The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • The life and times of Mikhail Gorbachev

    The life and times of Mikhail Gorbachev

    By the time he passed away last Tuesday, Mikhail Gorbachev had become an odd and remote figure of history; a quaint anomaly celebrated and revered abroad but condemned and reviled by the Russian high nobility and commoners alike at home. He is seen as the man who willingly and willfully gave up an empire with nothing to show for it except chaos and global irrelevance.

    In a sense, Gorbachev reminds one of some character straight out of nineteenth century Russian fiction, a heroic interloper full of touching naivety and high minded fecklessness. While Fyodor Dostoevsky, the rebel master of the dark labyrinths of the human soul, would have applauded, Leo Tolstoy, statist builder and heroic protagonist of crystal palaces would, have demurred.

    The case of Gorbachev’s native interlocutors is urgent and pressing, and ought to be heard first. According to them, in 1985 when Gorbachev took over the reins of power in the Soviet Union, the socialist behemoth might have been a lumbering giant with crippling food shortages, acute housing shortfalls, urban destitution and political institutions not fit for modern purpose.

    But whatever the doomsday predictions, it was not about to implode. It was the naïve and mildly sinister Gorbachev who pulled the plug to rowdy western applause. In western political demonology, the Soviet Union was the most potent threat to the west’s hegemonic supremacy and increasingly unilateralist view of the world. Better still if its fall could be engineered from inside by a privileged hatchet man rather than risk a ruinous Third World War.

    If Gorbachev had been the true Russian patriot and nationalist that he claimed to be, all he needed to do was to come up with meaningful reforms aimed at strengthening and shoring up the ailing system, after all western capitalism also suffers periodic ailment and nobody has thought of replacing the entire system with something else.

    The Soviet Politburo ought to have emulated the wise and inscrutable Chinese who when confronted by the appalling political mess left behind by Mao’s weird experimentations simply drew on their inner reserves of resilience and creative nous. When Tiananmen Square threatened to up-end the communist empire, the Chinese leadership did the needful facing down hostile propaganda and the hectic heckling from the western hemisphere.

    As a result, China has since moved on from strength to strength up to the point where economically at least, it has become the single most potent threat to western hegemony. Russia, on the other hand, has become a poor shadow of its former powerful self, with a former satellite like Ukraine cocking a military snook at it while it is unable to prevail after a six-month stalemated invasion.

    Read Also: Gorbachev was courageous reformer, says Buhari

    Had the old Soviet Empire not collapsed, the Ukrainians would not have had the temerity to declare independence or reassert their sovereignty. If they did, the mighty soviet military machine would have crushed the uprising in a matter of days. Now, Russia stands so badly diminished and humiliated to a point where unkind western commentators dismiss it as little better than a Third World thug, a Burkina Faso with a nuclear weapon.

    On the other side of the spectrum are those who hail the late former Russian leader as reforming avatar, the most consequential Russian leader since Stalin, a visionary global statesman who saved the world from Russia and Russia from itself.

    By the time Gorbachev came on board, the Soviet Union had reached a catastrophic dead end; a terrifying cul-de-sac from which there was no escape with Russia a danger to itself and to the world at large. A near-certain defeat and the consequent humiliating retreat from Kabul showcased to the world the extent of the military decline of the unraveling superpower.

    Mikhail Gorbachev was essentially a titanic force for good and for the betterment of humankind. Only a man of immense self-assurance, stupendous moral authority and prodigious emotional intelligence could have faced down the appalling human suffering, the collective heroism, the unrivalled valour of the average Russian soldier and the collateral damage to constituting nationalities held hostage by the soviet union and say enough was enough.

    Gorbachev is universally hailed for ending the cold war, for the dramatic reunification of Germany without a shot being fired, for détente between his country and western powers, particularly America and for making the world a safer place. Among denizens of the former Soviet Union, Gorbachev is also widely lionized for allowing the behemoth to peacefully disintegrate without any military confrontation.

    The irony of these stellar achievements was that they opened the door to renewed western hegemony and American unilateralism in global affairs. They also led to Gorbachev’s country holding the short end of the stick. Vladimir Putin, echoing the sentiments of many of his embittered and resentful compatriots, has described the collapse of the former soviet empire as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe to have befallen Russia in its modern history.

    But no person can be held eternally liable for fundamental and well-meaning reforms gone awry. Despite his deep-seated animus against the system, it could not have been Gorbachev’s intention to upend the entire order. He was too noble and decent a man for that kind of political chicanery.

    On the strength of discriminated evidence, it looks more like a collision of Utopianist altars; a clash of competing and countervailing visions of the society with neither able to prevail because they were a flight of ideological fancies not rooted in the realities of the Russian condition in the first instance.

    Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born in 1931 during the rule of Josef Stalin to communist parents who became stars of the Soviet collectivization programme. His father was an awardee of the prestigious Order of Lenin for harvesting over 800,000kg of grain in 1948. A gifted student, it was on the basis of this that the young Mikhail was admitted to Moscow State University to read law.

    But as he rose through the ranks of the communist system, what preyed on Gorbachev’s mind was not the thought of parents who had managed to survive and even thrive in the Stalinist system but of his grandparents on both sides who ran afoul of the brutal system. They were sent to gulag never to be seen again.

    On the rare occasion when he betrayed his inner emotion, Gorbachev was uncharacteristically vehement in his denunciation of Stalin’s “enormous and unforgivable crimes against the Russian people”. This was in 1987 barely two years after he assumed the leadership of the Soviet Empire. Unknown to the Soviet Nomenklatura, nemesis was at hand in the guise of the man with the red birth splotches on his forehead.

    Beyond superficial fidelity to the founding fathers of the Russian Revolution, Gorbachev’s intellectual and moral roots hark back to the tradition of nineteenth century liberal Russian thinkers and philosophers who believed that with enough enlightenment and civic education, a modern, humane and democratic nation could be forged out of the sclerotic hulk that was the ancient Russian Empire.

    On the other hand the fathers of Russian Revolution, in their Utopian fantasies, fervently believed that a new Man could be forcibly created out of a backward, feudal country steeped in tsarist despotism with all its attendant brutalities and dehumanization. To this end, no rod must be spared and no unspeakable cruelty too severe in the effort to create the new Soviet man. The ruins of both utopian fallacies lie buried in the frozen Ukrainian steppes and the grim realities of Putin’s post-Soviet Russia.

    The ancient Russian Empire struck back. Neither new Soviet Man nor true democracy is evident in Putin’s new Russia. What subsists is a resurgent Slavic and autocratic hyper-nationalism trying to claw back some of the territorial losses of old empire as seen in the messy entanglement in Ukraine.

    Three decades after glasnost and perestroika, Russia has emerged once again as the most potent military threat to American global domination. But this time around, rather than a clash of ideologies, it is a clash of tribalism with America itself in danger of mutating into a tribal and lawless fiefdom under a new Taoiseach of the ultra-right itching desperately for a return match.

    Old-fashioned ideologists may miss the old world based on clear cut ideological rivalry among the superpowers, particularly Soviet nobility in helping out weaker nations and its military derring-do at the behest of ideological brotherhood in Angola and elsewhere. But then, Angola has since transited into an embattled rentier state while in Nicaragua Daniel Ortega has transformed into a jowly corrupt tyrant. History does move indeed, but in totally inscrutable and profoundly ironic manner.

    As for Mikhail Gorbachev, nothing can take away his extraordinary humanity, his civility, his visionary vigour, his unusual intelligence and the superhuman bravery with which he faced the end as the historic odds mounted against his reforms. May his noble soul rest in peace.

  • Government takes over government

    Government takes over government

    Wonders will never end in Nigeria. With its back to the wall as oil theft mounts and the proceeds from the sale of crude which appears to be the sole purpose of postcolonial governance dwindles to nothing, the federal authorities have been forced to eat the humble pie. It has ceded the protection of oil facilities to a security outfit linked to a chieftain of the former Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), Government Ekpemupolo, aka Tompolo.

    It is the time of the new oilmen of Obange, apologies to John Munonye, a great but unsung novelist. It is beginning to read like a ghoulish whodunit novel in Nigeria. We all know of the Executive Outcome, a band of hardened mercenaries procured to prop up the failing government of Sierra Leone in a time of crisis for the former colonial pearl.

    But without war being formally declared, this is probably one of those rare occasions when a sitting government willing cedes part of its sovereignty to non-state actors. It must be a very concerning situation indeed. It is said in folk wisdom that only a thief knows how to trace the footprints of other thieves on the hard rock. One can therefore sympathize with the plight and anxiety of a beleaguered government.

    It is known in international circuits that oil is the sweet coagulant binding the component parts of the lumbering and stumbling giant known as Nigeria together. Once proceeds from oil disappear, the postcolonial state loses its fundamental raison d’etre and Nigeria itself dissolves into an apocalyptic maelstrom. Surely something desperate has to be done to avert looming economic extinction and deregulated anomie.

