Is there a connection between national literary gifts and political backwardness, between poetic exuberance and national delinquency?  To pose the question in another way, why do some nations produce outstanding creative geniuses only to come a sad cropper in the husbandry of human resources and visionary political engineering?

These are the questions that exercised the mind as Nigeria marked its forty seventh-independence anniversary on the first of October. Once again, it was time for introspective angst among enlightened Nigerians. The bleak mood was perhaps justified. Roiling from its latest self-inflicted crisis of electoral malfeasance, Nigeria seems destined for the scrap yard of failed nations.

When Oscar Wilde was asked why he thought Britain never stood a chance in a war with France, the Anglo-Irish wit and hell-raiser famously declared that it was because the French wrote perfect prose. There was an element of truth in this seemingly eccentric assertion. Compared to the literary figures and cultural icons thrown up by France at the end of the nineteenth century, the British literati were hewers of wood and drawers of water.

Yet it was the dour and predictable Britons that produced the enduring human institutions. The Germans were even crueler and mercilessly supercilious in their attitude to British cultural and intellectual endeavours. Compared to the outstanding thinkers thrown up by a unified Germany, the Hegels, the Marxes, the Feurbauchs,  British philosophers of the late nineteenth century were provincial nonentities sunken by the leaden weight of intellectual timidity and the facile superficialities of Empiricist philosophy.

Yet where it mattered most the British were light years ahead. While Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, was still trying to bring the Germans together under a unified state by the middle of the nineteenth century, Britain had already achieved stable nationhood for almost two centuries.

While there were no Rousseau or Voltaire to raise the literary and philosophical stakes, Britain was ahead where it mattered most, particularly the strategic capture of Canada and the gritty elimination of continental influence in North America as a whole. As for an America dismissed as a primitive cultural backwater by the European haute couture, it was to become the military and economic lord of Europe by the beginning of the twentieth century.

The connection between politics and letters, between creative output and national destiny has been well documented. But not so the intriguing disconnect between vast surplus of creative genius and political and economic underdevelopment. To pose the question concretely is to come face to face with one of those ineluctable mysteries of the nation-state paradigm. How can the country of the Soyinkas, the Achebes and those wonderful Benin bronze masters also be associated with arrested political and economic development? A rational inquiry is mandatory.

Surveying contemporary Nigeria is thus like surveying the extant ruins of the old Roman Empire. Amidst the catacombs of self-inflicted ruination, there is evidence of grand dreaming, of Utopian longing. Amidst the massive wreckage of hope and aborted destiny, there is evidence of great poetic exertions, of furious summons and fiery sermons when it was probably too late. As Shakespeare will put it, there is some architecture in the ruins.

If a nation’s destiny were to be determined by the verbal gifts and the rhetorical razzmatazz of its founding leadership, Nigeria ought to be a nuclear power and first class First World economy by now. Just take a sample. From the blistering anti-colonial ripostes of an Herbert Macaulay, the magnificent magniloquence of an Nnamdi Azikiwe, the deep philosophical ruminations of an Obafemi Awolowo, the grim apocalyptic hectoring of an Anthony Enahoro,  the cerebral hecklings of a Mokuwgo Okoye,  the terse anti-colonial genuflections of an Adegoke Adelabu, the keen witty repartees of an SL Akintola, the dignified cadences of a Tafawa-Balewa, to the caustic excoriations of a later-day Bola Ige, Nigerian first generation leaders seemed to have had the knack for turning politics into pure poetry in motion.

Read Also: Fumbling and wobbling to conclusion

But poetry is merely a passion, and one that can be put to clearly subversive use if not well-harnessed. This is probably one of the unstated reasons why Plato evicted the poet from the People’s Republic. A nation needs more than passion to survive and to flourish. It needs great will and great strength of purpose.

The stage for this embarrassment of literary gifts was probably set by the anti-colonial struggle itself. It was led by the nascent, feisty and fiery Nigerian press. Dominated by returning freed slaves and Brazilian immigrants who had seen enough of the weaknesses and failures of the metropolitan society, they were not going to be fazed by colonial viceroys. It was a great cultural war whose thunderous echoes and brilliant ripostes resonate till date. To read some of these fierce exchanges even today is to be transported to a world of exemplary verbal ingenuity.

