The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • Bigfoot is about

    Bigfoot is about

    Fear stalks the land. There is trepidation all over the nation. Uncertainty and a sense of foreboding, of an approaching apocalyptic meltdown, grip the citizenry. The omens are dire. Never in the history of this country have its people felt more insecure, more vulnerable to man-made misfortunes. A huge monster roams the land, threatening to overwhelm its already weakened defence and resolve. It recalls the fabled Bigfoot or even the more celebrated Yeti, the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayan Summit.

    Mercifully, Jonathan has cut short his foreign trip. He ought not to have gone in the first instance. It is an elementary law of sovereignty that you do not leave your domain when there is fire on the rooftop. This is the time to talk straight to ourselves. There is nothing to sell or advertise abroad about the nation at this particular point.

    It doesn’t appear as if the Nigerian ruling class appreciates the grave dimension of the current crisis in all its tragic, nation-evaporating possibilities. Let us no longer quibble about our situation. Nigeria is embroiled in an unusual civil war. We are faced with a grave emergency. The earlier we recognise this fact, the better for everybody. It is no longer possible to sustain Nigeria under its current configuration.

    Those who plotted the endgame of this gifted but troubled nation and the dark scenario of a war of all against all could not have been more prescient. They are spot on their money. Political prophecy has gone scientific. These amazing futurologists know the kind of political elite they are dealing with, that they will fiddle and fumble while Rome burns. A self-fulfilling prophecy requires a self-destroying political class.

    This past week has been very scary for those who bear aloft the torch of hope for this dysfunctional nation. Bigfoot struck serially and severally again. The Boko Haram people returned fire in what observers consider to be a reprisal raid for the Baga mayhem. They put the town of Bama to sword, attacking police and military formations before descending on the civilian populace. By the time the smouldering and belching cloud cleared, the town had become a ghost town clogged with horrendous casualties.

    As if this was not enough for a nation coming to terms with the utter devastation of its northernmost fringes, a hitherto little known traditional sect calling itself Ombatse struck in the Nasarawa village of Alayko. According to the sect, they ambushed and killed 95 security personnel in retaliation for the killing of nine of its members . It was a re-enactment of Dante’s inferno. In the fiercest of wars, the casualty figures could not have been higher.

    If the police force is this vulnerable in a country, it says a lot about the state of the country and its capacity to fulfil its most fundamental obligation to its citizenry. In a ritual of reverse victimhood, the police authorities have directed their personnel to wear black bands for one week as a mark of respect and sympathy for their fallen colleagues.

    It should tell us that something very serious is going on. Hitherto, it used to be the populace complaining about police brutality. Now the police authorities are loudly complaining about brutality against their own. With that level of morale, it is clear that the state is on its own.

    It is instructive to note that this past week, two current state executives were known to have taken refuge in Aso Rock as the security situation in their states deteriorated beyond their capacity and capability. In Ibadan, a calamity was averted when traders at the Bodija Cattle Market discovered that some of their colleagues had been murdered in Borno State where they had gone to buy cattle.

    The insurgents were reported to have separated the ambushed traders into their ethnic stock before murdering those from a particular ethnic group. As soon as the news broke, Snooper spent the entire day answering desperate inquiries from abroad, particularly from affronted intellectuals of Yoruba origins, who wanted to know just when enough would be enough. How long will restrained and civilised people put up with this flagrant provocation?

    As if these flashpoints, any of which could tip the nation into terminal and irreversible chaos are not enough, Bigfoot has been at work in the Rivers State, in a political dress rehearsal for actual war. The whole place has become a boiling cauldron simmering and sizzling with intent. Only luck and his own gritty determination separate Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi from sure impeachment by a minority assembly. It is said that when that happens, heavens will not fall.

    The pundits claim that such state outlawry and executive lawlessness have illustrious precedents. If heavens did not fall in Oyo, on the plateau and in nearby Bayelsa where serving governors have been tomahawked twice, why should it fall in the Rivers State? Meanwhile, the whole thing is assuming a nasty ethnic dimension with the Ikwerre people pitched against the Ijaw nationality. Are we still in a democracy or the rule of despotic strongmen who do not give a damn about the fundamental tenets of democracy?

    As it is usually the case when law and order take a flight and chaos prevails in a society, the lawless and chaotically minded rule the roost, Mojahid Asari Dokubo has been feverishly and ferociously rattling his sabre, threatening the corporate existence of the nation in the process. Asari Dokubo has become the principal Ijaw spokesperson in a land that has produced the illustrious Professor Tekana Tamuno, the great Professor Allagoa and the extraordinarily cerebral if occasionally controversial Professor Tamuno David-West.

    In a war situation, it is the man with the men and material that matters. How many arms bearing militiamen can the professors come up with? This is not a matter of book piracy. The real pirates are up and a-hollering. The nation is gradually coming under the odoriferous armpit of political warlords. When last did you hear of a man of ideas in Mogadishu? If the CNN is to be believed, one of Somalia’s best known professors of political science has taken up refuge in a college in Minnesota. There is no point pontificating about the post-colonial state when the real thing vanished over 20 years ago.

    So while Asari Dokubo prevails as the pre-eminent warlord of the Niger Delta, the Boko Haram rules the roost in the north with the Sultan, the military and spiritual heir to Othman Dan Fodio, reduced to pleading with the sect to accept amnesty. It doesn’t occur to the well-regarded Sultan that if amnesty had succeeded in the Niger Delta, there ought not to be an Asari Dokubo still threatening the corporate existence of the nation.

    Meanwhile, other insurgent groups appear to be cottoning in on the act. The Ombatse folks may yet succeed in carving out a wide swathe around the nation’s heart for themselves. In the east, MASSOB is heaving with Biafran bathos. In the west, the old militia majordomos are stirring again hoping to leverage federal political patronage to reinforce rusting ramparts.

    But they will meet with other nascent civilian armies in the combustible region. The dominant political tendency in the region will not allow itself to be so summarily dispossessed by force. You cannot step into the same river twice. Bigfoot is truly abroad and God helps Nigeria and all of us boxed into the tinder box. Like a wanton schoolboy, somebody is busy setting up explosive crackers all over the country.

