The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • The heroes of our current eclipse

    The heroes of our current eclipse

    What exactly does it mean when it is said that a nation is developed? And what is the difference between mere growth and actual development? If there is any emerging consensus among most watchers and scholars of Africa in recent times, it is that its postcolonial stasis is so deep and demeaning that it requires a fundamental reset and a rethinking of foundational categories such as development, the spiritual deracination of Africa, cultural anomie arising from the subversion and decimation of its organic institutions , the nation-state paradigm in Africa and the much rhapsodized notion of a universal liberal democracy.

    In one of the most startling paradoxes of our time, General Olusegun Obasanjo, an authoritarian and autocratic ruler of Nigeria both as a soldier and as a civilian, has opened a campaign against the whole tenet of liberal democracy dismissing it as totally unsuitable for Africa in its current phase. Obasanjo is merely returning to base or stalking a much bigger horse which may well be the upending of the current arrangement.

     It will be recalled that in 1989, the Owu-born former military commander penned a scathing indictment of democratic rule and argued for an authoritarian regimen to fast track development. But when the wind of democracy began blowing in Africa a few months after and those close to him dropped the hint that his antediluvian attitude to democracy might imperil his chances of becoming the next UN helmsman, Obasanjo quietly changed track and became an implacable crusader for democracy to his country’s good fortunes.

     Emeritus Professor Otonti Nduka is in a different league and a league all of his own. For over six decades and in an outstanding academic career spanning across several disciplines, the Eligbam community-born scholar and crusader has with remarkable consistency and extraordinary clarity of mind proffered practical and theoretical solutions aimed at lifting the continent out of its developmental quagmire.

      According to the iconic intellectual in a preface to his recently reissued collection of essays titled: The Roots of African Underdevelopment: The Postscript, the emeritus professor avers thus: The basic theme of my academic endeavours over several decades is the making of reason through scientific knowledge preeminent in the ordering and running of human affairs at both personal/individual and collective levels. Whether the endeavours have yielded any result or not; only time will tell”.

       According to Segun Gbadegesin, the notable Nigerian scholar, philosopher and traditional savant,: “For many decades, Emeritus Professor Otonti Nduka has been one of the leading voices, not just in philosophy and education, but also, importantly, in ethical development. His book is a testament to his fertile mind on these and other issues which matter to national development. We are grateful to him for putting his intellectual endowment to the service of the nation, indeed, the continent.”

       Which country will not be grateful to have such a son who has put his talents and self at the behest of his country and race? But we live in strange times and even stranger climes where meanness and mediocrity rule the roost and where the price of intellectual excellence and mental distinction is vendetta and vindictiveness. The person whose fresh energies, originality and mental endowments lead him on a different path away from the ploughed aridity of conventionality will always pay a heavy price.

       This is not a uniquely African thing. It is an integral part of human nature. According to Louis Althusser, the great French Marxist philosopher and political theorist,: “Western intellectual tradition makes the intellectual orphan to pay a heavy price. It is a price ranging from exclusion, alienation, madness and even death.” All the great avatars of human development pay this heavy price. Althusser himself in a moment of paranoid befuddlement after an argument murdered his wife and was promptly committed to a mental asylum.

      Emeritus professor Otiono Nduka is lucky to be alive and in fine fettle too. He writes with such elan and panache that reading him provokes raptures of intellectual ecstasy. Such is the polemical ardour of his expostulations and the interminable string of witty repartees that one could be forgiven for thinking that he was a young academic on the make. He takes no hostages and writes about the global doyens of developmental studies with aplomb.

      After his personally embossed copy landed on our desk, one had flipped through a few pages trying to locate the author on the spectrum of academic seniority. According to his short note, he decided to get in touch after reading the piece on the trauma of Haiti. Like all ancient gurus, what he left unsaid was more eloquent than what he said. Nigeria must avoid the horror and modern hell of Haiti.

      After a few pages, one was stunned to discover that the author was writing on the eve of his ninety sixth birth day. Early last month, on May 9th , the great man celebrated his ninety eighth birthday.  To make sure that this was not a grand hoax, yours sincerely put a call to the old man, and there he truly was. The brief encounter subsisted until nature succumbed to necessity.

       Professor Otiono Nduka smartly sidesteps the problem of offering a definitive definition of what development is because it is a complex amalgam in its sheer multidimensionality. According to him, it is like the proverbial tale of blind people clutching at different parts of an elephant and each one proclaiming Eureka.

       Truth be told, this is a vexed issue that has exercised the mind of some of the greatest and most illustrious children of Africa, including the late Professor Adebayo Adedeji who as the helmsman of the Economic Commission of Africa produced an alternative blueprint to SAP, Professor Onigu Otite, Professor Bade Onimode, Professor Omafume Friday Onoge and a slew of others including the remarkable Guyanese-born Walter Rodney who was eventually dispatched for his pains. Rodney memorably avers that majority of Africans went into colonialism with a hoe and came out with a hoe.

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     Simply put, development is the capacity to expand capacity, either by maximizing opportunities that naturally come your way or by optimizing advantages deliberately created. It is not a univocal affair but a multi-pronged and multi-dimensional struggle in which innovations sometimes cancel out innovations, either by incorporation, sublation or outright cancellation, and in which new insights open the door to fresh contradictions and new problems.

      Professor Nduka’s notions of development can be gleaned in major insights scattered throughout his notable monograph. But before going on to enumerate these, it is noteworthy that he takes a constant and consistent swipe at what development is not about and he can be quite caustic about the prevalence of these debilitating ailments among Africa’s postcolonial elite which can be a drag on true development.

     Chief among these are mental, spiritual and psychological lethargy leading to indolence and the glorification of frivolities, massive corruption, waste and mismanagement of public resources, outlandish profligacy such as seen in the FESTAC extravaganza, unpatriotic collusion with foreign interests to defraud the nation and the resort to superstitious idiocies in the management of human affairs.

    The emeritus professor fingers the prevalence of pre-scientific epistemology and the resort to magical rationalization of pressing political, economic and spiritual difficulties on the continent and among African people as a whole as being principally responsible for the debilitation and comprehensive devastation of the continent’s developmental capacities. He concludes that it is a story of “how Nigerians underdeveloped Nigeria”. (p74)

      Through Segun Gbadegesin, Nduka filters his asseverations further: “Science is knowledge which has been obtained largely through observation and experimentation and has been subjected to sustained critical scrutiny and passed through a many-layered epistemological filter. Mathematics is crucial in this respect. (p114)

      In a terse critique of pre-scientific epistemology which has stood the test of time, Karl Marx notes: All mythology seeks to dominate nature in and around the imagination and must disappear once scientific knowledge gains foothold”. Marx goes on to lampoon rural folks and the mystical ignorance which makes them to hold nature in such unwarranted awe and which often compels them to worship animate and inanimate objects.

     It should be clear from the preceding that Africa carries a crushing burden of poverty, superstition and mass illiteracy. To compound this crisis in Nigeria is a crisis of demography in which the population grows exponentially with the economy contracting and development lagging far behind. In the absence of a visionary elite with core values, it is impossible to evolve not to talk of imposing a coherent and commensurate population policy. 

      Professor Nduka Otiono is unsparing in his criticism of the indigenous African elite spawned by colonialism for their failure to rethink and reset the colonial paradigm imposed by the imperialist masters as it has been done elsewhere. But could it have been otherwise? Formal colonization met Africa at its weakest point, institutionally, culturally and spiritually speaking.

    Arab depredations and their wanton, premeditated violence on the east coast of the continent and early incursions from the Saharan fringes had already left native Africans dazed and disoriented. The introduction of international slavery had robbed them of some of their best brains and heroic fighters in an unequal contest with vastly superior forces armed with the newly acquired munitions.

      It was not the first time the continent was being left behind. Otiono, like many other developmental scholars and anthropological researchers, is equally puzzled by the fact that from all available evidence, the plough, which was a considerable advance on manual labour, eluded tropical Africa. But in addition to the deployment of slave and serf labour, traditional African big-time farmers married as many wives as possible turning them into human mules to work the farm even as they helped to expand the domestic capacity on the home front unlike the genetically incapacitated mule.

