The weaponization of religion for political advantage and the manipulation of electoral fault lines for partisan politics have become the bane of post-military Nigeria. There are frantic whispers about an on-going Lebanonization of the nation which may eventuate in some biblical nasty reckoning , that is if it has not already.

Partisan religious fervour and mutual recrimination based on divergent religious identities have invaded the Nigeria political space particularly at the national level in a way and manner no one would have thought possible a few decades earlier. The nomination of vice presidential candidates has become a ticking time bomb. Yet except in some sectarian enclaves, people used to wear their cap and religion very lightly in this country.

But we must not mistake the symptom for the disease. Fuelled and fanned by the elite, the worsening state of inter-religious cohabitation the nation has witnessed in recent decades is a reflection of the road we have travelled and how far the nation has failed to coalesce into an organic community of shared destiny and core values.

As the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party when John Kennedy was asked whether as a Roman Catholic he would take his orders from the pope, the Massachusetts senator retorted that he was an American first before being a Roman catholic.  In other words, and as it is the case in all serious and organic nations, national identity must trump religious or ethnic identity.

For the APC flag bearer, the road to Aso Rock Villa is turning out to be a veritable obstacle course or an arduous steeplechase. After the excruciating presidential primary attention is now diverted on the religion, region and race of the running mate. No leading candidate can afford to lose his focus at this particular point.

A lapse of concentration will surely be punished by those waiting for just that. And there are many out there waiting to trip you into making the wrong calculation. This is not discounting hired pundits who are out to deliberately wrong foot you into taking the most catastrophic decision. This is when mental fatigue or sheer physical exhaustion is met with severe retribution.

This is not going to be an ordinary election. These are not normal times in the nation. The country is going through an extraordinary political ferment. Whoever accedes to the presidency after the current administration will have to be a superman, and that is if the nation does not stall completely in mid-flight before then, what with the background of religious strife, social mayhem, bitter inter-ethnic divisions and a looming economic implosion.

This is not an ideal climate for political jousting or partisan wrangling. The enormity and severity of the crisis facing the nation requires that all hands should be on the deck in a bipartisan effort to save the nation. We say it loud and clear at this point that Nigeria requires its best brains to lift the country from the morass of despondency and delinquency that we have found ourselves. But since this is the way we have chosen to go, there is not much regular people can do about it.

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The only problem with this position is that the repressed has a way of returning with an even more ferocious insistence; the forgotten does not really forget itself and however much we choose to ignore historical reality, history does not ignore us. So when we think we can overlook a pressing social reality, some aspects of it keep thumping us in the face in the most embarrassing circumstances.

Despite our attempts to suppress the fact, the race to the Aso Rock Villa in 2023 is suffused with unresolved aspects of the National Question. Embedded in the National Question is the perennial quest by nationals in a territorial space for untrammelled freedom and genuine emancipation which guarantees freedom of religion and right to worship for all citizens without any interference from the state. The nation-state paradigm is a secular construct and not a site for religious bigots.

The current debate about the religion and race of the vice presidential nominee of the ruling party is based on the fear of religious and ethnic domination and as such is a short hand for unresolved aspects of the National Question. This is the reality we cannot afford to ignore. That it has assumed such a partisan fervour and fierce contention in some quarters is a reflection of how far the mismanagement of our ethnic and religious diversities has progressed in the country.

To be sure, and in fairness to General Mohammadu Buhari , this mismanagement of the multiculturalism of the country did not begin with his return as a civilian leader of the nation although he seems to have done his best to court the image of an ethnic and religious irredentist by conscious acts or unconscious proclamation. But neither Umaru Yar’Adua or his successor, Goodluck Jonathan, can be completely absolved of the charge of ethnic and religious exceptionalism.

But to get to the root of the current phase of this cultural absolutism we have to reach back to the military termination of civil rule in the Second Republic and the string of draconian military rulers that followed in the wake. Ironically under the guise that the military was a patriotic, neutral and nationalist institution that does not know tribe or religion, the worst form of ethnic and religious particularism was inflicted on the nation.

Thus while proclaiming the bogus neutrality of this strange doctrine, General Mohammadu Buhari, his deputy, the late Major General Tunde Idiagbon and the Chief of Army Staff, the then Major General Ibrahim Babangida all came from the same region and belonged to the same religion while the first two were ethnic Fulani.

But despite these infractions, the poison had not seeped into the larger society during the period under reference even though the signs were visible to the discerning. In 1993, an MKO Abiola could toy with the idea of a Muslim-Muslim ticket without batting an eyelid. Neither did he entertain the fear of an electoral backlash as a result of his choice. National attention was diverted on the qualities of the man leading the charge against military autocracy and not on the religion or personal virtues of the fellow he had chosen as his running mate and accessory.

In a curious twist of fate and fortune, it was widely reported that General Ibrahim Babangida was rooting for the late Pascal Bafyau, the rogue and renegade former labour leader, as Abiola’s running mate. But this was not because the veteran labour wheeler-dealer was a Christian stalwart but because he was a loyal ally and enabler of military despotism.

At that particular point, Bafyau had lost so much face with the Nigerian public because of his active sabotage of many labour initiatives that he was going to be a major electoral liability to any presidential ticket even if he was the pope or patron saint of workers rolled into one. Whether the Minna general was factoring this eventuality into his normally cynical calculations could not be ascertained. But Abiola, sensing an electoral debacle even as he played political dummy to Babangida’s sinister maestro, wisely sprung the trap.

But there was even a period in the history of the nation when the choice of running mate to a presidential contender and his antecedents were considered totally irrelevant to the fortunes of the ticket. In 1979, the sober, impressively credentialed but largely unknown and politically untested Alex Ekwueme emerged as running mate to Alhaji Shehu Shagari while Chief Obafemi Awolowo chose the equally inexperienced Phillip Umeadi as his under-study.