    What we are witnessing is the failure of the post-military amnesty vision in all its material fundament. Genuine amnesty involves considerable contrition and remorse for past misconduct. What is being confused with amnesty in Nigeria is the payment of gratuity and gratification to unrepentant criminals for the cessation of hostilities against their fatherland. It is a question of political and economic expediency since the cessation of hostilities remains a temporary truce. There may yet be some method to Asari’s madness.

    The fear of inter-regional and intraregional domination is real and palpable; so are the grievances. Jonathan and his government are looking for Bigfoot in the wrong direction. BOKO HARAM, MASSOB, MEND, OMBATSE, OPC etc are products of these fears with different inflections and intensity. Unless we remove the structural disfigurement of the nation which produces these fears, we will continue to be saddled with economic, political and spiritual warlords.

    For many, the Bigfoot is real, an evolutionary bypass, a throwback to the age of Neanderthal hunters haunting modern man. For others, it is a myth, a mirage a troubling reminder of unfinished business, a reflection of humanity’s fear of the unknown. In other words, if the Bigfoot, the Yeti or the Yoruba ologomugomu do not exist, we will have to create them. It is left for each society to plot its way out of the dark abyss. Nigeria is not doing too well in that department. And time is not on our side.

  • Now, the good women of the west

    While evil lurks in the corner dark, mysterious and as elusive as Bigfoot, goodness radiates its celestial beam and heavenly rays on a beleaguered society. It was Bertolt Brecht, the great German playwright and radical intellectual, who once wrote a play titled, The Good Woman of Setzuan. It was about Shen Te, a good woman, who tries to survive in a harsh and unforgiving society brimming with evil people. Like all revolutionary art, the play is a little bit idealised. But that is the only way to nudge humanity towards a higher telos.

    We can report that there are good women of the west as well. The torrent of tears washing down the Ekiti Hills for the late Deputy Governor of Ekiti State and political heroine, our own Funmi Adunni Olayinka, have hardly subsided when another very good woman, Modupe Adeola Adelabu, was nominated to step into her shoes. There seems to be no end to the supply of good and heroic women from the Ekiti hilly homestead.

    It was a political master stroke on the part of the governor, combining sound judgment with political dexterity and calculated to reap maximum political dividends without ruffling any geopolitical feather. Judging from the universal acclamation abroad and the joyous felicitations of the folksy Ekiti people at home, it would appear that Kayode Fayemi knows not just the art of war but the art of politics as well.

    A princess of the old Ewi dynasty of Ado Ekiti, Dupe Adelabu combines royal charms and nobility of purpose with granite character and a sense of unflinching loyalty hewn out of the rocks of Ekiti. On behalf of the class of 75 at Ife and all those turbulent and rascally boys, Snooper congratulates Her Excellency on a most deserved elevation.

    As a petulant pest, Snooper used to wonder in those halcyon days at Ife why the class with its many beautiful damsels had become such a rich poaching ground for the new military and intellectual aristocracy. There was the aristocratic, reserved but unfailingly polite Omowale Sutherland who married the future General Alani Akinrinade.

    There was the bookish and ever serious Josephine (now doctor) Aliu who married the future Admiral Mike Okhai Akhigbe. There was the elegant and formidably self-assured Victoria Yogha who married the future General David Mark, And there was the charming regal Dupe Adedugbe who married the late Deji Adelabu, the dapper and ever fastidiously attired prince of Ijero, who became the university librarian at Obafemi Awolowo University.

    And while we are still talking about the good women of the west, it does appear as if the ACN. has an inexhaustible supply of these gems, judging by the quality of the women the party has sent forth for higher responsibility. As a progressive and forward looking organisation, the party should now walk its talk and send one of these outstanding women to the gubernatorial mansion come 2015 or sooner thereafter. The west should blaze the trail again. It is time to produce the first female executive governor of the Fourth Republic. Here is wishing our good friend, Professor Dupe Adelabu, a happy tenure.

     

    Next Week: A Review of Ambassador Fafowora’s memoirs.

  • Rambling through the rumpus

    Rambling through the rumpus

    A peep into King Jonathan’s Mines

    There is no situation so utterly bleak and despondent that it doesn’t leave room for a ray of hope, and a window of opportunity. In other words, there is some hope in hopelessness. It could be the hope of the hopeless, or the optimism of the totally defeated. This is usually the last defence of the defenceless. Allah de, they collectively sigh. Or as the Yoruba will put it, there is nothing that has a beginning that does not have an ending.

    This too will pass, they chorus in unison. There is no condition so hard that it doesn’t in the end lend itself to certain ameliorative possibilities. Ko so oun tole ti ki ro, they caution. Radical philosophers believe that this corrupt optimism is a potent formula for a comprehensive paralysis of the revolutionary will.

    It is a shabby complicity with an unjust and decadent status quo. The meek have never, and will never, inherit the earth, they thunder. In his classic, Literature and Revolution, Leon Trotsky raves: “At any rate, we shall no longer accept tragedy in which God gives orders and man meekly submits.” How about that as a sizzling sampler from one of the greatest revolutionists ever?

    The iconic Marxist intellectual warrior was as clear-eyed as he was clear in his mind about what needed to be done. But some nuggets of hope are there, all the same in the most appalling of circumstances. Imagine how life would be in contemporary Nigeria without some measure of hope! This would amount to what Kafka—may the good Lord bless his tortured soul— called a life of unadulterated unhappiness.

    It was such a life of undiluted and unmitigated joylessness that the great German-Jewish writer promised his future wife. The wise woman promptly broke off the engagement, and Franz Kafka lived and died a bachelor and a model celibate. Like Gregor Samsa, his hero and fictional alter ego, Kafka would make do with posters of buxom and voluptuous ladies in his bedroom.

    And still talking about Franz Kafka, it will be recalled that he was a master of automatic writing in all its dream-like quality. It was a kind of writing that flows with the majestic assurance of a sleep walker. It is so certain about the uncertainty of life that it challenges you to think otherwise. It is called the naturalisation of the unnatural. Life itself is one grand dream. As Kafka himself famously puts it, actual reality is unrealistic.