      Consequently, and as far as objective reality was concerned, Africa did not lag far behind Europe at the point of colonial irruption. It is important to note that when the Portuguese adventurers arrived at the old Kongo kingdom around present day Angola at the tail end of the fifteenth century, they met a society better organised politically and with a superior social structure than the one they left at home.

     The Portuguese loitered around hoping to encounter the mighty army which underwrote the wonderful conurbation.  Alas, there was none beyond the rudimentary royal guards armed with arrows and machete. The invaders decimated the kingdom and in the next hundred years transported virtually all its inhabitants to the new colony of Brazil through the slave port of Luanda.                                            

         It was precisely at this point that the Industrial Revolution, pioneered in and spearheaded by England with its startling innovations and relentless radicalization of the modes and means of production, put Europe and the western world beyond the reach of Africa. Already, it feels like a bridge too far. The Industrial Revolution is a classic illustration of how to dramatically expand human capacity for rapid development and how to alter the texture of history by changing the structure of society itself.

      In conclusion, four overriding determinants can be isolated. (1) The superannuation of feudal authoritarian rule in Europe and its subordination to variants of liberal democracy (2) The rise of a scientific society. (3) The advent of historic whistleblowers from Copernicus, Galileo to Isaac Newton who continued to insist that the ancient world as we knew it was historically passé. (4) The ascendancy of a visionary political elite with the capacity to mobilize the entire nation behind it in the pursuit of worthy national objectives.

       From the foregoing, it can be seen why fractious multi-ethnic nations roiling in corruption, mismanagement of diversity and abject poverty without a visionary elite to mobilize the entire nation behind a worthy cause have their work cut out for them. Without certain things being in place in most of Africa, the quest for development will continue to be an exercise in futility. Here is wishing the emeritus professor many happy returns.

  • Democratic concussions in Nigeria’s post-military polity

    Democratic concussions in Nigeria’s post-military polity

    On June 12, 1993, the entire Nigerian populace rose as one to vote out their military tormentors through the instrumentality of an unlikely hero of democracy, a bosom crony of the military oligarchy and one of its most favoured contractors and plutocratic wheeler-dealers, MKO Abiola. At first glance, the whole thing didn’t make much sense.

       It looked like one of those grand spectacles of deception and camouflage long favoured by the military authorities in their protracted battle of will and wits with the Nigerian political society. It was a battle that had assumed an urgent and frantic tone in the previous five years as General Ibrahim Babangida, the most gifted strategist and political playmaker thrown up by the military inquisition in Nigeria, set about banning, unbanning and banning all over again the most endowed members of the political class in a war of attrition which shook the entire nation to its very foundation and left the politicians gasping for breath.

    And then when there appeared to be some dull rays of light at the end of the long tunnel, one of the military’s own, a man who owed his vast riches and octopus-like political influence to the military institution dramatically stepped forward and began cocking a snook at the same military institution insisting vehemently and vociferously that they must depart at once and without much ado, too. It just didn’t add up. There must be a monstrous sting at the end of the tail.

      Such was the metaphysical import of the day, June 12, 1993 for Nigeria and the entire Black race in general that not a single drop of rainfall was recorded anywhere in the country on the day. Lawrence O’Brien, the American Charge d’affaires in Abuja who was monitoring the intriguing power play and ominous development for his bosses back home, issued a terse diplomatic cable that noted that America would frown at any attempt by the military junta to postpone or abort the election under whatever guise. This was after the government through its numerous agents obtained a midnight injunction from an Abuja court under Justice Bassey Ikpeme which outlawed the holding of the election.

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       For his pains and for daring to interfere with what was regarded as Nigeria’s internal affairs, O’Brien was summarily expelled from the country. In the event, the election held without any major incident throughout the country and was adjudged by local and international observers to have been decisively won by Abiola . A tense face-off ensued between the military and the Nigerian electorate eagerly awaiting the endorsement and ratification of Abiola’s election.

       But this was not to be. After about a week and a half of testing the resolve of the people of Nigeria and the balance of forces, the military annulled the election. It was the greatest electoral catastrophe to have befallen Nigeria both in its colonial and postcolonial history. The ensuing crisis snowballed into a low-intensity warfare which subsisted for another five years until the military withdrew to their barracks.

     Nigeria will never be the same again. Last Wednesday as the presidential state dinner for democracy heroes got underway in Abuja, argumentative rumblings and polite recriminations about who did what and who betrayed who during the struggle to rid Nigeria of military autocracy coursed through the genteel and sedate ambience of the Banquet Hall.

       Looking back in a final gaze across the chasm of the quick and the dead, one can only surmise at the difference an Abiola presidency would have made to Nigeria. Such was the enthusiasm generated by Abiola’s electoral triumph and the man’s reputation for bucolic and unaffected empathy for the poor as well as his compassionate nous that the price of rice fell throughout the country within twenty four hours of his “unofficial” election. Nigeria was stirring in a ritual of hope, renewal and regeneration. It was not to be.

       Last year exactly thirty years after the June 12 debacle and as if to complete the aborted cycle of hope, an Abiola acolyte and disciple and an unwavering hero of the unstinting struggle of progressive elements for the democratic redemption of the nation came to power after a bitterly contested election marked by inflammatory rhetoric, divisive campaigns and ethnic grandstanding of the most deplorable hue. Bola Ahmed Tinubu romped home against all odds and puerile projections.

       It is a momentous irony that fate and fortunes have not cut Tinubu the same slack as an Abiola’s putative presidency. But only those who have not studied history well enough to appreciate its twists and turns will be baffled by this development. To start with history does not follow a straight, geometric path.

     Second and more importantly as this column constantly avers following the Heraclitean dictum, you cannot step into the same river twice. Thirty years are more than enough time for incalculable damage to be done to the fabric of a nation however strong and durable by political termites and other historic grave diggers. President Tinubu will do well to hold this incontrovertible fact to heart as he sets about consolidating his presidency and laying the foundation for a more perfect multi-ethnic union.

      Nigeria has never in its history been this bitterly divided and badly polarized. Ethnic revanchists, religious chauvinists, regional hegemonists and freewheeling economic terrorists are up in arms and on rampage. The disparities between the haves and the have-nots have assumed a staggering and disproportionate proportion. 

     The disposable income available to the filthy poor and the obscenely rich with access to state loot is so callous and cruel that it has become a national and international scandal which has turned the nation into an object of scorn and ridicule in global circuits. These economic inequities have in turn spawned industrial unrest on an industrial scale. Never in the colonial and postcolonial history of the nation has the state been more vulnerable to non-state actors.

       It is a known fact that President Tinubu inherited a parlous economy and if the outlandish facts emerging from the rubble of General Buhari’s reputational edifice are anything to be believed, it simply means the general from Daura and his cronies took the nation to the cleaners before repairing. It is also a known fact that that the languid and lackadaisical former infantry officer and his ethnic cohorts did enough damage to the management of ethnic and cultural diversities of a fragile nation to last a generation.

      As a consequence of this, the polity is roiling in bitterness and acrimony and the Tinubu administration is jolted by continuous concussions ever since its advent. Last Wednesday, the convulsive upheavals seemed to have peaked as Tinubu took a stumble and fell on the podium of democracy like a martyr. His detractors and die-hard adversaries pounced on this with relish. Within minutes, the social media was awash with images of the now famous tumble with many hinting at a more sinister denouement.

       Although he got up, quickly recovered his poise and was able to take the parade including the drive around the entire stadium without being aided or assisted in whatever form, this did not deter his political assailants. A baleful fellow called the columnist hours later to ask whether the president had “stabilized” and he got such a severe tongue-lashing that he vowed never to get in touch again. Even while the parade was going on, there were clusters of protests by people either bemoaning the pervasive hunger in the land or demanding for minimum wage.

      Nigeria has never felt more fractious and combustible than this moment. It is a totally different conjuncture from 1993 which in retrospect looks like the Age of Innocence despite the subsisting horrors of the civil war and the vicissitudes of military autocracy. The mood of the nation is foul and there is a roiling distemper everywhere. Enemy nationals abounds.  The National Question has returned to the front burner. Only sound and durable economic policies can supplant it from its pole position.

