Category: Tatalo Alamu

As we noted in this column about a fortnight ago, whoever happened to be elected as our next leader has his work cut out for him. Nigeria is in dire straits. The economy is on a tailspin with stagflation and de-industrialization driving the pauperization of the people to a point where Umaru Dikko’s cynical projection that Nigerians would have to start eating from the dustbin before he could believe there was hunger in the land has now become a moot academic point.

From all available evidence, it is now important to avert elite suicide in Nigeria. Our people are hurting from a misguided and misbegotten currency redesign fiasco. The horror of it all! Yet nobody of substance is offering a word on the fiscal gridlock of having the people denied access to their legitimate earning. This bizarre tomfoolery has lasted for too long.

In all likelihood, elite suicide will lead to the swift disintegration of the nation and leave all of us at the mercy of local hyenas and international vultures already on the prowl. Elite suicide occurs when the regnant elite formation of a nation can no longer handle the contradictions arising from their own acts of omission or commission.

The field is then left open to the rule of the mob which is anarchy formally enthroned. Politics in contemporary post-military Nigeria has failed to nurture and foster a wise and politic society. Instead the impolitic and impertinent rule the roost.

Professors, philosophers and wise men of the society are routinely slapped down in sharp and acerbic exchanges. One recalls that during the chaotic Chinese Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao finally had his way with a famous professor who had humiliated him as a private student by getting him to dig roots in a remote village without any opportunity of early restitution. It was called a Programme of Re-Education.

We will be lucky if this programme of re-education has not already arrived in Nigeria. Autochtonous species from the last redoubts of humanoid existence in Nigeria pop up everywhere. A city once celebrated for its leisurely cultivation and good manners has now become a point of convergence for arboreal creatures and other evolutionary fiascoes.

Whatever else you might say of the ancient Romans, it cannot be said that they didn’t lay down the rules of engagement in their famous capital. When you are in Rome, you do as Romans do. The English frown very much at disgraceful behavior not in accord with the people of excellent manners. The Chinese disdain bovine rudeness.

For some cultures, it is a matter of ancestral honour to comply with the code of conduct and habits of the hosting habitats. Nobody in their right senses will go to the core north and tell them that it is their desire to live among the women in purdah. It is a sacrilege that will be met with the appropriate response.

The tension is so palpable these days, the national discord so tangible that sometimes you feel as if you are in pre-war Lebanon or in the strife-torn Palestinian enclave of Israel. The discord and tension are driven by elite rancor and disharmony. Never in Nigeria’s post-independence history have the political elite been this badly polarized and bitterly divided.

It is just as well, then, that the BVAS imbroglio has forced Mahmood Yakubu and INEC to postpone the remaining elections by one week. That may well turn out to be a fortuitous collusion between technological imperfection and human incompetence. At least the tension will go down a little bit. As we noted last week, in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious country, if one section of the country decides to circle the electoral wagon for whatever reasons, it may provoke similar neuroses in other nationalities.

We have now arrived at a point where elections have become an ethnic census; a gathering of the tribal faithful. This speaks to a sharp retreat and regression of national consciousness which does not augur well for the Nigerian project. How did we get to this point when there are electoral markers in our recent journey to full nationhood which indicate a collective striving to overcome ethnic divisions and contra-national identities forged on religion and ethnicity?

The resurgence of ethnic revanchism and tribal triumphalism  in the nation’s political space is evident everywhere: in the media, on the internet, market place discussions and the so called social media where the gladiators come garlanded and festooned in primordial plumes. The cumulative damage to national consciousness is better imagined. This column has argued several times that elections without substantial elite consensus merely serve to exacerbate national fault lines.

Pretending to be saints in the matter, the federal authorities have also weighed in insisting that unlike what happened in 1993, they are not available to be used to truncate the electoral will and wish of the Nigerian people. In 1993, General Babangida and his military cohorts summarily annulled the freest and fairest election in the history of the nation sending the entire country into a nose dive from which it has not recovered.

On the face of it, the federal call out seems a patriotic and well-judged intervention. But it shows everything that is wrong with the post-colonial state. Unlike the classical incarnation where the state is supposed to be above the elite fray as it acts as a neutral arbitrator and impersonal adjudicator, the postcolonial state in Africa often wades into intra-elite disputes in a partisan manner, losing its authority and legitimacy to the fracas.

This was precisely how June 12 happened. Because it was a partisan rather than a honest and patriotic power broker, the military state allowed itself to be lured to take sides in the elite jousting for position and power. By the time the smoke cleared up from the coliseum, the army had lost all its claims as a national institution. It had become an ethnic quango brimming with state assassins.

As a parting gift to the nation, the Buhari administration must resist the lure of partisan proclamation from the lofty altar of the state as the nation faces its most tasking post-election management crisis. There is an ominous quietude about. Understandably, not everyone is happy. The outcome of the presidential election is a devastating blow to the solar plexus of many of the nation’s traditional power-brokers.