To be sure, not all the subsequent verbal fireworks are wrought from the imaginative reservoir of these great political dramatists. Sometimes it is the great occasion demanding great eloquence and getting it. Such we see in Anthony Enahoro’s motion for self-governance or his famous intervention on the declaration of emergency in the old west. We see it in the forbidding eloquence and chilling prophesy of Chief Awolowo’s  Allocutus before he was sentenced for treasonable felony.

It rears its fine Roman head again in Zik’s celebrated philippic against his political tormentors in the Second Republic, his earlier treatise on diarchy and his literary slugfest with Anthony Asika. Finally we glimpse the historic nature of the occasion in M.K.O Abiola’s speech rejecting the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential elections. It was a tour de force of heroic defiance which guarantees Abiola’s sacred place in the literature and history of rebellion against military tyranny.

To be fair, even the military that are hardly famous for their gift of the garb cannot be left out of this illustrious pedigree. Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu’s solitary broadcast is a rousing revolutionary sermon brimming with anger and Armageddon. Buhari’s speech to the nation on the occasion of the termination of the Second Republic remains a classic of its genre, endlessly quoted till date. So is Murtala Mohammed’s fiery put-down of western powers over their meddling in Angola.

Yet it should be clear by now that the stunning eloquence, the verbal accomplishment and the grandiloquent grandstanding of our founding fathers sit greatly at odds with the revolting shambles of a nation they seem to have bequeathed succeeding generations of Nigerians. How can men and women with such powerful imagination beget such a miserable and squalid nuisance? And how did such a supremely gifted country end up in the slough of despair and despondency, and with the current pedestrian rabble lording it over a hapless citizenry?

When all has been said, Nigeria is not an ordinary country. Nigeria is a profound tribute to the power of the colonial imagination and its self-subversive genius. If Nigeria did not exist in the colonial imaginary, it would have had to be created as a post-colonial necessity and as the ultimate test for the black multitude. The only other country that resembles Nigeria is the Belgian Congo, the hobbled central African giant. But the Belgian Congo is not a willed creation but an instance of primitive seizure by King Leopold of Belgium.

While assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the leading presidential contenders of the Second Republic, Stanley Macebuh had noted that if Azikiwe were to be elected, eloquence and rhetoric would flourish again. To many, it seemed an obscene and provocative affront. Yet Macebuh might have been stalking a bigger beast. Rhetoric does not feed a nation, but people do not also live by bread alone.

It has been noted that the great Zik was not a man of details, nor was he possessed of a practical transforming mind. But with his equable, even-tempered nature, such a figure could have been preserved as the ultimate symbol of national unity, dreaming great dreams in bold rhetorical brushes while leaving the practical business of transforming the country to visionary workmen.

Forty seven years later, the needed political restructuring which will allow Nigeria to optimise the complementary gifts of its various nationalities and their elite factions continue to elude the nation. In the event, it is their worst vices and most vicious proclivities that are on national parade as coerced cohabitation produces its toxic pathologies.

Having failed the elementary test of nation-building, having found the colonial state an insurmountable monstrosity in all its alienating rigour, the political elite have taken refuge in the political equivalent of poetic license. Put to callous work, poetic license thrives in feverish and fiendish plots against the nation, in cynical bonhomie. When he was accused of chopping money, the late SLA famously asked whether anybody’s grandfather could ever swallow coins. He rested his case.

It is the same imagination that produced the great speeches that also produced creative carpet crossing, clinical coups, annulment, the twelve two thirds legerdemain, sharia, misapplication of funds and digitalised rigging. The result has been one of the more memorable hellholes of humanity. The Nigerian evil genius is at war with the genius of the Nigerian nation.

In many respects, contemporary Nigeria recalls pre-revolution Russia in all its momentous contradictions. To many perceptive observers of the era, it was a great irony that a nation roiling in miseries and subhuman degradation could also throw up the greatest literary artists of the century.

The country of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov and Pushkin was also a country of appalling brutalities and inhuman suffering. Engels put it to the fact that economically backward nations could also play first violin. But the obverse of the coin is equally chilling. When a resident diplomat of the period was asked what he thought the Russians did best, he sighed in wry exasperation and then exclaimed: “They steal!”

Perhaps, then, this is as good as any other time to return to the first principles of nation-building, to the foundation of social and political justice upon which great nations are built. It is time to restructure and to recreate Nigeria in order to properly harness the creative gifts and imaginative fecundity of its people.