    Read Also; Tompolo: Serious action against illegal bunkering starts now

    The immediate danger, however, is the obvious dizziness and disorientation creeping into governance. Nigeria will be lucky to have a transition without a major implosion as the Buhari administration reaches the final bend of the river. All people of goodwill must pray for this fate not to befall the country. It will be a bridge too far for this seething cornucopia of embattled nationals.

    If our memory serves us right, it will be recalled that the selfsame Tompolo was a wanted man at the inception of the outgoing administration, hunted down, harried and harassed in the creeks and the snaky tributaries of the Niger Delta. But as government’s resolve to fight economic and political malfeasance weakened, the other Government has found his way back into limelight, after all what is good for the goose is also good for the gander.

    One can never be sure of the information at the disposal of the authorities. But when you pretend to solve a national problem by ignoring it, the multiplier effects come back to haunt you in the fullness of time. This is why the Tompolo pipeline contract has not met with universal applause or approval. There are simply too many nationalities and militant groups itching for a piece of the action.

    There will be active sabotage and friendly firing which may lead to a renewal of hostilities among the armed militias in the restive region. In the face of a government with weakened resolve and a manifest lack of appetite for confrontation with the real saboteurs, oil prospecting in the Niger Delta may shudder to a terminal halt. The fate the federal authorities fear most may then overtake the nation.

    It is instructive that Rotimi Akeredolu, the governor of Ondo State, has issued a damning disavowal of the whole deal and the imperial unitary arrogance behind it. According to the governor, if the federal authorities have shown a marked reluctance to approve firearm license for the Amotekun outfit which is designed to combat the grave security threat to an entire region, then it has no moral or political justification to grant license for military grade weaponry to Tompolo’s oil protection syndicate.

    Accusing the federal government of “insincerity bordering ,deplorably ,on dubiety”, Akeredolu sums it up with characteristic gusto: “If state governments, which are keenly desirous of protecting their citizens, establish ancillary security outfits and there had been pronounced reluctance, if not outright refusal, to consider permitting them to bear arms for the sole purpose of defence, granting private individuals and or organisations unfettered access to assault weapons suggests, curiously, deep-seated suspicion and distrust between the federal government and the presumed federating units”.

    This is perhaps the most trenchant critique from a sub-national unit of the misbegotten unitary federalism that has hobbled Nigeria since the collapse of the First Republic. It resonates and ricochets with unanswered aspects of the National Question. Coming from a state government that belongs to the ruling party, it is a damning indictment indeed. Tompolo may well be a symptom and the harbinger of stranger birds to follow. As Fela will put it, authorized stealing come jam authority stealing.

  • An afternoon with Yoruba Savants

    An afternoon with Yoruba Savants

    The nation-state project is arguably the most ambitious human self-propulsion since the discovery of religion. Most successful nations are invested with a mystical aura and the myth of exceptionality.  This is why for such countries the god of the nation replaces the nation of gods with nationalism often supplanting religion as a deity to be worshipped, supplicated to and placated. This is why in most successful countries religion as a formal proposition is an embattled idea. 

     But in bitterly divided nations riven by ethnic, religious and political animosities, mutual hatred and loathing is the order of the day. There is no national narrative to expand and build upon, no golden myth to sustain it in times of trouble, no shared values or common creed to summon in national distress and no evocative memories of national heroes to whip the errant political elite into line. 

       Even the notion of history and civilization are being fiercely contested. Progress is a savage battle ground. While many look back to a pristine el-dorado for salvation, others prefer to inch their way forward, away from the present dis-order, to a future salvaged from the prevailing mismanaged modernity. 

      In such circumstances, “national” politics is driven to its primeval roots. All politics become local as an existential and psychic necessity. In order to recuperate the future and its rosy possibilities, we must go back to the past to see what can still be retrieved from the murderous mess we have made of Nigeria. 

      Last week, we promised to bring our readers, the kernel of our intervention at the last and concluding segment of the Apero gathering that took place Saturday last week. Here are excerpts. 

    A Catalan conundrum 

    Protocols. It is a great pleasure to participant in the final round of Apero. As we have noted, blessed are those who are yet to give up on Nigeria. It is easy to give up on the nation. There is something frustrating, even infinitely infuriating about a country so scandalously blessed in natural and human resources only to end up as the poverty capital of the modern world. This bizarre anomaly is without any precedent since the beginning of recorded history. 

      Apero is coming at a very interesting conjuncture in the history of the nation. It is a time when the pessimism unleashed by all the stark indices of virtual state failure combines with the optimism of many who believe that the coming elections might just halt the drift towards national collapse. There many who insist that this is nothing but a promiscuous dream based on fantasies rather a honest engagement with the facts on ground. 

       It reminds one of Marshal Ferdinand Foch, a great French hero of the First World War, who famously insisted that although his left and right flanks are collapsing and the centre giving way, he was nevertheless advancing. Before coming to the main issues, it is pertinent to make some preliminary observations. 

      One has read all the recommendations of the participants of the Apero gathering. Needless to add that one has been very impressed by the depth, versatility and originality of the proposals. It is a moveable feast of intellectual production. One must congratulate the organisers for the feat of logistics and painstaking efforts that has brought together an incredible array of Yoruba thinkers, philosophers, scholars, military policy wonks, traditional savants and political crusaders to such an event. 

      The common theme that runs through all the presentations is how to secure the Yoruba nation, enhance its prosperity, boost its production capacity, reinvent its old cottage industry and bring back the embattled omoluabi ethos in the context of a besieged and embattled Nigerian nationhood. 

      It is axiomatic that paradise cannot be surrounded by hell. Something has to give eventually. As it is, the Yoruba nation is in a state of normative and ethical free fall. Let us not deceive ourselves. Yoruba sons and daughters have also contributed to the moral, spiritual, economic and political collapse of the nation. Many of us are in the habit of hunting with the hounds and running with the hare. 

       One cannot but notice that all the efforts and energies expended on this gathering are geared towards evading or bypassing the Nigerian postcolonial state. This is the product of perfectly rational thinking. As it is noted, if an inferno is consuming people together with their offspring, they must deal with the enveloping flames around themselves first. 

      As it is at the moment, the Nigerian state resembles a monster killer-whale thrashing about the vast waters ready to devour or destroy anything across its path in sheer predatory malice. The Nigerian state will not ignore or evade us in as much as we pretend to ignore it or we delude ourselves that we are evading it.         

       The Nigerian postcolonial state is driven by the logic of its own nation-alienating necessity. Our history has shown that what it cannot build, it must seek to destroy; what it cannot appropriate, it must seek to misappropriate. The evidence of this litters our post-independence history. Yoruba folk wisdom suggests that you must prepare an extra dish for he who will not allow you to feed to your satisfaction. 

      So the question is this: What happens if the state refuses to ignore or evade us? What if it decides to come after what it considers a constitutionally overreaching section of the federation as it happened in 1962, 1963 and 1965? 

      In 1962, a federally engineered plot led to the implosion of the Action Group and the declaration of a state of emergency. The following year in 1963 Awo was jailed in another engineered conspiracy which was a flagrant breach of the constitution and a unitary assault on a federating unit. In 1965, a forcible takeover of the old west through electoral shenanigans led to the collapse of order and the termination of the First Republic through a military uprising. 

      The contradictions we are tracking create what we propose as a Catalan conundrum for the Yoruba people within the Nigerian federation. What is a Catalan conundrum? It occurs when the most stable, the most prosperous and the best economically organized section of a federating nation decides that it has had enough and decides to leave with the federal authorities taking military umbrage  at what they see as a violent constitutional infraction. We will elaborate on this later.  

    I have been asked to compare political life in the run up to independence and the few years after to what was to happen subsequently. This is like comparing an apple to an orange. They are both fruits. But they taste different. This is because they have different historical trajectories and are powered by divergent dynamics of power appropriation. 

     To restate what is often stated nowadays with increasing vehemence. It is obvious with the benefit of hindsight that the colonial powers were not interested in the cohesion or organic unity of the territories they have subjugated beyond protecting their own economic interests. The elite of the different ethnic groups were separated from each other with interaction forbidden and in fact virtually criminalised. 

      This was the situation that obtained in the early decades after the amalgamation of different entities. You cannot give what you don’t have. The British masters were showing fidelity to the logic of their own colonial history which was to let the new nation congeal and cohere around a master-nationality that has shown superior discipline and organizational ability and let them get on with it in a brutal war of all against all. For them, order and stability are superior to political equity and social justice. 

       It took the equivalent of a civil war among colonial officers to make the authorities realise what a hot potato they had on their hand. In a seminal policy rethink, they came to the conclusion that based on recalcitrant realities the cultural, spiritual and political differences among the regions were of such mutually antagonistic dimensions, that it would be better to allow the people to develop along their own individual trajectories.  

