By Tatalo Alamu

If anybody thought the problematic issue of National Question with its ancillary notions of restructuring, devolution of power, fiscal federalism etc, is dead and buried under the crushing weight of federal government disapproval, such a person had better perish the thought. This past week the issue roared alive again roasting and flaying the atrophied conscience of the nation’s political elite.

With characteristic vehemence, clarity of thought and abrasive candour, Ayo Opadokun, the veteran Civil Rights campaigner, NADECO nationalist and elder statesman, tore the lid off the roiling cauldron of national deceit and state dissembling. In a series of interviews and interventions, the Offa-born lawyer and left of centre politico, shows us just how and why Nigeria as currently configured is a living lie and a seminal horror to its trapped and disoriented citizenry.

There is a lot to disagree with Opadokun who is a personal friend and long-term comrade in arms of this columnist particularly where the finer details of strategy for bringing about a restructured Nigeria are concerned.

The tendency common among the restructionist phalanx to lapse into unproductive heckling and one-upmanship with regards to the nuanced and overdetermined contradictions at home is also to be regretted. But this is not to take away the weighty import of his insights into the contemporary Nigerian condition.

Since all actions must beget appropriate reactions, it is useful to point out that Opadokun’s reaction is coming on the heels of the summary foreclosure of the possibility of restructuring by the federal authorities. Only a political hypocrite will fail to discern that with the arrant abrogation of the right of Nigerian citizens to think and reflect on the state of the nation’s misaligned configuration the stage appears set for a further hardening of position.

Despite General Buhari’s purported walk back on restructuring as he was about to jet out on another medical trip to England, it is the federal authorities themselves that are guilty of deliberate provocation of political opponents  or what is known in Nigeria’s colourful political parlance as “overheating the polity”.

As somebody who spent a considerable amount of time in an earlier incarnation with rogue mechanics permanently on the hustle, yours sincerely must take some responsibility for insinuating this weird phrase into the nation’s political lingo. This is not to take any credit but for the purpose of illuminating a national predicament.

The painful thing about this development is that the battle for the soul of the nation will no longer be restricted to its territorial space. As we have noted in this column a few weeks past, where national mediation fails, international arbitration must surely follow.

This is the Pandora Box of post-colonial nations with disparate and mutually unintelligible nationalities hastily and clumsily glued together to form an incoherent patchwork of dormant and active political volcanoes that litter the African continent. Understandably, the international community is loath to intervene in the messy and anarchic bloodletting lest it is also overwhelmed by the molten lava of violent eruptions.

As we have noted once in this column, humanity sometimes suffers prohibitive tragedies as a result of being trapped by its own creation. Such has been the case with the ascendancy of the nation-state paradigm and its institutional accessories, such as liberal democracy, freedom of association etc. The profound irony is that the UN charter guarantees the right of every nationality to self-determination and by extension self-actualization.

But the objective fact remains that sovereignty is rarely ceded internally by a sovereign state except in a situation of war or catastrophic state collapse. This was what happened in the case of old Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, East Timor, Ethiopia, Sudan, India/Pakistan and Pakistan/ Bangladesh. The mass-emancipation of many African countries followed the decolonising wave that swept the globe in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Yet it is strange and unnerving that anybody should so vehemently and unblinkingly disavow such a straightforward, commonsensical and handy idea as restructuring, or subject it to the withering contempt and opprobrium that we have recently witnessed, more so when it is obvious that for any living entity, restructuring in whatever form is a historic fait accompli which no force can suborn. But we are at a very perilous conjuncture of national history.

If only for this, there are hardnosed political juggernauts who believe that many of those who pooh-pooh the idea of restructuring do not really mean it, that they are merely strategically gaming, deliberately bending the stick of bargaining in the other extreme position so as to avail themselves of tactical elbow room. Echoes of General Buhari’s purported ideological somersault?

The problem with this position is that it believes it has the luxury of unhurried time. As it is at the moment, restructuring is no longer an elite game. That opportunity has slipped beyond the palms of the political elite. The vast Nigerian underclasses, irrespective of region or religion, have sniffed blood and their idea of restructuring no longer coincides with the elite vision of peaceful and piecemeal devolution of power.

