Category: Tatalo Alamu

• The terminus of termites

In poverty-stricken multi-ethnic nations, the most serious discords are fuelled by elite competition for increasingly scarce national resources. With General Buhari openly wondering how things could go so awry under his watch, and given the allegations of mindboggling corruption swirling around many important functionaries of the outgoing administration, we seem to have finally arrived at the terminus of termites.

But out of utter destruction and devastation comes the possibility of rebirth and regeneration. Nation-building is an open project. This is why it is far more important to concentrate on what can still be salvaged. The most potent threat to national stability is food insecurity. However, there is a sense in which food insecurity is always inevitable in a condition of generalized violence or in circumstances in which the entire country is embroiled in multi-dimensional armed conflicts.

 Either in antiquity and even more in our modern world, food security plays a pivotal part in guaranteeing the stability and progress of any society. This is why starvation is often regarded as a most terrible weapon of war. There is no army however proficient that can fight on an empty stomach.

In May 2021, the entire Chinese society rose as one to honour the departure of one of its iconic heroes. Yuan Longpin was an agronomist known as the “father of hybrid rice”. His contribution to the development of the first hybrid rice varieties was considered crucial to the success of the Green Revolution in agriculture which allowed China to be self-sufficient in rice production for the first time in its modern history.

   This was considered a matter of national pride for the Chinese people. A nation that cannot feed itself is considered an international embarrassment and a den of scavengers. Yuan Longpin went to his final resting place smiling and with multiple national honours from a grateful people. No African country, however big or commodious, has been near this breakthrough.

At a time when many countries are already deploying drone technology, satellite surveillance of farmsteads and robotic intelligence for irrigational purposes, most African nations are still stuck at the level of subsistence farming with rudimentary implements. The yield and output are so miserable that they can hardly feed the nuclear family. It may be useful to make a historical detour at this point.

While the idea of a modern Israeli State in the Middle East was being mooted by the western powers, a splendidly clairvoyant even if a tad cynical British statesman was known to have advised the perplexed Arab leaders of the time to allow the Sephardic Jews and their cousins to settle among them because the area would achieve food sufficiency in a record time.

Today barely seventy five years later, the modern state of Israeli has achieved food sufficiency in all areas and exports the surplus to the rest of the world. But for the endless strife in the region, Israeli could have been feeding the whole of the Middle East. It has been due to collective discipline, courage in the face of daunting adversities and the capacity for unrelenting scientific domestication of nature. The world waits for no laggard society.

 It is hard to surmise whether the Israeli gambit was just a one off or a dress rehearsal for future forcible occupations or compulsory resettlements, after all one of the contending options was to resettle the Jews around present day Uganda. This option was probably discarded because the choice of location no longer availed the imperialists the opportunity to set the Israeli cat among the Arab pigeons in a Middle East still in turmoil after the collapse of Ottoman suzerainty.

   Nothing much has changed since then, only the reconfiguration of global forces. The world is still divided between conquering nations that impose their will and conquered nations that must meekly submit to the will of the masters. Britain has since then gone on to expel the Argentines from the Falklands after military confrontation even as China brought Tibet to heel, decimating its culture and civilization while deliberately altering its demographic forever.  Russia is aiming to do the same thing in Ukraine.

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    Despite its size and incredible climatological clemencies when compared to Israel which is located mainly in the desert, Nigeria is not in the race. With the core east of the nation virtually paralyzed by violence and with armed banditry returning to the central stage on the eve of General Buhari’s departure, the incoming administration may find itself battling renewed insurgencies rather than tackling food insecurity. 

  The evidence and facts on ground are so clear and incontrovertible that they require no intellectual or creative amplification. Elite competition for scarce national resources is a direct consequence of an open looting of national patrimony  which no longer cares whether the national cake is baked or not. Just grab what you can.

   But this cannot go on forever. We are approaching a point when there will be nothing left to loot. This is the terminus of termites. When we get to that point, two things will happen, either separately or in conjunction with each other. State implosion in which the elites come to blows: an armed confrontation which will make Sudan looks like a child’s play or the Port Au Prince of “Commander Barbecue” whose horrific level of de-civilization and dehumanization can only be glimpsed from apocalyptic fiction.

  There is only one possible reprieve on the horizon, and that is if visionary governance takes hold in this land which immediately begins to set things right, particularly at the level of a vertical and horizontal reintegration of a battered country and a swift reorientation of elite impulse and the general populace alike. It takes a lot of balls and general bloody-mindedness.

  As we have demonstrated earlier, food security takes the pole position in the hierarchy of human needs and the architecture of insecurity. Our people hold that when hunger is removed from poverty, poverty is vastly degraded. Even in advanced and sophisticated societies, it is axiomatic that you must eat first before you can philosophize. The most tasking of mental exertions demands nourishment, unless one is a hunger artist.

  It is our mismanagement of modernity that has led us to this sorry spot, a liminal, limbo-like existence where the old rural communities are now viewed as times of idyllic bliss and contentment. In those agrarian communities, the communitarian mode of living saw to it that no one went hungry. Even the vagabonds and the ne’er do well were provided for and captured in the interweaving safety valves of familial, public and philanthropic benevolence. They must have sensed that they were paying for their own security.

But in postcolonial Nigeria, the heady and heedless rush to the cities, the phenomenon of unplanned and chaotic urbanization, particularly within the context of accelerating de-industrialization, and the increasing inability of paid employment to pay livable wages, have spawned a new generation of urban déclassé, hungry and angry and ready to vent their spleen on anything or anybody. Hunger is a real phenomenon in our cities and it turns many into ready recruits for all manner of anti-social exertions.

A visionary government must set in immediate motion, the process of recall and the depopulation of our cities ridding them of their poisonous human effluence. Those who have no means of livelihood and who have no visible business in the city must be encouraged to return home. Better still, considerable incentives must be given to those willing to be resettled in special farming communes to be set up in designated states across the country.

  Despite boosting agricultural output in some areas, the agricultural policy of the Buhari administration appears to be too unstructured and ad-hoc to make a permanent dent on the country’s needs. Some usually perceptive people are celebrating the return of corn to the market with the advent of the rainy season, forgetting that it is not supposed to be missing in the first instance and the fact that no serious nation ever leaves its food fortunes to climatological vagaries.

  This is the realm of primitive fetish and the superstitious inanition that have hampered Nigeria’s and Africa’s scientific food production for ages. While growing up, one’s mother insisted that if you happen upon a field of mushroom, the spread and stretch will dramatically expand if you immediately hurl some pebbles at the grey patch of delicious fungus.

  There was double jeopardy at work here. It was not only a case of hoping to reap where one did not sow, it was also a case of applying “native technology” to a process already completed. Almost seven decades after this wonder discovery of African science, certain species of mushroom have already completely disappeared from the system.

Rather than solely relying on enterprising individuals, government must now consider the possibility of going into large scale industrial farming either alone or in partnership with blue chip companies. As we have seen in the case of the outstanding and iconic Chinese agronomist, collective efforts matter a lot in this kind of national project.

 But individual geniuses are often decisive. Government must partner with and encourage our various institutions of agriculture, animal husbandry and fisheries to come up with cutting edge research adapted to local conditions which will optimize the yields in their various fields.

One will be shocked and scandalized if such researches are not already ongoing. On a recent trip to the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta after delivering the convocation lecture, one had been amazed and impressed by the staggering array of local products emanating from the university. But the extremely parlous condition of our university system renders such efforts isolated and not fit for general purpose except for the benefit of academic promotions.

Nothing short of a comprehensive blueprint for a well-coordinated National Agricultural Revolution will do at this point. Such a policy must involve a national buy-in by the people as well as the elite and must be accompanied by mass mobilization in which all available land is cultivated and made productive.