      As such they changed the modus operandi if not the fundamental logic of the colonising impetus. The immediate fruits of this policy rethink were obvious. It led to a thaw in the policy which foreclosed interaction between the new Southern elite group and the emergent northern powerbrokers. It also altered the power equations in favour of the indigenous political class spawned by the advent of colonization. 

       Self-rule for the three regions unlocked the visionary capacity of the colonized to preside over their own affairs and to chart an independent course. With the three regions in dynamic competition, production capacity was boosted beyond what was thought possible and the three regions experienced accelerated growth and development which led to a dramatic rise in living standards. 

      This was arguably the finest moment of the trio of founding statesmen who pushed their people to the limits of their ability and capability in order not to appear to have been left behind. It was the new spirit of give and take which led to the miracle of the Lancaster House conference held in 1957 which led to the adoption of an authentic and workable constitution based on federating units. 

      But this was not destined to last for long. The old demons of hegemonic domination suddenly reared their head effectively scuppering Nigeria’s chances of post-independence prosperity and stability. While Awolowo and Azikiwe were actively gaming to take over the government at the centre, Ahmadu Bello suddenly rumbled that Nigeria was his great grandfather’s estate and that he would soon resume the aborted mission to dip the Quran in the ocean. 

    And he made good his word. First, they came for the west. After that, it was the turn of the east to bite the bullet. It is useful at this point to be reminded that General Aguiyi-Ironsi’s Unification Decree of 1966 which was the original leitmotif for the northern-inspired violent military uprising which toppled his regime was never really repealed. Rather, its spirit was boosted and bolstered by succeeding military dictatorships until Nigeria became a unitary autocracy per excellence. 

      The journey of the nation to a berserk and misbegotten autocracy can be seen in two significant developments. Whereas in the Second Republic the transition to civilian rule from military dictatorship was marked by a cautious interference with the recommendations of the Constitution drafting body by the military authorities, the gloves seemed to have come off in the aborted Third Republic and the current post-military Fourth Republic. 

    The military, having domesticated its rule, appeared bent on imposing its will on the nation by resorting to an awful manipulation of the process when it appeared its tinkering with the constitutional document might not be enough.  

      In the document bequeathed to their compatriots as the Fourth Republic constitution, the military simply appropriated the people as if they are an inert mass to be moulded into desired shape. This vaporization of the citizenry has dire consequences and it forms the basis for comparing the First Republic with what obtains in the current epoch. 

       First, the relentless militarization of politics and the polity has turned Nigeria into a vast civilian garrison without an authentic democratic ethos. Second, the militarization of the political class has led to the homogenization of Nigeria’s political culture in a way that was thought impossible in the First Republic. 

    Third, it has led to the collapse of party discipline with influential party members behaving like local war-lords ready to cock a snook at their party or flout its rules and conventions. Third, the mode of leadership recruitment has become so absurd as to be eerily sinister. Finally, this has led to the abandonment of ideology-based politics with the evaporation of rational choice and reason based evaluation of party policies. 

      The net effect of all this is that a predominantly urbanized, forward-looking, intrinsically progressive ethnic group that has seen better days and whose people enjoy holding the feet of their leaders to fire even in the pre-colonial times find themselves roiling with rank disaffection and acute discomfort in the besetting political normlessness that Nigeria has become. Consequently, it is no surprise that a sizeable proportion of Yoruba sons and daughters want out from the stifling unitarist hell of Nigeria. 

      But this is not going to happen, if it happens at all, in the way and manner expected or following the pattern of predictable and conventional agitation. The region known as Catalonia with the alluring city of Barcelona as its jewel is without any doubt the most prosperous, the most advanced and the most enchanting region of Spain. This is partially due to the accidents of geography and its proximity to the advanced nations of northern Europe. 

       By all the acknowledged indices of nationhood, Catalonia is impressively credentialed: shared language, shared history and destiny and a homogenous culture to boot. But each time the Catalans have tried to raise the banner of rebellion and secession they have always been suppressed with brutal ferocity by their Spanish overlords down South. They will just not let them go. Their leader was publicly executed during the Second World War. 

      To be fair, the central authorities in Madrid have always shown the willingness to grant the restive region a great measure of autonomy and some trappings of independence. But outright separation is not part of the combo.  

     You cannot bluff your way with bullets and superior armoury. It would appear that while the Catalans were developing their region in relative peace and safety, it is the Castilians whose military muscle has held Spain together against sundry invaders. You cannot eat your cake and have it. In every human situation, there is always a trade-off. 

      Despite the charter of self-determination enshrined in its founding principles, the United Nations does not grant independence just like that and a la carte. The Yoruba nation has not shown the appetite or the wherewithal for a violent military confrontation. Neither have its denizens shown an aptitude for the precipitation of a violent disintegration of the nation beyond mere appeals and letter writing. Secession is made of sterner stuff. 

      In such circumstances, the situation requires tact, diplomacy and painstaking capacity for negotiation and the clarity of graduated objectives rather than Boys Brigade stratagems. We must not endanger our own people. There is time for pragmatic heroism and there is time for heroic pragmatism. 

      Rather than cutting our nose to spite our face out of sheer spite and folly, elementary wisdom and strategic acumen suggest we should let the Buhari transition run its course while not complicating things or muddying the pool for our political sons who are well-schooled and well-practised in the high- octane art of political intrigues and the cloak and dagger manoeuvres of the Nigerian postcolonial coliseum. They may be there for a divine purpose. 

      To this end, our humble advice to the leadership of the Apero gathering whatever their bitter regrets and disappointments with the events of the last seven years is to fully engage with the current dominant Yoruba leadership without foreclosing their own options for the inevitable renegotiation of the Nigerian union.  I thank you all. 

  • The Apero Intervention

    The Apero Intervention

    Blessed are those who are yet to give up on Nigeria. This column affirms this proposition this morning with every sense of responsibility. It is very easy to give up on Nigeria. There is something terribly frustrating and even infuriating about a country so scandalously blessed in human and material resources only to end up as the poverty capital of the world.

    Yet there are many patriots out there who have refused to give up on the nation, who insist that it is not over until it is truly over.

    For the past six weeks or so, Segun Gbadegesin, notable philosopher, traditional savant, quintessential Yoruba patriot and The Nation’s ace columnist has turned the page of his column to interrogating proceedings from a remarkable gathering of Yoruba scholars, intellectual luminaries, military wonks, public analysts, political crusaders and celebrated researchers carefully assembled to proffer the way forward for a troubled nationality in an even more troubled and endangered nation.

    In the event, it has turned out a remarkable feast of deep introspection and splendid intellection; a conclave of some of the best and brightest of Yoruba minds both at home and the fabled diaspora. In Yoruba cultural parlance and as the name itself hints, Apero is the gathering of the wise and wizened, the grizzled and the gnarled particularly in times of despair and political uncertainty. As the Yoruba themselves put it, we gather to share wisdom and not to distribute folly.

    The exchanges have been remarkably frank and forthright shot through with countervailing insights borne along by remarkable hindsight. From security for the constituent units of the nation, through the vexed issue of restructuring, to the educational disaster staring the nation in the face and the collapsed ethos of omoluabi which has pushed the Yoruba people into an ethical and normative free fall, nothing was off the table. You can only trick a woman into bed once, as they say.

    Nothing exemplifies this sense of urgency and the dire plight of a people under siege in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious nation more than the clarity and pained lucidity of Gbadegesin’s unrelenting exposition and remorseless gloss on the proceedings of the gathering in the past six weeks. The retired professor of Philosophy at Howard University writes lucid and deceptively artless prose that hides a telling punch which is occasionally deployed to devastating effect.

    A critique of this vast nature with its far-ranging and far-reaching recommendations and proposals for drastic reforms cannot but reveal willy-nilly the conditions of its own possibility. Although like a wise Yoruba elder and major stakeholder in the political fortunes of his people in the post-military dispensation, Gbadegesin tries to pull his punch, the anger sometimes breaks through. In the event, Apero is a subtle and restrained critique of the extant political hegemony in Yorubaland.

    Read Also; Nigeria 2023: The tunnel of reality

    At the inception of Apero, yours sincerely was invited by the organisers to contribute to one of the proceedings as a lead discussant. But prior commitments on the home front and a clash of engagements precluded that possibility. One had since been monitoring events from the side lines.

    But talk of odd telepathic developments. Just as one was about to put his intervention on paper, a call came through from Gbadegesin urging the columnist to appear as a lead discussant in the final session by comparing the situation in the run up to independence and the First Republic to the current order. In the time honoured old Yoruba code of honour, refusal this time was out of the question.

    Comparing the pre-independence era in Nigeria up to the period leading to the fall of the First Republic with the epoch of post-military irruption in the country is like comparing an apple to an orange. They are both fruits, but they taste differently. This is because the trajectories and antecedents are dissimilar and they are powered by different dynamics of power appropriation.