      As he sets about consolidating his economic, political and cultural legacies, President Tinubu should avoid a tendency to impetuous and off-hand pronouncements which could lead to dire consequences for the economy and the polity as a whole. These are not the most auspicious of times to test the will of a fractious and combustible populace already tottering at the edge of despair and despondency.

     It cannot be said by any stretch of the imagination that the president is a left-leaning economic radical. But he should avoid a sharp lurch to rightwing social engineering which can bring him into conflict and direct collision course with his naturally progressive political constituency. It is a fallacy of economic thinking to conclude that compassionate redistribution of wealth and privileges is in fundamental contradiction with capital accumulation. In most forward-looking nations run by a visionary elite both run hand in hand in the interest of social harmony and national cohesion.

      President Tinubu has demonstrated courage and calm fortitude in his refusal to be fazed by Nigeria’s gargantuan economic mess. But this must not be allowed to conjoin with a growing perception that the government treats economic miscreants with a kid’s gloves. This is bound to backfire at some point with the possibility of snowballing into active disquiet and massive unrest.

      Economics of social disruption must not be added to the crushing burden of fractious and inflammable multi-ethnic nations seething with tension and mutual distrust. When he was asked why he always chose poor countries with weak social fabric to impose the harsh regimen of structural adjustment, Milton Friedman, the archpriest of market fundamentalism, retorted that it was because no economic breakthrough can be achieved without some chaos and momentous social dislocation. This is the rupture that accompanies new births and historical transition with its pangs and traumatic pains.

       Although no historic progress is completely painless, developing African nations must seek a more humane transition as an alternative path to fast-tracked development in contradistinction to the ruthless acquisition and bloody-mindedness which characterized Europe and North America in an earlier phase of their civilization. Organic nations which have taken centuries to build up can withstand the stress and strain of creative destruction better than plastic, multi-ethnic colonial nations still striving to achieve authenticity and cohesive identity.

      With its prodigious human and natural endowments, Nigeria can take the lead in this new vision of a more compassionate and humane society. If it does not, this column dares to wager that it will become very vulnerable to centrifugal forces in the coming epoch. This is the symbolic import of the famous stumble at the Eagles Square in Abuja last Wednesday. It is a mystical sign to get up and go. Falling and rising is an integral part of the equation of growth and development.

  • The strange ways of democracy

    The strange ways of democracy

    The ways of democracy are truly strange. Without democracy, a nation is a disaster waiting to happen. With democracy creaking at the joints, even the most advanced nation is a debacle anxious to unfold.  With the apparent failure of the regular democratic process in America to rein in a convicted felon and prevent him from upending the system, with the ethical collapse of the political class in Britain and the rise of far right xenophobic movements all over Europe, it is clear that the world is witnessing an antidemocratic whiplash.

    Predicated on and sustained by the ancient Athenian myth that it is people’s power (Demos plus cratos), the people often find that their power ends when the quest for liberty is consummated. More often than not the people have to be protected from their own worst impulses by wiser counsel which cannot come from the rabble. Yet the fact also remains that the human spirit cannot thrive under authoritarian shackles for long without something giving.

       After wresting power from tyrants, people often cede power to tyrants. This is because people’s power cannot sustain itself or enrich the society for long. After ridding themselves of their Bourbon tormentors, the heroic French people could only watch as Napoleon Bonaparte, a harsh, no-nonsense authoritarian law-giver, collected power to save them from themselves and from anarchy and chaos. In England, the same thing had happened much earlier with Oliver Cromwell just as it would happen later in Russia as Tsarist monstrosity was exchanged for Stalinist catastrophe.

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      And then the struggle for human liberation and emancipation is joined anew, possibly under a new set of actors and on a different political and historical canvas. Perhaps no one has explained this paradox of people’s power better than Unamuno, the great Spanish poet and philosopher, who noted that under tyranny people seek liberty but under liberty they also seek tyranny. If democracy were to be an old woman, it would be a whimsical and self-indulgent grand matron indeed full of great wiles and an unrivalled capacity for self-delusion.

      This is what has led many sober analysts to conclude that rather than being a destination, democracy is indeed a process, a tortuous and tormenting open-ended process at that, full of daring advances and stunning reversals; full of open stumbling and faltering, riddled with landmines and volcanic craters; bristling with detours, diversions and digressions.

      It is in this respect that President Tinubu’s historical stumble at the podium of democracy last Wednesday in Abuja should be seen for what it truly is: a symbolic capture for posterity of a people’s subliminal anxieties about the prospects of democracy in a deeply polarized and alienated nation. Yours sincerely watched it live and from a ringside perspective too.

       Always historicize!  Thus admonishes Fredric Jameson, the great American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist theoretician. “History is what hurts”, we are told, and “however much we choose to ignore history, history in all its alienating necessities will not ignore us”. Dear readers, please follow us as we take a grand historical excursion into Nigeria’s perplexing and intriguing journey towards full democracy and organic nationhood in the past thirty one years of struggle and in the last one year of the Tinubu dispensation.

  • The party that lost its way

    The party that lost its way

    Nothing lasts forever. All good things must come to an end. And so must bad things too. In the tropics, things grow quickly only to expire rapidly. Applying geography to the principles of development, some developmental scientists believe that this amazing political volatility and the velocity with which institutions, systems appear only to disappear is the fundamental bane of tropical Africa and its postcolonial politics.

      As a country and a people, South Africans barely escaped the heat and torpor of the tropics by the skin of their teeth. This was why the original white settlers found its temperate, equable climate quite conducive and amenable for permanent settlement unlike the torrid hell of the tropics where mosquitoes and pipe borne diseases served as the people’s real army.

     But from all indications, it appears as if the emergent post-apartheid political class in South Africa is not completely exempt from the equatorial distemper and political volatility which afflict their counterpart classes on other parts of the continent. At the end of the day, it is beginning to look as if the ANC, the party of Nelson Mandela, has reverted to the status of the typical African hegemonic party: big for nothing, lacking in ideological solidity, reeking of abject cronyism and nepotism and totally bereft of a proactive vision for inclusive and emancipatory governance.

      Yet as this column never tires of affirming, you cannot plant cassava and expect to harvest yam tuber. So it is that when the mist cleared from the last general election, the ANC received a severe drubbing in the hands of the South African electorate. For many discerning observers of the South African scene, it has been long in coming and this is nothing but the chronicle of a humiliation and disgrace foretold.

      The rainbow coalition in all its multi-racial potency has been reduced to a rumbling cohabitation of disaffection and disillusionment. The party that had hitherto held South Africans spellbound with its mythical status as the revered conclave of those heroic avatars of the anti-apartheid struggle had taken such a severe shellacking from the people, losing its majority and magic at the same time.

      This is political divorce the South African way. At the end of the day and with only forty per cent of the popular vote, the ANC is reduced to groping through the electoral void and darkness and to groveling for support to sustain its slipping hold from hostile competitors.

    Waiting in the wing is the baleful and implacable Zulu supremacist, Jacob Zuma, a former president and convicted felon, who has become the biggest threat to the continued dominance of the ANC. Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa have a visceral dislike for each other and the former president has vowed never to have anything to do with ANC as long as Ramaphosa remains president.

      It will be recalled that Zuma’s party, the uMkhonto we Siswe otherwise known as MK, erupted on the political scene only last year and has chalked up a surprising fifteen percent of the total vote, making it the third biggest. It is a rampart platform of disaffected ANC bigwigs and perennial ethnic malcontents. The ANC is trapped between its monstrous Zulu hordes and the more restrained and ideologically focused DA (Democratic Alliance), the main opposition which operates under a race and class slur being a merger between former apartheid stalwarts and liberal whites who were critical of the apartheid regimen.