While Nigerians continue to enjoy and lap up the verbal resourcefulness of its errant political leadership, other apparently less gifted African countries have moved ahead, devoting their creative resources to genuine nation-building. They may not be throwing up potential Nobel laureates in literature, but they are building great harmonious communities out of the turbulent contradictions of colonial intrusions. Unlike the tortured fabulations of the great but alienated artist, Ghana, Botswana, South Africa and perhaps Tanzania are concrete works of art in progress.

In the end, it is perhaps pre-revolution Russia that may yet provide the golden key to the Nigerian conundrum. In a brilliant, apocalyptic forage into the future, an ordinary Russian of the twenty first century was asked for the names of the Russian pre-revolution leaders. “Weren’t these people minor political officials during the time of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky?” the bemused national replied. It is not unlikely that the same fate will overtake Nigerian leaders of this dismal period.

• First published on October 1st 2007

As the economic hardship bites harder in the land turning hitherto strong men into human fiascoes, snooper has devised a series of stringent austerity measures to stem the steamrolling tide of economic adversities. In addition to physically tape-ruling yam tubers and monitoring the outflow of foodstuff from the pantry like some ancient teacher, yours sincerely has stopped the unbudgeted inflow of country bumpkins and upcountry yokels to the house by cancelling existing visas. These days snooper tells his agrarian folks that he prefers to visit them, which is what the Americans call immigration control at source.

But trust Okon to find his way round the severe economic blockade. Unknown to snooper, in addition to his petty pilfering of foodstuff and moving the yam tape whenever his master chose to be away, the crazy boy has resorted to the twin strategy of padding and anticipatory approval of emergency expenditure. Playing on his master’s failing and fading memory, Okon conspires with market women to pad the budget and inflate price without any decorum or discretion. One morning, the pyramid scheme collapsed on the mad boy.

“ Okon, we budgeted ten thousand for meat, why has it turned to fifteen thousand?” an irate snooper demanded.

“Oga na me pad dat one. Market and kitchen don catch fire”, the mad boy whined with a sheepish smile which further infuriated yours sincerely.

“And what is padding?” snooper growled.

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“Ha oga, you no sabi padding? Where you come dey for obodo? Everybody dey do am, dem house, dem soldiers, dem judge. Even dem  Dogara boy come say padding no be crime. We come dey paddy paddy kontri, abi no be so?” the crazy boy snorted.

On that note, snooper elected to sue for peace with the implacable loony. But the kitchen erupted again.

“Okon, where is the omelet?” snooper thundered.

“Ha oga omelet o ma late ooo”, the crazy boy sniggered with venomous relish.

“Then you give me scrambled egg”, snooper raved.

“Oga even dat one dem done scramble. And dem don poach dem poached egg.  Even dullard sabi say when dem dollar don climb over 400 to one naira, egg must to disappear”, Okon retorted. At this point, snooper opened the steaming dish gingerly placed on the table by the mad boy and was confronted by something that looked like boiled unripe pawpaw instead of yam.

“Okon what is this nonsense?” snooper stuttered in implacable rage.

“Ha oga na new yam be dat. I go market and dem women tell me say no yam, but dem say if I wan buy new yam, make I go dem Iyanfoworogi village. I come reach dem village near Ife and dem old man come tell me say for dem village yam dey grow for tree. Him come show me dem tree with dem  obonge breadfruit. Na him I come buy one sack. Oga dem say him good. Boku  vitamin C, D, A, K, L, P, G dey there. Efen Fiagra sef he dey there”, the mad boy whooshed and winked.

“Don’t tell me that nonsense! Okon before I come back you must leave this house”, snooper thundered and stormed out.

First published in 2016.

Queen Elizabeth, much beloved mother and matriarch of her people, will be laid to rest tomorrow. Appropriately, a public holiday has been declared in honour of the great lady. The outburst of grief and affection has been unprecedented in its scale, scope and global intensity. For many people, it was as if the family’s favourite auntie has departed. Such was the level of international bonding with the British monarch.

Yet very rarely in history does an interminable mourning procession turn into an International Justice Tribunal. But when the person involved is one of the most extraordinary personages of the epoch, we must expect this kind of ghoulish and surreal drama which pulls at opposite strands of the entire gamut of human emotions.

Despite her affectation of simplicity, genuine common touch and cultivation of middle class values and bourgeois solidity, Elizabeth II was undoubtedly one of the titans of modern history. It takes a certain combination of charm and good luck to be so famously successful and not to be widely offensive. The late sovereign head of the United Kingdom charmed them all in the original African sense of holding people spellbound.