When General Ibrahim Babangida, Buhari’s military nemesis and bête noire, famously proclaimed from the military throne that although he did not know who would succeed him, he knew who would not, he was of course referring to his legendary capacity to ban, unban and then re-ban members of the political class.

In at least one significant respect, the Minna-born grandmaster of military chess was right. He was able to determine who did not succeed him. In the other respect, he was also partially right if his decision to leave General Abacha behind is seen as a masterstroke of genius and absolute self-interest. It is to be noted however that both feats have been achieved at the expense of the ruination of personal honour, the integrity of the profession and the reputation of his nation.

Power not directly deployed or crudely used for personal obligation is power most potent. The incoming administration must immediately put in place a mechanism for elite integration while a commission for horizontal and vertical mobilization of Nigerians across ethnic, religious and class divides must be immediately empowered to deal with exigencies arising from state omissions and commissions of the last eight years.

To do this, we must study closely the global phenomena that impact on the nation-state project in a dialectical combination of both the negative and the positive. Perhaps the most impacting of these global developments is the phenomenon of globalization. Twenty years ago, this writer had posited that if one cannot argue with an earthquake, one can at least study it closely in order to master its hidden dynamics and secret dialectics.

Globalization is rich and immense in its contradictory and countervailing resources. On the one hand, it can be seen as a major enemy of the nation-state paradigm since it forcibly co-opts nations into the ambits and parameters of its globalizing procedures and propensity.

On the other hand, since the nation-state project— as the site of the most potent resistance to globalization— needs to pull its inner resources and national resilience together to stand a chance against globalization, then the phenomenon itself can be seen as a paradoxical reinforcement of and collusion with the nation-state.

On the strength of evidence, we are still far away from the end of the nation-state paradigm. This is why despite its faults and iniquities, the nation is still worth putting up a strong pitch for. It is even more so in the case of a Nigeria which is widely regarded as the last Black hope.

• The Strange case of Omoyele Sowore

Globalization  the process by which a more developed part of the world incorporates and subsumes the less developed parts in its developmental orbit, has been with us for a long time, depending on the level of technology and the state of human consciousness. Slavery, for example, has always been part of the human condition as a consequence of wars, sieges, famines and other cataclysmic occurrences.

But the internationalization of slavery and the rise of globalized capitalism have engendered such dislocations and shifts in human consciousness the likes of which nobody has witnessed before in the recorded history of humanity. In the end, perhaps nothing can beat the description of globalization as the universalization of the particular and the particularization of the universal.

What do they mean by this? A particular brand of capitalism, that is western capitalism, projects itself as the global exemplar of this mode of production against the claims of all its competitors. From then on this brand began to lay claim to universal verity by suppressing the claims of other rivals and pretenders to the throne. By the time it has finished, it was natural to assume that there is, and has been, only one mode of capitalism that the world has known.

Western modernity, the intellectual ancillary and ideological power-house of western capitalism, deployed very much the same ruthlessness in its confrontation with other versions of modernity. It should be noted that before it gained global ascendancy over its rivals, western modernity, and in particular its Anglo-American variant, was only one of several competing and countervailing variants. But by the time it worked through its rivals, it was as if they never existed.

Despite the pains, the trauma and the shock therapy of its disruptive possibilities, globalization has been game-changing. It has brought accelerated development to parts of the world which would have taken much longer had they been left to intuit or feel their way forward. It has contributed immensely to the rise of a global knowledge society by making developments in the more developed centres readily available. Finally, it has accentuated global mutual awareness and collaboration.

But the obverse of the coin is equally compelling. Globalization encourages a cult of abstract idealism and unrealistic expectations among many former denizens of the Third World who have found their way to the west which tend to complicate efforts at home.

By constant carping and resort to an unfavourable comparison of the situation at home they often lose sight of the bigger picture, particularly where it comes to the democratic project. Yet it can also be argued that without nudging the home government to a higher ideal, nothing reasonable or realistic can ever be achieved.

Nowhere in the world has the democratic emancipation of a people ever been a tea party. You cannot latch on to the emancipatory projects of other people to compute and configure the historic trajectory of your own society.

You can surely borrow tropes and tropicalization but not the story line itself. The Magna Carta was not an African event, neither is the French Revolution or the Chinese Revolution for that matter. Out of its inner reserves of resilience and visionary stirring every society must fashion its own ethos of liberation. Without lifting yourself up by the bootstraps, you cannot appropriate the gains accruing from other people’s costly struggles as your legitimate inheritance.

None of these foreign events can be used as plea bargain or as part of an application for remission of sentence. Africans and in particular Nigerians must learn to build on their own history of resistance to evil governance. There is no short cut to manumission.

