The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • An extraordinary rendition at Heathrow

    An extraordinary rendition at Heathrow

    By Tatalo Alamu

     

    A new buzzword is about in Nigeria. Ever since the” interception” of Nnamdi Kanu in faraway Kenya, it has made its way into our political lexicon. It has firmly lodged itself in the firmament of the politically obtuse and the flamboyantly heedless. Legal pundits and experts in International Affairs humph and harrumph over it finer trappings. It is called extraordinary rendition.

    Rendered in yeoman’s language, extraordinary rendition means legal abduction or lawful capture by the state and its operatives. What this means is that if you are declared wanted by the authorities in a country, you cannot claim that you have been forcibly nabbed in another foreign land and taken to the same country against your wish. It does not even matter if you were crated or chloroformed by your abductors. The modern state can do no wrong in these matters.

    For a brief moment this past weekend at the Heathrow Terminal Five Level 3 Car Park, yours sincerely thought he was a victim of an unfolding extraordinary rendition when the cab driver left one abandoned in the back seat for a long time without any just cause. As one began fretting and panting, looking for any signs of MOSSAD-like figures or some shadowy black stalwarts on mercenary contracts, the rogue driver, with his heavily indented tribal marks, suddenly jumped in and zoomed off.

    “And where have you been?” yours sincerely bawled at him. The loony crook simply ignored the ranting and pressed on the accelerator instead. This increased the sense of panic and the urge to ease the bladder. But by now, one had concluded that this was not a solitary state abductor but a professional malcontent, one of those disaffected at home and dissatisfied abroad folks.

    “Can I use the washroom?” one asked in a plaintive and conciliatory tone. To one’s chagrin, the scoundrel ignored the plea again and let forth a fearsome grunt. Perhaps it was his way of saying that all verbal emissions must cease forthwith.  Snooper decided to let peace reign supreme while sending subliminal messages to his bladder that this was not the place to misbehave.

    In what seemed an eternity later, the car pulled into a gas station and the mean mugger jumped out and vanished into the inner recesses of the station. The unfolding daylight made his tribal marks even more deeply engraved. Something was surely going on but yours sincerely was too tired and exhausted to figure it out.

    As soon as the mystery cabbie came back, he ordered one to go and ease himself in a sign language which suggested something far more obscene and offensive. Yours sincerely meekly complied. It was becoming obvious by the minute that this was more of a case of a nutter off the railings than a state enforcer. But something still did not make sense, and it did not take long to find out.

    As soon as we hit the North Circular Road the music began. It was a classic piece by the late Ayinla Omo Wura heralding the housing revolution of the late military governor of Lagos State, Brigadier Mobolaji Johnson at the turn of the seventies. To one’s startling surprise, the driver who had played deaf and dumb all along, began joyously singing and jiggling to the rhythm. It was a most sonorous singing, heartrending in its evocative power. It was an extraordinary rendition.

    Katigori C, ile biriki, ten naira lowo wa

         Aiye e ma tapa s’ijoba e f’ara mo Mobolaji

    This was the last snapshot of Nigeria on the cusp of greatness before the building began to rock and sag. Now the house has fallen. This must be the advanced unit of the Igboho Brigade who take offence at any cosmopolitan-looking person coming from the home front. What the deaf and dumb driver was saying is that a time is coming when the deaf shall hear and the dumb will speak. Please pass on the abeti-aja native cap and the ancient gbariye robe. London has gone local and loco to the bargain.

     

  • Extraordinary rendition of the naira

    Extraordinary rendition of the naira

    By Tatalo Alamu

     

    And whilst we are still on the subject of extraordinary rendition, it is meet to report certain developments. During the week, a friend of mine and legal Dowager of forty five years’ standing forwarded to me a photocopy of a passport from the late seventies. The document is as subversive as the antics of the deaf and dumb London driver above.

    On the page usually reserved for the BTA (Basic Travelling Allowance), it shows clearly that on 13th October, 1980, 546.45 naira fetched $1000. Forty years after, 545 naira fetches only one dollar. In other words, you will need more than half a million naira to get a thousand dollars. An American with two thousand dollars is already a Nigerian millionaire.

    Let no stupid local economist come and tell me that what 545 naira can fetch in the local economy one dollar cannot fetch in the American economy. Tell that to BA or Delta airline. It is a jaded argument for the accelerating immiseration of the Nigerian people. What has hit us in the last forty years is the extraordinary rendition of the naira by state and sundry non-state criminals.

  • Soccer as political metaphor

    Soccer as political metaphor

    By Tatalo Alamu

     

    The European Soccer fiesta has now come and gone. For about four weeks, many soccer buffs sat glued to their television sets as many European nations attempted to outwit and outclass each other in nerve-wracking and heart wrenching confrontations. It was a moveable feast; a soccer extravaganza which held the entire globe spellbound while it lasted. New talents shone forth with brilliance and bravura while old titans sizzled and fizzled out in their last hurray.

    The tournament itself was a tribute to the indomitable and indefatigable spirit of humankind. Where there is human will there must surely be a way out of the most intractable viral conundrum that the world has seen. Originally scheduled to hold last year, the tournament was briefly put to sword by the rampaging coronavirus pandemic. But the organizers were having none of that nonsense. They simply devised a creative way round the pandemic.

    According to a local saying, what cannot speak cannot be smarter and wiser than what has learnt to verbalize its thoughts. In the event, the tournament turned out a glittering spectacle of human ingenuity and a testament to what continental cooperation can achieve in the face of extra-human adversity. The European master-race, the original colonizers of the rest of the humankind, has demonstrated once again what grit and determination mean for the survival of the fittest.

    But while all this was going on, something far more intriguing and revealing was also unfolding. Aljazeera, the historically minded even if occasionally controversial global television, was showcasing the latest heroic figure in a series named Footballing Rebels. It was about the talented Ivorian soccer superstar, Didier Drogba, and how he deployed the magic and power of football to save his beloved country from perdition and disintegration even if only briefly.

    Put together by Eric Cantona, the great footballing prodigy and philosophizing contrarian who forfeited what could have been a glittering international career by standing up to the soccer authorities in his native France, it is an engrossing documentary about how talented individuals could make a difference to their society when, where and how it matters most.

    From Brazilians to Hungarians and from Argentines to Tunisians and Algerians, many of these great and exceptional individuals chose to forfeit their careers or decided to risk jail, exile and even certain death rather than being found in bed with the untrammelled tyranny that has overtaken their beloved fatherland. In the process, they helped to save the fatherland from historic indignity and humiliation.

    Far more than their exploits on the field, this heroic daring has marked them out as true heroes of their countries to be worshipped and wildly venerated by grateful compatriots. The football stadium in Budapest is named after Ferenc Puskas, aka, the galloping major. Arguably the greatest Hungarian footballer of all time, Puskas chose to go on exile in Spain rather than suck up to the communist tormentors of his Magyar compatriots in what has gone down as the Hungarian Uprising of 1956.

    It was the end of the great Hungarian football team which dazzled the world in the early fifties and which was only prevented from winning the 1954 World Cup by the offensive and dishonourable conduct of the German team. In 1953, the Hungarian team memorably walloped the English in Budapest. If anybody thought this was a mere fluke, they returned to Wembley later to perform the same feat. Football had left home forever.

    But what is it about soccer which provokes such high octane emotions and nationalistic malaria? Without any doubt, the beautiful game of football is about the most entrancing and enthralling leisurely creation of humankind since the advent of modern civilization.

    To its aficionado, the puffery, leathery rounded object is worthy of veneration if not outright secular worship. Whereas hockey is seen to be too dignified and elitist, cricket too humdrum and genteel, rugby too violent and physical, it is football that seems to get the mix right.

    But football can also provoke wild enthusiasm and raw emotions on and off the field. The hyper-nationalist hysteria often drips with venom and vitriol occasionally bristling with ancestral feuds. When he was asked why he was so sure that West Germany would lose to England in a celebrated confrontation during the 1982 World Cup final in Spain, Brian Clough, the irrepressible coach of Nottingham Forest, retorted that England had already beaten the Germans twice.