Nobody raised an eyebrow that this was an all-Christian presidential ticket. Only astute political watchers could sense that this was a major electoral miscalculation on the part of the Ikenne titan given the ethnic configuration of the nation. Four years later, Awolowo was to underscore his contempt and rather bizarre disdain for hegemonic majoritarian politics by choosing the relatively unknown Alhaji Kura as his running mate.

Since then, the nation has gone through some tempestuous times. Draconian military rule does not put a lid on the boiling cauldron of ethnic and religious tension. Ironically, as the Nigerian experience has shown, they tend to exacerbate the tension. This is because iron-fisted and authoritarian military rule tend to drive debates and dissent underground and under the table where they fester and spread before exploding in apocalyptic violence.

Under General Babangida’s watch the nation witnessed the following upheavals (1) In 1988, there was the Sokoto riot following the nomination of the late Sultan Ibrahim Dasuki.(2) There was the SAP riot of 1989 which shook the nation to its foundation and alerted the international community of a looming anti-military showdown.

In 1990, the nation witnessed the bloodiest military uprising in its history which provoked a savage and bloodcurdling reprisal. May 1992 saw the Zango Kataf bloody eruption in which saw a combo of military rivalry, ancestral feud, lingering religious resentment morphing into a memorable communal uprising.

These upheavals however pale into insignificance when compared to the bloody imbroglio that followed the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election. It was an epochal moment for the nation, the culmination of a struggle for freedom but at the same time its profoundly ironic derailment. As this column noted last week, the reverberations of that historic moment continue to echo in the innermost sanctuaries of power game in the nation.

All these infractions and later mismanagement of ethnic and religious sensitivities in the nation have provoked deep-seated inter-personal animosities and widespread feelings of religious alienation. In certain circumstances, one even hears the baloney that Nigeria is a multi-religious state. This is sheer nonsense.

Arguably this is the most outlandish instance of a Freudian slip, a situation in which every ascendant religionist deliberately and single-mindedly moulds the nation in his own image until something gives. Nigeria may be a multi-religious nation but it is a secular state. The modern nation-state paradigm is anchored on the secularity of the state.

It is this deep-seated alienation from the Nigerian postcolonial state and the lack of religious inclusivity in its operative procedures that has been driving the calls for the presidential tickets of the major parties to be shared between the two major religions as a precondition of religious neutrality and affirmation of faith in the nation.

Yet at the same time, these calls, as insistent and clamorous as they have become in certain sections of the country, must be seen as nothing but facile and unduly optimistic strategies of containment; a resolution at the level of symbolism of the concrete existential dilemma of a people in a dire crisis.

Equality or assumed equality at the level of top state personnel does not lead to religious equality or the equalization of opportunities. Nothing, not even a vice president of muscular Christianity, can stop a bigoted Muslim president from acting out his fantasies or from deliberately promoting or pursuing policies that are deemed to be injurious to harmonious co-existence in the nation.

What a religiously conflicted society needs is not the bifurcation of presidential tickets along religious lines but a fierce secularist of a presidential candidate who will batten down the hatches of ethnic and religious prejudice and move the country away from the precipice of conflagration to a new era of harmony and peaceful coexistence. Luckily, the nation knows enough about the presidential candidates of the leading parties to know who the cap fits.

The immensity of the problems confronting Nigeria is such that it requires stirring efforts from different directions and perspectives. There are many ways to skin a cat. But while all this is going on, let it be remembered that power cannot abide a vacuum. Given the subsisting balance of forces, let those who believe in devolution of power, decentring and immediate restructuring continue to press their claim while those who believe in the state route to national redemption continue with their political forays.

At the moment, Nigeria resembles a chaotic and up-ended supermarket full of goods and goodies but requiring a superman of herculean bravery to set it back on the path of orderliness, lawful commerce and legal transaction without which it will continue to be prey to armed robberies, burglaries, shop-lifting and sundry villainies of berserk humanity. This is the point we have reached just before the postcolonial emporium goes under.

Snooper congratulates our dearest friend of “before before” and former comrade in arms at the old Students union barricades of the early seventies, Chief Wole Olanipekun, SAN on his recent elevation to arguably the most prestigious title in the Nigerian legal firmament. Having reached this stratospheric height in his chosen profession, the sky can no longer be the limit for the humble and retreating Asiwaju of  Ikerre Ekiti, the bucolic town nestling between Akure and Ado Ekiti.

Having been consumed in recent months by preparations for a chieftaincy investiture, yours sincerely was almost going to miss the historic elevation of one of the finest legal minds ever thrown up by the country. But an early morning call from Wole a few weeks ago put matters in sharp perspectives.

After brief pleasantries and protracted lamentations about the state of the country, a grumpy snooper pointedly asked the legal luminary why he failed to attend his investiture in the village. Upon denying that he ever received the invitation, the legal slugger and master of gruelling forensic examination, moved rapidly from the defensive to the offensive.

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“Look, bring that your big mouth”, (Gbe enu e wa nibi) Wole cut in. Are you saying that you didn’t hear that I was recently elevated as the chairman, Body of Benchers? Have you congratulated me? It was the turn of yours sincerely to squirm in embarrassment. Having achieved ethical parity, the conversation resumed on an even keel.

Looking at a king’s mouth no one would ever believe he ever suckled at his mother’s breast. It was about forty eight years ago that Wole made one of his customary forays into the then University of Ife as a student union leader from University of Lagos to “jazz” things up a bit. It was during one of the epic student protests against the Gowon administration. There was a lot of trans-campus hell-raising in those days. Till date, there are old Akokites who believe that yours sincerely actually studied there.

When it was time for the future SAN and legal luminary to leave, Dele Fajemirokun, the son of Henry Oloyede Fajemirokun, the Odidimade himself, volunteered to take the visitor to the university gate on his infamous scooter motorcycle. But just before the bridge, the hard pressed motorbike upended sending both riders crashing through Oluwasanmi’s flowers. Had there been any fatality, Nigeria would have been robbed of the services of two of its greatest contemporary sons, a legal titan and an entrepreneur of genius. Here is wishing Wole many more years of service to the fatherland.