Those who use the latest disruptive technologies to disrupt the electoral process of their country are merely fronting for anarchy and chaos. The people who actually do the voting know how they voted and if the outcome does not tally with their expectations, they will also resort to self-help. So, in the spiral of chaos and destruction, self-help normally cancels out self-help.

Nigeria is at a delicate and fragile conjuncture in its post-military democratic evolution. Seventeen years ago in a paper delivered at the official launching of Sahara Reporters at Empire State Building at New York titled The Blogger As Nemesis, one had hailed the arrival of the citizen journalist at the site of unspeakable political crime. But one had also cautioned against the abstract idealism and the unrealistic expectations which often fuel and propel the blogger and whistle-blower in the diaspora.

As we argued further, this relentless bombardment and unremitting revelations of shenanigans in high places can actually play into the hands of counter-revolutionary forces that may be looking to impose their own rightwing solution on the organic crisis of the state in the face of the helplessness and utter paralysis of the will of the extant progressive forces.

Having made his own heroic and sterling contribution both as an observer and participant in the struggle for the expansion of democratic space in Nigeria in the last three decades, Omoyele Sowore should now understand the full import of that cryptic statement about abstract idealism and the hopeless habits of great expectations.

As another parting gift to the nation, the federal authorities should discontinue with any matter pending for this gutsy and patriotic young man and release his travel documents. Should the federal authorities fail to honour this plea, the incoming president-elect must consider the matter as an urgent obligation to elite-reconciliation in a divided and polarized polity.

Tuesday was a battle. It was not a duel against malevolent spirits and other scary demons. Neither was it a mortal combat against ogres. It was a duel with nature. And as Shakespeare famously noted, nature must obey necessity. By three in the morning, yours sincerely had lost the battle and had been knocked cold on the canvas. After two sleepless, excruciating and nail-biting nights of watching the results of the presidential elections roll in with almost deliberate tardiness, nature finally had its way.

By the time one woke up two hours later, a new dawn had broken over the country. Bola Tinubu, our long-standing friend and political comrade in arms, had been declared President-elect of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. It was the stuff of scintillating fiction.

 It has been noted that Nigeria is great movie crafted by a master artist at the height of his power and full of strange twists and even stranger turns. The canvas bursts with tumultuous characters, sacred monsters and human fiascoes from bygone and better forgotten ages. Perfidious prelates, mutinous mullahs, political astrologers and other spiritual carpetbaggers abound. They ply their trade without any concession to truth or fidelity to trustworthiness.  

 Not many people thought that this epic of daring, this audacity of the immensely courageous, could be carried off without some elemental upheaval. But there you had it, slowly unfolding before the naked eyes. The political map of Nigeria was being redrawn, perhaps forever and if not so in the very long interim.  

It was a beautiful Wednesday morning. The sky was as clear as it was candid. The nation was eerily quiet. There was something surreal and even unnatural about the atmosphere. The jubilation and applause was muted and restricted. The protests were half-hearted and constricted.

  Yet for a people who have just managed to elect their first truly civilian administration in the post-military era without the nuisance of military interlopers and shorn of the influence of the old selectorate, it is all the more confounding. Great events often announce their arrival with underwhelming aplomb.

Not even the man of the moment was spared the pervading sobriety. The president-elect appeared sedate, subdued and sombre, exhibiting commonsensical restraint and uncommon statesmanship. Perhaps the reality that he had just pulled off the greatest political siege in the annals of the nation and the burden of expectations going with this finally dawned on him. The man who walked on water has finally arrived at the lonely harbour of political intrigues and mysteries.

An Ibo proverb has it that if a man says yes, his chi, or personal god, must concur. It is a propellant of militant self-belief and unrelenting self-assurance. Tinubu has walked his talk. A fighters’ fighter and perfect embodiment of the warrior-spirit in politics, his outburst about emi lokan has already entered the nation’s political folklore and cultural lexicon. No matter what happens hereafter, the man has already passed into legend in his own life time.

  Not unexpectedly, it is the nature of what happens hereafter that has further divided the nation and split its fractious political elite down the line. As this column never tires of warning, elections never resolve national questions but often serve to exacerbate them.

Yet the irony of the Nigerian conundrum is that these countervailing forces can be used as building blocks for a new nation in which no hegemonic bloc, ethnic formation, religious phalanx or military guild can dominate or prevail without intricate negotiations and alliances with other ascendant groups. No group can lord it over the entire nation for long without the situation dissolving into fratricidal violence.

In the event, it is the group with the least polarizing baggage and the negotiating skills to broker deals with other contending groups that is assured of reasonable success in the postcolonial emporium. As hobbled and disorganized as the APC appeared going forward towards the election, this is the lesson the party and its flag bearer have been able to teach the nation.

Those in the heat of battle or hand to hand political combat never see the situation as it truly is. Outsiders often see us better and from a sharper focus. The Americans provided the best description of the just concluded elections when they deemed it as most competitive. Nothing can be more perceptive.