    He was not referring to the 1966 World Cup final but the two world wars of the last century when the English decisioned their German cousins. Sometimes, the scores of military defeat are settled on the field of play such as the jnfamous grudge match between England and Argentina during the 1986 World Cup.

    Diego Maradona personally supervised the exit of the English team in retaliation for the humiliation of his country by Margaret Thatcher during the Falklands War. The gifted urchin and lapsed pickpocket from the slums of Buenos Aires was heard to crow later that he preferred his dubious first goal because it was akin to picking the pocket of the English.

    Disputed soccer matches have actually led to a shooting war between two Latin American neighbours. Footballers are known to have been shot dead by irate compatriots for what was considered an act of derelict perfidy against their own country. For years in France, a death sentence hung over the head of Harald Schumacher, the German goalkeeper during the 1982 World Cup Final, for viciously putting the menacing French striker, Patrick Battiston, out of contention through eye-thumbing.

    Sometimes the vendetta can move to airports such as happened to the Italian football team in the seventies.  After a terrible trouncing, the team had to be landed in a military airbase because the crowd waiting patiently to receive them was equipped with cudgels rather than bouquets. Surely if the players did not take their soccer lessons to heart, they could at least make do with some lessons in frantic pummelling.

    As usual in such matters, something new always comes out of Africa and the great continent makes a surreal entry. After the Central African Republic national Football team was thoroughly whipped by a neighbouring country, its military dictator, the thoroughly crazed Emperor Jean-Bedel Bokassa, personally flogged the entire team senseless for bringing such a shame and disgrace on the fatherland. It was said that the wailings could be heard in neighbouring countries.

    As a corrective to this sordid tale of African brutality, it is useful to point out that of the five greatest footballers that have graced the field of soccer, at least two of them, Pele and Eusebio, are of African descent. Their ancestors were victims of colonization, industrial-scale slavery and its internationalization, a phenomenon that we often celebrate as globalization in its very first wave.

    Globalization has led to the forcible homogenization of the human race and the increasing standardization of divergent cultures. But oceans of racism persist and discrimination based on dissimilar cultures subsists in even the most advanced locations of human civilization. It is a wonderful irony of history that the greatest resistance and most telling rebuff of globalization is seen at the level of the old colonial nation-states.

    Sometimes the resistance is unintended and entirely unintentional , the outcome of the forces of change unleashed by the dynamics of globalization itself. Nowhere is this sharp irony of globalization more evident than in sports particularly in football where the first are on their way to becoming the last and where economically backward societies are playing first violin.

    Something new comes out of Africa indeed.  The last European soccer tournament featured football prodigies of African descent who played outstanding football for their adopted countries. In some cases, these African avatars constitute the livewires of their teams: Romelu Lukaku of Belgium, Mbappe and Pogba for France, Alaba for Austria, Akanji for Switzerland and Raheem Sterling for England. As usual, the Dutch team boasted a riot of them.

    But it is said that however much we choose to ignore history, history in all its alienating necessities will not ignore us. History is the site and shrine of ancestral hurt and great human sacrifice. It is trite in Literary Theory that a work of art must reveal the conditions of its possibility willy-nilly the efforts of the author to hide them.

    So is the art of soccer. It did not take long for the sparks of racism and institutional prejudice to start flying at the last European soccer fiesta. When many of the players in the England Football team decided to open their campaign with the now famous kneeling posture as a gesture of solidarity with the oppressed of the world, it elicited protracted boos, jeering hoots of disapproval and intemperate catcalls from the stand.

    This was small beer compared to what was to happen next. England has always relied on courage and raw “ up and at em” physicality to make a mincemeat of their opponents. Although not outlandishly talented, organic teamwork, the mulish obstinacy and bulldog tenacity famously associated with the national temperament saw them romp to the final against better fancied teams.

    But all hell was let loose as soon as the team lost to the sleek and stylish Azzurri after an engrossing penalty shootout. The internet was deluged by racist jibes and taunts fingering the three Black footballers who lost their penalty kicks as the culprits. They were asked to go back to wherever they came from.

    It has taken the intervention of Boris Johnson and the entire British establishment to calm frayed nerves. They have given what is an unfortunate situation their best shot. It can be argued that most of the racist ruffians are soccer yokels and beer louts on the margins of decent and civilized English society. But they must have taken their cue from somewhere. Despite their bravest efforts, racism remains deeply engrained in the fabric of British society.

    It must however be conceded that despite this appalling setback, the country of good manners and tolerance fares much better than most European societies when it comes to institutional racism and rabid bigotry. What Britain and other racially bifurcated and ethnically divided societies need is just what the soccer yobs have repudiated.

    They need transcendental heroes, particularly cultural icons and sporting avatars, who will rise above the racial and economic divisions of their countries to bring solace and succour to their land. Marcus Rashford, the good boy of Manchester United, is doing his best in that department. Hopefully there will be more like him who will not be deterred by the lager louts and other beer-quaffing yokels.

    Hastily assembled and clumsily glued African nations need this even more to avoid chaotic disintegration. In a bitterly polarized Nigeria bristling with ancestral animosities, driven round the bend by a besieged feudal hegemony, we need the example of a transcendental hero like Didier Drogba. Drogba is an ethnic Bete from the South West of Cote D’Ivoire who rose above the ethnic and cultural divisions of his country to give hope and solace to millions of his compatriots.

    By so doing, he was able to unite his fractious and divided nation behind him. When Drogba won the African equivalent of the Ballon d’Or in 2006, he flew into the country with the trophy and insisted that the then Ivorian president, Laurent Gbagbo, must accompany him to Bouake to present the trophy after a soccer tournament. The scene was of biblical magnitude in the frenzied adulation and rapture. What the politicians could not do, Drogba has done with his soccer wizardry.

    It was a very brave and heroic thing to do. At that point in time, Cote D’Ívoire was effectively partitioned with Boake serving as the secessionist capital while the rump of the old state presided over in Abidjan. The rest of the country was a no-man’s-land of pulsating anarchy.

    It was only a man of plucky courage and international standing with a dash of metropolitan rootlessness that could go against the yearnings of his ethnic nationality in a fractious nation spilt along ethnic and cultural lines without paying a heavy price or even being served with the prospects of summary banishment.

    But Drogba had reached a point where the country needed him more than he needed the country. He had nothing to lose except perhaps his national identity which did not amount to much at that point in time. The politicians looked on with wry bemusement knowing fully well that football magic could only do as much and that war was inevitable when political disputes became intractable.

    Drogba could only stave off the inevitable by a few years. He could not prevent the looming collision of forces and an armed determination of the outcome of the crisis. But what is unknown to his compatriots is the fact that the real import of the Drogba intervention lies in opening the eyes of Ivorians to the possibility of a northern presidency and the inevitable ascendancy of Allasane Quatarra.

    It will be recalled that despite having served his country with distinction as a technocrat, Quatarra was prevented from acceding to the highest office in the land on the grounds of his being the son of Burkinabe immigrants from Burkina Faso. The nation’s founding father, Felix Houphouet-Boigny , did not help matters by refusing to name a successor. He had famously retorted that a Baole chief does not know his successor.

    Houphouet-Boigny’s death left his country roiling in terminal chaos and a crisis of succession which eventually led to a partitioning of old Ivory Coast after the military split along ethnic lines. It must have been a sad denouement for the rescue bid of Didier Drogba. But he has lived to see his country rise from the ashes of self-destruction. Those who make national integration impossible make national disintegration inevitable. Citizens of bitterly polarized African nations have a lot to learn from the example of Didier Drogba. May his brood increase on the continent.

  • On the nature of nations

    On the nature of nations

    By Tatalo Alamu

    This column signed off last week promising to revisit the South African crisis in greater analytical details. There are nations and there are nations. The tragedy of South Africa is a consuming tragedy for the continent. With its wealth, size, prosperity and strategic location at the southernmost tip of the continent, South Africa is critical and even pivotal to an African cultural and economic revival.