    Let us first erase some historical illusions from our minds. In the history of human evolution, there has been no completely organic or seamlessly idyllic society. Historians and sociologists of the human condition insist that if there is anything about organic societies, it is that they are always gone. In other words, human evolution is marked by protracted periods of war, hunger, famine, natural or man-made pestilence followed by peace, progress and rapid development.

    The notion of an idyllic and organic society of remote antiquity is an ideological weapon or merciless stick often deployed by embattled and besieged societies to whip existing recalcitrant realities into some tolerable order. Every monument to civilizational triumph is also a monument to appalling human suffering, unspeakable barbarities and terrible bestialities.

    For example, the much-maligned and bitterly resented military intervention in Nigeria’s postcolonial history also had its high noon of visionary capacity building and patriotic developmental impetus. These were the years of rolling National Development Plans and infrastructural frenzy whose extant legacies subsist.

    In his autobiography, The Son of a Peasant Farmer, the late Tayo Ogungbemile, a former students union leader who rose to become the Acting Comptroller General of the Custom and Excise Department, narrated how he walked up to Brigadier Adeyinka Adebayo’s office to present a policy paper on how to rescue indigent Yoruba undergraduates from the jaws of misery and truncated ambition through a means tested bursary programme.

    To his surprise, somebody from the governor’s office got in touch with him the following day to inform him that the proposal had been approved and adopted as state policy. If only this semi-confederal arrangement even within the ambit of military rule had been sustained, Nigeria would have been a better and happier place.

    But the colonial foundation on which all this rested was creaky and barely fit for purpose and to get a better perspective we must go back to the amalgamation and incorporation of hitherto separate entities by the conquering imperialist masters. For a protracted period after the amalgamation, the colonial authorities did not show much interest in the organic health and unity of their new ward beyond safeguarding their economic interest which was the main reason for conquest in the first instance.

    For decades after amalgamation, Nigeria  was ruled very much like a dual-state nation with the amalgamated components allowed to do their own stuff as long as the overriding economic interest or what Lugard infamously dubbed “the dual mandate” was not threatened or impaired. Even the developmental projects were geared towards facilitating this economic mission.

    The British authorities appeared more interested in insulating the stable and cohesive order they met in the north of the nation from being infiltrated and contaminated by the anarchic regicides and rowdy republicans down south. Consequently, all interactions among the emergent political elites of the amalgamated units were forbidden, prohibited and virtually criminalised.

    It was only around 1949 in the run up to independence and as the decolonising project took on a strong hue that the British authorities began to realise what a hot potato and combustible colonial combo they had on their hand. A seminal rethink of the colonial policy and overall imperialist organogram became inevitable. A belated awareness of the recalcitrant reality that based on significant cultural, spiritual and political differences, a loose confederal arrangement is the best for the colonial behemoth arbitrarily and whimsically hewn out of the heart of Africa.

    There were two important fruits of what has been called the civil war of colonial authorities in Nigeria. First, there was a significant thaw in the policy that precluded interaction between the elite of the north and their southern counterparts. Second, the colonial administration began to load the dice of political ascendancy in favour of the indigenous political elite spawned by colonization, having realised the political anomaly of handing over power back to the traditional institutions they had supplanted.

    The immediate fallout of the ensuing struggle for political supremacy between old tradition order and the new indigenous elite was the political imbroglio between the Alaafin of Oyo and Chief Bode Thomas which led to tragic consequences. In the north, the premier, the Sardauna of Sokoto, deposed and banished the Emir of Kano just to show the powerful northern emirate who was in charge.

    But by and large the new elite consensus was at play in shaping the political destiny of the nation and in producing a new federal constitution acceptable to all at the Lancaster House Conference in 1958. In the new found spirit of give and take, Obafemi Awolowo was prevailed upon to drop his exit clause and his romantic notion of classical federalism which had no basis in actual reality while Zik and Ahmadu Bello were persuaded to modulate their unitary federalism and confederal  predilection respectively.

    This was arguably the finest hour of these statesmen and the constitution that arose from their deliberations  was a great spur to national unity and rapid economic development. With each of the three regions in dynamic competition, Nigeria recorded its fastest growth rate ever. A great mammoth had erupted from Africa and the entire world took note.

    This was the situation in the first few years after independence until the old demon of hegemonic domination reared its head again, lending credence to expert prognostication that wherever there is a master nationality bent on a wilful domination of other constituent units, peace, stability and progress are at best a very tenuous proposition.

    The peace, stability and progress of Nigeria was shattered in the early hours of January 15, 1966 and the country has never really been able to find the magic of stability and prosperity ever since. The festering contradictions have since compounded the National Question pushing Nigeria to the very edge of failed statehood and aborted nationality. Unless we find the time and energy to recuperate the essence and spirit of the Lancaster house conference, Nigeria will continue to remind the world of Albert Einstein’s famous mad man.

  • The Editor bows out

    The Editor bows out

    He was our kind of person. You will always know your kind of person if you are truthful to yourself. Snooper mourns the passing last Tuesday of Chief Duro Onabule, aka double Chief. We were neither friends nor professional acolytes. But there was something about his proud carriage, his stubborn defiance and unapologetic disdain for political correctness which made a lasting impression on yours sincerely. Neither an obsequious placeman, nor a syrupy palace jester, he was every inch an Ijebu nobleman.

      The late chief was born in September, 1939 in Ijebu-Ode to a humble family. His father was a newspaper vendor. Perhaps struck by a hint of future destiny or simply mesmerized by the famous men of letter who manned the profession that gave him is daily bread, Onabule senior promptly nicknamed his son “editor”.

      And a notable editor and engaging columnist he did become eventually after steadily rising through the ranks. The story recalls the hero of Joseph Heller’s classic, Catch 22, who was named Major at birth. Upon joining the army, his superior commanders saw the opportunity for a practical joke. He was promptly promoted major. There the joke ended. The catch was that he could not be promoted any further. Colonel Major would have been an obtrusive joke taken too far.

      For a proud self-made man like Duro Onabule, climbing up the greasy pole of journalism and all its arcane rituals, its occasionally self-abasing obeisance, could not have been an easy task. He was not a whizz kid like some of his famous contemporaries.  With his middling education, he must have known that if he fell, there was nowhere to go but all the way down. He bore it all with uncommon fortitude and calm self-possession.  His career is a study in scrupulous integrity and a proud defiance of gravity.

    Read Also: Duro Onabule (1939 – 2022)

       It was from his editorship of Abiola’s Concord that he was said to have been “donated” to the new military president, the then Major General Ibrahim Babangida, as his spokesperson. He served his principal very well, with quiet aplomb, honour, dignity and unobtrusive integrity. This was the high noon of his career.

     He discharged his professional obligations to the mercurial and ever-gaming general so well that man of the pen and manager of professional violence parted with mutual respect and much cordiality. Onabule himself had the outward discipline and focused reserve of the famous and archetypal Prussian general.

       Thereafter, he retreated behind a wall of icy reserve and disobliging courtesy. He was so tight lipped and self-restrained that he could not be caught in public making unwarranted commentaries. On the very few occasions that our paths crossed in public, the usually curt but not unfriendly exchange of polite formalities ended on a glum note of offside tactics.

       Yet as somebody deeply intrigued by the IBB persona and the confounding circumstances of the annulment of the freest and fairest election in the history of the country as well as the high octave military intrigues surrounding his last days in power, there remains many unanswered questions. Yet despite all attempts to cauterize it, the June 12 debacle remains an open wound for the country.

       For example, what did IBB think he was doing when four days after announcing his step-aside, he got the self-same double chief to announce from his Minna redoubt new service postings for the military. In the name of what authority was he acting? A posthumous beneficence to his surviving military acolytes after losing command?

     It is interesting that the duo of Abacha and Diya swiftly countermanded the postings in the interest of service expediency. Abacha may be cerebrally undistinguished but he had a superior military brains than many of his better fancied peers. It ought to have been clear to IBB from that point on that Abacha was relentlessly inching his way to power.

     It is obvious that the late chief carried with him many secrets to his final resting place. Like an ancient Yoruba gnome, he knew where the corpses and sarcophagus are interred or disinterred as the case may be. But the code of omerta is not for nothing. Despite his closeness to the deep state, Onabule took no hostages in his column. There were times that one felt he had taken his bristling hostility to certain Yoruba personages too far. But that is the essence of the man.

      But despite all that, the late double chief was not without a puckish and impish sense of humour. When Newswatch magazine ran into a huge storm with IBB over its unauthorised publication of the report of the Political Bureau, the youthful Dele Olojede accosted Onabule for an interview at his Dodan Barracks redoubt. The double chief calmly fielded all the questions. But as Olojede was heading out, Onabule hollered at him: “By the way, where are you going to publish that?”

