Somehow, the feeling that it is approaching some end-time is irresistible these days. A fin de siècle is in the air. It is the last sigh of the marabou. You sometimes wake up in panic and then you wonder why you are panicking.

You know something will definitely go wrong. But you don’t know what or when. There is an apocalyptic foreboding abroad. To add to the surreal absurdist turn of events, it has been given out that the master of the house has taken to lecturing on security abroad while security at home has given up the ghost. This is the ultimate severance of sense from emotive sensors.

To add to the sense of eerie drama, you sometimes find yourself in the thick of a crowd running helter-skelter without really knowing what is pursuing them and to where. On an early morning stroll a few days earlier, yours sincerely suddenly found himself amidst a disorderly group of commuters, screaming and jumping about. In fright and panic, one was forced to join them.

“So why are you running?”, snooper asked the fellow in front of him, a stout youth with agrarian features.

“And why are you running, too?” the youth demanded without looking at his interlocutor.

“They say Boko Haram is here!” yours sincerely noted rather helplessly.

“Ah, Boko Haram is everywhere”, a voice boomed as if it was a supersonic loudspeaker.

“So, why are you asking me nonsense question? Run your own and I run my own”, the youth snapped’ startling one out of his wits.

“It appears rudeness has also become part of the national culture”, a humiliated snooper observed with a superior grimace. Meanwhile, the crowd appeared to have had a sudden change of mind and direction and was now running towards one.

There was something eerily discomfiting about a crowd you have been running with now suddenly running at you. One of them, a bearish-looking man with the features of a crazed cyclop, took a sudden lunge at one. This had the effect of jolting one back to reality. Nightmare stalks everywhere and night itself is pregnant mare.

A week after the Sallah festivities, yours sincerely was roused from afternoon siesta by some commotion on the street. A goat was bleating in distress in the distance with a distraught old woman screaming and raining curses on the poor animal. Lo! It was Mama Igosun dragging the Sallah goat yours sincerely had bought for her through the streets while heaping imprecations and indignities on the fellow.

One would have thought that a ram bought for Sallah would have become victual history a week after the Sallah celebrations, but not so. Mama had actually cajoled one to buying a hefty ram for her by announcing that she was tri-religious, being a worshipper of Orisa Oko, a faithful adherent of Islam religion and a worshipper of Christ all at the same time. “ Na Saadatu be my name before I follow my husband go join dem Alakatakiti ( Ancient Yoruba name for Cherubim and Seraphim Church members). Even your yeye mother him name be Moriamo!”she charged at one.

Despite her bellicose tone the fact remains that she observed both religions in the breach, going  neither to the church nor observing Muslim prayer rituals. When questioned she will respond with a sneer. “Bo se wuni laa se imale eni, abi no be so?” (We practise our Islam the way we choose) Upon being asked about the whereabouts of the goat on Sallah day, the old woman retorted that she had forwarded it to Alale for onward distribution among ancestors.

But the mystery cleared last Friday as mama barged into the room, screaming “Akanbi, Akanbi!! You no see this dem yeye goat? Nonsense animal. Common Godogodo goat him no fit fight. He come pretend to reverse but he come vamoose go run under dem butcher’s table. Naim I come drag am out”, the old woman chanted breathlessly.

“Mama, what is going on?” snooper asked in alarm.

“Na goat dey fight goat for market. Godogodo goat, Ibo goat, Yoruba goat, Kukuruku goat, Kanakana goat dem all dey fight. Na Okon be organiser and referee”, Mama cried.

“I see, what a great allegory!”snooper sighed and sank back.

Despite the euphoria that has greeted the successful completion of party primaries and the sunny projection of a successful transition come 2023, there are still some potent terrors stalking the nation. Any one of these or a combination thereof, could spell political and electoral doom which can send the nation on an apocalyptic tailspin.

Elite suicide occurs when the extant political institutions and the traditional bastions of state authority and legitimacy could no longer manage or contain a crisis arising from political conflicts leading to widespread anarchy and chaos. The state and its agencies are completely enfeebled and enervated with the enforcers in hiding or in technical surrender.

