcoming the colonial mindset about Africa and other entrenched prejudices. They could not but be loud, arrogant and conceited, unlike the self-assured Chinese who had nothing but sublime contempt for Western culture and civilisation.
The pity of it all. Britain would have found a powerful ally in a powerful, prosperous, democratic and liberal-minded contemporary Nigeria. Equatorial distemper is no respecter of humanity. Lugard was human after all, and a gallant and chivalrous lover to the bargain. Let good old Freddie now rest in peace while we get on with it.
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The siege of the light brigade
As a prelude to the “democratic” war of succession that will make or mar Nigeria, irrespective of the outcome of the ongoing National Conference, the old west is being gradually militarised. The entire region appears to have been placed on the political equivalent of a war footing. The siege is on. It is the kind of shock and awe military terror that will turn Stormin Norman Shwarzkopf to a whimpering old bugger.
A pincer movement is unfolding with the major strategic objective of paralysing the dominant political tendency in the region, or at the minimum render it hors de combat in the bid to capture power at the centre. You cannot be advancing when your stronghold has been set on fire. Militarily, it is known as a bridge too far.
With Musiliu Obanikoro, the newly appointed Minister of State for Defence, war-gaming from Lagos all the way to the Ilaje coastline, with Iyiola Omisore and Jelili Adesiyan sadistically probing the heart and plexus of the old region in Osun state, and with a column of reaction heading from Ondo to link up with joyous thugs and fifth columnists already in place in Ekiti-land, once again the Yoruba nation is being turned into a theatre of war and strife.
This time around, it promises to be the mother of all political wars. But it is the charge of the light and light-headed brigade, and once again, they shall not pass. After the rubble might have cleared, Nigeria will never be the same again. No politician or political group will ever be allowed to come to the western sphere again with the threat of war as the antidote to peace and progress. Even for a libertarian and seemingly carefree people, there is time for everything.
This is not an idle intellectual speculation, but a conclusion reached after a rigorous interrogation of the unfolding political process in the region. It is either the dawn of a new era or darkness forever. The reasons for this stark conclusion are threefold, and they are historical and sociological in nature. It is proper to delve into recent history first.
After the annihilation and political obliteration of the PDP from the region, the whole place has experienced a period of development and accelerated modernity. It is not a perfect state but the fruits are showing for all to see. Not even personal hatred for the individual actors involved or animus towards the chief motivator can remove the fact. From Benin to Ekiti, through Osun, Oyo, Ogun and unto Lagos, the old West is experiencing a developmental resurgence akin to a religious revival.
The people are grateful for the relative peace and stability that being relatively well-governed has brought unlike many other places in the country that have degenerated into hell-holes before our very eyes. You cannot give what you don’t have. At the federal level at least, the ruling party has shown itself to be ideologically bereft and politically bankrupt. As a party, the PDP is beyond soap and water.
You cannot confront light, however imperfect, with darkness however perfect. In order to make a dent in the evolving political consciousness of the sophisticated electorate of Western Nigeria, the PDP will have to come up with a superior paradigm of development and progress. It will have to come up with a visionary blueprint for the radical amelioration of the suffering and biblical misery which have plagued this land and turned Nigeria into the world capital of cannibal capitalism.
But after fifteen fruitless years in power, it is clear that the PDP lacks the intellectual cadre, the political discipline, the psychological stamina, the moral magnitude and imagination to come up with a transformative blueprint. As its body language reveals, it is obvious that it relies mainly on force and thuggery, when it is not fanning the ember of religion and ethnicity in a dangerously polarised polity like Nigeria. The kind of murderous and misbegotten individuals its primaries have thrown up in western Nigeria shows its contempt for the feeling and sensitivity of the Yoruba people.
The PDP is relying on old tricks where only new techniques will suffice. It will meet more than its match in the old West. You cannot fight a modern battle with ancient weapons, particularly a battle also joined at the level of an intellectual contestation for human consciousness and the greater good of the greater community. Unlike the old guard progressives who were sold on law and order, the hazards of the Hansard and other parliamentary canards, the new generation of progressives cut their teeth on the streets and in the trenches fighting against military despotism.
There is always a tide in human affairs. Anybody who witnessed the dogged ferocity, the relentless commotion with which Oshiomhole, Aregbesola and Fayemi and even the normally urbane and debonair Abiola Ajimobi fought to reclaim their stolen mandate will be living in a fools’ paradise to ever imagine that they will allow themselves to be flushed out of their respective gubernatorial mansions like terrified mice, more so when they have the might of the multitude behind them.
