The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • A diary of wastage

    He was the very symbol of wastage: frail limbs, premature grey hair and a sagging gait. I had put him down as another specimen from our museum of atrocity. He seemed to have understood. As he took his leave, the wasted young man asked me the million dollar question: “Why do we waste ourselves so much?” he cried.

    The metaphor itself, I’m told, originated during our darkest national moment: the civil war. But its sad antecedents, I’m sure, must be located in the bitter and self-destructive post-independence politics of our founding fathers. Like a malignant cancer, it has overtaken every facet of our national life. Wastage has become the dominant metaphor, the all-embracing formula for the tragedy of our collective existence.

    Wole Soyinka, ever the troubled prophet, first drew our attention to the creeping cancer in the mid-seventies. In a newspaper piece titled “Varieties of Wastage,” Soyinka assailed the invasion of our national life by the culture of wastage. We waste our best and brightest; our best and brightest politicians; our best and brightest soldiers; our best and brightest intellectuals; our best and brightest bankers; our best and brightest journalists etc. the road, taking its orders from the system, completes the carnage for us.

    One year this week, a novel and spectacular variety of wastage made its debut on the national scene. Dele Giwa, brilliant editor and one of the stars of Nigerian journalism, was bombed out of existence in his study. This writer is often amazed these days when people talk glibly about the Nigerian bomb without first conceding that the real “McKoy” made its sly and devastating entry several months ahead of the idle speculations. It is pertinent to add here that nobody can fool history and that if care is not taken, that horrifying spectacle of a gifted and virile young man with shattered limbs may itself become an alternative metaphor for our national condition.

    As the first anniversary of Giwa’s murder approached, I’ve been thrown into deep mourning and depression. Some days earlier, a good friend, Deji Adegorioye, who had gone to buy some drugs for his indisposed son had his life snuffed out by a bus belonging to the Celestial Church. Some weeks before this, another friend, Tunde Okeleye, a customs official, was battered to death by a danfo bus whose driver had perfected the murderous strategy of overtaking in the night with lights switched off. Death had barely closed in on him before some brave new Nigerians saw it fit to remove his money, his shoes, his wristwatch and the drinks he bought for his kids.

    As if all this was not enough burden on the soul, news came of the death by road accident of Professor Iluyomade, Oxford-trained law teacher and attorney-general of Ondo State. Something always conspires to deny us of even our brief sources of joy, I thought in deep gloom. I remembered how the Dele Giwa murder had put a damper on the Wole Soyinka Nobel celebration. And now the cultured and lively people of Ondo town will have to share the joy of their illustrious son winning the national merit award with the grief of burying another illustrious son.

    These cruel tricks of fortune! Three weeks earlier, I was thinking of sending a telegram of congratulations to Chinua Achebe on his return to high form when I learnt of the death of Dambudzo Marechera, the gifted Zimbabwean writer. I had reckoned that Achebe who had survived a thousand literary cudgels after his immensely frank but immensely impolitic put-down of Obafemi Awolowo surely deserved some congratulations. But the death of Marechera, the supreme artist of hunger whose life must serve as a classic example of the dissolution of the flesh by spirit (whisky and co), halted me in my track.

    These deaths make my mind to focus on the damage the notorious Ife-Ibadan road might have done to the intellectual development of this country. One now remembers the Bamiduros, the Kola Adenijis, the Taiye Adebanjos, brilliant men who have gone through all the rituals of education only to have their lives tragically terminated on The Road. I remember now a tall, dashing young man who would have graduated with our class of ’75 at Ife. Onome Ibru would have been an invaluable asset not only to the formidable Ibru empire but to the entire country. His life was cruelly abridged on this monster of a road.

    Now consider this. If one were to resurrect all the people we have put through the ceaseless mill of our unedifying history, all the brilliant men and women that our monstrous system has hurried over to the great beyond! What an endless procession of shame and misery would it have been! What a staggering burden of collective guilt for the living!

    Let us end this sad piece with a disturbing but profoundly soothing anecdote. In the gloom and misery that enveloped the nation in the wake of Giwa’s murder. I had the honour of briefly participating in one of the planning sessions for his burial. In the atmosphere of consuming sadness, I had asked a journalist friend whether things would ever be the same again in the country. The man looked at me and said philosophically: “In forty years time, Dele Giwa will be remembered as a fearless journalist of the eighties.”

    Then he told me a story about his father. The old man, sensing that he had only a few more months to spare, decided to take his son down the memory lane on a tour of familiar spots on Lagos Island. As they crossed from one alley to another, the old man’s face would light with memory as they came upon some familiar land mark. “That is the house of so and so,” he would begin, “he was a socialite who died mysteriously in 1937.” At another spot the old man would look up and remark: “This is the house of J.K. he died in his prime in 1956.” And so on…

    His message was clear. Life will go on. Life must go on. The only honour we, the dazed survivors ,can do to the wasted is to resolve to change a system that is responsible for such colossal waste.

     

    •Culled from Newswatch, October, 1987.

  • Now, the turn of the compassionate undertaker

    It is a grim irony. Even those who bury the dead in the land are not exempt from dying in horrid and gory circumstances. The undertaker himself has been taken under. At this rate, the biblical injunction is set to come to pass: Let the dead bury the dead. Talking about needless and pointless deaths, this one could have been avoided. That plane ought not to have been cleared to fly.

    It is one of the evils of cannibal capitalism that it sets base profit above all other considerations. Nothing else matters. If the ageing pilot of the geriatric plane cares let him bring it down on a populous estate. It is the contract that matters, apologies, Festus Iyayi. They will cry for a few days and will get on with it until the next crash. And so a few seconds after being airborne, Tunji Okusanya, his son, his staff, the air crew and Deji Falae, beloved son of Olu Falae, the respected Afenifere chieftain and technocrat, were plucked back to earth in a chariot of fire.

    Last week, the whole of Lagos stood still as the great city bade farewell to the compassionate undertaker. Traffic was disrupted for several hours on the island. The outpouring of grief was unprecedented. It is a typical Nigerian paradox that a man who lived to prepare others for dignified death should now in death teach the living about the finer and nobler aspects of existence.