But last week as her earthly remains lay in stately repose and as an interminable queue of mourners snaked its way through the heart of London to pay their last respect, the potency of the medicine began to wear off a bit.  While millions of genuinely bereaved Elizabethans stood still in dignified disbelief and regret, the anguished murmurs of many injured and dispossessed could also be heard around the world.

They echoed from the impoverished peripheries and hellholes of humanity and particularly from a Diaspora induced by different waves of colonization. While many grieved at the passing of a genuinely beloved monarch, the disaffected vented their spleen on the person they consider to be the ultimate symbol of colonial atrocities and racial indignities. One of these is a Nigerian-born American professor who offloaded a pile of bitter mush on the departing queen. It feels like the divine example of poetic justice.

A woman of stoic and stony temperament, Elizabeth Mary Windsor, the longest reigning sovereign in the history of Britain, would have been mildly miffed by it all. There are many people of weak constitution and tender palates, including this writer, who would have found the recriminations rather churlish and occasion inappropriate.

But international relations are not founded on international morality. Even if relations among nations were to be, it is no longer feasible in our bitterly divided world to celebrate genuine greatness and human distinction irrespective of provenance.

In a centrally fissured world seething with bile and discontent, it has proved impossible to cast our dark prejudices aside for a moment to celebrate our common humanity and one of its most iconic manifestations ever. You table that even in the most informed circles and murmurs of Stockholm syndrome rent the air.

After almost six hundred years of what Noam Chomsky, the distinguished MIT linguist, polymath and combustible contrarian, has called the five hundred year system of colonial expropriation and world-historic brutalities this is what the world has come to. Nothing is sacred anymore. Everything is bitterly contested and contestable. And human greatness itself has succumbed to the relativist rot.

Read Also: Lord Lugard was here….

But we can no longer continue to blame others for our historic weaknesses and infirmities. The wisest thing to do is to study how they do it, so that history does not continue to repeat itself. There is a local adage which holds that if you see a person being pursued by furious masquerades and you do not reach for their pot of soup, when then are you going to benefit from the inscrutable ways of the gods?

By the time she joined her ancestors about two weeks ago, Queen Elizabeth had already passed into legend as the ultimate global symbol of constitutional monarchy. Blessed with long life, an iron constitution and uncommon tenacity, Elizabeth had even managed to surpass her legendary and formidable great, great grandmother, Queen Victoria, who had to forge a truly global empire from what their German cousins would call “blood, sweat and tears”.

Both remarkable women had acceded to the throne in very unpropitious circumstances of divided and conflicted sovereignty. But each went on to distinguish herself. In the case of the younger sovereign, she did it her own way.  On her way, the dutiful and eager to learn Elizabeth mastered the art of being a revolutionary game changer while appearing a staid conservative. It was a class act in the most subversive nuance of the phrase. But it was also quintessentially English.

According to one of their great writers, George Orwell, England “has the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same”. For the subdued English royalty and aristocracy, it is the supreme survivalist strategy, having to become an aristocratic embodiment of middle class virtues. It is a change without changing. Long before the French proclaimed the cynical dictum that the more things change the more they remain the same, the English had already stumbled on the reality.

After almost four hundred years of upheavals and bloodletting on an industrial scale which climaxed with the gory decapitation of one of their kings, the British ruling classes have learnt not to toy with the lower masses. They must be placated rather than pacified. One way or the other, the unruly masses will have to be ruled by giving them what they need rather than what they crave. Let that other one remain at the realm of fantasy and imaginative day-dreaming.

It is an illusionist fantasia with the royal family providing the escape hatch to that dream world of longing but not quite belonging with their spectacular pageantry and arcane rituals. It is a bizarre sorcery of national regeneration and self-affirmation based on the exhumation of dead relics and other esoteric memorabilia. In their gold-plated horse-drawn carriages, gilded coaches and period automobiles, they transport the people back to a bygone world of absolute sovereigns and emperors.

But while they are at it, the real hatchet people who actually rule the nation and who superintend its daily affairs could be found huddling together with their red boxes on inter-city trains or espied being ferried to and from the real seat of power. In their sober departmental store suits and frumpy, off the peg blouse and skirts, they look like ordinary people doing regular chores. No attempt is made whatsoever to match the class and élan of the royalty and the aristocracy.