    In the event, the South African conundrum is also an African conundrum but with different symptoms and side-effects. This is what we have termed “the Zuma Condition”. But before we come to examine the overall state of the patient, it is important to focus on the vital organs.

    Majority of contemporary African nations are currently in the grip of a crisis of core values and political orientation.  So profound is the crisis and its overwhelming possibilities that even old theories about its organic nature can no longer capture the contradictions in all their peculiar cultural, economic and political perplexities.

    Many have argued that nothing short of a new, continentally linked movement, akin to the decolonising project, which will produce a new political elite and new political structures for blighted postcolonial African nations will do.

    And the outcome of this can no longer be guaranteed or taken for granted. It is possible that a few of these nations that have become a human abattoir for their own people will have to be prised apart in order to liberate the creative energies of the stricken populace.

    To take a cursory glance at the dire circumstances of some strategic African nations is to be confronted by the evil capacity of humankind to fatally undermine itself. Yet these are the same nations that are supposed to serve as the magnetic hub for the political emancipation of the continent and as the lynchpin for its economic renaissance.

    Last week, the much-touted and much rhapsodized South Africa dissolved briefly into an apocalyptic civil war as the attempt to rein in Jacob Zuma, its errant former president, snowballed into an ethnic and class conflagration which nearly consumed the much admired nation and its glorified rainbow coalition.

    It has taken the intervention of the military and some severe measures to restore order and some semblance of peace. At the end of it all, it was predicted that the infrastructural destruction will cause the economy to contract by a walloping two per-cent. This is a huge price for any nation to pay for the return of the colonially repressed.

    Egypt is under the hammer of a harshly authoritarian and repressive military regime which has squashed the promise of the Arab Spring under the jackboot. Whenever Abdel Fattah el-Sisi chooses to leave or is made to leave, it is obvious that the old demons currently hibernating will return to haunt the ancient nation and all this while neighbouring while Libya remains stateless for over ten years with its cowed populace cowering under the reign of bandit warlords.

    In Ethiopia, the ultimate civil war is loading as forces of Tigrayan regionalists overwhelmed the national army forcing it into a precipitate retreat. Mekelle no longer hearkens to Addis-Ababa. With Eritrean forces poised just across the border for punitive retribution, the possibility of a regional conflagration can no longer be lightly dismissed.

    In Cote D’Ivoire, the return of former president, Laurent Gbagbo, is bound to complicate an already complicated situation. It will be recalled that the incumbent president, Allasane Quatarra, rode roughshod over the Ivorian constitution, railroading the Ivorian court into meek compliance to procure for himself an unconstitutional Third Term. The subsisting ethnic and regional tension is simmering just below the surface.

    Meanwhile in the Congo Democratic Republic, the old Mobutu super-state also known as Bula Matari—the crusher of stones— is effectively defunct, leaving in its wake an anarchic land of ungoverned and ungovernable spaces in what King Leopold of Belgium, with savage and ironic malice, originally dubbed as The Free State of Congo.

    In Nigeria, historic hunger and biblical misery occasioned by mismanagement of critical resources is driving the populace to the edge of perdition even as a resurgent hedonistic feudal hegemony is bent on returning the nation to medieval political and economic peonage.

    As seen in the uproarious reaction to the interdiction of Nnamdi Kanu and Sunday Igboho, the ethnic and regional resistance to what is going on may yet morph into an apocalyptic convulsion that will resonate around the globe. The list goes on and on ad nauseam. Those who cannot help themselves cannot be expected to help others.

    Now, you ask yourself, what Africa has done to deserve this cruel fate? In contemporary Mexico, whenever a foreign tourist or a European traveller succumbs to a local variant of diarrhea occasioning some stooling and vomiting, the joke is that the person has contacted a condition known as Montezuma’s Revenge which is retributive justice for the annihilation of the Aztec Empire by the Spanish conquistadores. King Montezuma was the last Aztec ruler of the fabled empire.

    On one level of analysis, what happened in South Africa last week can be seen as an apt metaphor for the return of the colonially repressed. Like Montezuma’s Revenge, the Jacob Zuma Condition is the bitter revenge of the old African ontology against the imposition of modernity and western structures of governance on a traditional system that was yet to run its course.

    Given the phenomenon of apartheid, this confrontation was inevitable, merely waiting for the forces of modern rationality to come into full contact with the more recalcitrant manifestation of the old feudal African worldview. It was a massive collision of weltershaung which could affect the fortunes of the ANC and the political destiny of South Africa.

    The enormity of the crisis and the driving contradictions are such that intellectual paradoxes abound and the intimate friend often turns out as the ultimate intellectual adversary. Writes Helen Zille who is a shining avatar of the anti-apartheid movement in her own right: “President Zuma is a traditionalist, totally unfamiliar with the concepts of constitutionalism, thrust into the role of President –whose primary duty is to serve and defend the Constitution. A total misalignment”.

    Thus what begins as an admiring portrait of Jacob Zuma and his pristine warmth and unaffected humaneness turns out a ringing indictment rather than a stirring endorsement.

    Yet at another level of analysis, it is obvious that there has been a serious disjuncture between personality and placement or preferment which has been the bane of the feudalized politics of postcolonial Africa. Jacob Zuma was the wrong man in the wrong place and at the wrong time.

    But it was not as if the old ANC Nomenklatura did not know that they had a Zuma revenge on their hand. They rued privately about his looming ascendancy and its menacing possibilities. How to rein in his wild unrestrained passions and zest for low life, his unbridled libido and contempt for the norms of the modern society, became a major source of anxiety.

    But they could not deny his heroic antecedents or his exemplary personal bravery. He is an old Zulu warrior with a royal sense of entitlement. There is nothing he loves more than the traditional war dance and the clashing cymbals of ancient military confrontation as memorably captured for posterity in the epic film of native derring-do, Zulu Dawn.

    To deny him his presidential entitlement on the basis of unpresidential foibles and peccadilloes would have been a prohibitive faux pas for a nation emerging from the throes and trauma of monstrous apartheid rule. It would also have been seen as a deliberate affront to his ethnic Zulu cohorts. The example of Mango Buthelezi, his ethnic compatriot, and his last-ditch attempt to torpedo the entire transition process with his violent mob is too fresh in memory.

    What the old ANC hierarchs would have hoped for as they quietly threw up their hands and bowed to the inevitable was to pray that the institutions of political modernity and Weberian rationality ironically put in place by the apartheid masters would prove strong enough to withstand the ravages and shenanigans of the Zuma presidency and its possible nuclear fallout.

    Last week, the prayers of the wise old men of ANC seem to have been answered beyond their wildest expectations as the modern institutions in post-apartheid South Africa rose in defiance of anarchic nativism. Having withstood the massive shock to the system and the mindless carnage unleashed, it is the forces of constitutional rule and modernist order that are triumphant against atavistic regression and feudal retrogression.

    But it is not a done deal. The omens are still very dark as long as South Africa remains a bastion of political injustice and economic inequities so staggering in their disproportion as to be almost idiotic. While the newly ennobled ruling class live life to the hilt in oriental splendour, the multi-racial underclass huddle in modern caves and new concentration camps eking out a miserable existence at the margins of society.

    The new generation of ANC leaders cannot be said to be unaware of this tragic development which has cast an ominous blight on the social landscape of South Africa. Despite his tame and temperate leadership which deserves commendation, Cyril Ramaphosa has been dismissed as a sly and supine master of tergiversation, lacking in the great visionary and transformative energies to inaugurate a new South African society. If the rot continues, the conflagration next time will make last week look like a child’s play.

    It can now be seen how and why South Africa has been extremely lucky in its modern political institutions which can withstand the ravages of personal eccentricities and human frailties. Institutions are inaugurated by strong-minded people and sustained by equally resolute individuals such as when George Washington and his successors refused to turn America into a presidential monarchy despite the temptations. This is what finally unhorsed the aberrational presidential monstrosity of Donald Trump.

    Institutions are routinized habits and repeated gestures burnt into the human psyche through constant and unrelenting practice which often makes them look divinely ordained. This is what has made the difference between modern nation-states and the tragic caricatures in postcolonial Africa. To the extent that they are not interested in institutional validation, African big men cannot be accused of being interested in nation-building.