NB After putting this together on Saturday morning in Birmingham, snooper got a call from Chief Dele Fajemirokun while he was lapping up all the luxuries at the BA special hangar in Windsor on his way back to Nigeria. The old bruiser from Ifewara insisted that it was a mobylette motorbike and not a scooter and that Wole fell to the ground yelling some frightening expletives in his native Ekiti tongue.

For two scary days and two long nights this past week, the entire nation was fixated on a riveting and absorbing political drama unfurling in the serene and somnolent capital city of Abuja. It was the APC convention to elect its presidential flag bearer following on the heels of the seamless performance of its most formidable rival, the PDP. Abu Jah lived up to its historic reputation as a simmering cauldron of royal intrigues and princely plots enacted all the way from its Zazzau origins.

For a moment, it looked as if the APC was going to go under in terminal distress. It appeared like a sea mammoth stranded on a sandy beach flapping and thrashing about as it tried to make its way back to water. It eventually succeeded almost entirely on its own will and volition. It was quite a spectacle to behold. Future historians will marvel at the miraculous reprieve.

It is unfortunate that the two conventions were marred by incredible monetization and fiscal inducement. But that is the stage our political culture has reached. Every dominant political culture is the sum total of the ruling values of the dominant classes and the enabling environment of dominated people.

Except for acts of political voluntarism by a revolutionary group which terminates or short-circuits the extant reality, the historical process must play itself out in the fullness of time. Whoever remembers that Robert Walpole, Britain’s founding prime minister, was a remarkable figure of graft and corruption?

This caveat notwithstanding, the last APC Convention will go down in history as one event that shook the nation to its foundation. In boxing annals, it recalls the famous Thrilla in Manila when sheer willpower and ferocious intelligence trumped brute physical strength and savage resolve. The epic slugfest between Mohammad and Joe Frazier ,aka Smokin Joe,  was enacted over twelve pulsating rounds on a hot and sultry night in the Philippines’  quaint and exotic capital.

It was the ultimate test of human endurance and the capacity of the body to absorb punishing blows without wilting. Mohammad Ali himself said that he went to hell and came back that night. At a point in the fight, his handlers thought of throwing in the towel. But the Louisville Lip would have none of that. Smoking Joe was an inveterate slugger who kept coming at you no matter what you threw at him. Many experts believe that Ali’s brains was messed up from that night.

The tension on Tuesday night going into Wednesday morning was felt far more in the larger nation than inside the sweat-soaked coliseum at the Eagle’s Square in Abuja where the gladiators collided. Some of the contestants were mere jokers. Some were opportunists looking for an opening. A few were deluded paperweights punching above their weight. There was the odd spiritual charlatan. One or two lacked the grit and cujones for higher office despite their capacity for elevated inanities.

Bola Ahmed Tinubu is a supremely endowed prize fighter who combines amazing technical brilliance with incredible strategic savvy. Super intelligent rather than intellectual, he is a visionary dreamer who often sees a road were the most hard-headed political realists see a roadblock. This capacity to see farther and capability for chancing often lead him to political forays which leave both his friends and foes completely stranded.

He seems to relish danger the way a big game hunter relishes adventure and confrontation with the viciously feral. Nothing seems to daunt him or to dampen his spirit. Plotting, restlessly planning, eternally manoeuvring and gifted with the memory of an old African elephant, Tinubu is not a man to be met in the ring by an opponent that is half-prepared or half-hearted.

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Sometimes he comes across as a glutton for punishment, otherwise why does he keep going when out there is nothing but evil, treachery, mendacity and big bad men who are out to inflict maximum punishment? This is because he loves competing, not for the fun of it but for the big prize and the glory. Public adulation is the pure oxygen of public life.

In this regard, all great politicians are also people of great vanity. Whether they choose to flaunt it or hide it is immaterial. Nothing fazes the former senator, neither the tons of insult that have been heaped on him nor the emotional and psychological intimidation he has had to endure in the course of a remarkable career. What is scandal to somebody who refuses to be scandalized? The exceptional public person is a political voyeur who admires himself even as others admire him.

This relentless and single minded pursuit of the big prize often comes with a capacity for extremely ruthless and cold-blooded actions which often come across as sheer bloody-mindedness. The postcolonial coliseum is not a place for fumbling saints. There are certain decisions one has to take which would make the squeamish or the faint-hearted wet their pants. Ultimately, there are no paddies in the African political jungle. You pull the trigger before the trigger is pulled on you.

It all comes with the territory or the staking out of territorial claims. The big feral cats are known to demarcate their own jurisdiction with such urinal pungency which can only be violated on the pain of death. Any other gaming male straying or wandering into the territory must be prepared for the fight of his life. Anybody trying to take Tinubu’s prized political possession from him while he still has a fight in him must be prepared for the biggest rumble in the jungle.

The same dynamic also plays out in Tinubu’s choice of political associates and associations which are often marked by a tension between the necessity of friendship and the friendships of necessity. When Winston Churchill famously described Lord Max Beaverbrook, the Canadian-born publisher and long-standing chum, as a “foul-weather friend”, he was stressing the value of tested soul-mating. From the opposite spectrum, the cold and emotionally frigid Charles de Gaulle was described as a man who had confidantes but no personal friends.

With Tinubu the tension between personal friendship and political friendship, between private camaraderie and public protocol often plays out as a tendency to wilful dispersal to accommodate emergent realities or a deliberate disintegration of the centre of gravity with hints of higher integration. In the pantheon of great Yoruba kings from Oyo Empire otherwise known as Alaafin, there was one they called wogiri-mogiri, a master enthusiast of creative destruction.

Going forward to uncharted territory there is need for an expansion of cultural horizon and political nuances to accommodate those who cannot be captured in the Yoruba sociological catchment. This is not the time for a naïve triumphalism and premature chest-beating. There are a lot of people hurting out there. This is the time to build new bridges and to repair old damaged bridges.