This is why ethnic agitators for self-determination are on the rise. This is why all over the country we hear strident catcalls for the dismembering or disintegration of the nation. This is why we are witnessing the ascendancy of non-state politics and an increasing glamorization of anti-state actors and a valorisation of armed critiques of the state.

As they draw the disenchanted and disillusioned populace away from the trajectory of normal politics and democratic wheeling and dealing, as they suck the masses into the vortex of violent protests and destructive agitations, these apostles of the new politics of anti-politics may yet strip conventional politics of its last semblance of legitimacy and authority.

Amidst worsening economic woes and deteriorating security circumstances, the political struggle can easily mutate into a messy and anarchic bloodletting with the political class singled out for exemplary retribution. People who say they don’t understand what restructuring means and the fierce urgency of the moment will hopefully understand what this means.

The deployment of force and violence as the instrumentality of “settling” quarrels about National Question, whether as seen in disputes about national destiny or contestations of territorial integrity, has never been in doubt. Occupancy, which could either mean hegemonic domination or ability to impose military solution, is regarded as seventy percentage possession.

This logic of the superiority of might in national and international disputes was forcibly brought home this past week when Russian military forces fired warning shots to ward off a British naval vessel as it entered formerly Ukrainian waters in the Black Seas. The British prime minister was later to insist that his country does not recognize Russia’s forcible annexation of Ukrainian territory.

But the Russians would have none of that nonsense and in the face of their overwhelming military superiority Britain had no alternative than to back off. It was an ironic replay of 1982 when Britain forcibly reclaimed the Falklands from Argentina after a short full scale war between the two nations. Till date, the defeated Argentines mournfully refer to the island as the Malvinas.

Earlier in the same week, the Spanish prime minister successfully sponsored a bill to grant amnesty to Catalonian separatist leaders who had been sentenced to various prison terms for their roles in the last uprising against the Spanish homeland. Once again, the Catalan quest for self-determination has ended in humiliating defeat and national despondency with Catalonia at the mercy of Spanish military overlordship.

It remains to be argued whether incremental reforms and piecemeal struggles which chip away at the basis of Castilian state hegemony would have served the Catalonia people better than wholesale uprising which risks the rolling back of reformist gains when everything ended up in tears and defeat.

The quest for self-determination as an integral part of cultural monument has been part of human history since the dawn of civilization.  It re-echoes poignantly in the wailings of the children of Zion by the rivers of Babylon even as they refused to sing King Alpha’s song in a strange land. It resonates hauntingly in the sonorous melodies of the Dark City Sisters as they struggled to make sense of a senseless existence under the bestial and dehumanizing hammer of the apartheid system.

But it did not begin with South Africa or apartheid rule. Its modern roots can be traced to the very inauguration of the nation-state paradigm when the Spanish conquistadors invaded South America and the British brought North America to heel causing the massive uprooting and mass dispersal of the indigenous populace.

After the First World War, the National Question became sharply accentuated with the Russian Revolution and the dissolution of empires. Scores of people were rendered either stateless or without any national umbrella over their head. After the genocide by the Turkish army, the Armenians were lucky to have a country they could call their own. But the Kurds were not so lucky. They found themselves strewn and dispersed among five different countries where they constitute a hostile and bitterly resentful minority.

This is the situation we have found ourselves with force as the principal organizing instrument of state domination and feudal political hegemony which is a fundamental affront to the principal notion of the modern nation-state.  To put it starkly, the economic and political mode of production of feudalism is economic, political and spiritual slavery.

In exasperation and frustration with this peculiar Nigerian gridlock, many patriots have advocated a confederal system for the nation where any section that wants to live in the fifteenth century can continue to do so until the contradictions are resolved one way or the order as long as it doesn’t attempt to block the right of other sections to embrace modernity.

But that will be the day. Those holding Nigeria in this historic choke-hold and the ensuing millennial stasis will never let go until something fundamental gives. In their rabid ideological delusion and political disorientation, they have conditioned themselves to believe that the Nigerian nation-space is God’s gift to them to rule and ruin as they please.

General Buhari appears as a principal victim of this grand occlusion of reality. He may continue to delude himself that he is presiding over a democratic setting when the reality points to force as the organizing principle. This is why the Nigerian post-colonial state can indulge in serial infractions against the fundaments of the constitution without batting an eyelid.