      At the last count, the talk was of a Government of National Unity with the ANC surrendering the legislative rein to the DA while the ruling party remains in governance. But with the Zulu Question popping up once again, and the DA vowing to impose its rightwing neoliberal worldview on how the country is governed, it is clear that South Africa is engulfed by crisis of core values which it thought it had transcended with the emergence of Nelson Mandela.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  So what has happened in the intervening thirty years for South Africa to witness this massive return of the repressed? Is it a question of sheer political boredom or ennui with convention that often overtake voters in even the most advanced and sophisticated liberal democracies the world over? The power to disrupt power can often be as intoxicating as the power to dispense power. This is why it is important to beam a searchlight on the ANC debacle in order to serve as a cautionary tale for other hegemonic party formations and ruling coalitions on the continent.

    But we must thank God for small mercies. One of the great ironies of politics is that startling defeat often has its redeeming moments. The acceptance speech and the grace and statesmanlike sobriety with which Cyril Ramaphosa accepted virtual defeat and the dismantling of his party’s majority is arguably the finest moment of Ramaphosa’s political career.

      There were no tantrums or threats. The South African president accepts the supremacy of the electorate. This tradition of accepting defeat with grace and equanimity, ironically pioneered by the disgraced old apartheid party, is a pointer to how deep the authentic ideals of liberal democracy have taken roots in South Africa.

    Ramaphosa has always been a political enigma of sorts. He was rumoured to be Nelson Mandela’s favourite to succeed him as president. That was until the ANC Nomenklatura overruled Mandela in favour of the son of their old comrade in arms Giovani Mbeki. The future president was then sent to the city to make money and to hone his acquisitive skills. He might have succeeded beyond the wildest imagination, emerging as one of the nation’s preeminent plutocrats and loaded tycoons.

      It came at a price, with Ramaphosa enmeshed in fiscal shenanigans of his own making. Tragically enough and in retrospect, it would seem that unaccustomed riches have neutered Ramaphosa and robbed him of whatever remained of his ideological potency rendering him incapable of a visionary reimagining of a more egalitarian and inclusive South African nation.

     To be sure, both Cyril Ramaphosa and Thabo Mbeki are able and competent administrators. Each has also proved his mettle as solid emancipatory warriors in the long, tortuous campaign to rid their beloved nation of the apartheid scourge.

      But from what is on ground, it is obvious that neither of them has been able to make a dent on the nation’s mammoth social contradictions particularly the staggering political inequalities and economic inequities that have hobbled the South African society since the advent of apartheid rule. Neither of them, the golden boys of anti-apartheid movement, has been able to come up with a grand vision of a great post-apartheid society, inclusive and egalitarian to boot.

      Up to a point, Nelson Mandela intuited the problem and the possibility of a looming social apocalypse. But that is only up to a point. The great man correctly surmised that the long years of the struggle and his spell in incarceration under the most inhuman of conditions had drained him almost completely. He could only stay in office by ceding power to a younger, more mentally alert and far more energetic aide. Still, this was no substitute for a grand overarching vision of a new South Africa.

      Take for example the Jacob Zuma conundrum. Like his old mentor, Mango Buthelezi, the old Zulu lion, Zuma is a controversial and divisive figure, a Zulu supremacist with a feudal sense of royal entitlement totally at variance with modern democratic norms. But he is also a hero of the anti-apartheid struggle wildly adulated and lionized by his ethnic compatriots.

      The ANC old guard reckoned rightly that to deny Zuma his shot at the pie was to invite a scabrous assault by ever battle-ready ethnic hordes which could end up upending the rainbow coalition delicately and diligently put in place. They could only wring their hands in despair and disapproving despondency hoping and praying that the system would survive his baleful scourge.

       In the event, Jacob Zuma’ s reign turned out a classic study in arrogant, wrong-headed incompetence and tantalizing malfeasance. He was totally impervious to reason and inured to decent conduct. Hopping and jumping all over the place with an ancient spear handy and in hand, Zuma was a monarchical despot straight out of Sir Rider Haggard’s fiction. Like a vengeful demon, he simply took the ANC and South Africa to the cleaners. What the ANC paterfamilias were trying to avoid is what is now starring them in the face.

      That now leaves the question to be answered. Is there a big elephant in the ANC’s sitting room? Could it be that the great party founded in 1912 and which did not come to power until 1994 after it had come to represent the federated but unified consciousness of a new nation and a new people suffers from the Ben Bella Syndrome?  Ahmed Ben Bella was arguably the greatest hero of the Algerian Revolution. He fought the French colonial masters with everything he had.

     But when he eventually came to power, he was so drained and depleted by the struggle that he was reported to have spent the time moping and staring at the ceiling until he was put out of his misery by  Mohamed Boukhrouba ,aka Colonel Houari Boumediene, who removed him and sent him on exile. It was the same man who had helped him to power by using his military clout to neutralize Ben Bella’s implacable rivals.

     This was in sharp contrast with Habib Bourguiba and Tunisia. A deep intellectual who had studied his country closely, Bourguiba, while fighting to expel the French from the country, was already dreaming of how to transform the nation by overhauling its entire education system, emancipating the women, revamping its archaic agricultural mode and expelling the Tunisian monarchy of Ottoman Turkish extraction. 

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    Highly wily and compulsively manipulative, Bourguiba, through a combination of charisma and traditional Arab autocracy, accomplished all this within a relatively short period until he was removed in 1987 on the ground of senile dementia and total loss of cognitive ability by Ben Ali, his security chief.  The political culture of each country must be taken into consideration. Already worked on by a medley of Roman, Mediterranean, Ottoman Turkish and French cultures, Tunisia boasts of a highly enlightened political elite.

    The point to note in all this is that the set of skills and competencies required to fight off tyranny may be quite different from what is required to transform a nation post-tyranny. Only rarely and exceptionally in history do you find a leader combining the two. The ANC is still by far the best and biggest party in South Africa. But it faces a date with destiny and a radical metamorphosis.

  • The Children of Gaza

    The Children of Gaza

    Please spare a thought at this very minute for the children of Gaza. Many of them have been rendered homeless as a result of unrelenting bombardment of their homestead. They have been reduced to a precarious and feral existence as they eke out a living like slum rats in the massive ruins of Gaza. Some of them who have had their parents killed in front of them or siblings silenced forever in the apocalyptic  rubble are so traumatized by loss and the psychic intensity of their ordeal that they refer to the departed in present terms just as if they are around the corner and about to show up.

      It has now been revealed by medical experts that many of the kids are in urgent need of psychiatric rehabilitation as they manifest either suicidal tendencies or homicidal compulsions. A devastated war zone is the ideal breeding ground for war-mongers. These are the future Hamas warriors and implacable anti-Zionist ideologues. They will never be sworn to peace but to sweet revenge, and having seen what superior technology and better organization can do to hapless ancestors, they will come better organized and better prepared.

      Will the world ever learn? Will human-beings ever appreciate their mortal frailties and capacity for monumental errors of judgment? It is curious that while we are trying to deal with the seemingly interminable war in Gaza, we are already stoking the fire of the next round. In Gaza, we have seen the enemy and it is ourselves. Gaza has been a testing ground for new technologies of warfare, revealing a new capacity of humans to inflict maximum punishment and suffering on each other. The Middle East and the world will never be the same again.

     But as it is usually the case with human history, there is always a ray of hope and possibility in even the worst and most extreme of human adversities. Despite the horrendous suffering of the Gazanites and the horrible pains inflicted on them that may endure for generations to come, they are the unexpected winners of the moral and psychological warfare, not to talk of the propaganda blitz. In physical victory, the much lionized and admired nation of Israel stands diminished, depleted and psychologically drained even where the Israelis are not the original aggressors in this round of conflict.

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       Instead of being united by collective adversity, the Israeli society is badly demoralized and bitterly divided. Never in the history of humanity has triumph been more costly. As can be seen from the global eruptions against the war and in particular the momentous upheavals on western campuses, the Zionist franchise has taken a battering from which it is unlikely to recover. Never has an emphatic victory turned out to be more hollow and more Pyrrhic. It is most unlikely that Benjamin Netanyahu himself will survive a victory parade on the streets of Tel Aviv.

      As the Yoruba people will put it, a strong man without caution and discretion will always end up as the king among the weakling.

    And a volcanic eruption from Voltaire

    Upon seeing a young journalist importuning him for money again, Francois-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, the great French philosopher, writer and publicist exploded.