    Fellow Nigerians—to use the language of ancient coupists, (By the way when are we going to put those chaps on trial for treason?)——, this column is reporting itself to you this morning. There is no intellectual weapon this column has not employed to untangle the Nigerian condition. We have tried logical writing. We have tried the formal and forbidding format of the scholarly treatise. We have employed the arcane lingo and terse rigour of the political scientist. We have philosophised. We have fictionalised. We have blended fantasy with fact, which is the hallmark of what is known as New Journalism in America. Even our houseboy has become an iconic Domestic Secretary.

    There is no further point in confronting illogic with logic. Illogicality has its own strange and compelling logic. It is not amenable to sound reasoning. You cannot erase an ugly reality with beautiful writing. The negation of a negation can only proceed through negation. This morning, this column employs the virtues of automatic writing. It is a chaotic survey of a chaotic mess. It is a peep into King Jonathan’s mines from forty thousand feet above the sea level. It is quite a dizzying view.

    Does anybody remember Sir Henry Rider Haggard? He was a writer of magical yarns predominantly set in ancient Africa. It was as colourful as it was enthralling in all its savage splendour. There was a hint of upper class snobbism and racism about these engaging fables. But the portraits are haunting and unforgettable, and they are crafted with considerable sympathy for the noble savage. Snooper’s favourite is King Solomon’s Mines. Snooper’s favourite character was a fellow called Umslopogaas, a gigantic and heroic Zulu warrior who could fell an elephant with a single blow.

    It is strange and weird that at this particular point, Nigeria should come to resemble a King Solomon’s Mines where all kinds of chancers and prospectors collide in a bid for a piece of the action. There are unimaginable riches in the mines, but it is only for the strong and valiant. The weak and the poor have no chance. Diamonds are not for everybody. It is therefore entirely conceivable if the poor and the weak should go hungry in the midst of stupendous and unimaginable wealth.

    This is precisely where King Jonathan’s mines become a land mine of sorts. The poor will not go hungry for long. They are already eyeing the rich with intent. Given the intensive rate of exploration and dwindling global prospects, the mine itself cannot be lucrative for much longer. Having failed to make hay while the mines lasted, the Nigerian political elite must brace themselves to bear the brunt of the masses who will eventually fall upon them with relish and gusto.

    Let’s face our condition squarely. There is no point in quibbling or equivocating at this point. It is either a political elite is deserving or undeserving. Human history is littered with undeserving political elites of the past. They have been consigned to the trashcan of history where they rightly belong. When this fate eventually becomes the lot of the contemporary Nigerian elite, they must not bemoan their lot.

    It is a bleak and deeply unoptimistic situation, but this is ironically where utter hopelessness begins to emit rays of hope. The Jonathan presidency is a historic watershed for Nigeria. It is inconceivable that the nation can fall deeper into the morass of incompetence and sheer cluelessness. The structural disfigurement of Nigeria and whoever is in control of human destiny have used Jonathan to complete the chastisement of the Nigerian ruling class.

    It is either the pan-Nigerian critical mass arrives at this point in time or Nigeria will slip into ungovernable anarchy before terminal fracturing. But let us explain why there is some hope in hopelessness. At the last count, each component of Nigeria’s major ethnic nationalities have taken their turn at the colonial torture wrack that is Nigeria.

    Twice, the Yoruba have been whipped into line, during the “we tie” uprising and the June 12, 1993 annulment imbroglio. The Igbo have had their own brutal comeuppance during the civil war and what they perceive to be subsequent political and economic marginalisation. The Niger Delta populace has been savaged by a cruel and uncaring military/feudal complex.

    Hitherto, it used to be thought that the machinery of oppression and internal colonisation in modern Nigeria was solely and firmly in the hands of the Northern feudal oligarchy and their military enforcers. But that illusion of power is now firmly rested. It has taken two civilian administrations to dispel that arrogance of power.

    First, Obasanjo humbled the Northern power masters by beating them at their own game of political manipulation and electoral chicanery. Now Jonathan has humiliated them by calling their military and religious bluff even while pretending to fumble. The lesson to be learnt from all this is that no ethnic elite has a monopoly of the game of sinister subjugation and domination of other groups. The modern Nigerian presidency is an imperial Roman tyranny and an equal opportunity terror machine which does not recognise original ownership.

    So it is then that at this important political conjuncture, there are crucial lessons to be learnt. A wise political elite must learn how to cut its losses. At this point, there are two options before the Nigerian political class. They can continue with the old ethnic game. In which case, a fresh round of appearance before the torture machine is mandatory. In this particular case, it will start with the Ijaw political elite since they are the current ruling hegemony. Political ascendancy has its steep prices.

    Jonathan and the Ijaw political elite are in a far more delicate political situation than they can imagine. It is either they allow Nigerians to determine their electoral destiny or they face a possible showdown from other ethnic groups. The Russian roulette and Round Robin of ethnic victimisation will commence all over again. If Jonathan continues to alienate critical stakeholders in the Nigerian project, there is every possibility that his tenure will end in tragedy.

    Either way, the Jonathan presidency is an important watershed for Nigeria. The fourth Republic began on a note of placating and mollifying the Yoruba. After that, Obasanjo decided to throw a poisoned sop at his feudal friends and tormentors. The Jonathan presidency is largely seen as an attempt to placate the angry Niger Delta populace. At this point in time, even a political fool ought to know that it is the angry Nigerian masses that will have to be placated at the next poll.

    As this was being concluded, the weary eyes lighted on Michela Wrong’s appraisal of the recently concluded elections in Kenya in the current edition of The Spectator magazine. Her conclusions are as shattering as they are sobering and they bear quoting at length.

    {The deployment of modern electronic gadgets} “…cannot replace a society’s generalised buy into the democratic process. The reason political parties rig elections so enthusiastically in many African countries is because winner-takes-all systems of government and imperial presidencies make the rewards so enormous and punish failure so severely. Now fixing that is a lot harder.”

    Never has a Ms Wrong been more right. Appropriately too, it was at this point that the plane began its final descent into King Jonathan’s mines.

  • The winds from Wilmington

    And while we are still on the subject of the post-colonial state in Nigeria and its serial delinquency, it is meet to report that snooper spent last weekend in the sleepy and somnolent town of Wilmington in the suburban state of Delaware in America. It was to listen in at a well-attended summit on the fate and future of Nigeria organised by the Oodua Foundation, a Yoruba Thinktank based in the US.

