The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

Mothers of Africa?

Liberia, Malawi and now the war-ravaged Central African Republic. What do these African countries have in common? They are ruled by women , iron ladies if you like. We have had daughters of the east, those aristocratic women of oriental steel who seized their countries by the scruff of the neck. From India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, to the Philippines, these women of exceptional valour swept away the historic cobwebs of patriarchal oppression and male-ordered ineptitude. The result is often mixed. Most of the feudal monuments are still standing in these countries. But things will never be the same again. In Burma, the lady tiger will not be kept waiting forever.

One unique thing about these daughters of the orient is that they all seem to come from political fathers. They are daughters of former presidents as we have seen in Indian, Pakistan, Indonesia and the Philippines, or they are whelps of generals and founding fathers of the nation as we have seen in Bangladesh and Burma. Benazir Bhutto’s brothers came up to no scratch and sometimes it is left to these exceptional women to carry on with the family trade and tradition.

It is said that in traditional societies, when men foul things up they usually abandon the mess for the women to clean up. With the developments in Liberia, Malawi and now the Central African Republic, can it be said that the revolutionary waves are finally reaching the shores of Africa, the last bastion and redoubt of gendered and engendered feudalism? No one gives up entrenched historic privileges lightly. Snooper can already hear the bugles of war from the cultural descendants of the Ottoman emperors.

Liberia and Central African Republic have been particularly unlucky. Any human community saddled with the likes of Jean Bokassa and Samuel Kanyon Doe as leaders must be ready to reap the social pestilence. The syphilitic bandy-legged Bokassa and the rotund master sergeant had one thing in common: they were both certified cannibals. When the syphilis finally reached his head, the lunatic emperor was known to regularly snack on human flesh. In the case of Doe, he had openly boasted that he helped himself to the testicles of Thomas Quiwonkpah after the poor fellow fell in a failed coup bid.

Malawi has been lucky not to have descended into open civil war. But for a long time, the Southern African nation was under the dark spell and authoritarian hammer of Hastings Kamuzu Banda. Banda did not take hostages and once famously threatened to feed his main opponent to crocodiles if he had the temerity to step on Malawian soil. It was rumoured that this was his favourite pastime. A rumoured centenarian, Banda was so old by the time he died that he did not even remember who he really was. It was whispered that he was not even from Malawi.

With the advent of Joyce Banda, the country is experiencing a new lease of life. The feel good factor has been phenomenal. Banda has famously disposed of the lone aircraft in the presidential fleet on the grounds that it was surplus to requirement and had taken to the open skies like a responsible and responsive leader of a poor country. This cannot be said of certain African leaders who can boast of a presidential airline when there is no national airline.

In the historic morass that is contemporary Nigeria, it is of no use singling out women as beacons of hope and moral rectitude. Satan has no respect for gender. The cankerworm of corruption and venality is an equal opportunity agent in Nigeria. While the male species appear to be more blameworthy, there can be no doubt that the Fourth Republic has thrown up some equally vile and vicious women of low reputation and non-existent integrity. Where are the real mothers of Nigeria?

February 2, 2014
The return of the master spook

Old soldiers never die, as they say. Neither, it seems, do old politicians or illustrious spymasters. In fact, it is now safe to assume that all old masters in their fields never die. To be truly distinguished in your field of human endeavour you need to be truly obsessional. All great people are obsessive characters. That is the secret of human distinction.

When Chief Obafemi Awolowo was asked by Gbolabo Ogunsanwo, the master columnist, whether he would return to politics on the return of the military to the barracks, the late sage fixed the younger man with a quizzical frown. “Gbolabo, you can only return to what you have left.” Awolowo noted tersely.

In other words, the old man never left politics, despite the gale of purported proscriptions and banning. You can only ban what is “bannable” or boycott what is boycottable. Politics is unavoidable warfare, and the brash generals have a lesson to learn from the old political warrior. No wonder, they eventually came up with the dubious doctrine of the new breed. Daedalus may develop artificial wings, but cannot fly for long.

In the past few weeks, there have been some significant moves on the political chessboard. There is some tectonic rumbling. The geopolitical power plates are violently grating. Nigeria’s power blocs are on the move again, like massive tanks crunching their way through difficult terrains. The whole land is quaking with fright and premonition.

It all began with the APC hurricane suddenly developing a seemingly unstoppable momentum as it blitzed its way towards the seat of power. The gale of swift and sudden defections blew open the rotting innards of the ruling party, exposing the political putrefaction of its stalwarts for the world to see. Nothing concentrates the mind of a moribund ruling party which has outlived all its usefulness more than the prospects of an alternative national platform which seems to have bought into the ancient tricks.

For once, the PDP appears ruffled and out of its depth. The executioner is about to be executed. For a long time, this power-holding and power withholding cartel appeared impregnable; immune to common sense and futile probing from the outside. But for once, it is now experiencing the kind of internal destabilisation which its vicious power masters and diabolical playmakers had reserved for other parties. The sharp blade was probing its own neck, like the endgame of successful armed robbers.

In the event, the long drawn internal squabbling culminated in the ouster and political defenestration of its former chairman, the hapless Bamanga Tukur. After briefly dangling juicier carrots before his covetous eyes, the old shipper was himself shipped to the moribund Nigerian Railway as its demobilized deity.

For a completely derailed country—or un-railed country if you wish—this was cruel and appropriate metaphor. But it is not a done deal yet. With the APC relentlessly raising the stakes, there will be more defections and defecations in the power sanctuary and the foul odour and odium of voluntary incontinence will continue to offend the tame nostrils until the very end.

President Goodluck Jonathan appears to have fastened on a twin-pronged strategy in the face of compelling adversity and adversarial circumstances. Dangle the prospects of a National Conference which will dissolve in a world-historic chaos and confusion resulting in dire emergency and automatic elongation of tenure, or in the alternative go all out to win the presidential election by all means and at all costs without minding whose ox is gored or whose back is broken in the process.

On paper, it looks very good: a brilliant and compelling battle plan despite Jonathan’s serial dereliction of state duty and middling competence. But as Mike Tyson famously observes, every boxer has a plan until the first blow crashes through the solar plexus. This is when hallucination and disorientation take over in the lonely ring. The great ear-cruncher and master of bodily harm should know.

The northern power brokers, Jonathan’s major political opponents, appear to be in a far more precarious fox hole. For them, it looks like a lose, lose situation going forward to be confronted by the organised anarchy of a National Conference for which they have no real appetite, or waiting listlessly to be electorally hammered by a Jonathan willing to deploy all the armada of incumbency in addition to facilitating the electoral suicide pill that the sustained insurgency of Boko Haram represents. For once, the hegemonic northern bloc has its back to the wall.

It is within the context of this life and death power struggle that one must situate the return of General Aliyu Mohammed Gusau to prominence and national relevance, this time as Jonathan’s Minister of Defence. It has been said by those who should know that Jonathan for a long time has been trying to enlist the Gusau-born spymaster, dangling juicy carrots before him all to no avail until he finally succeeded.