Anybody who mistake Oshiomhole’s gamey gambolling for complacency, Aregbesola’s steely sangfroid and diligent defiance for loss of concentration, or Kayode Fayemi’s donnish demureness for loss of power appetite will have themselves to blame when real political hostilities commence.
It is curious that despite all the information available to him on the disposition of the region, President Jonathan has allowed himself to be sold the impossible betise that all he needs to do is to spring some politically expired thugs on the region and the people will scatter. We hope the federal collaborators and their new recruits take note of this show of love and admiration.
The people of the west have never scattered before bullets. As their tormentors always find out to their peril, when they retreat it is usually to gather momentum for the next determined push against the bastion of reaction. In the history of modern Nigeria, the west has never sought to dominate anybody, but it will resist domination, whether internally or externally inspired.
All the west had tried to do is to extend its vision of modernity and life more abundant for everybody, irrespective of race, region and religion. In this seemingly quixotic venture, it has met impossible and impregnable impedimenta, not to talk of an iron road block, and it has paid terrifying price in the loss of many of its golden children.
But whenever these moderate ideals of human emancipation are brutally suppressed such as happened during the First Republic, the repressed always return with greater vigour and ferocity such as we witnessed in the Second Republic and the aborted Third Republic when an impossible coalition headed by M.K.O Abiola won a presidential election that was summarily annulled. In the Fourth Republic, the very same ideals have turned out to be the most potent threat to a clueless Federal Government.
We cannot try to hang the messenger while ignoring the message. There must be something about this progressive ideal of an emancipated community which must explain their durability and persistent eruptions. What Jonathan and his henchmen should do is to study this ideal of governance, interrogate it intensely and see whether there are no lessons to be learnt.
There is no harm in picking the brains of your political adversaries. As old Abe Lincoln famously demonstrated, there are immense political advantages accruing from converting political adversaries to principled collaborators. The Nigerian project, or whatever remains of it, is too important to be left at the mercy of small minds.
Having said all this, it is also time for our progressives to engage in intense soul-searching and deep introspection about the tortured trajectory of progressive politics in contemporary Nigeria and the kind of progressive ideals they want to bequeath to coming generations. There can be no successful externally induced plot without a successful internal conspiracy.
Yoruba modern history is steeped in internal treachery, betrayals and perfidy. It may be due to the libertarian nature of the people which abhors despotism and unwarranted domination. In post-colonial Nigeria, the cloak and dagger politics have accentuated rather than diminish. This may be due to the epic sweepstakes of a predatory economy. But the question the progressives need to ask themselves is why since independence and up till now, the people who have always given them the worst troubles and headaches are people who have at one time or the other been part of the progressive umbrella.
In the First Republic, the Action Group fractured irretrievable as a result of external plots and internal rebellion. In retrospect, it can be seen that the Action Group was a disaster waiting to happen, being an ersatz and unstable coalition of modernists, monarchists and outright rightwing reactionaries. But a firm lid could be placed on the simmering cauldron as long as there was a strong and charismatic leader like Obafemi Awolowo at the helm.
In the Second Republic, the party fissured as a result of the jostling and jockeying for position among Chief Awolowo’s closest aides and lieutenants. In retrospect, it can safely be said that it was ironically the military bell that saved the UPN from catastrophic implosion. Awo himself hinted at this in his last epistle to the faithful in which he made an allusion to a coming Hegelian synthesis.
Just before the Third Republic could be properly inaugurated, the entire party machinery seceded to the waiting military thus sealing Abiola’s fate. From that moment, the Republic died in vitro, as they say. Now in the Fourth Republic, we are witnessing a wearisomely familiar script with so many falcons deserting the falconer. Take a count of the following and find out where and how they originated: Omisore, Obanikoro, Dayo Adeyeye, the late Wahab Dosunmu, Gbenga Daniel and now the young and youthful Michael Opeyemi Bamidele.
The situation calls for a candid evaluation of the following: the mode of leadership recruitment to the progressive fold, the pattern of political preferment and the process of consensus building among the progressives. It is in human nature for those who have been given undue and premature preferment to develop outsize appetite for power and glory.
While those who are sworn to the progressive ideal as a lifelong commitment to fundamental principles could afford to be sidelined or treated with brutal disregard, it should now be obvious that the political wayfarers and those who have not reached the level where individual ego can be subordinated for communal good would have none of that. Bar a few sublime souls, the anarchic ego is an outgrowth of anarchic and inchoate human societies.