    The president of the foundation is Adeniran Adeboye, a distinguished professor of Mathematics at Howard University. Snooper’s kinsman is a famous blend of eccentricity and analytical brilliance, but that is a subject for another day.

    To say that Nigeria is in ferment is an understatement. Nigeria is in a state of utter commotion and combustibility with each of its major ethnic components laying a siege on the state. In the north, there is a combination of economic, political and religious revolt against the state. From the east, the emergent Igbo mercantile class, the medium scale economic powerhouse of the nation, are in revolt against the laggard indolence and feudal sloth of the post-colonial state. It does not matter to them if this anarchic mercantilist outrage leads to a full blown social cannibalism.

    From the Niger Delta, it is obvious that the dominant political faction are bent on having it their own way even if Nigeria disintegrates in the process. From the Yoruba nation, it is obvious that its intellectual elite have laid a siege on the nation mercilessly and relentlessly exposing its murderous hollowness and utter inadequacies for the civilised world to behold. Something will have to give eventually.

    The stage for the Wilmington retreat was set by two powerful keynote speeches, one in absentia by General Alani Akinrinade, the thoughtful and cerebral former Army chieftain, and the other by emeritus Professor Banji Akintoye, a notable historian and star university orator in his prime. His completely grey eminence dazzled the swooning audience with his usual repertoire of folklore and deep grasp of historical dynamics. It was a rare glimpse of the old magical circle that surrounded the fabled Obafemi Awolowo.

    Thereafter, speaker after speaker rose in fury and venom to denounce the Nigerian post-colonial state and its historic iniquities. It would seem that the Yoruba political and intellectual elite are particularly angry with the Nigerian state for hobbling the march of the Yoruba nation to full modernity. Its agents have murdered some of its best and brightest children. It has aborted the legitimate aspiration of the Yoruba race for self-actualisation. It may well be that Chief Awolowo overreached himself in trying bring modernity to a nation that was not ready.

    The communiqué at the end of the two day confab reflects the growing concern and unease about the state of the nation and how to plot a way out of the cruel logjam and historic gridlock. Snooper has been speechless in Delaware and if the winds from Wilmington are to be believed, Nigeria is in very dire straits indeed.

  • Re: Salvation on earth: Two exemplary paradigms (1)

    Re: Salvation on earth: Two exemplary paradigms (1)

    Your concluding part makes you sound like a man in confusion. The Pentecostals in Nigeria are nothing but a bunch of docile elements being marooned by opportunist charismatic leaders. The tragedy therein is that the congregations are becoming so docile to a dangerous point of imbecility, to the extent that a Rev King could resort to burning members for submitting to his order though the law has taken its course. They pay tithes and sow countless seeds willingly even when they live below poverty line which is antithesis to the American model. And yet, the GOs and pastors display affluence and fly in private jets. It is tragic. – Omooba

    In contention, I hold that the revolutionary ferment of the Americas cannot be ascribed to being a reaction to the brutality of their conquest. My thesis: Iberia in its earlier incarnation as Al Andalus was a melting point per the all inclusiveness of Islam. The conquistadores, driven by greed and Christian fanaticism, didn’t hold themselves as a race apart, mixing sexually with Indian and Negro alike. To wit, the Umayyad era had accustomed the Iberian to unity of race. No such mixing occurred in the Anglosphere where the Aryan Briton held himself to be culturally and racially superior. The effects of which are to persuade the non- Briton about the inferiority highlighted and terminally dissuade him from seeking parity. Second refutation: the Caliphate and Borno were empires recognising that they had been vanquished by a more powerful empire, the protagonists of which they merely thought of as clever. How is it that since they had not taken on the hobbling baggage of religious and cultural inferiority they did not emerge as leading lights of modernisation in post-colonial Nigeria if your thesis holds? – Obinnna75

     

    Brilliant piece and the reason that I supplement my reading of the good book with the works of intellectual men of God from the early Christian intellectuals like St Augustine of Hippo (An African), his confessions, which I’ve just read, is brilliant reading and quite innovative thinking for its age; St Augustine of Canterbury, then fast forward to the reformation age, the two Martin Luthers, Martin Bucer, Jonathan Edwards, our own very Ajayi Crowther, Dientrich Boinheoffer to mention but a few. Unfortunately, apart from Bolaji Idowu no other contemporary clergy in Nigeria comes close in intellect, though credit must be given to Bakare, Akinola, Okogie and others in their application of the gospel to challenges in our society. However, the new age preachers, the bane of this article, don’t even come any close in intellectual rigour in how they preach the gospel – those described paraphasing MLK as intellectually light and failing to relay a consistent, constant message in the face of societal challenges where the church is in mission. As we learn from the history of the church our good leaders from whom we draw inspiration were never in the art of leadership for cheap popularity contests. In fact, they were renowned mainly for their vision, intellect, courage, bravery and the ability to recognise and articulate issues from a high ethical and moral compass supported actively and sustained by the Gospel. This unfortunately is what is lacking in the church in Nigeria today. – Omoba Oladele Osinuga Esq.

    Religion, especially the Pentecostal hue, has come to replace everything political independence promised and failed to deliver. It now fills the void left by the incapacity of the post-colonial state to fulfil its social contract to the people and so, in the words of Pius Adesanmi, “Religion has become the second great euphoria after the first euphoria of Independence.” Unfortunately, this euphoria too has not yielded the promised result of prosperity. Like Tatalo has eruditely outlined, organised religion whether it is the Judeo-Christian hue or the Trans-Saharan Islamic variant, form part of those social formation imported and inserted into the African milieu, but were emptied of the moral and philosophical content and foundation in this new environment. Coupled with their close dalliance and flirtation with the state, they have been unable to play the transformative role like we witnessed in Latin America. Like their counterpart in the various state houses, most leaders of religious houses have also cashed in on the misery and wretchedness of the mass of the people to feather their personal nest. For the suffering masses therefore, it is an unpleasant scenario of head you lose, tail you lose. – Ashindorbe Kelvin

