The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • The colonel in heavenly cockpit

    The colonel in heavenly cockpit

    With the passing this past week at the age of fifty eight of Hugo Chavez, the late Venezuelan leader, Latin America has lost one of its most colourful leaders and potent force against global imperialism. The iconic colonel was in every material respect an original in the true sense of that word. An unreconstructed military putchist, he had twice tried to seize power in bloody military uprisings only to be eventually swept into the Venezuela Presidential Palace in a popular and democratic uprising against the ancient regime.

    Thereafter and for the next 14 years, the son of impoverished middle class teachers unleashed his strange and utterly quixotic brand of socialism on the Venezuelan populace, winning unprecedented popular approval in the process. By the time he died of cancer-related complications in a military hospital in the capital city of Caracas last Tuesday, Chavez has become an authentic hero of the teeming masses of the Venezuelan people and the nearest thing to a secular saint.

    The unprecedented outpouring of grief on the streets, the hysterical wailings and chants of “Chavez to the pantheon”—a heartrending reference for the late leader to take his place beside the legendary Simon Bolivar, a.k.a the Liberator—only confirm Chavez status as one of the most illustrious sons of Latin America of all time. The pantheon of great Latin American leaders who lived and died at the behest of their people would be smiling indeed .

    In order to better appreciate the global odds Chavez faced, it is appropriate to situate his career and anti-imperialist and anti-American jingoism within the context of the turbulent template that threw him up , particularly the end of the cold war and a resurgent and rampart American mega-power. Unlike the morally and ethically compromised Manuel Noriega who screamed at “Gringo piranhas” even while cutting a deal under the table, Hugo Chavez was as straight as a primitive arrow. He was a genuine article and a real man of the people.

    Almost 30 years after President George Bush, the Elder called for a kinder and gentler world as an antidote to the neo-conservative cruelties of the Reagan years, the world is neither a kinder nor a gentler place. If anything, the modern world is increasingly marked by arbitrariness, by a brutal and random contingency, and by the sure and sheer certainty of uncertainty. The only thing predictable is what is unpredictable.

    Perhaps it is foolish and delusionary in the extreme to expect human society to escape the more sinister anomalies of human nature itself. Even the so-called idyllic and harmonious communities of the past are nothing but ideological mirages; fictional constructs through which we vent our frustrations and disappointment with the present. As somebody famously quipped, if there is anything sure about the organic communities, it is that they are always gone.

    Still, there can be no denying the fact that militarily, economically, politically and spiritually the world might have gone to the dogs in the last 30 years. Thanks to the principles of globalisation which made it possible for capital and labour to be switched round the globe and for the constraints of time and space to be summarily abolished, western countries, particularly the USA, have been able to exponentially increase their wealth.

    But this new-found prosperity has also led to a widening of the gap between the filthy rich and absolute poor, thus fuelling social disaffection within countries and among countries. The great political irony here is that it is the social inequity arising from economic inequality of staggering and idiotic proportions that has brought an African American to the White House for the very first time in the history of the United States.

    It is only the politically incurious who will be taken by surprise that the most potent forces against Barack Obama’s ascendancy comprise of the rump of the old Reaganite redoubt in alliance with the new missionary right with its bible-thumping fundamentalists. This is America’s contribution to the New Crusade. They brook no intellectual opposition, and with their wild-eyed fanaticism and the zealotry of their unipolar vision of human civilization and modernity, they represent a danger to both America and an increasingly multi-polar world.

    Militarily, the USA has extended its unrivalled dominion over the rest of the world. Perhaps, not since the Roman Empire has the world seen such awesome power and might. It has been suggested by military experts that after America, the next 25 countries combined do not possess the martial superiority of Uncle Tom. Grappling with America is like wrestling with a 500 pound gorilla in the jungle.

    Yet the tense stalemate of Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq suggests that in the evolving world, military might is not enough to prevail. Discretion may still be the better part of military valour in matters of political and ideological contestation, particularly if the ideological conflict comes with a religious and spiritual coloration. It is easy to militarily subjugate a territory, but it has proved not so easy to coerce a people into surrendering their religious beliefs. It is always a duel unto death.

    The tragic events of September 11, 2001 have shown the world how globalisation can work both ways. Switching men and material round the globe in a ceaseless manner, using electronic transfer of funds to thwart financial surveillance and deploying modern communication gadgets to abolish the constraints of time and space, the religious adversaries of the west were thus able to use the very principles of globalisation against the masters of globalisation

    This is the turbulent trajectory that has defined the life and times of the late Venezuelan leader. Yet despite Hugo Chavez’ sterling patriotism, there are a sizeable number of his country people who would frown at this posthumous apotheosis and near deification of a man they consider to be a mortally flawed demagogue. To a few of his fellow Venezuelans, Chavez remains a divisive and controversial figure who exacerbated the economic and ethnic fault lines of his nation.

    To them, his economic doctrine was barmy and simply did not make much sense, based on socialist emotionalism rather than a sound attempt to use god-given resources for truly transformative purposes. By dipping his hands freely and joyously into the petroleum reservoirs of his nation like some oilman of Caracas, Chavez has shown himself to be nothing but a vagabond potentate who would have led his country eventually into economic ruination.

    This may make economic sense, but it is a politically worthless argument. There can be little doubt about the salutary and telling effect of Chavez largesse to his people. By his emancipatory policies, Chavez has freed the most wretched of the Venezuelan earth from the clutches of the most desperate of poverty, disease and illiteracy.

    But more importantly by allowing the Venezuelan people to enjoy their god-given bounty, Chavez has returned us to the first principles of sovereignty: that power and national resources belong first and foremost to the people and not to a thieving political elite and their mealy-mouthed equivocations about a mythical transformation. This is a signal lesson to the ruling classes of other Third World countries, particularly Nigeria.

    In the end, what is important is what a leader means to his people and not what the homogenising citadels of political and economic correctness feel. In the age of western-induced globalisation, the reaffirmation and reassertion of national destiny has returned to the front burner. The nation-state paradigm may be frayed and frazzled at the edges but it still remains the most dominant instrument of territorial mapping.

