The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • Mourning Margaret, the Dowager of Downing Street

    Mourning Margaret, the Dowager of Downing Street

    Margaret Hilda Thatcher, who has just died, was arguably one of the greatest and most impacting leaders of the twentieth century. But she was also one of the most divisive. Even in death, she continues to provoke bitter divisions and controversies. While world leaders fell over themselves to pay her deserved tributes, the streets of Buenos Aires in Argentina and Brixton in Britain lit up in instant rejoicing and jubilation at the passing of the woman they love to hate. Thatcher, the milk-snatcher and the conqueror of Argentina, has shed mortality for immortality.

    The basis of her greatness lies in simple but stout convictions which she was ready to pursue to their ultimate end without caring whose ox is gored. She would not be crossed lightly. When truly roused, observers have noticed a lunatic glare in her eyes which hinted at deep psychological instability, but which also explains her deep reserves of strength and character. She was a long distance runner when it comes to feuds and friendships.

    There can be no doubt about her strength of character and steely resolve. The daughter of a Methodist alderman, the former Ms Roberts brought certain Christian fundamentalist principles to bear on politics. Among these are the virtues of thrift, prudence, restraint and self-help. Let those who do not work not eat. It is as simple as that, or is it? Ironically when these noble virtues are pushed to their ultimate logic, they lend themselves to the berserk individualism of an uncaring and deeply divided society. Thatcher herself famously posited that there is no such thing as society.

    This glorification of individual strength and personal salvation at the expense of communal care and affection was the ultimate chink in her formidable visionary armour. Thatcher’s fundamentalist zeal as well as the limits of her messianic certitude rose to the fore whenever she brusquely informed critics of her economic policies that there was no alternative, a mantra which earned her the nickname of “Tina”.

    In the end and even for her long-suffering party colleagues, there was no alternative to dumping the Iron Lady. It was a typical British political coup which was brilliantly effected in an autumnal morning of long knives. With tears in her eyes, Margaret Thatcher headed for Buckingham Palace in a lone funereal procession. The Iron Lady had become history.

    Margaret Thatcher was an unusual and atypical figure even by the standards of British politics. She was a profound anomaly for a political society which prides itself on its tolerance and the gentle virtues of pragmatic compromise. But there can be no doubt that the moment chose its Margaret. Before her, there was a historic deadlock. Britain had become a huge economic almshouse disposing munificence while Authur Scargill and his unionists held the nation to ransom. Britain needed an unusual political figure to drag and handbag it out of the millennial rut. Thatcher frogmarched Britain to her neo-conservative version of economic modernity. She earned herself an “ism” in the process.

    While her greatness is not in doubt, snooper regrets a certain gleeful insularity about Thatcher which lends itself to a racist smugness. Her support of rightwing regimes called her political judgement to question. Her dismissal of the ANC as a terrorist organisation which would never come to power was cruel and obtuse.

    In a befitting historical irony, snooper monitored Margaret Thatcher as she journeyed to South Africa much later to negotiate with the new authorities an escape clause for Mark, her wayward and accident-prone son. The ANC government obliged. It was a touching demonstration of the superiority of traditional African values. May Margaret find sweet repose.

  • An afternoon with Iku Baba Yeye

    An afternoon with Iku Baba Yeye

    What can we do without our royalty? And how will the world as we know it be without kings? Kingdoms and empires seem to vanish, but kings and emperors have remained with us forever. Radical historians and other intellectual regicides view them as risible relics of a feudal past that is better forgotten. But the joke appears to be on the revolutionaries. In traditional societies transiting to modernity, royalty seems to playa a critical and crucial role.

    For over three hundred years, the Yoruba have been engaged in a war of will and wits with theirs. Sometimes, they succeed in banishing a few or sending the odd royal to his maker. But as a long term strategy in a war of attrition, they seem to have settled for the policy of giving unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar. The king does not die, and neither does kingship. Please note that king, Caesar, Czar, Tsar and Kaiser are all etymological variations of the same word.

    The English succeeded in decapitating one of theirs in an epochal revolution. But after the Cromwellian levelling became a joke taken too far, they quickly signed on a new royalty. It might have been a typical English fudge but it works. The English royals are the nearest object of reverence and national veneration in Britain up to this point. Surprisingly, when the Spanish monarch asked the late Hugo Chavez to shut up in full public glare, the Latin American revolutionary promptly shut his trap.

    The French sent off their royal couple to the guillotine only for emperors and presidential monarchs to surface like social submarines. The Elysee Palace can only be occupied by royalty. After they blew up the entire royal family, the Russians found themselves cursed with Leninist and Stalinist Tsars until the revolution collapsed one sunny morning. Now, Vladimir Putin is behaving like another Russian Tsar, minus the pomp and pageantry and the Russians are not exactly resentful.

    In the case of the Americans, they, vowed from the word go never to have anything to do with royalty. They seemed to have learnt their lessons from the implacable tyrants they fled from in Europe. But with the regal Reagans and the kingly Kennedys, the Yankees appear to have spoken too soon.

    Always centralise! If this is the motivating motto of all modern societies, it also tells us why we seem to be stuck with kings. There can be no centralisation without a central figure. As long as this remains the preferred mode of human organisation, revolutions and the dissolutions of empires may consume royalty but only for new royalties to emerge. Napoleon acidly noted that a throne is but a bench covered with damask, but the sly Sicilian eventually ordered one for himself too.

    Snooper spent last Thursday afternoon watching a grand royal opera. It was as magnificent as it could have been in the ancient times of magical lore. The event took place at the Wallan Hall of D’Rovans Hotel, Ibadan. It was at the formal presentation of a collection of essays on chieftaincy laws in Nigeria in honour of his Imperial Majesty, the Alaafin of Oyo, Oba Lamidi Olayiwola Adeyemi 111.

    The Oyo monarch is a principal emblem of royalty in Nigeria and Africa and one of the most sacred totems of the unyielding potency of the institution. When it is said that Africans cannot build durable institutions, you can always point at the institutions of obaship which has survived and thrived for centuries. It is colonial and post-colonial disorientation which have made it impossible for Africans to adapt to western institutions.