    Snooper never met this fine fellow. But from all accounts, he was a kind and compassionate man who touched many lives. He exuded human warmth and abundant generosity of spirit. He was a humble servant of death and a proud savant of life. Despite the bonhomie and the hail fellow well met airs, there was also something of the otherworldly mystic about him. He was a man who knew that death is the ultimate leveller. Goodbye Tunji Okusanya, the compassionate undertaker.

  • The tautology of politics

    The tautology of politics

    The crisis bedeviling the nation is not just a crisis of politics but a crisis of the grammar of politics, or political grammar, if you like. As Albert Einstein has noted, insanity is doing the same thing all over again and expecting a different result. In grammatical tautology, there is an unnecessary repetition of meaning, using multiple words to effectively—or ineffectively—say the same thing.

    In political tautology, the same actions are repeated all over and we are told to expect a different result. The result is a crisis of political disorientation or mental disequilbrium in which the actors are conditioned by a stubborn mindset to believe their own lies no matter how outlandish and to seek to inflict same on a cowered populace. As everybody knows, incantation and political magic thrive on repetition and the linguistic violence of formulaic bombardment.

    Let us now begin to plot our way out of this jungle of post-colonial political tautology. The greatest and most compelling argument for the convocation of a Sovereign National Conference is the brutal abrogation of the political rights of Nigerians by colonial and post-colonial administrations, whether military or civilian. But this is also the greatest and most compelling incentive against its convocation.

    Nowhere in the world has the sovereignty of a people or nation for that matter been ceded lightly. It must be demanded or fought for; or there must be some compelling disincentives which force the hands of the rulers. The struggle for sovereignty affirms the sovereignty of struggle as the organising principle of all emancipated human societies. From Magna Carta to the Chartist movement, from the world-historic revolutions to the American Civil Rights protests, it is the struggle to affirm the sovereignty of the people that turn the habitants of a nation-space from inert, passive entities and nonentities to full blown citizens . This is when the nation in itself becomes the nation for itself.

    As it can be seen from the recent Delta Central Senatorial abracadabra, the brisk abolition of the electorate in Offa and the programmed electoral anarchy in Anambra State, Goodluck Jonathan , while paying lip service to a National Conference, is also relentlessly steamrolling the country towards a historic catastrophe that it cannot survive in one piece. What then is the purpose of a National Conference when evidence abounds that rather than attempt to solve the National Question the powers that be are working towards a predetermined National Answer and final solution?

    All over the world, national conferences are always an elite-driven affair. They are a specific mechanism to redeem and retain elite control of the levers of power. In the total absence of pressures from below and the margins, this is not a bad thing, and since current politics in Nigeria is a play of giants disconnected and disarticulated from the populace, Jonathan may yet get away with blue murder. But this is going to be a temporary respite until there is some fundamental retribution which will alter the character of the current political class.

    While waiting for this world-historic rupture and disruption of the mental conditioning of the political elite, it is appropriate to add that in the dispiriting fog of political tautology, nothing can be more refreshing than a fresh breath of scholarly analysis and its illuminating insights. This is the time for our thinkers, philosophers and intellectuals to rise above the fog of mental debilitation in order to fashion a new order for the nation.

    Ben Nwabueze, distinguished professor of Constitutional Law and a foremost legal theorist, is without any doubt the leading illuminati and intellectual star of our current political curfew. Snooper is not always on the same political page with the cerebral titan, but whether you agree with him or not, Nwabueze is a serious reader’s delight any day.

    Approaching his mid eighties, it is obvious that Nwabueze’s capacity for hard work remains undimmed and undiminished by advancing years. There is a seminal rigour to even his most casual pieces and an analytical clarity which marks him out as a master of clinical exposition. In the current depressing state of the nation, there is something to be cheered or even wildly applauded when a man of such age and distinction devotes all of his God-given sterling intellectual talents to solving the problems of his beloved nation as he deems it fit.

    Yet there is the troubling and persistent feeling that current favours, current partisanships and current passions often get in the way of the analytical rigour and seminal exposition. Despite the forthright eloquence, the radical fervour and the simmering contempt for the inanities of the Nigerian political elite, one often goes away with the impression that the distinguished legal theorist is nothing but a defender per excellence of the ascendant political status quo.

    His latest outing, defending the proposed Jonathan National Conference, gives the game away in all its damning and tortured ellipsis. Nwabueze is right to affirm that all the so-called conferences we have had so far are nothing but elitist conclaves which have never given the Nigerian people the right or choice to determine their sovereign destiny. He is particularly spot on in dismissing the 2005 Obasanjo National Dialogue as a sham, or charade lacking in immanent integrity and seriousness of purpose. Nwabueze believes, and tries to make us believe, that the proposed Jonathan Conference would be quite different.

    Yet the main plank and platform for staking his considerable integrity on Jonathan’s fidelity and seriousness of purpose is based entirely on faith and the fact that his group had submitted a draft proposal to the government, and not on a rigorous analysis of the political antecedents and current inclinations of the said administration. Last Thursday in a moment of late lucidity, Nwabueze seemed to be backing away in anticipatory disapproval.

    There can be no doubt about Nwabueze’s sterling standing with the administration. His nominee, Solomon Adun Asemota, the equally distinguished lawyer and respected advocate of a sovereign conference of ethnic nationalities, was eventually coopted after the Nyiam fiasco. But when matters as critical and crucial as this are entirely judged on the basis of cronyism and mutual back-rubbing, one must begin to wonder about the integrity of the whole process.

    In any case, let us not press our luck too far on this ethnic nationalities business. It is one of the pious myths of the decolonising project and the post-colonial nation process that the native people were not consulted before they were boxed into a colonial cage. The reality was that there were no people to consult as such. Force is the organising principle of the colonial project. Nigeria came into being after numerous native armies and economic conglomerates were put to sword by the colonial overlords or militarily browbeaten into submission.