No one is sure of the private concessions or the secret pact cobbled together between the two. On paper, it looks like a devastating blow to the jugular of the old northern power bloc, capable of splitting its aristocratic military caste down the line. Is the remote and enigmatic master spook emerging from the shadows to play his own game once again, or is this an elaborate political bluff?

In the absence of an overriding nationalist ethos, the Nigerian political terrain is a spreading chestnut tree of mutual backstabbing. So in these matters, no one can be sure of who is playing for whom and against whom. It is a game of double and even multiple agents all tending to cancel each other out like an ancient Janus conundrum. The famous owl of Minerva can only begin its flight after the event.

On the positive side, Gusau should be able to leverage his powerful connections in the global intelligence circuits and his background as a devout Muslim to achieve a breakthrough in the Boko Haram deadlock. This is one feat that seems to have eluded both Sambo Dasuki and the late and much lamented Owoye Azazi. Coming from the same fraction of the military, the same royalist Fulani antecedents and with marital ties to boot, it should not be hard for Gusau and Dasuki to work together. But in these matters, the more you see, the less you know.

General Aliyu Gusau has been in the political game for a long time. Shy, shadowy and self-effacing to the point of complete self-erasure, the Fulani military powerbroker is justly celebrated as one of the finest and most accomplished products of Nigerian military intelligence. Known to be courteous and solicitous of the wellbeing of his friends, he is also believed to be a remorseless foe capable of lasting and long-distance animosity.

Well-regarded in northern power circuits, the military intelligence chieftain is known to have a formidable capacity and stamina for political intrigues and open-ended power conspiracies. As a political fixer, Gusau has become a permanent fixture of Nigerian politics since the Second Republic and in particular in the post-military period. He is widely believed to be one of the four leading northern generals that brokered the return of General Olusegun Obasanjo as civilian Head of State in 1999.

If there is one person who would be viewing the return of Gusau at this particular point with considerable consternation and unease, it must be General Mohammadu Buhari, his old military boss and former Commander in chief. And this unease must extend to the upbeat APC.

Almost thirty years ago, Gusau experienced the lowest point in his military career when he was purportedly pencilled for dismissal from service on the orders of Buhari over some import license palaver. The dismissal was swiftly countermanded by a triumphant Babangida who had tried in vain to safe the neck of his subordinate and devoted friend.

Almost three decades after, the body language suggests that the passage of time has not healed old wounds, and the relationship between the two Fulani generals appears frozen and frigid. If that were to be the case, it is unlikely that Gusau would lightly fold his arms and allow power to fall into the hands of Buhari and the APC except in the case of an unstoppable national avalanche.

Whichever way it goes, Nigeria is in for politically exciting and dangerous times. If matters come to a head early enough with the APC relentlessly baiting the expiring ruling party and obviously spoiling for an early bodily clinch, a constitutional earthquake might well render a political tsunami quite superfluous or surplus to requirements

But there are so many variables to this engrossing power tussle to make it an overdetermined totality, as a great French Marxist philosopher of power would put it. It is to be noted that as powerful as he may appear, Gusau himself is not invulnerable and invincible. At well over seventy, age is no longer on his side. If he decides to pitch for himself, he may well be consumed by the dynamics he has helped unleash.

Some people are born kingmakers and some are born kings. Both require different talents. On the two occasions that Gusau had tried to claim the crown for himself, it has ended as a derisive and risible anticlimax. First, when the duo of Generals Diya and Abacha hoodwinked him as Army boss into believing that the crown was his once Shonekan has been dismissed only for them to summarily remove the ground from under him.

Second, when a half-hearted effort to succeed Obasanjo collapsed on the fringes and peripheries of politics without making as much as a dent. Both were avoidable exercises in self-demystification. It is to be noted that after the second misadventure, Gusau’s political fortunes took a nosedive. The great spook from Zamfara State would do well to note that in politics, the very notion of third time unlucky is often a diplomatic euphemism for political suicide.

Good evening….

Darkness is truly visible these days. The millennial fog is very daunting and haunting. At night, the entire country darkens over like some vast prehistoric cave. In the blinding stillness, the few rays of light look like tiny glow worms in a vast jungle of forbidding blackness.
It is a truly historic eclipse, showcasing incompetence, fraud , sheer wickedness and the Blackman’s inhumanity to fellow Black people. This privatization thing is nothing but a transfer of sheer irresponsibility from the state to the private sector. Whoever is supposed to generate light now generates virtually 24/7 darkness. The informed wager is that it may get worse.
The dreaded apocalypse is probably here with us. And the boy-emperor smiles, with the sheepish mien of culpable flippancy. There is so much stress and unease in the land. Men and women are on a short fuse. Tempers flare in the most public of places. Citizens are sullen and surly-looking, like a historic mob waiting for the final signal. Twice in the week, raw anger threatened to overwhelm both the House of Representatives and the Senate. As often, the over-pampered haymakers may come to blows in the coming weeks.
In the midst of the confusion and looming conflagration, words went round that the divine creator of Nigeria and Nigerians will address the nation on the state of the union. At the appointed hour, people flocked to the appointed place. Besieged and berserk humanity struggled and jostled for space and the place soon became a Bedlam of sorts. People shrieked and howled at each other like denizens of a lunatic asylum.
Even in hell, there is a pecking order. The rulers of the nation— politicians, priests, soldiers, intellectuals, Muslim clerics, bankers, local kings, oil thieves, marabous and other junkies and flunkies of power— sat in the front row, beaming smiles of self-satisfaction. But there is plenty of opportunity in confusion.
The ranks of the new nobility have been infiltrated by some local thugs who were throwing unimaginable insults at them. Among them was the irrepressible Okon who eyed the rulers with scorn and contempt. “Yeye people, see di kind mess you don put dem Black people and una still dey smile,” Okon hollered.
“There is need to protect the species from the serpents”, a famous establishment lawyer noted, looking in the direction of Okon and other gangsters with considerable suspicion. All of a sudden, a celestial sandstorm began, thus heralding the arrival of the great One. The altercation immediately subsided. An ethereal figure could be seen wafting through the divine cloud.
“Good evening!!!” the voice suddenly boomed and then disappeared with the receding cloud. The crowd began to disappear in greater confusion and loss of lucidity. Thus ended the historic sighting of the creator of Nigeria. It will take another hundred years for the historic import of the message to sink in.

January 26, 2014
Transitions and transformation

When the freshly minted President Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan announced that his regime would be marked by a transformative agenda, not many compatriots believed him. Nigerians have heard too much of such promises in the past only for them to turn out a damp squib. Let them just get on with the job and forget the stirring heroics, cynical Nigerians would be heard grunting. From Shagari’s Ethical Revolution to Yar’Adua’s Servant Leadership, our people seem to have heard enough.

So it is then that a prophet is not without honour, except in his own land. But it is also in the nature of prophecies to manifest in curious and unexpected ways. Last week as the shouting match in River State finally descended into a full scale shooting war, and as illustrious scalps tumbled from the Wadata Plaza and the military redoubt, the real transition and transformation finally unfolded before our eyes. It is not about the political and economic society. It is the transition and transformation of Goodluck Jonathan from a meek and diffident political apprentice to a full blown civilian caudillo.