    Built like a compact but supple prize fighter and without any hint of mechanical inflexibility, his Royal Highness exudes supernatural self-assurance. With his charisma, carriage and comportment , the Oyo monarch is a royal showstopper any day. The finely chiselled features hinting of centuries of breeding and genetic refinement, the Alaafin is the ultimate advertisement for royalty anywhere in the world.

    Like most exceptional kings, the Alaafin is many things rolled into one: scholar, diplomat, archaeologist, anthropologist, historian, raconteur, warrior, political strategist, traditional savant, writer and supreme athlete. In these days of sharp and severe division of labour even within the same profession, this kind of royal polyvalency is a throwback to some earlier times of superhumans.

    Ironically because of its virility and continuing efficacy, the obaship institution in Yoruba land often feels like a jungle of royal adversaries with our traditional fathers often jostling for supremacy and superiority of dynastic lineage. Snooper does not have the capacity or sagacity to dabble into the cloak and dagger world of Yoruba royal politics..

    Suffice it to say that while Ile-Ife was, and remains, the ancestral homestead and originating sacred site and spiritual shrine of the Yoruba race, it was the old Oyo Empire that took the race to the pre-colonial zenith of its military, political, diplomatic and economic genius.

    All the children of Oduduwa must be grateful to both founders and pathfinders alike for bequeathing a sophisticated culture which has transcended its origins in the forest to become a global brand. While it was the centralising genius of Oduduwa that cobbled and fused the disparate strands into an organic ethnic group, it was a succession of Oyo kings that expanded this into an empire with sub-continental reach.

    Like his martial ancestors, the incumbent Alaafin has phenomenal guts and what they call plenty of cujones to spare. It was an unusual act of personal bravery for a prince of Oyo to train as a professional boxer. The boxing ring does not recognise royalty. You are all alone and on your own. Only the handlers and the proverbial towel can save a prince from punitive pounding, particularly from adamant regicides on the margins of society roused by class hatred and envy. For every prince, there is a waiting pauper.

    The early life of the future Oba is the stuff of magical fables. Like all prize fighters, the Alaafin has taken a couple of hard blows. But he has also managed to deliver some sledgehammers. By his own public admission in Ibadan on Thursday, Oba Adeyemi has been involved in about a hundred litigations, ninety five of which he won by technical knockout and a few through lack of diligent prosecution on the part of his opponents. In boxing parlance, this is the equivalent of an opponent not answering the bell for the next round.

    It was as if from birth, his father, a strong-willed monarch, strenuously prepared the young prince for royal ascendancy. From early childhood, he was sent off as a royal apprentice to serve in the household of foremost traditional rulers and notables. It was an exacting and tasking royal journeymanship/.

    A series of character-steeling adversities ensued. In the event, his father was deposed and banished by the then Action Group government. Inevitably, the new political elite thrown up by the colonial irruption came into conflict and collision with the old traditional class. Oba Adeyemi became a principal casualty of this shift in the locus of power.

    In the north, the same dynamics was to see to the removal and banishment. of the old Emir of Kano, Alhaji Sanusi. Whereas the ordeal of Sanusi exemplified the tension between the old Kano metropole and the new Sokoto caliphate which began with the Othman Dan Fodio conquest, in the west there was a hint of old sub-ethnic rivalries and pre-colonial animosities about it all.

    Ahmadu Bello had fought with his cousin, Sultan Abubakar for the Sokoto throne and even after becoming the de facto ruler of Nigeria, this was still the prize he coveted most. Obafemi Awolowo, on the other hand, belonged to the new ascendant class who owed their hegemony to the colonial disruption of the old order.

    But looking at a king’s mouth, one would never have imagined that he ever sucked at his mother’s breath. At seventy three and after forty two years on the throne, Oba Lamidi Adeyemi has worn very well indeed. The entire hall erupted in swooning adulation and veneration as the royal retinue, replete with dancers and drummers, heralded the arrival of his imperial majesty. Resplendent as usual in fine native plumage, his royal highness was quite a sight to behold.

    Perhaps one was going to get a gift of royal dancing. Like all gifted musical artists, his royal highness has a supreme sense of inner rhythm which translates into exquisite fancy footwork and the inimitable regal trot. But it was not the time for royal cantering. This afternoon, his imperial highness seemed to have weightier matters on his royal mind. The scholar and the cultural warrior were ascendant.

    As he sat impassively on his chair behind a wall of practised silence like an all- seeing, all-knowing, all-hearing deity, you get a sense of why the Yoruba consider their kings as being next to their traditional gods. The ways of these deities are truly mysterious.

    You got a sense that your number was up when a native enforcer informed snooper that the Alaafin had ordered that he should be brought before his royal presence. But it was to exchange witty banters. As the king would later publicly reveal, he keeps a file on all major writings in the country. Needless to add that he has a capillary network of informants where it matters most. It doesn’t get more chillingly impressive.

    It has been an engrossing encounter in Ibadan with a worthy embodiment of arguably the most durable and viable institution thrown up by the ancient Yoruba society. In his rigour and painstaking devotion to duty, this remarkable traditional ruler shows just how sophisticated and socially advanced the pre-colonial political order could have been. The life of the Alaafin teaches us two important lessons: The immutability of destiny and the fact that it is not life that matters but the courage you bring to bear on it. Here is wishing the Iku Baba yeye many more fruitful years on the throne of his ancestors..

  • Now, Okon propounds a culinary theory of national chaos

    After an Easter celebration filled with bombs and bombasts, snooper had settled into a post-Easter rumination about the fate of the country. One is now slowly coming to the conclusion that things will not get better in this country in one’s lifetime. It is a psychological therapy called reconciliation under duress. No matter how you look at it, it is not a bad development.

    It consoles and soothes and helps you put a glossy sheen on things no matter how depraved and degenerate they may be. It allows snooper to reach back for historical comparison. Almost every Yoruba child born between 1823 and 1875 was born into a situation of great strife and turmoil. This was the period of the Yoruba Mfekane, or dispersal of the tribe.