    In death, Hugo Chavez has joined the illustrious pantheon of Latin America leaders who lived for their people and fought with them. Simon Bolivar, Che Guevara, Salvador Allende, Fidel Castro, etc. Together with a stellar galleria of equally iconic writers, poets, novelists, essayists and philosophers they have succeeded in forging a unique identity for the Latin American continent and as the counter-hegemonic lodestar against late imperialism.

    It was often said that the right may win all the major political battles in Latin America, but it will never produce great leftwing writers of the global stature of Pablo Neruda, Louis Borges and the incomparable fabulist, Gabriel Marcia Marquez. Yet the rise and ascendancy of a series of leftwing, anti-imperialist governments committed to a more humane and equitable vision of human society in contemporary Latin America may no longer be a historical fluke but the final working out of some momentous historical contradictions.

    The world and humanity at large may yet have the Latin Americans to thank for providing us with a way out of the six hundred year epistemological cul de sac of western modernity. As they have done with their Liberation Theology, their concept of no-capitalism, the stellar challenges of their original and groundbreaking scholars to the grandiose claims of Metropolitan modernity, the contributions of their institutions to a new global knowledge order and the vast array of different developmental models emanating from their governments, they have shown us that it is possible to envision a more humane and redemptive world order. May the great soul of Hugo Chavez rest in peace.

  • Okon sets a cat among the pigeons

    Only an event involving two of Nigeria’s most illustrious sons could have attracted the stellar crowd that graced the formal investiture of Wole Soyinka as the first recipient of the Awolowo Leadership Prize. It was perhaps the greatest collection of eminent Nigerians since the great philosopher-statesman dined alone. The commodious Harbours’ Hall filled to its full capacity.

    Unknown to a snooper disoriented by flu and long distance gallivanting, Okon had slipped his domestic mooring and dressed like a traditional Efik chieftain, the loony lad was right there in the crowd glad-handing and back-thumping like a politician of the First Republic. Snooper was aghast by this display of social delinquency by this impossible boy. But the make-belief racket was unsustainable and a brisk commotion soon engulfed the reception foyer.

    “Where is your card?” Okon was asked by one of the delectable hostesses.

    “Me, I no dey carry card. I come represent dem paramount ruler for dem Jamestown for Calabar. Abi you no sabi say na him safe Papa Awo from dem godogodo soldiers?” Okon retorted with a devilish sneer.

    “So have you registered?” he was asked again.

    “Me, I no be politician. So I no dey register nothing. Na dem Lai Mohammed dey do dat one for Abuja. Lai na my friend. Him nickname na Okunrin Raufu”, Okon sniggered. At this point, having realised the opportunity cost of detaining the scoundrel, he was waved on. But fate intervened and Okon was accosted by a lone television crewman.

    “Sir, how do you see the occasion?”, the earnest and intense looking chap asked a self-important Okon.

    “Me, I no be woman. Na woman dey use Ladies Occasional pill”, the mad boy intoned with a swaggering gait to the squirming embarrassment of his stranded interviewer. The affronted chap decided to seize the initiative.

    “What I mean is this: how do you see the prize given to Professor Soyinka today?”

    “Hen hen, na dat one you for say. As for dem prize, na dem Yoruba people dey deceive dem Nigerian people. I like dem Kongi man, but make him no dey follow follow dem yeye Yoruba people. Abi you wan tell me say dem no find Efik man to give dem prize? When dem wan lift heavy crane na Efik man, but when dem wan award prize na Yoruba man. Abi you think say we know sabi dem trick?”

    “Now that President Jonathan has reversed himself over UNILAG name change, are you happy?” the interviewer asked Okon with a deadpan expression.

    “Wetin concern agbero with dem knock engine? You see the problem with dem Jonathan be say na reverse him dey drive. Him dey reverse into everything and everybody. Everybody dey run from am like dem Gaiser for permanent reverse. He done reverse into dem Obasanjo and Baba dey cry for inside him bedroom. Na no break no jam vehicle or wetin dem Yoruba people dey call pakaleke Express. But katakata go burst when he come finally reverse into dem abandoned mala petrol tanker. Na dat one Baba Lekki dey call holocaust. Dem locust go dey scream ho, ho ,ho!!!!” Okon intoned with feverish excitement. At this point, even the interviewer became overwhelmed with apprehension. Casting furtive glances across the place, he quickly melted into the crowd with Okon in hot pursuit.

    “Yeye Kobokobo boy, you don finish the interview? You no even ask me about dem Patience woman”, a viciously jubilant Okon screamed at his heels.

  • The poverty of politics

    This morning, snooper makes a global case for the reaffirmation of politics as a noble profession, perhaps the purest and most selfless calling that humanity has come up with since man first socialised on the plains of Africa. But this is going to be a tall order. Everywhere you turn in the world, politics has suffered a gross devaluation of contents and form.

    It is however when we consider the fact that the current global crisis in all its economic and spiritual complications is fundamentally a political crisis, or a crisis of politics, that we begin to get a sense of how dire things might be. For the first time in about six hundred years, we have a pope resigning as a fall out of poor leadership in the Vatican

    How then did the world get to this sorry pass when old certainties have given way to new uncertainties?. In traditional and advanced societies, the formula for recruiting leadership material and the mechanism for controlling access to the upper echelons of political leadership were as sure as they were surefooted. Catch them young, and get the best and the brightest into the best schools. Every other thing would fall into place.

    If this formula worked in the past, it does not seem to be working very well at the moment. In the western world, particularly its Anglo-American sector, the best institutions have become too narrow, too elitist and too corporatist in their world view to address the issues of inequity and the fundamental disparity of income thrown up ironically by the great material strides these societies have taken.

    In Africa and the Third World, the authentic political elite, the best products of the best institutions. are muscled out by emergent social forces whose reality cannot be ignored. It is a classic case of double jeopardy. You see disaster approaching but you are powerless to do anything about it. As the rot assumes a world-historic dimension, you can only curse your star in impotent fury.

    So it is, then, that everywhere you turn politics as the conduct of human affairs for ameliorative and regenerative purpose has suffered a grim demystification. There is a frantic disavowal of politics and politicians. The mass of humanity holds them in bitter contempt. They are a sick joke, not worthy of any respect or reverence.

    But if politics is a sick and cruel joke, a theatre of clowns and buffoons, why not elect the real thing? All over the world, the people seem to be wising up to this momentous revelation. In Brazil, they have sent up a professional clown to the National Assembly. In the recently concluded Italian election which led to a hung parliament, the party with the biggest gain—twenty five percent of the votes cast—is led by a former comic striptease.