The interesting thing about a fascist terror machine is that it acts with impersonal rigour recognising neither its original owners nor its temporary custodians When in a moment of vengeful hubris you hand over such a torture instrument to a man weighed down by the ancestral memory of persecution and torture, a man whose cultural conditioning has not accustomed him to an automatic obeisance and deference to hierarchy and a feudal pecking order, you must be ready to reap the whirlwind.

Jonathan may well be the nemesis of the old Nigerian power coalition, just as Abacha turned out its military nemesis. In human affairs, political advantages are not designed to last forever. Somebody is bound to lose concentration at a critical point and make a stupid mistake.

The Nigerian post-colonial state and its hegemonic power brokers have had it coming for a long time. Good luck normally intervened. Now, the real Goodluck has intervened, and it is about time, too. Even political insanity has its statute of limitation. You cannot spend decades preparing for madness. Madness does not condone permanent deferral.

As readers will attest, this column is not given to hurling invectives and personal insults. When we focus on particular individuals, it is to highlight their importance in and to the impersonal process of history. For many, Jonathan may appear as an errant personality and historic misfit, but sometimes individual actors are often helpless and hapless agents of the remorseless and relentless turns of history.

In order to understand just what is going on, we must return to the nature of colonial and post-colonial transition in Nigeria and the kind of anti-developmental state and nation we have been saddled with by both our colonial and post-colonial overlords. A state and nation do not exist in vacuum. They are products of a specific political and cultural milieu and a determinate historical process.

Last week, we noted in this column how the military transition programmes often mirror the colonial transition itself in their emphasis on continuity rather than radical change, and their obsession with personnel replacement rather than a fundamental re-engineering of the structure of the state and the nation itself.

It is therefore appropriate to look at the nature of the military rule that Nigeria has had and their fixation with the status quo rather than the radical agency which would have rapidly transformed Nigeria’s political and economic fortunes. We need to understand the nature and character of the millennial incubus we are dealing with. It will then be possible to situate the Jonathan presidency within the lineage of civilian despotism. General Obasanjo who has been directly involved in two of the transition programmes both as a beneficiary and benefactor is a central figure in the historical tragedy.

Two of the military regimes did not even bother about transition programmes. In the case of General Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi, he was completely consumed with tempering and negotiating the radical momentum the military uprising of January 15 1966 had unleashed. The fallout would eventually consume him. General Mohammadu Buhari could not care a hoot. His natural disdain for Nigerian politicians coupled with the violent mood of the country against politics and the political class at the end of the Shagari regime made the climate very hostile.

After initially agreeing to a broad based transition to civilian rule programme, General Gowon suddenly changed his mind in 1974 on the grounds that the political class had not learnt their lesson. We may never know the intelligence available to the temperate and mild-mannered general who had done extremely well in healing the hideous wounds of the civil war.

But with Chief Awolowo on the prowl and the Ikenne titan acting with the majesty and assurance of a king in waiting, the odds were too unpredictable. Gowon himself would famously admit that he had rebuffed all entreaties to put Awo away. Even after the civil war, the fear of Awo was the beginning of wisdom. The following year, Gowon was swept out of office by his colleagues.

Despite all the chicanery and grand deception of the Babangida Transition Programme and the frantic war-gaming on behalf of the status quo, the dominant military faction bared its fangs as soon as it was confronted with the unpredictable outcome of the end election. They panicked and summarily annulled the election as soon as it became clear that MKO Abiola and the coalition of unaccustomed and irregular fellows were coasting to victory in a momentous landslide. For his temerity, Abiola would perish in captivity.

In the case of General Abacha, the obsession with the military, political and national status quo assumed a venomous dimension. After forcing himself on the nation even against the wishes of majority of the armed forces, Abacha came to the conclusion that only he could succeed himself.

His self-succession project had developed an unstoppable momentum when it became obvious to the protocol of power that the cost of acquiescing in his murderous siege on the nation might prove prohibitive. A sultan’s scalp was already in the blood-dripping kitty among many other illustrious apparitions, and the goggled one was beginning to eye the hilltop castle in Minna for the definitive endgame. An outstanding military terrorist, Abacha had bludgeoned the nation’s traditional power centres into submission and was on his way to becoming the country first truly maximum ruler when death intervened.

The two transition programmes involving General Obasanjo are classic examples of how to politically railroad a whole nation into compliance using the military tactics of camouflage and deception. The hapless and clueless Nigerian political class allowed themselves to be led into a well-laid political ambush before being electorally slaughtered. Only the deeply cunning can call to the deeply cunning.

As it was in 1979, so was it the case in 1999. General Abdulsalaam Abubakar, who as a colonel commanded the hand over parade by Obasanjo in 1979, appeared to have mastered the ropes very well. As usual, the obsession of the military hierarchs was with continuity and the preservation of the status quo. The political class served as ancillary and accessory to a well-oiled plot which caught them completely flatfooted.

Like its NPN forebear, the PDP was designed as a broad based national party teeming with men and women of calibre and timber who could deliver the bloc votes while guaranteeing continuity and the status quo even as they indemnify the departing military against loss of face and humiliation. An ideological blueprint for the rapid development and transformation of the country was a less urgent and pressing need in the face of antagonistic and anti-military forces of change. As usual with “non-ideological” posturing, it is based on a masked ideology of a conservative stirring of the most virulently reactionary kind..

In 1979, Obasanjo famously boasted that the best candidate do not always win elections. Twenty years later, the same man after wondering aloud about how many times Nigeria wanted to make a president of him willingly yielded to a draft “ambush” by noting that generals do not walk away from an ambush. They romp through it. Unknown to the kingmakers, the king had already been chosen somewhere else.

With the benefit of cruel hindsight, it is now very painful watching the AD chieftains hopping from one party to the other when their fate had already been sealed. Their participation in the Abubakar transition programmes served to confer legitimacy on a chicanery concocted somewhere else. But it could have been worse. The 1999 cliff hanger was more dire than 1979, the military having exhausted its political and historic possibility as an agent of change.

If one takes a long term perspective or what the French call la longue duree on this matter, it may be possible to see some good in evil and some merits in the PDP, given the balance of power at that particular point. It was a holding device put in place to work out the contradictions of military rule as the army beat a disorderly retreat back to the barracks. It did brilliantly well in that. Only men of Obasanjo’s nerve and verve, T. Y Danjuma’s steely and strategic brilliance and Aliyu Gusau’s arm twisting spooky genius could have achieved that feat of demilitarization without provoking a monumental backlash.

But eventually, a monstrosity can only beget another monstrosity. In a cruel paradox, the same road that leads to demilitarization also leads to a democratic gridlock. A holding device is just that. It is not designed to move the country forward economically and politically. We can now see the trail and the obsession with “safe” status quo that led to the emergence of Goodluck Jonathan. The PDP military-inspired hoax has lasted fifteen years. The Jonathan presidency is its defining end product.