    But Okon was having none of that. There is something to be said for the vitality and energy of youth. As snooper slipped deeper into this anti-revolutionary mush, Okon was all boundless energy and initiative. One morning, the bounder showed up in the sitting room dressed like a respectable Niger Delta chieftain.

    “And where is Asari Dokunmu heading for this morning?” snooper asked with a sarcastic leer.

    “Oga, I wan reach Abuja make man attend dem Congress of oil-producing Nationalities (CON) Dem say we dey meet for dem Hall 419 for dem Sheraton. We wan talk before oil scatter obodo as dem mala wan drive Jonothan comot with dem tira and dem wahala”, Okon replied with a frown.

    “ So what are you going to tell them at the conference?”

    “Ha oga dat one dey easy. I go tell dem say obodo problem be like dem problem of dem yeye Yoruba soup. As dem Yoruba soup get too much oil, obodo Nigeria too get too much oil. Make we remove dem oil and everybody go scram and we go get peace for obodo, When dem oil no dey again, you go dey hear dem mala scream, tefi mana, tefi mana”, Okon chortled with devilish relish.

    “Quite some culinary theory of national chaos”. Snooper mumbled to himself.

    “Oga dis no be time for grammar, na dem Yoruba grammar finis us before before, all dem Lagos lawyers and dem Shakabula journalists who dey answer Oyinbo name, yeye people”, Okon sneered. Snooper suppressed his mirth at the boy’s militant malice compounded by sheer ignorance.

    “So Okon, what else are you doing in Abuja?” snooper cautiously demanded.

    “I wan reach Aso Rock make I grab dem amnesty from dem Jonathan. He be like if dat one just dey distribute amnesty like dem Red Cross rice. Dem amnesty na for my brother sub-lieutenant William Oyazimo. Na dem Yoruba people finis dat one for Bar Beach becos dem think say na Ibo” Okon submitted.

    “Is that not the WAHUM armed robber of the early seventies?” snooper asked in alarm.

    “Him no be armed robber. Na dem Yoruba finis am becos him go knack dem Yoruba wife for dem barracks. You no say for dat time dem wuruwuru man for Dahomey come kill him number two dem Captain Aikpeh becos him say dat one dey knack him wife. Oga rubbing no be robbery” Okon flatly propounded. It was on that note that snooper wished the loony boy God’s speed.

  • The Census of Ghosts

    The Census of Ghosts

    (An Easter Combo)

    Unholy ghosts!!! It is profoundly ironic that on the same day that Jesus Christ resurrected, Nigeria should be dealing with so many ghosts. Without any doubt, the Boko Haram sect has become the greatest threat to the corporate existence of Nigeria since the Civil War. The organization, as expected of all guerrilla outfits, is shadowy and shrouded in mystery. Whatever its provenance, whether secular or theocratic in inspiration, no insurgent group worth its salt goes about brandishing the names of its core leadership.

    The government has repeatedly made it known that it does not negotiate with ghosts. Since ghosts are hardly visible entities, this is an eminently sensible position to take. You cannot sit down to talk or negotiate with an unperson, somebody who is simply not there. Yet at the last count, these ghosts have killed almost half a million Nigerians in the last three years and still counting.

    The trauma of a ghost country is compounded by its inability to trace or account for its own ghosts. Something will have to be done to bring the government of ghosts and the ghost of government together before we all become ghosts.

    The entire country is swamped by ghosts. Ghosts have laid a siege to the country. At the moment, four principal types of ghosts can be identified. There are arms-bearing ghosts, otherwise known as the Boko Haram insurgents. These are the ghosts that have been killing other people. They have struck fear and trepidation into the heart of the people. The entire land is flowing with blood and tears.

    The second group of ghosts are the economic ghosts. These are the ghost workers who cost government billions every month. Among the ghost workers are the miracle workers of the temporal ministries who facilitate the ghost workers. There are also the ghost barons who help with phantom subsidies and of course the pension thieves who vanish into thin air like ghosts.

    The third group are the political ghosts. These are the ghosts of pensioners who have died waiting for their pensions and politicians who have been killed in strange and suspicious circumstances. The particular group of ghosts are notorious for not resting in peace or allowing others to rest in peace. Then there are the holy ghosts and spiritual merchants who spiritually launder the loot.

    The last group are the ghostwriters. These are the literary ghosts, writers, journalists, historians and columnists, who help others to prepare or settle accounts, particularly where and when disputes arise in the other groups over the allocation of resources, or the allocation of economic, military and political casualties. A columnist who chooses to wear the cloak of anonymity is for example a ghost writer

    In view of this plethora of ghosts in the land, snooper brings to you this morning a short excerpt from the novel, Bulletin From the Land of Living Ghosts published eleven years ago in 2002. It shows once again how fiction can anticipate reality.

  • The land of ghosts

    What was the beginning of the journey of the general, or to put it more accurately, the beginning of the journey of his coffin, to the Cemetery of Patriots. Certain journeys are reversible, and certain journeys are irreversible. Certain destinations are returnable, and certain destinations are irreturnable.

    Whatever the nature of the general’s journey and destination, it was to be a harbinger of greater stress and crisis for the country. Whether there was any connection between the two events could not be ascertained as at the time this chronicle of the travails of the people of Muleria was put together. What could be ascertained was that shortly after the night of horror at the Cemetery of Patriots, that was a few months shy of twenty-one years after the great warlord disappeared, the entire nation became a ghost country.

    It was not just the odd sighting of the old general, or the customary reports of some ghosts in the city and the country side. Things soon assumed an epidemic proportion. There was a plague of ghosts. Ghosts were sighted everywhere: in homes, schools, churches, mosques, buses, court-rooms, barracks, campuses, offices, banks, hospitals and everywhere two or three people were likely to gather.

    The entire nation was bursting with wraiths and apparitions. The problem was that there was no hiding place. Unlike a war with well-defined zones and sectors, these were hostilities without bounds or boundaries. It was as if the dead had decided to return en masse. The stress and strain began to take its toll on a normally cheerful and ebullient people.

    And it was not ghosts alone. There were other spirits, too: fairies, daemons, goblins, gremlins, gnomes, sprites, imps and all manner of supra-terrestrial terrorists. From being haunted by the ghost of mismanagement, the government found itself confronted by the mismanagement of ghosts. And it succumbed to both.