Unfortunately the use of force as the organising principle of politics has its deleterious side-effects. The heavily weaponized state produces its own counter-thesis in equally weaponized non-state actors and groups bent on forcibly unhorsing the state for different reasons. There is dispersal and devolution of munitions in contemporary Nigeria and the state no longer enjoys a monopoly of the instruments of coercion.

With the proliferation of arms and many anti-state bearers, state authority and legitimacy become principal casualties of societal non-compliance. We can count how many times in the last few months that the Nigerian authorities have been forced to take back their own words in the face of equal or superior force. This is not a record a gung-ho adherent and enthusiast of military coercion like General Buhari will be proud of when he eventually leaves office.

It should now be obvious that with each passing minute, the opportunity for a peaceful resolution of the current phase of Nigeria’s endemic crisis of nationhood through equitable reconfiguration slips away. With hunger laying siege to many households across the entire nation, with armed rebellion in the north and the east and with a potentially destabilising political rebellion against unitary federalism burgeoning in the volatile and combustible west, something must give eventually.

Much will still depend on the political class however compromised and discredited sections of it have become. Since they have a lot to lose in the event of a national meltdown, they must find a way of bringing back ameliorative politics as a way of preparing Nigeria for the inevitability of the radical surgery of restructuring.

For starters, they must find a way to rein in the president of the republic and persuade him to tone down his penchant for inflammatory rhetoric which is unbecoming of a visionary leader of a multi-ethnic nation. Second, the authorities must find a way to de-proscribe IPOB and other outlawed self-determination groups. Even the British authorities were eventually compelled to talk to the IRA. Let them name their representatives so that they can be lured to the peace table.

From all indications, only General Buhari knows what General Buhari is thinking about. But unless he is determined to bequeath a democratic Trojan horse to the nation and a poisoned chalice to those who have helped his cause, one cannot disagree with Opadokun that national election under the dire circumstances that the nation has found itself is a forlorn and futile prospect.

By Tatalo Alamu

When General Mohammadu Buhari gets it wrong, he gets it very wrong. But when he gets it right, he gets it very right indeed. The belated redemption of federal government’s obligation to some of our sporting heroes is an ode to patriotic service to the nation. That it took almost thirty years for the federal authorities to fulfil their pledge is a grim index of bureaucratic malice and the politicization of sports in Nigeria.

We congratulate the recipients of this housing windfall and all those who worked behind the scene to make it possible. It is never too late to do the right thing. It is a belated closure but it works magic for the psyche of the nation, just like the heroic reversal of Democracy Day to the more appropriate June 12 and the belated recognition of MKO Abiola as the elected president who was never allowed to rule.

On a lighter note, this housing bonanza reminds snooper of two things. First, the song, I need a Roof over My Head by the great reggae group, The Mighty Diamonds. In the long run, everybody needs a roof over their head no matter how poor and de-privileged. Second is the novel, A House for Mr Biswas, by V.S Naipaul. Thinly veiled, it is a riveting literary biography of the author’s father and his lifelong struggle to secure a residence commensurate with his comically self-inflated status.

But let us thank God for small mercies. In the spirit of the time, the Lagos State governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, has also deemed it fit to honour the government’s pledge to Chioma Ajunwa-Opara, the 1996 Olympics gold medallist. Jide has ruled Lagos with compassion and technocratic distinction. And it is morning yet on creation day.

By Tatalo Alamu

Almost thirty years after the annulment of the freest and fairest election in the annals of Nigeria, the national contradictions that led to the annulment in the first place as well as the emergent pathologies are yet to work their way through the system. While the military satraps directly responsible for the annulment have retreated, the feudal camarilla that primed and prompted them into action is alive and kicking as it prepares the funeral pyre for the nation.

Three decades after, a more telling abrogation of the sovereign wishes of major constituent units of the nation is brewing. Evidence abounds of state intransigence and reluctance to abide by the political aspirations of the Nigerian electorate as expressed by their elected representatives, repressive moves against media freedom and an obstinate refusal to fulfil stated pledges to the people.