Being politically and ideologically bereft, the PDP can neither transform itself not to talk of transforming the nation. As it is at the moment, the party is a rudderless hulk that is about to transit Nigeria into another major disaster. The Titanic is approaching its titanic iceberg. Unfortunately having overdrawn their political and professional IOUs, the old Junker generals and masters of the Wehrmacht are no longer in a position to sort things out. Unless care is taken, it is going to be an apocalyptic meltdown and a nightmare for the Black race.

January 19, 2014
Tukur is not the endgame

A man afflicted with leprosy is often uncomfortable when it comes to the counting of fingers. While we are still on the slow-motion unravelling of the biggest party in Africa, it is meet to report on the gangland political elimination of its former party chairman, Bamanga Tukur. It has been a week of high octane drama in the PDP (Hereafter referred to as the People Decapitation Party) It was an elaborate game of bluff and counter bluff in which rumours and planted stories alternated with resignations and denials of resignation.

Unlike its more famous French precursor, the PDP guillotine is not a mercy killer at all. It is a crude and blunt instrument of political decapitation, the ultimate tribute to African political savagery. It will be recalled that Idi Amin Dada of Uganda once stocked the freshly decapitated scalps of his political opponents in a deep freezer in his sitting room. Every morning, the deranged Nubian cyclops would walk up to the freezer to hurl insults at the departed. For him, death was not enough. There ought to be something more terminal.

It is so sad to watch an accomplished administrator and distinguished industrial magnate like Bamanga Tukur reduced to a whimpering nonentity while begging for a job that had long disappeared. As the old octogenarian minus one year ran from pillar to post begging for a stay of execution, the hounds appeared to have sniffed blood. It was all reminiscent of watching morbid hyenas carving up their victim alive.

They were not even going to allow the old man a decent lying in state. For sheer drama, the end would have made Al Capone and the old Chicago Mafiosi look like callow apprentices. A poker-faced Jonathan pulled out Tukur’s resignation letter indicating that the Fulani aristocrat has consented to execution. From the way the old man winced and grimaced, his face contorted in pains like a badly mauled boxer, it was all clear that we were witnessing the equivalent of a low tech political lynching. When the selfsame Jonathan announced that he was giving Tukur a higher and bigger assignment, one could almost hear the old man cursing under his breath in Fulfude.

It would appear that in the twilight of an illustrious public career, the Fulani Brahmin made a grave political miscalculation. No matter his stout defence of Jonathan and his presidency, the man from Otueke would sacrifice just about anybody when his all-consuming presidential ambition is threatened. At almost eighty, age is no longer on Bamanga Tukur’s side. Having lost face with the larger party for what is considered his autocratic testiness, and having become a pariah among the northern power cohorts for his support for the unsupportable, a comeback into political reckoning is hard to envisage. So long then, Papa Bamanga.

But let it be noted that Bamanga Tukur is not the endgame. There will be more games before the end. And there will be more chilling political executions of big games. The head hunter is surely about and abroad. The guillotine is not a grass cutter.

January 19, 2014
Alien-Nation (11)

(The hood does not make a nation)

Around midnight on October1st 1960, the Union Jack was lowered in Nigeria. It was a remarkable moment indeed, a ceremony of departure and the consecration of the birth and arrival of a new nation. But just as it is said that the hood does not make a monk, the hood in nationhood does not convey or confer automatic authenticity on any nation. By a remarkable irony of language, hood may actually mean a mask, or the badge of false identity.

Yet in another sense, the lowering of the flag was also a powerful tribute to the departing colonial masters, their ability to create something anew and their power to territorrialise and re-territorialise a whole continent at will. What the departing imperialists were handing over to the new political elite were not the old kingdoms and territories forcibly seized from their ancestors but something radically new and novel. The old territories had been reworked, recast and sown together again with the thread of western modernity.

Just as a new religion requires its own priests, a new nation also requires a new national elite. Advertently and inadvertently, the structure thrown up by the new colonial order, with its western literacy, its new educational system, the spiritual re-engineering of the populace and above all the imposition of western political and economic order, was bound to throw up its own elite. It is no use moaning that Nigeria did not produce a Mandela, or an ANC for that matter.

At independence in Nigeria, the apparatus and personnel of the old colonial state were merely indigenized or Africanized leaving its raison d’etre substantially intact. Although the state was in transition from its colonial origin to its post-colonial destiny, to its designers and inheritors alike, what was needed and required was continuity with the promise and possibility of change rather than a radical rupture. A radical rupture would have involved a revolutionary challenge to the colonialists by the emergent elite and almost certainly a war of liberation.

To emphasize the seamless continuity of colonial and post-colonial rule, certain key colonial personnel were left in vital positions after independence. Among these were the Army Chief, top officers of the judiciary, the police and many security kingpins. The Queen of England also remained in place as ultimate sovereign until Nigeria was said to have achieved full republican status in 1963.

Despite the occasional political hiccups and journalistic hell-raising about the arrogance and racist assumptions of the colonial masters, the ascendant Nigerian coastal elite were not uncomfortable with colonial rule as long as it eventuated in Home Rule. They were, in any case, too westernized in their ways, too implicated and complicit in the colonial civilizing mission, to view things from a different prism. The tussle and tiffs between them and the Lugard brothers eventually boiled down to an ironic confrontation about who was more civilized and westernized. They were dandified and dignified “negro-saxons”, to echo Edward Blyden’s withering dismissal.

Their successors were not much different. In the case of Zik despite an early intellectual militancy, a pragmatic accommodation with colonialism soon crystallized in the face of the pragmatic difficulties faced by a global Black intellectual rooted in a specific and exacting colonial nation-space. There ensued a memorable parting of ways with his younger and more militant admirers who were to be harshly abandoned to their fate.

Obafemi Awolowo , who had studied Law in England, was content with an initial project of intellectually and conceptually re-defining and refining the paradigm and parameters of western governance in all its political, economic and philosophical foundation. It was a project that would consume his prodigious analytical capability and capacity for hard work. Rather than a local guerrilla leader, Awolowo was cut in the mould of the nineteenth century British parliamentary grandees. But even this was to earn him the ire of the colonial masters who saw him as a dangerous ideologue and political heretic who must never smell power..

Ahmadu Bello was very much a prince and scion of the old Fulani Empire. On the eve of the departure of the colonial masters, the Sokoto prince had remarked that Nigeria was merely the empire of his Caliphate forefathers. To him, nothing had changed. Colonial rule was merely a rude interlude; a vexatious intercession in the drive to subdue and subjugate the territorial space named Nigeria and make it amenable to Islamic rule. This was his cultural conditioning which must be granted. However, being exposed very early in life to the inner workings and dynamics of feudal hegemony would make the late Sardauna the most ruthless and sophisticated power player among his colleagues.

But if the remarkable Sokoto prince can be forgiven for his faux pas, the British colonial masters did not help matters. Or rather they resorted to loading the political, military and demographic dice in favour of the master-nationality around which they thought the nation could cohere and congeal. This was very much in consonance with their own national experience.