    The result of the institutional chaos is there for all to see. In many African nations, the Zuma Condition is rampant and unrelenting. Many of the leaders simply have no truck with political modernity or the nous of post-empire governance. They are human relics and anthropological curios from a distant past of untrammelled feudalism and a few of them are bent on returning their countries and the people to that retrogressive and superannuated status quo.

    In some cases, this can be traced to a militaristic temperament and conditioning which induce them to view society as a garrison to be harshly patrolled and treated like a vast military cantonment. In other cases, they are trapped in the discursive and ideological formations of a feudal past that has lost the basis of its political and material sustenance. When it is a combination of the two, it is a perfect storm indeed.

    This is the basis of the tragedy currently unfolding in Nigeria. It is only this mind-set that can explain why a  ruler of a fractious and combustible nation like the West African giant would reach back over sixty years to an antiquated Grazing Edict about animal routes in order to solve a problem already compounded by climatological, economic and political changes.

    But in a multi-ethnic nation where different segments and sections of the country have arrived at different levels of political consciousness and economic development via different routes, there is bound to be a lot of resistance to this attempt to ram the entire country through the procrustean bed of feudal conformity.

    This resistance is based on ethnic, regional, class and spiritual divergences. They are what currently drive the nation to a hitherto unimaginable level of polarisation and mutual resentment which requires visionary statesmanship rather than draconian inflexibility.  Unless steps are taken they are bound to shape up into a millennial conflict in the months ahead.

    No amount of ferocious state repression and the interdiction of the transient arrowheads of ethnic disaffection will make the problem disappear. For a nation already embroiled in armed interrogation of the state on economic and spiritual fronts in the north adding the volatile and permanently irritable south to the headache may yet prove a bridge too far.

    Still on South Africa

    A reader’s response

    Good morning and happy day. Your column this morning makes interesting reading, but it is not strange. The turn of events in South Africa is much expected and predicted. Any society built on injustice, inequality and unfairness will sooner or later succumb to the forces of natural correction.

    When I was opportuned to do so, I travelled extensively in that so called Europe in Africa and discovered that it was a living lie, a mirage and a waiting African nightmare. The plight of the Black Africans is no better than what is being suffered in the rest of Africa. Worse is the trauma of living in a society where the sharp socio-economic divide is still sharply maintained and unfortunately enforced by the transformation of white domination to Black inheritors’ domination. The sharp contrast between Sunnyside and Waterkloof Ridge in Pretoria, or Midrand and Tembisa is not comfortable to contemplate. On one side are people living in Bantustans with nothing to be proud of in the 21st century and the other side living in opulence.

    The promised economic salvation marking the end of apartheid never materialized. The worst is the land redistribution promised. It remains a mirage. The large farm holdings of the Boers against the subsistence farming of Blacks still persists. The South African blacks are going through second slavery. Something would have to give. The coming conflagration in SA would not be racial. Its cause will be a fight against the unjust socio-economic system and the need to right the “Century of Wrong” that we read about in our History class. The recent burning and looting is a foretaste of what is to come.

    Unfortunately, most of the ANC stalwarts have been settled by the White masters and the Blacks would one day, and that day is very near, have to take up arms against their compromised leaders who bestride the SA landscape in BMWs. My regards and happy Sunday.

    Babatunde Jose.

    Famous dismissals

    Voltaire to importuning journalist: If I were you, I will not be happy with myself.

    Journalist: But I must live.

    Voltaire: I fail to see why.

  • King Montezuma’s last stand

    King Montezuma’s last stand

    By Tatalo Alamu

     

    In South Africa this past week, what began as an ethnic call out over the legal plight of a former president snowballed into the worst political and economic crisis in the nation’s post-Apartheid history. Many have had to watch in horrified silence as hordes of the unemployed and economically dispossessed laid siege to the glittering monuments of western capitalism and as the cities dissolved in an orgy of looting, rioting and generalized disorder.

    The end of apartheid rule has not brought relief or succour. South Africa remains a deeply divided and conflicted society. For many of its disillusioned and distressed denizens, its deprived multi-racial underclass, deeply entrenched prejudices and institutionalized political inequities remain the order of the day. Home Rule feels like a mere exchange of White monkeys for Black baboons.

    The tragedy of South Africa and the possibility of state implosion raise once again the spectre of the fragility and vulnerability of the colonial model of nation-formation in Africa no matter the provenance. It is openly asserted in certain circles that Africans simply do not do nation-states. The African psyche cannot withstand the abstract rigours and impersonal rationality of western-type nationhood.

    Read Also: Dozens killed in South Africa unrest amid Zuma appeal

     

    According to this school of thought, what is unfolding in South Africa is the return of the colonially repressed. South Africa, after a period of estrangement caused by Boer dominion, is finally returning to its old African roots. With the Africanization of South Africa, Isanusi, the great local witchdoctor, has reclaimed its own. It is King Montezuma’s last stand.

    This may well be superficial bunkum. But before returning to the South African conundrum in greater analytical details, it is important to make a detour in order to better appreciate what is unfurling in this important corner piece of Africa. This is what we have done this morning with the publication of excerpts from an earlier fictional encounter with the great Boer racist and former president of apartheid South Africa.

  • An afternoon with the Crocodile

    An afternoon with the Crocodile

    By Tatalo Alamu

     

    A Less than thirty years ago, South Africa was a jungle of bestial tyranny with its desperate and disoriented majority populace cowering under the hammer of apartheid. It is a tremendous irony that in two decades, the same nation would come to represent the better face of Africa while most of the countries in the forefront of the struggle for its liberation have gone into quiet liquidation or are awaiting receivership. It is a teachable moment for all humble students of history.

    For some of us who were visiting South Africa for the first time, there was a distressing and humiliating sub-text to the glittering spectacle. Many of us had wilfully delayed the traumatic shock of the first encounter. When reports of the miraculous transition began filtering in, we dismissed them as a cruel hoax. No country could achieve such a dramatic political and ideological transformation within so short a time, we concluded. But what unfolded next was a sizzling and riveting feast out of magical realism.

    As our plane banked and dipped steeply on approach to landing at the Johannesburg’s Oliver Thambo airport, there was something eerie if not surreal about the whole thing. It was not just the freezing cold. Neither could it be the impressively lit network of jumbo runways. It was the overall ambience. This was not a glorified airstrip nestling in some primitive African jungle. This was a First World airport in a Third World setting. It was all so disconcerting and disorienting.

    The body is not accustomed to this degree of cold in mid-June. Your body rhythm is accustomed to flying northwards this time of the year to be met a few hours later by the early dawn of summer and the green, green grass of England. But this time around, you flew southwards at night and after six hours, it was dark, cold and wintry. It was actually mid-winter. And they say we are still in Africa. Winter in Africa? What an abysmal anomaly! But it is winter indeed and the magnificent airport is not a mirage either. Welcome to Johannesburg. Welcome to South Africa.

    The fireworks began right there at the immigration, ahead of custom clearance. This was the first sign that it was not going to be business as usual.

    “Where is your immunisation card?” the female immigration official bawled at one.

    “The South African embassy in Lagos failed to return it”, snooper calmly submitted.

    “There is no way we can confirm that”, she grouched, eyeing snooper with suspicion.

    “But there is no way your embassy will issue a visa without the card”, snooper sweetly insisted.

    “I know, but”, the lady began and teed off abruptly. She got up to converse in a strange tongue with a superior and soon returned with a threatening scowl.

    “Are you sending me back to Lagos? Snooper asked in alarm.

    “No, we are sending you to the clinic”, she quipped and cut snooper short. The clinic? Echoes of Stalinist psychiatric re-education! You go into that one as a refusenik and come out as human refuse. Mercifully, it has not got to that point in South Africa. In the clinic, you are given a sharp jab and you must give them ninety dollars in gratitude.