 At a point when land-starved countries like Singapore are taking to in-house farming, the vast productive and alluvial landmass in Nigeria which remains largely undisturbed and in a state of primeval bliss is nothing but a universal scandal which the rest of the world eyes with covetous design.

   As we said, national food security depends on other securities, particular peace and stability anchored on some broad national consensus. No country can achieve food security when it is permanently at war with itself and when it is plagued by multi-dimensional insurgencies. This is the conundrum of elite dyspepsia that the incoming administration will have to address.

This is not quite a saga. From its origin in Icelandic Literature, the saga is a tale of epic heroism and superhuman bravery brimming with outlandish derring-do. Seun, the iconoclastic son of the iconic and equally iconoclastic cultural gadfly and musical genius, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, has been in the news lately, many will say for the wrong reasons.

Unless one is a social deviant and anarchist, there is a lot that is outlandish about all this, but not much that is heroic. The facts speak for themselves. Seun was reported to have rammed the vehicle of a uniformed policeman. An altercation ensued and Seun lost his cool. His fists spoke louder than his voice and the young man reportedly struck the policeman without the dazed and bemused cop responding to the affront.

Strangely enough but given the Kafkaesque world of contemporary Nigeria, they seemed to have made up with the officer following him home and collecting the sum of twelve thousand naira to repair his damaged vehicle. If Seun thought that was the end of the matter, it has turned out that he was profoundly mistaken. The policeman was recording everything and he headed straight to the station to report the incident and tender his exhibits.

As the video went viral, the Inspector General was said to have been so outraged that he ordered the immediate arrest of the culprit. Thinking probably that he was going to visit the police for a friendly chat, Seun found himself handcuffed and thrown into a cell before being taken to court the following day.

However brave and nonchalant he may appear, Seun himself would have been alarmed by the unprecedented outrage and condemnation which have greeted his assault on a man in uniform. Despite the evidence of continuing police brutality against many innocent Nigerians, many citizens consider Seun’s infraction as the ultimate in civic insolence and social delinquency. It goes to show Nigerians are essentially law-abiding citizens who wish to live in peace in an orderly and better organized society.

We must thank God for small mercies. There is no calamity however great which does not leave room for some thanksgiving. Had Seun tried to assault an armed policeman in more civilized climes, the confrontation would almost certainly have ended in tragedy. Despite the massive outflow of public sympathy in this matter, the police must not revert to their default setting.

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The assaulted policeman was said to have lapsed into a coma after reporting the incident. Haba!! The hostility to Seun is wholly unnecessary and unprofessional. It gives the impression of a premeditated attempt to settle some ancient scores which would not do police image any good.

It is good to know where Seun is coming from. He combines the famed iconoclasm of the Kuti clan with a street irreverence and cynicism which come from the inner-city bowels of Lagos and its “dangerful” underworld. Unlike the other Fela siblings who exude fine upper class breeding and bourgeois civility arising from a cloistered and sheltered upbringing, Seun has had to make his way from Idi-Oro and the rough and tumble world of Kalakuta Republic. 

But this has not taken away a natural brilliance and striking intelligence. Yours sincerely once engaged the chap in a long discussion about Lagos and the problem of urban disorder at a place on Bourdillon Road.

Sober and extremely well informed about the sociology of urban chaos, Fela’s boy asked whether one was aware of the phenomenon of undocumented vagrants and uncaptured hoodlums who spread murder and mayhem in Lagos only to disappear into the inner-city caverns. Some of them even push their victims off the Third Mainland Bridge before jumping into the lagoon. It was a scary proposition.

Seun should have borrowed a leave from his illustrious father. Fela began his storied career by cocking a snook at the Lagos upper class society and its bourgeois values. Then he bought a brand new Benz which he loaded with firewood and could be seen driving around Lagos inside the grotesque spectacle. Then he changed his name. After that he founded the Kalakuta Republic which ended in tears and a tear-down.

 At the tail-end of his life when Fela was told that General Bamaiyi, the fearsomely whiskered and dreaded boss of NDLEA, wanted to have a word with him, the Abami man pooh-poohed the idea as utter nonsense. But when he was informed that the no-nonsense soldier was planning to storm his house, Fela quickly dressed up and noted. “ Dis one no be bamaiyi. Dis one na baamaayi”. (Just role on with it)

After almost a quarter of a century of running and occasionally stumbling, one can safely conclude that party politics and some variant of democratic rule have come to stay in Nigeria. One may demur at calling it a full blown democracy. But then as we have stated repeatedly in this column, there is no ideal democracy anywhere in the world; only approximations and proximate practice depending on how far a society has evolved away from authoritarian and unaccountable rule.

  This limitation notwithstanding, only the starry-eyed adventurer would imagine at this stage that a military solution is the answer to the country’s problems. Given the configuration of the country, the days of military coups in Nigeria appear to be over, except as a prelude to an unwieldy disintegration of the nation. This is perhaps the most signal achievement of the post-military dispensation.

 This past week, the apex court of the land settled the gubernatorial sweepstakes in Osun State in favour of the opposition PDP and its candidate, the ever gyrating and compulsively acrobatic Nurudeen Jackson Adeleke, making him the second person from his family to have ruled the state since its creation some thirty two years ago.

 The judgment demonstrated considerable circumspection, wisdom and statesmanlike sagacity. The Supreme Court seemed to have been nettled by recent criticism of some of its controversial decisions. This time around, the apex court appears to have jettisoned a reliance of technicalities to arrive at a credible approximation of substantive justice. In doing so, the court seems to have returned to the path of constitutionalism as taken by some of its fabled forebears.

 Only a supremely obtuse Supreme Court would refuse to monitor closely and acutely the situation on ground and the balance of electoral forces, or would attempt to play ostrich to the prevalent mood and sentiments of the voters. This is often a recipe for chaos and anarchy. Rather than deliberately courting disorder, judicial adjudication of disputed elections should be about returning peace to the street and helping the nation to find political equilibrium.

  It can be argued that for its abiding sanctity and institutional legitimacy, the court, particularly the apex court, should never be turned into a theatre for popular frivolities or ethnic grandstanding by political psychotics and other social deviants who can never find peace in a multi-ethnic society bristling with mutually antagonistic forces. But by the same token, going to court should not be turned into a legal euphemism for going to court injustice. 

The judgment of the Supreme Court on Osun should be seen as the “coup de grace”. Already virtually annihilated by the PDP steamroller in a core Yoruba state where it held sway with hegemonic relish a short while earlier, it would have been a miracle for an APC government to survive in such a hostile environment without a resort to political jiggery-pokery.

  As we have seen in Nigeria, this is a ploy that often comes with its own terrifying prospects and hazards for the survival of democracy. It is unfortunate that this should be happening in a state hitherto regarded as a bastion of progressive politics. The Adeleke clan are themselves cut from this progressive loin.

  Only God knows what their illustrious progenitor would be thinking in his grave. The ruling party went to the election badly divided and bitterly polarized. To be sure, a sophisticated electorate can actually vote in different ways on the same party and in the same election. But this time around, the rout of the APC is too compelling for such electoral nitpicking and erudite hairsplitting. The party should now go back to the drawing board to see where the rains started pounding it.

  It will be recalled that Oyo State, another core Yoruba state, had earlier given Seyi Makinde an emphatic return ticket to the gubernatorial lodge in Agodi. So overwhelming was his victory and so compelling was the bravura performance that even his opponents rose stoutly to congratulate him in a matter of days after the polls. This is as it should be.