    First it warned about rumour-mongering and threatened to deal ruthlessly with anybody peddling ghost stories. Then after its own deliberations about ghosts were reportedly abridged by ghosts, it confessed that there were indeed ghosts everywhere but that it had awarded contracts to ward off the invasion.

    Certain national landmarks were designated as Places of Burnt Offerings from Offending Children of Muleria to Their Offended Gods. A million doves were buried alive. Spiritual contractors, merchants of mayhem and other profiteers and parasites of popular misfortune smiled to the bank. There was an astronomical rise in the sale of frankincense, olibanum, absinthe and other incenses from the middle-east, Arabia, Persia and India.

    No household was complete without ethereal smoke wafting from the roof and the entire nation was soon engulfed in a cloud of fragrant vapour. Smart-alecs set up corner shops selling ghost charms, ghost amulets and, failing that, wands that could turn people into ghosts. It became customary to ask strangers: “Are you sure you are not a ghost?”Invariably, only the bravest of souls waited for the answer.

  • Now, the ghost of Chinua Achebe

    Now, the ghost of Chinua Achebe

    It is the post-colonial condition, stupid. For the past one week, Africa, Nigeria and the Igbo people have been mourning the exit of one of their most illustrious sons ever. Chinua Achebe has joined the galaxy of illustrious and distinguished patriots haunting the nation from inner and outer space. These distinguished avatars, men and women alike, will not rest in peace until Nigeria gets it right, or until the old colonial Ajele returns to disband the costly charade and chicanery.

    For a man who had a supreme and acute sense of beginnings, the great author also had a magnificent sense of an ending. It was a grand departure, exquisitely and exactingly timed to provoke maximum anguish and anxiety. When Achebe released his controversial war memoirs titled There Was A Country, snooper had a premonition that this was the old man’s parting shot at his crass compatriots.

    It was a grand Philippic and Parthian all rolled into one, dripping with fire, venom and thunder. Achebe has repudiated the nation as it is for the nation as it was or as it ought to be. It was an epic rejection of form and content. Achebe, the former Biafran oligarch, almost came close to declaring himself a former Nigerian.

    But if there was a country, there is also a country, despite its grave imperfections. There is no point in dwelling on the more unfortunate aspects of Achebe’s war memoirs. It was an angry and robust putdown, a savage indictment if you like. The adversarial posture ought to serve as a warning and timely reminder to intellectual and political elites who push and proxy their people into needless bloodbath. There are war criminals and there are war criminals.

    For a person like snooper who grew up in a political household where the late Zik was adored, and where the great man once sat in the early fifties speaking perfect and flawless Yoruba, it was a moment of excruciating agony. In the end, it is clear that Chinua Achebe was haunted by a transcendental homelessness in which exile became a type of home and home became a place of exiles, strange otherworldly characters and their putrid posturing. The home of the homeless is homelessness. We might as well add hopelessness.

    The post-colonial condition is particularly hard and harsh on the great and gifted writers. It turns them into political hermits and mental recluses. In its worst manifestation, it turns them into psychological wreckages, leading to permanent exile or internal self-deportation without parole or the possibility of exit mercy visa. This is because as artists—and adult enfant terrible—- they are at the frontiers of the psychic unease and the great psycho-social dramas of their society. It is a situation that does not lend itself to equivocations or evasion of the truth as they see it. They do not come to praise Caesar but to bury him.

    Whenever Achebe’s name and memory are recalled, what will come to mind is his adamantine personal and professional integrity. It was an implacable integrity, remorseless and unyielding in its obsessions and towering moral rage and revulsion. Ultimately, it was a disruptive integrity, as disruptive of the status quo in pre and post-Biafran Nigeria as it was of delicate nation-building in a crippled country..

    We cannot grudge such a great man his choices. There were a few great German writers and philosophers who did not deem it fit to explain to their compatriots what they were doing with NAZISM. They went to their grave in stony silence. Knut Hamsun, the Norwegian literary avatar, simply froze in arctic dumbness.

    Neither did Ezra Pound deem it fit to divulge the reason behind his Anglo-American baiting. They were all Hitler’s willing literary executioners. Had he been apprehended during the civil war, Chinua Achebe would have maintained the same impassive silence if not an outburst of angry contempt.

    There is a sense in which it can be argued that Chinua Achebe took his integrity from the cultural matrix of his Igbo people. Given what many see as the faithlessness and opportunistic chicanery of the dominant faction of contemporary Igbo elite in post-Biafran Nigeria, this might sound like a cruel joke. But there is no doubt that before colonial Nigeria, the Igbo society was arguably the most radical and revolutionary.

    It was, and is, a society in which everybody is a monarch and a monad. The energies released by this fiercely republican ethos would have served as a durable building block for a novel and thoroughly revolutionary society in which man was the measure of all things. It takes considerable personal integrity and some strength of character to sustain this streak of volcanic independence.

    But in a larger conglomeration of mutually contradictory nationalities, it can lead to a more severe ethical disorientation, particularly if it comes into conflict and collision with empire builders who rely more on communal strength rather than the valour of the exceptional individual. It is better to bond and bind together in an iron colonial cage where everybody is clawing at everybody to death. Even the solitary lion is vulnerable to a pack of adamant wolves.

    Significantly, Arrow of God opens on a blood-splattered canvas. The normal thing is for gods to kill off humans, like flies to wanton boys, to echo Shakespeare. But here we find humans killing off gods when they could no longer pass muster and after they have outlived their usefulness. Viewing this revolutionary anthropomorphism with unease and considerable apprehension, Wole Soyinka described the novel as a “dogged secularization of the profoundly mystical.”

    But it is obvious that Soyinka was viewing things from the cultural matrix of his Yoruba people, a people with a thousand virile gods who cannot and must not be disturbed in their lordly repose. After the Fulani jihadists overran their old empire, the Yoruba acquiesced in the formation of a new Oyo to replace the old Oyo.