In such circumstances, the rule of the mob or the reign of rural yobos and urban yokels sets in. Those who were old enough to have witnessed the fabled wetie insurrection of 1964 to early 1966 will attest to the destructive potency of this resurgence from the Nigerian underground.

The Nigerian postcolonial political elite have a legendary reputation for flirtation with suicide. When they wish, they push the nation to the edge of the abyss only to wheel it back from the brink in the nick of time. Like a pyromaniac mob, they enjoy setting off huge fires just to reassure themselves of their capacity for flame-dousing. One has lost count of how many times the political class since independence has taken the nation to the doorstep of suicide.

But it should be noted that these unwarranted embroilments take a cumulative toll on the health and psyche of a country still lacking an organic national identity. The Roman Empire did not die of a single major wound but from a thousand cuts. Those who believe that it doesn’t really matter and that no matter the adversity, the nation will fumble and wobble through are engaged in the most irrational exercise of self-delusion. Some wounds never heal completely.

This is where the uproar and widespread brouhaha that have greeted the announcement of the running mate to the APC presidential candidate is regrettable but understandable. No one in his right mind, and perhaps only the most insensitive brute, can deny the trauma and brutalization the Christian community in Nigeria has suffered in the past few years in the hands of psychotic religious extremists pursuing their theocratic delusions in a secular nation.

You cannot procure the profits of happiness with the proceeds of misery. It is a reflection of the mismanagement of ethnic and religious diversities of the nation in the past one decade that we have come to this sorry pass.

The demons of religious hysteria are on the rampage in the nation, baying for either political or electoral blood, whichever comes first. One must shudder at the hour when political campaigns and mass indoctrination based on religious identity are taken to places of worship in this nation.

Yet it is a measure of how far religious identity and the weaponization of faith for electoral purposes have proceeded ahead of ethnic supremacist politics that it is the choice of the APC running mate that has provoked widespread anger and indignation rather than the original culprit. This is what was alluded to in this column a fortnight ago.

If the truth must be told, it is the PDP which broke with the sacred tradition of its founding fathers by staying north after eight years of northern rule and by choosing as its candidate a member of the dominant hegemony for sheer electoral gamesmanship that must be fingered as the original culprit of this untoward development.

The APC, fearing an electoral debacle, merely responded in tactical kind. This obsession with power and with winning at all costs on all sides shows how difficult if not impossible is the very idea of consociational politics and elite consensus is in postcolonial Africa. It takes a disciplined and nationalist political class to pull off.

To repeat the Heraclitan dictum that is fast becoming the mantra of this column, you cannot step into the same river twice. In the light of this, it is important to go back to where the rains started beating us in order to draw appropriate lessons.

In the First Republic, no eyebrow was raised about the leadership hierarchy in the north which consisted entirely of Muslims. The Sardauna sent his deputy, Abubakar Tafawa-Balewa, to rule at the centre and Balewa chose Mohammadu Ribadu (1909-1965) as his deputy. When Ribadu passed it was the turn of Zana Bukar Dipcharima (1917-1969). Although the Sardauna hinted darkly about dipping the Quran in the Atlantic Ocean nobody complained of Islamization or Fulanization.

In the east which was a bastion of Christianity, it was an all -Christian affair. In the west which has a sizeable mix of Moslems, Alhaji Dauda Soroye Adegbenro was unanimously endorsed to replace the ousted S.L Akintola and heavens did not fall. For a long time in many states that replaced the old west, the Christian/Christian ticket prevailed without any hint of social or religious tension arising from the choice. What seemed important to the Yoruba people was good governance and service delivery.

In the presidential election of 1979, Chief Obafemi Awolowo of the UPN chose Phillip Umeadi, another Christian and southerner, as his running mate. Having failed in his efforts to persuade a group of leading northern politicians that good governance and superior service delivery are more important than pre-elective distribution of posts and offices, Awolowo took to this route as a gesture of defiance and heroic disavowal. It backfired catastrophically.

The military of that period was arguably at its most nationalist and patriotic phase. Nodding to ethnic or religious sentiments in appointments and promotions was considered taboo. There might have been some underhand or under the table gaming by people with malign and dark motives. But by and large, the old military, even in its conservative ethos, was a stickler for competence and professionalism.