    And so in the year of our Lord two thousand and ten, snooper, was unleashed on South Africa like a detoxified dog.  Perhaps it was the giddy disorientation of finding yourself in the First World while you are supposed to be in the Third, or the spectacular panorama of suburbia Johannesburg, snooper suddenly found himself levitating. On second thought, it might well be the after effects of the vicious, anti-flu jab, but the head now swelled to gargantuan proportions.

    By midday, snooper was positively hallucinating.  The glitz and glamour of Johannesburg, the oriental splendour of the newly commissioned Radisson Hotel, finally combined with a feverish ache to unlatch the gateway to delirium. This is the realm of super-stress where the mind temporarily dissociates itself from the body.

    What finally did it for snooper will remain a mystery. Perhaps it was an e-mail from Olatunji Dare, the distinguished Nigerian columnist, asking snooper to avail his palate of the palatial possibilities of crocodile meat while still in South Africa.

    All of a sudden, snooper found himself trapped inside the futuristic lift of the hotel with a huge bear of a man with a stern no-nonsense visage clutching an old umbrella which obviously doubled as an assault weapon. The Great White Hope took one look at snooper and let forth a wild growl of disgust and distaste. This must be the great Baas himself from the old heartland of apartheid.

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    And yet there was something faintly familiar about this crusty contrarian. He was a figure torn out of the pages of turbulent history. Snooper immediately connected. This was Pieter W. Botha himself, former president of South Africa, great apostle and actualiser of apartheid, the man who had a zero tolerance for racial tolerance. His turbulent career had ended in great misery and disappointment.

    Distraught at the very thought of the demise of apartheid on which he had built a remarkable rabblerousing career, the great crocodile had banished himself into the wilderness of a no man’s Siberia appropriately named Wilderness to sulk at the historic treachery. His implacable ghost was known to haunt his old house after it was bought by a Black businessman. For Botha, a.k.a Die groot Krokodil, this must have been the ultimate perfidy.

    “Mr P.W Botha, I presume?” snooper opened proceeding very warily.

    “That is a stupid presumption”, the old man growled like a bear at bay.

    Snooper lurched forward, taken aback by the vehemence and ferocity of the response.

    “Take it easy, now”, snooper responded tamely. By this time, the old crocodile had begun cradling his unsightly umbrella even as he surveyed snooper’s skull with clear, homicidal malice.

    “You must be an idiot, a very stupid man. Where are you from?” the crocodile screamed at snooper unable to contain his rage at such impudence.

    “I am from Nigeria”, snooper responded.

    “I thought as much. Your people are full of unmerited arrogance. But see the mess you have made of the north”, the old man thundered with a scorning glare.

    “But I am not from the north”, snooper protested vigorously.

    “Stupid man. Domkop ( an idiot in Afrikaans)  I mean Africa north of South Africa”, the crocodile snapped.

    “Mr Botha, see the mess your people made of native Africans”, snooper shot back rather belatedly. The old man was taken aback by the temerity.

    “Hou jou bek” (Shut up your animal mouth in Afrikaans), the crocodile exploded. “Our people faced special challenges. The Zulus were tearing out our balls and frying them for dinner. Seven thousand voortrekkers perished in one day. The Brits wanted to expunge us.  We were trapped between the sea and the mountains. So what do you want us to do—lie down and die like sheep? We did what we have to do”.

    “But the horror, the horror!” snooper moaned rather disjointedly.

    “You are a foolish man. The second name of history is horror. Everybody has been enslaving everyone else since the dawn of history. The Romans did it, there was no problem. Then the British, and then the Americans and even the Zulus here. It was when it was our turn that the idiots started talking about human rights. How I hate the Yankees and the perfidious Albions”, the old man lamented.

    “You should still have gone to the Truth and Reconciliation Tribunal”, snooper noted.

    “I am not a bloody hypocrite. The truth is there was nothing to reconcile. And to tell you the real truth I can’t bear the smell of those hotties”, the crocodile snarled.

    “You should have been guided by the noble example of Mandela who suffered so grievously but was willing to forget and forgive”, snooper observed.

    “I am not Nelson Mandela. Mandela was trained to be a king. I was brought up to do a job. Actually, I like Nelson a lot. The Blackman has a great capacity to forgive. My theory of history is this. Let the ruthless Whiteman build the infrastructure and let the Blackman come and rule with his compassion, his justice and sense of fairness. That is the miracle you are witnessing”, the old man noted as his harsh features softened.

    “Mr Botha, how can the rest of Africa catch up with South Africa?” snooper inquired.

    “You are a bloody moegoe ( Afrikaans for idiot). I have just told you. Try Bot”, the crocodile answered with a fiendish giggle.

    “Bot? Mr Botha? Oh no, not you again!!” snooper screamed.

    “Idiot, I mean B.O.T, which is build, operate and transfer after five hundred years!!”

    A heavy hand clammed snooper. It was our friend, the retired Nigerian ambassador. Snooper has been snoring on the plush sofa. From the twenty third floor of the Radisson Johannesburg, the city of gold and grief was a spectacular sight to behold. Welcome to South Africa.

  • Oga, dem don kidnap Nigeria

    Oga, dem don kidnap Nigeria

    By Tatalo Alamu

     

    It was the time of emergency and the season of kidnappers. The entire country was reeling under the hammer of intrepid kidnappers with the state itself a potential victim. What began as isolated cases of errant militancy in the Niger Delta has now graduated into a national industry requiring a major federal intervention.

    Snooper returned from a historic visit to South Africa only to find that he had himself walked into a well-laid domestic ambush. Okon and Baba Lekki had kidnapped the entire house. The only section that was yet to fall into the hands of the rebels was snooper’s bedroom and they had already laid a siege to it with a Kilimanjaro heap of expired leaves of moin-moin and eko which was Baba Lekki’s favourite meal.

    Snooper ought to have known that there was trouble ahead as soon as he entered the house only to be assaulted by an overpowering smell of periwinkles, burukutu from Burutu, rotting snails, fermented melons, Hibiscus flower and the peculiar body odour of people living close to the Ebola virus (Ebolies Mauritius Iwuruwuru).

    In the far corner of the house was an ethnic Kukuruku woman mouthing unprintable obscenities about the male anatomy. She was eyeing snooper with wild relish. But far more alarming was the fact that while the entire district was well lit, snooper’s domain managed with medieval lanterns and oil lamps.

    “What happened to the money I gave you for electricity?” snooper charged at Okon.

    “ Oga, dem kidnapper don kidnap dat one”, Okon replied with an annoying grin.

    “Meaning what?” snooper shrieked almost apoplectic with r “As I wan go buy NEPA na so dem kidnapper come capture me for Magodo. Dem say make I give dem dem handsome money, abi na ransom dem dey call am sef? Naim I come give dem money and naim dem come drop me for Majidun”, Okon croaked. At this point, Baba Lekki who has been snoring on the floor started singing an old Ebenezer Obey classic about Ikija from the depths of slumber.

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    “ I beg if you dey go Okija forest, ask dem priest make him return Orji’s singlet. As he come run go back dem Pikin Dey Piss party, we go need dem singlet for ward regination”, the woman at the corner simpered like an ancient simian.

    “Who is this mad woman?” snooper screamed.

    “Oga, no be mad woman at all ooo, na Sister Excellency. As kidnappers come overrun dem Aba, naim she come overrun Lagos sam sam”.

    “You must be insane”, snooper shouted at the mad boy.

    “Oga, I no be in chain again oo. Dem kidnappers dem don liberate obodo country and I don capture dem house be dat”, Okon snorted.

    “Which house? I give all of you five minutes or I will call the police”, snooper raved.

    “Take us to Lion Building, I wan reach my brother there,” Baba Lekki submitted with a sleepy stare. At this point, the mad woman made a determined bid to grab snooper from behind, screaming “Madu, time don reach for youth service now!!” Snooper fled to his room and quickly locked the door. This was as close to hell as it could get. Snooper could hear Baba Lekki sniggering, “were, were, why don’t you wait for her!!!!”