    It doesn’t get more hideously comic than that. Earlier, Indonesia had elected as president a former actor and dancer with predictably tragic result. Emperor Caligula would be smiling in his grave. The great Roman ruler was known to have sent his horse to the Roman Senate in a moment of wild hilarity. The horse-senator did not disappoint.

    If gold can rust, what will iron do? The situation is even more comically tragic in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in Nigeria, where governance has dissolved into a horrendous mockery; a permanent theatre of the Absurd with each new day bringing even more outlandish revelations of official shenanigans. How did we get to this sorry pass?

    The tragedy of modern Nigeria is the tragedy of a bankrupt political class which is not politically, intellectually and ideologically equipped to understand and appreciate the grave dimensions of the crisis facing Nigeria and its implication for Africa and the Black person.

    Beginning from the crackdown at King’s College in the forties, it is obvious that the colonial masters were not interested in nurturing an authentic leadership cadre or indigenous political class that would take the Nigeria of their subversive imagination to the next level of self-actualisation. It was clear that they were more interested in a compliant and collaborating indigenous class that would best serve and protect their interest. This is only natural, but it is a short-sighted policy.

    In order to be driven to the next level beyond its conception in the colonial imaginary, Nigeria needed an indigenous political class that is both adversarial and complementary to the colonial world view: complementary in the sense that it cannot lightly wish away the “national” reality on the ground, but adversarial in the sense that it would have to create the nation anew by striking out boldly even against the interest of the colonial masters.

    Given the contemporary poverty of politics and the inability of our ruling elite to understand and situate the multi-dimensional nature of the developmental crisis facing the nation, it is always a thing of joy to sit down with a politician who seems to appreciate the grave nature of the crisis facing the nation.

    It is in the nature of politics to agree to disagree, and whatever his morbid adversaries may put out on the internet, Rauf Aregbesola is not your run of the mill politician. The governor of the state of Osun is a troubling oxymoron: a thinking politician. With his boundless enthusiasm and incredible reserve and reservoir of energy, Aregbesola can wear you out with facts, figures and statistics. His mastery of details and developmental arcana is a tad short of the extraordinary.

    As this column never tires of asserting, the ACN is not a perfect party. It also suffers from the post-traumatic stress disorder of prolonged and protracted military rule. But one good thing Aregbesola and his ACN governor colleagues have done for Nigerian politics is to establish clear benchmarks and templates by which their performance could measured and evaluated by the public and the electorate alike. By so doing, they have brought back ideology into the front burner of political discourse.

    This profound ideologising of politics is both salutary and beneficial. It puts pressure on the other parties, particularly the PDP, to come up with their own ideological parameters. By so doing, it sharpens, clarifies and crystallises the choice for prospective voters. In the history of Nigerian post-independence politics, it is only the progressive parties and their leftwing fellow travellers who have made such templates available to the people. The ruling parties have always believed that ideologies do not matter, which is indeed a bankrupt conservative ideology meant to preserve the status quo.

    In politics, Aregbesola has been helped by his antecedents. His youthful flirtations with communism and his role as a field commander of the foot soldiers during the struggle against the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential elections have burnt into him certain deep ideals which power his politics.

    From communism, he has taken a deep compassion for the poor and needy, a passion for social justice, and from the June 12 struggle a deep commitment to political justice and unflinching loyalty to living and fallen comrades in arms. When Aregbesola speaks of his foot soldiers who fell during the struggle to reclaim his electoral mandate and of his friend and benefactor, Hassan Olajokun, who was killed in broad daylight on the Ife-Ibadan road, you could see tears welling up in his eyes.

    For a week and a few days, snooper was with Aregbesola on a whirlwind tour of America, testing the canons of his developmental project against adversarial and complementary framework, From Boston through Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh to Howard in Washington, we were there.

    It is often suggested that the fundamental failure of the Black person stems from his chronic lack of capacity to valorise capital. Even if you redistribute the resources of the world equally, in a few years time, the Black person will be penniless once again, cadging and cajoling on the streets. Is there a fundamental deformity of character in the Black person?

    Snooper does not think so, even though the zillions stolen from the public coffers in the last 30 years are enough to transform Nigeria into a modern paradise. Instead, the money goes into vainglorious personal projects and the most obscene of conspicuous consumption. Like a big cunning cat, the west waits to part the fool from his loot, and it has done so relentlessly and remorselessly. If you see a man being pursued by the Egungun masquerade, you will be a fool not to help yourself to his food.

    The problem, it seems, lies in our inability to come up with a matching ethos for modern capitalism. It has been suggested that modern Christianity has certain values which tend to reinforce the very ethos of modern capitalism. Among these are strict monogamy, the deferment of enjoyment and the suppression of wild, irrational yearnings. Even most of our so- called spiritual fathers have not been able to avoid this jollification of the flesh. The throbbing tropics have a way of reclaiming their own.

    The Calvinist ethos with its emphasis on thrift, hardihood and self-abnegation underwrites modern capitalism and its values. To the best of our knowledge, and with all humility, there is no matching indigenous African philosophy, except threadbare expostulations which underwrite indolence and freewheeling prodigality. In African countries which have recorded a measure of success in modern capitalism, particularly Ghana and Botswana, we see a national elite given to thrift and self-restraint.

    In the end, it all boils down to the question of leadership and of a viable political class. The political class as currently constituted can only lead Nigeria along the path of perdition and destruction. Something urgent will have to be done to reclaim this country and its long-suffering people from the suffocating grips of monstrous predators. Without an overarching federal development, stung out of its laggard and thieving dementia by developments elsewhere in the country, even regional integration may ultimately prove a forlorn dream.

    This is why developments in Osun and all the ACN states should concentrate the mind of those interested in the future of Nigeria. The aim of government should be the greatest good of the greatest number. Developmental politics which tries to optimise resources for optimal capacity building and the greatest benefit of the downtrodden should be on the front burner.

    Aregbesola is right to emphasise youth empowerment and the maximisation of human capacity. Osun is known for its prodigious production of human resources. But there are complexities and contradictions on the way. You cannot step into the same river twice. Almost everybody sent abroad by the government of Chief Obafemi Awolowo came back to contribute their quota to the development of the region. If Nigeria remains a post-colonial hell, there is no chance that these youths will return.