    Voltaire: Young man, if I were you, I wouldn’t be proud of myself.

    Young journalist:  But I must live!!

     Voltaire: I fail to see why.

  • A patriarch departs

    A patriarch departs

    To the magnificently draped and finely appointed events hall at Harbour Point where the land ends and interminable seas begin for a rousing Service of Songs for Pa Gabriel Adegoke Ajayi last Wednesday. It was a severely jetlagged columnist that made it to the venue. Haven promised himself and the children to pay papa our last compliments, yours sincerely had to wing his way homewards by whatever means available.

    Patriot, patriarch, philosopher, traditional savant and man of culture and sartorial refinement, Papa was also a man of uncommon humility and Spartan self-effacement. In his later years, he came to resemble one of those ancient Yoruba sages:  all-knowing and all-seeing but hiding it all behind a huge wall of chummy and adorable reticence.

      The late centenarian was a man of uncommon faith and exemplary devotion. Nothing could ruffle his Olympian equanimity. In his Gbongan community, he was very much loved and adored by both the young and the old. He was an apostle of peace, harmony and reconciliation. A quintessential traditional statesman, he was well-known for his unobtrusive kindness, generosity and charity. In Lagos which he took to like a fish to water, he mentored many a aspiring young people particularly from the provinces.

       As attested to by the presence of many brotherhoods and sisterhoods of Christian faith that came to pay him their last respect, Papa Ajayi was a heroic rallying point for Christianity becoming Life patron of the Youth Club at St Jude’s Church, Ebute Metta which he joined in 1949 at the age of twenty five and later as the Leader-General of the Guild of Stewards at the cathedral. He was also a Sunday School teacher.

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       In a moving tribute, Deinde Abolarin, one of papa’s numerous younger acolytes and adopted children, noted that in all his encounters with the departed icon both in Lagos and his Gbongan homestead, Ajayi never asked God for earthly riches and other secular blandishments. He was content with his allotted lot. The only covenant he made with God was for his maker to grant him the indulgence to live up to a hundred years.

     So sure and certain was papa that God would accede to this wish that no doubting Thomas or mortal frailties could upend his belief in the sacred covenant. On February 3rd, Papa reached the centenarian milestone. A few days later on the eighth day of February, Pa Gabriel Adegoke Ajayi was recalled by his maker.

       This write up is a tribute to a genuinely great man and one of the extraordinary figures thrown up by colonial and postcolonial Nigeria in order. We write this to draw attention to alternative lifestyles in this diseased and afflicted landscape. There is much more to life than stealing and state larceny. Here is a life of unrivalled devotion to people and noble causes. If Nigeria is ever going to get a reprieve from the colossal collapse of values, then it is important to cultivate a cult of heroic example.

    Pa Gabriel Olagoke Ajayi was born to the illustrious family of Chief Amos Ebenezer Ajayi at Ile Asoro Compound in Gbongan on February 3, 1924. He was the second of three siblings of his father and Mrs Elizabeth Eketunde Ajayi equally of blessed memory. Early life was rural and idyllic. The junction town was a mini melting pot with its peaceful, placid ambience hosting people of diverse sub-ethnic backgrounds while serving as an important and strategic holding fortress for traversing travellers. Ibadan was only forty miles away, Oshogbo thirty miles, Iwo nineteen and the famous Owu kingdom about sixteen miles distance. No town can be luckier in its choice of location.

     Christianity came early to the people and there was an equally vibrant Muslim community. In the event, the passion for education and higher learning grew exponentially among the people inducing a federated consciousness of competing ambitions which propelled the town forward as a remarkable citadel of learned people. The fruits of this hunger and thirst for education can be seen in the endless strings of accomplished and distinguished Gbongan indigenes in all the professions that we see today.

      Pa Ajayi was a rugged prototype and early exemplar of this passion for educational excellence and personal distinction among a forward-looking people. Very early in life he exhibited the remarkable trait of independence and single-mindedness when he was merely a six year old boy. He decided to journey to Ibadan forty miles away all by himself. He was lucky to be rescued by travellers who brought him back home to his parents unharmed. 

      By 1939 at the tender age of fifteen, Ajayi was in Ibadan Grammar School for his secondary education having passed his Primary School examination from St Pauls’s Central School, Gbongan. From Ibadan, he proceeded to Ijebu-Ode Grammar School from where he obtained his Senior Cambridge Certificate in 1942 in flying colours. Lagos, the enchanting capital of Nigeria, beckoned.

       In 1943, barely nineteen years of age, the young sojourner from the rural and provincial junction town duly arrived in Lagos to begin a remarkable career in civil service which saw him traverse many departments and ministries including Public Works Department(PWD), Ministry of Transport, Ministry of Health and Ministry of Communication where he was an Internal Auditor. He retired as a Senior Accountant at the Federal Provident Fund on January 21, 1976 at the age of 52 years after serving for 30 years without any blemish or stain on his professional escutcheon.

       It is remarkable that Pa Ajayi lived for another forty eight years after retirement. But a leader is always a leader no matter in what capacity he has found himself and no matter what dice life has thrown at him. What the civil service has kept to itself, the larger society received with bounteous gratitude. Pa Ajayi was to spend his retirement years reading, reflecting, counseling the younger ones while plunging full time into church and community activities.

      It can be said that this was when he truly came into his own. Despite his traditional aristocratic background, he was a man of modest taste and frugal disposition. Not for him any outlandish display of ostentatious wealth. As a thoroughbred civil servant, the civil service had instilled in him an almost ascetic self-denial which was colonial in its rigour and Spartan discipline. Ajayi believed that a man must live within his means.

      He was a genuine article or as the Americans will say a real McCoy. Those who flocked to him in his later years for guidance and mentoring did not do so on account of unmerited wealth or his wheeling and dealing on the corridors of power and corrupt influence. They did it because they found him an altruistic and noble-hearted man who was genuinely interested in people and their development.

      On a countervailing note, a leading son of the area and one of Nigeria’s most gifted entrepreneurs ever once rued to this writer in a tone of weariness tinged with puzzlement and perplexity about the strange modesty and the lack of energy and ambition for material wealth which seemed to have rendered the first generation of Gbongan elite who found themselves in the old capital hors de combat in the  scramble  for patrimonial loot and the stupendous bazaar opened up by Nigeria’s postcolonial pabulum.

      It was in the course of our long discussions and usual meditation about how to project the endowed township on the global map. And to cap it all, the same scion continued on a mournful and disconsolate tone, after they have retired and decided to make a home of Lagos, they look for the safest and most obscure corner of the city such as Iyana-Ipaja, Orile Agege, Igando, Ejigbo and Ikotun-Egbe to build their retirement perch as if they are not entitled to the choicest real estate in the city.

      I put this down to the ways of people of organic empires and kingdoms, people whose ancestors have created an orderly, peaceful and harmonious society in which everybody knew their place and things were done by measures and where defaulting criminals were punished with exemplary firmness and iron promptitude.

       In an ironic reversal of Peter Ekeh’s famous thesis about the “two publics” in which the new public, unlike the old traditional public left behind in the village, is seen as a Roman coliseum where anything goes and everything is up for grab, this new elite group from the heartland of old Yoruba empire sought to infuse the values of their ancient world to align with the dictates of the new colonial imperium.

      This is quite unlike their most implacable competitors, ferocious savages emerging from the hot hell of their anomic and normless primitive society. Grabbing, grasping and grappling with everything, they have come to see life as a ceaseless war in which all is fair. Yet as the Nigerian narrative unfolds, it is clear that those who hanker for order in a fundamentally disordered society might have put themselves for elimination.

     The last lot always tends to lose out in the economic sweepstakes. But if they survive the machinations and occasional resort to assassination, they often reach the zenith of their career where their passion for justice and equity, their sagacity and pragmatism and above all their tame and temperate political temperament often compel the nation to reach out to their prototype particularly in times of crisis and confusion.

     Neither king nor plutocrat,  Pa Ajayi was buried in his hometown on Friday with all the accolades and plaudits reserved for a colossus among humanity who left his footprints in the sand of time. The entire town took on a carnival-like atmosphere. From the second Service of Songs on Thursday and the burial proper on Friday, it was a triumphant communial processional.