      Unknown to Olojede at that point in time, Newswatch had been summarily proscribed by the military authorities for its infraction and daring contumely. The death sentence was later reduced to a six-month ban. Duro Onabule was quite a character. Last Wednesday, IBB returned the full compliment to his fallen friend in a brilliant and stirring tribute. May his plucky soul rest in peace. 

  • In search of African avatars

    In search of African avatars

    With the dramatic ascendancy of General Mohammadu Buhari in the Nigerian presidential sweepstake and the restoration of electoral normalcy in a larger chunk of the nation, it has become fashionable to dream again about the possibilities for Nigeria in particular and the lost continent of Africa as a whole.

    As this column keeps hinting, the omens about the Buhari administration itself are still not very clear. While some encouraging signals are coming from the retired general and former military autocrat, the incoming administration appears swamped and besieged by some deadwood and dinosaurs from the old order that are bent on stamping their accursed imprimatur on what should be a new beginning for Nigeria.

    From the old volatile west, there have been some rumblings. Some starry-eyed idealists in league with cynical revanchists of the defeated ancien regime are dropping the heavy hints that the dominant political group in the west has sold the Yoruba nation to the Hausa and Fulani feudal oligarchy. It is alleged that a frenzied and wholesale northernization of the power apparatus is proceeding apace while ambitious and perfidious lieutenants of the man known as the Lion of Bourdillon are sharpening their knives for an inevitable confrontation.

    Some of these political anxieties are worthy of analytical consideration. In and out of power, it is normal for any cohesive and organic power formation to bind and bond together. This resilience which comes from strong feudal ties and alliances and the superior capacity to organize itself and disorganize others as the occasion warrants is the secret and source of the strength of the old north. Once it identifies its interests, no other power formations in the nation comes close to the north in projecting and protecting its own.

    Be that as it may, it will be very foolish and strategically short-sighted in post-military Nigeria for any power formation however dominant to imagine that it can impose its will and political eccentricities on the rest of the nation. Nigeria can never return to that past. Those who believe that this is still possible after Abiola and Abacha as well as those who raise the bogey of renewed ethnic domination are merely incapable of dialectical reasoning in all its rigorously paradoxical possibilities.

    Rather than pointing at the inevitability of renewed ethnic domination, the political resurgence of General Buhari merely points at the ineluctability of a new beginning. Until things finally fell into place, the general had been at it for quite some time without any possibility of success even as his adversaries actually imagined that they had seen the last of the old warrior from Daura.

    While the block voting from the core north certainly helped, it was the explosion in national consciousness and the dramatic expansion of public space and the global means of communication and public enlightenment that set the pace.

    This is why this morning, this columnist solemnly appeals to the general not to allow himself to be captured by ethnic hawks and other tale bearers. The general should see himself as a product of a national upheaval, a pan-Nigerian coalition against evil governance and authoritarian misrule represented by the outgoing PDP government. If by any chance, Buhari is unable to fulfil his destiny as the man to lead Nigeria out of the wood, such is the current political ferment in the nation that many rival claimants would be thrown up by the crucible of contradictions.

    Read Also: The Road Not taken

    One of the key areas that must command General Buhari’s attention is indigenous knowledge production. Buhari will be the recipient of a thousand papers about how to reform and revamp our educational system but all this will come to naught if there is no fundamental capacity building attempt to indigenize our knowledge system. This is the key to all successful societies and nations from the western powers, China, Japan, India, the Asian Tigers and the advanced societies of the world.

    The largest chunk of the Third World is powerless and backward and will continue to be powerless and backward because it lacks the production of organic and indigenous knowledge to power its political, economic , spiritual and technological development. Yet, the very notion of a huge chunk of Africa and some parts of Asia and Latin America as the Third World is steeped in remarkable ironies.

    Before it became a veritable and enduring marker of backwardness and underdevelopment, it was the radical and progressive leaders of these countries such as Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Surkarno who proposed the term at the Bandung conference as a way of distinguishing countries within their spheres of authority which pursued a middle of the road policy of mixed economy as against capitalist and socialist countries which belong to the first and second worlds respectively.

    Yet after the collapse of the Second World and actually existing socialist countries, one would have thought the term Third World would itself disappear, but it has clung to these countries like an ugly limpet. The fact is that if knowledge is power, the production of knowledge is the production of power. Those societies that cannot produce organic and authentic knowledge will only produce powerlessness and utter poverty. This is because poverty of knowledge cannot lead to knowledge of poverty.

    This poverty of knowledge is at the roots of Nigeria’s abysmal poverty and its continuous production of powerlessness in all its dimensions and ramifications despite outlandish oil riches. Unfortunately as the large scale looting of our national patrimony and the utter ruination of the economy confirms, you cannot redeem poverty of knowledge or gain knowledge of poverty by importing clever examinees from Harvard and other western citadels and sanctuaries of knowledge and power production. They will simply chew the cuds.

    Unless they retool themselves or readapt their analytical skills, Harvard products must reproduce Harvard productions. These glorious citadels of western knowledge and learning and their productions are not meant for the easy consumption of non-western societies. They were not established to help Africa solve its spiritual, economic or political problems.

    Knowledge and power production is not a charity ball. Every society must lift itself up by the bootstraps. Establishing ascendancy in human society is not a tea party. In the brutal and unremitting battle of knowledge production and its concomitant production of power, human societies without organic capacity for indigenous knowledge production must fall by the way side.

    But you do not have to reinvent the wheel. The evolution of human society is marked and characterized by cross-fertilization of ideas with insights from one society or civilization acting as prodding insight for other human communions. Western knowledge production benefitted a lot from Arabic sciences which arguably took its impetus from Egyptian civilization.

    The infusion of philosophical ideals and injection of scientific knowledge which allowed the West to overcome the Dark Age came largely from intellectuals, scientists and philosophers fleeing the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks. When a set of ideas is forcibly imposed on other societies such as we found in Western colonization, it is the equivalent of epistemological rape.

    Yet rape victims often survive to play first violin. It is only in Africa that they appear unwilling to do so. Let us look at the career of two of the Third World avatars who made momentous contributions to springing their respective societies from western knowledge-trap. Although a Cambridge graduate, the late Lee Kuan Yew related to western ideas with considerable aplomb. He was not averse to cocking a snook at western civilization or sneering at what he considered its dubieties. As far as he was concerned Singapore is not America or England.

    He once confessed to an interviewer that his greatest luck was that he was able to identify other colleagues who had the intellectual confidence and self-assurance to take apart any western concept or idea and then see how it can be adapted or discarded in accordance to the Singaporean reality.

    With that, he was able to boost the indigenous knowledge production which transformed Singapore from a Third World colonial backwater to gleaming and glittering First World in one generation. It may help to recall that Yew was of ethnic Chinese stock. The Chinese often view western arrogance with the sublime contempt of the bearers of an older human order.

    The other avatar is our own Obafemi Awolowo. Although a private student, Awolowo gained a degree in commerce in addition to his legal qualification. Yet through sheer mental discipline and extraordinary willpower, he was able to acquire a formidable knowledge of western society and institutions and by leveraging the insights gained, he acquired knowledge of a former colonial dominion which remains unmatched in its penetrating acuity and originality.

    When Awolowo applied the knowledge acquired to his Yoruba people, he was able to frog march them to the frontiers of western modernity within a momentous decade. In terms of knowledge production and political consciousness, this epochal boost has placed the western region of Nigeria at the cutting edge of political sophistication and intellectual awareness. Perhaps the best compliment the west could pay to Awo was when a British prime minister described him as belonging to the first rank of administrators anywhere in the world.

    Yet it needs to be stated that there is nothing preordained and inevitable about the ascendancy and triumph of western modernity over its other rivals. It was a function of random contingency, geography and the spectacular role sheer luck often plays in human and societal affair.

    By the end of the tenth century China was the leading empire-nation in the world with its ocean-going liners and their fabled mastheads described by spellbound observers as huge clouds unfurling in the skies going as far as the port of Mombasa in contemporary Kenya. Artefacts recovered in that ancient port suggested Chinese presence dating back to the seventh century.

    By the beginning of the twelfth century, Portugal had emerged as the first truly modern nation-state. But it was precisely at this point that the Chinese mandarinate became embroiled in a murderous power struggle with the feudal dynasty over the destiny of the nation which led to China being closed off to the outside world for centuries.

    By the time the veil was lifted, the world had moved on. In the case of the Portuguese, geography and location led the intrepid sailor, Vasco da Gama and his successors, towards Africa and India rather than towards Latin America and its vast riches and vaster colonial possibilities.

    Even then, the race to full western modernity was a ding-dong affair among western nations, with Portugal yielding ascendancy to Spain and with Holland economically trumping the Spaniards barely sixty years after gaining independence. England completed the military and economic rout of the early colonial powers only for England in turn to be militarily and economically shellacked by the emergent American superpower. In all these struggles for ascendancy, it is the nation with superior knowledge that always prevailed.