    What bothers me most is the gentleman – in tie and ironed pants, chanting some personal liberation ryhme of “It is well”, “God bless you” – thief that adherents of the Pentecostal/ prosperity doctrine has become. To me, they destroy the country more than Boko Haram. They say “if I don’t take it, others will”. Paying tithe from the stolen money will sanctify the money. – Sola

  • Re: The census of ghosts

    Boko Haram are quite known but they only operate under disguise. Since Nigeria’s security apparatus is not able to control and terminate Boko Haram in its entirety, they have graduated from snipers to wanton killers of fellow Nigerians. The offer of state amnesty has been largely drummed to their hearing, hence they have resorted to escalated killing to justify the need for state amnesty or as usual state pardon. In total submission to the will of wanton killers before turning some states into graveyards, please grant them what they want! – Olutayo

     

    Bros Tatalo. I have been reading you for a very long time and I thought you will never be wrong. I am so flabbergasted today because you are wrong – there are no ghosts in this country at all. Let check your four types of ghosts one after another:

    1. BOKO HARAM MEMBERS: Boko Haram members are not ghosts because they hold meetings with eminent politicians in the North and even take photographs with them. Various pictures they took with the Borno State Governor, for example, were published by the press. Oga Tatalo, ghosts don’t hold meetings with humans and take pictures!

    2. GHOST WORKERS? No! There are no ghost workers in Nigeria at all. Names Like Nelson Mandela, Ahmadu Bello, Abraham Lincoln, Fela Kuti, Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola, Murtala Ramat, Ramat Muhammed and many others that are on LGA council pay rolls all over the country and on the federal parastatal pay rolls are not ghost workers at all because they have managers, supervisors, offices, co-workers, accountants, bank accounts, employers and they are well known by all these and their agents. Some of them even sign attendance register twice every working day. Oga Tatalo, ghosts don’t get employed by mere mortals and then sign attendance registers!

    3. THE GHOSTS OF PENSIONERS WHO HAVE DIED WAITING FOR THEIR PENSIONS? No sir, you are wrong again! Nigerian pensioners don’t die like that. Some will live up to 200 years and many that were employed by Lord Lugard are still receiving their pensions regularly (as at when due). Tatalo sir, if you doubt me ask the chairman of the Task Force on Pension Reform, Dr. Abdulrasheed Maina.

    4. GHOSTWRITERS? Noooh! Oga Tatalo! Just take the write ups and leave the ghosts. – Idahosa Osagie Ojo

     

    GEJ can’t talk with ghosts in Nigeria, but talks with them through “back channels” in foreign lands. – Fula

  • Re: Nationals against the nation

    Omo Iya…all dis grammar because we ask you to convert to Islam. If you do not want virgins you can pass them along to Okon and the rest of us. We know what to do with, and to them. – Iska Countryman

     

    Na wa o. Are you trying to be funny or what? This is a serious piece and here you are trying to make light of it. The rational civilisation of the West will always and for all time have the victory over your anachronistic religion of hatred. Please you need to be careful with your comments. – Axelrod

     

    The Nigeria as we know it would survive your ‘rational civilisation’ crap. – Iska Countryman

     

    The Nigeria Army (NA) – all eyes on the NA. As long it coheres, those Yusufiyya remain a mere irritant. If the army splinters, kyrie eleison. – Obinnna75

    The eboes are holding on to the army hot potato. Trust me, history will not repeat itself. – Iska Countryman

    Great article as ever. But why does Prof. never mention Achebe. You kept quiet when he released his last book, and now that the man is dead, Prof still prefers silence. Is Prof afraid of anything? – Pjay

    Vintage Tatalo doesn’t paint the portrait of he who has just departed to join the pantheons in a hasty manner. Doing so will cause him so much anguish never so fathomable by us mere mortals. – RealityCheck

     

    So much grammar and long story. Snooper, if and when you and your APC people get there, leave the subsidy, in fact reduce the price of fuel to show your love for the people. Life is so easy from the computer’s keyboard or the Ipad. – Kooldealer

     

    I would love to rightly assume that conversion to any religion should not be through force. If any religion or doctrine has what it takes to convince and it has inherent in it such things that, a person desires, then it is should be a matter of personal choice and not something that you impose on anybody.

    Interestingly, as humans, we have the will to choose whosoever we desire – and even if a person was born into a family with high level of religion connotations – and grew up therein, that does not, hinder such , as he/she becomes an adult from deciding whatever he wants, based on personal preference and decision, and yet such must be in accordance with acceptable conduct and the rule of law.

    However, genuine thirst and real craving for true knowledge becomes necessary. In fact, when you come to look at it, if you don’t pass or succeed, in elementary school, how can you proceed to secondary- and hence, how can such a person proceed, to all the other levels of secular education! In addition to that, if you can’t as easy as that, get, a virgin here on earth to marry- and, I guess, you must be somehow, in the right place and at the right time, and must have lived that sort of life, to get anywhere near that, particularly if you are not one of the discerning- then where are you going to get that from- on the other side, where there are no marriages! If it was, in the sixties, seventies, and perhaps eighties, then that may have been possible, in some communities and also in some part of the world. Genuinely speaking, it does not add up! I mean what virgin- in fact, only few men perhaps have got anywhere near that in the natural.

    Therefore, please don’t let anybody fool you- if your grammar is not in place in secondary school and also through A levels, then except you get into adult education somewhere or, a personal tutor teaches you or you simply teache yourself and learn it, then your grammar is likely to be out of place. Why is that? It is because there are rules and regulations that you must comply with.

    Therefore, based on these, we must never forget that the natural man will no matter, what manifest the things of the natural man – and except he becomes a new creature and then craving and hunger for such things – would rule him. – Idoniss Ando

  • Salvation on earth: Two exemplary paradigms (1)

    Salvation on earth: Two exemplary paradigms (1)

    The Argentines are having a ball. This column sees no reason why they shouldn’t. In Diego Amanda Maradona and Lionel Messi, they have two of the greatest footballers that the world has ever produced. The mesmerising Messi is currently the world’s best footballer, and like the prodigious Maradona at his prime, he could waltz or blitz his way through a battalion of defenders with the ease and facility of a goldfish in water. The sheer ecstasy of watching these two is the ultimate in orgiastic visual pleasure.