The election hugged all the fault lines and flashpoints of ethnicity, religious rancor, demographic polarization, inter-generational conflicts, gender disparity and class disequilibrium without any one of them or a combination thereof being powerful enough to take down the country. At the end of the most consequential presidential contest in its post-military history, the nation is still standing.

There were so many surprises and unfathomable twists. It will be safe to conclude that nothing is sacrosanct again. All revolutionary reordering of the society often begin as minor political hiccups. As we have noted, we may be witnessing the forcible reimagining of the political cartography of the nation as handed down by Lord Lugard and as reinforced by the advent of unitary government. Nigeria may yet involuntarily restructure itself to a more livable country without formal battlement.

We say formal battlement because lives have already been lost. Due to what is known as the cunning of history, men join particular battles without knowing what higher causes they are being used for other than what they think they are fighting for. This perhaps is what the President-elect meant when he said that he himself may well be an agent of a bigger phenomenon.

With this election, we have witnessed the disappearance of the twelve million votes warehoused somewhere in the core north permanently poised as a weapon of electoral shellacking. In retrospect, no one can be sure of the actual existence of this mythical electoral incubus usually called upon to steamroll the rest of the country into electoral compliance. All we know is that even General Buhari lost in his home state of Katsina.

Second is the decline and political superannuation of certain apex sociocultural organizations in the country. Out of abiding respect, this columnist will not mention names. But it is now obvious that they have been punching above their real weight and are of scant electoral values when the chips are really down.

  They have survived for long by skillfully aligning themselves with the mood of their respective regions. When they stray and go off message, humiliation and disgrace follow. In order to avert the looming terminal disaster, their regnant rumps must now go back to the drawing board. In Yoruba culture, there is a protocol for the retirement of pertinacious elders from partisan politics and this may be what is unfolding before our very eyes.

   Finally, this election has shown the terminal unraveling of the old class of military selectorate, the men of the 1975 post-Gowon power consortium, who have held the nation by the political jugular ever since and whose word had been final in selecting who rules and runs Nigeria. This time around, their whimsical and hypocritical endorsements amounted to little within their own catchments areas.

  They left things too late until bitter defeat and demystification became their lot. Unfortunately, it is obvious that they can no longer call for reinforcement from the usual quarters. Fortunately, Nigerians are a kind and forgiving lot. They will accord them full respect and recognition in appreciation of their past services to the nation once they gracefully refrain from meddling in our affairs.

  The obverse of the coin is equally interesting and full of mystifying portents. It is generally acknowledged that the heroes of the APC sudden renaissance against all odds and conventional wisdom are the northern governors who stood firm against the polarization of the party as its presidential primary took a nasty and unpredictable turn.

  But they themselves have not been able to prevail in their respective states. The feisty and rambunctious Nasir el-Rufai barely hung on in bitterly divided and polarized Kaduna State by the skin of his teeth. Aminu Masari was narrowly edged out in Katsina State. Governor Mai Mala Buni lost Yobe to PDP while the courtly and affable Abdulai Umar Ganduje was steamrolled by the Rabiu Musa Kwankanso blitzkrieg in Kano.

  The substantial votes accruing to the APC in these core northern states cannot be lightly discounted. But the fact that the governors struggled to barely retain the status quo is an indication of the unstable political dynamics in that region and the fact that the north is yet to throw up a dominant political figure post-Buhari. Politically speaking, everything is up for grabs in the north.

It is a measure of the unruly dynamics and the desacralizing momentum of the unfolding political era that the victorious APC flag bearer lost his Lagos base to a coalition of ascendant forces. This is the state where the former senator has loomed large, unchallenged and seemingly unchallengeable in the last twenty four years since the return of civil rule. As if to add to the bitter pill, the APC was also wiped out in Osun State, a core Yoruba dominion and bastion of progressive politics.

    Despite this tumultuous yearning for change in other parts of the country, it is only in the South East that we witnessed the return of the phenomenon of total voting. Buoyed by ethnic hysteria and egged on by irrational fears masquerading as facts, it is an anti-democratic ethnic census; the equivalent of circling the electoral wagons. It can only provoke similar neuroses in other nationalities and return the country to its 1966 default setting.

 How this will help Peter Obi grow his “revolutionary” momentum remains to be seen. Without any doubt, the most substantial factor impacting the recently concluded elections is the demographic shift in favour of youth. But it is a phenomenon mainly restricted to the predominantly urban conglomerations of the nation. Without ever tending the revolutionary gardens or weeding the shrubs, Obi has cashed in on the cocktail of ethnic resentments, economic inequities and generational disillusionment.