This is an age long distinction that must be maintained at the pain of death. It is a fine line that all parties must respect. The monarchy may be a costly distraction but it is a necessary distraction, a transcendental symbol of inclusiveness needed to sustain the unity and organic cohesion of a nation bitterly cobbled together. It is also there to insulate those who must reign from those who will rule.

The British ruling classes have learnt their lessons in a very hard way indeed. According to Simon Schama, the distinguished Dutch historian, several decades after, some battle fields in the Scottish Highlands and the English midlands still reeked of the foul and fetid stench of badly decomposed humanity. Despite the later rhapsody of the green, green grass of home and the allure of interminably rolling hills draped in verdure and pasture, medieval Britain was very much a vast killing field.

Unfortunately for the rest of the world, it would appear that it was this home franchise of brutal and unanswerable conquest that Britain would later export to the world as the first modern superpower. Having subdued their neighbours with maximum force, the sturdy islanders broke through the Channels in a spectacular foray which saw them establish their colonial dominion in places as far flung as India, Africa, North America, Australia, New Zealand and later China.

On their way, they had routed the intrepid Spaniards who thought the Brits were no better than seafaring marauders, the French who believed they were only a nation of shopkeepers and their self-regarding German siblings who dismissed them as weak, vacillating, unreliable and perfidious in the extreme.

How such a miniscule island-nation could chalk up such outlandish military successes remains a historic mystery. As recent as April 1982, the Argentines got their bloody comeuppance from Margaret Thatcher for daring to dispute British suzerainty over the Falkland Islands.

Surely, after the advent of the Industrial Revolution which gave them access to superior weaponry and munitions has been factored into the equation, some other things must be at play. Diffident in victory, calmly reticent in stunning triumph, lying low and occasionally playing the fool, the British genius lies in its profound capacity to mask and conceal genius. It is a deadly combination which has brought grief to many unsuspecting adversaries around the world.

To whom much is given much is also expected. It has been suggested that arising from the disproportionate economic advantages accruing to it as a result of colonization, the brutal expropriations of other people’s land, the internationalization of slavery and the global warming now threatening many nations as a result of the despoliation of the global fauna and fossils, Britain should give something back as a token gesture of remorse and regret for the atrocities committed.

But that will be the day. In the history of the modern world, no nation has ever given up its historic advantage except compelled by circumstances beyond its control. In a Darwinian world of the survival of the fittest, it is like asking your tormentors to go easy on you because you are also human. We are yet to find a name for this emergent syndrome. It is certainly not from Stockholm.

One of the charges against the late queen is that she soaked in the material riches and stupendous munificence arising from the colonial expropriation of other people without evincing any sympathy for the plight of the colonized. But what was she to do? Ask that the largest stone in the English crown which was the reward of colonial plunder in India be returned to the owner? She would have been summarily dethroned and sectioned.

It has also been hinted by the eternally naïve that King Charles will do the needful, given his emotional identification with the lowly, his forthright and outspoken outbursts against unmerited privileges and genuine concern about the terrible effects of climate warming.

But as the new king will soon discover, the boyish enthusiasms of pre-coronation must give way to the hardy sobriety of post-coronation. Any off-message rallying away from the script will attract instant reprimand from the real rulers of the land such as happened to his wayward and sybaritic great uncle, King Edward.

In the end and as Queen Elizabeth’s sterling career has demonstrated, old empires may change form like a snake casting off its slough. But they remain essentially the same. Even in its post-empire incarnation, the imperializing imperative remains and dominion is not a tea party.

It is up to those who feel oppressed to summon their inner reserves of creative enterprise to come up with countervailing centres of civilization just as the Chinese, the Indians, the Singaporeans, the Malaysians, the South Koreans and the Gulf Arabs have done. It is the reality of newer and more competitive versions of modern civilization that will compel Britain to face up to its own structural and political inadequacies rather than whining and throwing tantrums about colonial atrocities.

Here is wishing the great matriarch of Britain eternal repose.

After open air jollifications at the intriguing Waka club on the Catholic Mission street last Sunday, snooper paid an unscheduled midnight visit to the famed Lagos Lawn Tennis Club. The feel-good atmosphere was as hilarious as it was infectious. There was a dancing retired admiral, polite and amiable to the hilt in the true officer and gentleman tradition, and plenty of chicken suya.

