Category: Tatalo Alamu

As this brutish year finally takes its brutal blow before the court of history, most Nigerians would be wondering what had hit them. Like a heavyweight boxer pole-axed with savage precision, Nigerians are distraught and disoriented. Even by the standards of their cruel bondage to an unhappy fate, never in their history has a year been more punitive of the soul and destructive of the body.

Even at the very tail end, the year has lost neither its poison nor its potency, sending a gubernatorial convoy into a fatal clinch and snatching away our own Chief Wumi Adegbonmire, a master political combatant and journalistic warrior of distinction from the land of tigers. This was shortly after celebrating his beloved wife’s seventieth birthday. A childhood romance cannot terminate in more awry circumstances. Akure, Yorubaland and Nigeria mourn their illustrious son.

At the very last count, at least three governors are all swapped up in hospital beds. Sullivan Chime has not been seen anywhere in over a hundred days. Suntai Danbaba of Taraba State is reported to be comatose in a German hospital. As this is been written, Idris Wada of Kogi is reported to be battling for his life after sustaining serious injuries in a convoy crash which left his ADC dead. And the First Lady is making expeditious recovery from a strange ailment whose provenance is as mysterious as the arcane rituals of governance in modern Nigeria.

To God be the glory. But one must be careful about which divine praises to utter. Even the celebrated author of that phrase is said to be in hospital somewhere on the planet. With spiritual, economic and political escape routes seemingly blocked , tragedy cannot be more comprehensive. Yet somehow and somewhat, a way has to be found out of this national logjam or we are all goners in the short run.

In such circumstances, Nigerians should not wish themselves a happy new year. Even divine graces and favours are earned and merited. God is no longer a Father Christmas. You cannot plant unhappiness and expect to harvest happiness. It doesn’t work like that anymore. Rather than wishing themselves a happy new year, Nigerians should be happy that it is a new year. A new year is a time of renewal and rejuvenation. We must roll up our sleeves. The Chinese are coming, and may be some Africans.

This outgoing year is remarkable in at least one respect. It is the year Nigerians probably lost the last shred of illusion about the ability of the Nigerian post-colonial state to provide solace and succour to its citizens. It was the year when the falconer finally lost the falcon. If Nigerians were expecting a messiah and a quick fix to their political and economic woes, they finally got the message. It was the year of yearning in hope and expectation and of yawning in impotence and terminal frustration.

True enough, the year began on a turbulent and tempestuous note with the provocative removal by government of a yet to be established petroleum subsidy. It drew the implacable ire of Nigerians. For a week, it was a tense and fraught affair, with tottering democracy on a lifeline. The great pan-Nigerian political mass which had not been seen in 20 years since the annulment of the June 12 presidential election made a dramatic return. Something was about to give, or so it seemed.

It turned out to be a damp squib, as they say. It turned out that there was no real synergy between Labour and the mass-movement. It was a revolutionary moment without real revolutionists. There was no real linkage between refulgent radical forces waiting in the wings and the masters of the masses. Given the limits and limitations of their political consciousness, the leaders of the movement were waiting for a Deus ex machina to be thrown up by the commotion and combustion.

It was a foolish and forlorn hope, but an accurate reflection of the balance of forces at play. A revolution is not a congressional mass of fevered devotees, but a congregation of hard and hardened men and women of intellectual faith. No wonder, Labour slunk away leaving labourers in the lurch and only to reappear in even more perfidious circumstances. A country throws up the Labour Movement it deserves.

With their reformist, work-a-day consciousness steeped in opaque under the counter negotiation with officialdom, the new Nigerian Labour aristocracy are not Gdansk Port workers. The Poles are a tough race whose history is steeped in heroic martyrdom against local and external oppressors. For centuries, the Russians took them for lunch while the Germans often had them for supper. But they never give up.

In fairness to Nigerian Labour, they did make a telling point which ought to absolve them of historic responsibility. They were not fighting for regime change but for the reversal of harsh pricing of petroleum products. In that, they achieved a limited and partial success. You cannot ask the children of squirrels why they are not tigers. In the animal kingdom, no genetic miracle can achieve that feat.

But it will be the height of intellectual folly for anybody to assume that the sacrifices of affronted Nigerians and those who summoned them to the barricades have been in vain. Throughout history, men and women fight for something or some ideal only to discover that what they have fought for is not what they have achieved. It is then left for others to carry on in the perpetual struggle against oppression and injustice.

Probably unknown to both sides, the January protests achieved a dramatic and telling effect which might have altered the Nigerian political psyche forever. In panic response to the protests, the government began hurriedly probing itself. In the process, it exposed the rotten innards of world-historic corruption and official malfeasance for all to see. It simply means that we cannot continue like this and that something will have to give, sooner than later. We may all have Goodluck Jonathan to thank for this epic feat of elite collective suicide.