    If it is of any comfort, we might as well add things have not always been this bleak and dreary in Africa. When the Portuguese adventurers arrived in the old Kongo Kingdom around present day Angola, they met a society vastly superior in organization and cohesion to the one they left behind at home. They loitered around listlessly, hoping to encounter the mighty army which underwrote this mighty empire.

    Alas, there was no army, only a loosely coordinated and rudimentary fighting force not much better than a hunting pack. The emperor had no clothes on. The Portuguese could not believe their luck. They then proceeded to sack the kingdom with clinical cruelty. In the next few decades almost all the surviving inhabitants were captured and transported as slaves to the new colony of Brazil through the new slave port of Luanda.

    The lesson to be learnt from all these encounters is that knowledge matters and human capital is the driving agency behind all societal advances. It will take at least three decades and three generations of unbroken progressive leadership to reverse the damage done to Nigeria and its capacity to produce its own organic human capital. We will be lucky if the damage is not more fundamental and irreversible.

    It may well be the time to resume the search for African avatars all over again. Pandit Nehru once ordered that if India could not clothe itself, the proud nationals of the new country should go naked. Within a few years, India had achieved self-sufficiency in the production of apparels. Nehru was tapping into the subliminal pride of the people of an ancient empire. They would have recalled that Indians used to joke about the poor quality of western fabrics when western adventurers finally made it to the Indian subcontinent five hundred years earlier.

    At this critical point, Nigeria and Africa need leaders who will mend the broken spirit and resuscitate the collapsed morale of the founding continent and original cradle of mankind. This is the crucial significance of what appears to be a new beginning in Nigeria.

    • First published in 2015
  • The Road Not taken

    The Road Not taken

    Like all ancient empires, kingdoms and fiefdoms of yore, a nation is a perpetual work in progress. But it is not a permanent project in progression. Nations also have their time line to shape up or ship out as the case may be.

    There is a time when irreversible decline arising from insurmountable contradictions sets in leading to mindless destruction of human and material capital. Death usually ensues. The notion that there is abundance of time to rectify human errors, an oceanic plenitude of opportunities for self-correction of avoidable lapses, is one of the dismal illusions of the postcolonial elite in Africa.

    As the Buhari administration begins its final phase of disengagement, there is no better time to assess and evaluate the road not taken. This is not an opportunity for bitter recrimination but a chance to examine what could have been done in a better way; to apprehend what conduces to nation-building and what lends itself to nation-disablement.

    We cannot grab the future without grappling with the immediate past. We must decide whether to build on the meagre and underwhelming achievements of the outgoing administration or to return the country to the years of the locusts and open the door to total disorder.

    Unfortunately, the old ruling conglomerate has shown itself to be beyond soap and water; an irredeemable lot solely and soullessly obsessing with recapturing power without any transformative vision of the nation, a party that cannot even be trusted with abiding by the zoning formula which is its most sacred tradition and the signal bequeathment of its founding fathers to a beleaguered nation.

    Read Also: In search of African avatars

    There can be no doubt that when he came in the second time as a civilian leader, General Buhari stirred the hope and expectations of many of his compatriots. There was a pleasant and optimistic buzz in the air. There was an air of national rebirth and rejuvenation about. It was as if Nigeria had finally found the messiah it has been looking for all along. It was a magic moment, the magic moment of Mohammadu. But many were also those who demurred, dismissing the whole thing as a gargantuan media scam; an illusionist fantasia; a hollow apotheosis.

    But General Buhari looked every inch the part: lean, piously ascetic, compellingly frugal and astringently abstemious, there was a fire of indignation and outrage burning in his eyes. How could anybody do this to such a gifted nation, he seemed to be asking. He was like an Old Testament prophet; a modern Daniel come to judgement and justice.

    Seven years later, the jury is out and about to return its verdict. Whether it is completely damning or mildly reproachful remains to be seen. There are many hurting compatriots out there who believe and insist that the nation has been taken for a ride once again and that the serial gang rape continues, only a change of defilers. But as we have noted, this is not a time for recrimination but a time to reimagine the colonial Trojan horse away from the path of perdition and possible extinction.

    This morning, as part of the process of nation-retrieval, we bring you a piece which heralded the second coming of the general from Daura seven years ago.  In many respects, the article appears spot on in its dire prognosis. But if in retrospect, the optimism and faith appear misplaced and unwarranted, if it is shot through with promiscuous hope, the columnist accepts full culpability.

  • At bay in Aso Rock

    At bay in Aso Rock

    These are strange and confounding times in Nigeria. The country is in dire straits. The cloud has darkened over Mr Lugard’s catatonic contraption. A thick pall of depression and despondency hangs about. Enemy nationals lay a mortal siege on the nation on all fronts: military, political, economic and spiritual. Talk of what is known in nautical language as a perfect storm. For the average citizen already trapped in the abyss of hopelessness, it feels like being in a horror movie.

    It is surely a strange horror movie, this one. Brisk and brutal in pace; cruel and creepy in its grisly and bloodcurdling particulars, it could only have been scripted by the wondrously fertile imagination of contemporary Nigerians. Occasionally, the filmic actuality throws a brilliant sop of respite laced with expectations in the direction of the famished populace and they snap it up as an alternative to dying in distress at the consuming cinema or Theatre of termination.

    Otherwise amidst the unremitting tragedy, how do we explain the spectacular triumphs of Nigerians and Nigeria-born citizens in international sports and politics?  Nigeria is a sensational success abroad but a sorry scandal at home. It is as if Nigeria is saying that it is not over until it is over and that the movie has merely reached an interlude and not the dead end. What then is one to make of a horror movie that comes with this strange and unique sense of humour?

    The lead actor and current Taoiseach is himself a character out of the surreal Theatre of Alienation: imperiously detached from tragic realities, gaunt, strange and estranged, with a faraway look of otherworldly fatalism, he is peppered and assailed by a thousand arrows from outraged nationals like a bear at bay. Haunted and hunted, sometimes, the insults get too personal.

    But he is strangely impassive and stoical amidst the raging disorder. He himself has said that he could not wait to get out of the scarifying cross. It is like moaning for political euthanasia. But while all this is going on and in a move that would have made the founding father and Patron Saint of Absurdist Theatre, Eugene Ionesco, cringe with envy, the lead actor took off to another country to give a lecture on security.

    It is a terrifying pit of hellish suffering and abjection out of which everybody is expected to lift himself by the bootstraps. One sometimes pictures the suffering president in the lonely splendour of Aso Rock with all the lights put out in the dead of the night as result of the prevailing insecurity stumbling about until he collides with a snow white apparition. It may well be the lady in the other room looking for a box of matches.

    A ragtag militia made up of assorted ruffians and ragamuffins has apparently put out of business one of the greatest conventional armies thrown up by postcolonial Africa. This is an army whose top commanders had won international plaudits for peacekeeping and heroic derring-do beginning with the old Congo, through the then Tangayika and on to Liberia and Sierra Leone.

    In his military heydays, the great man himself had been known to pursue Idris Deby and his renegade bandits all the way from the shores of Lake Chad to the wretched precincts of their Fort Lamy prefecture. Not even an official remonstration from his then civilian Commander in chief could restrain him.

    But all that has gone up in smokes. It was another country and another army. Nowadays, the insurgents cock a snook at the most sacred sanctuary of the postcolonial state, disrobing it of authority and legitimacy in the process. Against all secular expectations and conventional logic, they even threaten to abduct the head of state and an outspoken governor from their state fortresses. It doesn’t get more sacrilegious.

    If anybody thought that this was a macabre comedy of horrors taken too far, the marauders made good their threats on three fronts.  First, they sacked the Kuje Maximum Security Correctional Facility in a textbook military assault that must have taken months to plan and liberated their impounded confederates.

    Second, they ambushed a forward presidential convoy in a daredevil daylight operation that must have been painstaking in conception and execution. Finally, they mounted a daring frontal attack on the elite presidential guard killing some of its officers and men in the process.

    The Brigade of Guards is the praetorian corps of the state. To subject its officers and men to this kind of cruel demystification by an irregular outfit exposes the nation’s vulnerabilities in a shocking and dramatic manner. It is bound to be consequential with far-reaching multiplier effects.

    Not unexpectedly, the coordinated intimidation of state actors has brought a climate of fear and trembling to the capital, threatening to turn Abuja into a ghost city. Schools are closed. Places of worship are deserted. Market people abandon their stalls completely when they are not forced to close early. Office workers stay back at home.

    According to observers, even the posh and glitzy hotels that litter the picturesque Abuja landscape now wear a forlorn and furtive look of apprehension. This is as close to an apocalypse unfolding as it will ever get. The entire apparatus of the state wears a helpless and paralysed look, like a rabbit demobilized by terror and fear at the mere sight of a predator snake.