    On a personal note, snooper is saddened and depressed by an interesting development. Everywhere that we visited in America, from Boston to Pittsburgh and to Washington , there was at least one person who originated from the ancestral town. From Howard University where the legendary Professor Sunday Adeniran Adeboye conducts mathematical inquiry in addition to occasional internet firefights, to Boston where Segun Adeyemi is Bridge Engineer to Washington where snooper chanced upon the daughters of the late Dr Edward Arowolo, the World Bank supremo who died at the age of forty two and Professor Rufus Adegboye.

    These Nigerians were products of an earlier sterling education. They still retain a sentimental attachment to the home country. But they are not coming back soon, if ever. Nigeria is a nursery bed for valuable plants to be transported to the west. What will be the epitaph for a country that has squandered its money and most valuable children so badly?

  • Soccer as political allegory

    Once again, Nigeria’s legendary luck and mysterious provenance have been on grand display in the recently concluded soccer fiesta in South Africa. Against better fancied and indeed better prepared teams, the eagles have prevailed. It is a tad short of the miraculous. The eagles’ victory came against the run of play both outside and inside the field.

    Yet as this column never tires of asserting, Nigeria is a profound tribute to the subversive genius of the colonial imaginary; a prospective candidate for greatness and the salutary ironies of adversity. When it gets its act together, Nigeria is like its own football team at the summit of its genius. It is pure poetry in motion.

    But no nation has ever lived on football. Otherwise, Brazil would be the greatest nation on earth. If soccer is the new opium of the people, it is a poor tranquiliser indeed. The pains and the torments often return to the afflicted in greater measure. The crises and contradictions resume with greater intensity. The morphine of soccer glories is not always available even under the counter. To forget his woes, an alcoholic has to be permanently drunk, which is impossible. A person who dreams of great riches without hard work has a pact with punitive poverty.

    Now that that the euphoria has died down and the protocol of pundits has vanished, it is time to face once again the ugly realities of our existence. Now that the denizens of public parks and their celebratory fireworks have retreated to their dens, it is time to put the eagles’ victory in proper perspective and within an analytic framework. There are surely lessons to be learnt and it is important to get to the root of the matter before the wrong conclusions are drawn.

    This is not to take anything away from Dr Goodluck Jonathan. An unlucky president also deserves his lucky break. We must be generous even to our political adversaries. Jonathan has every right to milk the eagles’ triumph to its maximum possibility. Napoleon rated good luck above sheer proficiency when it came to assessing his generals. A man may have uncommon abilities, but the gods may conspire against his being catapulted to human greatness.

    If Jonathan’s minders had the presence of mind and are not too consumed by fatuous carping and bitching, they ought to have persuaded their principal to take a picture with the victorious eagles wearing their jerseys. That is what those who have an eye to history and posterity do. There is an iconic picture of General Yakubu Gowon in Eagles’ jerseys as he welcomed the victorious Eagles team of 1973. Shortly after that, the eagles were handed a 5-1 shellacking by the no-nonsense Zambians.

    Still, this last one was sweet and sublime victory. Snooper shared in all the hoopla and euphoria. It was great and good to be a Nigerian once again. In the global circuits, only those who travel frequently can describe how national misfortune can determine the fortune of the national. At Boston Airport last Monday, an American Custom official cheerily and heartily waved snooper on, congratulating him on the victory of the eagles. Have a good country and you will travel. It is a profound irony that Nigeria’s greatest soccer moments in the last 30 years have come either in time of unwholesome military dictatorships or under-performing civilian governments.

    In the end, nothing must take away the sterling performance of the eagles’ boys and the sublime coaching skills of Stephen Okechukwu Keshi. Nobody gave the boys a chance. Official support was niggardly. There were dark and ominous hints that Keshi himself has been penciled for dismissal after the game. The seamy racket involving the recruitment of foreign coaches was about to unfurl again.

    But Keshi triumphed against all odds and adversities. Having conjured something out of nothing, his achievement is nothing short of the miraculous. It is an interesting irony that having travelled around a bit, it is at home that Keshi would finally find his moments and materials. There is often an ineluctable logic to human destiny.

    Stephen Keshi has shown us what is possible when grit, persistence and determination combine with natural talents and home-made resources. In a sense, this ought to be the story of Nigeria itself, but why it is not so is a question the Nigerian people and their political elite would have to answer before the court of history. Keshi has shown the character and aplomb, the cheeky brilliance and the ability to cock a snook at adversity which have made Nigerians to be unique specimens around the globe.

    In other words, what we are saying is that the eagles’ soccer triumph is a political allegory for Nigeria. It points at , and at the same time, points away from the political quagmire of the present and what can be achieved once the correct lesson has been drawn. It shows what can happen to a nation once ethnicity, quota system and federal character are shunned in the recruitment of national leadership. Keshi has proved to us that once these viruses are taken on headlong, the nation can come up with its true First Eleven on the field of soccer.

    But soccer has never rescued a nation or its political class from internal contradictions or a crisis of development and eventual damnation. Snooper once asked a famous American professor friend why he thinks that the US lags behind Brazil in soccer, despite its immense riches and resources. My friend looked sternly at me as if snooper had lost his mind.

    “Well, we can’t allow our boys roaming the beaches in the morning and practicing soccer when they should be in school. In America, any youth who plays soccer in the morning will end up with the police in the afternoon.” Then he added the devastating clincher. “For every Pele and Maradona so produced, there are at least a hundred miscreants. These are social pellets and time-bombs.”

    When a soccer-besotted snooper thus lamented the fact that in the event, America would never be a great footballing nation, the professor snapped. “Well better a great country than a great footballing nation. In any case, all your great and exceptional footballers will end up in the west to entertain us. Many of them will never go back and you will never hear of their children as footballers, but as successful professionals in other fields.”

    Still, it will be a poorer world without great soccer stars and great footballing nations. The tantalising and intriguing question must now be posed. Will Brazil trade off something through the great and sterling efforts of its recent leaders in lifting more and more people out of the poverty loop and in clearing the slums and the beaches of their gifted urchins?