The problem with this, apart from its sheer historical fatuity and miscognition of the practical realities on ground, is that the colonial masters did not walk their talk until very late in the day. For almost half a century, they kept the north in quarantine and isolation from the rest of the country. The amalgamated territories were ruled very much like a dual-state nation. It was not until the early fifties that the elites of the territories sat together for the first time. Needless to add that it was a dialogue of aliens with the Sardauna famously dismissing the farcical -and soon to be fratricidal- communion as “the mistake of 1914”.

If the two territories had been kept apart the way they were, it would have been possible at independence to work out a loose federation of amalgamated territories with power completely devolved to the federating units. But it was at this very moment that the old British demon of harsh centralizing and compulsory unitarism took hold of the colonial imagination. Through a series of frantic maneuvers, power and privileges became concentrated at the centre with dire consequences for the new nation.

With the equipoise of contending regional titans and their perfectly weighed prejudices and preferences, it was impossible to unify and homogenize the emergent national elite. By the same token and logic, it was impossible for a supreme Nigerian leader to emerge and prevail. The stage was then set for a prolonged and protracted siege on the state by the major nationalities.

The modern Nigerian state thus became an open coliseum; a theatre of war and warfare rather than a platform for the aggregation and reconciliation of competing elite claims. This is a situation that subsists till date. With Awolowo moving to the centre in 1959, the dominant faction of the Yoruba elite tried to overwhelm the alien state. This gambit provoked such a direct and severe response from the feudal north with dire consequences for both nation and Yoruba nationality.

The Igbo people moved next on the chessboard. Again, this resulted in a repercussion of such severity that they rue till date. But the Hausa/ Fulani faction that managed to maintain a hegemonic stranglehold on the state, thanks to their military proxies, has also suffered a catastrophic backlash with the north today virtually in political and economic ruins not to talk of religious turmoil. The protracted intellectual and psychological siege has unsettled them to the bargain and for the first time the old north is looking very helpless and forlorn indeed. It may well be the turn of the clueless Ijaw hegemons to suffer the misfortunes of political fortunes.

It has been a killing field on an industrial scale. This medieval torture wrack, this orrery of horrors, is not the Nigeria of our dream. But as it has been said, a man may make himself a throne of bayonets but he cannot sit on it. Old grievances and resentments cannot be set aside, but they must be understood within the context of a multi-national nation comprising of strong ethnic formations and the consequent narcissism and solipsism.

Chief Obafemi Awolowo , arguably the most gifted and administratively capable of them, identified the major problem of the nation as feudalism in the north. But ignoring the political realities and contending cultural milieu, he chose to attack the problem frontally by attempting to bypass the northern feudal lords to reach the people directly. This panicked the old north. It was said that once on a campaign trail, the Sardauna coughed up dust and phlegm and then exploded that Awolowo would have to pay dearly for this grave insult of forcing a prince to campaign to his own subjects.

Zik who was unarguably the most cosmopolitan and liberal of them all, having been outwitted by Awolowo in the west and finding the north impenetrable with the emirs barely tolerating him retreated to the ethnic fortress and eventually the great man was to be fingered as having authored the Biafran National Anthem. But even before then, it was rumoured that at the time of the 1964 constitutional crisis an affronted Zik was already being serenaded by irate military officers of Igbo origins on the need for a drastic change.

With the west on fire and the entire nation roiling in a political cauldron, was a coup inevitable? Virtually so. It was also in keeping with the norms of the time. Unlike now, it was the time when the men on horseback were viewed as an alternative modernizing elite. Ahmadu Bello’s error of judgment arose from his equating a feudal fiefdom with a nation-state that was not of his making and the attempt to impose the norms on people of radically divergent worldviews.

There was bound to be a collision of altars and a national tragedy when this worldview came into fatal contradiction with a fiercely republican ethos that had no truck with a feudal pecking order. Yet by virtue of the same cultural logic the mutiny by mid-ranking officers of mainly Igbo origins was so politically clueless, so motivated by bloodthirsty and irrational vengeance that it became part of the national problem.

A return match was inevitable, more so since God marches on the side of the bigger battalion. The Igbo not only needed to be put in their place but out of place, after all men are hanged not because horses are stolen but so that horses may not be stolen, as they say. Needless to add that the revenge coup of July 1966 put the earlier one in the shade in terms of its savage ferocity. For three days, Nigeria was effectively defunct and without a central administration. When the smoke cleared, Brigadier Olufemi Ogundipe had been militarily browbeaten into precipitate flight and the earlier cries of Araba or secession had died down.

With that historic triumph, the prospects of Nigeria’s rapid political and economic development in the hands of visionary modernizers rapidly and dramatically diminished. Thus was set the template of permanent political instability and economic underdevelopment in which even military transition programmes came to mirror the colonial transition itself with emphasis on continuity rather than change and a change of personnel rather than a change in the personality of the state and the structure of the nation.

When Chinua Achebe famously put the failure of the Nigerian state and nation squarely at the doorstep of a failure of leadership, he was not completely wrong, except that he ignored the structural and configurative constraints which have hobbled the emergence of a nationalist political elite and stalled our march to genuine nationhood. As it is at the moment, Nigeria is a telling rebuff to the Blackman’s ability to manage human complexity and the contradictions of a vast modern nation-state.

As we slouch towards another epic political gridlock chillingly reminiscent of fifty years ago, it is clear that what Nigeria needs is a new national elite that will draw up a fresh charter for the nation. A National Conference, sovereign or otherwise, might remove the constraints if it addresses genuine fears and grievances, but it will not give us a new elite, except in circumstances of tumult and turmoil. But unless we find the will and the willpower to create Nigeria anew, the fat lady will soon come on stage.

January 12, 2014
An evening of songs for the lady of the ports

The don port oooooo! All good things must end, and everything that has a beginning must have an end. Some have a sense of an ending and some don’t. And so to the plush and magically enchanting Oriental Hotel this last penultimate Friday for an evening of songs and reception for Obiageli Anubi who turned sixty and retired as the General Manager (Legal Services) of the Nigerian Ports Authority after decades of exemplary and dedicated services to her fatherland.

After the cold blizzards of Christmas in dreary England, and after ventilating on the dire plight of Nigeria for hours on end, snooper decided that a fresh breath of air was in order and in fact imperative. It surely takes a glutton for punishment to continue ruminating at the keyboard for hours on end about the woes and woe-betide misfortunes of Nigeria. If one does not want to go mad and start attacking the computer in misdirected anger, there must be a backup escape plan.

And so the exquisite pile of Oriental Hotel beckoned on a cool and pleasant evening after a church service at TBS which snooper avoidably skipped. There was class and what the French called élan. It was a long time yours sincerely heard such beautiful and sonorous singing. The orchestra was as accomplished as it was sophisticated, switching fluidly and seamlessly from jazz, local music to the classical music of the haute couture. And yet it was an entirely Nigerian cast. Will good music eventually save Nigeria? A beautiful lady sitting next to snooper whose identity must remain a secret casually remarked that the enraptured pianist looked like he was about to have what the French discreetly and elegantly describe as la petite mort. Ou la la!!!!