    They knew in their heart that the old empire was gone, but they also knew that they needed a new mystical rallying point to preserve the sacred notions of the nationality. If the new hegemon punches above his real weight, the maverick and royalty devouring Ibadan Army was there to put him in his real place. This was the brilliant political motif of an endangered people that Obafemi Awolowo brought to bear on the formation of the Egbe Omo Oduduwa..

    The question to ask is whether people and nations need a dash and good dosage of mystery or a splash of political sorcery to preserve their sacred self-notion and to serve as a rallying symbol of unity. The British know that their royal rulers are of German extraction, but they have held on to this noble fable to serve as the ultimate national symbol and talisman. The only special request the Japanese demanded from their American conquerors was to allow them to retain their royalty.

    Until the Nigerian political elite sit down to understand and appreciate the strengths and constraints of the diverse cultures that make up the nation and then find the way and will to turn these into resources of redemptive nation building, it will continue to be a dialogue of the deaf in a dying nation. The various pre-independent colonial conferences could not have done this. They were merely pre-tournament briefings before the gladiators were unleashed on themselves in a duel unto death. What a Homeric mayhem it has been!

    On a personal note, snooper has very warm and fond memories of Chinua Achebe. He was the first person to publish an academic paper by the columnist. This was in Okike, way back in 1981. He was the very epitome of kindness and courtesy There was a touching correspondence which continued even after snooper relocated to the University of Sheffield in Britain. Thereafter, the post-colonial condition intervened. May the soul of the great man rest in peace.

  • Nationals against the nation

    Nationals against the nation

    (Four pillars of instability)

    In its extreme formulation, the title of this column can be recast as “Nationalities against the Nation”. Nationalities are groups or people(s) with distinct cultures, linguistic coherence and a homogeneous spiritual, political and economic worldview who inhabit a nation-space. Nationals are bona fide citizens of a nation-state. But there ought to be a distinction between nationals and nationalists.

    Nationals are in the nation, but nationalists are both in the nation and for the nation. In other words, while there have been a sizeable number of worthy and illustrious Nigerian nationalists many of whom have lived for the nation and a few of whom have died for it, there is as yet no Nigerian nationalist class in the proper sociological sense of that term.

    Yet every nation requires a true nationalist class to move from being a nation in itself to a nation for itself. It was not for sheer brinksmanship that Admiral Horatio Nelson of Trafalgar presaged every naval battle with the memorable summons: “England expects every man to do his duty”. It was a call to martyrdom in the service of a nascent nation. With one hand already lost in battle, Nelson himself eventually succumbed to a solitary enemy rocket.

    In effect, then, what Lord Lugard created was a nation in itself, which was the best he could do in the circumstances. To become a nation for itself requires the sterling and heroic efforts of a truly Nigerian nationalist class that would then transform the chaotic amalgam to a coherent and organic nation. One hundred years and much momentous bloodshed and upheavals after, this has proved a costly and illusory mirage.

    A nation-space in a perpetual and permanent state of becoming is vulnerable to certain nation-destroying tendencies and activities. With the carnage in Kano this past week and the discovery of active cells in Lagos , it is clear that the Boko Haram insurgency is bent on tipping the nation into an orgy of religious and ethnic bloodbath the like of which has never been seen anywhere in the world.

    This is a dire moment for the nation. As it is currently constituted, the Nigerian political elite, particularly its dominant faction, is organically incapable of handling the challenge. The unforeseen contradictions of post-military anarchy and anomie have rendered the ruling party statutorily incompetent and incapacitated by its lack of transformative imagination and vision.

    Given the structural and systemic disfiguration of the nation, the PDP may win many more elections, but it is incapable of holding the nation together for much longer. A fixation with elections is electoralism in its worst and most berserk form. This is the time for the emergence of a truly nationalist class which will save Nigeria from political, economic and spiritual predators. Unfortunately for now, there seems to be none in the horizon. So by the time we all wake up from this nightmare in all its bloodthirsty absurdities, Nigeria may be gone.

    As it is at the moment, Nigeria is prey and hostage to four main predatory groups whose activities, wittingly and unwittingly, are mutually reinforcing in their nation-evaporating possibilities and potentials. Although they may have their arrowheads and clusters among certain ethnic groups, it is juvenile and delinquent bêtise to reduce this complex issue to a question of ethnicity or of some nationalities against the nation. Whenever and wherever nationalities have risen against the nation, it is always an elite-driven phenomenon.

    The four groups that Nigeria is vulnerable to and that have rendered the country virtually ungovernable are the following. First are the political terrorists who are using the power of political ascendancy and incumbency to unleash a reign of terror on the nation in order to secure and safeguard their temporary and transient advantage. They have broken all the rules of sober and civilized governance in this country and we are still counting. With their boorish and undemocratic conduct, they constitute the gravest nuisance to the nation.

    The second are the spiritual predators and religious terrorists who will stop at nothing in recreating the nation in their own image even if entire swathes of the country is laid waste and the nation itself is foaming with blood. They are savage and medieval tyrants who will stop at nothing in turning Nigeria into a theocratic state of their torrid hallucination. To their Stone Age and fundamentalist mindset, the very idea of a secular state is a horrific anomaly. Yet this is the very fundament of the modern nation-state paradigm.

    It is the theocratic state that is a modern anomaly, the exclusive preserve of societies transiting from first degree feudalism to modernity. Goodluck Jonathan is right to call Nigeria a secular state. A nation may be a multi-religious nation with freedom of worship guaranteed to its citizens but when a state becomes multi-religious, it means that every ascendant religious group can take its turn in spiritually gang-raping the nation without any regard for the core values that bind it. This is a classic enactment of Hades on earth.

    The third group are the economic terrorists who are bent on bringing Nigeria economically to heel. At the level of state actorship, they are those who believe that Nigeria is a sinking Titanic to be stripped of all valuables before the might hulk topples over. They are like raiders of a lost Ark. At the level of economic society are the petty and petit predators : hegemonic amputees who had lost potency and feel hardly done by a nation that had castrated them politically. As a result, they are engaged in all manner of economic sabotage against a nation for which they nurse nothing but seething animosity and volcanic resentment.