       After the service of songs, yours sincerely headed out to reconnect with the town. One did not return home until midnight having been “captured” by some chaps who couldn’t believe that an apparitional figure like the columnist had actually materialized from the shadows. The rendezvous was the latest and arguably the poshest hotel in town. Situated near a palm-oil processing mill on the outskirts of the town, a strong stench of rotting palm kernel and decayed palm shroud lingered producing a feeling of eerie nostalgia. May the soul of papa rest in peace.

  • Weep not, William

    Weep not, William

    As Ngugi calls out the President of Kenya

    Oh boy, oh boy!!!! It has been a long time one had read such a blistering polemic. In a widely circulated epistle during the week, Ngugi, the great Kenyan author, has called out his president , William Ruto, for becoming a slave to American interests in the beleaguered country known as Haiti. Beware of these cunning sophists. Nobody would have thought that the old wizard of Gikiyu Valley still retained the literary firepower and the argumentative savvy to put the old political hyena out of contention.

      But there he was laying the stick deep into the rough back hide of William Ruto. It is obvious that Ngugi is in fine literary fettle and has lost of none of his immense capacity for a savage putdown. The crux of the contention was Ruto’s decision to send Kenyan police to keep peace in Haiti, a decision Ngugi believes is a slap on the face of the longsuffering people of the embattled country.

      If anybody should be compelled to keep peace in Haiti, it is the international order, particularly the Americans and French who have laid waste and devastated their former slave colony under the guise of peace-keeping. This charade has been going on for over a century and Haiti can no longer be described as a functioning country but a pulsating hell on earth.

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       Unlike many African leaders, Ngugi knows his history very well. Haiti is the first authentic black nation anywhere in the world, its Black leaders comprising of the descendants of freed slaves having fought off the mighty army of France to establish a nation of free citizens. Famously described as the Black Jacobins by CLR James, the Trinidadian writer and cricket enthusiast, it was a revolutionary rupture with the new colonial order brought to life by imperialist masters.

    But the colonial masters were having none of that nonsense. For the Americans, the inalienable right of all people to freedom and self-determination does not extend to sub-human species such as former African savages now parading themselves as revolutionary liberators. If such contumely were to be encouraged, it may plant funny ideas in the mind of their African slaves who at that point in time still had more than half a century journey to manumission.

       As for the French who were the former masters of the Haiti slave plantation, they smarted for a long time as a result of the heavy military drubbing  inflicted on them by a ragtag army of runaway slaves and irregular local militia. Consequently and with the connivance of the Americans, they resorted to a naval blockade which made it impossible for the Haitians to trade with the outside world. The reparations they demanded and got for lifting the naval siege crippled the new nation.

    Ngugi, a master of invectives, was unsparing in his strictures. Particularly telling was the oral technique of calling out a person by directly addressing them in their father’s name. Ruto’s eardrums will be ringing for a long time. The greater irony of it all was that Ngugi could be so dismissive, so corrosive and contemptuous of America’s values while writing from Atlanta. The narrative of human redemption is a permanent work in progress.

  • Tragedy in Tehran

    Tragedy in Tehran

    • The problems and prospects of theocracy

    Persia, or ancient Iran, the land of oriental splendor, of magnificent plumes and fineries, bewitching riches and wonderful poetry, has been in some posthumous turmoil of late. At its zenith, the Persian civilization was a landmark of learning and enlightenment; a beacon of great possibilities for the human race. But that was a long time ago. The world has since moved on. Civilizations come and go, leaving in their wake glittering monuments to human ingenuity as well as massive convulsions which take time to work out.

    Last week, a helicopter carrying the Iranian president and his entourage including the Foreign Minister, disappeared in the remote and mountainous region bordering Azerbaijan. It was after the presidents of the two countries had commissioned a dam for the benefit of the Shi’ite neighbors. It will be recalled that Azerbaijan, of Turkish provenance, has been at loggerheads with its Armenian neighbors over some disputed territories. It has only recently managed to turn the tide of defeat with some rousing victories.

    At first information was sketchy, in the tradition of closed and paranoid systems. But you must give it to the Iranians. Their management of information was superb and well-choreographed, like all people of empire who have to control the dissemination of news to the populace in order to avert panic and a security meltdown, this time under theocratic thralldom.

    It was first given out that the presidential helicopter which was travelling in a convoy was missing as a result of fog and possible miscommunication. Much later, it was admitted that the plane had actually had a hard landing. The passengers could be at some risk. Only those well-schooled in aviation gobbledygook or in the cloak and dagger lingo of international diplomacy could understand what that meant.

    Surely, if they knew that the helicopter had come down, they also ought to know where and how to locate its wreckage? That was not forthcoming. At that point, seasoned experts concluded that the worst fate imaginable had overtaken the Iranian president and that the authorities knew too but were only trying to prepare the public for the announcement while putting in place security measures to contain the situation.

    The announcement came eventually. Despite their effective management of information for the local populace, what the Iranian authorities were trying to hide was in full public purview. Despite its much vaunted claims to military superstardom, Iran lacks the capacity for self-surveillance and the ability to impose its will on its own territory. It took an unmanned Turkish drone to locate the charred wreckage of the presidential helicopter. Only God knows what the Americans and the Israelis knew at that point.

    In the event, Iran has been thrown into deep mourning. But the tears are not entirely for Ebrahim Raisi, the fallen president, who was not a particularly well-liked or venerated public figure in the capital. Many Iranians see him as an illiterate thug and brutal enforcer who must bear responsibility for the death of thousands of civil rights protesters and many others who accuse the ruling elite of massive corruption and cronyism. Well-schooled Iranians point at Raisi’s garbled syntax as evidence of a lack of formal schooling and the absence of familiarity with classical Persian grammar.

    Iranians could not understand how their country has fallen so low and how the glorious promise of the Islamic Revolution of forty five years earlier with its war-cry of political equity and social justice had come such a sad cropper. Many who were not born then cling to the romantic and starry-eyed notions of that epochal uprising against the old Shah and the ancien regime.

    Every government, whether secular and democratic or whether otherworldly and theocratic, must find a way of rejuvenating itself through its own internal mechanism and of renewing the faith of the people through its own exertions and exhortations. The theocratic monarchies of the Middle East and of Morocco and Brunei have proved particularly adept at this ritual of self-reproduction.

    Succession being non-hereditary, the failure of the Iranian Shi’ite revolutionists in this department may be due to the paradox of success leading to eventual failure. As products of a genuinely popular revolt against a moribund and corrupt system, their naturally authoritarian leaders saw no need to level with the people beyond a reliance on the harsh brutalities of mullah thugs and other enforcers who believe their job is simply to deal with enemies of the state with exemplary violence.

    This is always the problem with embattled theocracies operating under the cloak of secrecy and oath of furtive silence. Forty five years into the Iranian revolution, it is obvious from the unremarkable string of mediocrities it has thrown up as leaders that the fascist clerisy ruling Iran lacks the capacity for internal self-renewal as well as the ability to connect with the people. Increasingly disillusioned, the Iranian people have been voting with their feet. The election that brought Raisi recorded a miserable thirty percent turnout.

    The Iranian tragedy has been compounded by the fact that despite the country’s limited success in the field of nuclear development, it has suffered a series of reversals and humiliation in the military theatre which has put a question mark on its capacity to defend itself not to talk of project itself as a potential Islamic superpower.

    The summary execution by the Americans of Major General Quasim Soleiman, arguably Iran’s best loved general and deputy commander of the Revolutionary Guards while he was on recce in Iraq, the attack by the Israelis on its Damascus Embassy Annex which eliminated some key officials and the tame responses these acts of coordinated escalation have drawn from Iran have sown the seeds of doubts about the ability of the Iranian leadership to protect the country from unprovoked aggression.

    The Iranians’ weak responses might have prompted some military cynics to insist that the embattled leadership must have informed both its tormentors well ahead and probably how far and deep its missiles would go. There is something to be commended about the political realism and calm rationality of the ruling theocrats of Iran. They knew they were in the anaconda hug of an implacable enemy that would punish them severely for the slightest infraction.