    If we are looking for the real pre-colonial owners of what became Nigeria, we will have to search for the relics and debris of the ancient Ibadan army, the Ekiti insurgents, the Niger Delta barons, the Ilorin army, the Arochukwu magnates, the Nupe generals, the caliphate troops who took a shellacking in 1903, the abducted king of Benin, Jaja of Opobo, the Ijebu armed forces and many others.

    These are the lost and lapsed sovereigns of the numerous pre-colonial states in what eventually became Nigeria and not some mythical, fluid and flux nationalities. In a multi-national nation, there is nothing wrong with ethnic identity politics, but the unpleasant fact we are trying to avoid is that Nigeria, like all colonial nations, is a creation, concoction and contraption of state violence. And violence has been its organising principle ever since. This is what explains the centrality of arms and their bearers, despite the civilian lulls and lullabies.

    How then do we humanise this violence-suffused entity and make real life livable for its stricken and afflicted denizens? As a corollary to that important question, what are the possibilities of a sovereign national conference? Pray but keep your powder dry, says the famous admonition. Nwabueze is surely right in vesting the Jonathan administration with full sovereignty. There can be no dual sovereignty in a functioning state except as a precondition for anarchy.

    It is interesting to note that all the African countries listed by Nwabueze where sovereignty was seized by national conferences are Francophone nations. The French, taking a cue from their own history, imposed a system of presidential monarchy on their African holdings. The idea is to let an authoritarian strongman rule as father and founder of the nation until a biological coup d’etat intervenes and blows the lid off the roiling cauldron. This is what has led to civil wars in the two Congos, Mali, Cote D’Ivoire, Guinea and simmering discontent in Togo. The current harshly monarchical presidential system which does not take into account the fact that Nigeria is powered along by a negative equilibrium and by competing and countervailing centres of power is bound to end in similar grief.

    Nwabueze is at his most bearish and bullish when it comes to the vexed issue of the permanent conflict and endless contestation between legal and popular sovereignty and between the people or forces claiming to represent them and the ascendant sovereign authority. This is also where the political and intellectual contradictions appear in boldest relief. The legal titan is of the opinion that if Jonathan reneges on his promise, if he decides to play hanky-panky by throwing the buck back at a delinquent National Assembly, then the proposed National Conference can assert its authority and seize sovereignty.

    This is a direct and dire warning to the Jonathan administration. The patience of its most ardent intellectual supporters is wearing thin. Nwabueze does not tell us how this will happen, and probably rightly so. But if history is our infallible guide, it is a damp squib. On the few occasions when the Nigerian people have acted with a pan-Nigerian concert to assert their sovereignty, sections of the elite have always moved in to scupper the nascent national consciousness, leaving room for the best organised power cartel to seize sovereignty. It is unlikely to be different this time around. The constitutional pundit ought to know. But this is the bane of political tautology. Professor, welcome to the political laboratory of the great scientist Albert Einstein and his theory of insanity.

  • Okon to convene his own conference

    Ever since President Jonathan , in a sudden Damascus-like conversion, decided to convene a National Conference, the entire country has been agog with intellectual and political excitement. The presidency must be enjoying itself. It is like throwing a scrap of meat at the whippersnappers of change and asking them to get on with the feral scrape or get lost.

    Pundits have been moving from one television station to the other. Nobody now seems to remember the Indian origins of that word. Of great concern to an ageing snooper is how some of these chaps always manage to arrive at the station in the early hours without appearing bleary-eyed even as yours sincerely battles with insomnia. It doesn’t add up, or do the stations have five-star suites? This is what George Lukacs, in a famous swipe at Theodore Adorno, calls the Grand Hotel Abyss.

    But while snooper is wallowing in self-pity, you can trust the irrepressible Okon to cotton in on the latest road show in town. The boy has been assembling a truly historic cast of rogues, ragamuffins and other riff-raff on the margins of society for what he called a Conference of Real Ethnic Minorities of Nigeria, CREMON. One morning, the affable crook , drunk with self-importance, walked up to snooper.

    “Oga, we wan start. As dem fly dey chop madman, madman fit chop fly too”, the mad boy crowed.

    “Start what, and where?” snooper snarled.

    “Dem conference of dem real people of Obodo, all dat one wey dem yeye Yoruba lawyers dey blow grammar na wetin Fela call dem army arrangement. We no dey for mala magomago and dem Yoruba monafiki”, Okon calmly submitted.

    “I see. Have you obtained Police Permit?” snooper demanded.

    “Oga, we don get dem Learners’ Permit from dem license office.” Okon snorted with criminal relish. Before snooper could respond to this outrage, an irate Ibo who had been stomping and stamping around with a scowl suddenly exploded. “Nna, make we begin to fire now, now. If not for dis confluence I for don sell ten tires for Ladipo since morning.”

    “Stupid Ibo man. Na so, so money, money, money”, one man spat with contempt.

    “Watch your tongue. I come from Onitsha and I no be Ibo man”, the man screamed. A call to order suddenly rang out amidst the din. It was James Henshaw, the old Calabar aristocrat and hell-raiser ,who claimed to have seen action as a submarine crew during the Second World War. He had arrived on the premises a day earlier with a retinue carrying his fresh supply of crocodile and hippo meat. When he was not reading old newspapers or sniffing from an enormous pouch of snuff, he was eyeing everybody with a supercilious frown which could be quite unnerving.

    “I hereby declare the conference open. The mistake of 1914 is that the Brits didn’t make Calabar the Federal Capital. We will sue them for reparations”, the old bandit declared. A burly Ijaw man with rippling biceps suddenly jumped up.

    “I am not a Nigerian, and I don’t speak English, period”, he announced in English and with a ferocious scowl. The Ijaw stalwart then ordered his aide to translate what he said for the benefit of everybody. As the chap started speaking in some ancient Old Testament tongue, there was pin drop silence.

    “Kai, this is what they call Lingua Fracas”, Baba Lekki rumbled from the depths of slumber. Pole-huggingly drunk as usual, he had fallen asleep on the sofa while claiming to take minutes. It was at this point that an old Godogodo soldier who had been watching the proceeding with barely concealed irritation let go a brisk volley from a concealed revolver which sent everybody scampering for safety.