  Makinde has been playing some astute and brave politics. He has shown himself a master trapeze artist of the political tightrope. The Yoruba political illuminati may pretend not to be watching and evaluating the performance of their sons and daughters in the field of high-wire politics. But they are actually and acutely monitoring developments. As they say, when a person is sent on a slave mission, he is expected to deliver with the aplomb and nobility of the freeborn.

   With this development, the PDP has punched a massive hole in the heart of the APC electoral suzerainty in the old western region.  With Ogun state already trapped by an adversarial pincer movement emanating from Ibikunle Amosun’s Owu redoubt and from some confederate elements in the Ogun East Senatorial district, this is going to present some political difficulties going forward for the president-elect.

  But Tinubu is a man of extraordinary political dexterity and sagacity who thrives best when under political pressure. It would have been strange and unusual if his acute and well-placed strategic antenna has not picked the landmines. It was precisely this and the constant taunts and jibes from elements of the northern political mafia that goaded Obasanjo into committing the electoral heist of 2003 and the forcible subjugation of his own region which signposted the decline of his political fortunes.

 From this, it can be seen that the demons confronting party formation in contemporary Nigeria are wholly within, powered by their own internal contradictions, particularly their mode of leadership recruitment and the perverse patterns of patronage and preferment which can be likened to a bastard feudalism unknown anywhere in contemporary political practice.

  Consequently, there is an ideological and structural meltdown everywhere. This is why it has been possible for a leading candidate in an ultra -right wing party to duck out of the party presidential primary only to emerge hours later as the presidential candidate of a purportedly leftwing party with which he had no prior organic connection or evident ideological kinship.

Yet despite this counterrevolutionary heist, there are millions of compatriots, including the supposedly enlightened, who look at this as the moment of revolutionary rupture with the old order. Surely, what is known in theory of knowledge as coupoure epistemologique is driven by more earth-shattering forces rather than a fellow who reminds one of the famous quip about the banality of evil.

   Going by the same logic, this is why it is also possible for a ruling party to throw all kinds of imaginable and unimaginable obstacles across the path of its leading candidate just to prevent him from prevailing and only to enthusiastically embrace the same candidate after he had miraculously triumphed as if nothing has happened. Just like that, as the immortal Fela would put it. This descent into what feels and looks like the realm of political phantasmagoria is a direct reflection of the contradictions at play.

 As a result of this strange political drama, the discerning observer would have noticed two intriguing developments. First is the sheer loss of ideological exuberance in contemporary Nigerian politics despite all the uproar. Either among old tested political buffs or newly arrived greenhorns, a sober pragmatism is the name of the game. The current commotion about zoning is a quarrel about patronage and not about principles.

 No one is willing to take any risk or act outside the script. Yet it should be obvious that in a mortally conflicted society, politics can do with a dose of idealism. It is axiomatic that without the injection of visionary idealism, no meaningful development can take place in any society. The triumph of transactional politics and of the commodification and commercialization of politics leads to a steady erosion of popular faith in the redemptive and ameliorative prospects of politics.

  The loss of faith in politics eventuates in apathy, withdrawal from public space by the people and abdication of civic responsibility. More ominously, it makes citizens very vulnerable to political conmen, spiritual quacks and violent religionists who promise them life more abundant and plutocratic wealth provided they become willing dupes and witless executioners.

  This weaponization of disorder and hunger in the land by politicians, clergymen and sectarian insurrectionists, bears only evil fruits as it leads to state atrophy or relentless attempts to bring the nation to its heel by armed confrontation. Once the platform of politics as the supreme arbiter of elite competition collapses, the highway to Khartoum or Mogadishu opens up.

  In the light of the above, enlightened self-interest demands that the political class takes a harder look at the code and conduct of politics in the Fourth Republic. The last election shows how prone a dysfunctional political society is always to a universal eruption of discontent and seething anger, an unstructured “revolution” which would have been met by a “structured” counter-revolutionary uprising. This in turn could have put paid to the nation as a uniform “non-negotiable” entity.

  Had the whole thing not been marred by an opportunistic switch of platform in the very last minute, had the leading lights been at it for much longer and in a calm, deliberate, painstaking and pan-Nigerian manner, had the movement been purged of its dangerous religious gaming and primordial excrescences, the outcome could have been very different. Even at that, it was a close-run thing.

But a serious nation cannot continue to run on luck forever. Something must give at some point. This is why it behooves on the political class to take a wholesale and holistic evaluation of the problems and prospects of party formation in the Fourth Republic. Since the collapse of the Second Republic at the tail end of 1983, we have never had political parties with firm ideological orientation, except the two state parties foisted on the nation by General Ibrahim Babangida famously dismissed by Chief Antony Enahoro as “government parastatals”.

  In the event, the Uromi sage was proved right as it was the principal members of the “left of centre party” that led the phalanx of treachery and perfidy that torpedoed MKO’s historic mandate.  So much then for a progressive and “left of centre” party. By the time they finished with the nation, there was nothing left of the centre except the humongous carcass of General Babangida’s chicanery.

 As a conservative establishment, the military are not institutionally equipped to furnish postcolonial nations with authentic, ideologically motivated left of centre parties. This is akin to shooting themselves in the foot. Twice in the history of Nigeria, in 1979 and 1999— and that is discounting General Babangida’s fabled fiasco— the military imposed broad-based pan-Nigerian parties on the nation requiring considerable elite consensus and conciliation. That was the NPN and the PDP. No one could fault their choice as it was in line with their training and elitist vision of the country.

  Unfortunately and as a result of this ideological lacuna which privileges booty-sharing as the precondition for national stability rather than accelerated economic development, the two state parties soon dissolved into a bazaar of open larceny which led to their collapse under the weight of their own iniquities and contradictions.

  But we cannot continue to blame the military in perpetuity. They have done their bit and have left the scene. In fairness to their heirs, they have been on their best behavior for almost a quarter of a century. It is now left to the extant party formation to take an inward look, particularly with regards to party registration from the grassroots level, the distribution of patronage and the vexed issue of leadership recruitment.

This column joins the civilized world and millions of musical enthusiasts and aficionados of stirring melody in wishing the late master crooner, screen idol, philanthropist and indefatigable campaigner for civil rights, Harry Belafonte, a warm, rousing and hearty farewell. Born on the first day of March, 1927, the great crooner died on April 25th. The musical word has been in mourning ever since.

  It has been a Jamaican farewell to a Jamaican original: warm, pulsating, heartfelt and shot through with a cheery insouciance which the great crooner himself would have lustily applauded. You may leave Kingston, but Kingston never leaves you. Born in New York the son of Jamaican immigrants, Harry Belafonte never forgot his Jamaican roots. He was to parlay the Caribbean riches and magical allure to his first ground-breaking album which became the first solo LP to sell over a million copies.

  That was in 1956 and the album was appropriately named Calypso, a mellifluous medley of Caribbean concoctions. The young man seemed to have distilled the experience of a decade-long sojourn in Jamaica living with one of his grandparents into the stuff of memorable and enchanting melody. A new musical icon has arrived on the global scene.

  After that stirring debut, nothing really could stop him. And he looked every inch the part. Tall, exotically handsome, magnificently well built, exuding confidence and an artless bravura, Harry Belafonte quickly became a global heartthrob with a cult following among teenagers in many countries. An older friend of the columnist who was in secondary school in the fifties spoke of desperate attempts to emulate his unique hair cut which always ended in tears at barbers shops. It was his natural hair line.

Yours sincerely discovered that one was not the only one to marvel at the source of Belafonte’s arresting looks. One had fingered a eugenically auspicious Caribbean potpourri of Indian, African and native genes. The reality is even more interesting. On both sides, he was the product of mixed racial unions. His mother was of Scottish and Afro-Jamaican lineage while his father was the child of an Afro-Jamaican mother and a Sephardic Jew of Dutch extraction.