    The last group are the logical progeny of the first three, intellectual counter-terrorists and anti-state actors who deploy superior knowledge and advanced political consciousness to mount a devastating siege on the Nigerian post-colonial state in all its startling inadequacy and bankruptcy. They are products of the global rise in counter-hegemonic knowledge by which those who are outside of government know far more than those who are inside.

    Whether from home or from abroad, they deploy their intellectual firepower to telling effect forcing the hunter to become the hunted. In its extreme and adversarial version, it is an anti-terrorist terrorism whose aim is to exclude the excluders and which will stop at nothing but the reconstruction of the nation and the reconstitution of the state. After each encounter, the government looks so weather beaten and punch drunk that you have a sense that only gluttons for scarifying punishment would like to remain in power no matter the perks and perquisites.

    With all these forces ranged against themselves and against the nation and the state, it is not surprising that Nigeria often gives the impression of a nation permanently at war with itself. It is to be noted that apart from minor border skirmishes with Cameroons and Chad, Nigeria has not fought any external war since amalgamation.

    Yet the history of the country is a history of epic bloodletting arising from civil wars, coups, countercoups, civil uprisings, religious insurgencies, invasions, massacres, pogroms, tribal feuds, state executions and economic genocide. The enemy is entirely within, and Nigerians have been killing Nigerians ever since amalgamation.

    All lucky countries are not the same and every unlucky country is unlucky in its own unique way. In the crucible and roiling contradictions of national evolution, adversities often turn into advantages just as advantages turn into adversities. The ANC was founded in 1912, changed its original name in 1923 but did not come to power until the last decade of the last century. With all its ugly scars, apartheid turned out to be a unifying factor for the diverse and disparate ethnic groups of South Africa.

    The Sotho people who were subordinates within the context of the mighty Zulu empire simply turned to education and Christian modernity and were able to turn the table with their massive manpower. Yet unlike the Gikiyu/Luo/ Kalenji/Masai maelstrom which continues to hobble modern Kenya and the majorities/minorities struggle for power which has stymied Nigeria’s march to authentic nationhood, nobody ever hears of the ANC fracturing along ethnic lines, despite the worst efforts of the Mangosuthu Buthelezis.

    This was because the ANC was primarily and principally a politically conscious intellectual organization waging an ideological warfare against apartheid. Forged in the cauldron of an unjust and ungodly system, the ANC acquired the discipline, the fortitude and the political clarity which promote national spirit and consciousness above the petty demands of ethnic animosities. Apartheid was an equal opportunity barbarity and not even the fair skinned Indians could pass.

    Nigeria may not be lucky in the lottery of colonial conquerors. But it is to the credit of the British colonial masters that after decades of neglect and negligence, they finally roused themselves to provide the institutional framework by which the new nation would be governed. The constitution so bequeathed was not, and could not have been, a perfect document since the colonial masters themselves were not altruistic arbiters.

    But at least there were nascent institutions. It was left to a Nigerian nationalist class to improve upon for the greatest benefit of the greatest number of people. This was unlike what happened in Portuguese overseas possessions. As the first true nation-state and founding colonial power, armed with raw brutality and without the intellectual sophistication of later modes of modernity, Portugal simply regarded its overseas possessions as forcible extensions of the metropolitan mainland. Indeed at a point in history, the entire Portuguese royalty relocated abroad and ruled from Brazil until the bubble burst.

    This was why in virtually all the Portuguese overseas holdings, from Angola, the Cabinda enclave to Mozambique through Guinea Bissau, a national war of liberation had to be waged to rid the nations of their colonial incubus. It has proved very costly and draining for the countries and for Africa. Till date, Guinea Bissau which was conceived as a Portuguese overseas plantation remains without any viable political institution with armed bandits parading as soldiers while political warlords and drug cartels rule the roost.

    Nigeria has not been so unlucky. But there is a limit to legendary luck without commensurate political praxis. The four pillars of national instability enumerated above, in combination or as individual calamities, can tip the nation into a sudden implosion or engender its catastrophic dissolution into warring ethnic nationalities. This is particularly so of the Boko Haram war against the state and the nation.

    Despite the bluff and the bluster, Goodluck Jonathan appears to be at his wits’ end. The national hopes invested in his administration have all but evaporated. You know a ruler is beaten black and blue when he begins to make offensive and insensitive noise against the spirit of the nation. He has been hinting darkly about the removal of the “remaining” phantom subsidy even when the national uproar caused by the last is yet to subside.

    The president has shown a bizarre and inexplicable prodigality in expending social and political capital both at home and abroad. The ship of state is once again at the mercy of elements. This week, the Americans tellingly excluded Nigeria from a democratic summit. By virtue of its size, military and economic might, Nigeria ought to be an automatic choice. If this is the international verdict on Jonathan’s tenure, the national verdict is bound to be more devastating.

  • Corporal punishment for the corpulent prince

    Oh dear, oh dear, it is Alapansanpa in Aso Rock. Anybody familiar with Ihe cultural history of Ibadan must surely remember the dreaded masquerade and its infamous ambidexterity when it comes to wielding the native atori whip. The victims are known to weep and wail far into the night from complications arising from post-flagellation trauma. Not a few have ended up with distorted and permanently corrugated buttocks.

    There are weeping generals and there are whipping generals. When snooper famously announced that actual reality in Nigeria had retired him from fiction writing, not a few thought that this was a premature and unwarranted termination of noble labours. But reality in Nigeria has continued to make fiction look like a poor cousin: inferior and famished.

    Has anybody noticed that mum has been the word from the prince and lead Alsatian of the Aso Rock presidential menagerie-since the impossible and implacable Dr Mohammed Junaid famously declared that he once personally witnessed our own Doyin Okupe of the Agbonmagbe royal lineage being subjected to merciless presidential flogging by former president Olusegun Obasanjo? Or is it snooper that is hallucinating as usual? What further indignities must a man suffer in a legitimate forage for the next meal? What a plebian assault and insult!

    It may however be that in this matter, canine discretion is the better part of valour. A few months back, snooper witnessed the two political medicos square up to each other on television. With his visage permanently frozen in fiery contempt, snooper knew that it was only a question of time before the Moscow trained medic raised the ante.

