The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

Bandung, seventy years after
- The Rise of Miniature Men
It is perhaps the grand irony of our time that at a period when daring discoveries in space exploration, medical breakthroughs and the exploits of Artificial Intelligence are advancing the frontiers of human possibilities, there is also a dramatic contraction of leadership possibilities on a global scale. Unlike the titans of an earlier epoch who bestrode the world like supermen of the highway, contemporary international politics is marked by a retreat into the cocoon of the nation where vicious battles are waged on a daily basis against imagined and imaginary enemies said to be bent on sabotaging the sanctity and integrity of the collective union. It is almost impossible to find leaders who can come up with a unifying and overarching vision of the human collective, one that can effectively link the crisis of the nation to the global crisis of the nation-state paradigm itself. It is a long way from Bandung.

The world and international relations as we know them are undergoing such a fundamental reset that the accompanying turmoil and turbulence have occasioned what can only be described as a pandemic of national traumas in many countries. Such is the crisis of values and political orientation that old certainties no longer hold true and the ancient navigational map with which nations negotiated their way in rough and inclement weather has been torn to shreds. There is a lurch to the right in many countries with America leading the way. Each country is so preoccupied with solving its “internal” problems that the possibility of a global solution to the crisis recedes every day.

The Trumpian anti-revolution is gradually seizing control of the dominant American imagination. The mood of quiet hysteria is palpable in many American neighborhoods. There is a tame despondency abroad. In the relentless war of attrition, resolution is giving way to resignation and reconciliation under duress. In the new narrative, Trump is not so much an ogre or a bad person despite his manifest flaws and failings but an inevitable historical necessity needed to whip America back to its senses. The corrupt and dissolute East Coast establishment and its misbegotten hegemony have had it coming for quite some time. The Don is a mere historical catalyst. The Trumpian eruption represents a settling of scores between the blue-eyed Brahmins of the Boston corridor and the hardy, ill-educated descendants of later immigrants from Germany and central Europe who bitterly resent being put down and denied access to the innermost sanctuaries of power and privileges in their adopted homestead. It is an intersection between class and sub-race in all its violent concussions and overdetermination.

The Irish, Italians, French, Swiss and Nordic Europeans had earlier cocked their snook at the American establishment and had been accommodated. Meanwhile in an attempt to rid the capital of destitute and unwanted homeless, the entire Washington perimeter has been placed on a war-footing with Trump himself often personally leading the charge. Anybody who raises a compassionate query about this procedure of crowd control is likely to be dismissed as a liberal leftwing loony and radical anarchist who should be taken in for immediate questioning. It feels like the House Un-American Activities Committee of the Joe McCarthy era of communist-baiting all over again.

   Unfortunately for the global order, the Russian rump of the old Soviet Union which used to provide some countervailing pushback to America’s hegemonic designs has itself mutated into a hyper-Slavic imperialistic hegemon on its own coveting alien territories and their riches at will. It does not matter to their sense of earlier brotherhood that the Ukrainian Nikita Khrushchev ruled the Soviet Empire for almost a decade or that Stalin himself was originally from Georgia. France is consumed by internal contradictions with Emmanuel Macron looking bewildered and disoriented beside Donald Trump this past week at the Whitehouse.

Keith Starmer, diffident and essentially decent, came off as being discomfited and destabilized by internal murmurs of dissatisfaction as well as a politically ruinous wave of rebellion among Labour Party parliamentarians which have seen his approval rating plumbing in recent weeks. Among immigrant middle-class families in Britain and America, the Kemi Badenoch Disease, a vigorous and vibrant disavowal and disapproval of the Home Country and its values and a passionate endorsement of authoritarian jackboot are fast spreading. The weak and the poor are unlikely to inherit the earth, they contend.

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Once again, and from whatever angle one looks at it, Africa is left holding the short end of the stick. With its parlous condition and enervated economic policies, Africa is unlikely to muster the strength, energy and resources to resolve the human and humanitarian conundrum confronting it. Yet it feels like eons ago when the hopes of a radicalized and avant-garde segment of western intelligentsia were focused on the possibility of Africa carrying the germs of the redemption and the regeneration of humanity. The hopes were not entirely forlorn and misplaced. Based on focused research into the wider currents and dialectics of history, these intellectuals came to the conclusion that as the most economically and racially brutalized section of humanity as well as the most naturally compassionate and generous, Africa and its denizens carry within their commodious heart, the capacity to reimagine and actualize a better, fairer and more humane world based on the authority and integrity of biblical suffering and dehumanization. Georg Lukacs, the great Hungarian easthetician and socialist theorist, came to this conclusion in his seminal book, History and Class Consciousness, although his analysis was freighted more in favour of the Master-Slave dialectic and on class as a history changing category rather than race.

Around the same time in a review of a collection of some works under the aegis of the new movement known as Negritude, Jean-Paul Sartre, while dismissing Negritude philosophy as anti-racist racism, called attention to the potential and possibility of the new movement energizing the struggle for the redemption of humanity through its disruptive and counter-hegemonic rhetoric. A lone voice of demurral at that point in time was the Martinique-born psychiatrist, Franz Fanon, who, based on his concrete evaluation of his patients on the French colonized Caribbean island, came to the conclusion that the negro person was too psychologically, spiritually, economically and politically damaged to be of much use to humanity, not to talk of its redemption.

   But the aye-sayers received a tremendous boost from the Bandung Conference and its aftermath. That was exactly seventy years ago. It was a glorious conjuncture for Africa and the underdeveloped parts of Asia and Latin America. The decolonizing project had received a big shot in the arms after the Second World War. Many countries were clamouring for independence and self-determination. The two “world” wars had proved a ruinous exercise in self-demystification for the western world. Africans who fought side by side with white soldiers now discovered that there were no special creations in the face of relentless fire: men, all men, die like other men and are afraid of dying like other men; white soldiers suffer cold, hunger and exhaustion just like the enlisted Black. There are no superior races when humanity faces the same tribulation.

   The Bandung Conference in Western Indonesia was the first attempt by the emerging leaders of the non-aligned nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America to forge a common front and an identity which will distinguish them from the western and communist spheres which constituted the First and Second World. It is a brutal irony that before it became a veritable marker of underdevelopment and millennial suffering, the idea of the Third World was first conceived to separate a First World of capitalist countries and a Second World of socialist countries from a Third World of developing countries with a mixed economy and the political doctrine of liberal democracy.

The spirit of Bandung resonated round the world with its message of fresh hopes and redemption for a stricken humanity. Its driving avatars were seen as men who have walked their talk. There was Achmed Sukarno who had led his country in a war of liberation against the Dutch; there was Pandit Nehru, the patrician intellectual and statesman who was leading India out of the dungeon of colonization and from Africa came Gamel Abdel Nasser who was the hero of the Egyptian revolution and Kwame Nkrumah who had just emerged from colonial jailhouse to lead his country away from the ruins of colonial interdiction. It was a gathering redolent of hope and brimful of promise. Hovering in the wing was China with Mao Zedong and his affable and aristocratic sidekick, Chou En Lai, puckishly stoking the fire of rebellion against the west. It was enough to send the Whitehouse under Dwight Eisenhower into a panic mode.