It can be argued in retrospect that the botched major’s uprising of January 1966 finally domesticated the virus of ethnicity and religious bias in the Nigerian armed forces. Yet up till that moment, it was still largely containable through a combination of bluff and sheer bluster.

When General Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi took over the reins of power after the mutiny, he appointed Brigadier Olufemi Ogundipe as the Chief of Staff, Supreme Headquarters and the then Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon, a Christian from a minority northern ethnic group, as the army boss. After the mutiny petered out, its putative leader, Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu, quietly negotiated a safe passage with the new supremo and was taken to Lagos by Colonel Conrad Dibia Nwawo, his old and much beloved instructor.

After the assassination of Ironsi, Gowon appointed Lieutenant Joe Akahan, an ethnic Tiv from the north, as the Chief of Staff of the army with the old Navy veteran, the then Commodore Joseph Akinwale Wey, serving as the Chief of Staff, Supreme Headquarters. He also made Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the Vice-Chairman of the Federal Executive Council. It was an all-Christian team, but nobody raised an eyebrow, or perhaps it was too perilous to do so.

Unfortunately by then, the cankerworm of ethnicity and religious inflammation had already found its way to the sinews of the society as well as the fabric of the armed forces. It was to lead directly to pogroms in the north and a terrible civil war in which millions perished. After the civil war, all became quiet on the eastern front given the military and political amputation of the third leg of the old ethnic-based triumvirate.

But the military scions of the northern minority groups who believed they were the ones who bore the brunt of the war and who put the hegemonic cabal back in power began to ask probing questions of the oligarchy. It was to lead to thre military upheavals and savage reprisals, 1976 with the Dimka failed coup; 1985 with the Vatsa group and 1990 with the Orkar uprising.

The ethnic and religious tension did not abate even after an officer of minority extraction seized the reins of power from a scion of the feudal oligarchy.  Having deposed his former boss, the then Major General Ibrahim Babangida eventually lost patience with being serially accused by Junaid Mohammed of excluding Fulani military officers from the pork pie. Babangida simply impounded the late Kano born fiery medic and hell-raiser.

The choleric and implacable Junaid, who was later to surface at OMPADEC after cooling his heels in military detention for trying to insinuate ethnicity and religious bias to pure military postings, got more than he bargained for. But it was widely believed that his constant carping and the ominous stillness of the northern feudal oligarchy panicked the Babangida administration into joining the OIC as a way of establishing some kind of religious and ethnic parity. It merely deepened the crisis.

In a sense, then, it can be argued that Babangida’s regime was a watershed in the annals of governance in post-independence Nigeria and the Minna-born political gamesman a ruler of great consequence for the destiny of the nation. It was under him that the Nigerian military reached its apogee of professional competence in peacekeeping abroad.

But it was also under him that the insinuation of ethnic and religious identities into the officer-corps and the nation’s politics assumed an ominous dimension, despite being a robust secularist and religious liberal himself.

Three nation-defining events can be isolated: The failed Orkar coup of 1990, an armed critique which put the National Question in sharper relief; the Zango-Kataf uprising of 1991 which Babangida himself described as an attempted civilian coup; and the 1993 annulment of the freest and fairest elections in the history of the nation.

After this, the nation has never really been at ease as the deployment and weaponization of ethnic and religious identities took the front burner at the expense of genuine nation-building even in the post-military Fourth Republic. During the Obasanjo regime, some elements in the north resorted to the gambit of Sharia just to remind the Owu-born general of who held the ultimate veto power. It was a joke taken too far and it led ironically to Boko Haram and the savage decimation of the north.

Nigeria is a country that has been much traumatised by religious and ethnic polarities with the fire being stoked on either side by parasites of national hysteria. General Buhari has not helped matters by his cavalier and less than sterling handling of diversities in the nation. One can then understand the umbrage, the outrage and the outcry over same faith presidential ticket. For those who have been hurt in the inferno, it is a matter of life or death.