These are the historic demons the progressive leadership would have to grapple with as they seek to protect their political stronghold even while making a bold pitch for the centre. It is going to be a tough call, particularly given the cultural anxieties and markers of political incompatibilities the coalescing factions bring to the alliance. But it is not an impossible task. As for the light Brigade, perhaps it is time to retrieve their history books from roasted plantain hawkers.
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Okon in kidnap nightmare
These are strange and very interesting times in Nigeria. It is becoming increasingly difficult to separate living from a permanent nightmare and horrible reality from realistic horror. Even for a Stone Age society, there are some horrors that are simply unimaginable. But they are for real. The widespread trading in human parts induces a suspension of reality in the sane and sober.
Is this an official scam to turn everybody into compulsory vegetarians? At least in Ancient Rome when African gladiators were trotted out to fight animals unto death, they were given the chance of a honourable exit. But this new Negro necrophilia on the Equator suggests a vast cuckoo’s nest from which no one can escape.
Increasingly, snooper finds himself taking to bed to avoid the seemingly inevitable. But it turns out that even the bed is no longer a bed of roses. The bed is a bedlam in its own right. Last Friday as snooper lay in bed ruminating about the heinous crimes in the land, particularly the recent idiotic nonsense about the Nigerian economy overtaking South Africa, the phone suddenly rang. It was Okon sounding agitated and distraught.
“Okon, where are you?” snooper bellowed.
“Oga, katakata don burst. Agaracha don….” the boy mumbled.
“I say: where are you? You’ve gone to the market for over five hours now”, snooper screamed, cutting him off.
“Oga, monkey don go market and he no go return. Dem kidnapper don get man”, Okon replied.
“If they like let dem keep you forever”, snooper raved. At this point a voice in the background demanded the phone from Okon and then began in clear crisp English.
“This is General Constitution Iponkiri. We have your boy”, the voice announced.
“And you can keep him forever”, Snooper screamed.
“Send us five million before evening or we shall cook one of the boy’s legs and send it to you as pepper soup”, the general announced calmly and without any fuss or funfair.
“Oga, if I be your son…” Okon whined in the background.
“You can do whatever you like with him. I don’t negotiate with criminals” snooper cursed with much distemper.
“You see, it is you we actually want, and we know how to get you. I can tell you that you are wearing blue pyjamas and lying on the bed with lots of books”, the general continued as fear crept up the spine of yours sincerely.
“What?” Snooper exclaimed in disbelief.
“I can also tell you that there is an unfinished bottle of beer under your bed”, the poker-faced terrorist continued.
“E la tanran ooo!” snooper screamed in acute distress as he lapsed into ancient Ife dialect. The force of the exclamation was such that he hit his head against the bed and woke with a searing headache. And there was Okon bringing tea with a devilish smile.
“Oga, abi you be kidnapper sef? I been dey hear you speak to dem”, the mad boy chortled with satanic relish.
“Get lost!” snooper screamed in alarm.
“Oga, if you be kidnapper, I get business” Okon noted with a wink, Snooper leapt at the mad boy who fled shouting, “Oga wan kidnap me oooooo!!!”.
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The Nigerian post- colonial state in transition
(Hope and hopelessness)
To both its foes and friends, the very idea of Nigeria as a nation has always been a curious but compelling proposition; a mesmerizing paradox. So also is the very idea of the state in post-colonial Africa. The matter is so serious that the arguments about the existence of this elusive but palpable phenomenon in Africa often assume the quasi-religious fervor of the argument about the existence of God himself.
Is this state thing—to parody Bush the First—a savage monster or a caring father? If the state truly exists on this benighted continent, why is it that there is so much suffering and misery, unlike in other lands and climes where it is viewed as a stern but benevolent father? Why have Africans, at least in the past five hundred years, become a mere canon fodder for human history? It was not always like this. In pre-colonial Africa, the state even its rudimentary formation was almost at par with developments elsewhere in the world.
But it can get worse. No human affair can remain stagnant for long. No state can remain static forever. The fate of Africa is a gripping reminder of some unfinished evolutionary business. It has been said that although humans first civilized in Africa, they have not continued to do so there. In many spheres of human endeavours, Africa is witnessing a startling regression into barbarity. It cannot continue like this. Enlightened Africans must put on their thinking caps.
If Africa continues to be deemed a nuisance to the rest of humanity, a minimum form of re-colonization is inevitable. We might just witness another Berlin Conference for the partitioning of the continent all over again. If a column of humans is headed in the wrong direction, like a heady but obtuse column of ants heading for perdition, it must, for its own sake and the sake of humanity, be forcibly turned back in the right direction.