    The affable and amiable Remo prince is right to keep mum on this matter. As a Moscow trained doctor, the Kano stormy petrel must have had more than a passing acquaintance with the ways of the KGB or the OGPU, the old Russian all-purpose police. It is not unlikely that he might have recorded the tumultuous shellacking for posterity. If care is not taken the fire-spitting contrarian may yet release the pummeling proceedings to Nollywood under the title, The Pacification of A Prince of the Upper Majidun River, with the sub-title, The Labours of A Lacerated Labrador.

    Snooper will like to have the last word on this one but not the last stroke of the cane from the old general. Obasanjo is known to wield the whip with a soldierly sternness and a monstrous mien of private pleasure. He once famously flogged a security man for mishandling a crowd and his victims are known to take to a shuffling crouch. Anytime you see the prince walking with a crouching gait, it may well be as a result of spinal lesions occasioned by corporal and corporate beating.

  • The wages of arbitrary rule

    The wages of arbitrary rule

    It is a normative freefall in Nigeria. When a society experiences a combination of anomie and normlessness, the captive denizens exhibit a certain numbness of feeling and weariness of the soul arising from sheer ethical disorientation. There is a growing effrontery and shamelessness emanating from the seat of power and governance. A feral compulsion is abroad as the state of nature returns. And since the normative grid around which human societies cohere and coalesce has collapsed, everybody is openly hunting down everybody. It is called social cannibalism.

    The ongoing erosion of the templates of democratic rule in Nigeria bodes ill for the former British colony. Arbitrary rule has become the norm in the nation. The dangerous but sure fact about arbitrary rule is that it often provokes its own dangerous and arbitrary reaction. As general arbitrariness takes on specific arbitrary rule mutual cancellation often results. We are not there yet, but we are slowly creeping towards it. When and if the current democratic experiment collapses, it is surely going to take Nigeria as we know it along with itself. This is the danger of democratic rule superintended by a non-democratic elite.

    As the societal rot and official corruption accelerate, and as arbitrary and despotic rule takes firm roots in the nation, it is now as clear as daylight that the dominant Nigerian political class can no longer avoid a historic retribution. No one is sure of how and when this will come about. But one thing is now very clear. As it happened in the First and and Second Republics, the national contradictions thrown up by the dissolute and feckless nature of the political class can no longer be solved or resolved under the rubric and template of “normal” democratic rule without some extra-constitutional tinkering with the current structure and political configuration of the nation.

    There is an urgent need for a national referendum about certain nation-disabling fundaments which have hobbled Nigeria’s march to authentic nationhood and rendered governance at the centre very amenable to despotic arbitrary rule and the tyranny of jungle justice. Why is Jonathan behaving true to type and like all Nigerian civilian and military despots despite the much rhapsodized pan-Nigerian mandate that swept him into power?

    Jonathan’s personal imprimatur in the current phase of the national crisis has been very disturbing, marked as it is by a feckless and reckless disdain for consensus building and the childlike relish with which he seems to delight in cocking a snook at the nation’s dominant power blocs. It may be that Jonathan probably knows what many do not know that Nigeria is an unviable proposition. He has detonated quite a few explosives, and he is not done yet, probably until Mount Vesuvius arrives in Abuja. A product of arbitrary and whimsical messianic delusion, he has shown remarkable courage and consistency in exposing the hollow hubris of those who foisted him on the nation. They will be licking their wounds for a very long time.

    As this column never tires of insisting, Jonathan is not the problem. We must move beyond individual manifestation of national contradictions if we are ever to arrive at the real source of our problems. Take the case of the state pardons that have once again exposed the ethnic, ethical , political and economic fault lines of the nation. The fact that four prominent former rulers of Nigeria stayed away from the Council of State meeting at which Jonathan steamrolled his pardon request ought to tell its own story. But the president was not going to be fazed by the subtle blackmail of his predecessors.

    The irony, however, is that this black market convening of the Council of States does not give the highest advisory organ in the nation the dignity and gravitas it deserves. It also exposes a dangerous dysfunction in the body which cannot endear it to fellow citizens or commend it as a group of revered arbiters. Had General Abdulsalaam attended the meeting, he would have been able to throw light on the precise and specific status of General Diya and co and helped to resolve the legal conundrum. Jonathan would have saved the state much public ridicule and scorn.

    Ordinarily, state pardons ought to reflect certain guiding principles which promote core national values. The whole exercise must be informed by a drastic objectivity and impersonal rigour which promote the institutionalisation of the rule of law and social justice. They must not be informed by personal consideration, disdain for the moral health of the society or by political clientelism.

    On several fronts, Jonathan’s pardons fall far short of this. Yet we must learn to disentangle the good from the bad and ugly. In several respects, Jonathan ought to be commended for showing courage and statesmanship in granting state pardon to the victims of the 1995 and 1997 purported coups against the government of General Sani Abacha.

    Some of these illustrious officers paid a terrible price for merely daring to speak truth to power, particularly in the wake of the annulment of the June 12 presidential election. A few of them were merely the victims of professional rivalry and envy and of General Abacha’s vengeful brutality and dark paranoid furies. Today, many of them remain walking shadows of their former selves, hobbled forever by the excruciating physical torture and mental torment they were subjected to.

    An army that lost its way in the political jungle is a monster indeed. This pardon ought to have come much earlier as a culmination of the process that led to the Oputa Panel and an act of national closure to an inglorious epoch of military rule. But for some inexplicable reasons, both the process and the outcome were aborted by their initiator. It would appear that General Obasanjo’s judgement and sense of justice were beclouded by vengeful animosities and personal vendetta.

    The problem with this inability to rise above petty animus to a statesmanlike enunciation of national principles is that it is also a function of arbitrary rule. There is covert and overt dimension to arbitrary rule as we have seen in the Justice Salami saga. An arbitrary ruler may decide to keep quiet in the face of strong social and political currents in the society, thus hoping to profit from the ethical chaos of a country he ought to provide leadership for. This kind of arbitrary rule sets the template for future arbitrary rule and the reign of anomie.