    But revolutions and revolutionists are usually made of sterner stuff. A person cannot learn to be left-handed or leftist-leaning in old age. Lacking an organic backbone and totally bereft of a vision for the radical transformation of the society beyond its soporific shibboleths, Obi’s inchoate ensemble is likely to coalesce around its ethnic substratum in the coming weeks. As the gloves come off, the “revolutionary” himself is likely to be outed as a smart Alec merely gaming the system.

  With ethnic revanchists on the prowl stoking the fire of national conflagration, the president-elect has his work cut out for him. Going forward, a lot will depend on his legendary political skills and capacity for conciliation. For now, congratulations are in order.

The above would have been a depressing catalogue of Yoruba comprehensive failure in the postcolonial Hades of Nigeria. But it is a profound irony that the argument eventually turns on itself. All the failings and weaknesses of the Yoruba people also happen to be the source of their strengths and successes in contemporary Nigeria.

It is due to these failings and weaknesses that the scion of the Igbo ethnic group and the Yoruba greatest political rival for power would describe Obafemi Awolowo as the greatest Prime minister Nigeria never had. It is also not by accident that the frontrunner and the man to beat in the current race for the Nigerian presidency is also of Yoruba extraction.

Thirdly, the moderate success that modernity and modernization has had in the South West of the nation is due to the liberal and accommodating nature of the Yoruba people. This is what has made the old region a magnetic hub for those absconding from the harsh economic and political brutalities of their catchment area and a Mecca for those in quest of cultural and sociological rehabilitation.

Finally, in the unremitting harshness and bitter desiccations of the postcolonial coliseum that is Nigeria, the South West is still the most livable and most civilized segment of the nation. This is at a point when the other rival regions have virtually dissolved in chaos and commotion as a result of internal contradictions.

Contrary to the postulations of later-day mischief-makers motivated solely by hatred and vendetta, the original Afenifere credo does not mean that one should love one’s neighbor more than oneself. The ethical thrust of the Afenifere maxim inheres in the equitable delineation of spheres of authority and jurisdiction. If this were not so, the original Action Group would have meekly surrendered the old Western region to Zik’s poaching and predatory antics.

If your neighbors want to indulge in the futilities of unitarist dominion in a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural nation, he should by all means go ahead but he should not by any means attempt to corral or overrun your own region in the process. Two Yoruba proverbs explain what is going on.

One has it that even the farmstead belonging to a father and his son must have boundaries. The other holds that if you find yourself and your child engulfed by flames, you must first try to rid yourself of the tongs of fire before you would be in a position to save your child.

It is useful to recall that before the NCNC was subject to wholesale ethnicisation upon the death of its old supremo, Herbert Macaulay, and the ascension of Nnamdi Azikiwe as its leader, it was predominantly the party of the Yoruba coastal aristocracy comprising of Saro elites, Brazilian émigrés and the indigenous moneyed and propertied class. But by the time Zik finished with it, it had become the pre-eminent vehicle for Igbo political aspiration.

This was the momentum that carried Zik to the old Agodi Gate thinking that the premiership of the Yoruba west was a done deal. The flamboyant master-propagandist did not betray any sense of outrage at this frank anomaly. It all seemed perfectly normal. But he failed to reckon with the fact that the Yoruba political elite know how to fight best when they have their back to the wall.

As state-oriented people of empire, who have themselves thrown up one of the most remarkable imperium in pre-colonial Africa, the Yoruba know when to rock the boat and when not to stir things up. This can never be equated with timidity or cowardice. It is called state valorization. But it did not stop them from cocking a snook at the state when it overstepped its bound.

No one knows how to fight their corner better than the people. For a long time during a crisis, there may be evidence of a moral atrophy or paralysis of the will. Empty verbal grandstanding or futile sabre rattling may be the order of the day. But when a consensus emerges often through the recondite means of aggregating the mutually hostile outlook and warring notions, Yoruba always manage to throw up leaders who show grit and determination.

It is the leonine valour of an Herbert Macaulay. It is the grit and determination shown by an Obafemi Awolowo as he slogged his way through futility and heroic failure. It is the grit and determination shown by an MKO Abiola as he marched through aborted triumph and heroic martyrdom. And it is the grit and determination currently shown by Bola Ahmed Tinubu as his political blitzkrieg rolls relentlessly towards the coveted prize. Not many political purists would have given the latter duo a fighting chance.

The ways of history are truly mysterious. Nobody gave Bola Tinubu much of a chance when the gladiators’ arena opened. It was seen by many as a bridge too far. But Tinubu has shown much courage and heroic indomitability in the way he has demolished opponents of mythical power. He has picked his way through the desert of a thousand vipers like a gifted snake charmer until nothing appears to be standing between him and the Golden Gate. It is the stuff of the greatest fiction.