  With his natural assets, it was almost inevitable that Belafonte would find his way to big-time film-acting. With his great friend, Sydney Poitiers, Belafonte had tried his hand at play acting earlier before the release of his chart-bursting album. The critical consensus was that Belafonte was not a great actor. Here, the plane seemed to have overshot the runway. It takes more than good looks and screen presence to be a great actor. Belafonte seems to have accepted the verdict with grace and equanimity.

This notwithstanding, it is perhaps as a campaigner for civil rights and champion of Black emancipation in a fraught and socially convulsed period of American history that this great son of Africa and America would be best remembered. Harry Belafonte took great personal and professional risks. He could not be fazed by the prospects of being blacklisted which eventually came.

Belafonte befriended and collaborated with Martin Luther King and was a famous feature of some of those epic marches for freedom without caring whose horse is gored. He took on some of the notable figures of contemporary American history without flinching and with remarkable aplomb. This was the finest moment of this son of Jamaican immigrants. May his great soul rest in peace.

May Day in Sudan

Africa is once again the epicentre of global developments. As usual it is not as an active participant but as a passive and inert repository, a cannon fodder of historical struggle, which perhaps explains the apocalypse in Sudan and why things have taken a violent horrific colouration. With the developments in Sudan, it is tempting to conclude that the more the old international order changeth, the more the universal verities remain the same.

  Unfolding realities may force new events to take on a new garb, but it is a garment made from the old fabric. The Berlin Conference of 1884/1885 and the partitioning of Africa were leavened by an ideological and economic commonality of purpose among the contending western powers which made things to appear quite benign.

   It was this benign avarice and covetousness which allowed them to postpone global confrontation for another thirty years until the Germans broke ranks.  This time around, the veil is torn off revealing barefaced international roguery and the shambolic, sclerotic hulk of colonial nation-states imposed on the benighted continent.

   Nobody is asking aggrieved members of the Nigerian political elite not to complain about the irregularities and electoral malfeasance they perceive as characterizing the conduct of the last elections. This is how democracy has been deepened in Nigeria in almost a quarter of a century after the military departed the scene. The problem is that many of those who are shouting the loudest this time around have also been the prime beneficiaries of electoral heists in the past.

  Consequently, it behooves on genuine Nigerian patriots to know exactly how much legitimate pressure  can be piled on struggling democracies without something giving. Already burdened by weak legitimacy, deficit credibility and lack of elite conciliation, there is a limit to the pressure fragile democracies can take before things tip over into anarchy and normlessness.

  To starry-eyed idealists in the comfort of their home or the breezy television pundits ventilating in the air-conditioned ambience of television studios all this might sound like sterile hogwash, but those who have taken part in actual struggles against tyranny and autocracy know that it is always a close-run affair full of unintended consequences and unanticipated detours.

   Modern nations are a permanent process of organic memory bristling with shared tribulations and communal triumphs. The foundational problem with struggling democracies in Africa, particularly in a country like Nigeria, is the absence of a social contract between the ruled and the rulers which commits the ruling elite to a programme of continuous political reforms and economic development.

 This kind of social contract, often unwritten, cannot be procured through endless constitutional tinkering but on the field of permanent struggle for political emancipation, bloody toil and ceaseless human exertion. This is part of what constitutes the holistic myth of national becoming; a veritable reservoir of sacred facts and fanciful evocations.

  Unfortunately, the fractious nature of colonially-induced countries, the mutual unintelligibility of countervailing cultures and the sheer ethnic and religious polarities, make concerted efforts for political and economic freedom a very tall order indeed.

  The gridlock is unimaginable, like an articulated vehicle with the wheels facing different directions. The din and the commotion from grating and grinding drown out everything.  Without some heroic pulling away from the abyss, the nation-state paradigm in Africa is at the end of its tether.

  Since nature abhors a vacuum, no one is sure of the kind of hybrid mutations or genetic monstrosities that are in the offing. The international community seems to tire of the nation-state and its depredations in Africa and are probably preparing for some endgame. Unable to handle the Pandora box put in place by their colonial forbears, they have decided to find a way round the beached whale.

   This past week, while a section of the Nigerian political elite was still bickering and threatening fire and brimstone over the outcome of the last presidential election, America quietly announced a new multi-billion programme of “mutual cooperation” with African nations for the joint explorations of rare metals that abound on the stricken continent.

  Now, the real battle has been joined and the final scramble for Africa is well underway. It promises to make the Berlin conference of 1884/1885 the child’s play it really was. The velvet gloves might have come off. There may be no point in pretending any further about the benignity of the global order. Rather than lying waste in primeval forests and fever-compliant jungles, these precious metals can be used for startling technological advances and enhanced human prosperity in advanced societies. 

 It will be recalled that France, China, Russia, North Korea and a host of sundry international non-state actors are already involved in extractive predation in many parts of Africa, particularly in Zambia, DRC, Sudan, Niger and Mali. Charles Taylor has done his bit after carving out a huge swathe that hugged Sierra Leone and Liberia. Not even Nigeria is exempt from these extractive depredations.

  Recently, the youthful Burkinabe military ruler bemoaned the fact that since the French left his country has lost about forty percent of its original size to rampaging marauders.  The Tuareg dominated, Sahelian northern part of Mali is also virtually decoupled from the Malian state. There are enclaves in the vast, chaotic Democratic Republic of Congo that are military prefectures. Central African Republic limps on after a savage civil war has devastated the entire country.

   Of all these continental tragedies, it is the grim nightmare unfolding in Sudan that concentrates the mind. Sudan is another word for black. But it is now a compelling metaphor for all that has gone wrong with postcolonial Africa, particularly the utter despoliation of a nation and its humongous resources by a disparate rabble of military renegades. 

  It was not always like this. Sudan was a compelling racial melting pot, a modern Mesopotamia of sorts where oriental, Arab, western and indigenous people merged and meshed. Although there was always a whiff of Arab overlordism and its hegemonic culture, much of this has been diluted and degraded by centuries of marriage and interracial mixing.

   Khartoum itself was a vibrant city, hosting many cultures with many aspiring pilgrims of Nigerian extraction stranded by choice either en route to Mecca or en route from the Holy City. There are cross-cultural references to Yoruba people in the novel, Season of Migration to the North by the Sudanese writer, Tayeb Sallin.

  The country also boasted of a robust Communist Party which was wiped out to the last man in an abortive uprising against General Jaffar Muhammad el-Nimeiry in 1971. But if anyone had doubts that Sudan had come into its own, the heroic uprising by the generality of the people against the cruel and predatory rule of General Hassan el-Bashir proved the point.

  That was only four years ago. Now, after three weeks of savage fighting Khartoum has been reduced to a vast crater with the odour of death and decomposition thick in the air. If anyone thought that heaving off the culturally and religiously incompatible southern loop of the country would bring peace, the reality is far more depressing.

   Unfinished business looms large in the fractured country. This week, one of the belligerents, Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo, aka Hemedti, let it be known that it was about time that people from the neglected and war-torn Darfur region of western Sudan take over power in the beleaguered country. This introduces a class and ethnic equation simmering just below the surface into an already combustible situation.

  Dagolo comes from a minority Chadian-Arab clan straddling Sudan and Chad who are despised and regarded as lowly and inferior by the more cultivated and cosmopolitan Arabised gentry of the twin-city of Khartoum and Omdurman. Hemedti has made fabulous wealth from his past infractions and has vast international connections.