All hell broke loose as we were departing and snooper’s gaze fastened on the plaque of former presidents.

Read Also: Three Sojourners’ quotes from Oscar Wilde

“Hmmm, I didn’t know that Lord Lugard was your founding president”, snooper observed in innocence. Our host, sensing an insurgent trap, exploded.

“Is that the kind of foolish question you should be asking after taking our beer and suya?”, he snapped. Snooper kept his peace but the host was far from satisfied. Charging snooper to the car, he railed in Lagosian lingo. “So ti e ri awon omo ale ara oke yi. (See these upcountry louts! )”

Baron Fredrick John Dealtry Lugard must have been laughing in his grave.

• First published in 2007.

Since we are all in a British state of mind with the passing of Queen Elizabeth, it is meet to sign off this week with three quotes from Oscar Wilde, the great Anglo-Irish wit, dramatist and literary curmudgeon.

Read Also: A very long goodbye to the Queen

1. I am an atheist. Thank God.
2. Always avoid the careless habits of accuracy.
3. I am dying as I lived —— beyond my means.

Let us begin with a solemn wager. It is economic destitution fueled by the absence of a truly nationalist political class that will see off many African postcolonial nations. The truth is that most of what we see as religious strife and political unrest afflicting the majority of African nations can be traced to economic malediction caused by political delinquency. In the absence of a viable solution to the fundamental economic crisis of providing life more abundant to their people, the elites simply weaponize religion and politics.

Humankind is fundamentally Homo Economicus. It was when people left the hunter-gatherer stage behind them, when they achieved a measure of self-sufficiency in food production that they began to organize and supervise themselves by building durable institutions. As it was noted, you cannot philosophize on an empty stomach. Insecurity arising from drastic shortages of food has always been the greatest threat to human society. It is an open invitation to revert to the state of nature.

Every society must explore and exploit its greatest strengths in material and human resources to provide prosperity and life more abundant to its people. It has been proved to the modern world that a society destitute in natural resources but with profound knowledge production can actually excel in food sufficiency for their people whereas societies with a surfeit of natural resources but led by knowledge-challenged rulers will come a sad cropper. This is the bane of contemporary Nigeria.

This is why it is important to set the economic agenda for the incoming administration. Let us interrogate and frisk our putative presidents about their economic mission for a nation in the throes of economic strangulation. Nigeria is truly in dire straits. In a world in which the entire paradigm of the nation-state is beginning to fray at the edge setting off unprecedented panic and chaos in many countries, Nigeria is stuck in the groove of a misbegotten unitary federalism.

The leading candidates must perish the thought that this is going to be business as usual. It is business unusual. They must come up with a visionary programme for rescuing a dying nation or the equivalent of a Rooseveltian New Deal for the injured and aggrieved of the land. Luckily, one or two of them are stirring.

One of the things that secretly thrilled this columnist about the second coming of General Buhari was the Economic Nationalism of his first coming. Alas, it has all turned out a damp squib. Except for the half-hearted and ill-coordinated attempt to turn the nation inward towards food production, there is no economic nationalism in view. The adversity of Boko Haram and sundry banditry coupled with a cavalier attitude have made a short shrift of all that.

Just as it proved impossible to argue with military dictatorships over thirty years ago about rational governance and a knowledge-based economy, it has also proved impossible to argue with a government with a unitary vision which sees the entire nation as a vast garrison to be dominated at will and reined in by force. The result has been democratic recession and economic retrogression, despite the triumph of electoralism, a chicanery in which regular voting replaces the grim modalities of true democracy.

To be sure, Economic Nationalism has its metropolitan detractors. But it is a reflection of a western agendum of perpetual domination of vulnerable countries and their fragile economies. Forgetting their own iconic statesman and humane economist, Lord Maynard Keynes, the London-based Economist, a famous listening post of western economic intelligence, has gone as far as dismissing Economic Nationalism as an unrivalled example of economic illiteracy.

But just say that to the Singaporeans, the Indians, Malaysians, the Vietnamese or the sturdy Chinese who actually closed off their borders in the most extreme instance of autarchy that the modern world has seen and watch their reaction.

The unarguable fact remains that vulnerable economies of developing nations need massive state intervention to jumpstart their economies and safeguard the interest of the most vulnerable sectors of the society. But this is not the same thing as turning the state into a huge economic almshouse. In multi-national nations, leaders without ethnic agenda always know where to draw the fine balance.