There is no point in looking for solution and salvation in the clouds. Beware of the man whose god is in the sky, Bernard Shaw, the Anglo-Irish gadfly and wit, famously warned. Where Nigeria is headed, and how it is going to get there, can be glimpsed and analyzed from everyday occurrence in the nation. It is a simple exercise.
Admittedly, and like all human affairs, it is a strange potpourri, a turbulently contradictory ensemble; brimming with horror and the possibility of progress at the same time; redolent of hopes encrusted in benumbing hopelessness. But it provides a manual of optimism and the practical possibilities of extricating ourselves from the debris of dysfunction.
As the swollen and testy river of the post-colonial state in Nigerian rushes headlong towards its rendezvous with destiny and history, let us try to isolate in no particular order a few of the social forces that will be crucial and critical in determining the fate of Africa’s most populous country and potentially its most potent human community.
Ironically, it has been in the area of economic development that it has been demonstrated that it is possible to think out of the box of convention in Nigeria. As we have noted once in this column, whenever a fundamental economic crisis is disguised as a political crisis among elite, we can be sure that both the explanations and the solutions offered would be false. The truth of the matter is that predatory politics such as we witness in Nigeria is dependent on predatory economics and the notion of society as a savage and agonistic battle field.
So it is then that it was such a pleasure watching Ben Akabueze, the Lagos State Commissioner for Finance and Economic Planning, fielding questions on television last Monday about the remarkable transformation programme of the Lagos Government. It must be repeated in this column that Lagos State has been the revelation of the Fourth Republic in terms of its modernizing agenda and the revolutionary impetus with which the battle of paradigm shift has been waged so far.
Right from its 1999 innovative blueprint which took so much time in putting together and consumed the energy of the cream of the Nigerian progressive intelligentsia, it was clear that something new was afoot in the old Colonial Protectorate. Never in the history of Nigeria has a government prepared itself so strenuously for office.
Fifteen years into the dawn of new democratic governance in Nigeria, it is clear that the modernizing and transformative impetus of the Lagos State Government has hardly dimmed. If anything, the project has deepened under Babatunde Raji Fashola. Fashola has proved a worthy successor to Bola Tinubu, the original avatar of relentless modernization.
In the light of the exemplary performance of the duo in the field of economic development the question must now be broached. Can modernization be a politically neutral project? Given the fact that neither Tinubu nor Fashola can be considered as flame throwing radicals can modernization be adopted as an ideology and political project irrespective of the personal idiosyncrasies of the political figures?
When the issue is posed this way in a country desperate for development, we leave behind us such sterile and static dichotomies as left versus right and radical versus reactionary that had set the pace for earlier debate. But this is not without some grave moral and ideological consequences. The danger in abandoning the old dichotomies lies in the fact that despite modernization and its gains, it leads to an ideologically neutered politics in which it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between right and left and progressive and retrogressive.
This is not a moot point or a mere academic tiff. Despite the flurry of modernization and the transformation of Lagos City into a glittering and alluring megalopolis, there is some carping and sniffing that the project is too elitist and not people-friendly. The answer to this is that after successfully testing its modernizing template, the Lagos state government must now broaden its conceptual parameter and refine the paradigm with a view to lifting more people out of the poverty trap. The recent Annual Bola Tinubu Colloquium which focused rightly on the plight of Nigeria’s multi-ethnic underclass may well be a sign of a shift of paradigm.
Akabueze was particularly spot on with his linkage of economic growth and development with intense capital projects as opposed to the recurrent expenditure which consumes virtually all of the state budgets in contemporary Nigeria. His laments about low electricity generation as the key structural impedimenta to rapid growth and development in Nigeria must also worry our policy planners. For example, Lagos needs about 10,000 megawatts but currently generates only 1,000 megawatts. It will take a billion dollars to double the output to 2,000. When viewed from this perspective, the problem looks like an insurmountable mess, thanks to corruption and kleptocracy.
With its sterling vision of a new economic nirvana with the Lagos mega-city as its economic and transformative hub, the Lagos State government appears on top of its brief. The old Colony is astir once again. But it faces major constraints from the lax and laggard central government with its sloth and inefficiency as well as the cultural and political constraints of the old regional arrangement.
From its stiff and rigid body language, its polite frown of unease and Governor Raji Babatunde Fashola’s charge to the Lagos State delegation to the ongoing National Conference, it is clear that Lagos regards itself as the leader and articulating hub for the new economic miracle of the Yoruba nation which deserves some consideration and a special status.