Unless something else is the matter, the former Lagos state Governor has demonstrated enough guts, conviction and steely resolve under withering fire to be admitted to the Nigerian Hall of Fame of exceptional politicians. Based on the events of the past few months, only the most biased and jaundiced would deny that Tinubu by his courage, character and cujones is an authentic member of the Yoruba pantheon of mythological heroes, those avatars who choose to dare gravity and court martyrdom.

Let us now round up the observations. In the postcolonial coliseum, it is the emergent contradictions and new realities that throw up the type of leader most suitable for the moment and the mode of engagement. You cannot prescribe the ways and means of old heroes and their fighting strategy for new situations. This is what makes old revered savants look so helpless and pathetic under new light.

It is the passage of time and unfolding realities that have made the peremptory order by a section of the ancient Yoruba leadership asking their political wards to refrain from participating in the presidential election to now appear in its startling and grievous magnitude. It is a flawed and fissured policy shot through with ideological and strategic errors.

To start with, the order betrays an aggravating lack of fidelity and faith to what it is trying to copy.  Consociational bonding and pacting among the political elites of a fractured polity is usually preceded by widespread consultations and intense negotiations among all the elites and not by sectional grandstanding and one-upmanship. The Afenifere grandees compounded the initial error of judgment by showing open hostility to some of the contestants.

Second, asking people to refrain from contesting under a severely flawed 1999 constitution which they themselves have openly condemned and contemned is like asking to be accorded priority of service in a restaurant you have dismissed as a public health hazard. More seriously, it is akin to tying up the hands of your own political wards behind their back in the context of a free for all fight.

One can then imagine what would be the fate of Nigerian politics if Bola Tinubu had declined to contest the presidential election or if he had ducked out of a confrontation with the feudal limpets in APC in the same way and manner Peter Obi bolted from the apparatchiks of power in PDP. It is still morning on creation day. Tinubu may just be the lightning rod for a cause greater than himself. Those who refuse to profit from a dialectical reading of history are condemned to suffer the horror of its consequences.

As the nation finally wings its way towards the most momentous election in its post-independence history, one thing is now certain. This is not going to be election as a carnival. The mood of the nation is too tense and foul for that. There are times when a carnival-like gaiety takes over the electoral fortunes of a nation, usually as a precursor to great revolutionary changes in the structure and texture of the society. There is no such indication at the moment.

As it is, there is no great ideological contest going on. The ruling elite have settled for liberal democracy, warts and all. The eponymous Nigerian masses and their former patrons in the intellectual sub-class are too inchoate and incoherent; too weak, too enfeebled, too disoriented and too structurally divided to mount any meaningful challenge to the dominant order. This, it seems, is not the time for any fancy stuff.

The only beef among the various factions of the political elite appears to be the management or rather the mismanagement of modernity. Even at that, only one or two of the candidates appear to be adverting their mind to the fundamental crisis of modernity in a country hobbled by conflicting and countervailing modes of economic, political and spiritual production.

Yet everywhere you turn in Nigeria, the mismanagement of modernity stares one in the face whether as seen in the casual and cavalier override of the supremacy of the Supreme Court, the inability of the Central Bank to submit itself to the rule of law, the economic onslaught on the socially disadvantaged and the endemic lack of capacity-building in the leading parties which has resulted in their inability to cohere and coalesce into organic political formations.

At a time when other countries are taking developmental strides towards a new type of human society, it is a pity that we are still mired in a developmental stasis as we struggle to leave behind us the pre-modern epoch and its mindboggling incapacitations.

The queues that surfaced this past week, of hard-pressed Nigerians hunting for their own currency like Stone Age people foraging for food is a sad reminder of how easy it is for human civilization to suffer a catastrophic reverse. The mindset that loathes modernization and its consequences is the greatest enemy of the nation-state paradigm in Nigeria.

As the nation approaches its rendezvous with history, there is a seismic undercurrent which may not be apparent to the casual observer but which is nevertheless suggestive of a tectonic shift of attitude and perception among the Nigerian populace. First is the increasing preponderance and involvement of Nigerian youth in the struggle for power. This is a reflection of a shift in the demographic balance of voting power. Youth is a stuff that will no longer endure.

One may of course regret the ungentlemanly and boorish conduct, the resort to foul and violent language particularly on the internet, the unethical deployment of fake news which has virtually compromised the efficacy of the legitimate channels of communication and the resort to fraudulent manipulation of public opinion through fabricated polls prediction. But when you look at it closely, these are all byproducts of the crisis of modernity. You cannot cherry pick your way through a crisis.

Two issues keep cropping up in elite discussions, particularly among the concerned elite of Yoruba extraction. These issues reared their head once again in correspondence this past week with two avid readers of this column. They are both distinguished Nigerians, of different genders. The first position illustrates from an acute perspective what can be called the afenifere debacle in the postcolonial dystopia of Nigeria.

The second is a lament about the de-civilization of Nigeria in the light of ongoing attempts by some state institutions to deny Nigerians the right to assert and validate their humanity. We give full hearing to the first position before rounding up with our own commentary.