    All pointers are in that direction. In recent years and as Brazil gained greater economic prosperity, political justice and racial equality, its soccer fortunes also appear to have dipped. The endless production of soccer prodigies has not quite halted but the factory line appears to be stalling and spluttering. In recent years, Brazil appears to be no longer at the cutting edge of soccer artistry.

    Its last truly great team were the 1982 World cup soccer wizards including the recently departed Socrates, Falcao, Junior and Eder, he of the dipping outrageously long shots. It managed to win the World Cup in 1994 after a tedious and uninspired performance. The bulk of that team would later succumb to an inspired Nigerian team which came from behind to beat them at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

    We have now come up with a troubling social and historical conundrum. Brazil and Nigeria present us with allegorical parables. Could it be that the more underdeveloped a nation is, the more overdeveloped its football is? Germany and to a lesser extent, Holland, Italy, Spain, France and Britain are obvious exceptions. But it could also be that the great irrational alchemy which produces the truly outstanding soccer maestros such as Pele, Tastao, Garincha, Revelino, Eusebio, Puskacs and Maradona could only thrive on poverty, biblical misery and great social inequity.

    No son of a truly rich person has ever become a great footballer, or legendary boxer for that matter. A madman is a grand spectacle as long as he is not your sibling. For many Africans and Latinos, soccer is the surest escape route from the poverty loop. But in this case individual salvation does not lead to collective salvation.

    The choice is stark for developing countries like Nigeria. They may have to choose between soccer glory and accelerated development. Without economic development, the powerhouse of soccer is nothing but the football of the real powerhouses of the world. They will almost be kicked to death until they escape the prison house of soccer glory. It is a tragic paradox but such is the stuff of human history.

  • A rendezvous with Rauf

    A rendezvous with Rauf

    In the end, all politics is local. While we are still talking about accelerated economic development for the greatest benefit of the greatest number, it is meet to report on the latest efforts in the regional integration department. For the past one week, snooper has been trampling and traversing some major intellectual and economic powerhouses of American global supremacy with Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, the energetic and indefatigable governor of Osun State, Nigeria.

    Snooper often relishes the role of intellectual mugger and bouncer all rolled into one, and it has been a memorable cultural and cerebral feast. From Harvard in Cambridge, Boston, through the Carnegie Mellon empire in Pittsburgh to Howard University in Washington, snooper was there, sparring and not sparing and with the fury of an ageing boxer threatened by terminal retirement.

    The aim of the visit is two-fold. First, to avail potential investors, particularly well-heeled Nigerians in the Diaspora, of the bold and visionary developmental strides undertaken by the Osun state government. Secondly, to test the main intellectual planks of the regional developmental paradigm against the critical interrogation of an academic audience that does not take kindly to flabby-minded drooling and empty posturing.

    It was going to be very hard to convince an audience steeped in western hegemony that there is no single monolithic route to modernisation and economic development. Western modernity is just one version of the multiple narratives through which human development can be framed. There was nothing preordained or inevitable about it. The advanced society does not wear a single coluration or complexion. Aregbesola spoke convincingly to these issues without being fazed or overwhelmed by the distinguished audience. Only the massively self-assured could go to a Harvard teeming with monetary school cold warriors to defend the importance of Keynesian economics and massive state intervention

    Perhaps snooper should drop an ironic mea culpa for all those who equate regional integration with a secessionist ploy. Aregbesola was once accused of being the political arrowhead of this separatist agenda with snooper duly fingered as its intellectual godfather by the same columnist. This usually perceptive chap ought to know much better, but that is a matter for another day. If one is going to be intimidated by an animal with horns, it is not going to be a snail.

    Next week, snooper would bring the full report of the trip. It was not just an intellectual tour de force, it was also socially engaging. Among many others including the Walter Carrington couple, snooper was treated to a rousing meal of pounded yam in the home of his childhood friend, Jacob Kehinde Olupona, Professor of African Traditional Religion at the Harvard School of Divinity only to be ambushed the very next day by Tayo Akinwande, a.k.a Tata, a software prodigy and Professor of Electrical Engineering at M.I.T, who could barely contain his excitement on hooking up with snooper after so many decades.

    There he was, now impressively beefed up and exuding the aura of absent-minded brilliance, hollering snooper’s undergraduate nom de guerre with great relish. Snooper had been their adored leader and campus generalissimo in the department of sophomoric delinquency. Forty years later, the table turned as the leader became the led and yours sincerely barely managed to survive Tata’s onslaught at a downtown Boston bar. Sweet revenge came when our man spent about 20 minutes frantically searching for his phone. It was in his pocket all along. Oh la la, as they say.

  • Murder, most foul and vicious

    Murder, most foul and vicious

    Believing that what personally touches one must come last, this column does not always encourage any emotional incontinence from even its creator. It was a great author who admonished that we must always separate the man who suffers from the artist that creates. But there are moments when the profoundly private cannot be separated from the powerfully public, when what we have all made of Nigeria returns like a monster to stare us in the face, and when an injured man must return to the community for solace and succour.

    This morning, snooper evacuates the cerebral fireworks and the din of agonistic contention from this column to mourn our late and beloved aburo who perished in the hands of hideous hoodlums on the notorious Ife-Ibadan road in the early evening of January 26th. He was returning to Ibadan after a funeral reception in the ancestral town of Gbongan. But he never made it back to the warm embrace of his beloved wife at their Iyaganku GRA residence.

    A chartered auditor, Godwin Kolawole Adedeji was a scion of the notable Adedeji family of Gbongan and the famed Ojo family of Ibadan. He was a director in the Federal Ministry of Mines and Power. Before then, he had served his country meritoriously in NAPEP and the Petroleum Trust Fund. He had also worked at the UAC as an auditor before transferring his services to the public sector.

    All those who met and interacted with him in the places he had worked spoke of a quiet and reticent fellow, devoted to duty and hard work and given to stoic fortitude and Christianly forbearance. He was also a man of immense personal generosity, lavishing kindness and affection on all who came his way without any ethnic or religious bias. He was a model Nigerian. Had he been allowed to live, Kola would have turned fifty eight in March.

    By all accounts, it was a life of humility, piety and studied self-effacement. He did not push himself or push anybody around. He was courteous and polite in the extreme. Even in our old age, Kola still greeted snooper with the Yoruba deferential gesture of half-prostration, despite the fact that he was already a grandfather several times over.