   And he is not a hammock-bound commander. If he prevails, it will lead to seismic upheaval which will convulse the entire region with the defeated national army dissolving into urban banditry. If he loses, there is every likelihood that the rump of his militia will head for Darfur to begin a separatist insurrection.

Either way, it is apocalypse on the lower Nile. It is a tragedy already foretold even if inadvertently by outlandish fictional imagination. In his celebrated evocation of rapine and plunder in colonial Africa, titled The Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s narrator spoke of an encounter with the European enforcer deep in his lair in the wild ravines of Belgian Congo.

  Simply known as the manager of the interior, our man was so well-dressed and lavishly appointed that he could have been acting a major part in a film. But he was in fact superintending the most brutal and systematic despoliation of a people known to modern history. In his efforts to cream off the natural resources of this absurdly endowed region of Africa, Leopold, the German-born king of Belgium, killed, maimed and heaved off the arms and limbs of a whopping third of the indigenous population.

Almost two hundred years after, another manager of the interior came in the guise of Joseph Mobutu, a former pickpocket from the Equatorial forest of Gbadolite who had been recruited into the Belgian colonial army on the strength of his native intelligence and innate capacity for brutal exertions. Ever nattily dressed and impressively decked out in his trademark Fez cap and leopard hide cane, Mobutu could well have been an African prototype of the old colonial manager as he surveyed the ruins of his country from the balcony of one of his remote palaces deep in the Congolese jungle.

   Almost thirty years after Mobutu was driven out of the place, a properly functioning state is still a shaky proposition with vast ungovernable spaces interspersed with “free states” of lawless anomie. Countless civil wars later, the Democratic Republic of Congo hosts several contending armies of occupation. Extractive predation remains the order of the day with the state and other “free leasers” as active participants while a military prefecture rules the eastern tip of the country.

 Just as King Leopold and his agents by passed or simply ignored the traditional state structures they met on ground in the old Congo, the new managers of the African interior are most likely going to ignore the vastly diminished and attenuated relic of the postcolonial state on ground. This is going to be a state worse than formal colonization which flaunted some obligations.

  Some West African countries are already prone to this territorial meltdown. This is why Nigeria with all its current democratic imperfections and structural blemishes must not be allowed to go under. With Congo and Sudan out on a limb and with Ethiopia tottering on the edge as a result of a protracted inter-ethnic melee, Nigeria remains the only country with the size, the resources and the prodigious human endowment to lead an African pushback against a new wave of colonization. 

 But Nigeria ails grievously: politically, socially, economically and spiritually with the Sudanese symptoms slowly surfacing. This is why a lot will depend on what happens in the coming months.

Okon falls to Mama Igosun

It was the longest day, and the cannons of Kiriji were already booming. Even before commencing on the great march on Mama Igosun’s redoubt, Okon was already dreaming of sweet victory and sweeter revenge. “I go tie up dem Yoruba witch as dem dey do for Akwa Ibom. Dem small children go pepper am and im go confess. Dem go know say na dem yeye Yoruba people dey trouble dis kontri. After dat na dem OPC house I go head make I go finish dat were man who come beat Okon just like dat”.

   After Okon was forcibly dislodged from the house in a civil commotion that lasted a whole day, he had taken up residence with Baba Lekki who promised him a medical concoction that would make him invisible to any human-being.  But the crazy boy still had his doubts about Baba Lekki and his bogus charm. As he evaded Baba’s lunging walking stick, Okon suddenly rounded on the old crook.

   “Baba as una dey chase me, dat means you dey see me? So when dem medicine go start work, abi na Yoruba wayo?” Okon demanded.

    “Na by remote control I go trigger am. I get dem remote control from dem Agbanrere (Giraffe) neck and dem buffalo horn”, Baba replied.

     “So, how one go know say one don become spirit?” Okon pressed.

     “When you hit dem LASTMA people and dem no reply”, Baba answered.

      “Baba  wetin if dem charm no work?”, Okon asked the ageing scoundrel.

      “Foolish boy, he come be like the case of dem apprentice pilot who dey ask him oga wetin go happen if parachute no open. Na dat one dem dey call jumping to conclusion”, Baba Lekki retorted with a sinister smile.

     “Baba, walahi, if dis yeye juju no work, as you come draw blood from my head, naim I go draw blood from una mouth”, Okon snarled as Baba Lekki tried to hush him away. By now, Okon knew he was on his own. But he was determined to press his luck.  Very soon, Okon arrived at the sight of an uncompleted building that had just collapsed. It was a scene out of the apocalypse. While people were wailing, open looting was also going on. His sense of natural dignity and justice affronted, Okon blocked the path of a neer do well. “No be dem dead people property you dey thief so?” Okon demanded. Before the mammoth urchin could give a reply, Okon dealt him a resounding slap on the face.

   “Allah wa kabr, awon omo ogun orun dide”, the illiterate vagabond screamed and fled.

   By now, Okon had arrived around the neighborhood. He was now convinced that the charm was working and that he was truly invisible and invincible. Earlier, he had accosted a policeman who was openly taking bribe and dealt him a blow to the plexus. The rogue cop fled screaming “Chineke dem ghost from Atan don destroy me”.

    But the first sign that all might not go well on the home front came soon. There was Mama Igosun dressed like a local hunter swigging directly from a bottle of Seaman’s schnapps even as she swung to a 1930 classic by Denge in honour of one Maggie Macaulay.

As Okon made to sweep past her thinking that all this was an elaborate bluff, the Amazon blocked his path and stated cursing his ancestors.

    “Ekolo, abi wetin you call yourself, you no dey greet your mother for dem village?” she hollered as she tried to collar Okon.

     “Move”, Okon thundered as he sidestepped. Mama Igosun was so taken aback by the vehemence and ferocity that she tripped and fell. Okon rushed towards her room.

    “Hen hen, o ti lo gbagbara, abi?” the old woman screamed as she sprang after Okon. Overconfidence overtook the crazy boy. Before he could look back, the irate woman dealt him a blow on the back with a frying pan.  The effect of the blow was electric. Okon wound up like a stung millipede and upon recovering his senses, he took to his heels with Mama Igosun in hot pursuit.

As Nigerians await a new administration, it is imperative to beam a searchlight on the unenviable past which has determined the trajectory of contemporary international relations. Without understanding the global past, you cannot make sense of the universal present or come to a firm cognition of the immediate future.

Dear readers, what you are about to read was first published in the Summer of 2005. The west and the entire globe appeared to be in the grip of a new type of war .This was after the American-led invasion of Iraq and the virtual annihilation of the Taliban plague in Afghanistan. Barack Obama and the riposte of ultra-conservative bible-thumping American right as epitomised by Donald Trump were still far away.

So was Brexit and the rise of a xenophobic right wing nationalism in Europe. So was Covid-19 which was probably an oblique outcome of inter-power jockeying for pre-eminence and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia which is a direct manifestation. So has been the rise of militant and political Islamism as a countervailing force, despite military reverses and the ascendancy of globalism as an economic doctrine.

Meanwhile, a resurgent Taliban militarism has expelled the US from Afghanistan in humiliation and disgrace after almost twenty years of occupation. The scenes reminded one of the apocalyptic meltdown of America’s retreat from Saigon.

At the same time, Iraq remains a dismal anarchic mess two decades after the American invasion, and that is not discounting the American-inspired collapse of Ghaddafi’s Libya and the dissolution of the Maghreb buffer zone into a hotbed of narcotics and gun-smuggling which has turned the entire Sahelian subcontinent into a chaotic bedlam.