    Amidst the lunatic din that ensued, a voice of calm authority suddenly rang out. “Eku ile mbi ooo”.  It was Mama Igosun. Mama Igosun was back. At first, she appeared to have taken a light view of the confusion. “Orisirisi ni colony”, she purred. Then she rounded on Baba lekki who was her old classmate.

    “Laminu, with all dem cocoa money dem use to train you as London lawyer, you see your life?” she thundered. Baba Lekki responded by bursting into Fela’s song.

    Luku lawyer, he dey run oo

     E wo lawyer, he dey run oo

    Mama Igosun could no longer abide the nonsense. She suddenly seized a giant broom and charged at the miscreants. “Kini gbogbo palapala yi? Afira yin!!!” she screamed. Everybody fled in different directions with Okon screaming, “dem mother of all dem kidnappers don come ooooo”.

    Both articles first published in July, 2010.

     

  • Ethnic siege and the Nigerian state

    Ethnic siege and the Nigerian state

    By Tatalo Alamu

    Matters always come to a head during the time of Mohammadu Buhari. Stuff happen, as the Americans colourfully put it. In the final analysis, we may have to thank our stars for this soldier- statesman—in the profoundly literal sense of the phrase—who has led us through thickets of nettling thorns into painful illumination and enhance awareness.

    To be truthful, some of these developments are entirely out of his hands, the results of unforeseen historical circumstances and unanticipated political developments. Others are traceable to failings of temperament and a constitutional lack of forbearance for the unwieldy dynamics of a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society.

    By a curious irony, it was during his first coming as a military leader that military messianism developed what is known in local parlance as “k-leg”. The contradictions arising from this led directly to the annulment of the freest and fairest elections in the history of the country, the summary abrogation of the will of the Nigerian electorate, General Sani Abacha’s despotic rule and the humiliation and demystification of military dominion over Nigeria.

    This time around under General Buhari’s watch as a refurbished and upholstered democratic ruler, we are witnessing the limits and limitations of authoritarian civil messianism in a volatile and combustible multi-ethnic nation with several contending and mutually contradictory civilizational ramparts. The mismanagement of the diversities arising from this social, economic and political combo is leading Nigeria once again to uncharted waters.

    General Mohammadu Buhari has contributed his own sterling quota. But in fairness the mess is not entirely of his making. Thrice in his post-military incarnation, the man from Daura sought to rule the nation as a civilian leader. But he was outwitted by the dominant power elite as constituted. On the fourth occasion, it was starry-eyed Nigerians themselves who called upon Buhari to come and rescue the nation from insecurity, corruption, the collapse of governing ethos and creeping anarchy.

    Once again, it has turned out a damp squib. While the federal authorities are jubilant and triumphalist about the neutralization of Nnamdi Kanu and Sunday Igboho whose rebellion against the state is as unstructured as it is militarily uncoordinated, one only has to take a cursory glance at the general’s backyard to view a different type of rebellion.

    The entire north has dissolved into generalised political anarchy and economic chaos. This past week, a news item reported that ISWAP/Boko Haram has named a governor to superintend Nigerian territory it has seized. More ominous is the fact that by stealth and violence, the rogue insurgency has succeeded in stamping its overriding ideology on the region, forcing the shutdown of most institutions and compelling even a state governor to withdraw his kids from school for fear of abduction.

    This is why anybody thinking that the “interception” of Nnamdi Kanu and the nocturnal defenestration of Sunday Adeyemo, aka Sunday Igboho, is the end of the nation’s security nightmare must have a rethink.  Educationally challenged rabble-rousers both may appear; forsworn to a life of sybaritic pleasure they may be, but both are also shrewd political calculators gifted with raw cunning and native intelligence.

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    They are bumbling minesweepers clearing the path for the main forces in contention. As such, they reflect and project the strengths and signal weaknesses of the elite ethnic formations that threw them up in the first instance. Having seized the political imagination of their respective people, it is hard to see how the separatist tremors for political equity that they have unleashed among the teeming masses of their people can succumb to mere political pacification.

    If the political class is not roused and sufficiently exercised by the threat posed to their suzerainty and continued hegemonic hold on the nation’s firmament by rogue non-state actors and sundry forces of disintegration, it simply means that the nation is on its way to certain and irreversible political suicide.

    While the surveillance, sophistication and military wherewithal deployed in the twin operation are noted, this is not the time for triumphalism and needless jubilation more so since the same zeal and sophistication have not been shown in other theatres of contention.

    This is not the time for alleluia chorus and self-congratulation which can be misconstrued in the climate of hysteria and the mismanagement of diversity that we have found ourselves to mean ethnic triumphalism. This is the time for a visionary reinvention of the nation provided we still have the time and the presence of mind.

    The use of the word “interception” to describe the arrest of an errant citizen abroad is redolent of state militarism and civilian despotism. In military parlance, to intercept an aircraft means to forcibly interrupt and disrupt its flight pattern with the sole aim of bringing it to land by sheer force and sophisticated electronic harassment.

    Curiously enough, this is the second time this kind of state abduction is happening under General Buhari’s watch. When we drew attention to Umaru Dikko in this column a few weeks’ back, little did we know that something equally portentous was in the offing.

    This is not discounting the barely disguised attempt to muzzle and intimidate the press as globally referenced by the subsisting faceoff with Twitter. There is widespread concern about the possibility of a further curtailment of press freedom.  A bill to that effect, sounding straight out of Jonathan Swift’s Academy of Lagado, surfaced in the lower house from a member without any history of professional, occupational and emotional affiliation to the press .

    Déjà vu is too weak an expression to describe what is going on. Thirty six years after Buhari’s forced departure as a military ruler, the country is enveloped by the same climate of fear and state repression under his civilian watch. But you cannot step into the same river twice. The political class may remain the same but many things have changed elsewhere in the country.

    This time around, nobody ever reckoned with the advent of the social media and its disruptive possibilities. Neither could anyone have factored into their analysis the destructive potentials of fake news and its state-derailing capacities. But even without these additional munitions and reinforcements, the traditional Nigeria print media, having collected many colonial and post-colonial scalps in the course of its chequered history, has proved itself a formidable customer indeed.

    What now remains to be placed in focus is why things appear to change in Nigeria only for them to remain the same. In its first coming, the Buhari military junta was dismissed by the then rampantly patriotic ASUU leadership as the military wing of the NPN. This time around, Buhari’s civilian government is widely seen as the state wing of ethnic hegemony. The transition from defender of class interests to perpetuator of ethnic hegemony may be small beer but it says a lot about the true nature of the Nigerian postcolonial state.

    Ever since independence, the Nigerian political elite have proved themself incapable of acting in a pan-Nigerian concert or with an organic wholeness to redeem the nation and offer a new charter for the abused and dehumanized citizenry. With every fresh crisis of nationhood, the political class usually dissolves into its ethnic particularities driven by adversity to its primordial cocoons.

    Consequently, every ascendant group has seen the state as an alien construct to be cordoned off and barricaded against hostile interlocutors while the feeding frenzy subsists. Meanwhile, the excluded mount a permanent siege to the state until something gives. When and if they succeed in gaining forcible entry, a fresh siege by the dislodged ensues while the old game of excluding the excluders begins afresh.

    After the unfortunate incident of 1953 during which the departing northern delegates met with a hostile reception, Ahmadu Bello famously exploded that the mistake of 1914 had been discovered. Thereafter with a combination of military wile and political guile, the Sokoto prince proceeded on a systematic state capture of the new nation.

    But the Action Group, the major opposition party, was having none of that. In the ensuing confrontation, Awolowo’s party succumbed to a massive state-engineered fracturing and Chief Awolowo himself ended up in jail.  After the massively rigged elections of 1965, the simmering political unrest in the west snowballed into a violent upheaval from which the First Republic never recovered.

    The opportunistic military takeover by General Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi after the mutiny by officers of predominantly Igbo extraction and the attempt to impose a unitary order on the nation by the politically naïve general led to a reprisal coup which was unprecedented in its savagery and appalling brutality. Thereafter, it was obvious that the contradictions unleashed by the close and open game of state hijacking could no longer be resolved in the theatre of politics.