The National Youth Service is arguably the military’s greatest legacy to modern Nigeria. It all looks like yesterday, but it is almost forty years ago in Uwani, Enugu and the old East Central state that it all began. As usual, the ubiquitously urban snooper was drinking and philosophizing away at a nearby joint chillingly called Mess 87 when intelligence report came that a group of female undergraduates had arrived for a party at the youth corps quarters nearby.

Yours sincerely, reeking of alcohol and cheap tobacco , rushed posthaste to the scene only to find that he had been comprehensively out-generalled by the duo of Jide Anubi and Sola Alabi a.k.a Shaft. One thing led to the other and Oby, one of the undergraduates from the Enugu law Campus of the UNN, eventually became Mrs Anubi.

Almost forty years after, the sleek and elegant lawyer in training has transformed into the matriarch of the Anubi family and a proud and steely-looking grandmother to boot. Last Friday, Engineer Anubi, trying to rub salt in an old wound, cheekily reminded snooper of his mortal loss. Get off my back, young man.

Perhaps the most pleasing and value-laden remark of the night came from a friend of the Anubis who noted that the celebrant radiated happiness and fulfillment because she left office with her integrity and reputation intact, unlike many of her predecessors in the same office. It will be hard to beat that as a testimonial. Here is wishing Mrs Anubi a great time in retirement.

January 12, 2014
Alien-Nation (1)

(One Hundred Years of Solipsism)

Solipsism is a condition in which a person regards his own thoughts, deeds and interests as the sole determinant of reality to the exclusion of everything else. Nothing else matters apart from this self-absorption, and the entire universe can go to hell. It is a situation of abysmal and irredeemable egotism.

On the other hand, alienation can be regarded as a social condition in which the degree of estrangement is so severe that people become and feel like aliens in their own land. The nation itself comes to resemble an alien contraption, a medieval torture wrack, designed to torment its hapless citizens to submission.

In an engrossing historical replay of the dramatic technique of estrangement and the literary theory of defamiliarization, what is familiar suddenly becomes unfamiliar. It is a war of all against all, and alienated nationals become enemy combatants in their own fatherland. The national fabric is fractured in an irreversible manner. Radical anarchy reigns supreme.

One hundred years after Amalgamation, Nigeria has become a classic example of an alien nation. There is no disputing the fact. Everywhere you turn, you are confronted by the social pathologies arising from alienation: a deviant post-colonial culture of unprecedented impunity, anti-social behaviour ranging from armed robbery, kidnapping, ritual killing for money, official extortion, state burglary of the Exchequer all compounded by elite political delinquency.

This is as close to hell on earth as it can get, more so since there are extant glimpses and vestiges of the paradise Nigeria could have been for the Black person had things gone alright and not awry. Even more so, when there is a persistent belief that there is an immanent rationality, a higher divine logic, which quietly guides human history to a higher and more beneficial order irrespective of the collective death wishes of certain societies and people.

Although originating from the West after the horrors of the Dark Age, the modern nation-state paradigm is supposed to be a radical advance on earlier forms of human organisation of territorial space such as empires, fiefdoms, principalities, parochialities and kingdoms. The old monarchical states are forcibly and radically restructured and democratised to accommodate new talents and vibrant emergent energies.

As more and more people clamour to have a better say in the way and manner they are governed and consequently as the divine sovereignty of monarchies gave way to the secular sovereignty of the people, human governance is infused with a new rationality in which the pulse of the people becomes the pulse of power itself. New institutions are put in place which emphasize the separation of power and which act with impersonal rigour and objectivity, recognising neither prince nor pauper in the pursuit of social justice, law and order.

Unfortunately, modern Nigeria has failed woefully and lamentably in all the indices of modern governance. It is sad to note that the ancestors of modern Nigerians who lived in the territorial space cobbled together by colonial fiat would have been happier in their pre-colonial fiefdoms despite the wars, famines and internal slavery. For example by 1904, the Egba city-state had solved the problems of sanitation and misappropriation of state funds.

Although premised on a dubious civilising mission, the colonial conquest and subsequent amalgamation of the territories that make up modern Nigeria was not done to ameliorate the living conditions of the natives. It was principally an act of imperialist aggression designed to expropriate the abundant resources of the periphery for metropolitan prosperity.

But let us be brutally frank with ourselves. This was also an act of compulsory globalisation which was virtually inevitable in the absence of a local, African or West African, seafaring global power which could have validated these local resources in the international market. Without such inter-continental validation, these native resources to which no human value and labour have been added are next to useless, a paradoxical tribute to nature’s subversive generosity and ability to play a spoiling mother to her tropical children.

Globalization in one form or the other has always been the first condition of mankind, depending on the stage of history and the state of technology. The caravan route that stretched from ancient Kano to Baghdad was an earlier and rudimentary form of globalisation. It brought the wonders and magic of Mesopotamia to the African hinterland. At a point in history, the basin of the great rivers of Babylon was at the centre of human civilization and advancement.

Centuries later when Mansa Musa set forth on a journey to Mecca taking all the gold in his empire with him like a footloose vagabond, he was obeying the logic of globalisation albeit with ruinous consequences. But from the eleventh century, it was the emergent seafaring powers of Portugal, Spain, Holland and England that led the rest of the world in the race to modernity.

Sweet indeed are the uses of adversity. Although colonisation originated from base economic motive, it did leave some beneficial effects and benign legacies. Among these are modern literacy arising from the alphabetisation of the local languages, modern educational systems, modern communication system, a good road network, a modern railway system and above all a desirable ethos of transparency and accountability in fiscal management. The post-colonial conquerors of Nigeria must go into hiding when their achievements are compared with those of the colonial interlocutors.

In some ways, then, Nigeria, despite the inglorious circumstances of birth, is , and remains, a tribute to the colonial imaginary and its profoundly self-subversive genius. Although often described in colonial exchanges as an arbitrary block hewn out of the heart of Africa, there is also evidence of a romantic colonial vision which saw the creation of such a large, sprawling Black conurbation as the possible future catalyst and saviour of the entire continent.

In other words, if the idea of a huge and formidable African country like Nigeria did not exist in colonial imagining, it would have had to be willed into existence by the post-colonial imagination. The heroic efforts of some visionary African leaders in this respect, notably Kwame Nkrumah and his pan-African dream, Sekou Toure, the early Zik, Julius Nyerere and even Muammar Ghaddafi and Gamel Abdel Nasser, despite their pan-Arabic narcissism, cannot be easily ignored.

One in every four persons of the Black race happens to be a Nigerian. With its huge and largely arable landmass, its prodigious human and natural resources, the vibrant collective memory of its people and their sheer spunk when compared to other Africans, Nigeria ought to become the Mecca of the Black race and a medicinal haven for its tortured psyche.