    But he was not a softie by any stretch of the imagination. On both sides of the family, he was descended of illustrious warriors, and he could tackle like a compact tank. As a youth, he was known as the “admiral” and till the end there was still something of a martial gait to his quiet bearing.

    His loss is Nigeria’s loss because it was said by those who know of these things that he was in close contention for the post of Auditor General of Nigeria. Now the audit is on the grim statistics of elite haemorrhage in Nigeria. Once again, we mourn for a country which like a deranged old hen must suck life out of its most precious eggs in order to prolong its miserable existence.

    How does it feel writing the obituary of your own younger sibling? It is a stark reversal of the evolutionary process. This is too close to call even when one is a compulsive glutton for punishment. How does a traumatised wife explain to the children who have all partaken of a mire humane and civilised existence in Canada that she found their father’s lifeless body with the skull openly split by a crude axe right there on the Ife-Ibadan road near the quarry at Wasinmi? What a savagely ironic mockery of that village’s name!

    The grim reaper has been at work, scything down anything and anybody at sight like one of those dreaded and iconic Egunguns of Yoruba folklore. Once, we were many youths roaming the wild, enjoying the bounteous fruits of nature and eating from the communal pot of their father, S.A, the notable teacher and community leader.

    Now like a Homeric battlefield, men and women are falling on all sides in a crushing pile. The great future that we dreamt about is almost behind. It was a life of schooling, but may be we missed something about the school of life. We went to school as we were told only to succumb to those who didn’t.

    We have been taught a hard lesson by them. You cannot create a personal paradise in an environment of consuming hell. They will come for you, and as they say in America, just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they are not going to get you. Once your number comes up in the irrational lottery of a dysfunctional society, there is nothing anybody can do about that.

    In a traumatised society, metaphysical self belief is often a talisman for physical self disbelief. Last Thursday evening, snooper departed Kola’s residence in Ibadan after a service of songs in company of a childhood friend who had recently retired as a Permanent Secretary in Lagos state. We were heading for Gbongan to be with the family in preparation for the burial the following day.

    It was getting late and a hideous and fearful pall of darkness suddenly descended on the notorious Ife-Ibadan road. Having cautioned his friend about the dangerous folly of travelling on that road at night, yours sincerely was full of premonition and dark foreboding. But like all people who believe they are metaphysically fortified, our friend would have none of snooper’s words of cautionary wisdom.

    As darkness enveloped everywhere and driving becomes a function of autopilot, our friend growled at snooper. “ I never knew you are this security conscious. Listen, you are travelling with the anointed”. Snooper took a look at him and quipped. “When the armed robber chaps get hold of your bulky frame, you tell them you are anointed. They will ask you, oga wetin you say before ramming your skull.” By that time, the anointed will need ointment if not some immediate life-saving surgery.

    Unknown to our friend, snooper was actually thinking that his (our friend’s) older brother, Segun, had perished in a terrible early evening accident on the same road a decade and a half earlier. Decades before this, their father had also succumbed in a different theatre of road carnage. But even then it is getting impossible to even leave your room these days without being reinforced by some mystical faith in your destiny if not destination.

    As if to confirm snooper’s premonitory hunch, and by an almost preternatural development, there on the road and at a very sharp bend after Ikire very close to where Kola was murdered was an articulated lorry lying completely athwart the road. But for the prompt and timely intervention of the police who opened a bypass for motorists, the carnage would have been unimaginable. Snooper at this point could hear some fearful rumbling from the anointed. But it was a mere vigorous shaking of the lottery can. Our numbers were not up, not yet. At 8.23 am the following morning, the vehicle was still lying across the road.

    How did we get to this point in this country where you leave your loved ones in the morning and you are not sure whether you will be returned to them in a body bag? Or whether it is your spouse that will happen upon your corpse in the middle of the road? Kola’s murder has all the dark hints of a modern whodunit and the satanic ingenuity of a professional execution.

    At first, it was given out that he had jumped from a moving car and smashed his head against the road. But the autopsy has revealed something darker and more sinister. His head injuries were from an axe which suddenly struck. Frozen for posterity were the looks of quizzical horror and tormented bewilderment. What have I done to deserve this, he seems to be asking his sadistic executors.

    That question must now be answered by the men of Osun State police command. This is one vicious murder that must not be swept under the carpet under the guise of permanent investigation. The bald and bare facts are there. Kola did not kill himself. Somebody somewhere must be responsible for this heinous crime against humanity.

    By all corroborated accounts, Kola left the funeral reception around six in the early evening to get to Ibadan. He never did. At the bumps just outside Wasinmi and before Ikire, some armed hoodlums intercepted the car and abducted him. He was taken to a nearby bush where it is believed a stormy confrontation took place.

    Thereafter, he was struck twice at the back of the head with a crude instrument. His body was taken back to the point where he was abducted and deposited near the road. To remove all evidence, the abductors burnt the car they operated with. They were also hoping that by the following morning the body would have been smashed up by traffic with vultures completing the rest. But this was not to be. The body was discovered in the early hours of the morning by his wife who had set out from Ibadan to find out what was going on.

    This is obviously not the work of some amateur killers. This is professional elimination by hard and hardened criminals. The police must find out what is behind this callous execution. All leads must be followed to their logical conclusion, and the criminals brought to justice. There are indications that the highest echelons of government apparatus in Osun State have already swung into action. This is as it should be. This will not bring Kola back to his family but it will effect a much needed closure. May his gentle and noble soul find perfect repose.

  • Some political insults for the road

    One thing that is missing in the contemporary political atmosphere of Nigeria is the great art of political insult such as was evident particularly in the First Republic and classically in the Anglo-American political theatre. It is an index of the lack of education and preparation of our current political class that they cannot come up with the wit and brio to match the forensic exertions of their illustrious forebears. They are nothing but dismal caricatures and epigones of this distinguished tradition. Since snooper is in a foul and uncharitable mood, we will supply three political and literary insults for the road.

    1

    Benjamin Disraeli, the great author and remarkable politician, was once accosted by a furious younger opposition parliamentarian. “Sir, it seems to me that you will either die on the gallows or of some horrible venereal disease”, the younger man bellowed.

    “ Youngman, that depends on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress”, the great man shot back.

    11

    And when the selfsame Disraeli was asked to explain the difference between a calamity and a catastrophe, his eye twinkled with epic mischief..

    “You know William Gladstone?” Disraeli began in reference to his greatest political foe. “Well if Gladstone were to fall into a river, that would be a calamity”, Then he quickly added the mortal clincher. “But if anybody were to pull him out, that would be a catastrophe.”.

    111

    George Bernard Shaw, the great Anglo-Irish dramatist was a notorious hell-raiser and incorrigible social gadfly. He was once the object of lavish attention from a leading lady of the London literary saloon and a rich heiress to boot. Thinking that Bernard Shaw would be flattered to be the object of her adulation and public affection, she sent him a telegram of invitation.

    “Lady B…will be home tomorrow at 7pm”, the telegram read.

    “So will Bernard Shaw”, came the prompt reply by return telegram.

  • And Okon puts his boot in

    As soon as the eagles romped over Mali and the whole street exploded like a dormant volcano, Okon barged in with insane excitement written all over his face. Snooper thought the crazy one wanted to cotton in on the celebratory atmosphere, but it turned out that he had more sinister motives for his unwarranted disruption.

    “Oga, kai, kai abi you no see say dem Nigeria dey play better football now after dem come chase dem yeye Yoruba boys from dem team? Na Yoruba people dey spoil football as dem dey spoil everything for obodo,” the crazy boy sneered.

    “Shut up, you fool. And who are these Yoruba boys?” snooper screamed at him.

    “Ah dem Taiye, Kehinde, dem Obafemi Awolowo, dem Yakubu Aiyefele, dem Oyobo and dem Oyinbo Bini brother with all dem babalawo and agadagodo football”

    “Get lost:” snooper shouted at the mad boy.

  • Eagles on Iroko

    Fair is fair. Even a government at bay deserves a lucky break, so it is understandable if Goodluck Jonathan decides to milk the goodwill redounding from the Eagles’ spectacular resurrection in South Africa. By an amazing and profound coincidence, the old eagles died in South Africa about two and a half years ago. Now, they are being reborn in the Country of Good Hope. It has been a moveable feast of fluid and flowing football. Messi beaucoup, boys!!!

    Nobody ever gave them a chance. Snooper for one did not. After physically witnessing the epic fiasco in South Africa, yours sincerely vowed never to watch the miserable rogues again this life time. Sometimes last week, snooper was fumbling with the remote control wondering what time later that evening Stephen Kessi’s jaded journeymen would be dismissed by the dreaded Ivorians.

    But the match was actually on. After watching for only a few minutes, snooper concluded that this was a new breed of Eagles. The boys have succeeded in unlocking the secret of their great ancestors. This was classy football at its sublime summit. After the brilliant dismissal of the Ivorians, the eagles went on to surpass themselves in a superlative shellacking of the Malians.

    Last Wednesday as the eagles were putting the Malians through the grinder, the entire country went still. Not a pin drop was heard. All the major streets of Lagos were deserted. Nigerians have gone to worship the only god they worship in unison: the god of soccer. Even armed robbers and kidnappers suspended operations. After the “service,” the streets erupted in jubilation and wild celebrations.

    Thanks again, boys for rekindling our hopes in a battered and beleaguered nation. Perhaps in the end, nothing can beat the description of the Malian goalkeeper who said that his team played Brazil and not Nigeria. To be compared to the greatest footballing nation in the world shortly after being dismissed as lax and laggard lame ducks is a tad short of the miraculous. so whatever happens this afternoon is a splendid bonus. Well done boys.

  • Intellectual Slavery and the Colonial Subject

    Intellectual Slavery and the Colonial Subject

    A fool and his intellectual capital are soonest parted. As it was in the beginning, so it it is proving to be at this late and probably closing phase of western domination of the universe. As the Black month unfolds, it is appropriate to dwell on the issue of intellectual slavery and the mental constitution of the colonial subject. The greatest wars take place in the territory of the human mind, and it is the unchallenged domination of this vital front by the western imagination that is responsible for its six-century domination over the rest of the world..

    There is a consensus among anthropologists that slavery has always existed in human society. It is an offshoot of warfare. Old Britain, for example, was a colony of the Roman Empire. People have always colonised and enslaved each other. But intellectual slavery, that is the mental colonisation or the deliberate and systematic inferiorisation of the other, has achieved its most potent form and formula with western imperialism and its variant of modernity.

    Physical enslavement and actual colonisation can be savage and abusive of human dignity, but intellectual slavery, because it works insidiously at the level of the mind, is even more cruel and exacting. Once a people’s mind is conquered and enslaved, the dominion and domination naturally extend to other domains such as the political, the economic and even the spiritual. The mentally enslaved is thus comprehensively de-humanized, that is stripped of their humanity— which makes the work of the conqueror easier.

    So it is, then, that today, the Black person, unlike the Chinese and Indians, has no viable religion of his own, no economic system, no political institution, no traditional epic genre as Isidore Okpewho has spent a life time refuting, no literature as they impishly and impudently told Wole Soyinka as a Knight’s fellow in Cambridge, no culture as they taught Chinua Achebe, and of course no history but a barbaric void as Lord Hugh Trevor-Roper grandly claimed.

    Having been a combatant in the global theatre of mental decolonisation for over three decades, snooper is not often amused by the antics of the mentally colonised. But one must not fail to notice when some delicious ironies appear in the horizon to lift the universal gloom about the unhappy fate of the Black person.

    Just as the Black month of February was unfolding, there on television was a group of retired Nigerian rulers together with the incumbent stoutly defending the government decision to spend billions of naira to commemorate the centenary of the amalgamation of the protectorates of Nigeria. There is a lot to celebrate about the amalgamation, they all chorused as if on cue and without any sense of irony.

    It was a most beguiling and historic snapshot, particularly with the most combatively unenlightened among the lot railing and thundering with the usual combustible gusto. There may be a lot to celebrate about Nigeria despite everything. But the amalgamation was not a Nigerian event.

    The “Dual Mandate” of Lord Lugard is a famous piece of fiction and a pious fraud since there is no evidence to show that the overrun nationalities ever gave their consent. It is a consecration of empire and imperial might, a testimony to its awesome power of colonial coercion and ability to territorialise and reterritorialise Africa at will.