Last week, Sudan finally imploded with hordes of refugees spreading across the entire continent. The humanitarian catastrophe is better imagined. The bandit military caste that has held the nation to ransom for decades finally squared it off with a renegade militia that has its origins in the Janjaweed killing squad that terrorised Darfur for decades. Led by  Mohammad Hamdan “Hemeti” Dagalo whose Chadian-Arab origins are despised by the Khartoum-Omdurman Brahmin caste, this is a duel unto death fuelled by illicit funds.

In a scene reminiscent of the best efforts of Gabriel Marquez, the master of magical realism, Omar Hassan El Bashir, the man who caused it all, has been sprung from Khartoum central prison where he has been detained since 2019 and is purportedly held in a Military hospital. It doesn’t get more surreal in Sudan and postcolonial Africa. The prisoner of Khartoum may yet succeed in the terminal hospitalization of his country.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”  Thus, Charles Dickens famously opened his literary biography of revolutionary Europe. A Tale of Two Cities is a fabulous yarn about London and Paris. At that point in time, the two European cities were the twin-summit of western civilisation in all its glory and glittering contradictions. Yet Dickens, the supreme poet of urban squalor and muse of radical discontents, might as well have been writing about our own age, except that New York and London appear to have replaced London and Paris as the focal flashpoints.

      The world has entered a phase of radical dis-ease, of revolutionary and disconcerting paradoxes reminiscent of the approaching end of a historic era. We are far from the end of history, but not nearly as far from some history-defining endgame. Startling technological advancements cohabit with—and aids—political barbarity. The most advanced and refined of human societies also harbour the most extreme cases of regression into animal savagery.

  Pre-historic deprivation and destitution sit side by side with post-human paradise and sated, saturated bliss. While there are veneers of the First World in the old Third World, huge slabs of the Fourth World have invaded the First World, making nonsense of the old binary geopolitical polarities. Niger and Darfur jostle for attention with Tavistock Square and Aldgate.

      May you live in interesting times, prayed the wise and eternally inscrutable Chinese. No prayer could have been better answered, and in full measure, too. We surely live in interesting times. A new type of conflict, the first truly global war—for want of a better term—is beginning to envelope the entire universe.

  Unlike the old-type of warfare, this one is a war without defined battlefields or recognised combatants. The whole world is one vast battlefield and everyone a potential casualty. Mufti is often the uniform and there are no bugles heralding different armies or flags announcing national divisions.

 In such circumstances, the Geneva Convention about warfare seems tired and outworn. “Citizens” wage war against their own country in a startling redefinition of the whole notion of treason and patriotism; volunteers die in strange lands in a chilling re-enactment of the medieval struggle between Christianity and Islam. The enemy combatant may well be your neighbour, your friend, your colleague at work , a former schoolmate or even your own blood relation. Goodbye to 1984 and the world of big brothers. Welcome to the twenty first century, and to the brave new world of puppy tyrants.

    Whether this is a clash of civilizations, of cultures, of values, of barbarities, and even of fanaticisms and fundamentalisms is now beside the point. What is obvious is that international interaction is yielding to a new order. Buying into the advances of globalization, an anti-national, anti-modern and anti-consumerist species of Islam has been able to impose its own notions of warfare on the combined forces of western civilization.

  Knowing that it lacked the technological superiority to prevail on the strict and rigidly delimited battle-field, it has literally taken the war to the streets. Knowing that the crudest bomb can become a weapon of mass destruction in the crowded megalopolis of the west, it has struck terror into the hearts of millions by bringing the war “home”. And since it doesn’t have to clean up even in its own occupied territory, it has forced America into the quagmire of nation-building, a task for which it is particularly ill-suited by reasons of culture and political temperament.

        Like the proverbial fallen, hegemonic Islamism, down and out, flat on its back after centuries of repeated military and political humiliations from the combined forces of western ascendancy, has nothing to fear or lose. He that is down needs fear no further fall. But he that is down can bring others down, too. This variety of Islam may yet become the nemesis of a Christianity-based civilization.

   By slowly draining the west of its prosperity in a permanent conflict with horrendous casualties, by making nonsense of its technological supremacy through sheer attrition, by striking mortal fear into its dazed citizenry , and, above all,  by forcing it to compromise on the virtues of political plurality and tolerance that is at the root of its prosperity and civilization, militant Islam may end up up-ending the western giant.

We are back at the Dickensian paradox, and the brilliant English novelist’s tale of revolutionary Europe. The moment of consecration of empire is also the moment of its demystification. The lesson of history is that the precise point a society gets fully into its stride, the moment it reaches the summit of its particular civilization is also the moment it begins its irreversible slide into decay and irrelevance.

Britain was at the height of its imperial glory during the time of Dickens. The gifted novelist might have glimpsed the internal contradictions. But the profound irony was that at that point in time, his beloved country had also technically ceased to be a leading military power. It might have been the master of the seas, but even in Europe, the Crimean war had already showcased the future might of the Russian and Prussian (German) armies.

       Every Rome, then, has its own barbarians and whether the Islamic multitude will do for America and the west remains a matter for heated speculation. It might suffice to add that ancient Rome did not die as a result of a single mortal wound but of a thousand cuts. A nation’s torment is often etched on the face of its leading city. Like the great European cities of the late nineteenth century, New York and London have become the metropolitan show-cases of contemporary discontents. 

     Four days apart at the end of July, yours sincerely found himself tramping through the sweltering heat of New York at the height of summer only to be confronted by an early autumnal breeze in London. Originating from the mesmerizing chaos of Nigeria and post-colonial Africa, one has spent the better part of two decades living and working in several western countries and in the process earning the honorific title of a citizen of the western world. But a slow and steady transformation is beginning to take hold and to change the colour and complexion of life in the west, particularly after the tragedy of September 11, 2001.

       Perhaps the loss of western virginity has been long in coming. You cannot lay claim to being the arrow head of civilization and still maintain a political chastity. European imperialism and the triumph of western civilisation over native American culture did not flow from chastity but from intimidation and cruel pre-emption.  If the events beginning with the spectacular siege of the New York twin-tower led to a heightened awareness, a sense of insecurity and vulnerability in western societies, they have now culminated in a radical loss of innocence.

Having reconciled itself to the fact that the struggle against Osama Bin Laden and his followers is not going to be a quick fix, New York wears its state of emergency very well. The entire country appears to have been placed on a permanent war footing with periodic bulletins and adjustment of alerts. Yet everything appears calm and unruffled on the surface, until you begin to probe the inner recesses of the society.

  The security presence at the airport remains discreet and unobtrusive, but the customized screening, if your number comes up, is often comically invasive. Nevertheless, an ill-judged joke could induce an attack of nerves and send you in the wrong direction.  If you are asked whether you carry any sharp object on your person, better not indulge in any metaphorical flight by pointing at your head as this could mean pushing you headlong into the screener.

The journey from Newark’s Liberty airport to New York city proper via Kennedy airport remains pleasant and mind-soothing, until heat and traffic snarl take over. From Kennedy airport, you slip into Queens through Jamaica and then on to the subway from Brooklyn. Despite the surrounding filth and the shabby, claustrophobic milieu, the trains are still spotlessly clean and well-kept. The subway tramps are still there, so is the teeming multitude of the multi-racial underclass, a rainbow coalition of assorted crooks and con-men.

  Yet humanity still trumps villainy. You ask for a location and you are immediately surrounded by earnest guides and professional pathfinders. United by destitution and deprivation, the beatitude has no time or leisure to sort itself into primordial identities of race and religion. Overhead in the well-appointed suburbs and what is known as middle America, a bible-thumping fundamentalism, a homogenizing leviathan rules the roost.