    Arguably the greatest casualty in all this is the national assembly which has been forced to close shop due to the fear of being overrun and captured by insurgents.  For the first time in the history of the post-military Fourth Republic, the nation’s highest legislative body has succumbed to palpable fear with members scampering to the safety of their ethnic redoubts.

    In a rather melodramatic manner, a fear stricken member was heard urging colleagues to flee the federal capital post haste and not to leave anything to chance. And then abandon their famous oversight duties? Abi nkankan nse  man yi ni? Is there something wrong with the young man? Who will then act as the overseer of the unsightly?  Having discovered the true weight of weightlessness, they are not about to leave anything to chance or to murderous chancers for that matter.

    But you cannot plant cassava and expect to harvest yam tubers. The return of the native is neither assured nor paved with a heroic passage. The IPOB which has become the non-state law-giver in the eastern corridor has let it be known that they are not welcome anywhere in the east unless they return with their idol, the combustible and tempestuous Nnamdi Kanu.

    It is an order much taller than the diminutive hell raiser himself. If the horror movie does not lurch into real tragedy at this point, it doesn’t get more horrifically comic than this, with state functions taken over by anti-state actors. The state looks on bitter bemusement and complete befuddlement. Even the mightiest army can only fight on restricted fronts and not an open-ended theatre.

    Should the legislators be tempted to wander farther into the South South corridor, let them be informed that Mujaheed Asari Dokubo is already rumbling with intent. Anybody who has seen the viral video of the old Riverine war-lord, dressed like a pre-colonial plutocrat of the creeks and surrounded by men armed to the teeth with military grade weapon, will surmise that he has resumed hostilities in full force.

    It is a perilous moment for the post-colonial state in Nigeria. Before now, the word out there was that, feeling the heat, Asari has fled and relocated abroad to a neighbouring country where he started a university. But for him to return at this point to resume hostilities shows that he is sensing that the balance of forces might have slipped away from federal agency.

    On a lighter note, yours sincerely spent several nights together with Asari on the campaign trail in the old Ondo Province about a decade ago. Amiable, easy-going and reticent to a point of shyness, Asari does not give much away about his past in the creeks. It is only when you took another glance at his formidable rippling biceps that you knew that they were meant for other exertions beyond his daily consumption of huge wraps of eba and other nocturnal victuals of the amatorial variety.

    The Nigerian postcolonial state is buffeted and assailed on all fronts to the point of a possibility of multiple organ failure. General Buhari has repeated ad nauseam his heartfelt desire to go back to his cows in Daura.

    Whatever the current universal disappointment with his performance in office, the fiery denunciations and angry call out by affronted nationals, it is in the enlightened self-interest of the fractious political elite to help him achieve his desire. The alternative is a catastrophic state collapse which will imperil the nation, the West African corridor and the Black race in general.

    Nigeria has arrived at a perilous conjuncture and we must avoid cutting our nose to spite our face. This was how it began in the Congo, in Somalia and in Biafra. Even if we agree to part ways eventually, it cannot be done under the current atmosphere of anomic state duress. It can only lead to the epoch of bandit warlords. This is what is already playing out in Zamfara State. It is the return of Mlungu, as the dying Chaka warned his regicidal half-brothers.

    It is said that when you find yourself in a hole, you must stop digging. The government has been digging furiously. It is an open ditch which will consume everybody. Here are three urgent things the general from Daura must do to avoid a cataclysmic upending of the nation and his dream of going back to his cattle in peace.

    First, we urge him once again to take a harder second look at his cabinet and do the needful. As it is, the Federal Executive Council is a dead-end and a den of deadbeats. Many of his appointees no longer inspire hope or confidence. They are tired and stressed and have nothing more to contribute beyond marking time and waiting for the appointed hour to go home.

    Second, the president must urgently consider the desirability of appointing one of his most competent and trusted aides to serve as coordinator and driving spirit of the Transition Programme as well as his own political disengagement .This will serve not only to energise the dynamics of power transmission but it will also dispel the dark rumours and insinuations of a hidden agenda to scuttle the entire transition at some point. As we have noted on this page before, a lack of a sense of an ending is the veritable Achilles’ heel of Africa’s postcolonial rulers.

    Finally, General Buhari must look into the possibility of convening a conference of former and current military commanders as well as top echelons of the intelligence community to brainstorm about the terrorist scourge that is threatening to overwhelm the nation and the way forward. In the age of asymmetrical warfare, the military needs to boost its capacity for thinking out of the box beyond the received opinion in regular military academies and institutions.

    From George Patton, through Ludendorff and Charles de Gaulle, all great military rebel thinkers and paradigmatic philosophers of change often suffer grievously for their temerity and contumely. But with time, the old heresies often become the new orthodoxies. Nigeria may be lucky to find one or two of such geniuses lurking in the ranks of its military.

  • Okon and Malam Yisa call in the big whip

    Okon and Malam Yisa call in the big whip

    As stranger events tumble over strange developments and as bizarre enactments of Yahoo governance takes firm precedence over the principles of rigour and rationality on which the modern nation-state is founded, one begins to wonder whether the people of this nation-space will not be entitled to some historic compensation for the cruel joke visited upon them.

    Just as one was digesting the outlandish largesse by the government to General Buhari’s ancestral cousins in a foreign land, reports came that the federal authorities have characterised the ambush of the convoy of a serving Assistant Inspector General in which the orderly lost his life as a calculated act of intimidation by non-state actors.

    A few days earlier following on the threat by bandits to abduct the president and one outspoken governor, Malam Belo Yabo,  a fearless Muslim cleric from Sokoto, had urged the terrorists to make good their threat without any further delay. Yabo had in addition urged them to make sure they gave the president, a former two-star general, a good roasting on his lean and impertinent buttocks.

    Oh boy! Oh boy!!!!! The very thought of the stiff and ramrod-straight good old general from Daura crying for mercy as the crazed terrorists lay it deep in his back.  Something new always comes out of Africa indeed. Africans have taken the nation-state paradigm to new dimensions.

    This is probably the first time in the history of the post-Westphalia nation-state, a paradigm of benevolent terror rooted in refined violence and calculated intimidation of the citizenry, that state actors appear to be at the complete mercy of non-state actors. At this rate, the European masters may be forced to recall their defective franchise due to its epic malfunctioning in Nigeria.

    It was at this point of deep rumination that actual reality sought to upstage fiction once again in their never-ending duel in Nigeria. Okon suddenly barged in wearing a sheepish smile and carrying a huge bundle of fresh atori whip like a devotee of some ancient masquerade. He was immediately joined by a huge, Dervish-looking man straight out of Nubian Sudan. He was carrying a bigger bundle of heavy-duty whips of all shapes and sizes.

    Snooper jumped up in fright as the man set down the bundle and began screaming: “Ina dogo….Ina dogo….Ina dogo??”

    “Okon, who is this?” yours sincerely screamed at the mad boy.

    “Ha oga dis one na Malam Metumbi  Pandogari from Niger State”, the crazy boy retorted.

    “And what is he saying?” snooper shouted.

    “Him dey ask for dem tall one, dem very tall man”, Okon sneered.

    “In my house?  Meaning what?” one raved in fear and apprehension.

    “Ha oga dem mala get kontrat make him supply bread, bullet and better bilala to dem Zamfara bandits. Naim I come dey help am”.  At this point, the other man opened with a sinister hiccup.

    “Megida, I kukuma get am for all size. Won’na na for dem Yaro Gomina for Kaduna, dis one na for dem big senate fresident, dis one na for dem speaker, dis one na for thief whip and dis na for Babangida. Walahi, I go frog am well well”, the man rumbled as he pointed to the various sizes.

    “But Babangida is no longer there,” one protested.

    “Ha oga, babangida dey mean master for house”, the mad boy sniggered.

    “This thing is no longer a joke”, snooper moaned as one back-heeled to the room.

     

  • Encounters with Professor Adeniran Adeboye

    Encounters with Professor Adeniran Adeboye

    He was a childhood hero of this columnist; a figure of legendary brilliance whose capacity for crunching figures and abstruse mathematical formulations was adjudged as being second only to Omololu Olunloyo, an adopted local luminary who had briefly attended the iconic St Paul’s Primary School in the junction town.

    It was said that together with his best friend, Dapo Akinrefon who was later to die in a car crash on the notorious Ife-Ibadan road, the duo of Olunloyo and Akinrefon permanently locked up the first and second positions in their class with nobody approaching their stratospheric heights. Dr Akinrefon was returning home after a glorious academic career abroad when the car somersaulted.

    Arguably because he was closer to one in age bracket than both Olunloyo and Akinrefon, it was the legend of Adeboye that held enduring fascination for yours sincerely. As a star-struck youth, one fleetingly recalls Adeboye waltzing away at a local ball in the old Customary Court which doubled as the Town Hall.