But something went catastrophically wrong. We are still searching for the Black box of the most astonishingly talented Black nation. Even if we ignore the discreet obituaries already making the international round, we cannot ignore the telltale signs all around us that this nation is about to collapse and die.

Once again, the international community is concerned not because they love Nigeria but because its huge carcass will constitute a catastrophic global health hazard. If you don’t dispose of a dead person on the basis of sanitary hazard, you must do it on the basis of enlightened self-interest. In sheer magnitude, the humanitarian catastrophe arising from Nigeria’s possible disintegration is better than verbalised.

The good news is that unlike biological organisms, dead nations can actually be revived and resurrected. But it will take a colossal willpower on the part of the doctors and the doctored. While most nations are willed into existence by a few individuals, it usually takes the collective efforts of many to transform the imagined community into an organic reality. Few are called but many must volunteer.

No matter the nature and manner of its coming to be, a nation is never given. It is usually defined and refined in process, a process which is a Homeric battlefield; a site of perpetual conflicts and ceaseless overcoming of contradictions. In order to properly focus on what went wrong, we must go back to where the rains started beating us. (To be concluded next week).

January 5, 2014
Okon becomes a public letter writer

It is the season of letters. Missives have become missiles flying all over the place like weapons of mass destruction. The gentle and polite art of belles-lettres has been transformed in post-colonial Nigeria to a weapon of political offensive often with chilling prognostications. Over Christmas, snooper received a letter from his daughter which began with the ominous opener: before it is too late. The heart froze at the looming prospects of literary fratricide. But it turned out to be a merely mischievous but arresting opening gambit of seasonal felicitations.

Looking for a theory of political letter writing, Baba Lekki, the old crusty contrarian, calmly explained that the word “lethargy” which he described as the principal ailment of the Nigerian ruling class has now transformed into the exact opposite of its original meaning. According to the crazy old man, it now means “leta ji” or the awakening of letters.

When the dust has settled a bit, perhaps a young researcher in one of our universities will conduct a scholarly inquisition into the Impact of Letter Writing on the Politics of The Fourth Republic. There can be no doubt that the old profession of public letter writing profoundly affected the literary and political development of modern Nigeria. Those ones were a breed from another planet: fierce, fearsome patriots who took no hostage and were walking dictionaries in their own right. There are at least three famous Nigerian writers whose fathers were public letter writers.

But while we are still on this subject, it is appropriate to report that Okon has cottoned on the act by becoming a public letter writer. He had set up shop in the garage with a rusty, antediluvian computer which he probably stole from the warehouse of a defunct newspaper in Majidun owned by the one with the deathly grin. A rapid queue soon built up. It was a distraught woman that first came forward.

“Oga Okolo, abi wetin dey call dat yeye name? I wan make you write letter to dem yeye NEPA people. Before, before dem dey produce 12 hours of darkness, now dem don increase am to 23. Ask dem make dem add the rest one hour so dat katakata go scatter dem mama”, the woman screamed.

“I hear you my sista”, Okon nodded in agreement. Another woman came and asked Okon to write a love letter to her banker lover.

“Ha mama, I go begin dat one with osculate me, my bobo”, Okon sneered.

“Osculate ko, ejaculate ni. Weeree. He be like if say your head no correct sef”, the woman snapped and left. Then it was the turn of a distinguished Lagosian-looking man in three piece suit and colonial bowler hat. He had an aura of authority about him which was quite unnerving.

“I was a colonial PLW, which means public letter writer, but these days if you send a private letter to these ones they will respond with a public letter bomb.”, the man opened..

“So baba, wetin you want me do with dat one?” Okon queried.

“Ha, that is not why I am here. I want you to write a letter to Vanguard demanding for the true paternity of Iyabo’s letter.” The old man suddenly exploded.

“Ha baba, on dat one I dey maternity leave”, Okon quickly retorted and began packing his computer.

January 5, 2014
Elephant and Castle

(The political economy of royal succession)

Just in case you are thinking of the huge and sprawling shopping complex to the South east of metropolitan London, this is not about shopping. Or rather let us just say that this is about shopping for a president in a royal jungle. It is about the political economy of succession in an animal farm. All animals are equal, but some animals are truly more equal than others.

Sorry folks, we have to return to the feral and furry realm of animals once more. A few weeks back, we had thought that we were done with animal tales. But there are compelling reasons to return to the magic world of crawlies and good old Comrade Napoleon. This is what happens when the tools of conventional Political Science fail dismally to explain or grasp the dynamics of an unfurling political drama.

Conventional Political Science rests on a set of stable variables for its analytical validity and integrity. To a large extent, you can predict the outcome of the inevitable collision of human and social forces. After all, when you have eliminated all that is impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth, to appropriate the great Sherlock Holmes. But in the post-colonial jungle, nothing is set and everything is variable. It is the ultimate nightmare of the political scientist.

You would have thought that only a year after the last presidential election and given the dire and fraught situation of the country, a nasty succession battle would be the last thing on the mind of our political class. You would have thought that amidst country-wide social unrest and given the fact that the north of the nation has virtually imploded politically and economically from the Boko Haram scourge, presidential election would be the last thing on the mind of politicians.

You would have thought that the conventional wisdom is to fix what is broken first before deciding who should handle it. But you are profoundly mistaken. This is Nigeria, Blackman’s own country. And who would have thought that at this particular moment the Jonathan presidency would come to resemble the Yar’Adua presidency in its inert and futile probing like a stalled caterpillar and its mix of political and physiological ailments? It is all beyond our human ken. It points at some malignant tricks of some powerful occult forces.

If anybody had thought that the next presidential election or the impending succession battle would be fought over the Boko Haram plague or how to secure the political stability of the nation by redesigning its grand architecture, they had better perish the thought. A plantain plantation or Banana Republic does not require architectonic wonder. Just allow the oil to flow and all will be well.

It may be an economy based on extractive predation, but it is an economy all the same. After all there is demand and there is supply, which is the first law of economics. Secure the oil rig first and the electoral rigging can come later. This is the political economy of royal succession in an animal farm.

Last week, there were some significant moves on the chessboard which foreshadow a great battle of will and wits in the coming months. It points towards another epic succession battle. It is a play of giants and both the grass and the grassroots are already trembling. Against the selectorate, the electorate have no chance. The kingmakers only vote after the king has been chosen for them. This past week, the elephant rumbled and the castle quaked as if it has suffered a tectonic concussion. Let us return to the elephant and the castle.

With its mammoth brains, the elephant is gifted with phenomenal memory. It neither forgives nor forgets. Its powers of photographic recall are a tad short of the miraculous. It remembers human faces and scant topographic features. It stalks those who have attempted to harm it with chilling resolve. It often lies in wait for those who would ambush it. When roused to fury and indignation, the elephant is a truly formidable picture of elemental rage and umbrage, tearing at and pulling out everything in sight and out of sight. Its capacity for absorbing punishment is legendary and even in death—as the Yoruba will attest—the skull of an elephant is no luggage for children.