These are very fraught and interesting times indeed. It is a very precarious moment in the history of the nation. Nigerians need to reflect deeply  about the fate of the country, particularly about the ironies, contradictions and paradoxes that mark their constant encounter with history and the unending struggle to create a livable nation out of the chaotic amalgam handed down to them by their former colonial masters.

To do this in the column this morning, we have decided to enlist the thoughts of some outstanding philosophers. From different angles, their penetrating illuminations will beam on different aspects of the Nigerian conundrum.

  Perhaps it has to do with the month of February itself. In the tropics, February is a complex and contradictory month. It is the month of progress and retrogression alike. It is the month of renewal and regeneration when the tropical world bids goodbye to the hot and sultry dry season to welcome the first rains of the year. The farmers get to work. There is hope and optimism in the air. But things can still go terribly awry, particularly if there is a miscalculation of the climatological designs of the elements.

  The month of February occupies a storied place in the post-independence history of the nation. It was the month when a Nigerian military leader was assassinated in broad daylight on the streets of Lagos. Were he to be alive, the mercurial and tempestuous Murtala Mohammed would have been eighty five this year.

On February 13th 1976, he was cut down in a hail of bullets at the age of thirty eight. The officer who captured the assassin told this writer of how he brought him down to Bonny Camp tied up with his belt as makeshift handcuff.

 During the melee, the then Major General Alani Akinrinade, having conferred with Lieutenant General Theophilus Danjuma, strolled into an adjoining room filled with officers in order to find a radio set to counter Colonel Dimka’s incoherent and inebriated broadcast. The officers all stood up to attention. But they were all part of the plot. 

 Let us now fast forward the plot. Eight Februaries ago, Major General Mohammadu Buhari was riding the crest of public opinion as the messiah the nation had been waiting for. At this point, the general from Daura could do no wrong. Nigeria had taken a bad mauling from corruption, insecurity and wanton inefficiency. The tall, abstemious and astringently incorruptible former infantry officer was widely seen as the man with the magic wand to do the needful.

  Despite some sharp disavowals and strident condemnation of what was perceived as his bigotry, his sectionalism and predilection for languid abdication of responsibility at critical moments, nothing could dent or sully his reputation among his teeming compatriots for fairness, fearlessness and abiding patriotism.  He was considered a man far more sinned against than sinning.

 There was widespread nostalgia for his first coming when he stood ramrod against the bastions of corruption and state debauchery. He wore his steely patriotism on his sleeves and as part of his epaulettes. If only he had been allowed to do the needful by his corrupt and politically tainted military contemporaries, Nigeria would have been a better place for everybody. Unhappy indeed is the land in perpetual search of heroes.

   Eight years and two presidential terms later in this momentous month of February and as the general from Daura prepares to hand over to his successor in arguably the most consequential election in Nigeria’s history, the public mood has turned sour and sullied. All the accolades and ululations have disappeared.

  In their place there is a country-wide bitterness and recrimination. Even in places where the general was deified and considered a secular saint, he has been subject to rowdy humiliation or sullen disapproval. It appears as if the northern militias no longer hearken to their old magus. As they say in this part of the world, dem mumu don do.

   There is something very nasty and even psychotic about the Nigerian political mob, particularly when it finally turns against a public figure. There is no reason or restraint to the wild animus. No hostages are taken and no quarters are given. The achievements, however minor or miniscule, count for nothing. The mood is frankly and frantically regicidal. Having shot himself in the foot, how the president hopes to conduct free, fair and generally acceptable elections in these murky circumstances remains a mystery.

  It will be speculated that what finally did in and unhorsed the former infantry officer are his careless and carefree attitude to public plight as seen in the lingering fuel crisis and his obsession with economic corruption even while stoking the fire of political corruption. By a remarkable political irony, the two Supreme Court arbitrations this past week underscore and signpost the president’s plight and predilection.

   The first, and by a stretch the more infamous, is a tribute to judicial infamy and political nepotism. It will rank as a calculated assault and unconscionable damage to Nigeria’s political evolution. In reinstating the candidacy of the senate president and by resorting to empty legal technicalities such as the fuzzy and woozy distinction between originating summons and writ of summons to do so, the apex court flunked a chance to pronounce on a matter so fundamental to Nigeria’s burgeoning democracy.

   If the political parties had been functioning properly, the ranking echelons ought to have prevailed on the senate president not to pursue the case to the apex court, particularly after appearing to have relented. It gives the impression that Senator Ahmed Lawan is still needed for some unfinished hatchet job. More seriously, it puts the Supreme Court on the spot, doing further damage to its already besmirched reputation.  Ruling classes must realize that they cannot win all the time.