But we will be hurting ourselves the more if we fail to appreciate and understand the complex and complicated realities driving what may appear a cruel and unfeeling choice. As long as a section of the country holds the franchise for undemocratic vote-herding, and baring an urgent structural reconfiguration of the country, strategic-minded politicians will give pragmatic priority to what will get them into office rather than transient applause which guarantees nothing but electoral annihilation. It is a question of the balance of electoral forces.

The cumulative damage of the ethnic and religious manipulations of the country’s fault lines cannot be undone overnight or by a single gesture of heroic futility. What is important in the coming months is for Nigeria’s active and increasingly sophisticated electorate to hold the feet of the leading candidates to fire and get them to avail the nation of their programme for the religious and ethnic detoxification of the nation.

As we noted at the beginning of this piece, Nigeria’s political elite are prone to brinkmanship and constant flirtation with suicide. There are four major terrors staring the nation in the face which may imperil the journey to a successful transition in 2023 or bring the democratic process itself to a shuddering terminus. First is the possibility of state implosion arising from a combination of incompetence and sheer mental fatigue.

Second is the possibility of non-state and anti-state actors overwhelming the state in a lightning blitzkrieg. As we have seen with the security nightmare which led to the Guje Correctional Facility invasion and the ambush of the presidential advance convoy, this is no longer a matter of conjectural possibility but a dire plausibility.

Third is the possibility of hunger, looming famine and deepening social discontent in the land snowballing into an apocalyptic nightmare of anarchy and nation-wide chaos in which the already overstretched security forces find it impossible to restore order and normalcy.

Finally, there is the terror of unintended consequences and obdurate political gamesmanship. When the presidential candidate of the APC, in an offhand remark, noted that the spirit of 1993 may be upon the nation, many of his virulent critics descended on him, some chiding him for equating himself with Abiola. But he may be clairvoyantly describing a social and historical process rather than the trajectory of personality.

This is a figure of speech in which the trope, in full enactment, surpasses the best intention of the speaker; a clairvoyant moment of revelation. In 1993, the Nigerian people were ready for a new country but their military overlords were not. If the current political ferment in the nation is a precursor of 2023, let us hope that those who have held Nigeria to political ransom are ready. The cost will be prohibitive. There is time for everything under the sun.

Whilst we are still on the subject of countervailing religious identities and their impact on postcolonial politics in Nigeria, it is meet to report on developments in other departments. Arriving very late due to an epic traffic gridlock to a meeting of Yoruba cognoscenti somewhere in Ikoyi penultimate Saturday yours sincerely found himself immediately raising some awkward posers.

The gathering of elders was convened to harmonize and streamline Yoruba position in the light of the unfolding Babel. But to our consternation, no woman was deemed as worthy of being invited. Is this how it is going to be in the putative Oduduwa Republic or in a fully restructured and decentralized Nigeria? This is not a moot point, particularly in a world in which gifted women are seizing the commanding heights of politics.

Upon snooper’s objection, our host, a suave and urbane banking plutocrat, noted that someone had earlier raised the same point, but a former gubernatorial ogbologbo shot him down by insisting that the merit of the objection notwithstanding, a conclave of Yoruba elders is always meant for men.

Oh dear, oh dear! This reminds us of a famous scene out of Things Fall Apart when a fellow who had neither taken the requisite titles nor could boast of barns overflowing with yam tubers began punching above his weight at a meeting. The hero of the novel cut him short and bellowed: “This meeting is for men!”

But while Okonkwo’s fearsome haughtiness was a reflection of a self –made man whose rise to stardom was facilitated by the fluid republican ethos of the Igbo society, our man’s riposte is the product of an enduring feudal patriarchy and gendered prejudices in the Yoruba world.

Yet the point of convergence is that any society ruled more by brawns than by brains is likely to make a short shrift of female puny efforts or reduce women to spiritual duties. We have not heard the last about countervailing identities as we move towards the full emancipation of Nigeria.

If a man is diligent in his work, he will not only walk before kings and royalties, he will become a king and royalty in his own right. For the better part of this past week, the art and culture community in Nigeria, the grizzled purveyors of sacred tradition and the surviving illuminati of the Ori Olokun Theatre, have been celebrating one of their own who had just attained the historic age of eighty. That is a whole decade or ten clear years beyond the allotted benchmark of three scores and ten.