Against the background of the gory tragedy recently enacted in Owo, Tinubu’s emphatic emergence as the presidential candidate of the All Progressive Congress is a wonderful elixir for the Yoruba people and those who are still committed to the Nigerian Project. It is a temporary reprieve and the last thing standing between Nigeria and the clamour and shrill cries of separatism or dissolution increasingly coming from the region.

There are times when a people, a race or a nation in the course of their chequered history have to choose between permanent hostilities with their neighbours or some moderated and modulated form of cooperation and co-existence. After several centuries of intermittent and internecine hostilities which severely disrupted continental harmony and advancement, the French, Germans and the British finally agreed to a pact which allowed the three nations to enjoy peace and prosperity.

But in a situation where the neighbours are boxed into a colonial cage of contraries under the rubric of one “nation” such as we have in Nigeria, the situation becomes extremely concerning requiring exemplary and visionary statesmanship. The dingdong hostilities between the Fulani hegemony and the Yoruba political aristocracy have almost brought modern Nigeria to the gates of state failure.

In the course of protracted conflicts, it has led to the instigated disruption of the old regional federalism, the imprisonment of Awolowo, the termination of the First Republic, Chief Awolowo’s brief rehabilitation, the exclusion of the Yoruba people from the engine room of the Second Republic, the fall of that republic, protracted military rule by officers of northern origin, the annulment of the June 12 presidential election, Abiola’s incarceration, his death and Obasanjo’s emergence as the civilian leader of the Fourth Republic.

Old enmities die hard. Despite the enormous costs to the nation, the ancestral grievances and misgivings continue to simmer just under the surface even in the Fourth Republic. This was what led Tinubu and a few of his visionary associates into forging an alliance with the radically conservative core of the northern political aristocracy.

Whatever the dire and unintended consequences, it turned out a masterstroke of political genius as the alliance carried all before it in the 2015 elections. A natural bridge builder and student of power, those who have studied Tinubu’s political odyssey very well can attest to the fact that the deft manoeuvrings and transnational gambits of the northern power masters hold a deep and abiding fascination for him.

Tinubu’s relationship with the late President Yar’Adua was particularly chummy and it was the Katsina aristocrat who returned Lagos allocations seized by the federal authorities under General Obasanjo. Given this background, one would have expected the alliance to do very well and hold the country together in the stress and storm of postcolonial politics.

When last week this column opined that the northern wing of the alliance that gifted APC to the nation ought to have taken advantage of the emancipatory progressive politics brought to the table by the Southern segment of the merger, it was hinting of the countervailing possibilities of two diametrically opposed visions of the country.

Alas, this was not to be. No sooner had the APC romped into victory than those who are interested in raw power rather than its ameliorative potentials shut out the South West wing from the engine room of the Buhari administration. It has been a comprehensive disaster. With almost all the sections of the country up in arms against the federal authorities, it was clear that those who hijacked power and have held General Buhari willing hostage are leading the country to a terrifying cul de sac.

Perhaps this was the vision of the looming apocalypse glimpsed by the northern governors this past week that made them to revolt in a stirring and heroic counter offensive to thwart the original coup to stop Tinubu by all means masterminded by a few retrograde elements in the APC led by its chairman and his accomplices.

It is now immaterial whether this was a clever feint to buy time while the real plot unfolds or a tactical ploy to gain some respite from relentlessly adversarial political developments. Whatever it is, it should be obvious that you cannot step into the same river twice. With General Buhari’s declining authority and dwindling legitimacy, it should be obvious that the vice grip of some conservative elements on the nation’s destiny is about to be weakened, one way or the other.

These are the external and internal constellation of forces that aided Tinubu’s dramatic triumph this past week, particularly hostile forces liberated by the parlous and dire state of the nation threatening to bring the Banquet Hall down. Make no mistake about it, this is the first time the northern power mafia are being shellacked at their own game of political intrigues.

There will be epic consequences. But it will not be the expected consequences but consequences arising from the law of unintended action. This is not the Moor’s last hiccup. It is not a done deal yet, and as we have said it is not the time for a naïve triumphalism and political grandstanding but a time for the consolidation of gains and the building of alliances across uncharted territories.

Bola Ahmed Tinubu has gone to hell and back. Only those who have been put through the labyrinthine torture wrack of presidential power play in Nigeria could appreciate what this means. There may be something historically fortuitous about his emergence at this time and period. It may well be that going forward a particular political tendency that has held the nation to ransom needs a sympathetic undertaker.

The walls of antidemocratic messianism and autocratic consensus forging have been breached. As this column noted in ending last week, Nigeria is confronted by the prospects of irreversible failure or a dramatic national redemption. The opening omens are quite auspicious. The real thrilla in Abuja is about to commence.

God bless George Bernard Shaw wherever he may be.  The great Anglo-Irish wit, dramatic genius and literary hell-raiser was quite famous for his abrasive tongue and acerbic sense of humour. He was definitely not a person to get into a verbal tango with. Of middling education and even more mediocre exposure, Shaw was known to have publicly complained that his education was continually interrupted by schooling. We leave you this morning with four of the great man’s memorable sayings.

1. Upon a complaint about the flippancy and lack of seriousness among the British people, Shaw was heard to have exploded. “I hate people being happy when they should be happy.”
2. Despite his unprepossessing looks, George Bernard Shaw was very much a ladies man who enjoyed being lionized and lavished with attention by the great beauties of the time. At a charity ball, a great society lady was known to have asked Shaw why she was the object of his attention and slavish adulation when there were so many other women of greater beauty and natural endowment. “Well, it is a Charity Show, isn’t it?” the old codger glumly responded.
3. Another great lady of the time famous for her lavish entertainment and generosity to writers and struggling artists thought that the grumpy dramatic genius would jump at an opportunity to be invited to her place. “Lady Jane will be home tomorrow at Seven O clock prompt”, her telegram announced. “So will Bernard Shaw”, the crusty contrarian responded by return telegram.
4. Finally a third great beauty of the period, a great believer in the new science of Eugenics, famously proposed to have a child for the great writer on the ground that such a product will combine her dazzling looks with Shaw’s great brains. The celebrated eccentric took a despairing and dispiriting look at the fawning lady, “Well, madam, what if the poor child inherits my looks and your brains?” Bernard Shaw shot back. End of conversation and end of discussion. Bernard Shaw was something else and may his great soul rest in peace.