    If we are looking for the wages of arbitrary rule, we need not look very far. There is a way in which the immediate past always returns to haunt the present. The Alamieyeseigha saga is a classic instance of political nemesis arising from arbitrary rule. Here is a man who has been sinned against as much as he has sinned against his own country and people. Whatever his economic crimes and as heinous as these might have been, Alamieyeseigha ought not to have been removed from office by a kangaroo assembly.

    It was setting a marble template for arbitrary rule. The former governor of Bayelsa State ought to have been allowed to serve out his term as stipulated by the letter of the constitution before being arraigned, provided his economic crimes and the international embarrassment he caused the nation were the real reason for the furious animus of the powers that be. The problem with putting down durable institutions is that it does not allow personal sentiments to get in the way of social justice, nor does it permit private grievances to pursue public rectitude and order.

    As this columnist cautioned Malam Nuhu Ribadu then, the kind of noble relief he sought for the nation against economic predators was only feasible in a genuine revolutionary situation and not under a democratic dispensation with entrenched guidelines and legal stipulations. A phantom revolutionary situation has a way of provoking genuine counter-revolutions, consuming its starry-eyed idealists in the process.

    But the poor Malam was too far gone in this drastic miscognition of subsisting reality. In the event, Nuhu Ribadu himself was to become a victim of arbitrary rule, hounded out of his job and eventually out of uniform with his former patrons utterly powerless to do anything about it. For a moment, Ribadu himself became an absconding fugitive from his beloved fatherland. The problem with arbitrary rule is that once it is set in motion, it becomes an impersonal fascist terror guillotine which cannot recognise its original owner; an equal opportunity decapitator.

    There are more ominous ironies in the air, and those who have ears let them hear. It was the arbitrary and unconstitutional removal of the former governor of Bayelsa that paved the way for Goodluck Jonathan and provided him with an unstoppable momentum to the nation’s presidency. Now, the falcon can no longer hearken to the falconer; the monkey marionette has become his own monkey. Arbitrary rule is the name of the game and you cannot blame Jonathan for sticking to a winning formula.

    So far so good. By granting pardon to his benefactor and former godfather, Jonathan has also set himself up in the jungle of arbitrary rule. Jonathan is mixing politics and grim political calculation involving personal gain with public order and social justice. His outburst and unpresidential diatribe against the perceived enemies of his former boss show how desperate and arbitrary things have become in the country. In the face of public obloquy Jonathan ought to have maintained a dignified silence.

    The political reality is that Jonathan needs the former Squadron Leader to secure his home base in the looming and inevitable showdown with Nigeria’s dominant power blocs and its fractious factions. Whatever his economic infractions, Alams remains a local hero among his people for his sterling contribution to Niger Delta emancipation. The traditional kingmakers of Nigeria have their back to the wall on this one. Before the current reign of arbitrariness exhausts its possibilities, there will be a lot of wailing and caterwauling in the land. Those who set the template for arbitrary rule and their acquiescing godsons will receive their comeuppance in the fullness of time. That is the iron law of the post-colonial jungle.

  • Baba Lekki unfolds his coat of arms

    Whilst we are still on the subject of whimsical and arbitrary rule and its self-perpetuating dynamics, it is proper to report that arbitrary violence is a logical fallout of arbitrary rule. Arbitrary rule is an act of psychological violence against the populace. Accustomed to the routine and wanton cruelty of arbitrary rule, arbitrary violence takes root in the society as everybody luxuriates in the superiority of brute intimidation.

    Last Tuesday as snooper was making his way through the vehicular maelstrom of Matori, a group of desperate urchins sitting atop a moving train and armed with stones the size of boulders were aiming their hand propelled grenades at passing vehicles. One of the crude missiles landed just behind snooper and made such a clattering noise that the fear of the lord was driven into everybody. Nobody could have stopped a moving train. This is as close to Hades as it could get on earth.

    A few days later, snooper was still ruminating on this apocalyptic meltdown when he was confronted by a most outlandish sight in the kitchen. It was a glum and gloomy Baba Lekki wearing a huge outsize coat with its front pockets bulging with poorly concealed weapons of mass destruction. His face was grotesquely swollen with a massive lump superimposed on what used to be his nose. He looked like somebody who had just managed to extricate himself from a giant rodent trap with telltale wounds. Snooper was secretly enthralled by this remarkable discomfiture of the old contra and master of anticipatory violence. But all efforts to draw him out about the nature of his plight failed woefully.

    “Okon, which one be this one again oo, or has your baba become a comedian?” snooper asked gleefully, casting a wicked glance at the human fiasco in the kitchen.

    “Oga, dis one no be matter of comedian ooo. Even dem comedian dey cry for Lagos, becos palaver no be dem play and anikura come pass alawada. You know say Eko na wicked place. He no good make dem small yeye boys dey beat old man. Na dem beat baba sotey for Idumota him head no correct again. You no see how him Yoruba nose come big pass him mouth? Na dem panel beat am silly silly. He get one kata Yoruba welder boy for Oshodi. Him name be Kamoru. Na him dey beat dem people. Efen police sef him dey beat dem. He come beat dem policeman like dat he come shit for uniform”, Okon retorted, eyeing Baba Lekki with a wicked grin.

    “Okon, so why is he wearing this big coat?” snooper asked, trying hard not to burst into laughter.

    “Na him native insurance be dat one. Inside one pocket baba get dem heavy stones, inside another him get dem blade and dem jack knives and inside dem top pocket him put dem Awka pistol and dem Yoruba juju. If Baba hit dem elephant with dat one elephant go kaput”, Okon sniggered.

    “Men, this is anarchy”, snooper exclaimed.

    “Anarchy ko, inaki ni”, Baba Lekki rumbled at last with violent scorn even as he sulked like an infant.

    “Okon, tell him not to come to this house with this coat again”, snooper ordered with a comic frown.

    “Ha oga, I no fit tell am dat oo. Baba say na him coat of army be dat. You no say baba be old soldier for dem Congo. Na for Congo dem wild monkey come bite him head fiam fiam and baba him head no correct again “ Okon snorted.

    “I said coat of arms and not army coat”, Baba Lekki groaned as he wobbled out of the house to snooper’s immense relief.