Unfortunately for Africa and perhaps Asia, it all turned out a damp squib. The African renaissance most educated Africans could glimpse with independence looming, the Afro-Asian effervescence that could be noticed in the dramatic appearance of African titans of the decolonizing project on the global stage, all fizzled out within a few years of independence. The heady promise of Bandung had all but evaporated. There was no third way or a Third World for that matter. In the contending babel of ethnic nationalities, the possibility of liberal democracy became a mirage and a postcolonial myth. In many African countries, particularly in the two Congos, Malawi, Equatorial Guinea, Togo, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Dahomey, Sierra Leone and Gambia, authoritarian personalist rule became the order of the day. In Ghana which showed a lot of pre-independence promise, Nkrumah lapsed into a despotic autocrat whose word could not be challenged. Egypt and most of the North African nations transited from semi-feudal agrarian societies into a neo-military state. Nigeria which did not show much political promise or the prospects of economic dynamism in the run up to independence simply lapsed into a semi- autocratic state with the trapping and veneer of modern democracy.

With the foregoing, it is clear that seventy years after, the promise of Bandung has not materialized. Most of the great leaders thrown up by the ferment never realized their earlier promise or fulfilled the great expectations. Having been ousted in a military coup six years earlier, Kwame Nkrumah died of cancer in a foreign clime, a sad, lonely and frustrated man. In Indonesia, Sukarno succumbed to a violent military upheaval which uprooted all traces and vestiges of communism in the rich archipelago. In Egypt, it was said that a frustrated and embattled Nasser was heartbroken by the lack of heroic resolve of fellow Arab leaders who subverted and sabotaged his idea of a pan-Arab union just to protect their own fiefdoms and miniature empires. This was before his heart gave way as a result of serial military defeat and humiliations inflicted by Israel.

Historians and sociologists of the human condition often believe they have a handle on the undercurrents which drive historical developments when in fact they are only privy to their superficial moorings. To be sure, some of the leaders of an earlier epoch who concentrated solely on solving the internal problems of their countries did very well by themselves. These include the celebrated Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, the fabled Dr Mohathir Mohammed of Malaysia and even the early post-revolution Chinese leadership and their policy of autarchy which closed off China to the outside world until it was ready to negotiate on its own terms.

The conundrum to ponder is whether it is the mysterious forces of history that summon great exceptional individuals, doers and thinkers alike, to attend to the riddles of humanity or whether it is these extraordinary personages who summon the courage and the willpower to bend history to their iron dictates such as we found in the great Negritude movement, the Bandung Conference seventy years ago and the great surge in anti-colonial animus which led to the independence of many countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Whatever happened thereafter is another matter entirely.

It would appear that in its closing stage, the nation-state paradigm is having a lot of fun at the expense of history with its contradictory cadences just as it happened at the inception. America’s current splendid isolationism is just a passing fancy. The global titans will be back and Africa will rise again when the conjuncture is right and ripe. That is the lesson of Bandung.
August 24, 2025
The Rise of Uncivil Society

We live in uncharted times. In most western and non-western societies, there is a sharp lurch to the right which makes open and sometimes violent competition for increasingly scarce resources the norm rather than the exception. The human capacity for consumption which ironically is a result of better and healthier conditions and better living facilities in advanced countries has outstripped the capacity for production. No amount of fertility magic in advanced agricultural laboratories seems to be able to do the trick and increase the yield. Or perhaps it is a question of poor and inefficient distribution of resources. Whatever it is, the Western banquet halls are no longer welcoming of uninvited quests and the stricken hordes from the concrete hells on earth.

Across the English Channel, the authorities turn them back and puncture their inflatables with sharp knives driving them further to the open seas. In the adjoining forests of the French Normandy coast, it is an unending battle between agents and bands of smugglers ferrying their human wares across the channel through the thick forests. In less welcoming climes, their creaking and barely sea-worthy boats are pushed away to the mid-seas and their human cargo left to face the inclement circumstances. In America, they are openly abducted in public places and on private farms and summarily deported often in brutal and most humiliating circumstances. The cheery bouquets that welcomed Jamaican and other Caribbean immigrants to Britain during the Windrush episode less than a century earlier and the hordes that throng the New York harbor just a little over a century before, have all completely disappeared. In their place now reigns open hostility or barely concealed irritation.

       If gold can rust, one can imagine the circumstances of iron. In Africa, things are even more desperate and precarious. The exponential rise in population and in circumstances of steadily increasing poverty and extreme predation of natural and human resources by a deviant and psychotic elite group is straight out of the playbook of postcolonial sadism. Scarcity and lack of adequate feeding culture often predispose human societies to nastiness and loss of compassion. Prolonged and protracted exposure to hunger and starvation shortens the temperamental fuse of humanity and induces surges of aggressive behavior. Yet it is clear that for the moment, the old idyllic Africa of plethora of game and plenitude of fodder from the forest may be gone forever. The epic feast of pounded yam in Things Fall Apart in which it took participants two whole days to appraise who and who were on the other side of the humongous carbohydrate skyscraper will forever remain in the realm of fiction and not of actual reality.

If we still do not get the nexus and connection between poverty, social dislocation and unruly behavior, we can at least recognize the fact that the uncivil society is here with us in full throttle. It is a society marked by violent discourtesy, arrant vulgarity and a bovine lack of consideration for others which harks back to the savage state of nature. No state of human existence can be stagnant forever. It either progresses, or it sinks further into the abyss of barbarity. De-civilization has been knocking at our door for quite some time.

Now, the ugly chimp of postcolonial meltdown has arrived at our doorstep. It was a little over twenty years ago since one wrote a piece in Africa Today, cautioning the then ruler of the country about a tendency to rude and violently uncouth conduct which could lead to the de-civilization of the polity and a descent into uncivil hell. Last week, the former ruler was openly complaining about the invasion of his vast estate by law enforcement agencies to apprehend Yahoo Boys who seemed to have taken up permanent residence on the premises. As the EFCC prepared to arraign the culprits on Friday, one is at pain to determine which one was more hilarious and which one was more tragic: the complaint or the purported invasion.

It speaks to the impermanence of authority and prestige and the transience of power. The influence of power and authority is not determined by how long you can hang on to it but by the beneficial and lasting influence on one’s society. Civil conduct enhances the rational quotient of civilization and makes interpersonal relationship more amenable to order and justice. Some societies are adjudged to be more civilized than others to the extent they succeed in moderating and modulating human behavior to fit into accepted practice which has evolved over the ages and is now seen as part of their civilizing armament.