          If you survive the sweltering heat and manage to turn into the right corner in Brooklyn, you may yet find a Nigerian restaurant serving steaming pounded yam dish. This is not mainstream eating culture, but a kind of counter-cultural alternative life style moodily and testily tolerated. Unlike the cosmopolitan and adventurous European taste, the American palate is more conservative and this gastronomic regression is viewed as a quaint anomaly, a lapse of refinement.

   The covenanted messianism  which sees America as the future of humanity often leads to a stifling cultural conformism and a unique closure of the American mind, but it also coalesces into a granite uniformity of purpose once America is under threat.

As it reacts with panic and fright to the eruption of Islamic militancy and mayhem on its shores, the British political establishment may rue the absence of the uniformity of purpose and the manufactured consensus that appear to serve America so well in moments of crisis. But this will be to compound an original error of judgement with an obtuseness of purpose. Britain is not America.

Over the centuries, and through much strife and stress, Britain has developed a culture of political plurality based on tolerance, compromise and fair-mindedness. In the process, it has evolved perhaps the first genuinely multi-cultural society that the world has seen. Extremists of all hues may from time to time tug at the fabric, the compromises may often seem like shabby collusion and complicity with evil but it works most of the time. By going to war with Iraq without the support of crucial pillars of the nation and with a manufactured consensus, Tony Blair substituted  American culture for  British norm.

         The dire consequences of that spectacular miscognition have arrived, with fear and unease enveloping Britain after the tragedy of July 7, with the militarization of a gentle society and the growing voice of right wing fanatics braying for blood and calling for a final solution to the immigrant menace. It is tempting to conclude that after running with the hare and hunting with the hounds, Britain has been hoisted by its own imperialist petard.

  But that will be a disservice to the society of good manners, of gentlemanly restraint and wise discretion. It is these golden virtues that produced the little Lagos of Peckham and what is known a tad derisively as Londonistan. Whatever its colonial past and current imperfections, Britain is shinning example of multiculturalism.

       That tradition now seems to be under grave threat. The kind of troop and security deployments that have been seen on the streets of England, particularly in London, in the wake of the recent tragedy must not be allowed to remain for long. A city with heroic antecedents, London, over the centuries, has seen many troops. But they were of a different hue: Magna Carta partisans, defenders of liberty and freedom, militant mobs, revolutionary crowds, chartists, Cromwellian stalwarts, Hyde Park tormentors of absolutism, freedom fighters fleeing from tyranny, exiled heroes of democracy and barons of sundry barricades.

        It is from this illustrious and noble tradition that Britain must now draw profound resources and reserves of strength and resilience in the confrontation with an Islamism mired in the grand dream of a  past  Al- Andalus rather than the great vision of a future El Dorado . In doing this, Britain must revert to its traditional role of a wiser elder sibling to an America of rampart militarism and bare knuckle reflex.

While military might is often decisive in war, it is intellectual and moral might that often carries the day in a confrontation of cultures. As the Iraqi debacle has shown, when Britain apes American militarism, the world is a less safe and healthy place, and the whole of western civilization is endangered. If the initial misjudgement is allowed to be compounded by further errors of perception, if a species of Islam finally drives the west to become its mirror image, then we might as well bid goodbye to Western civilization as we know it.

•First published in Africa Today, August 2005.

 In September 1993 as Nigeria lurched towards another full blown military dictatorship despite the exit of General Ibrahim Babangida in controversial circumstances barely a month earlier, this writer wrote a piece in Tempo the underground anti-military magazine. Titled Interim Bridge Over Troubled Waters, the article gave the Interim National Government of Ernest Shonekan a few more weeks to survive and the reasons why.

  The military hegemony that scuttled Abiola’s presidential mandate had not really left. They had merely retreated to reassemble their scrambled wits. They would be back. And back they were, in a question of weeks. On November 17, 1993, General Sani Abacha struck and swept the interim contraption into the trashcan of history.

   The country was at a dangerously low point, militarily, politically and culturally. The annulment had opened up a wide fissure in national cohesiveness. In a futile bid to hang on to the poisoned chalice, Ernest Shonekan began stalling and stonewalling. Even after a landmark ruling by the late Justice Dolapo Akinsanya abrogated the constitutional validity of the interim government, Shonekan, a lawyer, was in Port-Harcourt  asking the judiciary to steer clear of a matter beyond their judicial competence.

  Midmorning on November 17, 1993, General Abacha led a coterie of senior officers including the recently departed Donaldson Oladipo Diya to put the Interim man out of his misery. The first sign of trouble was when a group of soldiers led by a famously swashbuckling colonel summarily yanked off the state flag on Shonekan’s official car while General Abacha and his colleagues went in to ask Shonekan to do the needful.

 It was a tense and teary confrontation.  It was said that the UAC boardroom wizard was so miffed by the discourtesy and brusque disrespect that he chose to be driven to Lagos throughout the night rather than take the opportunity of a flight offered him. Having served its purpose, the interim contraption had become history.

 The fault was not only in the stars of the former UAC boardroom guru. It was also in the dynamics of the very events that threw him up. The success of failure is perhaps the most appropriate paradox to describe the dynamics of events that led to the emergence of the mild-mannered, urbane and reticent Ernest ‘Degunle Shonekan as the interim leader of Nigeria in perhaps the most difficult period in our transition from military rule to civilian governance.

   Having been chairman of a Transition Council with the stated brief to successfully midwife the transition from military rule to full blown democracy after General Babangida’s transition programme began to look like the cruel hoax it really was, Ernest Shonekan ought not have been saddled with the task of ruling the country after the entire exercise collapsed with the annulment of the election it was supposed to supervise.

  It was akin to rewarding failure. But the military, as the indisputable masters of Nigeria at that point in time, needed somebody they could completely trust to hold their colonial booty in trust while they return to the drawing board. Having been chummy with many of its leading lights, having played squash with them, not to talk of waivers in lucrative real estate deals, the apolitical and some will say anti-political  Ernest Shonekan fitted the bill perfectly.

  In the event, the interim government was dead on arrival. Beyond further confusing and disorienting the political class, it was never meant to usher in new elections after six months. The collapse of a Transition Programme after seven years of ribald rigmarole sustained by cunning and treachery is a major state failure which could only be redeemed by countervailing forces. The interim government was a civilianization of incompetence with the sole purpose of perpetuation of the military status quo.

Read Also: Afenifere USA opposes interim govt, urges Tinubu to unite Nigeria

  Yet despite the manifest and glaring failure of the interim contraption and the inability of its proponents to appreciate the dire wages of elite failure in a major national project, it is bizarre and bewildering that some influential Nigerians are still pinning their hopes on an interim government as the solution to our political problems.

  If the early proponents of this strange fixation with extra-constitutional tinkering with the political process can be excused on the grounds of misguided patriotism particularly at a point when General Buhari appeared bent on taking the country down the road to Mogadishu, nothing can justify such calls now that the transition project appears to have given birth to a new political order, irrespective of the birth defects and whatever the ill-health of the newborn. You cannot abort a new baby.

  The call for an interim government is a semantic and constitutional anomaly which has no place in an evolving democratic order, no matter its teething problems. It is a reflection of an abiding fascination with militarism. But it is also a strategy of false containment against brutal reality. In actual fact, the complete collapse of an order, whether democratic or military, has no place for the interim. Nigeria was saddled with an interim regime because the military still retained the initiative.

  When a military organogram collapses having exhausted its historic and political possibility such as we witnessed with the sudden and abrupt termination of the Abacha regime, it is only a fresh beginning which can stave off an apocalyptic meltdown.

  It should be recalled that in his maiden broadcast to the nation after the death of General Abacha, General Abdulsalaam Abubakar mooted the idea of concluding the widely discredited transition programme of his predecessor based on phony elections and self-succession.