This past week perhaps the worst kept secret of the Fourth Republic finally became public knowledge. The rumour mill had been abuzz. The president himself had dropped broad hints of a favoured dark knight among those jostling to succeed him but declined further disclosure on the grounds that the poor fellow might be assassinated thus inadvertently suggesting that his party has become a camarilla of assassins.

Many are the pundits who concluded that as plodding and unhurried as the retired infantry general may appear on the surface, he is too alert and strategically minded to leave the question of his successor to mere chance. He was merely waiting for the right moment to deliver the killer blow. All military generals are masters of subterfuge and ambuscade.

Last week as if reading from the horoscope of political turmoil, this column actually went as far as stating that Nigeria is about to witness another spectacle of a retired general joining battle with the civilian faction of his hegemonic party in another do or die duel of political supremacy which will alter the complexion of the political landscape. The column bears quoting at length.

“In 2007, the departing General Obasanjo singlehandedly imposed Umaru Yar’Adua on the nation. And heavens did not fall. Fifteen years after, another retired general is trying to repeat the same spectacular stunt…. Here is wishing the general from Daura the very best of luck as he takes the nation on an ambiguous adventure”.

Forty eight hours later on Tuesday, and as if reading from the same manual of military subjugation of civilian subalterns, the general from Daura struck. In a carefully choreographed political ambush, the former infantry general read the riot act to twenty two governors serving under the auspices of the ruling party.

In a tersely worded statement redolent of blackmail and psychological intimidation, President Buhari urged his subordinate colleagues to grant him the same courtesy of choosing his successor that he had extended to them in choosing theirs. It was an irrefutable and unanswerable riposte. It was payback time after all one good turn deserves another. Tyranny and misconduct at the sub-national level can be replicated and even surpassed at the federal stage.

Mum was the word from the governors. They had immediately gone into a face-saving brainstorming session which was reportedly deadlocked. It was not the first time the old Sahel cheetah in Aso Rock would be having the governors for lunch. Readers will recall the events leading to the summary imposition of the party chairman by the president after enduring their self-important tomfoolery up to a point.

The president’s plea was quite revealing and it spoke to the structural anomaly bedevilling the country as well as the peculiar peccadilloes of the Buhari administration which have led the nation into a sorry pass. Since when has it become the norm for the federal government to take its cue from state administrations?  In the beguiling oxymoron known as unitary federalism it is a classic manifestation of political dysfunction for the sub-unit tail to wag the federal dog. It destroys the very basis of unitary formation and the argument for its overbearing proclivities.

The problem really is that it takes more than minatory violence to rule a nation, particularly a conglomeration of diverse cultures like ours. Real power, in all its persuasive force, flows from the might of example rather than the example of might. Old unitary nation-states that have survived and weathered the storm of implosion have done so by the force of persuasion rather than the persuasion of force. Nigeria has chosen to learn its lesson the very hard way.

General Buhari’s style of governance is particularly dangerous for the nation at this perilous point. It is not a hands-on mode of governance. It would not have greatly mattered in peaceful and sedate times. But in a country perpetually on the boil, a lackadaisical attitude can actually compound the problem by not acting when it matters most or by leaving things unaddressed until it is too late.

It is obvious that the former infantry officer prefers to watch critical events unfurl in wry phlegmatic humour while quietly plotting the comeuppance of those who underrate his resolve. How else can one explain the belated and rather tepid nature of the federal authorities to the plot to foist Goodluck Jonathan on the party and the nation once again by extension? Not even when some shadowy principalities bought a nomination form for a whopping 100 million naira for the Otuoke man did the federal government deem it fit to raise an eyebrow.

Not unexpectedly, the well-heeled and well-oiled plot was traced to some serving governors in the ruling APC who appear hell bent on truncating the zoning arrangement. That Mr Goodluck Jonathan, a prime beneficiary of the zoning arrangement, should be complicit in the plot to scupper the arrangement that has catapulted him from backwater obscurity to national prominence speaks volume for the quality of leadership recruitment in this country.

This column will spare the former president further obloquy in recognition of his position. Suffice it to say that his conduct on this matter has been most reprehensible. His attempt to defame the entire political system having failed to benefit from it combines the worst form of cynicism with uncharitable malice. Had he succeeded, mum would have been the word. But if had succeeded, that would have disabled the delicate armature which powers the Fourth Republic and the Obasanjo Settlement of 1999.

The Fourth Republic and the Obasanjo Settlement of 1999 are not short of a legion of undertakers. The PDP has just beaten APC to the tape in the race to scuttle the project of consociational politics which requires structured elite consensus. The irony of the just concluded PDP convention is that however its outcome is lauded and feted for its orderliness and discipline, the victory is enacted on the funeral pyre of zoning and equitable allocation of offices.

By jettisoning and abjuring the vision of their founding fathers all in a bid to secure victory at the next presidential polls, the PDP betrays a power desperation which is the bane of postcolonial politics in Africa. But who can blame them? Power is the shortest route to economic parity in Africa. Sadly demoralised and dispirited having been driven out of power in humiliating circumstances the surviving power hegemons are no longer in a position to brook any political idealism.

PDP has lost all visionary impetus. It is a poor shadow of its former self. This is no longer the original party of Alex Ekwueme, Lawal Isa Kaita, Sunday Bolorunduro Awoniyi, Solomon Lar and the early Atiku. Shorn of its energy and predatory courage, it reminds one of a torpid and senescent crocodile stranded at the bank of a river while waiting for easy prey.