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Most human societies erect guardrails against what they consider to be uncivil behavior. England is universally rhapsodized as the country of good manners where the gentleman is expected to wear his hat and opinion lightly. No heavy-duty intolerant stuff which sets the imagination of the fickle masses ablaze and makes national cohesion virtually impossible. The Japanese and the oriental community are a delightfully courteous and well-mannered race. The only thing they are intolerant of is intolerance itself. Their Chinese, Korean, Malaysian and Indonesian cousins make such a fetish of good conduct and decent behavior that any disgraceful behavior and dishonorable conduct is viewed with extreme hostility which often invites severe communal sanctions. As a visiting professor in Holland, yours sincerely once severely upbraided a Japanese postgraduate researcher for fouling up the wash room after a rowdy drinking binge. The fellow disappeared completely only to reappear about a week after with a retinue of oriental curios who had come to plead for him.

The main drivers of social aggression and rude incivility are economic dysfunction and spiritual deracination. Traditional African societies also erected iron walls against boorish behavior and rude misconduct. Among the ethnic nationalities of what became known as Nigeria, respect for elders and disinclination towards what leads to social disharmony ranks very high on the order of engagement. This old agrarian code was obviously aided and boosted by material clemencies. In postcolonial societies, it breaks down once there is scarcity of resources or lack of means to get by in an increasingly harsh environment. As the mother of this columnist would put it, you cannot put down a person without means for poor conduct. The demon chasing him is greater than social graces.

    There is rudeness and incivility everywhere and it is an epidemic. You have rude passengers, rude hostesses, rude politicians, rude ministers, rude lawyers, rude judges, rude professors, rude diplomats, rude opinion-writers, rude columnists, rude traditional rulers, rude subjects and rude musical superstars. The problem is that rudeness does not cancel out rudeness. It only exacerbates the circumstances. This is where we are.

In recent weeks, there has been a remarkable upsurge in instances of rude incivilities and boorish public behavior particularly among air-travellers. Road rage often ends there and then, particularly among the underclass unwashed and other vagrants of the road. But air rage because of the type of people likely to get embroiled gets more publicity. It is often a fierce competition for scarce resources at the aerial level. Not everybody can own an aircraft. The class occlusions would have been hilarious if tragedy was not hovering in the air.

How do you remonstrate with a person who was only recently lifted from the abyss of savage poverty and abject illiteracy that he ought to thank his stars and conduct himself properly? He can surely not afford to be seen using his recently acquired social heft to be tyrannizing over members of the old middle class who are invariably better educated and better exposed than himself. But having only himself barely escaped the claws of the selfsame middle class in its collusion and complicity with the ruling class only a man with a greater sense of compassion and vision of social justice would pass off the opportunity to rub it in when the occasion arises as it is bound to.

Hell hath no greater fury and burning indignation than a scorned former pauper prince rise to stardom in a highly stratified society. The story is told of how the father of the recently departed Awujale, a diffident and noble pauper prince, was subject to ritual indignities and humiliation by the Ijebu monied class just so that his son could receive their nod. It was obvious that throughout his long and blessed reign, Oba Sikiru was determined to have it back on his family tormentors by acquiring the financial heft by fire and by force. This is how class contradictions play out in a turbulent postcolonial society in a state of flux and why there is still a lot to play for and pay for.

It is only poetic justice that Wasiu Ayinde Marshal, the Fuji music idol, should find himself in the crosshairs of public obloquy concerning his rude conduct and public display of boorish incivility to aviation personnel. He has had it coming for quite some time with his uncouth arrogance and uncivil self-importance. Even his most ardent supporters have had it to the hilt with his garrulous self-conceit and indiscretions which must have embarrassed his patrons in high places. A person should rise to the level of his friends in high places rather than try to drag them under to the dungeon of sinister buffoonery.

To a barely lettered musical yokel, this may be sheer grammatical overreach, but trying to stop a train with his hands and body mass was the height of suicidal folly. But leaving that aside, how does one inform the other lady that the hostesses she had assaulted might be better educated and socially superior to her? The resort to physical violence by the Ibom Air Staff is regrettable, but that is the ugly nature of these times when incivility reigns supreme.

As soon as word came to No 10 Downing Street that John Major had been sworn in at Buckingham Palace as the next Prime Minister of Great Britain, his friend, Lord Jeffrey Archer, the irascible novelist, quickly hid himself in an adjoining washroom. According to him, he wanted to be the first person to address the Prime Minister as “Sir”. As far as he was concerned, John Major was no longer an ordinary person but the human embodiment of the British state in all its imperial might and grandeur.

    Wasiu Ayinde has come a long way. His political, economic and cultural fortunes rose exponentially after he nailed his mast to the destiny of the incumbent president of the nation. Nobody should begrudge him his just rewards. He has shown character and grit in the face of danger and adversity. Let’s face it, his bucolic pride and princely sense of self-worth must also have played a role in that. In a country where musicians and artistes are notoriously fickle and unstable, depending on where their bread was last buttered, the Ijebu –Ode noble man has shown that he is a cut above the rest of the musical clan. This is probably why his friends in high places treat him with indulgence and bemused tolerance. But to whom much is granted, much is also expected. If he is incapable of self-tutoring, they should get others to teach him to a level commensurate with his current status as a cultural ambassador and custodian of our sacred tradition.

August 17, 2025
An Illustrious scion of an illustrious clan

The grim reaper continues its relentless harvesting among the best and brightest that this country has thrown up. The figures balloon daily. Sometimes, you can no longer tell who is actually living from who is truly dead. The mind and its mindless mischief take over. Sometimes, you see somebody in a crowd and you are about to hail them before suddenly realizing that they had already joined their maker. Sometimes, it is the intimidating array of dead and un-delisted people in your phone entries that wreak the havoc.

Sometimes in a moment of madness you actually pick up the phone to call a dead person and it is their spouse who connects at the other end and you begin to stutter and mumble some mumbo-jumbo knowing fully well that you have been remiss in your duty and responsibility to both the living and the dead. Some of the people who had left were so remarkable and so colourful that you begin to imagine that they would have constituted themselves into a band of divine merry-makers in heaven. You would be glad to be there with them.

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If you graduated between 1970 and 1975 from one of our universities, you must have had many friends separated from the brood. The universities then were veritable platforms for elite bonding and we bonded very well, irrespective of clan, class or creed. The only thing we recognized was excellence and the aristocracy of the intellect. It was shortly after the civil war and it was time to reimagine Nigeria as a land fit for heroes and a haven for the Black person after two thousand years of wandering , dispersal, hiding in caves and ritual humiliation by other races.

We mourn this morning, the departure of a great friend, Muftau Dapo Durosinmi-Etti of the notable Etti clan of Lagos. There are some friends you don’t get to meet often but when you do, it is as if you were together the previous evening. He was a man of immense charisma and mesmerizing personal magnetism. Amiable, personable and immensely likeable, so infectious was his bonhomie and the goodwill his open personality radiated that you cannot fail to pick him out in a crowd as he cracked endless jokes and delivered bon mots in a devil may care omo Eko style. He had the gait and bravura of a natural prince.