It is a telling reminder of a fundamental failure of governance that the subsidy hoax has reared its abominable head once again after the last and “final” removal. For the last thirty five years, this columnist has argued about a permanent subsidy trap that has ensnared the nation.

As long as the nation relies entirely on proceeds of oil sales without local refinery, as long as we operate a mono-cultural economy without any tangible productive capacity in other sectors of the economy and as long as there is a run on the naira as a result of untrammelled kleptocracy and the worst instance of executive and legislative larceny that postcolonial Africa has witnessed, a phantom subsidy will subsist. Whenever the naira hits a thousand naira to the dollar, the economic sorcerers and their apprentices will be back. And so will the ASUU people.

This morning, we bring to our readers a piece published thirty three years ago about SAP and its dire possibilities for the nation while the columnist was a Leverhulme Fellow at the University of Birmingham. The anti-SAP riots were just a few days away then.  Now, the full gale has hit us in the face. Lack of knowledge and the humility to admit wrong kill a nation indeed. It is a good place to begin the economic debate about the future of the nation.

It is now mandatory to offer a critique of the structural adjustment programme, SAP. Such a critique, I believe, is not incompatible with the highest of patriotic duties. Indeed, such a critique can be astutely deployed by a well-meaning but misguided government towards the clarification of its economic goals.

It is part of the intellectual tragedy of SAP that African governments which pursue this programme are driven by the very logic of SAP to listen to the sound of their own voice as well as the voice of the sycophants and professional cheer-leaders who surround these governments. Consequently, all one hears are shouts that there is no alternative.

Those who know their contemporary history very well must remember that this was also the war-cry of Margaret Thatcher in the early eighties. It was a cry that earned the Iron Lady the unflattering appellation of TINA, (There Is No Alternative) from a hostile section of the British press. If only to avoid the pitfalls of Thatcherite “Revolution” in an underdeveloped economy, a critique of SAP can no longer be postponed.

One major reason for this critique is the fact that it is necessary, before the cries of the alleluiah boys drown the anguished cries of millions, to offset the solid virtues of SAP against its horrendous social devastations. Second, it is necessary to demonstrate that contrary to official claims, the dismay of many intellectuals with SAP is not predicated on the withdrawal of social privileges purchased by an overvalued currency. Finally, it is imperative to debunk the myth that SAP is original or homegrown.

Three recent international developments have spurred on this critique. First, the publication in the Sunday Times magazine of the names of the leading two hundred rich families in Britain. The findings are startling. They show that after ten years of structural adjustment, after heroic attempts to create yuppies and yobos with Porsches, Britain is still dominated by old money.

The leading rich families are still the royalty, the feudal landowners and the retailers. England remains very much a nation of lords and shopkeepers. In this major respect, Margaret Thatcher’s revolution is very much a sound-and-fury affair.

The second development is the publication to coincide with Thatcher’s ten years in office of a very perceptive political biography of the Iron Lady by Hugo Young, a political columnist with the Guardian newspaper. Titled: One of Us, it is an absorbing chronicle of how Thatcher, by a combination of feminist guile and sheer ruthlessness, was able to rout the exhausted paternalist grandees who dominated the old Conservative Party and who gave it its human face.

The third development is Thatcher’s recent whirlwind tour of Africa during which several African leaders could be seen falling over themselves to be in the good books of the Dowager of Structural Adjustment and obviously the World Bank.

The structural adjustment programme has its solid merits. It is designed to encourage thrift and self-reliance. The greed for the consumption of foreign goods is discouraged. Waste in the public sector is curtailed. Social albatrosses are hacked down. Export drive is stimulated via incentives and a sober assessment of the strength of the national currency. The goal is a healthy balance of payments.

No self-respecting nation can ask for more. Thatcher’s achievement in transforming Britain’s economy from the utter stagnation of the Heath and Callaghan years is extraordinary. Even the socialist economies with their nationalized inefficiency and bureaucratic sloth are discovering that there may be something to learn from this.

As it were, the monetarist policy on which structural adjustment is based takes its inspiration from the ruins of Keynesian economics and social engineering. Lord Keynes, at the risk of vulgar brevity, was an advocate of huge government spending, of massive job creation, of the regulation of prices and of compassion for the poor.

Structural adjustment programme, on the other hand, deregulates, privatizes and encourages rich and powerful individuals to hold the society to ransom. Thatcher herself has given this its classic formulation when she remarked that “there is no society, only individuals”.