  But he was swiftly countermanded by those who have put him there and forced to beat a hasty retreat. Had a more benign or visionary faction of the military succeeded in facing down General Abacha, what we could have had was either a swift restoration of Abiola’s mandate or a new order depending on the balance of forces.

  Almost three decades after, the new generation of officers and men of the Nigerian armed forces must be commended for having the courage and foresight to resist the calls for military intervention from some misguided youths and other aberrant factions of the political class. They now come better equipped in the professional sense and more intellectually endowed than their professional forebears.

  Global awareness about an emergent knowledge society which depends more on brains and emotional intelligence and the Nigerian tragedy must have furnished them with the hindsight that in a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural nation seething with multi-sector polarities, the irruption of military force into a political contest for hegemony can only trigger a chain of events the end of which no one can predict.

  The unfolding   Sudanese calamity lends a heavy credence to this supposition despite the glorious heroics and derring-do of the average Sudanese citizen in the last four years. Old Sudan has already fractured as a result of the mismanagement of ethnic and religious diversities by its ruling Arabized caste.

   But this fracture has not prevented two reactionary and reprobate factions of the hegemonic military/militia caste that has held the nation to ransom since partition from Egypt from coming to blows on the streets of Sudan in an apocalyptic endgame which has led to the entire country foaming with blood.

  Having preyed and predated on the country’s natural resources for so long, they are completely inured to the rationale of modern governance beyond their own struggle for power supremacy. The result is the human catastrophe we are witnessing on the streets of Khartoum in all its biblical magnitude with heavy weaponry bought for the protection of the nation being trained on it and on public institutions.

  Ruled by a bandit caste of Arab-descended conquistadores, Sudan is a classic metaphor for how not to do a modern state in postcolonial Africa. There are many African nations following suit. Somalia has been virtually stateless for over thirty years, except for a fraught reawakening. The Congo has never really known any peace since independence.

They have lent credence to the joke in international diplomatic circuits that the Black person doesn’t do big cities or big states either. If you point at the mighty empires and major kingdoms of pre-colonial Africa, they will point your attention to the fact that the operative word is “pre-colonial”.

  In Nigeria, the contradictions are so finely nuanced, so minutely discriminated and so overdetermined that it has so far proved impossible for any dominant faction of the political elite to maintain a hegemonic stranglehold on the rest of the nation. It is a negative equilibrium and whoever tried to dominate the country for long has always come to a perilous end as a result of countervailing pressures.

  The countervailing forces also dominated the last elections and made it impossible for the eventual winner to have absolute dominion over the whole of the nation. As many commentators have noted, it was perhaps the most competitive election in recent years and the one that reflected the will of the people the most. The National Question may be resolving itself in the most unexpected and dramatic manner, through mutually antagonistic sovereignty of the indigenous people of Nigeria.

  The multi-ethnic and multi-cultural colonial behemoth without an overarching vision of the nation is a classic recipe for political and economic underdevelopment, if not permanent chaos. Short of unbundling the mosaic and allowing the different ethnic groups go their separate ways, which is a virtual impossibility, concerned patriots must appreciate it when the mammoth heaves in the right direction and make the right alignment.

 The 2023 elections were not perfect. But they are a long way from the obtuse and criminal imposition by the executive which was the norm in an earlier phase. For those who may not know, it has taken a costly and bloody struggle to wrest Nigeria from the octopoid embrace of our former military despots and their various civilian adjutants.

When they join or instigate the calls for an interim government, it is because the game is not going according to plan. When they press deluded and starry-eyed youths into disruptive service, it is because they sense that they have been outsmarted in their old game of dividing the political class in order to rule them.

  Something is stirring in Nigeria. Even where it seems that the different nationalities are going their different ways, the centre is holding. It is a kind of competitive and self-assertive democracy which could well be a prelude to a more beneficial renegotiation of the terms of association or a more perfect union if the dynamics permit.

  Almost thirty years after Nigerian youths with bare fists fought the despotic might of the military on the streets of Lagos in protests against the annulment of the June 12 presidential election and the imposition of an interim government, a lot of water has passed under the bridge. In waves after human waves reminiscent of the Chinese army of the early fifties, they launched themselves against the tanks and armoured vehicles. Many perished and others were ruined for live.

  It is in the nature of history. As it is said, men and women fight for certain ideals. But at the end of it all, what they have fought for is not what has come to the fore. It is then left for others to pick up the struggle for a better society and a better world. Here is wishing all our readers a happy Eid el fitr.  

To the enchanting and scenic landscape of Ozalla in deep and rural Edo State this past Tuesday morning for the investiture of Dr Uyi Oduwa-Malaka as the Uzoyare of Ozalla Kingdom by his Royal Highness, the Onotare of Ozalla kingdom, Abraham Aikpokpo Akhigbe, (Okpamen VIII).

As a starry-eyed youth, yours sincerely caught the travelling bug or Sokugo, the wandering disease, while listening to tales of adventures and astral travelling from itinerant Fulani tribesmen as they traversed the whole Yoruba firmament with their cattle.

  Armed with only their pole guide and generous doses of some native concoctions, these intrepid wayfarers soaked the juvenile imagination with bone-chilling tales of adventures and miraculous encounters with strange animals as they descended on the southern coast from the arid and parched plains of the Sahelian desert.

  As the fabled Benin forest opened up to the rustic Savannah this wet and blustery April morning, yours sincerely was suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling of nostalgia. To get past Benin City proper to the Bye pass was a hellish proposition of hooting vehicles and yelling humanity snared in a tormenting tortoise of traffic.

  The arterial road to Auchi and the north of the nation had witnessed a significant deterioration since the last time one journeyed on the road. That was about ten years earlier. Now it was pock-marked and crater-ridden forcing the driver to undertake some hair-raising manoeuvring which would have been out of place in a normal clime.

 The driver, a daredevil racing buff of old Edo extraction, couldn’t care a hoot. Neither, it seemed, could the police orderly. His mandate, beyond running occasional political commentaries to the raucous delight of the portly driver, was to deliver two aging Yoruba notables to Ozalla in tolerable condition.

       Yours sincerely had been reduced to a carping and complaining wreck a few kilometres into the journey. The driver also concluded at this point that it may be advisable to take the Ifon-Oluku junction alternative route on the return stretch.

   “And this is the road Adams also takes from his village to Benin?” Yours sincerely finally exploded to no one in particular. My amiable companion in the car, a political heavyweight, former senator and former federal minister of state from Ondo State, took it all with calm placidity and serene equanimity.

 “Baba, na so we see am O”, the rogue driver intoned with a cynical guffaw. Adams, a great buddy of the writer, had had two memorable stints as governor of the place. Now, the entire land was in a state of fearful commotion with the north going back to APC while Benin and environs had succumbed to the dreadful plague Obidiency.

  Shortly thereafter, we had turned off the main road into a rural feeder which led to Ozalla kingdom. The entire route was festooned and decked in bright posters. It was as if the entire community had risen to welcome its remarkable product. There was a lot of singing and dancing. Even the palace of the Onotare appeared grand and freshly coated. The bevy of singing damsels, fresh, rosy-cheeked and displaying their remarkable embonpoint could have come out of the ancient palace of Overamwen.

   The ceremony over, we were treated to the memorable cuisine of Ozalla kingdom. It was a movable feast. But what did it for yours sincerely was the palm wine. Chilled and wondrously preserved in native gourds, it tasted better than the best champagne anywhere in the world. It has been a wonderful time in Ozalla. And here is wishing the Uzoyare many happy years in the service of her people.