We met in London during the NADECO years in the home of a mutual friend who has since gone on to stratospheric heights in Nigerian politics. The parting of political ways between him and his friend did not diminish the fondness and affection. Not for once in the subsequent years did one catch him out saying an unkind word about his estranged friend or dropping an unworthy innuendo. He did not allow adversarial politics to sully his sunny disposition. The last time I met him, he had led a retinue of the Durosinmi-Etti clan to the Ikoyi home of our friend, the Odidimade himself, Chief Oladele Fajemirokun, the Baba Oba of Ifewara, to ask for the hand of his adorable daughter, Omolade in marriage to his nephew. It was a joyous and rousing occasion. It was the last snapshot. May his soul rest in peace.

August 17, 2025
The Planes of Heathrow

How Nations Miss Their Flights

Nothing in human experience can be more exciting and exhilarating than suddenly beholding from the skies, the dazzling arrays of planes and aircrafts below as your own began its final approach at a major international airport. This was the experience last Thursday morning at London’s Heathrow Airport as the sleek Air-France jet descended on the English skies from the French side of the Channel. This morning, the typically British weather, at first blurry and bleary-eyed, began to show some signs of cheeriness and gaiety. A few of the planes were gliding and sliding into position and formation ready to vanish into the clouds. Most were nestling in supine splendor primed and poised to display their awesome capacity for superhuman speed and velocity at short notice. Daedalus and Icarus would be proud of human achievement and the strides humanity has taken in its heroic efforts to take to the sky, unlike the father-son experiment which ended in a huge fiasco a long time ago.

In the over fifty years’ experience of watching planes come and go, one had become an addict of plane-spotting. The obsession had led one to become a denizen of airport hotels all over the world. The closer the airport is to actual plane landing and taking off, the better. The best in this regard is the defunct Hilton Hotel just outside JFK Airport in Jamaica, New York, before it was parceled out and turned into luxury apartments. From the vantage point of its Executive Lounge on the twelfth floor, you could watch as aircrafts come and go and contemplate planes parked with orderly precision in endless rows like monster-birds in a historical formation. These different planes, in their glamour and prestige, advertise the wellbeing and continuous viability of their owner nations. As such, they are projections of what is known as soft power, the capacity to convince and influence without resorting to naked force or raw coercion.

As planes of all colour and hues came into view this morning at Heathrow, you came to the conclusion that this is like a congregation of nations. Apart from the big hitters such as America, Britain, Germany, France, Canada, Holland, Japan, Australia and the emergent Arab economic powerhouses of Saudi, Qatar and UAE, you had planes from Argentina, Brazil, Austria, Italy, Malta, Norway, Sweden, Cyprus, Finland, Iceland, China, South Korea, Ireland and Russia. The negligible African presence is made up of Rwanda, Kenya, South Africa, Ethiopia, Morocco, Ghana and Egypt. The rest of the continent is an ominous void. You ask the Ghanaian driver who came to pick you up why Terminal Four at Heathrow Airport appears to be less busy than the others and he looked at you with diffident surprise. “Ha, sir, that may be true, but you wait until Air Indian arrives and all hell is let loose with all kinds”, he noted with a wry grin and then became glum and uncommunicative again, as if he was not the one you just heard. It is a strategy of survival and every wise soul in a foreign clime knows when to shut their trap, particularly in a period of hysterical nationalism and colour-combing.

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The mood this morning darkened into sombre despondency. It is more like looking down below in anger. It is said that birds of the same feather flock together. But it can also be established that birds or nations of the same plumage bandy together. You see, all happy nations are the same, but every unhappy nation is unhappy in its own uniquely unhappy way. You suddenly realized that your beloved country, Nigeria, is nowhere to be found in this glittering commonwealth of nations, this assemblage of flying nations in their glorious plumes. The metaphor of a grounded bird is very appropriate. Nigeria has lost its capacity to take to the sky. It has winged itself with its clumpy mass hugging the bare earth, unable to fly or even walk. It has become the proverbial edun arinle, a species of monkey that has lost its aerial mobility and capacity for energetic acrobatics which now consoles itself by hurling stones at its more fortunate siblings on tree branches.

You had left home in anger and a near-fatal weariness of the soul as members of the fractious and unproductive political class bicker endlessly about who will rule Nigeria in two years’ time even as the nation shows early warning signals of expiring from the stress and trauma of serial gang-raping. They are too far gone for the murderous absurdity to be apparent to them. Too much politics ruins a nation. What the nation needs is a moratorium on politics which will allow it to deal with its hobbling contradictions. If this is not done in circumstances of peaceful abeyance of partisan politics, it will be done in conditions of total state enervation by converging forces of economic, political, social and spiritual bankruptcy.

But as the siege-smart Arabs will gladly let you know, to flee your fate is to rush to find it. If you think that you have safely absconded from the political horror show at home, the first rush of foreign air confronts you with the tragedy of aborted hope and unfulfilled expectations that has become an integral item of your baggage. If you are too tired and drowsy to take in Charles De Gaulle Airport in its heady magnificence and sheer class, Heathrow is like history that will not let you be however much you try to evade or avoid it. The planes of Heathrow drop on you like a bomb the stark truth of state failure and national incapacitation. In Nigeria, ethnicity is so weaponized by the ruling elites that it becomes the most veritable instrument of checkmating the state and curtailing national development. It is perhaps only in Nigeria that ethnic cohorts of a former top official being tried for corrupt self-enrichment and criminal embezzlement of state funds will besiege the court and cause the termination of further proceedings. All the major ethnic groups deploy weapons of choice which includes ethnic violence against the state, economic terrorism against the nation and the mobilization of cultural and intellectual resources against both the state and the nation.

Since the postcolonial state is seen by ruling classes as a hostile alien construct which must be invaded and destroyed rather than a mechanism for resolving ethnic conflicts and elite disputes arising from the distribution of resources, the void arising is taken over by multifarious clashes and polarizations with the apex conflict being about who presides over the distribution of national resources at a particular time and for how long. The forces that drive the conflict also make sure that there is no recourse to egalitarian distribution or inclusive governance, a situation which fuels further clamours and attempts to derail the ruling group. It is a war of all against all with no end in sight until a dominant warlord emerges who forcibly puts an end to the crisis by imposing his own solution. This is what has happened in Cote D’Ivoire as Alisane Quattara is poised to win his fourth term and all is quiet on the Cocody front, after partitioning and civil war; just as it happened earlier in Uganda in 1986, Congo Brazzaville in 1997 and Rwanda in 1994 after genocide.

A nation’s external borders are never fixed and unalterable if its normative and ethical boundaries remain loose and alterable. This is the problem with inauthentic and inorganic African nations whose normative boundaries are marked by lack of fixity and rigid rules of engagement or what can be called an absence of founding values and charter of association. Because of this fundamental lack of a primal organogram, there is a reign of economic and political injustice in most of these countries which makes them permanent preys and habitual hostages to instability. Hence, the constant cries for an urgent resolution of the National Question and convocation of a national conference either sovereign or non-sovereign. The snag here is the permanent lack of elite unanimity with those sections of the elite holding the wrong end of the stick being loudest in condemnation but going into complicit quietude once the balance of power alters. As it has happened with many African countries that we enumerated above, there is no exceptionalism driving political evolution in Nigeria and the situation remains very vulnerable to the emergence of a supreme law-giver after all elite passion might have been spent.