Now chaired by a man who has divested himself of the idealism of his youth for power pragmatism and retrograde hay-making, the less said about the former “comrade” the better. On his road to political Golgotha, Ayu was famously described by a former Marxist colleague and mentor as exhibiting an increasingly brittle temperament and an irascible mien. The call by Chief Edwin Clark on Ayu to resign his position is unnecessary. As the Yoruba will put it, it is the biting cold of the Harmattan that will dissuade a scantily clad woman.

This is not the party that will lead Nigeria to the altar of inclusive politics or the egalitarian distribution of resources. Consociational politics and the elite consensus which led to the formation of the original PDP are made of sterner stuff. They require discipline , forbearance and extreme patriotism on the part of the political elite. It is not about capturing power at all costs. There must be a nation first before any other thing can fall into place.

It is a shame and a major political tragedy that the two state parties have not demonstrated these virtues of discipline, forbearance and extreme patriotism. This is where it is most appropriate to return General Buhari’s marching order to the twenty two APC governors.

When the president stressed the need to strengthen the internal cohesion of the party to power it to victory, he seems to have forgotten that the APC is not an organic party but an unstable amalgam of contrary and mutually countervailing legacy parties. The best it could achieve was a dynamic unity based on dialectical tensions.

But in the unhappy circumstances it has found itself the APC stands the risk of disintegrating into its component parts. The president, a cultural hegemonist of the most fearsome order, has been unable to manage diversity both at party and national levels.

Instead of unifying the party, the cabal that holds him willing hostage has been at its most appallingly polarising and divisive. Rather than making use of the emancipatory progressive politics the dominant tendency in the South West has brought to the table, the president and his antediluvian honchos are more interested in a project of medieval triumphalism.

This is the badly destabilized and politically demoralized party that the president hopes will make electoral hay in the coming elections. But nothing is impossible in Nigeria. Party identity has since lost out to personal identity and the politics of name recognition. But while this can play out at the local level, everybody will have to bear their ancestor’s patronymic at the national level.

As we say in this column, you cannot step into the same river. When General Obasanjo unilaterally imposed Yar’adua on party and the nation, many things were working in his favour. First the opposition parties had been rendered hors de combat by Obasanjo’s relentless destabilization. The AD has suffered an implosion from which it never recovered and the APP was about to die under the military scalpel of the master-surgeon. It was a blood-splattered canvas indeed.

Second, the National Question had not become so intractable and neither has the mismanagement of the nation’s diversity occasioned such a nightmare. Despite his incarceration and the lingering unease and suspicion over the June 12 debacle, Obasanjo continued to treat his former military subordinates and top members of the northern establishment with wary affection and regard.

He did not show his hand until he had fully recovered the initiative. It is useful to recall that the Yar’Adua plot later blew in Obasanjo’s face with the impeccably principled Katsina nobleman refusing to play ball while an irate Owu general would dismiss him as an “ungrateful wretch” in his memoirs.

Fifteen years after, history appears to be repeating itself but the circumstances could not have been more inauspicious. The benign collusion and complicity of events which allowed Obasanjo to have his way have now been severely curtailed by further developments. The falcon can no longer hear the falcon.

Under General Buhari’s watch, the National Question has so badly deteriorated that the resulting fissures cannot but impact any national election or presidential nomination. The ruling party under Obasanjo was far more cohesive and organically structured.

The opposition parties these days, unlike the induced somnolence which pervaded the atmosphere under Obasanjo, are a lot more vibrant and rampart.  They have been joined by new party formations that appear bent on having their pound of flesh making the APC look increasingly like a bear at bay tortured and tormented to death by a hundred hounds.

To compound the problems of the ruling party, the advance of technology and the advent of electronic voting have made the kind of egregious rigging which characterised the 2007 presidential election technically inconceivable unless INEC goes completely rogue. The tide is high indeed and there is time for everything.

A surly and sullen mood now pervades the political landscape. With the ruling party, ambushed by its own perfidies and treacheries, still dithering and quarrelling about its choice of presidential nominee this late in the day and with one of its leading stakeholders openly chafing at the shenanigans, something nasty is afoot. One must pray at this point for Nigeria’s legendary luck to intervene and save the greatest project of the Black race this past century from self-inflicted ruination.

But the omens are not very reassuring. At this point given the rancour and disaffection that pervade the nation, Nigerians must prepare for the possibility of a “hung” presidency a situation in which no party is able to convincingly prevail at the presidential polls, presaging a descent into anarchy and chaos given the dismal state of elite consensus. On a more positive note, it may well be that a dramatic miracle of national emancipation may be loading.

Omo wohira (Be discerning in your choice)
K’oma r’erukeru (do not buy a useless and good for nothing slave)
Erukere abi lala l’enu (A useless and good for nothing slave that sleeps soundly, drooling when it is time for work.)

Please permit this column some strange reflections this morning. Erukeru is abroad. The above is a panegyric or praise chant of an illustrious Yoruba lineage which admonishes the members of the clan not to make the mistake of procuring an Erukeru, a devious and good for nothing slave, from the slave market. The import of the admonition will become clearer as the political fable unfolds.

In fifty two years of watching and participating in struggles for the democratic emancipation of Nigeria nothing has prepared one for current developments in the country’s post-military Fourth Republic. One can now say that having been taught a valuable lesson by political developments in Nigeria those who insist that nothing is impossible are probably right.

A slave market democracy is a strange coinage indeed. It is a troubling oxymoron. Slavery ought to belong to the classical antiquity of human evolution. What has slavery got to do with democracy? But the fact remains that a particular human mode is not always eradicated in one swoop. It continues to exist in actual or vestigial forms in many other areas.

How else does one describe a political system which conforms to the surface realities of democratic rule while maintaining fidelity to the internal format of classical slavery? A mode of production can exist side by side with other modes until one supplants the other or they are both pushed aside by an emergent mode.