It has been a moveable feast; a remarkable enactment of the Alarinjo Theatre but this time on the wheels. The long drawn fiesta exploded into life last Monday at the bucolic and serene Ipara homestead of the master crooner. All the great and good people of the culture industry were there to honour one of their own; an authentic original. The ceremony was billed to culminate in a sensational show stopper at the Freedom Square, Ikoyi last night.

In the early hours of last Monday, this columnist placed a call to Tunde Fagbenle, the hell-raising aficionado of culture and longstanding friend and associate of Jimi Solanke. After the customary exchange of satanic banter and broadside, yours sincerely, bleary-eyed and sleep-starved after a twelve hour transatlantic shuttle, asked the former Punch columnist where he was going to be for the day.

“ Where else can one be except at Ipara with Jimi Show, or are you a mad man?” the choleric Igbajo nobleman of Ijesha extraction bawled over the phone sending jitters to the spine. “Haba, Baba kilagbe, kileju?” one responded in mock reverence. You can trust Fagbenle to pick the tone of false respect and the sneering inflection.

“Tani baba e? O to golotogoloto bayi o ni baba?” (Who is your father as big and bulky as you are you have no father?) came the blistering response. When one cited the raging inferno around Ogere of the previous night as an excuse, it invited a more damning expletive from the old contrarian. One quickly dived for cover.

It all seemed like yesterday. But it was exactly twenty years earlier in 1992 when Papa Jimi celebrated his sixtieth birthday at the veranda of his modest flat at the Road Seven Extension of the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife with the selfsame Tunde Fagbenle as the chairman of the occasion and yours sincerely in attendance.

With a gifted local band in attendance, it was a great night of singing, dancing and bawdy merrymaking. After the party, yours sincerely played host to Fagbenle who spent the rest of the night cursing and bemoaning the loss of his money to local bounty hunters who besieged him on the dance floor while he was busy gambolling and frolicking. All entreaties from his wife came to naught.

At that point in time, Baba Agba was already a household name in Nigeria. He had made his mark with sterling contribution to the industry. But fame had not been accompanied by much prosperity. A measure of that was to come tumbling his way later.  In those days, you looked into his faraway and occasionally quizzical frown and you guessed that the great man was far from finished.

A restless soul, sticker for excellence and perfectionist to the core, he was to spend the next twenty years consolidating his rich oeuvre. He had become a master story teller and raconteur of exceptional fecundity. Given all the plaudits and accolades that have come his way this past week, it can be said that the young man from Ipara has transformed into the grand old man of the Nigerian culture industry.

Talented lyricist, gifted musician, a raconteur of genius, master story teller and dramatist extraordinaire, Jimi Solanke is unarguably one of the greatest cross-over artists ever produced by this country. As a teenager barely out of secondary school, the tall lithe chap from Ipara in Ijebu-Remo plunged himself into the industry with the vigour and enthusiasm of youth. He was a cultural missionary who discovered his mission early in life.

His unbridled enthusiasm for the arts and music, and the nocturnal forays that must accompany this earned him a summary expulsion from the household of his guardian in Ibadan who could not understand how and why a young man from a well-connected and notable background, with a lineage that stretches back to the ages, will choose a life of music and revelry over more decent and prestigious careers such as Law, Medicine and Education.‘

But the young man was not going to be detained by temporary setbacks or deterred by transient censures. Nothing was going to prevent him from the pursuit of excellence in his chosen field. He had been guided to his calling by some inner voice of certitude. No amount of early humiliation or earthly excommunication was going to stop him. The combination of singing, dancing and acting was a jealous mistress which does not brook faithlessness or lack of higher seriousness.

Despite the fact that his name and reputation preceded him, our first encounter with Jimi Solanke was full of drama and surprises. As a fresh star-struck undergraduate at the then University of Ife in late 1971, one had gone to watch a “Command performance” of Ola Rotimi’s memorable rendition of the tragedy that struck the Benin people in 1897 and the last moments in office of their heroic and exemplary monarch, Ovonramwen Nogbaisi.