  • Seventy salutes to the people’s admiral

    General ignorance should not be an excuse for the ignorance of generals. While majority of Nigerians, disoriented by poverty and the trauma of worthlessness, are being programmed to celebrate fake and phony heroes, one of the greatest products of the Nigerian military, Admiral Godwin Ndubuisi Kanu, recently turned 70. In keeping with the man’s modesty, humility and self-effacement, the day passed quietly and without any funfair or futile fireworks.

    A longstanding friend of column and columnist, Kanu is wonderfully cerebral and even his most casual thoughts are marked by painstaking rigour and analytical sophistication. As they say, it is not where a man stands in times of comfort that attests to his true worth but where he pitches his tent in times of discomfort. Twice in his lifetime, Kanu has turned his back on the very institution that produced him, and at grave personal peril and discomfort. The small measure of freedom Nigerians enjoy today and the return of professionalism to the military are due to the quiet labours of many unsung military heroes. Snooper salutes this illustrious son of Ovim and Nigeria and wishes him many more years of heroic services to the fatherland.

  • Olodumare, these Children of Oduduwa again!!!

    Olodumare, these Children of Oduduwa again!!!

    The Yoruba boast of being the most politically sophisticated people in Black Africa, nay Africa. The bragging and braggadocio are not without some solid merits. Urbanised for over a thousand years, with a cleverly nuanced traditional kingship system which abhors tyranny and despotism and which sets store by civility and courtesy, they have also produced some ancient world class philosophers that would have made the Hellenic civilisation cringe with envy.

    The sad obverse of the coin is that every social and political advancement often comes with and at a stiff price. Urbanity produces its own social pathologies. In folk mythology the city is often demonised as the nearest thing to hell itself while city-dwellers are generally regarded as unreliable, wicked and devious in the extreme. To the urban sophisticates, the rural denizens are regarded as uncouth, ill-bred and dull-witted. This abiding polarization between the city people and the rural folks often plays out with great consequences in Yoruba politics

    Yet it is also very likely that when urbanisation is not accompanied by a corresponding technological development and an increase in the store of scientific knowledge, the human imagination is driven back to mysticism and intellectual sorcery. As Karl Marx famously observed, all mythologies try to dominate nature in and around the imagination. It is the advance of science that dispels such rural idiocies.

    There is no extant record to show that the Yoruba developed great demotic schools and democratic learning institutions to correspond with their great urbanising drive. Or to put things more cautiously, if ever there was such a thing, the colonial conquest killed it off in embryonic formation.

    Consequently and despite the political sophistication, forests of a thousand demons abound. As everybody knows, mastering the Ifa corpus is not for the mentally deficient. It is a steeplechase of mental endurance and spiritual stamina. The privatization of knowledge often leads to the privatization of power which they had tried to avoid in the first instance.

    For if knowledge is also power, the restriction of access to this power breeds a spiritual and intellectual aristocracy which looms large It is the land of a thousand deities and there are more gods to appease than human beings. The result is a “natural” ruling class comprising of savants, spiritualists, royalists and other enforcers of the writ of the realm and a permanent sense of siege and unending civil war which assumes several guises and dimension. Colonial conquest merely destroyed the political and economic basis of this anti-royalist royalism but not its ideological basis. Hence, the new Yoruba aristocrat still comes with a strong sense of personal entitlement.

    Had the Yoruba been an organic nation in their own right, it would not have mattered. The nation-state project is a permanent process of either working out, sublating or supplanting national contradictions. But when a people with highly developed social characteristics and idiosyncrasies are thrown into the same roiling crucible with other people, the principle and process of homogenisation makes them very vulnerable indeed. Enemies without find common cause with bitter enemies within.

    This is not a closet theory of cultural superiority or historical persecution. Every human society or culture has its own way of apprehending reality or dealing with historical exigency. But there are cultures within the Nigerian nation-space that have tried to grapple with the problems of modernity by evolving into empires in their own right. When the imperializing and centralizing motif of all empire builders take hold of their ascendant avatars, they are bound to come into direct collision with other empire builders and hegemonic wannabes cohabiting in the same territory..

    This is the crux of the unresolved Nigerian National Question. It is like boxing the Germans, the French and the British into the same colonial cage and asking them to get on with the job. The human toll is going to be prohibitive. There are some sharply individuated cultures that cannot be easily ground into colonial homogeneity and conformity.

    So is it then that every time the Yoruba seem to be on the verge of arriving at a consensus about their fate in a multi-national nation, vicious internal dissension and dispute arise. Every time there is some progress, the progress is cancelled out by forces within playing hosts to forces without. Every time a successful mobilization of the Yoruba people around a cause occurs, swift demobilization recurs.

    As the hazy outlines of the next civil war in Yoruba land appear in some relief, we must pause and shudder at the implications. In at least three states, loyal dissidents are poised and primed to challenge their political chi to a wrestling match. It is bound to end in tragedy.

    Is there then some ancestral curse working itself out.? Does it mean that this land will not know any peace until the kingdom comes? Or is there some banal sociological explanation at play that continues to elude us? Could there be some sub-ethnic tension still at play which leads to a permanent polarization of elite formations?

    All over Yoruba land despite the stunning advances of the last half a decade, political warlords are preparing for battle. As usual, the loudest noise is coming from the fissures within the new dominant group. As it was the case in the distant and immediate past, progressives are up in arms against progressives and as it has been famously noted by the authors of The Gods that Failed, the final battle is not between socialists and reactionaries but between progressives and former progressives.

    This is what has been happening in Yoruba land in the past fifty years or more with former heroes and sturdy progressives suddenly finding themselves as internally displaced persons, or worse still, as itinerant political hookers and electoral miracle workers.. Snooper once had cause to publicly warn the late Chief Bola Ige against allowing himself to be so internally displaced to the margins of political reaction and irrelevance. It is usually the land of the unreturnable, apologies to Amos Tutuola. In an attempt to get even things often get more uneven.