As it is currently configured, Nigeria is plagued by, and hostage to, five types of fundamentalist terrors. There is state fundamentalism fronting for the political fundamentalism which eternally schemes to railroad a fractious multi-ethnic nation to comply with a malign and antediluvian vision of the society. There is economic fundamentalism as reflected in economic belligerence against constituent members of the nation by both the hegemonic groups and the subordinated fractions.

There is cultural fundamentalism which is projected as ethnic exceptionalism directed against constituent units of the nation. There is spiritual fundamentalism which has no concept or conception of the modern nation-state and which sees Nigeria as a mere pre-colonial landmass which can be occupied at will or summarily transformed into a theocratic empire.

Finally, there is counter-hegemonic intellectual terrorism which is engaged in a no-holds-barred artillery bombardment of the state buoyed by the intellectual firepower of the Nigerian Diaspora. As we have noted in this column, this Diaspora intellectual terror is fuelled by an abstract idealism and romantic nostalgia which cannot be delayed by the nuanced contradictions at home. But then in war, you choose your most favoured weapons.

This is why the Nigeria situation is so concerning. Each of these fundamentalist terrors is enough to cause maximum disruption to a fragile multi-national nation or make it to flounder irretrievably. But when it is a war of all against all such as we are witnessing, tipping over or toppling from the cliff cannot be far away. Once again, Nigeria is being nudged towards civil war by those who believe they have the might and the wherewithal to impose a military solution on the crisis.

It is a costly political gamble and it has proved very expensive before. It will even be more so this time around given the rise of multi-dimensional ethnic animosities across the length and breadth of the nation. This is not to talk about the inflammation of local sensitivities by rampaging hordes widely suspected to be the forward formation of a transnational insurgency group bent on overrunning Nigeria.

But whether we move away from the brink, as possible in a negotiated settlement, or we move through it, as in actual hostilities, it is clear that something fundamental will have to give against these fundamentalist ramparts. Within the context of Nigeria’s protracted crisis of nationhood, adversity has its great uses. One learns a lot by studying and learning from the mind-set of political adversaries.

Yet the great irony of history is that the lessons are often lost on those who proffer them and who stand to benefit the most from their salutary insights. One of such lessons is that in political games or wars of position, one must never confuse or substitute platform positions for actual positions. Platform positions are the hard and unyielding stances assumed in the heat of battle which often yield to more practical and pragmatic re-evaluation as hostilities grind on.

Claiming Niccolo Machiavelli as his mentor and patron saint, Vladimir Lenin once rhapsodized about the political values of thinking “in extremity”. According to him, if your opponent bends a stick in one direction you do not help political equity or restore parity by straightening it but by bending it in the other direction. In the course of arduous negotiating, both camps will arrive at the acceptable angle.

It is a miracle that the stick of baiting and bargaining has not yet snapped in post-independence Nigeria. In an interview after the annulment of the June 12 presidential election, Ibrahim Tahir, the Cambridge educated conservative northern power broker, chided the Yoruba political establishment for sticking to Oduduwa fundamentalist platform position rather than coming for bargaining and negotiation.

It was around the time that Abubakar Rimi, the flamboyant and charismatic former progressive governor of Kano State, also insisted that he was not in politics to please Abiola or aid his political fortune. This was after a tidy sum of money was rumoured to have changed hands.

As far as these scions of the feudal oligarchy were concerned, the annulment of the freest and fairest election in the history of the nation was a done deal about which no power on earth could do anything. Both Abiola and the hegemonic Yoruba faction supporting him were advised to pocket their sorrow and pride and allow peace to reign so that the country could move forward according to the corrupt lingo of the time.

The dominant political establishment and their spoilt brats, irrespective of ideological posturing, were so confident that the criminal electoral heist was a done deal that they wholeheartedly threw their weight behind an interim contraption which had no basis in the grundnorm of the nation.

If they thought the dominant Yoruba political establishment and the Nigerian civil society groups would lie down quietly on the track to be rolled over by the locomotive of reaction, they were profoundly mistaken. Despite finding a pliable and politically obtuse Yoruba technocrat to front for them agitations against the military and the Interim National Government intensified.