Jonathan has helped to demystify the Nigerian post-colonial state in a way that has never been done before, and in a way that has never been thought possible, to the ire of his sponsors. They have given the shoeless boy from Otueke platform shoes to wear and he had laced them with explosives. It will be Mount Krakatoa later. No onomatopoeia of impending volcanic eruption can be more appropriate. The government has its back to the wall and no one believes it anymore. You cannot transform a stone country. This house has not fallen, but it cannot stand the way it is.

Let us expect more unintended miracles from the explosive laden shoes. Meanwhile, please step forward as the Person of the Year, the eponymous protester on the streets of Abuja and the Gani Fawehinmi Square in Lagos. After the protest, Snooper stumbled on a pair of abandoned uni-sex shoes at the Ojota end of the park. They must belong to either Justus or Justina. May their tribe multiply.

AS the political space in Nigeria opens up to fresh possibilities, intense political jockeying has also commenced all over the country. Across the length and breadth of Nigeria , the usual actors are at it again, forging fresh alliances and trying to weld together a shattered national consensus. It is a party of giants. Political titans are on the march again. But the great river of human affairs flows on endlessly and ceaselessly. This time around, impersonal titanic forces also abound, ready to overturn the apple cart.

It is in the nature of political ferment to generate their own controversies. We have received numerous responses to last week’s piece titled Four Yoruba and Nigerian Avatars. While many hailed the piece for its captivating logic and flair, a few described it as a seminal analysis of four of the problematic personages who have dominated Yoruba and Nigerian history in the past sixty years. For snooper, what is intriguing and interesting is how most of the commentaries came to agree with our evaluation, particularly of the Owu-born retired general.

This morning, we publish two sample commentaries, one from a professor of Communication Theory and the other from a reverend gentleman. Once again, they both end up with the same posers. But since former president General Olusegun Obasanjo is quite in the news these days as a result of the ongoing political permutations and realignment of forces, we republish this morning a piece first published in very early 2006 just as the Third Term fiasco was about to explode in the general’s face.

This piece, once again, confirms why the imaginative projection of a fiction writer is sometimes superior to the late insight of political scientists. It is not for nothing that Sigmund Freud regarded Fyodor Dostoevsky, the great Russian novelist, as the master and mentor who saw it all before him. Although almost seven years old, the following piece resonates with the dynamics of power play and the futility of clinging to power in a country with a microplurality of contending and mutually contradictory power-centres.

As the Nigerian ship of state enters turbulent and uncharted waters, we must be careful in which direction we push the troubled hulk. The troubled early years after independence appear to be back with us, but with heightened and more critical contradictions. This time around, almost everything that can go wrong in a fragile nation and a more fragile democracy has gone wrong and without powerful countervailing institutions.

As it was the case in the First Republic, we have a military stretched to the limits of its fabric and professional tether by internal security operations. We have a bitterly divided political elite. We have a situation in which a section of the country has been rendered virtually ungovernable by armed insurrection, with the other sections besieged by social, economic, political and religious vampires and vultures.

But now in addition to these ancient woes, we have the alarming situation in which ordinary and normal military postings are judged and condemned through the prism of religious and ethnic coloration. We have warlords and powerlords jostling for contention. We have a ruling class that has become a byword for a bizarre and berserk variant of kleptocracy. Never in the history of this country has the run on the Exchequer been more openly defiant and in your face. Presiding over all this is a president who reminds one of a boy-emperor handed an empire as a toy rigged with explosives.

In politically divided and ethnically fractured nations where zero sum politics is the name of the game, the struggle for power is often seen as a struggle for the soul of contending nationalities. No wonder then that democratic contests are framed as a battle for the survival of the ethnic group in a hostile environment rather than a struggle for office. In such circumstances, elections are nothing but an ethnic census or a tribal referendum. They solve and resolve nothing. In fact as we have argued on this page and it is now apparent in the plight of the nation, elections tend to worsen the contradictions.

If it is of any help and comfort to us, primordial scare mongering is not restricted to developing nations alone, but with an important proviso. As we can see in the tragedy of the Republic of Congo, the other African giant with which the chaotic mess of Nigeria is often compared, developed nations are not colonial amalgamations or overseas plantations and mega-mine crematorium put together for the sole purpose of extractive predation. In about sixty years, Congo has had only four rulers: Patrice Lumumba, its murdered and iconic founding president, Joseph Mobutu and the two Kabilas. The first three were either violently overthrown or murdered. Every election has been followed by a civil war.

Now if gold can rust, what is dross expected to do? During the run up to the ill-fated Treaty of Versailles and the knotty issue of German reparation, an American negotiator was so affronted by the unrelenting hostility to the Germans of Georges Clemenceau, the French prime minister, that he was forced to ask him.”Pray sir, have you ever been to Germany?”