It was, to say the least, a commanding performance. Jimi Solanke electrified the stage with his mesmerizing royal gait, his magnificent oratory and sheer bravura. There was something manic and possessed about it all. It was as if the great thespian exhumed Nogbaisi’s royal cadaver and breathed life into it. The sonorous wailing of women in the background; the terminal gongs of terminated empire added to the eerily unreal atmosphere as one was transported back to the ancient palace.

In all the life of this columnist, this was the first time one was seeing the actor outclass the acted, or the copied surpassing the original copy. The only other occasion one can recall was George. C Scott, the great American actor, playing General George Patton, the great American Second World War Tank commander. It was a performance destined for the history books.

Such was the brilliance of Scott’s performance in this film, the shaman-like self-assurance and the dare devil swagger, that when the real General Patton appeared in a cameo, one felt very sorry for him indeed. Till date one cannot recall the memory of the great American military genius without the image of George Scott interspersing. Neither can one think of the great Benin ruler without a recall of the man from Ipara.

After that scintillating performance, Jimi Solanke could do no wrong in the eye of his youthful admirer. He was like a secular deity. Reports began to filter in of his heroic derring-do in the political department during the infamous wetie insurrection in the old West.

Imagine the playful and apolitical actor-musician as the mythical driver of the mythical vehicle from which an equally mythical personage launched his famous assault on a radio station which briefly interrupted the broadcast with a fiery denunciation. Yet to the best of our knowledge, our man never boasted or bragged about his exploits.

There were also reports of youthful romantic escapades which merely deepened one’s fascination. A former classmate at Ife later told the columnist that after she parted ways with Papa Jimi to hook up with a newly arrived officer at the Federal Cabinet Office, Jimi would change the beat once the new couple arrived at any gig in which he was playing and launch into an old Julius Araba classic.

O gba’ya Oya, o gba’ya Esu

O gba’ya Sango meta, meta meta

  Oya a ya’le e, esu a ya’le

  Sango a fi e sofo……..

Such are the ways of musicians and dramatists of genius. Another lady friend of the columnist told him that when her husband, a great socialite of the closing decade of the last century, had a child out of wedlock he had approached the great commander himself to play at the naming ceremony, the evangelist declined citing reasons of religion and Christianly charity. But the great Egin crooner would have none of that nonsense. He not only agreed, he went ahead to perform.

But on subsequent encounters at parties whenever the lady tried to give him a whipping look of disapproval and disappointment, the master musician would suddenly change the beat, cantering and capering to great self-delight as he crooned:

Ototo larin wa, ototo larin wa

   Mo sebi ile aiye lapade ara wa

To return to base, it was not long afterwards that Papa Jimi left the shores of Nigeria for a sojourn in America to try his luck and fortune. It was neither a fulfilling nor an entirely happy interlude. The west, and America in particular, is always too constricted and restricted to contain authentic African talents without deodorising and sanitizing the potency of their gifts to conform with the demands of a cultural particularism cleverly disguised as universalism or globalism.

In the case of an African original like Jimi and perhaps several native African artists before and after him, it was like trying to re-engineer and reconfigure a fully formed embryo. It was going to be a bridge too far. It did not take too long for the singing birds and dancing simians of Ipara to recall and reclaim their own. Jimi decided to cut to the chase. It was a fortuitous decision.

In the event, America’s loss was Nigeria and Africa’s cultural gain. Yours sincerely was divinely positioned to witness the return of the native. In 1979, one was privileged to give a ride to the returning thespian from Agodi Gate to the then University of Ife in a refurbished and reconditioned Passat LS car. Not being well-known or familiar with him at that point in time, this is not an event Papa Jimi would probably recall. But it is true, very true.

It was morning yet on creativity’s day. Jimi’s greatest artistic and musical exploits lay ahead of him. As he packed his formidable frame into the passenger seat of the car, Baba Agba remained quietly defiant and with his imperious visage unbowed and unfazed by temporary adversity. Recalling the dramatic extravaganza of Ovonramwen eight years earlier, one was still too star struck to conduct any meaningful conversation with the august personage in the car.