Going back to our plane-spotting, it is noteworthy that up till the last minute of the last administration, the incumbent Minister of Aviation was reassuring his compatriots that a wholly owned indigenous national carrier was on the cards and that planes from its hangars were about to materialize out of the skies like those wonder birds out of Heathrow Airport last Thursday. In an exemplary feat of congenital crookedness, an aircraft belonging to Ethiopian Airlines was hurriedly rented and painted in Nigerian colours just to sustain and feed the illusion of Nigerians eagerly awaiting the dawn of a new national carrier. It was a gargantuan scam shot through with bizarre idiocies that could only be contemplated by a member of a privileged clan that had lost all sense of proportion and propriety. When the same minister was brought to court for other indiscretions, he was hugged and mobbed by his admiring and adulating ethnic cohorts obviously ready for any emergency. This is what happens to nations without normative and ethical boundaries. And reprieve will not come from the skies. Only planes from well-organized countries do. Last Thursday, Nigeria was not at Heathrow.

August 10, 2025
Divinely and dutifully, the Doyen goes home

She was the perfect embodiment of steeliness and stateliness. Her slight frame belies the iron infrastructure. She did not suffer fools gladly and fools gladly avoided her. Political correctness if only for the sake of avoiding conflict was not her forte. Let conflict avoid her. The lady was not for turning. But on Tuesday evening, five months into her eighty second year on earth, the lady finally turned to meet her maker in a gesture of steely compliance. There goes our dear friend and doyen of intellectual journalism in Nigeria, Doyinsola Abiola, wife of the late business mogul and martyred president of Nigeria, Mashood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola.

Snooper mourns a personal friend and a friend of the column. She was a rugged pioneer in the field of intellectual journalism, a remarkable phase which as the name implies moved journalism away from being a recruiting den of deadwood and the flotsam and jetsam of the society to a glittering parade of the best and the brightest of the profession. Fiercely determined, strong-willed and impressively credentialed, nothing could have stopped the young woman from reaching the top of her chosen profession. Educated in the best schools both at home and abroad, there was something reassuring and refreshing about her self-confidence and the lucidity of writing and self-expression. In her prime and up till the point she succumbed to frailty of health, she was always bubbling with ideas and fresh projects. Little wonder that she shot through the ranks of the profession like a meteor, becoming a much sought after Features Editor and later a full editor of a newspaper, arguably the first in the profession, and later as the Managing Director of the whole publishing conglomerate. In all this, she excelled in her capacity for brilliant innovation, for dutiful mentoring of the younger generation and for technical trail-blazing the like of which had not been seen in the country before. More importantly, she led from the front in times of danger and dark scheming like a first class warrior and granddaughter of an illustrious generalissimo of the redoubtable Egba people, Balogun Aboaba.

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Despite her professional accomplishments and glittering reputation as a newspaper administrator and first class editorialist and features writer, it was perhaps on the home front that this remarkable woman recorded her greatest achievement, as devoted and dutiful wife of MKO Abiola and as an unfailing intellectual consort to the man who would be president at arguably at the most turbulent period of Nigeria’s post civil war history. Home was a front indeed. Coming from a Christian and monogamous background, and from the cloistered ambience of doting parents, nothing could have prepared the young lady for the chaotic disorder of Abiola’s freewheeling liaisons and relentless pursuits of fresh game. But she bore it all often with a calm bemusement and sometimes with a vexed irritability which cut no ice with the games master. Abiola once famously noted of Margaret Thatcher that for every iron lady, there is an iron bender somewhere. The Gbagura chief was also a man of monumental fortitude and gutsiness which provided a perfect foil for her sophisticated sniffing and upper class nitpicking.

The collaboration worked very well, providing a cerebral armature for Abiola’s worldly pursuits particularly his assault on the Nigerian military presidency. While providing intellectual cover for the Egba magnate, his more cerebral wife sought to impose some order on the life style of a man who was more intelligent than intellectual. Sometimes, it worked but most times it was the politically savvy sorties of the street smart merchant that prevailed. Doyin once told the columnist that each time she berated Abiola for the unwholesomeness of some of his associations and his tendency to parley with criminal-minded ruffians and ragamuffin, —awon asinwin ati asinde—he would retort that you must be ready to spend a lot on lies before you can buy some truths. It was a friendship of two endowed but temperamentally dissimilar people made in heaven. May Hamidat Doyinsola rest in perfect peace.

August 10, 2025
Extreme politics and its consequences

We want a great Russia, but they want a great bang, Pyotr Stolypin— the last democratically elected premier of Russia just before he was assassinated

Extreme politics always has its consequences. Perhaps it should be added as a caveat right away that instances of extreme politics also occur in homogenous nations with entrenched liberal democracy. This happens whenever there is a breakdown of the grand unified vision that holds the nation together as a result of the collapse of elite consensus. It is however in fractious, multi-ethnic and religiously fissured societies of colonial Africa, Middle East, Asia and Latin America that extreme politics is the norm rather than the aberration. Rather than being an arbiter and astute arbitrator of competing elite demands, the state itself is a theatre of war and violent contentions as the conflicting and often mutually exclusive claims of constituent nationalities while they jostle for scarce resources lead to a collision of altars.

   In postcolonial Africa, extreme politics has led to civil wars, revolutions, catastrophic break-ups of nations, genocides, periodic pogroms, civil uprisings, religious upheavals, military coups, violent annulments of popular elections and ethnic nationalities programmed by their devious elites to be on permanent collision course. In the light of the above, it should be obvious that any nation afflicted by any or a combination of these social albatrosses is permanently in the emergency department or a regular patient in the Trauma ward. Depending on which part of the ideological spectrum one can be located, Nigeria should count itself lucky that due to the global de-marketing of revolution and what has been called the ongoing process of de-marxification of the entire world there are no strong, vibrant and viable leftwing movements or organizations left in the country ready to capitalize on and exploit the massive social contradictions.

   If this development is particularly true of Nigeria, it is also very true of the rest of Africa. For almost five decades, leading up to the first decade of the twenty first century, Latin America was the hotbed of these revolutionary but sectarian upheavals with countries such Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Mexico and Uruguay coming under the terroristic thrall of charismatic insurgents. The continent even birthed the phenomenon of Liberation Theology, a band of Jesuit priests who believed that paradise was possible on earth as a heroic human construct. If all is quiet on that front now, it is because the idea of a supreme, all-conquering Caudillo has also suffered irreversible attenuation.

   Looking back now in sober retrospect the whole idea of The Second International, with its flawed but humanitarian heroism, feels like a fictional reprise of a world about to disappear forever. The world, in the main, appears to be moving relentlessly in the direction of a rightwing authoritarian populism peppered by xenophobic nationalism. In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn, the leftwing hell-raiser, had to be dismissed as Labour Party leader before his party became electable again. As Prime minister, Keith Starmer is learning to master the ropes of deep-seated national ambiguities and political fudging. In France, only a desperate last minute alliance between the old left and the new Macronite centre prevented the rampart from disappearing in a far right tsunami. America has just executed a swing to the far right with potentially perilous consequences. Russia has transited to a hyper-Slavic redoubt ready to defend the interest of the larger Slavic sub-race despite the nuclear harrumphing of Donald Trump. The world seems to be tired of revolutions while revolutions are themselves tired of the world.