  The second judgment on Wednesday which aligned itself with the public mood by restraining the federal authorities from pursuing the punitive and draconian deadline for the exchange of old currencies for new ones, restored much hope and credibility to the apex court. Whatever the political motivation of the distinguished jurists, this is why it will always be unfair and unjust to dismiss the apex court in its entirety. The apex court is also full of countervailing tendencies.

  But such is the foul mood of the public that not many are ready to cut the Supreme Court any slack over this. A hardened cynic cautioned this writer. “Whoever told you that the two interventions did not emanate from the same official quarters? Look my friend, the Supreme Court is not supreme when the supreme interest of the ruling class is concerned. The reefs are dancing to the beat of the same underwater musician”, he crowed.

  And so the nation has found itself between Scylla and Charybdis or between the rock and the hard place; between the lure of cautious optimism and the hard evidence that buttresses unyielding despondency. Meanwhile the entire polity is on edge. The political mob out there has taken the power game a notch higher in the decibel of destruction. If the powers that be fail to read the signals correctly, it is only a question of time before anarchy reaches out to the temple of authority.

  In his sober moments and in his heart of heart, President Buhari must be ruing the day he decided to rule Nigeria once again as a civilian Caesar. The Nigerian Power Consortium made sure he lost his youth, his energy, vitality and remnant political idealism in the elusive quest before throwing the laurel at him like a morsel of meat before a whippersnapper. By now, he would have come to the belated realization that this current Nigeria is not the same that he once ruled about forty years earlier.     

 Forty years after his first coming, Nigerians are poorer, more embittered, more embattled and more fractious. The public temper is far more brittle. The National Question has never been more sharply posed than at this perilous moment. Having been mugged for over forty years by a succession of military and civilian autocrats, Nigerians have reached the edge of the chasm and are in no mood for any anodyne nonsense or sweet talk.

  The ongoing currency change debacle would have been unthinkable under General Buhari as a military ruler of Nigeria. He would have browbeaten and steamrolled his way through. This was because at that point in time all the remnant state institutions remained in awe of the regnant military establishment.

 There would have been no room for a wayward and politically incontinent CBN governor. The Supreme Court would have been in strict compliance. Ouster clauses or ousting clutches would have made sure that the Apex court did the needful and did not do the needless. As a consequence of this near-perfect military dictatorship, General Buhari, a few months into his tenure as a military ruler, was able to effect a  currency swap without inflicting needless and protracted pains on the populace.

  But that was then, and it had to be then too. The late Dele Giwa once told of how Buhari’s deputy, General Tunde Idiagbon, personally drove him through the streets of Lagos in the dead of the night without being able to unburden what was troubling his soul.

  Idiagbon was the epitome of the patriotic and incorruptible officer of immaculate integrity unlike the corrupt mafia that now inhabits Aso Rock under a civilianized Buhari. Like all other Nigerians, Dele Giwa woke up to find out that the old currency was no more.

   It is now time to bring in our great philosophers. According to Heraclitus, the great philosopher of perpetual flux in human affairs, you cannot step into the same river twice. This was the puzzle this writer pressed on General Buhari at the beginning of his tenure as a civilian ruler of Nigeria. If he had thought otherwise, the events of the last eight years and the sober reality of unpleasant events converging should be enough to convince him of the absolute truth of this philosophical gem.

  No human society remains the same for long. Historical developments and unfolding contradictions in human affairs make sure of that. By all accounts, General Buhari in his military heydays was a fine and outstanding officer indeed. But the set of skills and competencies required to run a military formation is quite different from what is required to rule a modern, multi-ethnic and fractious nation. The latter requires greater tact, diplomacy and greater analytical, political and emotional intelligence.

  We can now bring on our last philosopher.  Karl Marx is unarguably one of the greatest thinkers of modern civilization. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon is a sustained piece of brilliant polemical ruminations full of biting irony, whipping wit and endlessly inventive invectives. Expanding on Hegel’s observations, Marx concluded that although history repeats itself, the first time it is as a tragedy while the second time is as a farce.

  In the first tragic occurrence, Napoleon Bonaparte, a successful military officer, aborted the French Revolution by imposing a personal dictatorship on the fledgling republic. This was after much toil, tears and heroism on the part of the ordinary French populace. Almost fifty years after, Louis, Napoleon’s nephew, aborted fledgling democratic institutions in France in a coup d’état that borrowed its tropes from his uncle’s heroic derring-do. This was what Marx considered a tragic farce.

   Many modern readers miss the rich ironies of Marx’s lancing thrust. It was not just that Louis Napoleon was a shameless parody of his more illustrious uncle. This was how Napoleon himself would have appeared to the world at that point, a regressive caricature of his former self, if he had bothered to show up. In other words, there is time for everything under the sun.

  When everything has ended in another narrow reprieve for the nation or something quite tragic, we may yet have General Buhari to thank for deepening our knowledge of historical self-parody. For now, it is the eighth and last February of Buhari’s second coming.