In anger and angst, not even the castle is safe and secure from the elephant, more so when the elephant itself has sojourned twice in the castle. A bid to secure permanent residency met with massive popular discontent in which the earth quaked with towering indignation and disgust. The elephant retreated in shame and misery. But it has not forgotten old business or forgiven old businessmen. In military parlance, it is known as discreet evacuation of troops while awaiting reinforcement.

Last week, Nigeria’s surviving pachyderm from the Jurassic Age, the irrepressible and inevitable General Olusegun Obasanjo, finally roused himself to political battle but from the economic trenches. With well-controlled indignation and in an act of political marksmanship quite stunning for a man of his advance age, Obasanjo took the economic policy of his political protégé to the cleaners. The proposed introduction of the 5,000 naira mega-bill, he averred, was not only going to further compound the economic miseries of Nigerians, it was bound to fuel massive inflation.

All hell was let loose at the castle. This was the political equivalent of Pearl Harbour when the Japanese suddenly overwhelmed the imperial might of America. You would have thought that as a distinguished member of the Council of States and Jonathan’s political benefactor and godfather, Obasanjo had a safe and secure communication channel, a hotline as they say, to communicate his misgivings to the presidency. But this is what late M.K.O Abiola famously described as “high-wire politics”.

A succession war is in full swing. The elephant has bared its battle-tested trunk. Knowing fully well that transformation is the kernel of Jonathan’s message and self-declared mission, and knowing fully well that a sound economic policy is the heart of transformation, the great elephant has wrapped its trunk around the presidency’s soft and septic underbelly.

This is a textbook military operation, a bold Panzer strike at the jugular before the mopping up operation. Once Jonathan is rendered combat-ineffective, it will be a question of time before his limping presidency is taken out of contention. Obasanjo is a past master of the politics of delegitimation. His artillery bombardment of Babangida’s “deficits of honour, credibility and integrity” prepared the ground for the Minna General’s crucial lapse of concentration and hurried exit from power.

The same gambit led to the eventual unraveling of Alhaji Shehu Shagari, General Mohamadu Buhari and lately the Yar’Adua presidency. In the particular case of Alhaji Shagari, Obasanjo gave a damning and devastating critique towards the end. When the Daily Times deliberately published a garbled and mischievous version, the irate general sent a blistering rejoinder. Abacha who could read the game very well swiftly impounded him, but this did not prevent the goggled one from meeting a similar fate.

For months, there have been rumours of a final and terminal parting of way between godfather and godson. It was deliberately leaked to the press that Obasanjo was eyeing a Sule Lamido/ Rotimi Amaechi ticket. This was swiftly and hurriedly denied. The stinging economic rebuke is the clearest indication so far that that the Jonathan administration is an object of stringent scrutiny by Nigeria’s power mafia and the report card may not be too flattering.

Predictably, the presidency has been placed at the equivalent of a war footing. Presidential canine sentries simply tore into Obasanjo. There were even echoes of Michael Okhai Akhigbe’s infamous put-down of the old warhorse as a frustrated farmer. Leading the pack of hounds is Doyin Okupe who ironically was Obasanjo’s former spokesperson. With patronizing glee, Okupe dismissed his former boss as a private citizen who is entitled to his own views. One can almost hear the bellicose medico smacking his lips in relish. It all recalls a passage from Job: “My desire is that mine enemy hath writ a book”.

But the icing on the cake of insolence goes to Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the feisty Central Bank Governor. Virtually dismissing Obasanjo as an economic illiterate, Sanusi, with caustic severity, added that the old war veteran may be a successful farmer but he is a bad economist. The main plank of Sanusi’s diatribe was that it was Obasanjo himself who had introduced mega-bill currencies into the Nigerian economy.

Yet in the very next breath, and in patent self-contradiction, Sanusi added that Obasanjo’s introduction of mega-bills did not lead to inflation due to “prudent fiscal and monetary policy”. Does that not mean that in spite of himself, Obasanjo is not a bad economist after all? In any case, the Central Bank guru has not told us how the current massive run on the naira through various sinister scams and the Sanusi-endorsed unjust taxation of the poor called subsidy removal will not eventuate in printing more and higher megawatts naira thus fuelling more tacit devaluation and inflation.

As it is often the case with Lamido Sanusi, the ease, fluency and facility of delivery seem to have got in the way of logic and deep reflection. In Nigerian officialdom it is not a crime to speak before thinking. Yet it is quite unlikely that these vitriolic denunciations could have passed without some tacit endorsement from the presidential bunker.

The elephant has the castle within its rifle sight. But the castle is unmoved and unmoving. It all points at a nasty roforofo fight or what the Yoruba call yanponyanrin. The old general may be trying to return to his old political base. But for once in his career, he might have made a fatal political miscalculation with Jonathan. This is because other unstable variables might have crept into the equation. The chap from Otueke is unlikely to go down lightly and meekly.

(First published in April, 2012)

December 29, 2013
The legend of Scheherazade

Scheherazade is a legendary Persian queen and the main storyteller of One Thousand and One Nights.The story goes that every day Shahryar (Persian: “king”) would marry a new virgin, and every day he would send yesterday’s wife to be beheaded. This was done in anger, having found out that his first wife was unfaithful to him. He had killed 1,000 such women by the time he was introduced to Scheherazade, the vizier’s daughter. [Scheherazade] had perused the books, annals and legends of preceding Kings, and the stories, examples and instances of bygone men and things; indeed it was said that she had collected a thousand books of histories relating to antique races and departed rulers. She had perused the works of the poets and knew them by heart; she had studied philosophy and the sciences, arts and accomplishments; and she was pleasant and polite, wise and witty, well read and well bred.

Against her father’s wishes, Scheherazade volunteered to spend one night with the king. Once in the king’s chambers, Scheherazade asked if she might bid one last farewell to her beloved sister, Dinazade, who had secretly been prepared to ask Scheherazade to tell a story during the long night. The king lay awake and listened with awe as Scheherazade told her first story. The night passed by, and Scheherazade stopped in the middle of the story. The king asked her to finish, but Scheherazade said there was not time, as dawn was breaking. So, the king spared her life for one day to finish the story the next night. So the next night, Scheherazade finished the story and then began a second, even more exciting tale which she again stopped halfway through at dawn. So the king again spared her life for one day to finish the second story.

And so the King kept Scheherazade alive day by day, as he eagerly anticipated the finishing of last night’s story. At the end of 1,001 nights, and 1,000 stories, Scheherazade told the king that she had no more tales to tell him. During these 1,001 nights, the king had fallen in love with Scheherazade, and had three sons with her. So, having been made a wiser and kinder man by Scheherazade and her tales, he spared her life. ( As culled from Wikipedia)Problems donating? | Other ways to give | Frequently asked questions | By donating, you are agreeing to our donor privacy policy. The Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization. By donating, you are agreeing to our donor privacy policy and to sharing your information with the Wikimedia Foundation and its service providers in the U.S. and elsewhere. *Monthly payments will be debited by the Wikimedia Foundation until you notify us to stop. We’ll send you an email receipt for each payment, which will include a link to easy cancellation instructions.

December 29, 2013