    But there are even more profound reasons why the Argentines should feel cool with themselves. The Catholic world has just elected its first ever Argentine Pope. Ninety five per cent of Argentines may be devout Catholic, but before now moving the headship of the papacy to the pampas or the whole of Latin America for that matter appeared a long shot in the dark. Now it has happened.

    In addition to this is the economic and political transformation going on in Argentina . Slowly but quite discernibly, Argentina is turning the political and economic corner. In recent decades, Argentines could only live on the glory of the country’s golden age in the last quarter of the nineteenth century leading to early twentieth century. Decades of brutal military misrule and grinding economic misfortune had sapped the energy and confidence of the people.

    It is also perhaps wondrously and intriguingly symbolic that Margaret Thatcher, Argentina’s greatest modern tormentor, should choose to answer the final call at the very moment of Argentinean revival and renaissance. The boulevards of Buenos Aires flared up in jubilation and ululation as the news broke that the nemesis of the nation had joined her ancestors. Famously libeled as a nation of Italians who speak Spanish but think they are English living in Paris, the Argentines appear to be finally rediscovering themselves.

    But it is not just the Argentines who are headed for a starry ascent. Virtually the entire continent of South America seemed to be witnessing a continental rebirth and rejuvenation. From Panama to Peru, an entire continent is being shaken and dragged off its rutted and gutted grooves of complacency and sloth. Leading the pack is Brazil which in a decade has lifted more than 50 million people out of poverty into middle class self-sufficiency.

    Brazil’s dramatic economic transformation and looming ascendancy as a global power have won grudging respect and concession from the USA. Brazil’s president, a pragmatic disciple of the iconic Lula, has been invited for a full state visit to America, the first time in about two decades that a Brazilian leader is being accorded such a honour by the US.

    The entire world is watching the developments in Latin America with curiosity and bated breath. This prodigious human emancipation and stunning optimisation of humanity’s capacity for self-transformation is not the result of a sudden religious conversion or the benevolence of some ancient Aztec or Inca god or goddess. Neither is it as a result of a slavish and sterile imitation and uncreative adaptation of other people’s culture. It is a tribute to the power of visionary and original ideas to re-engineer human society.

    Anywhere in the ancient and modern world where human society has taken a huge leap forward, we can be sure that some original and transformative ideas are behind the stunning advancement on behalf of all humanity. This was what happened with ancient forms of writing in ancient Egypt and old Babylon, the idea of democracy and revolutionary warfare in the Greek and Roman empires, seafaring in Ancient China, the concept of nation-state in the Iberian peninsula, the Industrial Revolution in England, modern philosophy in France, modern warfare in Germany and the revolutionary refinement of the nation-state paradigm in the US.

    We can add modern exemplars like Singapore which broke the binary spatial distinction between the First and Third worlds through the brilliant ideas of one exceptional individual and of course the new experiment in the brotherhood of all humanity irrespective of race and religion in post-apartheid South Africa which owes its inspiration to the humane intellectual genius of a man called Nelson Mandela.

    As armies of contending ideas wage relentless battle, all that is solid often melts into thin air. The ideas that finally lifted the Dark Age for Europe came from the Muslim world in its most visionary period and in particular from the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks which led to the exodus of philosophers, thinkers, writers and other cutting-edge contrarians to mainland Europe. In their dark and devious schema, Western historians and intellectuals often project the Dark Age as a period of global human degeneration. But this is not so. It is a clever attempt to foist a unique European fiasco on the rest of the world.

    By the beginning of the tenth century, the Chinese nation was arguably the leading human society. Its sea-going vessels were described as huge clouds in the sky as a result of the size and sophistication of their masts. Extant artifacts in the Mombasa Museum in modern day Kenya suggest that Chinese sailors had visited the place around the sixth and seventh centuries. But it was around the tenth century that a vicious power struggle lasting for centuries broke out between the mandarinate and the Imperial Chinese feudal court.

    At the very period when China should have opened itself to receive fresh ideas from the rest of the world, it closed itself off. A long period of national decline ensued. Chinese eyes finally opened when the British, from about eight thousand miles away, seized Hong Kong. The Japanese Imperial Army added insult to injury when it invaded and subjected the Chinese to atrocious cruelties. The Boxers’ Uprising was a protest against national humiliation as well as an incipient rebellion against the feudal order. The turmoil eventuated in the Chinese Revolution.

    We must now return to our original quarry. Why is it that Latin America is experiencing an economic and political resurgence and rejuvenation while African countries, with the exception of a notable few, are gripped by stark stasis and collective retrogression? We need to establish two historical theses. First is that the religious standing and spiritual state of any society is a reflection of its intellectual stage and mental development and not the other way round. Except in moments of revolutionary crisis, all religions rely on the power of faith rather than the power of ideas. Just stick to your belief system and forget about fancy stuff which may be the handiwork of Lucifer. Unfortunately as Norman Mailer, the rogue American novelist and thinker, famously posited, there may be some devils working for God.

    See where Martin Luther and the discovery of printing dragged the old Church? And see where the Latin American Liberation theologists were dragging the whole concept of salvation before the Imperial Catholic church pulled the plug in a brilliant intellectual counter-insurgency coordinated by the inevitable and cannily cerebral Cardinal Ratzinger, the first modern Pope on pension.

    The second thesis is so simple and self-evident that it amounts to an intellectual scandal when it escapes our intellectuals. It is that the mode of conquest and colonial rationalisation also conditions and in the last instance determines the fate of human emancipation from the ravages of colonialism. Colonisation also has its rich and dark ironies. The first wave of Iberian modernity which allowed the Portuguese and the Spaniards to seize the South American continent was merely a dress rehearsal for the full blown Euro-American modernity that was to follow.

    So is it that while the Iberians could match the later day colonial masters in the department of colonial cruelty and physical coercion, they were mere toddlers when it came to intellectual sophistication and sheer capacity for psychological intimidation. For example, the Spaniards relied on raw firepower and epochal physical cruelty in their conquest and subjugation of the old Indian empires. At that point in time, only superior technology in armaments separated the two civilisations. In fact the Incas were ahead in terms of social order even though they practiced human sacrifice on a Fordist scale.