    But to have crumbled in despair and look away as if nothing happened would have further lowered their esteem in the eyes of a restive populace. The people had already called them out for their inability to improve their material condition and stem the rising tide of hunger and misery in the society. To now discover in addition that the Islamic clerisy is also totally incapable of defending them against external aggression is to invite an apocalyptic meltdown.

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    The perpetual tension between theocracy and a secular vision of the world as encapsulated in the tenets of liberal democracy and the nation-state paradigm has been brought home once again in Tehran. Historically speaking, this latest round commenced when the Ottoman Turks were finally overwhelmed outside the gates of Vienna in September, 1683. 

    It will be recalled that as a result of the ascendancy of the Turks in the Islamic military sweepstakes with the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the new flag bearers of Islam stuck to the original manual of conquering the world by force and military fiat while their secular competitors intuited their way through science and philosophical revolution which opened the eyes of humanity to hitherto unimaginable vistas. Artillery of knowledge is always superior to the knowledge of artillery.

    As a result of that fateful turn, never has the gap between the secular vision and the Islamic world been wider and never has the military and economic superiority and dominance of the secular west over theocratic empires more emphatic. For example, it was given out last week that the helicopters carrying the Iranian president and his entourage were already flight-rusty due to lack of spare parts and adequate maintenance. This was due principally to American sanctions.

    Unhappy and endangered is the country that has to rely on its principal enemy for the supply of spare parts to maintain its fleet and military arsenal. It is a promissory note for self-liquidation. Surely, those who know the spare parts must also know the coordinates and communication channels of the fleet. It is very curious that without any prompting, the Americans and the Israelis began shouting from the rooftop that they knew nothing about the tragedy. The mind goes back to Samora Michel, the adulated and widely revered Mozambican leader and apartheid South Africa.

    The best outcome Iran can hope for to dispel the unremitting fog of tragedy and adversity is to pray for a quick resolution of the Gaza debacle. Thereafter, it must embark on a house-cleaning exercise that will lead to a rejuvenating and rejigging of the system before it tumbles into an apocalyptic nightmare.

    Unfortunately, the odds are not in favour of an internal reorganization in Iran. It will take another revolution for the system to open up. This is because unlike secular revolutions which are always open-ended and subject to rerouting, Islamic revolutions are driven by and often in thrall to a Master Text which cannot be queried or revised.

    Despite the arbitrary and vicious tyrannies imposed on them by despotic revolutionists, the French, Russian and Chinese societies were lands of a thousand philosophers and writers that could throw up contrarian figures that could modify the revolution while retaining broad fidelity to its ideological ideals like Deng Xiaoping or jettison it altogether as Napoleon and Gorbachev did. This is a theoretical and practical impossibility in Iran because Islamic societies are powered by totally different dynamics.

    Secularization has a way of producing its own deviants. In the US, Donald Trump has just issued what may go down as the most despotic Encyclical in the democratic history of Western civilization. According to the disturbed sicko, he was going to rule like a dictator over a unified American Reich.

    If the idea of a dictator ruling over the world’s most durable democracy is not disturbing enough, the echoes of Hitler and his doomed Reich ought to set off the alarm signals in the most patriotic of American citizens and all the global sympathizers of the most successful country the world has seen. A confrontation of hegemonic blocs of all hues and shapes now appear to be inevitable in America. If Donald Trump prevails, that will be the end of America as we know it.

    So despite the setbacks for Iran, there is still a lot to play for. But it will not be the outcome conventionally expected. It is precisely at the point when global attention is diverted by principal gladiators that a third party emerges to steal the thunder from both parties. Who would have thought that the centuries old contestation and struggle for supremacy between the dominant faiths of modern civilization will end up as a struggle for who can deliver greater material satisfaction and protection for their people?

    But while we are still at it, it is possible that other “faiths” lurking in the shadows especially in oriental and Scandinavian societies may step forward to offer their people even greater material satisfaction or superior capacity for forceful self-projection. All that is solid melts into thin air. Given human capacity for diffusion, dispersal, re-absorption and eventual dilution, it will in future be impossible to divulge the ethnic ancestry of these emergent societies just as it has proved impossible in the case of ancient Egyptian and Roman civilizations.   

  • Baba Lekki dismantles Okon

    Baba Lekki dismantles Okon

    Okon has been painting the city red. After making some money from his new business of human trafficking which he chose to call Mass Transit Across Lagos Rivers by Man-Made  Ferry (MASTMAMF), the crazy boy has been huffing and puffing all over the place, boasting that he would soon be in a position to liberate himself from domestic bondage.  The loony one hinted darkly that the day of judgment was at hand and that as a man of means, he was in a position to acquire more wives. “Oga sebi dem yeye Yoruba charge and jail baba say I dey commit bi-gamey, him go see tri-gamey soon soon”.

    After tiring of his idle drooling, snooper told the mad boy to go to hell.

    “How about throwing in the towel to go and enjoy your money?” snooper asked.

    “Oga, abi you think say I be foolish man? I no dey throway my towel like dat. I must to see something first. If to say you bring better Yoruba woman now, I fit do dat”, the crazy boy retorted with a sly wink.

    “Okay, take a leave of absence then”, snooper snapped.

     “I no get problem with dem leave of absence, na absence of leave dey worry man”, the mad boy rallied with expansive flourish.

    Perhaps Okon had carried his yanga business to Baba Lekki and the old man decided to teach him the lesson of his life. After a day of drinking and carousing around Obalende, Idumota and Obun Eko, the old man took Okon to Banana Island to view some vacant property. It was a mansion recently put up for lease or let by a hard-pressed politician who had exhausted his fortune in a hare-brained political venture. Cleverly and with devilish aplomb, the old crook had inserted an “i” in the signboard reading To Let.  He then told Okon to go in and ease himself before they could begin negotiations. Foolishly, Okon agreed but before he could unzip his fly, irate guards fell on him and beat him to a pulp.

    It was a deflated and thoroughly disfigured Okon that lumbered home that night. He was sporting a black eye and some hideous facial bumps like somebody who had been trapped in a bee cave.

    “Okon, what happened?” snooper screamed but secretly delighted.

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    “Oga, na dem mad Baba Lekki. He come take man to dem obonge house for Banana and dem to let sign come become toilet. Him say make I go pee. I no even comot blokos before dem godogodo people come beat Okon to nonsense”, the chastened chap moaned.

    “So where is Baba Lekki?” snooper asked.

    “He come vamoose like them Opobo ghost”, Okon muttered in pains.

    “I see”, snooper noted with a comic frown.

    “Oga wetin be Caveat Emptor abi na Epsom Salt?” Okon demanded.

    “Ha, it means buyers beware”, snooper replied suspecting another scam.

    “Kai, kai, na God go punish dis dem Yoruba people. Baba come take me to dem Yaba house and him come change dem sign to Cave Empty and him come tell me na Irunmole dey get am before before and I fit get dat one for small change. Dem senior Yoruba digbolugi no sabi say I don pass dem place before with dem sign. Naim I come pick race”.

  • Recent developments and their global context

    Recent developments and their global context

    All over the world and in nations whether civilized or civilizing, there is a crisis of rising expectations which has impacted negatively on the public perception of governments and the whole idea of governance itself. In the heaving and surging tide of cynicism and skepticism, people question the inherent capacity of governments to better the lot of the people they are supposed to govern.

    Citizens also express doubt about the conceptual possibilities of maximum satisfaction based on the timely delivery of all deliverables on which modern governance itself is anchored. In some extreme instances, it has led to some fringe groups demanding for the total eradication of government or the abolition of the tax regime with the war-cry: No Tax is the best Tax. At best, this is the well-paved boulevard to anarchy and chaos.

    Yet, there is a sense in which this profound disappointment and dissatisfaction with modern governance is rooted in an equally profound paradox: The paradox of progress. The rise in public consciousness and the liberalization of education which can be linked to the advent of Liberal Democracy and the age of Enlightenment have led to a growing skepticism and a healthy cynicism about human ability to rule over other humans in a way that would have been unthinkable in earlier epochs of absolute monarchs.

    Nevertheless, given the spate of political distemper and economic underperformance particularly in postcolonial societies where the natural process of political evolution was suborned by colonial intervention, the question now being asked in different quarters is whether liberal democracy and the whole concept of modern governance have taken on more than they can ever deliver or whether they are in fact suitable for societies with different pre-colonial trajectories. 

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    Whatever one can make of these agitations, the blunt truth is that not many people believe in government or invest much hope on them to do the needful anymore. Not even the great democracies of the west that have shaped the narrative of human progress and emancipation are spared the turbulence of doubt and despair.

    Take as an example, the case of Great Britain, our former colonial masters. After a string of competent but hardly inspiring leaders, the nation is poised to give the Conservative Party a resounding shellacking in the coming general elections. Led by the frugally efficient, coldly effectual but insubstantial Rishi Sunak, the party has struggled through three prime ministers in a matter of months and now appears to be at the end of its tether with a resurgent Labour Party snagging at its heels. The British public always appears to wait for an electable, socially pukka Labour Party leader before giving the conservatives a massive slap down.

    In the United States of America, the situation is even more precarious. The two main parties appear to have exhausted their political and historical possibilities. But the nation as a whole seems unwilling to embrace the third option. That would be a bridge too far for its conservative, radically modified and manipulated palate. So come November, the manic, maniacally divisive and hysterically manipulative Donald Trump may prevail, opening the door to an apocalyptic nightmare.

    In other major western democracies of Western Europe rightwing phalanxes of ethnic irredentism are mounting a siege on centralist and left of center ruling coalitions. There is a surge of the old, unyielding ultra-right in France which is quite alarming in its scope and baneful intensity. Russia under Vladimir Putin has become a bastion of reactionary hyper-Slavic nationalism bent on putting other civilizations to sword. Before our very eyes, Israel has become the greatest threat to world peace and territorial equilibrium in the Middle East. 

    If gold can rust, one can imagine the condition of iron. It is perhaps in post-colonial Africa that the distrust of politics and politicians has taken an extreme dimension. Popular contempt for politics finds outlets in military coups, the ousting of hegemonic cartels, civil unrests, violent protests, labour lock-outs, ethnic insurrections, religious upheavals targeting the state, economic warfare against the nation and generalized insecurity.

    This conundrum of progress without happiness or satisfaction has led religious scholars and developmental scientists to wonder aloud whether the whole idea of total government or governance which satisfies all human yearnings and aspirations is not an evolutionary overreach for the human species given the stage and state humans have reached at a particular period.

    In a multi-ethnic country like Nigeria, seething with tension and the bitter polarization of the political elite along regional and cultural lines, the circumstances are particularly dire with an implosion often not very far away. This is even more so in the aftermath of a contentious presidential election and the inability of the ruling group to secure an elite consensus for its programmes and in the face of a countervailing elite faction that is unrelenting in its bitter opposition to every step taken by the government.

    Such is the disharmonious and fraught atmosphere that no measure taken by government enjoys universal applause. In the event, some of the solutions canvassed by various stakeholders for overcoming the impasse reflect the urgency of the situation. While some urge a return to the more representative and less costly parliamentary system, others canvass for the retention of the presidential system under a reconfigured and radically restructured country in which no overbearing Caudillo prevails at the center.

    Yet for some nothing less than the dissolution of the country and its reworking into a loose association of independent states will do. A recent entrant into the coliseum is the former Head of State, General Olusegun Obasanjo, who has turned round to condemn the whole idea of Liberal Democracy as being inappropriate for non-western countries emerging from traditional societies. As usual, Obasanjo, compulsively conspiratorial as ever, may be stalking a different horse.

    This cacophony of discordant voices reflects the very lack of elite unanimity which is critical in pushing the country in the direction of comprehensive political and economic reform. Not only that, it is an eye-opener to how a politically fissured and fractured nation can host enemy nationals, armed dissidents, spiritual saboteurs and economic felons among factions of the political class and all within the same violated and embattled nation space. Permanently working at cross-purpose, the nation itself is permanently on the boil.

    In this toxic environment where there are no core national values or an overarching vision of the nation, anything goes. In the absence of any restraining factor, there is a desecration of the sacred ethos of politics and a devaluation of its ethics.

    To fill the vacuum is what this writer once described as “the politics of anti-politics”, a regnant tragedy in which everything that does little credit to whatever is noble and uplifting about politics is in full public view. This is what is unfolding in Kogi and the Rivers State where all known rules of political engagements are spurned only to be replaced by a bizarre personalization of power.

    When this writer first mooted the idea of the politics of anti-politics at the eighty fifth anniversary lecture of the Yoruba Tennis Club in September, 2001, twenty four years ago, it was to caution the nation against the authoritarian distemper and the lack of higher political sagacity that was beginning to threaten the foundation of post-military transition in Nigeria. Obasanjo, the man the soldiers had chosen to replace themselves, was beginning to show signs that he was still ill at ease with the democratic culture of give and take.

    Even that early in the day, he had done his best to snuff life out of the opposition parties. The APP was mortally wounded and the AD was on life support machine. Afenifere was on its way to the political hospice. Having captured Gani Adams, Obasanjo promptly put him on trial for treason with the enthusiasm and ferocity of purpose he had not shown while handling those who declared Sharia space in a secular nation-state. Of course, the Yoruba people were having none of that and they made sure they besieged the court until the trial was adjourned sine die.

    Yet a decade after this when the selfsame Gani Adams, now ennobled and empowered beyond his wildest imagination, attempted to corral the Yoruba people into supporting the Jonathan project, he was treated with the contempt and utter disdain reserved for bounders and cads as he marched up and down the streets of Lagos with his well-armed thugs.

    A decade after this and a few weeks back, the Yoruba people treated with the same disdain a group of political adventurers who attempted to take over a radio station in Ibadan in a very quixotic and harebrained bid for secession. So far no notable Yoruba lobby or influential group has come to their aid.

    Despite being at the intellectual vanguard of the clamour for the restructuring of the country, the Yoruba people are very subtle and sophisticated in their political offensives and can be very discerning and discriminating in the choices they make. To outsiders, this may appear as frustrating as it is disconcerting and concerning.

    The post-colonial arcade remains a site of congregating ethnic neuroses in with each group try to outflank the other. In the endless war of manoeuvring and positioning , Yoruba may momentarily appear confused and disoriented , but that is precisely because they are instinctively feeling their way forward in a  jungle of dissociated sensibility where nothing is what it seems. It is the consensus that matters to them even when they get it tragically wrong. It will help them to beat a retreat.

    Three months after the writer broached the concept of the politics of anti-politics in 2021, Bola Ige was brutally hacked down in the privacy of his bedroom. Almost a quarter of a century after, his killers have never been apprehended. Since then, more than two dozen speakers, deputy governors and governors have been removed from office either through judicial ruse or legislative chicanery.

    This is the background to the contemporary turbulence in Nigerian politics and why there is an overcast of uncertainty. The initial errors of judgment of the new administration arising from enthusiasm and relish for novelty coupled with the inherited political dysfunction, the institutional disorder and the accumulated errancy of the political class have turned politics into an ignoble profession and cast a deep cloud over the survivability of the Fourth Republic.

    As there can be no going backward, we have to keep pushing forward. Yet, it will be unwise to ever imagine that we can spin our way out of the deep political mess and fundamental developmental malaise afflicting the country, or to think that a mere resort to patriotic platitudes will do as the nation lurches from one difficulty to another. As we must have learnt from the sharp reversal of the fortunes of the national currency, even maintaining the old fiscal equilibrium is going to be quite a herculean task.

    The fierce battle to defend the integrity of the naira which seems to have taken on a more strategic reticence has shown a nation at the mercy of economic miscreants, political saboteurs and an enemy clerisy bent on upending the state and the nation as we know it. If the current administration allows them to weaken its resolve, or if it decides to “play” with them as a result of pressures, then we are on the threshold of significant developments.

    As the nation celebrates the twenty fifth anniversary of military departure and the onset of civil rule there is ground for cautious celebration and some sober reflections.