    If this singular feat of human supremacy should be celebrated at all, it should be by relics of empire glorifying the might and power of their ancestors and not the descendants of those who were herded in like human cattle. The celebration and commemoration of one’s own enslavement is a classic instance of mental colonisation and the most depressing example of Afro-Saxony in recent political history. By the same token, the Japanese ought to commemorate the arrival of Commodore Perry on their shores, and the Chinese the seizure of Hong Kong.

    Yet as we have hinted, a lack of self-awareness and its ironic possibilities is a logical corollary of mental slavery. The Secretary to the Federal Government was widely quoted to have repeated Lord Lugard’s words with warm approval that Nigeria was “the product of a long and mature consideration”. Snooper will like to ask the burly and amiable Anyim Pius Anyim if any of his ancestors was present at the deliberation.

    If the Nigerian officials had wanted to be fair to themselves and to history they ought to have gone a bit farther in time to the Berlin Conference which began in 1884 and effectively saw to the colonial partitioning of old Africa. It was in 1884 that Henry Morton Stanley, the footloose Welsh explorer who managed to fight on both sides of the American Civil War, arrived in Berlin clutching a raft of treaties with traditional African chiefs who had willingly signed away their possession in exchange for meretricious trash.

    Next year, it will be 130 years since 1884, even though the Berlin Conference actually concluded in 1885. Since this tradition of frittering away immense natural resources has continued in Africa, particularly in Nigeria, we must not be afraid of celebrating and lionizing our worthy ancestors. Where it comes to a celebration of self-dispossession, the Nigerian government must accord this date a priority over mere amalgamation.

    But there may be more mundane matters hiding under this grandiose nonsense. The goat eats where it is tethered, says a famous Cameroonian proverb. Even if one cannot discount an element of deliberate mischief in all this, it is noteworthy that virtually all the newspapers reporting on the centenary extravaganza published a curious picture of Anyim with his mouth apparently salivating with intent. It could not have been at the prospects of the giant Ohaozara yam or rice from his native Ishiagwu.

    What will Equaino, Du Bois, Blyden, Martin Luther King, Cheikh Anta Diop, Azikiwe, Nkrumah, Macaulay, Senghor, Sapara Williams and all the avatars of the great project of mental decolonisation say about this desecration of history by the ruling elite in Nigeria? How will Frantz Fanon, the great psychiatrist of cultural deracination and political schizophrenia, describe the ruling class that presides over the current post-colonial anomie of Nigeria?

    It should be noted that while this capitulation to neo-colonial slavery is going on in Nigeria, two great sons of the Third World, one a Nigerian, the other an India and both Nobel laureates in different fields, are engaged in stellar decolonising projects. Soyinka and Sen are two of a different kind, but both are united in their passion and affection for their respective countries and continent.

    While in a new book, Wole Soyinka is deepening and refining his time-honoured quest and engagement with the recovery and recuperation of a noble and heroic African past as a weapon for confronting the neo-colonial devastation of the continent, Amartya Sen is chairing a committee in India to revive Nalanda, the world’s oldest university, after an 800 year recess.

    Soyinka surely has his Marxist and neo-Marxist critics who accuse him of romanticizing Africa’s feudal and unedifying past. The debate and the fundamental flaw in this argument are beyond the purview of this column. But suffice it to note that the decolonizing project is more than a matter of life and death for its heroic protagonists. Exile, humiliation, torture and death have been their lot. The question is: why has it proved so costly proving to the rest of the world that all people are equal and that even if Africa is no longer at the cutting edge of civilisation, it was at least the cradle of current civilization as evolved?

    The reason is the size, scope and scale of ambition of western modernity. For the first time in the history of the world, we have a vision of modernisation which can only expand and grow by denying or suppressing everything that came before it and by obliterating all that is parallel and contemporaneous to it.

    Hence the costly struggle to re-establish the Egyptian foundation of western modernity and the momentous inspiration it derived from classical Islam. Once the link and the trail of human achievement are re-established, the myth of the primitive Africa savage is very hard to sustain indeed. And so by the same taken is the project of mental colonisation..

    In 1809, more than half a century before the outbreak of the American civil war, the Abbe Henri-Baptiste Gregoire, sent a manuscript of a new work to Thomas Jefferson, a founding father and the third president of the United States. The book was a celebration and commemoration of essayists, writers and scientists of African extraction who had found their way to the west. It was titled, De La Litterature des Negress.

    As we have had cause to note in this column, despite his principled opposition to slavery, Jefferson’s view of the intellectual capacities of black people was notoriously truculent and characterised by savage dismissals. In an infamous passage from his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson noted thus of the African American: “It appears to me that in memory they are equal to whites: in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.”

    This remarkable diatribe was coming on the heels of the literary exploits of the trio Equaino, Cuguano and Sancho, former slaves of African descent, who seized late eighteenth century literary London by the scruff of the neck and were feted in all the leading saloons of England’s capital for their astounding feats of imagination. Being very well-connected to the metropolitan circuits of the old world, Jefferson could not have been unaware of the literary triumphs of these exemplars. Perhaps it was a case of prejudice compounded by deliberate ignorance. Gregoire’s treatise could have been a well-aimed and profoundly clandestine attempt to help Jefferson modify or moderate his unhelpful worldview.

    But it was an uphill task. The same views resonate in the works of European intellectuals and philosophers such as David Hume, Emmanuel Kant, Friedrich Hegel and even Karl Marx. As far as Marx was concerned, India and the African continent lost nothing in the wanton destruction of their old culture by the European conquerors as it was a culture shot through with idiotic superstitions and morbid myths.

    Nowhere else in human history had there been such a systematic and concerted attempt to cast a whole race as inferior. It was a pan-Western project of mental colonisation in which conservative, liberal, reactionary and radical intellectuals shared a unified vision of the world based on collective mental conditioning and the assumption of the “natural” superiority of western modernity.

    The consequences of mental colonisation are still very much with us, despite the cessation of physical colonisation,. They can be seen in nation-states that are inferior and poor copies of the original, political institutions that are not up to scratch, political elites that are a miscegenated breed of thieving nuisance, economic systems that are uncritically and uncreatively borrowed without any thought for the local conditions and in borrowed religions that lack race-specific nutrients.

    It will take a new intellectual elite with a new dream of Africa and a new visionary conception of human redemption to free the Black race from the clutches of mental colonisation. Before this mental revolution, all political revolutions are null and void..