    The civil war and the summary amputation of the third leg of the old tripod of power configuration only served to reinforce northern hegemony. This northern dominion over the nation was to continue for the next three decades leading to the annulment of the best election ever held in Nigeria, Abacha’s despotic inquisition and the subsequent disgrace of the military.

    Yet the Fourth Republic had barely commenced when the northern power mafia showed their hand again and the fact that they are most uncomfortable with ceding the trappings of power. Unable to deploy their usual military proxies, they opted for the Sharia gambit to mount another siege of the state. But the ploy boomeranged spawning a major armed critique by the Boko Haram insurgency. Power without corresponding vision and responsibility has led the north and the nation into a cul de sac.

    General Buhari’s deployment of state terror and a military solution in a civilian setting has merely compounded the crisis. The attempt to turn the state into an ethnic laager rather than the site for arbitrating and disaggregating conflicting elite interests has provoked the most dangerous power struggle in the history of the nation. The fabric of the nation has been stretched beyond its elastic limits.

    Never in its history, and certainly not during the civil war, has the country been this bitterly divided and badly polarized. Never have separatist agitations been more vehement and never have catcalls for the dissolution of the country been more strident. Never have southern youths been more openly rebellious and brazenly contemptuous of authority. As we write this, a massive protest rocked the political capital of the old West over the midnight invasion of Igboho’s residence.

    In stable democracies rulers preside over the affairs of their nations with wisdom and circumspection very mindful of the fact that they can never be in power forever. General Buhari is ruling Nigeria as if he will be in power for eternity. Yet willy-nilly he must surrender the reins of power at the appointed hour.

    Even if he is in a position to determine who succeeds him, he is in no position to determine the trajectory of events in the post-Buhari dispensation or their complexion and coloration for that matter. Deceit and dissimulation are not signs of smartness and sophistication but evidence of dishonour and political disrepute.

    As if already afraid of their shadow, some spoilt brats of the northern feudal oligarchy are up and about puffing and huffing about how undemocratic zoning is for the political health of the nation. They have forgotten so soon that although not enshrined in the constitution, zoning is a product of serious consociational politics and elite pacting which saved the nation after the debacle of northern military rule that completely devastated the fundaments of the nation.

    After six years of unrelenting hegemonic triumphalism and the arrogant mismanagement of ethnic diversities, General Buhari has returned the country to the status quo ante and to the days of draconian military inquisition and state terrorism. There is no art to know the mind’s construction on the face. If this is Buhari’s sole reason for returning to power, then he has served his country very poorly indeed.

    The Fourth Republic is in urgent need of a fundamental reset. War is said to be the continuation of politics by other means. The civil war occurred when centrifugal forces unleashed by the struggle for state power could no longer be contained within the ambit of regular politics. Despite our current circumstances, despite Igboho’s provocative antics and Nnamdi Kanu’s grim terroristic hectoring, neither party has declared formal war on their nation. Wars are made of sterner stuff.

    But we will be fooling ourselves to imagine that the protracted ethnic siege laid to the Nigerian postcolonial state has not been without dire consequences for the nation. For one, it has made it impossible for meaningful national development and impactful economic growth to take place. More ominously, it has led to a central fracturing of the nation along ethnic and religious line. Fifty years ago, we did not have open calls for the dismemberment of the nation.

    If this destructive trend continues, something is bound to give eventually and it will not come from the Igbohos and Kanus. It is time once again for the remaining wise people in the nation to fashion out a new charter and organogram for the nation. If there is any salutary lesson to be learnt from this epic tragedy, it is that nation-building is a permanent project which cannot be left to the psychologically flawed, the politically unevolved and those with stunted emotional intelligence.

  • Dying but living forever

    Dying but living forever

    By Tatalo Alamu

    To rural and idyllic Edunabon penultimate Wednesday for the funeral ceremony of Mama Lydia Adunni Oyeleye, relic of the late founding Director of Nigerian Customs and Excise, Chief Oyebode Oyeleye, Okanlomo of Ile-Ife and Aare Maiyegun of Edunabon.  To its starry-eyed denizens, this historic town, jocularly known as the “city of Edinburgh”, is the nearest thing to the Garden of Eden on earth.

    Serenity and leafy tranquillity taken into consideration, even the fabled Scottish capital of Edinburgh would be a poor match for Edunabon this temperate late June morning. There is always something very therapeutic and tranquillising about the countryside. In the rapidly modernising Britain of the Industrial Revolution, people fled from the chaotic and anarchic cities when they had had enough.

    For miles on end, the gentle rolling countryside bristled in its evergreen daintiness. The bounties of nature were on full display. The corns were out in full force and in all their celestial varieties. It was their season. It was their time. Naked and disrobed, they grinned from ear to ear before disappearing forever into the bowels of famished humanity.

    Childhood nostalgia flowed back. There has always been something enchanting and alluring about this collection of agrarian settlements that make up the organic community known as Origbo meje: Akinlalu, Ashipa, Ipetumodu, Yakoyo, Moro and Edunabon in no particular order. Iwaro, the seventh settlement, has since disappeared leaving archaeological ruins in its wake.

    Despite the atmosphere of transparent peace and the personal warmth and affability of its habitants, you have been taught never to overstep your bounds whenever you venture here. These are the descendants of recuperating warriors and off duty combatants from the longest Yoruba civil war. As youths from neighbouring towns, you were told that even the General’s homestead of Yakoyo is really an ironic sobriquet connoting something more deadly and uninviting than what it purports to mean.

    So this Wednesday morning, you found yourself a wise and wary participant-observer amidst bucolic but tame celebration of a departing matriarch. But for the brief but by now proverbial hitches at the Lagos tail-end of the express road, the early morning journey to Edunabon was quite pleasant, with the lush vegetation reminding one of abandoned pleasures and the unabating longing for the countryside.

    By a miraculous reprieve, and to one’s pleasant relief, the road that connects the Ashipa junction on the Ibadan-Ife Road to the Moro-Edunabon junction on the Ife-Ede road through Sekona had been paved and tolerably tarred by the Oshun State government. The last time one traversed the vital arterial link, it was a jagged and ragged mess pockmarked by potholes and collapsed sections. The ancient Community High School peeped out somewhere, a sorry and sordid ghost of its former self.

    It didn’t take much time to arrive at the Anglican Church, Edunabon.  Despite the fact that midweek Wednesday had been strategically chosen by the Oyeleye family as a form of crowd control in keeping with the existing mood of the nation, many still found their way to the church from Edunabon and the entire Origbo community to bid farewell to a beloved mother.

    As the church service progressed in a rousing crescendo of dancing and singing, one was forced to concur with the ancient saying that a child may have as many new clothes as an adult but cannot boast of the same baggage of disused apparels. The old traditional churches may not have the glitz and razzmatazz of the new ones, but they are still the one to beat when it comes to rapturous worshipping and the elaborate ritual of departure.

    Nostalgia flooded back as one noticed some of the callow choirboys leading the hymnal recession. It brought back memories of one’s own youthful exertions as a spiritual rookie in that department. But that was almost sixty years earlier. With its luxuriant plantain fronds and mango trees, the church premises appeared frozen in time.

    That was exactly how it was forty years earlier. I drew the attention of General Alani Akinrinade who sat next to me to this memorable cameo of mummified memorials and he sombrely nodded his assent. It is said that man fears time, but that time fears the pyramids. They are still standing six thousand years after. The Mississippi flows relentlessly forever.

    Mama Oyeleye was a woman of timber and distinction in her own right. She was born in Kontagora on the 13th day of October, 1932 as the second child of the family to a father who worked in the old PWD. After school, she trained as a dressmaker and was an instructor for many years at the P.Z Training school in Marina Lagos. She retired in 1979 as the Necchi Machine Demonstrator at the P.Z Unit in Kingsway Stores in Marina.

    On the 21st of August, 1953, the then Lydia Adunni Lasiyan married her childhood sweetheart, Oyebode Oyeleye, and the marriage produced seven children who have all distinguished themselves in various walks of life both in Nigeria and abroad. What remains to be said was that this woman of valour and muscular faith, while pursuing her own career, was also pillar of strength and support to her husband as he rose to national stardom and professional distinction.