“No sir!” Clemenceau, a.k.a The Tiger, shot back. “But twice in my lifetime Germans have been to Paris!”. He was of course referring to 1870 and 1914. Had The Tiger tarried a bit longer, he would have lived to witness a more comprehensive German “visit” during the Second World War when Hitler’s Panzer Divisions overran France in a question of days. One can then imagine what would have happened had the French and the Germans been boxed together in a nation-space by colonial fiat, and without a road map.

But it can be worse. And some nations have paid terrible prices as a result. If the rhetoric of injustice and marginalisation succumbs to dark, paranoid fantasies; if passions are inflamed to a point where they lead to a bitter scape-goating or stigmatisation of other ethnic groups, civil wars or genocide often result. Nigeria, Rwanda and Kenya come to mind. In Kenya in 2007, the entire country dissolved in ethnic mayhem after disputed presidential elections. But as soon as an internationally driven acceptable formula for post and power-sharing was found, all became quiet on Mount Kilimanjaro.

Although often mainly executed by ordinary people, all the genocide in post-colonial Africa are driven by elite hate propaganda and are often the nuclear fallout of bitter contention for state largesse. Genocides do not descend suddenly from heaven. The principal role of intellectuals in fanning the embers of hatred and inflaming genocidal passions is often ignored by intellectuals who write on genocide.

Once again, Nigeria appears to have arrived at a critical juncture. Political battles are almost always preceded by intellectual contestations. You can almost tell when a nation is headed for a major showdown whenever certain key cultural and political codes, eg, genocide, demonology, terrorism, federalism, devolution of power, sovereignty etc become sites of fierce intellectual combat.

In the old West, even when the battle field wears a new garb and fresh mutants of the old tendencies emerge, the contest is still structured around the ancient ideological divide which showed up fifty years ago when the Action Group fractured irretrievably. Whether as seen in the struggle between federalists and anti-federalists, between the demos and their demonologists , between Afenifere patriots and Abacha collaborationists and now between the so called mainstreamers and the champions of regionalism, the ghosts of Awo and SLA have always stalked the battle field.

Unflinching loyalty to a cause, a group or the communal ideal is a timeless phenomenon since humanity first socialised and civilised. So is political treachery which is arrant disloyalty to the communal ideal. Just as no alchemy can transmute base metal into gold, no verbal alchemy can transform treachery to loyalty. From the Jews to the Japanese, it has been shown how loyalty to the group and established communal ideals promotes good virtues, particularly resilience, industry, generosity of spirit and the cult of heroic self-denial in the service of the society.

Every human society has a way of dealing with dishonourable dissent and outright disloyalty and political treachery. The disincentives range from stigmatisation, demonisation and when all else fails the employment of Political Terror. Terror ranges from physical coercion to other more subtle forms of economic, spiritual, metaphysical, artistic and intellectual intimidation.

In the old Yoruba society, there were certain institutions which acted in concert to protect the integrity of the communal ethos and ideals. These ideological apparatuses of the old Yoruba state include the Ogboni Confraternity, the oro and Osugbo cults which employed the efficacy of physical, intellectual and spiritual terror to ensure strict compliance with societal norms. It was not for nothing that a baffled and bewildered Peter Morton-Williams described the Ogboni as “mystery-mongering greybeards”

The problem with Nigeria, and with all colonial creations, is the clash of competing loyalties, that is loyalty to the old organic community and loyalty to a new nation that is yet to be properly founded, one that remains an artificial contraption and a mere geographical expression as Awolowo famously noted. Although loyalty to the new modern nation ought to supersede loyalty to the primordial community, that is only where and when the state acts out its true historical role as an arbiter, arbitrator and mediator of the competing and countervailing demands of the different factions of the ruling elite.

Unfortunately, the Nigerian post-colonial state has proved itself to be incapable of arbitrating or mediating anything, except when it comes to the deployment of gratuitous and autistic violence against different constituting units and nationalities. Like a childlike monstrosity, the Nigerian bandit state is frozen in conception as an instrument of Colonial Terror against captive nationals, utterly incapable of coming up with an organic organogram that will satisfy the yearnings and aspirations of its captured natives.

In such circumstances, rather than being an ameliorative clinic of national clarity and charity, the state becomes a theatre of chaos and confusion in an absurdist drama of national entropy; a Bazaar of buccaneers where every ascendant group barricades the door as the feeding frenzy of political hyenas commences. To the faithful, come and chop is the war-cry and there is no difference between the colour of blood and the colour of red wine. Each must flow abundantly.

As every outbid or smashed nationality retreats to lick its wounds, the ethnic igloo welcomes back its own at great costs to national consciousness and cohesion. In the event, the embattled nationality, particularly if it retains some residual cohesion from its pre-colonial political formation, begins a process of internal purgation. Conscientious objectors and opportunistic “one-Nigeria” dissidents alike are branded as traitors and harsh sanctions often follow.