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But what is extreme politics? Extreme politics is the politicization of the process of allocation of resources and the procedure of who gets what and at what time in a way and manner that imperils national progress and renders economic development practically impossible. It is marked by a subordination of the political process to the crude partisanship of ethnic, religious and regional muscle flexing in a way which makes the conciliation, compromise and consensus-building critical to elite harmony and national cohesion impossible. It is unfortunate, even tragic, that beyond what one can dismiss as occasional instances of individual eccentricities and opportunistic haymaking, extreme politics is on the rampage once again in Nigeria.

The democratic and national fabric weakens whenever the wisdom, judgment and capacity to take fair decisions on behalf of the entire nation by those saddled with the responsibility is subjected to a daily barrage of criticism by disaffected elite groups driven by fear, anxiety and sheer phobia. Anybody who has been reading some national dailies and watching prime time television in the past week would have noticed a sustained barrage of attacks on the Tinubu administration as if the bugle of war had sounded somewhere. It is not only the tone and tenor of these attacks that are regrettable but their nature and content. One of them with lordly disapproval insisted that Tinubu must leave immediately. Another noted without any recourse to any data or statistics whatsoever that his rule has been a categorical disaster for the north of the nation while a third only marginally more sanguine than the first two insisted that an electoral catastrophe awaits the president should he dare to put himself forward for reelection in 2027.

   What is worrisome about all these threats and maledictions is that they are coming barely two years into the Tinubu administration when it has barely passed the halfway benchmark in what is supposed to be a two-term tenure for a president of southern extraction in accordance to an unwritten clause of power-sharing arrangement on which the stability and cohesion of the Fourth Republic rests. The potentially catastrophic disruptions which are bound to follow the premature termination of this delicate rotation of power do not seem to disturb the peace and cheery equanimity of the proponents. Far more worrisome is the fact that this caterwauling is coming almost entirely from people who were until recently active collaborators and fully fledged members and appointees of the ruling party, unlike the peace and quietude that obtained during the eight years of General Buhari’s rule. They have not even spent two years out of the power loop before they have begun to gasp for breath and to threaten the peace and foundation of the nation. How are they going to survive eight years in a strange land?

The conclusion is inescapable that these are, in the main, spoilt children of unearned and unmerited privileges; prodigal brats of the feudal oligarchy without a second address and without any means of livelihood beyond feeding off politics. With their state diapers and feeding bottles removed they cannot contemplate a life of hard work and thrift outside the feeding frenzy of the postcolonial pabulum. But there is a big problem here. You cannot step into the same river twice. After the June 12 fiasco, Abacha’s inquisition and the mismanagement of the ethnic diversities of the nation, the National Question has been exacerbated and the mood has darkened. The framing temperament of the country can no longer tolerate the toxic effluence of extreme politics such as annulments, assassinations of key political figures of a particular region and electoral shenanigans ending in messy stalemates. No section of the country can any longer impose its narrow, circumscribed and antediluvian vision of human order on the entire nation. It is either we embrace political and economic modernity or we damn the consequences.

    The auguries are dire. This is not a question of scaremongering. After the June 12 imbroglio, the Yoruba people seem to have had it to the hilt with the Nigerian nation. There are many of them who are not Tinubu’s supporters but who will take umbrage at any attempt to prematurely or unfairly terminate his tenure either by electoral skullduggery or by more devious and invidious means of state incapacitation. This will bring them circling the wagons all over again, this time around in a more decisive manner. With the core east up in arms against the hegemonic coalition, it may well signal the unleashing of some irreversible forces of implosion. Those who are testing the water and probing for the soft underbelly of the current administration ought to put their talent for regime destabilization into more productive use.

   The immediate tragic consequence of extreme politics is that it often forces a vulnerable government to concentrate more on unproductive politicking and deal-making rather than focusing its talents on productive governance which conduces to accelerated development and increasing national prosperity. More dangerous is the fact that feeling the pressure and the heat of the unrelenting attempts to wrong foot and destabilize it, a weak government without a full mandate or overarching national legitimacy might be forced by exigencies to ignore or look away from the quest for social justice and egalitarian distribution of resources so as to placate or mollify already over-pampered elite groups who undermine national cohesion and the equilibrium of the polity by their greed and avarice. The irony is that it leads to that which the authorities fear most: the widespread collapse of order and authority that open the backdoor to unimaginable social and political catastrophe.

We have witnessed the horrific consequences of extreme politics at critical phases in the chequered history of this country. In the First Republic, the unjust take-over of opposition stronghold, the imprisonment of opposition leaders, the pacification of weaker nationalities and widespread rigging of elections led to a breakdown of law and order, the termination of democratic rule and civil war. The same scenario repeated itself in The Second Republic with very much the same outcome. In the aborted Third Republic the recourse to politics in extremity following the mismanagement of the nation’s ethnic and cultural diversity by a military junta opened the backdoor to another military dictatorship of unparalleled brutality and venality. After twenty six years of uninterrupted civil rule, we should be able to resist the temptations of ancestral infirmities that will return us to the limbo of liminal existence.

August 3, 2025
Two female soccer epics (The Mundials of Wundia)

In Yoruba parlance, a wundia is a woman in her prime, full of zest, guts and gutsiness. Like many other things, the term is probably borrowed from Arabic and Islamic culture. It is said that in some traditional societies the male folks were known to have fled governance after they had fouled things up leaving the women to clear the mess. Yours sincerely has always been an unapologetic advocate of women taking over the reins of leadership in postcolonial Africa. Of course, there have been a few female backsliders who seem to outdo their male counterparts as predatory piranhas preying on their own societies. But overall, the numbers are negligible and few and far between.

Last weekend, and only a day apart, two epic soccer matches took place which reminded us of the self-surpassing capacity of our female soccer divas and their ability to show focus, discipline and vision when and where it mattered most. In faraway Switzerland, an impressive, solidly deployed and well-organized English team of defending champions survived a first half scare when they fell behind to trump a vastly more talented and enterprising Spanish team of World Champions. A day earlier on Saturday, it was the final of the Women Africa Cup of Nations (WAFCON) tournament. The Nigerian female football team, the Super Falcons, came back from the dead, two goals down after twenty seven minutes, to defeat a Moroccan team that was an absolute marvel to watch as they ran the Nigerian team ragged.

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But the Nigerian heroines rallied and showed grit and determination where and when it mattered most. So certain and so convinced was the Voice of Nigeria reporter on the scene that he went away to file his report that Nigeria had suffered a colossal and irreparable loss to the Atlas Lionesses. He would have woken up to the nightmare of irreversible victory. It is unfortunate that the Moroccan authorities have resorted to mean-spirited complaints about the age and true nationality of one of the Nigerian stars. But let us leave the sourness alone and enjoy the wonderful soccer. It has been a magical outing for female soccer.