Democracy bears strange fruits indeed. There are democracies and there are democracies. There is no ideal democratic society anywhere in the world. They all tend to approximate the ideal form even though it can be said that certain societies are more democratic than others. Sometimes, there is a trade off with certain societies (China for example) enjoying economic democracy while losing out in terms of political democracy.

On the other hand, the denizens of western societies seem to enjoy more political democracy:  egalitarian rights, freedom of speech and association while the economy is concentrated in the hands of a few plutocrats. Yet there are others such as the postcolonial societies of Africa and Latin America where progress on both fronts is painful and negligible.

Several millennia after the Greeks first planted the idea in human imagination and several centuries after the Americans, French and British thought they had reinvented the practice, Democracy, or demos kratos, the power of the people, continues to fascinate and to surprise. Local conditions, the political fauna and fossilized tradition in conjunction with the stage the historical dialectic has reached have a way of imposing themselves on the complexion and colouration of democracy.

Nigerians are famous for not doing things in small or half measures. As Chinua Achebe would ask, why should a person who lives by the bank of the Niger River wash his hands with spittle? This week as the four-yearly ritual of Delegates Summit to elect presidential candidates of the principal parties opened, it has not been short of high octane drama and outlandish conduct which would beggar the most hilarious comedy of the Theatre of the Absurd genre.

It has been a spectacular bazaar of horse trading, or properly speaking an outlandish tragi-comedy of slave-trading and slave-raiding with the prize often going to the person with the deepest pocket or the person with enough state backing to browbeat or outwit the others.

At the end of the day, there are no real victors only the least vanquished who must have accumulated both baggage and political IOUs heavy enough to weigh him down in office and preclude any entertainment of brave reform or visionary derring-do. Meanwhile, there is a run on the naira because most of the transaction has to be carried out in foreign denominated currency. This is the reason why after twenty three years the political space has contracted as the economic circumstances have also worsened.

In a functioning political culture, a delegate is a person to whom authority and legitimacy have been delegated by a larger body. He his therefore expected to vote according to the dictates of his conscience and certain principles shared with the delegating authority. But the average Nigerian delegate lacks principles and conscience because those who “run” him also lack principles and conscience. The party itself lacks ideology and deeply held convictions.

In the circumstance, the convention becomes a free for all trades fair with the delegates freely offering themselves to the highest bidder and showing no qualms of conscience whatsoever. When he is reined in, that is if he is reined in at all, it is to remind him of the consequences of his action. But at that point in time, the delegate couldn’t care a hoot.

Like all mercenary soldiers who dream of emancipation, the opium of fake manumission has kicked in irredeemably. With his pockets bulging with his loot, the slave-delegate knows that he has collected his meal package for the next four years. He has become an Erukeru, a soulless and merciless slave who sleeps soundly and snores while the master goes out to work.

But his term of enslavement has just begun. As the bulge in his pocket disappears, so does the illusion of freedom. He will soon be back to square one. Having paid his dues, the master is in no mood to entertain any pleading for an amelioration of his pitiable and pathetic condition. A female senator from Ekiti State was once heard to complain that she didn’t owe her constituency any obligation having paid for their votes. These are the wages of slave market democracy.

This past week, the son of a former vice president of the republic was overheard asking the delegates who collected two million naira to vote for him to return the money or face the consequences. He is wasting his time. He should ask his father how much he was able to recoup from the failed presidential bid of 2015. If he is lucky the person who vanquished him will act on his behalf against the rogue electorate. That is how it works.

You cannot begin to accuse a lame man of carrying a misshapen luggage. If we are going to free this country from the antediluvian morass of economic, political and spiritual backwardness, we must begin by tracing where the rains started beating us. It was not like this in the First and Second Republics.

The principal parties had distinct ideologies and discernible worldviews. Most members subscribed to these worldviews and were willing to die for them. As Awolowo observed of Ahmadu Bello: “you may not like the Sardauna, but you always know where you stand with him”.

The military excursion into politics and their attempt to create a new political class in their own image led to the introduction of big time money politics in Nigeria. It led to the twin evil of the militarization and monetization of politics.

According to the late Professor Oyeleye Oyediran in a perceptive analysis, the new class project opened up, leading to the co-optation of important sections of the new moneyed class, the intelligentsia who believed their bread was better-buttered under the military, retired military brass hats, the old bureaucracy and other ill-assorted wannabes.

What would have been an important and beneficial trade off was the emergence of a new political class with national and nationalist orientation. But that illusion was soon dispelled by the June 12 debacle which was a product of ethnic exceptionalism and old hegemonic war-mongering. In the absence of solid ideological mooring and a nationalist outlook, the relentless monetisation of politics became the order of the day.

The conventions of the two state parties, SDP and NRC, witheringly dismissed as government parastatals by Chief Anthony Enahoro, particularly the SDP convention in Jos where MKO Abiola emerged as the flag bearer was a pointer to things to come. Big money changed hands freely and the prize went to the highest bidder.

The same scenario was to repeat itself five years later at the PDP convention in Jos after General Sani Abacha’s baneful interregnum. There, a hitherto penniless and fiscally emasculated Obasanjo carried all before him in an unstoppable momentum. In a classic instance of the militarization and monetization of politics, General Obasanjo famously took his delegates to Jos in a sealed train and promptly bivouacked them outside the city.

Thereafter, every subsequent presidential election in the nation, including the egregiously rigged elections of 2003 and 2007, betrayed the influence of money politics and the militarization of democratic procedure. With mass poverty biting harder and the general immiseration of the populace proceeding apace as a result of an absence of visionary politics and bold structural and institutional reform, the slave market democracy became the norm.

It must be said that General Buhari’s anti-democratic populism, a combination of authoritarian intolerance and messianic posturing, is the obverse of this bad coin. A situation in which twelve million votes are permanently warehoused waiting for the word of the Mai Gaskiya, like a rough and ready militia on a short leash, is a classic example of slave market democracy which bodes ill for the nation. This certainly cannot lead to a pan-Nigerian democracy but to ethnic exceptionalism and a flagrant veto on the aspirations of many.