With the west in commotion reminiscent of the Wetie uprising and once again unable to douse the inferno they had helped to ignite, the power barons moved for their much tested instrumentality of full military solution. Rather than see reason and the fact that in a federation no section of the nation must impose its ill will and military advantage on the rest of the constituent units, they chose to subsume and subordinate their interest to flagrant military despotism.

But five years of Abacha’s untrammelled tyranny and low intensity warfare resulted in epic consequences for both the oligarchy and the rest of the country. A sitting sultan was summarily defenestrated. Abacha himself lost his life in the heat of battle and so did Abiola, the winner of the landmark election. The much admired bridge builder, Shehu Yar’Adua, perished in the plague while General Obasanjo escaped by the skin of his teeth.

It took the advent of Abdulsalaam Abubakar to push back the belligerent state warring against its own people while offering the injured and affronted of the land what was considered a fair deal. It was not a tidy truce but it afforded the country an opportunity to start afresh in a hybrid republic teeming with former military despots and their civilian adjutants.

It had been a gigantic collision of altars leading to a collapse of old platform positions. Those who insisted that Nigerians must align and acquiesce to political evil did not fare much better. In the old west, they have become eternal political refugees beyond political redemption.

Abubakar Rimi, having failed to become Obasanjo’s Foreign Affairs minister, lapsed into political irrelevance and went to his maker in miserable circumstances. As for Ibrahim Tahir, having been dumped and abandoned by the oligarchy, the gifted and brilliant Taliban Bauchi passed in forlorn and distressing circumstances in a private clinic.

Twenty eight years after the annulment, it is clear that the old ghosts are still with us. Despite the relentless march of democratic spirit and the advent of civilian rule, the nation is yet to shake off the shackles of authoritarian misrule and the antics of a feudal establishment bent on bringing it to heel if it does not conform to its vision of conquest and medieval servitude.

This is why it is beginning to feel as if a new civil war is afoot. It has taken the second advent of General Buhari to remind us of unfinished business and the fact that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Many of the hawks that enabled Abacha’s draconian inquisition have now found state sanctuary in Aso Rock. They have been joined by freshly hatched feudal limpets without institutional memory of recent holocaust.

The attempt to resuscitate an antiquated Grazing Edict solely designed for the old north and which has been overtaken by events and the march of history is a prime example of political fundamentalism which exposes the state as a partisan belligerent trying to impose its Stone Age notion of equity on the rest of the nation.

The Fulani Herders’ question is an integral part of the National Question which can only be tackled through national consensus and within a holistic framework of give and take. It smacks of cultural fundamentalism fronting for ethnic exceptionalism to attempt to impose a nomadic way of life which has had its day on the rest of the nation.

So also is the futile attempt to close the borders in the most productive section of the economy while winking at the porous nature of the borders in another section. It is a sure sign of economic belligerence by the state against constituent units of the nation which can only lead to countervailing economic hostility from the affected segments.

Once again and twenty eight years after the annulment of the best election ever held in this ill-starred nation, all the constituent units appear to be up in arms against themselves and against state belligerence. Every section is fighting with its best weapon.

In the west, political fundamentalism rears its head in a burgeoning movement for self-determination and open calls for the dissolution of the country. Given the serial assaults on the spirit of the nation, it is hard to blame those who believe that the country is fundamentally rigged against modernity and rationality. In the east, an urban guerrilla insurgency is taking root, relentlessly devastating public infrastructure even as the entire region becomes a war zone all over again.

The entire north is going up in flames with an armed critique of the state manifesting in widespread banditry that has dislodged the elite from the countryside and a protracted religious insurgency that has now been given international muscle by a rogue transnational Islamic sect. It is hard to see how a military solution can be imposed on what is evidently a multi-sectorial national crisis.

It would have taken a military genius and visionary reformer in the mould of Mustapha Kemal Ataturk to shake the north out of its medieval rut, dragging it kicking and screaming into the twenty first century. But given his attitude and views on many issues, General Buhari has demonstrated beyond an iota of doubt that he is neither a reformer nor a visionary leader. A person cannot be compelled to give what he does not have.