August 3, 2025
Okon takes to the ceiling

May you live in interesting times, the Chinese, wise and inscrutable in their ways, often note with a wry chuckle. The children of Confucius have seen it all. There is nothing new under the sun. Civilizations come and go, leaving wonderful specimens of the human species. While female soccer divas are scaling new heights, Okon has been conquering the Atlas Mountain in his own way, this time around the kitchen ceiling. Yours sincerely noticed that the crazy chap has been behaving in a strange and unpredictable manner of late. After completing his daily chores, the weird one would disappear without apparently leaving the house. Yours sincerely decided to solve the mystery for himself. After due surveillance, the discovery was startlingly mundane. One evening, Okon was caught scrambling the ceiling in the kitchen in panic and fright.

“Okon, what is the meaning of all this nonsense?” snooper screamed at him as he peeped from an opening in the ceiling.

“ Ha oga meaning na menini for dem mala language”, the mad boy snorted.

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   “Meaning what?” yours sincerely raved, beside himself in rage.

   “Ha, oga no vex, I beg. As dem yeye Yoruba people dey say, the thing wey drive monkey come climb palm tree him still dey wait below palm tree”, the crazy boy rumbled.

“I am tired of this nonsense. Lamidi please bring me my shotgun”, snooper charged at Lamidi, the half-crazed violence-prone driver, a recuperating NNDP thug and veteran of the Wetie campaign.

    “Ha beere (big master in Yoruba) mi. No need to waste agba (bullet) on this Kukuruku. Make I bring my plier make I remove him blokos and him go dey dance super kelele” Lamidi droned as he began a traditional war dance. Sensing trouble, the loony began disembarking. “Mad person pass mad person. Make I come down” Okon whined.

   “You fit?” snooper sneered.

    “Oga na killer Yoruba I dey run from. You know say dem Obonge king for Ijebu come quench and na de time Yoruba people go dey hunt people, dem go dey catch dem, dem go kill dem and dem go dey whack dem from dem big pot”, the mad boy sang breathlessly as he fell on the kitchen floor with a thud.

   “Idiot!” snooper rumbled with a prolonged hiss as he retreated.

August 3, 2025
The sympathetic undertaker

It was a spectacular display of public mourning, never seen in the annals of the nation. A benumbing enactment of political distress, it sent signals far and wide to the most remote of political congregations and the innermost sanctuaries of power. Some incurable cynics have dubbed it the ultimate example of political grandstanding enacted for audience present and absent, seen and unseen, near and far away for the purpose of securing some political advantage or gaining some electoral equities. “It is the twelve million votes!” they mumbled like a thief about to be robbed. Whatever it is, the master choreographer who put it all together made sure that he was in total and absolute control from start to finish. There was no room for any margin of error in this kind of political necromancy. The would- be ethno-religious pallbearers were banished to the margins of utter irrelevance where they choked on their own bile while the opportunistic interlopers could only watch proceedings in anger and from the shadows of self-banishment. It was an emphatic display of the awesome capacity and capability of the postcolonial state to control the crowd in life and death.

The state funeral of General Mohammadu Buhari was the first of its kind ever witnessed in the history of the nation. It was an event watched by millions of his compatriots, a signal parting draped in exquisite ironies, symbolism and the mystery of final and irreversible departure. From the moment his death was announced till the moment the remains were lowered into mother earth after a thunderous gun salute, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu took absolute charge and made sure the state funeral proceeded according to his wish and willpower. The picture of the Nigerian president emotively hugging the coffin of his predecessor as it was about to be lowered into mother earth would remain a fetching symbol of patriotism and pan-Nigerian possibilities for a long time to come.

It was a moment of radical epiphany, as if in death, General Buhari was admitting to possibilities and political permutations which he refused to entertain while alive. Twice in this column in the past we had broached the possibility that the north may yet be rescued from its morass of underdevelopment, de-education and millennial immiseration by a historical figure originating from outside the region. We had thought that with his vast following among the northern masses, his mystique and messianic authority combined with the aura of irreproachable integrity and pious irritability with injustice and inequities, the general from Daura was the obvious candidate to rescue his beloved people from the quagmire of multi-dimensional poverty and Stone Age suffering. Throwing money at the people was an early sign of fumbling incompetence that was unsettling in its arrogant ignorance.

   It reminds one of Emperor Haile Sellasie throwing coins at his stricken subjects in a condition of dire famine and biblical hunger. In the light of General Buhari’s failure to rescue the north, attention began to be shifted somewhere else outside the region. Let’s face it, enlightened self-interest dictates that the north must be helped out of its misery. For as long as we remain one entity and the north remains the way it is, we are going nowhere. Just consider this fact. The north often inflicts its misery and trauma on the rest of the country by brutalizing it to corporate compliance with its parlous plight. This comes in the guise of periodic pogroms, frenzied ethno-religious assaults, regular offloading of economic miscreants and zealots, forcible occupation of choice farmlands and deliberate infiltration of its cities by armed gangs. No nation can witness any meaningful development or political stability with this level of internal destabilization and disruption.

As soon as it became obvious that General Buhari was in no position to fulfill what appeared to be his manifest destiny, it became imperative to look outside the region for a nucleus of compassionate leadership sympathetic to the plight of the elites without shirking its responsibility of rescuing its teeming masses as they transit from feudal serfdom and servitude to modern citizenship. In the run up to the 2023 elections, this column cautioned the northern leaders to moderate and modulate their hostilities to the then Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu because in the light of the dramatic interplay of structural contingency and human agency playing out at that point in time in the nation’s history, the former senator represented the best hope of the north. Tinubu is obviously not antagonistic or hostile to the core economic interests of the north or the political aspirations of its leadership as long as they recognize the implicit power sharing arrangement encoded in the constitution of all major parties in the country. This sensible devolution of power between the competing and countervailing power elites of the nation is what has helped the Fourth Republic along in its fraught and perilous journey towards a “more perfect” democracy.

   With their old format and dogmatic mindset about power-sharing, it was clear that General Buhari and his fanatic followers, particularly the anti-democratic political mob that held him in messianic awe, were going nowhere whether they were in APP or ANPP and even CPC. If the general from Daura liked, he could have cried from here to eternity and nothing would have changed. The truth is that in a fractious multi-ethnic nation seething with tension and polarities, no section of the country can impose its narrow, circumscribed views and vision on the rest of the country without momentous consequences. This was how General Buhari and his frenzied supporters were compelled by exigent circumstances to reform themselves particularly after the presidential elections in which both the dog and the baboon were soaked in blood in conformity with the general’s dire predictions. But it was to no avail. As a shrewd man of force and violence himself, the general knew where the balance of power resides despite the orchestrated arson and vicious bloodletting. The following was how this writer described the unfortunate circumstances in an article titled: Between the Messiah and the Militia. (2011)

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“Anybody who has watched a Buhari rally in recent times, or the crowd waiting to receive him in public places must come to one conclusion. This is not an exultant crowd waiting for a political emancipator. This is a traumatized mob waiting for a messiah.