May be rightly so, given its gargantuan GDP and sheer population. You cannot step into the same river twice. The old regional arrangement which gave pride of place to Ibadan under Chief Obafemi Awolowo can no longer be sustained given the fact that economic hegemony cannot be divorced from political hegemony.
This is one of the compelling realities of military state creation in Nigeria that we must face. The military strategy, with the bogey of Awolowo and probably the Sardauna concentrating their mind, was to liquidate regionality as a mantra of political identity and regionalism as an ideological instrument of resistance to faulty federalism.
They almost succeeded. But as long as Lagos remains within the progressive orbit, the new contradictions can be managed and overcome. If however it were to be captured by a rival party with no truck with regional integration, the whole edifice can be brought crashing down. Mistaking this token totem of economic progress as a symbol of Yoruba irredentism, the federal authorities are bent on bringing Lagos politically to heel and the nation itself to ruination in the process.
There is a surfeit of other forces in contention for this demolition job which may render the federal efforts quite nugatory. This is where hopes of a resurgent Nigeria give way to the hopelessness of entrenched tunnel vision. While Ben Akabueze was giving his lucid disquisition on the state economy, the Nigerian military was rolling out its tanks in their awesome number in what it describes as a major operation to rid some vital Northern states of Fulani herdsmen. In recent times, these indigenous insurgents have made large swathes of the old Northern Nigeria virtually ungovernable.
Whatever its failings, the Nigerian military remains the most emblematic and powerful totem of the Nigerian post-colonial state and its ability to compel obedience and compliance to its writ and authority. The state, like some powerful deity, evokes terror and a feeling of safety at the same time, with equal ability to protect and to punish.
In its classical incarnation, the state exists to protect the people and to secure them against adverse and hostile circumstances. In exchange for this security, human beings are only too willing to surrender some of their rights and part of their freedom. The alternative is a return to the state of nature from whence they emerged and whose vicissitudes they mortally dread.
This is why in certain societies, the worship and glorification of the state takes on a religious motif. As the linchpin and launch pad of its offensive against adversarial elements and the backbone of its defence against hostility, the military has been constant as the most critical sector of state architecture.
This is why the third isolated force should be of utmost importance to perceptive compatriots. While the Nigerian military was waging a psychological offensive through a display of its awesome arsenal, a delegation of northern Nigerian leaders was asking President Jonathan not to renew the state of emergency in three northern states as a result of the current Boko Haram war.
Their argument is that since the military campaign has failed to stem the tide of the insurgency, it was time to explore other avenues of ending the conflict. The northern leaders came just short of saying that the military has been worsted by the Boko Haram insurgency. For the reasons that we have enumerated above, Nigeria is entering a very dangerous territory.
The defeat and even the demystification of the regular military by an irregular army always have dire and severe consequences for both the state and the nation. We cannot eat our cake and have it. Everywhere in post-colonial Africa where this has taken place, it has led to a drastic reconstitution of the state and occasionally a dissolution of the nation itself.
The list is long and seemingly endless: Ethiopia, Somalia, Liberia, the two Congos, Sierra Leone, Libya, Mali, Uganda, CAR etc. As the country is sucked into the vortex of what is obviously a borderless international war and with numerous internal militias testing its resolve, the question is: can the Nigerian military buck the trend or will it buckle under the threat?
The overwhelming of the Nigerian military will be a momentous event for both nation and continent, if not the entire world. The magnitude of the humanitarian catastrophe is better imagined. An unbroken line of refugees will stretch from one end of the West African coastline to the other. It is going to be an apocalyptic nightmare; a Dante’s inferno.
This is a unique and precarious moment in the history of the post-colonial state in Nigeria and Africa. It is clear that President Jonathan can no longer use the outcome of the ongoing Constitutional Conference as an instrument of radical surgery for the ailing Nigerian state and nation. As a belated convert to the original national clamour, he dithered and delayed long enough for the eventual gathering to suffer a dilution of agenda, a diminution of status and a dwindling of credibility.
If this was his original strategic intention, he has succeeded far beyond his hopes and aspirations. But it is only a temporary respite. He will soon discover that the original problems are still very much with us. Jonathan will be lucky if public revulsion and anger do not mount should the economic and security situation worsen after the conference and its huge bill. But nothing can be completely useless. Jonathan should at least use the conference as a listening post to gauge the foul mood of the nation. Once again tea leaves are rustling in Abuja.