What remains to be said is that in all this, an authoritarian father-figure looms in the background constantly whipping a recalcitrant prodigy into line. It is a source of tension and constant psychological unease, but it is also the lynchpin of great imaginative fecundity. As in the Yoruba art of facial branding, the beauty comes after the brutalization. This remote and unsparing patriarch figure is the source and inspiration of arguably Jimi’s greatest songs: Baba Agba and Bara eni joye.

In ending, if one were to compare Jimi Solanke and Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, two of the greatest Yoruba artistic geniuses ever, one can say that while Fela committed straightforward class suicide without caring a hoot about either the Yoruba traditional aristocracy or its contemporary political elite, Solanke remains a rebel traditional aristocrat very much rooted in the culture and tradition of his people. Having reached the pinnacle of human existence, here is wishing Baba Agba many happy returns of the 4th of July.

It is a cruel irony that that it has taken the murder of the former Japanese Prime minister by a deranged contemporary to sweep the political defenestration of Boris Johnson off the front pages of global news. No two politicians could have been more dissimilar in outlook or more different in temperament.

Shinzo Abe was a quintessential Japanese patriot; a tame, courtly and princely descendant of Japanese post-war political aristocracy, his grandfather having been Prime minister while his father was Foreign Minister. A descendant of remote Turkish immigrants, Boris Johnson is a typical rogue chancer of no sterling political pedigree; a wild cad who saw political life in terms of the main chance rather than an ennobling vision of the society.

There was always a chance that he was going to bring down the entire British establishment through one act of extravagant indiscretion or that he might decide to take everybody down in a Samsonite huff after a typical stunt has gone catastrophically awry or after a major misfiring from his staccato bursts of bluff and insolence.

The British political establishment and its political panjandrums could only watch in pained silence and quiet affront as another typical upper class lout takes the entire society to the cleaners and as mounting political scandals became the enduring legacy of an undeniably gifted fellow who knows how to con the masses without being able to control his own primitive passions. Permanently dishevelled and meticulously shabby in appearance, the old Etonian charmed them with sheer chutzpah.

It was a classic recipe for disaster. The tame and proper British society has always been fascinated by aristocratic brats who cock a snook at them and who operate at the margins of law and order. It was akin to watching a snake and the snake-charmer. He held them spellbound because he was plumbing at the depths of societal contradictions and moral failings.

It is hard for any society to rise above its own prejudices. It was only when they are at the brink and when disaster begins to knock at the door that they begin to ask questions. Brexit has failed to deliver on its promises.

The economy was in a shambles and the old order has been disordered by Johnson’s political cronyism which privileges personal loyalty to friends at the expense loyalty to the larger political society. This is what the leading columnist of a leading British magazine has dismissed as a “chumocracy”, a government of chums by chums and for chums. Good old Eton and its proverbial dormitory and playground have struck again.

Those who know the outgoing Prime minister very well and have been watching his resistible rise to political stardom have been warning and shouting from the rooftop that a political disaster was loading. It came this past week as the proverbial thief appeared to have taken too much for the owner not to notice. You must give this to the British establishment. When roused, it knows exactly what to do. It was a typically British political assassination.

Those who know how these things work had predicted that Boris Johnson was operating a government by overdraft after he scraped through the last vote of confidence. He had tried his best through the usual combination of bluff, intimidation and blustery to stay on after the initial spate of resignations. But after the spate became a cataclysmic avalanche, Johnson knew there was nowhere to hide.

In the end, let us just say with the ancient Greeks that character is fate both at the personal and national levels. Just as the heroes of Greek tragedy are eventually suborned by their character flaws as we have seen in the case of Boris Johnson, great nations are also sometimes laid low by national peccadilloes. The coup that saw off Boris Johnson has ended in a typically British constitutional fudge which has seen the Prime minister hang on to power precariously and perilously.

But many vow that the system has enough inbuilt mechanism to forestall the outgoing leader’s capacity for mischief and cunning brinkmanship. They have signed his death warrant but have allowed him to choose the execution date. Nobody can beat the former colonial masters when it comes to political gaming. So long then, Boris.