    The once shoeless local hero, now a proud student of the prestigious Government College, Ibadan, was nattily turned out with a neatly folded jacket clasped in his left arm in the manner of a dandy of the early sixties. It was later on that one’s older brother explained that what was hanging from the great man’s left arm was in fact not a coat but his mother’s native shawl which he was carrying in lieu. Such brilliant, in your face effrontery! As they say in local parlance, it remains to be seen who is foolhardy enough to ask a female apparition why she was piggybacking her infant upside down.

    One had been on the trail of the schoolboy prodigy ever since. Occasionally, reports wafted in of the academic laurels he was accumulating in faraway America. The quarry remained as elusive as ever. But several decades later in 2011 at a conference organized by the Oodua Foundation in faraway Philadelphia to examine the Yoruba conundrum in the postcolonial hell that Nigeria is turning into one ran into Professor Adeboye who was one of the moving spirits behind the gathering.

    In the intervening decades, the Gbongan homeboy had transformed into an academic star in America, becoming a distinguished professor of Mathematics at Howard University. Not only that, he was also the proud father of a budding professor of Mathematics. But in a fifty three year sojourn in America, Adeboye has never lost his passion for Nigeria and his umbilical attachment to all things Yoruba.

    That morning in Philadelphia, one had been attracted by a booming voice in the Coffee Room with the unmistakable inflection of the Gbonganian dialect, a variant of Oyo with the influence of Ife and old Owu sub-cultures. Lo! It was the elusive professor resplendently turned out in Gbariye traditional costume with beads and abeti-aja cap to match. He was like a figure torn out of the pages of history. Even in America, the man looked like an ancient Yoruba savant presiding over a conclave of elders.

    In the event, it proved impossible to have a private moment with the famed professor. But there was a moment of outstanding hilarity when he called out one to remind the columnist that at the turn of the fifties, his own father, a noted chief and political practitioner, with the columnist’s father together with a man called Sansi Jo’ewe (Sanusi Ijoewe) were all arraigned on trumped up charges. Their real offence was that they were ardent supports of Zik. One can still recall how the professor almost brought the table down as he kicked the air in a show of mirth.

    Our next encounter didn’t yield much fruit either. This was several years after at the wedding of Chief Ajibola Ogunsola’s son in Atlanta. This time around, our man turned up with his spouse, a completely acculturated Black America who had taken to Yoruba habits without having lived in Nigeria. The couple looked quite regal in their richly textured adire dress. This time around, the professor’s time was completely taken up by a classmate he would be seeing for the first time since they left secondary school almost sixty years earlier.

    Professor Adeniran Adeboye’s story is rich in inspiration for younger Nigerians demanding for a place to stand in the sun. It is a heroic saga of indomitable will and an inextinguishable thirst for knowledge and self-empowerment, a remarkable trope for the possibility of redemption in even the most adversarial and unoptimistic of circumstances.

    So, when the opportunity for a transatlantic conversation presented itself last week, yours sincerely snapped it up with both hands. Professor had called to find out how one was coping amidst the turmoil and turbulence as the remaining scaffolding of the postcolonial state in Nigeria appears to succumb to unremitting adversity.

    After the inevitable lamentation about the plight of the nation, the columnist wasted no time in opening up proceedings. The myth-encrusted story in town was that after struggling to finish Primary School and with no possibility of parental support to further his education, Sunday, as he was popularly known in town, took to full time bread selling, a trade he had picked up to augment his lean resources while in school.

    It was not a bad trade since the main arterial route that linked the old west to the east passed through the ancient town. This was the situation until fate came calling in the guise of a British gentleman called Reverend Bullock who pulled over his car to buy bread.

    The white man was said to have been completely bowled over by the wonder bread seller who spoke excellent English. One thing led to the other and the youth was encouraged to sit for the entrance examination of Government College which he was to pass in flying colours. Reverend Bullock happened to have been the principal.

    When Adeboye was asked about this, he responded with much solemnity. “Let me place this on record. It was your father who made it possible for me to attend Government College. My father had gone to him with the admission letter and a bill of twenty pounds for the first term. After reading the letter, your father asked him whether he knew that his son had achieved the impossible feat of gaining entrance to the same school attended by Adelabu, their political idol and leader of their party. Baba, we must find the money wherever it is”.

    According to the professor, his father responded with spontaneous gaiety and much celebration. He had gone home to raise hell telling his mother that the boy was going to Adelabu’s former school and the money must be found by all means. It was the equivalent of a declaration of national emergency.

    Luckily, the enterprising bread seller had already saved enough money from his profitable venture. But an attempt to invest his earnings in a cocoa buying venture with some relations ended in a fiscal fiasco. The money disappeared.

    Thereafter began the arduous slog of adding up fresh earnings, selling all the sellables in the household and pawning all the pawnables. By the end of the year, the figures had added up and in January, 1958 Adeboye headed for Ibadan as a fresh intake of the famous and prestigious Government College.

    “Let me tell you”, Adeboye began on a joyous note. “It was a history-making event. That year, three boys from the town gained admission to Government College. Kola Akinbami ,Dele Ajayi and myself and it was reported in the Daily Times”. But despite all the hoopla and congratulations, the actual reality on ground kept jolting the young Adeboye. He knew it was not yet uhuru.

    Somehow he was aware that the feat of money gathering that got him into Government College could not be repeated, more so since he had been forced to abandon his lucrative bread selling business. After the first term, Adeboye packed all his stuff convinced that he was destined to be remembered as the fellow who spent one term in Adelabu’s alma mater.

    But here fate intervened again. Having been forced back to school by his adamant father who ordered him to go and slog it out until he fell fighting, the future professor went back without his fees. He stalled and stonewalled for six weeks before he was expelled from class like other defaulters and restricted to the dormitory.

    Thereafter, Adeboye resorted to borrowing class notes from his more fortunate colleagues and cramming them. He was only allowed to sit for the end of term examination because his father mysteriously materialized in Ibadan with the requisite fees a week to go. Astonishingly enough, the young man came top of the class and was promptly awarded a scholarship. Thereafter, it was smooth sailing all the way and on to the nation’s premier university where he took a degree in Mathematics in flying colours in 1967.

    The homeboy had made good. But even here, there was going to be a snag. The UI authorities threatened to withhold his result unless he came up with the outstanding balance of ten pounds he was owing the university. It was the then Dr Rufus Adegboye, aka Baale, who came to his rescue. Before then, he had been told that the late Justice Bolarinwa Babalakin wanted to see him urgently.

    Upon getting to the Ago Taylor residence of the late jurist, he was offered another ten pounds which he declined on the ground that he had already paid his fees. But the fiery, no-nonsense mother of the jurist who was staying with him would have none of that nonsense. “Oko mi, gba lowo e. Owo e ni. Kii poju”. (My husband, take it from him. It is your money. It is never too much), the old princess from the Ogunsua royal family ordered her justice son to release the money.

    So it was that the former impecunious boy in straitened circumstances ended up a graduate student with surplus funds. For the next two years before he left for America in search of greener pasture, Adeboye traversed almost the entire gamut of the graduate work force, starting out as a graduate teacher on sixty pounds per month, switching to old ECN which offered sixty two pounds and ten shillings, then to WAEC which slightly raised the ante and finally to Unilag as a junior lecturer where he was offered a whopping eighty four pounds and ten shillings as entry level salary.

    Not even army officers, or judges or civil servants were paid that much then. But it was linked to productivity and originality of research. This point must be emphasized in the face of the current paradoxical plight of ASUU. At this point, the transatlantic exchange with the professor succumbed to an irreversible transmission failure.

    When the conversation resumed the following day, it was a more sombre Professor Adeniran Adeboye lamenting dire circumstances of the nation and how Nigerians have ruined Nigeria. What irked the professor so grievously? Apparently in a Diaspora Forum he belonged to, an irate compatriot had posted some unpalatable diatribe asking for military intervention rather than allow either of the presidential candidates of the PDP or APC to take over the country.

    “Do you remember in 1956 how my father’s house was sacked and how many people were killed by Action Group stalwarts in front of your father’s house, all because of Zik?” he demanded.

    “Yes, even though a youth then I remember very well. Four people died in front of our house. When the thugs came back in the dead of the night, my father ordered a general evacuation of the house. I still remember him in purple shirt and trousers clutching his double-barrel gun as we left. His mother, my paternal grandmother, vowed that night that she will not live to bury her only son. She died about two weeks later in August 1956”, yours sincerely responded.

    “Now, see the mess they have made of the country, despite the huge sacrifices. I am afraid I can no longer be part of such a country!” the professor sighed and the line went off again. This time around, one did not have the courage or the spirit to resume the conversation. It has been an engrossing excursion into history with the distinguished professor of Mathematics.