Now with President Buhari all set to impose his choice of presidential candidate on the ruling APC in the name of an authoritarian and undemocratic consensus principle, we are about to witness the ultimate test of slave market democracy.

To be sure, this political duel unto death often takes place under an ideological occlusion in which the principal combatants are led to believe that they are acting in the best party and national interest when in actual fact they are motivated by the basest and grossest of personal and hegemonic interests. But this illusion of disinterested patriotism and pure national interest does not last long before other countervailing realities intervene. That is when the gloves must come off.

We can now see how slave market democracy is driving the parties to the end of their tether and the nation itself to the edge of perdition, if care is not taken. Having collected their shekels, having had their field day and their feeding frenzy, the delegates, both the mob and their mobsters, will be summarily decommissioned for the selectorate to select and the electorate to follow suit in routine affirmation of choicelessness and helplessness.

It can now be seen why the nation needs a fundamental reset. The Fourth Republic is a product of its time, of a particularly traumatic post-military emergency. It has served its purpose. Slave market democracy can only lead to the emasculation of parties, of politics and the people. Eventually it will consume the polity itself. The auguries are very dire.

We can view and review the process of deterioration and decline as it seems to reach the last bend of the river. In 1993, it took about twenty three men in military uniform to annul the electoral wish of fourteen million Nigerians who voted. The selectorate thereafter took charge of the political fortunes and misfortunes of the ensuing Fourth Republic. In 2007, the departing General Obasanjo singlehandedly imposed Umaru Yar’Adua on the nation. And heavens did not fall.

Fifteen years after, another retired general is trying to repeat the same spectacular stunt. But Obasanjo’s legendary luck held in two significant respects. He was lucky in the choice of political conjuncture: the National Question had not become this volatile and foreboding as a result of the gross mismanagement of our diversities. Second, the wily titan from Owu got his ethnic sum and regional calculations right. Here is wishing the general from Daura the very best of luck as he takes the nation on an ambiguous adventure.

ERRATA

In this column last week, the name of the iconic late Mozambique leader, Samora Michel was inexplicably substituted with the name of Joseph Savimbi of Angolan infamy. This is political sacrilege of the highest order. Savimbi caused so much pain and trauma to the Angolan people in a needless and pointless war of attrition with the ruling MPLA. His name cannot be mentioned in the same breath as Samora, a much beloved hero of the Mozambican people. Also, the last three paragraphs of the second piece were yanked off due to production error. The whole piece is reproduced below.

A day after Jide Sanwo-Olu, the urbane, even-tempered and level-headed governor of Lagos State, announced a total ban on Okada motorcycle drivers, yours sincerely woke up to a fearsome din of cheers and applause coming from the street below.

Bleary-eyed, Snooper frantically pulled the curtains. The whole scene was hazy and blurry at first. In the distance and amidst the total confusion, one could only make out the half-crazed dustbin woman of Sierra-Leonean ancestry screaming on top of her voice in wild excitement.

“Oga, oga!!! You still dey sleep? Something done dey happening oo. Mama done do am again. He come finis dem Okada boy who come run like Saro wayo man”, she screamed on top of her voice.

At that point the outlandish spectacle became discernible. It was the irrepressible and indefatigable Mama Igosun. Dressed in her husband’s ancient PWD uniform which had become her default mode for hell-raising, she had dismounted from a motor cycle and was dragging the poor machine towards the house heaving and panting as the crowd cheered and hailed.

At this point, the mad dustbin woman of Saro extraction burst into an old, naughty Sierra-Leonean ditty.

Woman dey pantap

Man dey bottom

Come see something wey happen ooo

Mama had been in a quiet surly mood of late ever since her latest request to return to her Igosun homestead was firmly rejected. She had become mildly disruptive in the house often urging Gbabi-Magbabe, the driver and former NNDP thug, to finish off Okon by slamming him with an amulet from his deadly repertoire of charms. One blow and Okon would fold in convulsive spasms like a stung millipede.

The previous day after a fearsome altercation with Okon over Sukuniyan, an ancient delicacy made from  unhatched eggs, the ancient amazon barged into snooper’s room.

“ Wo, Akanbi, I say I wan go home. I wan reach Igosun. I don tire for this yeye Lagos people. Na so so grammar, no action. All dem Yoruba leader dem don chop dodo(plantain) and dem no fit talk ododo (truth) again,” the old woman screamed in choleric rage.

“Mama, you cannot go to Igosun. There is nobody there for you”, snooper replied.

“Akanbi, na becos I dey respect you. I sabi my way well well. Na Akanran road I for take. So if you say make I no go home, go bring my shrine make I dey worship Orisha Oko”, the fiery contrarian sulked.

“Mama you can’t do that here. I am a born again Christian”, snooper objected.

“And who born you again? I sabi when dem born you for Seven Day Hospital and my sister come dey cry like dem Agege fowl”, the feisty warrior screamed, resuming ancient sororal feuds. At this point, snooper walked out on her in mock anger.

But this morning as one beheld the old woman beaming over the motorcycle with great pride and satisfaction it was obvious that a public relation fiasco was unfolding.

“Mama what is all this about?” snooper asked pointing at the motorcycle.

“Ha Akanbi, I seize am from dem yeye Godogodo boy. As I dey lawyer am why him still dey ride dem okada, he wan stab me. Him don forget say person no dey stab dead wood. Naim I come whack him head with them wheel spanner and as he come dey run, him come fall and I come carry him okada come home”, the old woman noted breathlessly.

“No mama you can’t do that. It is against the law”, snooper shouted.

“Which law again after dem don ban them? You see na law, law, law go kill Yoruba people. I say I wan go home, abi na by force? Kilode gan gan?”, the old woman screamed and stormed out on snooper.