Once again, Nigeria is on the verge of becoming a pariah in the international comity of nations. What remains for the nation’s surviving statesmen is what is known as a management of mismanagement that is a holding stratagem to prevent the country from completely toppling into chaos and anarchy under the watch of its current helmsman such as happened under General Abacha, his old nemesis and subsequent comrade in arms.

By Tatalo Alamu

Twenty eight years after Abiola’s epoch-making Farewell to Poverty manifesto, Nigeria has sunk deeper into poverty and the immiseration of its people. Many have been reduced to a feral existence, foraging for food like sewage rats. A malignant vision has become sober reality. It was the late Umaru Dikko who famously insisted that until Nigerians began eating from the dustbin, let no one complain about poverty and hunger in the land.

Having been dislodged and forced into exile as a result of a factional power play by the other party as famously propounded by Adisa Akinloye , aka Egunjenmi, Dikko had plenty of opportunity and time to watch Nigeria descend into authoritarian infamy and military misrule from his Porchester Terrace pile in Bayswater, London. He himself had miraculously survived a botched kidnap attempt which would have seen him crated back to Nigeria as a guest of his military adversaries.

Fly Nigeria, it is a crate way to travel!!, Private Eye, the London satirical magazine, famously crowed of this novel dimension to human transportation. But to Allah be all the praise and glory. After eleven years in exile, Dikko was literally parachuted to add fillip and feudal sinews to the Abacha Constitutional Conference and to continue the game of ethnic-baiting from where he left off. In Nigeria, the more things change, the more they don’t change.

Yesterday, Nigeria celebrated the twenty second anniversary of the return of the military to the barracks, having exhausted their goodwill as well as their historic and political possibilities. In a cruel irony of fate, Democracy Day was marked by tears and teargas. There were angry protesters in all the major cities of the nation. Scores were arrested as the demonstrations petered out as a result of state intimidation and repressive ferocity.

Now you ask yourself, which kind of democracy day is it that is marked by booming guns and the whizzing of expired canisters? The state is unhappy with the citizens and the citizens are unhappy with the state. That is the contemporary Nigerian conundrum. Nigeria is a uniquely unhappy place. All happy nations are virtually the same. But every unhappy nation is unhappy in its own unique plight.

Twenty two years after the retreat of the military to the barracks, we are yet to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Nigeria is still jogging in the jungle. The few gains that can be said to have been recorded have been cancelled out by worsening insecurity, looming famine, ethnic bigotry, genocidal hatred for the Other and a gripping sense of national paralysis. The situation is dire. It has never been like this in the history of the nation.

Genocide is clearly on the horizon. Before our very eyes, the Nigerian post-colonial state has degenerated into a partisan combatant in an asymmetrical war of all against all. It is now fire for fire, the headline boomed yesterday. It was not quoting a putative guerrilla Taoiseach. It was the head of state himself.

The modern state is a site for the resolution of competing and countervailing elite interests. But where the state becomes a belligerent in its own right, no national mediation and reconciliation is possible, only deepening chaos and anomy.

Yet in all this, we may all have to thank General Buhari for deepening and intensifying the national contradictions for us in a way nobody has thought possible. Die-hard patriots are regretting their participation and sacrifice in the arduous task of nation-building. No nation can survive without some sustaining myths and honourable illusions.

But General Buhari has shown us that we have been living a lie. The man from Daura has taken the nation to the cleaners. There is no return from this kind of feudal Laundromat for any modern nation. The earlier we face the consequences, the better for all of us. The only way possible is if we return to the idea and ideal of the multi-national and multi-ethnic nation as forcibly imposed on us by our colonial conquerors and begin to work our way up all over again.

This is the only way to salvage something from this peculiar mess of the Black race. Enough of the preachments and sanctimonious humbug from those whose failure of nerves and vision put us in this crying shame in the first instance. Abiola, Gani Fawehinmi, Ken Saro-Wiwa and all those who have been sacrificed at the shrine of Nigeria would be shifting uneasily in their grave.

This is why this morning we are republishing an encounter with the man who is widely considered as the father of modern Nigeria, Herbert Macaulay. First published to commemorate Nigeria’s independence anniversary eleven years ago on this page, it remains as relevant as ever. May the labours of our true heroes never be in vain.

Conversation with Herbert Macaulay

It is October 1st, