Category: Tatalo Alamu

Yesterday, Okon struck again in the most unlikely of holy places. Snooper was looking forward to a great breakfast of sausage, ham, liver, omelette and fresh toasted bread. In the event, the breakfast was a comprehensive fiasco. The cereal tasted like saw weed, the sausage looked like the pallid fingers of a domestic monkey, the bread haggard and unkempt and the liver tasted like the boiled blood of wild cat.

“Okon what is going on here? What type of breakfast is this?” snooper screamed at the mad boy.

“Oga abi you never hear say dem don deregulate market?” Okon asked with a savage smile.

“Is that why you want to kill me?” snooper shouted at the mad boy.

“Oga no be me wan kill una. Na dem gobment. Crate of egg na two thousand”, Okon began. “I asked dem yeye women whether na Ogongo egg sef”, Okon sniggered.

“And this rubbish?” snooper asked, pointing at the purported liver.

“Na better liver. But wait oooo. He fit be human liver sef. Na Ejimofor sell me dat one”, the mad boy croaked. In anger and alarm, snooper aimed a wild blow at the lunatic which he ducked with professional expertise.

“May God punish your mother!!” snooper cursed

“Oga, dem mala and dem gobment dey punish mama pass God. Dem they thief money and dem dey thief dem vote”, Okon noted with a devilish smile.

“Come Okon”, snooper began in total exasperation as he took a second dive at the rancid omelette with a fork. “Even if egg is ten thousand, what type of omelette is this? Didn’t you complain to the women?”

“Oga I complain so tey, but dem mad women say dem go call dem Market Force make im come finish Okon. Dem say Market Force na ogbologbo asinwin and him don kill ten market people already. So, I tell them say I no dey understand dem yeye gobment at all.. Dem dey deregulate everything, but dem no fit deregulate common election, dem still dey regulate for that one.”

“So?”snooper hissed in disgust and indignation.

“So, dem Road Safety people come arrest Okon for illegal parking. I come tell dem fools say I no get motor but dem say na my mouth. Sebi your stupid mouth dey dance belebele about government, abi?  Naim I come remove my clothes for dem thieves like dem mad Market Force. Naim dem come come run, naim I come pick race too”.

• First published in May, 2009

It a time like this when Nigeria yearns for world-class statesmen and visionary nation-builders, we must borrow seasoning from foreign climes. Snooper remembers the old English bulldog, Winston Spencer Churchill. Arguably the greatest Englishman of all time, Churchill was also one of the world’s greatest literary geniuses, winning the Nobel Prize for literature solely on account of his spellbinding prose.

But the great man was also as naughty and as stubborn as they come, prompting his darling wife, Clementine, to observe that of all her sons, Winston was the most difficult. God helped whoever was on the receiving side of Churchill’s rapier-like wit and saucy verbal resources.

Despite being a remarkable prose stylist, Churchill was often a sloppy writer paying scant attention to the demands of syntax, often wilfully splitting his infinitives and violating some of the elementary rules of grammar. His private secretary, an equally formidable, no-nonsense lady, would have none of these infractions. After a particularly horrendous grammatical mix-up involving a split infinitive, the great lady corrected and sent back to her boss.

“This is one of those corrections up with which I cannot put”, a furious Churchill wrote back with a more inglorious infraction. God bless good old Winston.

The last time Okon Anthony Okon was sighted around Mende, he was colourfully dressed and heading for a famous Laundromat in Ikeja. When he was asked about his mission, the impossible boy shot back: “I wan reach dem Washaman for Ikeja. Dem Baba Lekki tell me say dem don take Baba Abiku to cleaners for him mad yabis against dem gobment. So, I wan reach dem people before dem put  Abiku inside dem big rolling garawa, or him kaput be dat.”

After an evening spent consuming some strong stuff at a birthday party in Yaba, snooper arrived home determined to squeeze this development in this column. But columnist knocked off right in front of the computer barely able to finish with : Stop Press. Dragging himself to the bedroom, snooper sank into a celestial slumber hoping to resume in the morning after the situation improved. But later in the morning yours sincerely arrived downstairs to be greeted by a scene of apocalyptic chaos. The clothes had been left in disarray on the iron board without being ironed.

When the crazy boy returned from the market and was confronted, he shot back. “Oga, no be you put stop press for dem computer last night, abi wetin stop press mean again?”  End of conversation. Snooper retreats with his rumpled tail shirt blazing from Okon’s verbal bazooka.

In their original designation, the Taliban were Islamic students. But by the end of last week and in an ironic reversal of role, it was the hardened and ferocious militia that was teaching America and the rest of the world master class lessons in national determination and commensurate military firepower. The student had become the master.

As the Taliban fighters encircled Kabul and then began to swoop on the Afghanistan capital in classic military fashion, you got a sense that a major military humiliation and comeuppance of a superpower was under way. At the same time after you have taken away from the equation the natural fighting instincts of the Afghan people, one also had a sneaking feeling that the master-drummers in this Taliban tango are in the background.

Unless something dramatic had happened in the twenty years since they melted away after the punitive pounding by the Americans, the kind of superior intelligence, logistics and armaments required to put this together is beyond the ken of an irregular fighting outfit. America’s oriental and Asiatic enemies are laughing all the way at the humbling and discomfiture of the greatest military power the world has seen since the collapse of the Roman Empire.

The scale of America’s military reversal is stunning and stupendous to say the least and it is a matter for military experts to evaluate. There are eerie echoes of Saigon, 1975 when the defeated and bedraggled American forces were forced into a precipitate and disorderly evacuation of the old South Vietnamese capital while the doughty Vietnamese warriors waited in the wing.

Forty six years after, history does repeat itself, but not in exactly the same fashion. This time it is a comic horror show with the heavily bearded Karl Marx watching with a sickened guffaw. It is not quite Saigon. Unlike the Gadarene rush out of Vietnam, American soldiers are still technically in control of Kabul’s Hamid Karsai International Airport where they are supervising an increasingly messy and chaotic evacuation of American personnel and Afghan dependants.

The victorious Afghan militants know which line not to cross in order not to invite the wrath of a stung American scorpion. The Americans also know why a gung-ho militarism can no longer suffice. If only this lesson had been taken to heart twenty one years earlier! Perhaps there would have been no 9/11 and there would have been no botched invasion.

The world is changing indeed, but not in a manner we envisaged and which any pundit could presage. Whereas the affronted Vietnamese nationalists waged a war of self-determination distinguished by its ideological clarity and immense self-possession, the toughened Taliban warriors are waging a war of ethnic determination based on a crisis of civilization and a differing perception of global political values based on religious orientation. It is a duel unto death.

The tragedy of modern America is the tragedy of a strong powerful man without much countervailing discretion. Discretion is famously described as the better part of valour. In Yoruba cultural parlance, the strong man without discretion is usually dismissed as the king of cowards. The Americans ought to have known that historically the Afghans fight like eunuchs with nothing to lose except earthly encumbrances.

The notorious Afghan Khyber Pass has been the graveyard of many mighty western armies from time immemorial. Many European generals have perished in the mountainous gorge which straddles present day Afghanistan and Pakistan. In a storied encounter, the remnants of the Anglo-Indian forces were wiped out to the single man who lived to tell the story.

What the Americans were trying to do in Afghanistan would require staying put for at least two hundred years and not a mere twenty. Yet in our modern world with its radically revolutionized timeline, a single year can appear and feel like an eternity. Every other thing happens so fast, but people do not change that fast.

Changing the cultural values and political attitude of a proud and recalcitrant people cannot be an overnight combo. It takes decades of domestication and intense cultivation which require continuous presence and eternal alertness. In the long run, both the person drying the cocoa pod and the cocoa pod itself must suffer evaporation and evisceration together, according to an acute West African observation.

It is this evaporation and evisceration that the Americans fear most, particularly the reaction of outraged citizenry aptly summarised by the phrase “Vietnamese Syndrome”. This is when donor fatigue meets host rejection. But nation-building has never been a quick fix. America should learn from imperial masters of olden times.

For every nation so built in the imperialist image, you must collect a mountain of rumbling bones. The bones continue to rumble in postcolonial Africa, Asia and everywhere else. While the French have maintained a discreet taciturnity over the current Afghanistan debacle, the wily British have wisely ruled out even the remotest possibility of a military intervention.

The Americans are a victim of the brave new modernist world they have helped to inaugurate. Without formal annexation which would be frowned up by the rest of the world as colonial occupation, it is no longer possible to occupy other people’s land and countries in the name of any “civilizing mission”. The world has since moved on. The Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, the Arabs, the Vietnamese and now the Afghans would have none of that.

The standard American response to this is to crow that America does not do nation-building. This intellectual betise is a dubious repudiation of the doctrine of manifest destiny, the notion of American Exceptionalism and the entire Jeffersonian ethos on which the modern American nation was founded.

The radical repudiation of British overlordship, the extermination of the native Indians in their ancestral habitat, the forcible assimilation of African slaves into the rubric of the new nation and the dislodgement of the French, the Mexicans and the Spaniards from their vast possessions in North America, are nothing but clear examples of involuntary incorporation in the name of nation-building albeit on the same continent.

So also are the serial occupation of Haiti, the dislodgement of the Spaniards and the formal colonization of the Philippines as well as the forcible incorporation of the Hawaii islands at the end of the Second World War. Lest we forget, the Americans also spent time in Japan at the end of the Second World War engaged in both nation-building and nation-rebuilding.

One or two of these efforts might have come off as cack-handed and half-hearted but the messianic urge to remould the world cannot be doubted.  The American debacle in Afghanistan is predicated on a miscognition of changing global realities and cultural orientation based on countervailing civilizational values.

Whereas a contrite and remorseful Japanese nation was willing to renounce its rampart militarism and shift its old warlike ethos to the economic development of its people, the Pashtun Afghan hegemonists remain resolutely wedded to an Islamic feudal past. How this feudal anachronism now powered by the wild and merciless fanaticism of the reenergized Taliban zealots will play out in the light of colliding modern realities remains to be seen.

So are the Americans right or wrong? This is not a moral or ethical question at all. In every human epoch up till this moment, the ruling ideas have been the ideas of the ruling empire or ascendant people. What the Americans have tried to do is not different from what the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians, the Arabs, the Turks and the English tried to do with varying successes.

Those who are seized by the wanton urge to massacre and destroy do not leave any legacy. Despite the fact that the Roman Empire was upended by the barbarians, Roman legacies survive till the present era. But for the triumphant victors themselves, such is the cunning of history that what often survive them are far from the intended results.

Postcolonial Africa and Nigeria in particular play host and hostage to the pathologies of British colonization. Yet repeated political and military humiliations by the west have not turned the Iranians, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Singaporeans and the Indians into cultural, economic, spiritual and intellectual slaves of hegemonic western powers. Serial military defeats have driven these ancient people back to the deep reserves of their culture and extant civilization.

Consequently, the Chinese, the Japanese and the Singaporeans have managed to evolve a unique, home-concocted brand of capitalism which is proving superior to western capitalism in terms of service delivery and the economic emancipation of the greatest number of their people. India excels intellectually and is proving a giant in technological innovation.

In the wake of the engineered and orchestrated collapse of socialist ideology in the old Soviet Union, Russia has lapsed into a hyper-Slavic nationalism that is far more potent and virulent than anything the west witnessed in the high noon of socialist daredevilry. Through revolutionary upheavals and severe self-isolation, the hardened and disciplined Vietnamese have been able to negotiate a delayed entry into the orbit of global capitalism far more favourable to their people rather than being dragooned into tame compliance.

So, the world does change but not in the way anybody could envisage. The owl of Minerva always begins its flight after the event. This is the fundamental lesson the victorious Taliban ought to have taken to heart. As the advanced team of Taliban helmsmen gathered round the ornate desk in the deserted presidential palace at Kabul last Sunday, not even their most gifted astrologers and political star-gazers could have predicted the turn of events and the speed and precipitate pace of American retreat. Not even the best and brightest State Department policy wonks could.

But judging by subsequent events, the Taliban seem to have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. Their trigger-crazy enforcers seem to be back on their beat after twenty years. Ethnic resentment and uncoordinated resistance seem to be brewing against the return of the country to the war-like hegemony of the Pashtun tribe. They are by far the majority ethnic group but the nation also contains a generous sprinkling of Tajiks, Uzbeks, Arabs, Balochs, Gujaris, Turkmen, Brahuls etc.

Twenty years of American occupation could not have been completely in vain. There is a whiff of democratic enlightenment abroad. Afghan women appear to have become more outspoken and less likely to be fazed by Taliban thugs.

If the Taliban choose to return the country to the Stone Age barbarities and cruelties, the summary executions and wanton desecration of the sacred pre-Islamic heritage that marked their first coming, they are likely to be met by growing resistance and sustained international isolation. That can only turn the country into a hotbed of geopolitical contentions and fierce jostling among the superpowers leading once more to national ruination this time on an epic scale.

Were the Taliban so minded to project Islam as a humane and progressive religion, what they ought to do now, rather than resort to raw militarism, is to find the intellectual, cultural and economic resources to restore their war-shredded country to the golden age of Islam when women were the leading lights, where brilliant philosophy and speculative science flourished and where a knowledge society in its rudimentary stage was the order of the day. It was known as Andalusia.

In summary, it is obvious that we live in an increasingly conflicted and mutually antagonistic stage of human development. The irony of this is that it is due to increasing material prosperity and spiritual emancipation in many societies which has made it possible for peoples, cultures and nations to reassert their primal identities against the hegemonic pretensions of globalised capitalism.

In other societies such as we have seen with the Taliban it is a combination of nationalist aspiration and theological embroilment with religious values they view as hostile and completely antithetical to theirs. Whatever the combinatoire, it appears the era of a unipolar world in which a lone superpower determines the fate of human society is in its last throes.

This is the principal lesson of the American debacle in Afghanistan. The Roman Empire did not die from a single wound but from multiple injuries. It is a teachable moment for the greatest power the world has seen since the collapse of the Roman Empire.

The relationship between some great men and their strong mothers has never ceased to fascinate snooper. After having conquered and subdued the whole of Russia, Joseph Stalin, a failed seminarian, returned home to his native Georgia to what he thought would be a rousing welcome.

But his mother was unimpressed. Scanning the new emperor of the land of the Tsars with maternal disapproval, the old woman erupted: “Joseph, it is a pity you didn’t make it as a priest”, she growled.  The man who had famously asked how many divisions the Pope himself could muster retreated with his famous tunic coat blazing.

Coming nearer home, a triumphant Brigadier Godwin Alabi-Isama in the early seventies once approached the Palm Groove area of Lagos where his mother was residing with sirens blazing and outriders scorching the earth. There was much commotion and hullabaloo.

The great war hero had just been made the acting military governor of old Bendel state. As he made to open the door of the apartment, the old woman, a formidable Ilorin princess, jumped at him. “So you are the one causing all this confusion in this quiet neighbourhood? Afira ee!!” In Yoruba parlance, this is a command to immediate disappearance.

“Ma’min, e ma doju timi”, (Mother, please don’t disgrace me) the crestfallen warrior pleaded with his adamant mother. A compromise had to be worked out where the war hero had to go to the nearest military barracks to remove his uniform and entourage before he could slip back into the neighbourhood.

On a final note, snooper once engaged his mother in a long conversation after a sojourn abroad collecting academic laurels. Snooper wanted to know whether a nearby community famous for rural psychiatry was still in existence. After listening to snooper drooling endlessly about the virtues of rural psychiatry, the old woman suddenly shot out: “Sir, do you have somebody who is sick?” End of discussion and end of conversation. Oh sweet mothers. Some mothers do have ‘em indeed.

 

Impunity in a society that has moved on is an excellent opportunity for a nation to flirt with suicide. This is why at the moment Nigeria appears to be running on an autopilot. Nobody seems to be truly in charge. The president has just returned from medical pilgrimage abroad where Nigeria’s highest diplomat in the host country reportedly had a tough time keeping away prying native eyes keen to register their displeasure with the state of things at home.

Although the security situation appears to have slightly improved in the last few weeks, there are still areas of deep concern when it comes to actual governance, particularly the management of the nation’s ethnic divergences, and an economy that is on a tailspin.  The problem is that the nation’s affairs have been so badly bungled, so grossly mismanaged, that it will take years of unrelenting messianic toil by a committed political elite and a group of mandarins that know their onions to get things back on track.

The prospects of that state resurgence and national renaissance appears to be very bleak, judging from the current lopsided configuration of the nation and the violent state suppression of all agitations for a renewal of the national charter or a redefinition of its territorial dominion. With the clampdown on all agitations for a renegotiation of the basis of the country, all appears to be quiet on the eastern and to some extent the western fronts.

But we wager that this can only be a temporary and transient retreat, as even more potent forces regroup, reorganize and re-strategize. This is because from time immemorial, arguments and contentions about the National Question are better resolved through rational dialogue and sober negotiation rather than the  summary liquidation by military force and fiat of agitators for a more humane and democratic polity. They will find their way back to the front burner one way or the other.

Nigeria’s burden of malignant national memory is compounded by the culture of impunity. Political impunity trumps other impunities. It is from the barrel of political impunity that other impunities flow. Without political power, either in its soft or hard form, economic, cultural, gender and spiritual impunity does not thrive. Political impunity, or power without ethical responsibility, gives immunity for other forms of impunity and provides them with cover from punishment.

This is why it often grieves the soul so badly and bitterly that those who should be in jail or voluntarily depart for political purgatory having contributed to the political and economic adversity of the country still strut about freely insulting the abjured spirit of the nation and the memory of many who gave up their life for the inauguration of a more humane and egalitarian society.

We are dealing with professional managers of political violence and the militarization of the society for the purpose of perpetual domination. Since power, in its untrammelled and unadulterated form, is all that matters to them and thinking that they have neutralized and de-platformed all oppositions while putting sundry competitors in the political infirmary, they are now going about figuring out how to impose their next presidential choice on the nation come 2023.

If they succeed, it will not be because of any divine instrumentality or the superior justification of their hegemonic quest. It will be a mere reflection of the balance of forces at play. For this not to happen, it will take a critical pan-Nigerian mass and the entire nation acting in patriotic concert. Judging by the forces at play and the current balance of power, one cannot see this happening between now and 2023 unless there is a true revolutionary uprising which completely suborns the old ruling clique.

This is why one is often nonplussed and quietly amused by protests from some progressive circles about the unjustness and unfairness of the 1999 Constitution. It is the subtle ironies of history once again. We need to ask ourselves why the protests suddenly resurged almost two decades after the constitution had been operationalized when the progressive forces had all the time, focus and energy to protest or even reject the imposition of the constitution.

The point is that the military constitution was an acute reflection of the balance of power and the forces at play at that point in time. Beginning with the coup of 1983 which terminated civil rule and the subsequent annulment of a presidential election ten years later, the military had driven back the forces of progressive politics and the democratic emancipation of the nation. In between, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the avatar of that political tendency, had joined his ancestors in May, 1987.

The shrewd and politically alert leaders of the progressive platform knew that they had reached the point of political exhaustion and struggle-fatigue. They were after all not revolutionaries but left of center political juggernauts who knew their limits and limitations.

It is to their credit that they had gone that far without betraying the struggle or compromising their integrity. To insist on going any further would have cost them some pricey members and the fractious political alliance that has sustained them and borne them perilously aloft in the turbulent years of Abacha.

The military oligarchy, wearing the deceptive camouflage of repentant nationalism and their most humane and conciliatory face in Abdulsalaam Abubakar, knew exactly where they wanted to go and who they wanted to hand the country over to despite the fact that their messianic pretensions had suffered a massive jolt.

They were content with humouring and massaging the ego of the old troublesome Yoruba elders, conniving with them to register a regional party and tactically allowing them to impose their supremacy and suzerainty on their catchment area. They knew that Obasanjo, their old nemesis and bête noire, once he had gathered the levers of power in his palms, would go after them and re-establish the supremacy of unitary federalism with punitive urgency.

In the event, Obasanjo did better than the conventional expectations of the old power masters. Having routed ambitious military officers who might constitute a nuisance to civilian rule on the grounds of their complicity with military despotism and politically controversial past, Obasanjo turned his attention to the two opposition parties, particularly the AD, relentlessly destabilising them until they fractured and folded up.

In equal opportunity gaming, the wily and hardboiled Owu warrior snared up his own party in an anaconda hug sending the original founders who managed to escape by the skin of their teeth on a fatal stampede. The survivors from the Second Republic who thought that the rosy days of the NPN were back, where party supremacy was a sacrosanct principle, soon learnt to their peril that what was unfurling before them was a classic war game of a military in civilianizing transition.

Those who were wise quickly jumped out before they were overtaken by a more sinister fate. Others went under wondering what had hit them. This was not an ordinary party. The post-military party formation is not exactly a truly civilian gathering. It must reflect the conditions of its possibility and its provenance in garrison politics. It is for those who can take orders, as Obasanjo famously inquired of Atiku.

Consequently, the Oputa Panel for National Reconciliation, rather than being a theatre of atonement; a vehicle for national catharsis and redemption of sins, quickly dissolved into a grotesque parody; a parade and panorama of impunity on an epic scale. The commission itself was a victim of impunity. It was not meant to be otherwise. Nothing of enduring value could have come out of such a hopelessly impaired agency.

This is why two decades after the termination of military tyranny nobody has ever paid for or atoned for the grave infractions against the spirit of the nation. Those who annulled a free and fair election, the freest and fairest in the history of the country in which fourteen million Nigerians voted, are still strutting about as if it was all in a day’s job.

Occasionally, they venture from their accursed liars to further insult the sensibility of the nation. Since no one has ever been interdicted or remotely queried for such heinous electoral heist, they cannot be accused of gross indiscretion.

And they are in excellent company. Despite the widely documented assassination of high-profile Nigerians that occurred under General Sani Abacha’s watch and the freely given confessions of some of his murderous henchmen, nobody has ever been brought to book for the serious crimes. Indeed in a deeply polarized nation in which one nationality’s villain is another nationality’s hero, all the monuments named after the goggled Kanuri general from Kano remain intact.

Now his principal honcho, and main enforcer, has ambitions of ruling the entire country. Given the power equation in the country, it may not be a forlorn dream. On too many occasions, we have seen what we thought was an impossible dream become harsh reality in the country to our mournful chagrin.

It may be useful at this point to expound on the doctrine of fatal impunity before we round up by speculating on where the culture and the collapse of national values are leading the nation. Impunity appears legal and lawful when the perpetrators of crimes against the nation get away with it because they are either too strong or powerful or because the balance of forces is overwhelmingly freighted in their favour.

Moral suasions and futile protests can never lead to restitution or the restoration of the moral universe in such circumstances. But no such situation can subsist forever. Impunity is immunity on the prowl, depending on how much a society is willing to take which in turn depends on the objective realities of its economic and political condition.

When Louis X1V of France famously proclaimed himself as the absolute incarnation the state, it was an acute judgement and prime example of impunity accurately reflecting the balance of forces in feudal France. Under him, France reached the apogee of its imperialist grandeur. When the balance of forces shifted to the people in a revolutionary uprising a century later, some members of the royal family had to pay the supreme price.

In these matters, the famous owl of Minerva always begins its flight at dusk ,that is after the event and after the deed has been done. In human history, very few oligarchies or antiquated feudal royalty have been known to freely give up their privileges and perquisites even when it is glaring to all that their time was up. It is one of the iron laws of oligarchies that they must be incapable of reading the handwriting on the wall.

From old England, feudal France, colonial America, colonized Brazil, Tsarist Russia, post-colonial Iran and the Hapsburg Empire, they are always swept away after much violence and protracted bloodshed. While Benito Mussolini was hung like a common criminal from the lamp post by the local Italian militia, Adolf Hitler spent his last days in his besieged bunker, ranting, raving and hallucinating as Soviet tanks crunched their way into Berlin from the east and American shells fell from the west.

But as the weird finale crept nearer, Hitler suffered a momentous intervention of lucidity and utter clarity. He had noticed that many of the bulkier, taller and more athletically endowed American troops that had vanquished his Germany were descendants of German people who had fled the inequities and impunities of feudal Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to make a new life in America.

Their leader, the tall, bulky and calmly menacing General Dwight Eisenhower, was one of these new liberators of the ancestral fatherland. The Hohenzollern Kings had long been deposed by the Germans themselves but the new Hohenzollerns represented by Hitler and his court must bear the brunt of American umbrage and global outrage.

Anybody who has been following the unfolding drama of age-old political impunity and economic inequities in Nigeria will attest to the increasing power of the Nigerian Diaspora lobby and the disproportionate influence the exiled natives wield in directly impacting developments at home. They are unlikely to return to their old fatherland as conquering troops.

But it is obvious that they will deploy their economic as well as political resources and intellectual firepower to influence the course of events at home. The hostile reception accorded to General Mohammadu Buhari on his   last two medical trips to England is an indication of approaching turbulence. Since emigration from Nigeria has not been uniform and evenly spread for obvious reasons, this development is likely to fuel the rabid paranoia of an increasingly isolated hegemonic class and the siege mentality of the clan.

In an editorial that went viral this past week, the Punch newspaper chronicled how Nigeria’s strength and importance in the world of sports is being systematically whittled down by defecting Nigeria-born athletes and sports people who have shown preference for wearing the insignia of other countries. In a particularly embarrassing instance, Nigerian-born Monica Okoye helped the Japanese female basketball team to dislodge the Nigerian team from the last Olympics game.

More international embarrassments are likely to follow. Like the fabled African slave woman in Brazilian captivity who produced seven more children for her Portuguese abductors, Nigeria has become a famous nursery bed producing young offshoots and tender plants for eventual transplantation to more humane and benign environment. Nobody would remember this great sacrifice just as no one remembers the great soldiers, writers, philosophers, jurists and athletes of African extraction who helped to man and service the Roman Empire.

Several thousand years after, Africans are still at war with themselves like a race fated to extinction or assimilation. The direct military impact of the Diaspora can already be felt in the funding and financing of separatist groups in the country, particularly IPOB. Tactically isolated and increasingly driven underground by the scorched earth policies of the government, IPOB is resorting to increasingly brutal and terrorist reprisals of its own which now include assassinations and summary decapitations of known opponents.

The situation is likely to worsen as a beleaguered hegemonic caste reaches the end of its historic tether. It ought to be clear from the above that no matter how long it is elongated and stretched beyond the limits of human endurance, impunity has its timeline and historic serve-by date.

It is a profound historical irony that the wisest and smartest ruling classes in Africa in recent times are the Boers and British overlords of South Africa and Zimbabwe. They knew when to cut their losses and save their people and nations from further punishments. Their African counterparts, particularly in Nigeria, simply have no sense of an ending.