    But neither the Spaniards nor the Portuguese could come up with the sociological cum philosophical intimidation behind the French concept of the colonial subject as an “evolué”, or the intellectual coercion behind Lord Lugard’s infamous “dual mandate” which forcibly steamrolled the economy of the colonised into the metropolitan orbit in a crude rehearsal of modern globalisation. And this is not discounting the intellectually ordered millennial messianism that informs the very notion of American Exceptionalism.

    With this background in mind, one can now see why it was easier for the Latin Americans to overcome the contradictions of Iberian colonisation. Raw physical conquests often beget raw physical resistance. It is easier to acquire knowledge of firearms than to acquire the firearms of modern knowledge in a context of unequal exchange. The Iberian conquest spawned several armed rebellions which began almost immediately and became the bloody trademark of the continent for the next 300 years and still counting. In the process, the people developed a heroic culture of militant self-belief and zero tolerance for tyrannical rule.

    We can also see why intellectual subjugation is the worst and most deadly form of conquest. It leads directly to spiritual, economic, cultural and political enslavement. With his old religion gone, his culture subverted, his traditional institutions decimated, his modes of knowledge production devastated, the African , unlike the Chinese, the Japanese and the Indians, requires a complete makeover to even minimally function. But even to achieve this requires that he must first overcome the massive inferiority complex engendered by centuries of intellectual slavery in which he has been made to realise that he is surplus to the requirement of humanity. It is akin to being faced by a circular firing squad.

    The foregoing also explains why Latin America has thrown up an original riposte to Roman Catholic orthodoxy in the form of Liberation Theology while Nigeria and Africa have come up with an even more showy and stagy version of American prosperity preaching. Both are variants of Liberation theories. But while Liberation Theology preaches individual striving on behalf of communal salvation which is achievable in this world through relentless struggle, Pentecostal/Prosperity doctrine preaches individual salvation through self-liberation from want and poverty which is also achievable in this world through the cultivation of the right attitude. Both have their uses and points of convergence and divergence.

    With due respect, the Pentecostal theory of human liberation cannot begin to compare in classical erudition, intellectual rigour and sheer philosophical élan with Liberation Theology. But that is neither here nor there. Both have their practical values and ideological efficacy. While Liberation Theology is in strategic alliance with insurgent groups hoping to bring down unjust and tyrannical states in Latin America, the Pentecostal Church, at least in Nigeria, appears to be in alliance with a delinquent state which it helps to maintain order and stability by transferring to itself part of the state function of providing solace and succour to its citizens. For the fanatical adherents, this is not just an opiate but the oxygen of life itself. Needless to add that it is also an anti-revolutionary carbon monoxide.

    This column does not pretend to enjoy a monopoly of wisdom. It remains an interactive session in which readers are encouraged to talk back. Since this is a very weighty matter which involves the destiny of the Black race, readers are invited to ventilate their views before the matter is brought to conclusion in a few weeks’ time.

  • Requiem

    Just call her Angel of the morning. She came, she saw and touched the lives of many. May the gentle and generous soul of our own heroic Diva of Ekiti dawn, Funmi Adunni Olayinka, rest in peace. Snooper mourns a great fan of this column and a devout follower of the saucy antics of Okon. She was refinement, good breeding and civility personified, ever so polite and courteous, ever so solicitous of one’s wellbeing. In a crowd, she would go out of her way to ask after the crazy cook.

    The world is a stage indeed. The last time Snooper saw her she was dancing on the stage to the mellifluous music of the Highlife maestro, Victor Abimbola Olaiya. It was at the Lagos City Hall on the anniversary of Olaiya’s 60 years on stage. Little did we know that while we were celebrating one icon, another was bidding the stage a long goodbye. The delectable damsel was a paragon of beauty and noble virtues.

    Avid readers of this column should remember that last September when snooper complained and moaned endlessly about spending his last birthday alone in bed amidst a crushing avalanche of books, magazines, journals, periodicals and quarterlies, she promptly responded by sending some rare gourmet’s delight from Ekiti with the stern instruction that it was not for the proletarian palate of the Okons of this world. Alas, both delicacy and delinquent disappeared in a midnight heist the like of which has not been seen before. It was a beautiful soul in a beautiful body. May her kind soul rest in peace.

  • State foreclosure in Nigeria

    State foreclosure in Nigeria

    Foreclosure stares the Nigerian state grimly in the face. It is a terrible irony that our endlessly squabbling politicians do not yet appreciate the dangers to the nation. Their attention is completely fixated on the elections coming next year and in 2015, even as the object of their fixation is slowly yielding to the forces of internal strangulation.

    At no point in its history, either colonial or post-colonial, and certainly not even during the civil war, has the Nigerian state appeared more fragile and vulnerable. Trapped between two extreme and extremist cultures of political violence, the Boko Haram insurgency in the north and the MEND insurrection in the Southern creeks, strafed by a thousand armed gangs bent on bringing to heel its remaining emblems of power and authority, the state appears powerless and paralysed.

    Like a solitary schoolboy ambushed by bigger bullies, the state offers its drink to one and its victuals to the other, hoping that they will go away and leave it in peace. But they are not about to. Inflation is the natural law and logic of bullies. When you appease, you must be ready to yield more appeasement. This is because the more you try to give, the more they demand. Appeasement without a demonstration of strength and resolve, and without compelling evidence of your own minatory deterrence, is a voluntary suicide mission usually dead on arrival.

    This week even as the Boko Haram sect continues its routine devastation of the north despite the prospects of amnesty dangled before it, the MEND opened a new front by threatening and actually carrying out its threat despite the substantial economic and political pacification from the government. The decomposing bodies of 11 policemen must speak volumes for the dire straits in which the state has found itself..

    The powerful Nigerian military has battled valiantly and heroically to confront and contain these nation-destroying demons, but it is also beginning to show signs of weariness and demoralisation. As this column has repeatedly cautioned, this kind of well-heeled insurgency fired and inspired by ideological zealotry and operating in an economically blighted region suffering from political disorientation, is not in the conventional military manual.

    Without a conventional order of battle (ORBAT), the military will have to learn its lesson on the hoof, and as the war without defined fronts progresses. In addition, the military is hobbled by overriding political considerations and the inconsistency and feeble-minded opportunism of government policies. Saying one thing today and doing the very opposite the next day, Goodluck Jonathan himself comes across as a tragic comedian in a perplexing political tragicomedy.

    But it is not a funny matter when the state becomes a big joke despite its awesome powers of enforcement and coercion and when the bully finally becomes the bullied and the tormentor the tormented The problem of the post-colonial state in Nigeria is compounded by its vanishing legitimacy and authority even in the areas where it holds unchallenged sway.

    For many Nigerians, the state is seen as incapable of projecting itself as a true defender of national interests. It is so grotesquely corrupt and inefficient that its moral authority over its own citizens has evaporated. This is in addition to its military incapacitation in the face of armed critiques of its existence. Although this did not begin with Goodluck Jonathan, he seems bent and destined to drive the logic to its ultimate summit and summation.

    When a state loses its power of moral and ethical suasion over its citizens and when the power of its apparatus of coercion has dramatically diminished in addition, that is state failure looming. It is now too late in the day to begin to suggest measures to shore up the authority and legitimacy of the government. This will involve a drastic self-purgation, and with its eyes fixed on the election of 2015, the Jonathan administration cannot even afford to toy with these measures.

    Unfortunately, it is not a problem that can be wholly redressed or addressed by elections. As it has been demonstrated so many times in the history of post-colonial Africa and Nigeria, elections superimposed on seething national contradictions do not solve or resolve anything. In most cases, they worsen the contradictions and exacerbate the national fault lines.

    It is the business of recreating the Nigerian state and nation which the political elite shy away from that is the hardest task. Yet without this fundamental shift in the paradigm of state-making and nation-building, there is nothing to stop this embattled nation from eventually dissolving into anarchic bloodletting the like of which has never been seen before.

    The old African pre-colonial political elites seemed to have managed the contradictions of society-building and state-making very well. This was because the old African state was an organic outgrowth of pre-colonial African society and there was therefore a uniformity and homogeneity of political culture which allowed for faster consensus building, the odd tension and political dissonance notwithstanding.

    This is quite unlike what obtains in colonial and post-colonial Africa where the state largely remains an alien and alienating contraption forcibly grafted on disparate and often mutually contradictory political, economic and religious cultures which makes national consensus very difficult except when it comes to stealing which wears a universal mask and does not require any mental rigour or highfalutin ethics.

    Where the state-nation is lucky to have a visionary founding father who can skilfully weld and fuse the disparate ethnic strands together to achieve a homogeneous entity, it is easier to fashion and fabricate a national consensus. Unfortunately, most founding fathers in Africa left their nations writhing in the debris of political and economic chaos.

    In its classical incarnation, the state was the most powerful embodiment of national aspirations surfeit with mystical notions as the ultimate guarantor and protector of the sacred destiny of the people and the society. This is true of any pre-colonial society. In royalties, monarchies, empires and fiefdoms, state actors are carefully groomed and nurtured through a rigorous and painstaking selection process.

    When and where a mistake is made, it is left to other powerful countervailing institutions to correct the anomaly with speed and utmost discretion without destabilising the polity. This is unlike what obtains in post-colonial Africa where tyrannical and unjust rulers often manage to circumvent elections as the expression of the sovereign wish and will of the populace.

    Africans must find some redemptive resources from the pre-colonial past. African elites, unlike the Chinese, the Indians, the Japanese and the Arabs, do not consider themselves modish and sophisticated until they have started casting aspersions on their pre-colonial culture. Yet as we demonstrated in this column last week, the continuing virility and potency of some of these institutions long after the subversion of their political and material base ought to serve as a cautionary reminder.

    In a famous passage on Greek Art, Karl Marx, the grim materialist and patriarch of periodisation, wondered aloud why artistic products from ancient Greece have continued to please and intrigue us long after the superannuation of the material culture that supported them. “The difficulty is not that they pleased us but that they continue to do so”, Marx rued. It was surely an affront to materialist logic.

    The same logic should now be extended to post-traditional societies. Why do certain institutions, rituals, emblems, sacred totems and tropes from the pre-colonial order have a lingering efficacy and potency long after the colonial amputation of the political and material basis of their existence? These are powerful ideological apparatuses of the old pre-colonial state and they will continue to be for a long time until they are overtaken by a combination of events. The death of material base does not automatically translate into the demise of superstructure.

    However that may be, all of this must indicate to us why the Nigerian state faces grave problems. It is a state that has been unable to grow any authentic national institution with the possible exception of the military which has also had its misadventures. It is a stunted state suffering from pedological leprosy. Nothing will grow on nothing. The political elite are riven by primordial fissures. The national psyche is centrally fractured. The state preys and predates on the nation directly leading to armed objections to its existence. .

    We have been careful to distinguish between state foreclosure and total state failure. Let no one at this point come up with the bogey, the blackmail and the buncombe that all this may lead to military intervention. In any case, military rule is preferable to the apocalyptic meltdown and the genocidal bloodletting looming. If the Boko Haram sect had succeeded in bringing down the Third Mainland Bridge, it would have taken some extra constitutional measure to restore parity to the nation. The mere threat, which is not over yet, brings the national tragedy to sharp relief.

    Whereas state failure compels a drastic and radical re-composition of the state and reconfiguration of the nation, state foreclosure, like a foreclosed property, demands immediate change of ownership and perhaps ownership restructure. The revolutionary turmoil in the land ought to tell the PDP that it has nothing left to offer the nation. Despite payment rescheduling and mortgage modification, the ruling party has failed to meet its obligation to the nation. Urgent repossession is the only solution.

    Since it has proved incapable of internally reforming itself, not to talk of coming up with the visionary policies to move the nation forward beyond the initial demilitarisation, all Nigerians, including patriotic members of the PDP driven by enlightened self interest, must rise up in one guise and under whatever national platform to see off this pernicious party before it sees off the nation.

    When compared with other grave possibilities facing the nation at the moment, this is the equivalent of mild surgery and a compromise in favour liberal democracy. Otherwise, state failure will accelerate at full throttle. The hazy outlines of radical anarchy are already with us.