    Thirty years after his glorious transition, the Origbo people and the larger Ife community recalled their illustrious son with affection and reverence. Without claiming any credit, he was known to have contributed immensely to the development of the area and the enhancement of its manpower without lapsing into cronyism or nepotism. He was famous for his intense abhorrence for corrupt practices and self-recruitment based on primordial consideration.

    Decades after leaving the service, his sterling career at the Customs is universally benchmarked as the ultimate gold standard for rectitude and integrity in the Nigerian post-independence public service. Such was his remarkable disdain for opulence and unearned wealth that when he died he could boast of only two buildings. One was his modest bungalow in Surulere, Lagos and the other an unremarkable duplex which stands on the road to Sekona in Edunabon. They do not come like this anymore.

    General Alani Akinrinade, himself a man without much appetite for slackers and slobs, recalled an exceptional individual who was an absolute stickler for rules and regulations even in community meetings he presided over. Chief Oyeleye was not ready to bend the rules for anybody and those who came late to meetings or manifested disruptive tendencies bore the brunt of his sharp reprimand.

    When it came to donations, he contributed what he could afford without being in the least fazed by those who tried to upstage him or the nouveau riche who thought they were putting him in his place. All they got from him in response was an inscrutable smile. The refuse dump does not refuse or reject any refuse dumped. It was well as long as it was in the interest of communal development. He knew where and when to ambush such unruly rascals when they tried to corrupt communal values.

    As we left the modest reception hosted by the Oyeleye children, the mind began to swirl and swell with all kinds of desperate queries. Where did we begin to get it wrong in this traumatized and much abused nation? The much admired and well respected man we have been talking about did not descend from heaven. Neither was he an Ayorunbo, an escapee from outer space. There were no mysteries about his earthly circumstances. We know where he was born and how he grew up.

    We need to start asking ourselves where the rains started beating us. Considering our dire circumstances, there is an urgent need for a new ethical order in the land. Without this, all the talk about restructuring and devolution of power will come to naught. You cannot build something on nothing. Even if we break into a thousand pieces under the current state of anomie, it is an exercise in futility without a fundamental reconfiguring of our mind-set.

    This recuperative essence of the Black psyche, a reengineering of the soul utilizing the redemptive tropes already present in our society, can only be carried out by a visionary political elite. Fortunately there is some architecture in the ruins as shown by the exemplary example of the former founding Director of the Customs and Excise.

    It will however be a mistake to conclude that the revered Edunabon chieftain was a lone star in our galaxy of transformative heroes. There were many other ethical luminaries like him in the firmament; a few acknowledged and many unsung and uncelebrated. They came from the old civil service, politics, the old academia, the private sector, the medical institution, the judiciary, the press, traditional royalty, teaching, law and even the much maligned military.

    Our good friend and intellectual sparring partner, Ibrahim Babatunde Jose, once regaled this writer with what he considered an example of his father’s eccentricity and quaint devotion to the old ethical order. As an undergraduate student of Political Science at the University of Ibadan, the younger Jose and his mentor, the late Areoye Oyebola as at then the editor of the Daily Times, took advantage of Alhaji Jose’s absence from the country to get his son a holiday job at the Daily Times.

    When he eventually returned, the older Jose was obviously pleased to have his son in the office to welcome him back to the country. But when the chap failed to leave after the pleasantries were over, Alhaji Jose became suspicious and pointedly asked his son what he was doing loitering about his father’s place of work.

    The older Jose, undisputed master at the Times’ group, could not contain his indignation at this development. “ Oh no, Mr Tunde, it is not done like that!!! You cannot work here, you cannot work here, you hear?” Alhaji Jose screamed at his son and promptly called his bosom friend at Radio Nigeria, Alhaji Saka Fagbo, to help him offload his off-message son.

    Please note that at that point in time, Alhaji Jose bestrode the Times empire like a colossus and could do anything he wanted, more so a minor matter like a holiday job placement.  Also note that it was within Areoye Oyebola’s remit as the editor of Daily Times to offer this kind of temporary employment without any reference to management. Finally, note that the applicant came eminently qualified in his personal capacity as a leading student in his class.

    These isolated avatars were eventually steamrolled and swamped by a society whose ship of sail was already set on a wrong course. With the new postcolonial society lacking the organic capacity to transform their example into a critical mass for a new dawn, they remain solitary crusaders and lone expeditionists to be mopped up as ethical stragglers in the brave new world of corruption and sleaze. As Louis Althusser famously put it, only the production of new heroes keeps old heroes alive.

    Even pre-colonial traditional African societies had their moral compass in place for navigating around new ethical conundrums. But that has been lost forever to the irruption and massive disruption that came with colonization. Now, something fundamentally depressing has overtaken postcolonial Nigeria and this is why everything appears to be upside down.

    It could be the advent of oil and the fabulously unearned wealth which has neutered the moral proboscis of the emergent Nigerian postcolonial elite. Like gluttonous rodents set upon a sugarcane plantation, they have gorged themselves to a state of stupefaction and ambulatory paralysis. Or it could be the conflicting and countervailing cultures of multi-ethnic societies which have made it difficult if not impossible to fashion out a truly national charter.

    Whatever it is, we must find our way out of this hellhole. With the possibility of pan-Nigerian heroism receding by the hour, it is going to take one hell of a multi-faceted struggle. This is the only way to guarantee that the labour of our avatars has not been in vain. May the good Lord grant Mama Lydia Adunni Oyeleye and her illustrious husband eternal repose.

  • Now, in remembrance of things that have come

    Now, in remembrance of things that have come

    By Tatalo Alamu

    Sometimes when a society finds itself engulfed by violence and political irrationality, it is often better to take a peep into the past in order to have a fuller prospective view of what may lie in store. When history repeats itself, it is not due to “history” but due to the persistence and recurrence of human follies and what has been called the eternal cycle of human stupidity. What follows are excerpts from a piece in 2014 commemorating the centenary of amalgamation of the Southern and Northern protectorates of Nigeria.

    “With the equipoise of contending regional titans and their perfectly weighed prejudices and preferences, it was impossible to unify and homogenize the emergent national elite. By the same token and logic, it was impossible for a supreme Nigerian leader to emerge and prevail. The stage was then set for a prolonged and protracted siege on the state by the major nationalities.

    Chief Obafemi Awolowo , arguably the most gifted and administratively capable of them, identified the major problem of the nation as feudalism in the north. But ignoring the political realities and contending cultural milieu, he chose to attack the problem frontally by attempting to bypass the northern feudal lords to reach the people directly. This panicked the old north. It was said that once on a campaign trail, the Sardauna coughed up dust and phlegm and then exploded that Awolowo would have to pay dearly for this grave insult of forcing a prince to campaign to his own subjects.

    With the west on fire and the entire nation roiling in a political cauldron, was a coup inevitable? Virtually so. It was also in keeping with the norms of the time. Unlike now, it was the time when the men on horseback were viewed as an alternative modernizing elite. Ahmadu Bello’s error of judgment arose from his equating a feudal fiefdom with a nation-state that was not of his making and the attempt to impose the norms on people of radically divergent worldviews.

    There was bound to be a collision of altars and a national tragedy when this worldview came into fatal contradiction with a fiercely republican ethos that had no truck with a feudal pecking order. Yet by virtue of the same cultural logic the mutiny by mid-ranking officers of mainly Igbo origins was so politically clueless, so motivated by bloodthirsty and irrational vengeance, that it became part of the national problem.

    As we slouch towards another epic political gridlock chillingly reminiscent of fifty years ago, it is clear that what Nigeria needs is a new national elite that will draw up a fresh charter for the nation. A National Conference, sovereign or otherwise, might remove the constraints if it addresses genuine fears and grievances, but it will not give us a new elite, except in circumstances of tumult and turmoil. But unless we find the will and the willpower to create Nigeria anew, the fat lady will soon come on stage.

    •    Excerpts from One Hundred Years of Amalgamation published in 2014.