    How one wishes that the surviving Afenifere grandees could learn from this maxim and the terrible fate that has befallen the internally displaced. Snooper appreciates that these grand old men are fighting for their political life. But there is a fate worse than quiet political death. It is living obloquy and disgrace. When these old heroes begin to plot with a much reviled central government against the dominant political tendency they themselves have spawned it doesn’t get more tragically ironic.

    In fifteen years after the D’Rovan Affair, Afenifere itself seems to have come full circle. The hunter has become the hunted. The brand has lost much steam and stock value. From a post-military global dominance of the Yoruba political horizon, it is now confined to an obscure corner. It has also spawned a younger breakaway faction which is more militant and uncompromisingly regionalist in focus and orientation. The fate it reserved for its old erring members now seem to beckon the surviving titans. Could this be the final working out of the D’Rovan imbroglio?

    As the emergent gladiators in the South West prepare to battle themselves onto death, let them remember the fate of similar gladiators of yore who gravely misread the political signals or miscued the tempestuous dynamics of Yoruba post-colonial politics. Many of these men and women started out as heroes in their own right but ended up as villains.

    Painfully enough, this is not a matter that can be resolved by ordinary morality. You can be morally right and politically wrong. Every political opportunist will eventually get his come-uppance. But there are moments when a political opportunist can be properly aligned and in turn with the aspiration of his people. We leave our readers this morning with a portrait of the two major avatars of our political curfew.

  • Awo and SLA: Two Exemplary Paradigms

    Forty seven years after the assassination of Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola and twenty six years after the death of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the relics of the bitter war are still taking up positions behind their departed principals. It was an epic duel which defined and crystallised the Yoruba political identity and which has determined the subsequent position they will occupy in Nigeria’s political evolution.

    Like the ancient and mythical duel between Shango and Gbonka, it is not as if the victor and vanquished of that royal battle between two of the most illustrious Yoruba sons ever are unknown. But the politics of memory can be as harsh and even more vicious than the original engagement. As Walter Benjamin famously puts it: “if the enemy wins, not even the dead are safe”

    To choose between Awo and SLA is not to choose between a villain and a hero, but to choose between a fallen icon and a resounding and resonating avatar. Both of them represent two paradigms that are present in a people, a society and nations at every critical juncture of history. These are the paradigms of heroism and pragmatism.

    Akintola might have entered contemporary mainstream Yoruba consciousness as a symbol of political perfidy and betrayal but the truth is more nuanced in all its minute and discriminated particularities. As a person, Akintola was not incapable of heroism and personal valour. His heroic last stand against Captain Nwobosi and his men attests to his unusual personal bravery. He went out with a bang, and with his sub-machine gun smoking, like Salvador Allende of Chile would do later.

    Heroism has its limits, just as pragmatism has its limitations. The heroic may be nothing more than a quixotic quest, a march of criminal folly in the face of overwhelming odds and a recourse to wanton personal or collective suicide. But there are also moments when pragmatism defiles and dishonours a people, when it may be better to die on your feet than to live on your knees. Those who accuse the Israeli of a Masada complex, of wanting to fight to the last man know what they mean. Masada was the mythical battle site where the ancient soldiers of Israel perished to the last man rather than surrender. It has defined the Israeli nation till date.

    It will take a harsh historical analogy to imagine the plight of the Yoruba nation in Nigeria after the imposition of the state of emergency in 1962 and the subsequent pincer-movement occupation of the west. Vichy France comes to mind. After the German Panzer divisions had blitzed their way through France in a stunning military manoeuvre that changed the concept of war, a group of respected Frenchmen came together and opted for an appeasement of Germany in order to save France from further devastation and punishment.

    This was the birth of Vichy France. On the face of it, the argument was rational and respectable. It was the pragmatic thing to do. Marshal Pétain, the leader of the group, was not a spring chicken or a lily-livered coward. He was France’s most celebrated and decorated soldier. The hero of Verdun was arguably at that point the greatest Frenchman of the century. He was the most influential French statesman.

    But unknown to Marshal Pétain and his collaborators at that point in time, the other paradigm, the paradigm of heroism, was stirring in the heart and bosom of many French people. Many were simply fed up with German military arrogance and the constant humiliation of their people. This spirit of heroic resistance was to find expression in a lowly obscure Brigadier.

    Charles de Gaulle escaped abroad to make his historic broadcast bristling with fury and defiance. He was denounced as a traitor and promptly sentenced to death by the Vichy government. But at the end of the tunnel it was the spirit of heroism that triumphed. De Gaulle ended as the greatest Frenchman of the twentieth century while Marshal Pétain and his Vichy collaborators ended in the scrap yard of infamy.

    While it lasted, the Awolowo-Akintola political marriage appeared to have been made in heaven: the one was a political genius while the other was a politician of genius. In terms of personality, they were also a perfect foil for each other. While Awolowo was retreating, reticent, remote and enveloped by a superb aura of mystical grandeur, Akintola was witty, down to earth and brilliantly alert. Affecting a jocose flippancy, nothing actually escapes his keen and agile and politically fertile mind. He was the grandmaster of political brinkmanship.

    It is unfortunate that Akintola has not escaped a certain demonisation as an ogre. Nothing can be farther from the truth. He was in fact an unfailingly polite, warm and generous person, solicitous to a fault and an omoluwabi where it mattered most. It is possible that as he became more embattled, as his authoritarian scams exploded in his face and as the entire west rose in fury and resentment, the less flattering aspects of his personality came to the fore and he became a demonic nuisance, but like Marshal Pétain, he was not without his redeeming virtues.

    The argument that finally separated him from his beloved boss was a classic instance of pragmatism versus heroism. Confronted by the overwhelming federal might and the awesome machinery of feudal compliance that the northern power masters brought to play, believing that politics is principally the allocation of resources, a function of who gets what and at which point in time, Akintola thought the west should be in alliance with the north.

    It was, all things and the balance of force considered, a rational and prudent choice. There was no point in knocking your head against a brick wall. But to Chief Awolowo, this was nothing but a shabby compromise with evil, a shameless capitulation to the forces of servitude and feudalism. Documenting his aversion with the scholarly thoroughness and inflexible rigour that have come to be associated with him, Awolowo came to the rigid conclusion that Nigeria would never move forward until the feudal forces have been eliminated.