   There is a feral frenzy to these fellows; there is the manic glint of the politicized fanatic in their eyes; there is an all -consuming raw anger which is implacable in its thirst for vengeance; there is a wild and merciless ruthlessness of resolve which does not recognize the template and rubric of law and order, or its corollary of logic and rationality. Law and order have come a sorry pass because they are not always at the service of justice and equity. Unhappy indeed is the land that needs a hero. This is not your run of the mill multitude that will accept any result however fair or some digitalized fantasies for that matter. But the rest of the country must also fear. A mob is not a democratic crowd. Because of its traumatized antecedents and psychic disposition, this crowd is not rooting for a political saviour but its anointed messiah. It will vote all right, but the vote is merely the lightning rod for its high wattage of savage inquisition.   In case you still don’t get it; in case the fancy language gets in the way of clear understanding, what we are saying is that the genie of massive revolution has berthed in the north of the nation. We have on our hands a rampaging horde radicalized by hunger, brutish want and millennial misery. Like an awakening mammoth, the stirring has been slow, but it has been there for the discerning to glimpse. This is what you get when a self-pampered political elite decide to commit suicide as a result of greed and lack of vision. It is the messianization of politics. The twelfth imam is here with us.

Everything predicted in the column came to pass a fortnight after. But this column also cautioned the general and his rampaging mob that they must never hope to accede to power in Nigeria unless they changed tack and their modus operandi. “As it is, the Buhari ticket cannot gain complete ascendancy over the whole nation without dissolving itself into a pan-Nigerian coalition of progressive forces which will modulate and temper its dangerous messianism.” The old Buhari movement seemed to have taken this cautionary advice to heart by teaming up with South West progressives who taught them how to stay and protect their vote after voting. They also helped to spruce up the general and soften his image as a stern and uncompromising unreformed and seemingly unreformable autocrat and military despot. The rest is history. Needless to add that humongous resources must have gone into this project.

You cannot step into the same river twice. There cannot be two Buharis in the same generation. The Buhari block vote and warehouse are gone forever. Whatever remains are like stragglers after a major battle waiting to be mopped up. Given his stellar performance at the state funeral for the departed general, his genuine empathy for his family and his inspired role in the transformation of the Buhari inflammables into a regular movement and electable commodity, President Tinubu is in pole position for prime vote harvesting. Unless there is a subsequent catastrophic slippage somewhere, this makes him virtually unstoppable in the presidential sweepstakes come 2027. By then, what rolled out of Lagos in 2007 as a beaten and dominated political rump after General Obasanjo’s electoral heist would have become the dominant political tendency in the country.

And this is where the paradox turns on its head. The sympathetic undertaker himself needs our sympathy. While total dominance and political supremacy based on deal-making and the construction of ingenious alliances among different factions of the political elites will do for electoral triumph, hegemony is more enduring and more deeply rooted because it is based on a set of ideals forged in the political imaginary of the people and burnt into their consciousness. This is why the Buhari tendency will fade off and fizzle out in a matter of years. Beyond an emotive identification with the northern masses and divisive recourse to ethnic exceptionalism, Buhari never set down his ideals in writing, unlike Nasser with his Pan-Arabic nationalism and Muammar Ghadaffi with his anti-Western polemics. You cannot give what you don’t have. Buhari was never a man of ideas and never pretended to be an intellectual. But this is also why after almost a decade in power he could not make a serious dent on the condition of the northern masses, unlike Nasser and Ghadaffi. President Tinubu should avoid this trap of power pragmatism in which holding on to power is all that matters. It is the graveyard of enduring legacy.

July 27, 2025
A royal slippage of intriguing consequences

It is a sign of the times. The economic, political and social insecurities Nigerians have been going through in the last two decades have led to a sense of siege among the various nationalities. There is a dramatic raise of the bar of cultural conformity. What used to be passed off as harmless jokes about your host communities now attract severe verbal sanctions or even worse. Deliberate infractions invite aggressive and threatening behavior or severe verbal thrashing. If you are unlucky, things may get physical. Among the normally liberal and accommodating Yoruba race, you dare not joke about the sacred customs of the people and hope to get away with it lightly. There are cultural police and traffic wardens of compliance everywhere. People seem to take exception to the invasion and desecration of their sacred tradition which is the realm of their metaphysical prowess and the armoury of their mystique and general wellbeing. When and where the offender happens to be a traditional ruler who is the custodian and ultimate defender and Praetorian guard of the selfsame tradition, then all hell is let loose.

Oba Sikiru Kayode Adetona, a revered monarch and visionary leader of his people who transformed his native Ijebu-Ode from a rural municipality to a thriving and bustling modern city, has found himself in the crosshairs of the fierce artillery bombardment of his own people and many other concerned Yoruba cultural patriots for his startling and astonishing indiscretions about the customs of his people and the traditional rites of coming and passage of the king. If as a youthful twenty six year old prince repatriated from England, the late Awujale had no control over the rites of initiation, he has taken his revenge by making sure he was buried according to his private wish as a Muslim. The handful adherents of traditional customs who showed up at the interment were treated like orphans from the nearest orphanage. After that all hell broke loose with some folks calling for the head of the late Oba even in death since he acceded to the throne by deception.

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Let our royal fathers beware of incurring the wrath and ire of their own people in these testy times. In fact if verbal fusillades could wake up a dead king, the Awujale would have been back in the storied comfort of the royal boudoir. A man of plucky courage and amazing forthrightness, the Awujale was given to equally amazing indiscretions. With characteristic imperial hauteur, he would have dismissed the whole brouhaha as a storm in a royal tea cup stirred up by some of his jobless subjects and other miserable interlopers. It was not that he did not give enough hint of what was to come. In his autobiography published eleven years earlier on his eightieth anniversary, the late Oba openly disemboweled the customs of his people and the sacred rites of royal installation. The quietude among the larger Ijebu populace on both occasions suggests a degree of complicity and conspiracy. Had the Ijebu people been less “civilized”, less tolerant and less accommodating of royal foibles and eccentricities, the entire populace would have risen as one to exhume the royal corpse and subject it to frightening indignities before throwing it away.

The politically savvy and worldly wise Yoruba people are faced with a conundrum in circumstances of traumatic transition to modernity superintended by both Islamic and Judaic civilizations. While it is not meet or wise for an Oba to be seen championing or openly supervising the desecration of the sacred tradition of his people, nothing can, or as ever stopped, the march of modernity. While custom is constant, culture is ever evolving ultimately catching up with and forcing custom to accede to its dictates as it struggles to break free of the cobwebs of outworn tradition in all its retarding stupefaction. In overarching traditional societies marked by vibrant sub-cultures, the development is uneven and irregular with some cultures at the frontiers, a few straddling the middle ground while others cling to the certainties of ancient traditions. The wise conclave of Ijebu kingmakers who insisted that after Oba Adesanya the next Awujale should be an educated person knew what risks they were taking by bypassing the father. After the long transformational rule of Sikiru, we dare say that the next Awujale cannot be a throwback to atavistic fantasies and fetishes.

July 27, 2025