The hidden agenda of SAP, then, is to make inequality respectable, to liquidate the pathologically poor, to encourage a cult of the individual and to treat intellectual workers with philistine contempt. The success of the policy can be seen on the faces of the new beggars of London, the army of destitute, the million homeless in the underground and the mass exodus of intellectuals from Britain.

As a result of the huge social tension and unease engendered by SAP, a startling paradox comes into focus. Government must invade every facet of society to enforce social cohesion; everybody must be whipped into line. It is obvious that the leap to the Hobbesian jungle of economic deregulation leads to harsh political regulation.

No developing country nation can afford the huge social dislocation, the destruction of local enterprises and the massive flight of intellectual capital engendered by SAP. One can, of course, understand a developed capitalist economy adjusting its economic parameters, but an underdeveloped economy which is not even fully capitalist? This is the fundamental fallacy of SAP in Africa. There is as yet no structure to adjust.

The solution, of course, is a retreat from SAP. We must first build a structure through a national development plan which returns priority to local entrepreneurial initiatives, which resists the foreign imperative to artificially undervalue the national currency, which respects worthy intellectual pursuits and not philistine self-seeking and which, while combating official corruption and profligacy, also respects the obligation of all decent governments to the weak, the poor, and the needy.

• First published in Newswatch, June 26, 1989

To the Oriyangi Police Station on this wet and soggy morning where Okon is being detained on allegations of oil theft, petroleum pilfering, bunkering, illegal storage and pipeline sabotage thereby contributing to the economic adversity of the nation. He had been nabbed by undercover policemen while laying a pipeline that ran through a major house of worship and an orphanage around the Mowe-Ibafo axis.

The Oriyangi Station is located on a scraggy escarpment which abuts a ravine filled with water and murky sludge close to Arepo village. In its heydays, the gorge was reputed to be the abode of a truly fearsome man-eating albino crocodile which often raided the nearby cattle market for snacks. Often after shedding the customary tears, the monster reptile could be sighted lounging on an anthill while lazily picking its teeth.

This wet and cloudy morning, it was obvious that Baba Lekki was in no mood to take hostages as the old contrarian peppered the DPO with unanswerable queries. Oil brings prosperity and peace. But as it has been found out particularly in The Third World, it can also bring problems and palavers. This was what appeared to be playing out this morning as the choleric curmudgeon rounded on his quarry with savage relish.

The Divisional Police Officer, a roly-poly, normally affable, polite and easygoing fellow of Ondo extraction known for his fondness for his native Suberu Oni music and for swigging from a handy bottle of Schnapps, was completely nonplussed by the old man’s unrelenting adversity punctuated with foul insults.

“Officer, you have the wrong man in your cell!” the old man suddenly thundered.

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“How do you mean? A boy who was caught red-handed with illegal petroleum product?” the DPO responded calmly as the old man continued his regime of psychological intimidation.

“You see, the case is completely non-justiciable”, the old crook crowed.

“Baba, I no sabi grammar, go tell that to my lord in court”, the officer responded.

“It means the case cannot be legally sustained. You cannot build something on nothing. Do you know the meaning of Arepo?” the old devil insisted.

“ I don’t know”, the officer responded glumly and warily, suspecting a forensic trap.

“It means we have found oil. Let the oil go round. This oil racket cannot continue. By Schedule thirteen, oil is now part of the Inclusive List. Everybody in Nigeria is an oil thief”, the old man screamed.

“Baba, if you are an oil thief, you let us know. I am a policeman and not a thief”, the DPO muttered.

“You see what I mean?” the old man began with a devilish grin. “Officer, I put to you that you are a blockhead”.

“Eiye ogbigbo laa y’oju re je!” the police man cursed in Ondo vernacular. Baba if not to say I know say you be friend with Egin Gani, I for pull out your useless front teeth”. A tense silence ensued. The old man opened up proceedings again with a sledge hammer.

“So what is the state of the case now?” the old man demanded.

“After preliminary investigations we hand over the matter. Or is there any other thing after preliminary investigations?” the befuddled cop mumbled.

“After preliminary investigations come investigations of the preliminary”, the old man retorted with a satanic smile. There was another tense silence.

“You see, this baba sabi book pass all dem put together”, a voice rumbled from the main cell. It was at this point that some thugs sacked the station sending everybody scampering for safety.