    It was a harsh and bitter division but one that frames and maps the fault lines on which the modern Yoruba nation itself is founded. There are markers of cultural differences in the Awolowo-Akintola split which escapes most commentators. Although speaking one language, the Yoruba are not a culturally homogeneous group. Coming from the northernmost fringes of the nationality, Akintola’s people had a long history of continuous interaction and association with the north.

    In fact throughout his life, the late politician was dogged by the rumour that his mother was from the Bachama ethnic stock. Were this rumour to be true, Akintola would have shared the same maternal lineage with the Sardauna as well as his kinsman Benjamin Adekunle, the tempestuous military hero.

    Coming from solid Ijebu stock which looked toward the coast for cultural association and economic sustenance, Awolowo could not have been more culturally different and differentiated from Akintola. For him, the supremely calm and dignified Fulani aristocrats with their unfurling turbans would have been an object of unending intellectual curiosity and probable discomfiture.

    In the event, it was at first a ding-dong affair. Akintola was unable to sell his vision while Awolowo was unable to extend his dominion to the Yoruba heartland. But what was perceived as his unfair persecution, unjust imprisonment and the hostile encirclement of Yorubaland dramatically altered the equation. Still bristling with the memory and ancestral resentment of repeated Fulani incursions and by now reaping the bounteous benefits of Awo’s visionary leadership, the Yoruba rallied wholesale to the Awolowo banner. The rest is history.

    There are important lessons to be learnt from this historic face off. Let those who are attempting to rewrite Yoruba history as a result of recent internal colonisation deviously disguised as visionary emancipation beware. As the Yoruba enter another critical and crucial stage in the political evolution of modern Nigeria, the leaders they need are not those who show bravery after the event but those with proven records of heroism and gallantry in the service of the people.

  • On Sovereignty

    On Sovereignty

    Modern sovereignty derives its power and authority from the withdrawal and substitution of the “divine” and absolute right of kings and monarchs to preside over the affairs of humankind for the legal right of the people to choose who will rule them. In effect, although sovereignty belongs to the people, they are deemed not “sovereign” enough to preside over their own affairs. As it has been famously noted, if men were angels, there would be no need for government. Nowhere in the modern history of mankind have the people actually come to power. Power is often held in permanent trusteeship for them: either delegated by them or collected on their behalf by those with the will to power.

    This contradiction between the legal power of the people to determine the sovereignty of their rulers and its political limitations in the face of rulers ready to assert their sovereignty and authority often leads to a democratic conundrum: the pious myth of liberal democracy as peoples’ power in motion, or as government of the people by the people and for the people collides with the harsh reality that this is nothing but a gigantic swindle. It is the government of the organized few by the organized few and for the organized few in most cases.

    The battle for the soul of Nigeria has shifted in focus in the past month since the advent of President Jonathan’s advisory committee for the convocation of a National Conference. Sovereignty itself has become a site of fierce intellectual struggle. There are those who insist that in order to pass muster, and since it is a gathering  the Nigerian people, the sovereignty of the proposed confab is non-negotiable and should be guaranteed ab initio by Jonathan. There are also those who insist that since sovereignty has already been ceded by the Nigerian people, there can be no two sovereign authorities co-existing in the same polity except as an anarchic anomaly. For Jonathan to surrender his authority without a formal seizure of such in organized elections amounts to sovereign suicide.

    If everybody sticks to their guns on this sticky matter, particularly organised labour and the influential South West, it can be assumed that the conference is dead on arrival. The widespread clamour for the sovereignty of the conference is a direct indictment of past efforts and a reflection of grave concerns about the viability of Nigeria in its current incarnation. If Nigeria were to be running well, there would have been no need for such a historic dialogue. In fact never in the history of Nigeria has there been so much contempt among the educated classes for both the sovereign and the notion of sovereignty itself within the backdrop of a politically and economically traumatized citizenry. When then and where then lies the sovereignty of a state that has virtually unraveled?

    It must not be forgotten that no ruler in post-colonial Africa has willingly surrendered his sovereignty.  Not even with imminent death and the dissolution of empire. African rulers can be a hardy and recalcitrant lot. In 1996, and in a cruel twist of ironic fate, snooper  watched Mobutu, his body already ravaged by cancer, being helped to his feet by a frail Nelson Mandela on a frigate moored off the coast of Angola. Kabila’s forces were already closing in on the capital. But Mobutu was too far gone in his delusions to have any truck with reality. A few days later, Mobutu was chased away from his country to die in ignominious exile. Even as he fled, his official griot was singing on the radio that the president reigns but does not rule.

    It must be conceded that that was a situation of war and anarchy. But it was war and anarchy arising from a political stalemate engineered by Mobutu and arising from a deliberately deadlocked National Conference in which a dithering France paid with the life of its ambassador to Zaire. Jonathan still has some residual good luck.  The widespread loss of authority and legitimacy as we are witnessing in Nigeria does not equate to a loss of the power of coercion and forcible compliance. Based on that alone, the Nigerian state still has substantial sovereignty. Whether that balance of force can be maintained or sustained in the coming months particularly if anarchy spreads and anomie deepens will determine how much sovereignty is left for the Jonathan administration.

    This morning, in continuation of our policy of letting a thousand flowers bloom, we publish an article that offers a fresh and interesting  perspective on the issue of confab and leadership.

  • Confab versus Leadership

    The issue of Confab is not new to Nigeria or Nigerians. Over time, we have been inundated with echoes, agitations and clarion calls for the convocation of a national discourse. Such an envisioned discourse has been tagged various names or given different nomenclatures – depending on the side of the aisle you position or find yourself. With the growing clamour, it has dawned on men and women of thought that the agitations have been on the pedestal of selfishness, parochial interest or ethnic egocentrism. Thus, it is becoming increasingly obvious that some people believe the Confab could provide an opportunity to settle some latent scores especially for some sections of the country or those Nigerians who have always felt cheated and therefore aggrieved in the leadership debacle and general distribution of the largesse that has accrued to the country especially, since the advent of the first oil-production at OLOBIRI, decades ago. This is however, without prejudice or discredit to the gains of competitiveness, self-help or independence, growth and regional development, of old. All told, the Confab euphoria is not about nationalism or development per se, rather, it is a rivalry or tussle on who “rules” next or whose turn should it be thereafter – based on some political intricacy or ethnic calculus.

    By extension, the objective of such a Confab is the evolution of a brand new Constitution that would potentially accommodate most of the yearnings of the people since the current 1999 Constitution as amended, is supposedly, a relic of military interventions in the polity. Paradoxically, a good number of the drafters then, have now joined hands in condemning the Constitution and currently in search of a brand new one. Rather than blame the operators of the rule book or barometer for governance, every Confab apologist seems to exploit the omissions or “commissions” in the Constitution, as if there is a perfect Constitution anywhere in the world.

    I am told, Sovereignty has a dual hue or composition – Popular and Legal.  The popular one resides in the people, who however, go to the polls to express themselves by electing their leaders or representatives who there from is given the Legal Sovereignty in trust. Meanwhile, the Constitution expressly states and insists that any act of irreverence by the holders of the Legal Sovereignty in the course of its exercise, is tractable and therefore the Legal Sovereignty is redeemable by the power of recall by the people lest, they have to wait for the next general elections for appropriate redress through the sanctity of the ballot. It is little wonder why there is a yawning divide amongst people regarding a Confab report – those who want the Confab document to be subjected to the whims and caprices of the National Assembly, in contradistinction to those who want a referendum to decide the way forward based on the same Confab document.

    To all intents and purposes, the National Assembly, being a beneficiary of the extant polity, would hardly succumb to the dictates of a Confab document since the legislators are after all, deemed to have been given the Legal Sovereignty by the people, at the instance of the most recent polls. The proponents of referendum, who are apparently averse to the status quo ante, are not pragmatic enough to observe that the two sovereigns are to a large extent mutually exclusive of each other, since they cannot operate concurrently in real time. However, they are collectively exhaustive in the end. Thus, any extant political administration has the constitutional power to initiate, arrange, convoke a Confab and examine the attendant document from which a referendum could be called for, if adjudged expedient or desirous.

    Whilst the National Assembly cannot make or write a Constitution, she could alter or amend a subsisting one to a large extent beyond which she is empowered to call for a referendum that could lead to the making of a new Constitution – presumably agreeable to a good majority of the populace. However, our antecedent regarding Confab issues as in many other development areas is “res ipsa loquitur” – the matter speaks for itself. Our various governments understandably, have been flagrantly insincere to the bidding of a Confab – including other existential areas and this lacuna has elicited an epoch of incredulity – leaving a cumulus of suspicion, distrust, skepticism, unreliability and deception at the doorsteps of Aso Rock. And since government is a continuum, the current administration is therefore not exempted from the morass of insensitivity and impunity, over time. Indeed, the current administration, through all manner of unrepentant raisons d’état, has had and still having her fair share of the revolving and unremitting irreverence to the sensibilities of those who willingly obliged or surrendered Legal Sovereignty in trust.

    A glimpse or cursory look at existing records – regarding committee approach to national issues, indicates flagrant disrespect to the honorable and revered committee appointees whose erstwhile reports and honest recommendations have been resigned to the heap of dysfunctional statistics. Swept under the “impregnable carpet” at ASO Rock are reports of UWAIS, DANJUMA, RIBADU and ORASANYE – depicting a tiny few in the pile. Thus, those crying foul of deception or distraction in respect of this current attempt at resuming the Confab recurrent decimal, are not without their justification.

    Truly, it is virtually sacrosanct save a revolution, to do away with or underrate the powers of an existing National Assembly or government based on a convoked Confab or its attendant document. Meanwhile, evidence abound that the casualty of any revolution (presumably bloody) goes beyond the instant immeasurable carnage and egregious destruction or deprivation of the very resources the revolution was meant to protect, in the first place. Each revolution invariably mortgages the life and times of a nation including those of unborn generations, as a revolution culminates in utter confusion and instability, whilst growth and sustainable development become a mirage, if the country survives.

    Any in-depth search for the main cause of a clamour for a Confab or new Constitution or the most authentic resource and catalyst for ethnic disturbances or even religious upheavals, would throw up “FAILURE of LEADERSHIP” as the root, trunk and branch for such agitations. Whilst it is true that human beings are invariably forward looking with the view to expanding their horizon and bringing about self-progress using all forms of methods, it is equally incontrovertible that they also relish the opportunity of easy paths or reassuring roadmaps to fortune, comfort and freedom. Thus, the Nigerian citizenry would prefer the path of least resistance towards achieving their goals as opposed to confrontational or revolutionary means or ways that could be tortuous, devious, antisocial, irreverent and sometimes illegal. Incidentally, the popular and well-acknowledged sanctuary that is most available to provide such paths of least resistance is the government of the people by the people for the people – the government of the day.

    Political pundits relish and extol democracy as the best form of government currently known to man, the world over – regardless of the concomitant gerrymandering or filibustering, it obliges. It is therefore no gainsaying the fact that good governance as epitomized by benevolent, visionary, insightful and purposeful leadership is the sine qua non of growth and sustainable development in a developing nation as Nigeria. After all, the 1999 Constitution as amended, unambiguously states and insists that the primary purpose of government is to provide security and welfare for her teeming population – enshrined in Chapter 2, Section 14, subsection 2(b): Fundamentals Objectives and Directive Principles of State Policy. Thus, if government provides and also seen or adjudged as providing the enabling environment through the provisioning and enhancement of infrastructure (power, water, transportation), health and education, it would be easier for the citizenry to benefit wholesomely and irretrievably from learning, commerce, business and general welfare.

    The sprawling effects of such a sincere and committed disposition of government to her nationals would improve the general wellbeing, stimulate wealth creation, sensitize economic emancipation and enhance growth and sustainable development. As the workforce would continually and numerically soar based on general growth – while keeping all major economic indices in check, idleness, truancy, crime and criminology would be at controllable low ebbs – with the cooperation of a disciplined and savvy judiciary. Thus, poverty, misemployment, underemployment and unemployment – adjudged as the raison d’etre for breaches of law and order, civil disobedience and all manner of unremitting but avoidable agitations would subside, as more people would be happy, gainfully employed, committed, and focused on self-development at the very least. At that point, issues of ethnic demagoguery or religious bigotry would be reduced, as a growing number of people would be genuinely engaged in creating wealth for themselves and summarily for the country. A resounding byproduct of such a commitment by the government is a gradual increase in patriotism with obeisance to rule of law by the people – invariably guided by the much or less each individual or group derives or benefits from government’s benevolence.

    So, the case for the convocation of any Confab albeit, not irrelevant, is definitely not a front-burner issue that would quickly transform or launch Nigeria into limelight or levitate to her rightful place in the comity of nations. Rather, the quest for diligent, forthright, dogged, committed, knowledgeable and visionary leadership is primus-inter-pares and it is crucial to our survival now and forever. And the leadership odyssey is NOW as time is running out.

    Dr Bello, a former MD of NITEL, lives in Abuja.

  • As I was saying………..

    As I was saying………..

    Obituarists beware. Reports about the death of column and columnist are wildly exaggerated. Snooper is alive and kicking. The celebrations are premature, not to say immature. Despite the announcement of a short exit, the disappearance of this column has given rise to wild speculations. A version had it that Snooper has disappeared in a Stalinist purge. Another held that the columnist lost out in a bitter power struggle and had been banished to the outer periphery of political Siberia. When yours sincerely appeared briefly in public sporting dark goggles, it was noted that he was recovering from the beating of his life.

    It was the late Kingsley Ozumba Mbadiwe who famously warned some foolhardy journalists taking potshots at him to learn from the fate of their predecessors. K. O ominously hinted that when a particularly newspaper and its editor were busy attacking him, he decided to ignore them. But six months later—according to K.O’s inimitable lingo—both the paper and the editor folded up! Talk of a chilling retribution and restitution.

    Still, it is with some trepidation that Snooper returns to these labours. The more things do not change in Nigeria, the more they appear to change. Nigeria reminds one of an old movie with new actors. One is left with a permanent feeling of Déjà vu. Since the script and the storyline remain the same, the great surprise is that one is often surprised, particularly by the new actors’ eerie fidelity to futility. There is no pedological alchemy that will turn cassava to yam. You must reap what you sow.

    And so like a captive audience watching an old movie in a dilapidated cinema house, we are sometimes forced to applaud out of sheer ennui or polite perplexity. The actors know that the audience cannot leave just like that, and the audience know that the show must go on if only to preserve both the order of illusion and the illusion of order in a collapsing theatre. To break the historic deadlock and this engrossing illusionist fantasia will take a great surge of the human will to create anew.

    So it is , then, that in a manner reminiscent of a gramophone record with the stylus stuck in a groove, we keep repeating ourselves even as we keep reenacting old scenes. Dear readers, the title of this column is not a new one. The original copyright belongs to an audacious and daring icon of resistance to tyranny. Our man was plucked from the rostrum as he was about to address a crowd only to be frog-marched to detention and jail. When he returned to the same rostrum a few years later, he began with the defiant words: “As I Was Saying!”.

    Twenty five and half years after Snooper first used this title in a column for Newswatch,it is appearing again. This was in March 1988 after military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, de-proscribed the great trending magazine. In a feat of extreme daring and feckless audacity, Newswatch had published the entire report of the Political Bureau set up by the military junta to midwife the transition to democratic rule. So incensed was General Babangida by this fundamental challenge to the predilection of military rule to secrecy and stealth that he summarily proscribed the magazine. After public pressure, the proscription was changed to a six-month ban. It was a crippling blow to a magazine that was yet to recover from the assassination of its founding helmsman, Dele Giwa.

    In Nigeria, comedy often interlaces with tragedy. For Snooper, the most hilarious aspect of the tragedy of proscription came in a little known incident which took place right inside the cavernous bowel of autocracy known as Dodan Barracks. While the nation waited with bated breath for the military’s response to Newswatch’s temerity, the young Dele Olojede, as at then a staffer with the magazine, sought an interview with Duro Onabule, Babangida’s press secretary.

    Onabule calmly obliged. After the interview and as Olojede was making his way out of Dodan Barracks, the man known as double chief called out to him. “By the way, where are you going to publish that?” Unknown to Olojede, his magazine had been proscribed by the military junta but the news had not been aired. Onabule should know.

    This incident showcases the awesome powers of a military oligarchy to not only to manage information but also to dominate its environment. But it also showcases the inch by inch, column by column, toe to toe and barricade after barricade nature of the protracted and costly struggle to rid Nigeria of military despotism and its noxious effluvium. Newswatch editors, to mark the magazine’s de-proscrption, published a rare editorial which courageously lambasted the tyranny and arbitrary nature of military rule and its stifling and suffocating breaches of the fundamental rights of the citizens. It was titled: Jogging in the Jungle.

    It is sad to note that a quarter of a century after, we are still jogging in the jungle of arbitrary and whimsical rule. The actors might have changed, but the script and story line remain the same. Despite the formal termination of military rule, succeeding civilian regimes have been characterised by paranoid secrecy, historic heists, lack of accountability, flagrant denial of the fundamental rights of citizens to freedom of association and a predilection for autistic and brutish violence against the populace. Despite oases of liberation and human advancement, we have, in the main, merely exchanged a civilian tyranny for military despotism.

    Looking back, it is hard not to feel a tinge of weary disappointment and terminal depression. It is hard not to feel that all the costly sacrifices have been in vain; that those who have died have died for nothing. But we must never allow temporary disappointment to lead to a permanent paralysis of the political will. We must always be guided by the longer and larger perspective. Nation-building is a permanent work in process, full of stunning advances and stinging reversals. It is important for people who come after us to know that there were people who were permanently and defiantly on their feet until they fell, like Babarinde Oluwide Omojola recently. So, folks, as I was saying…….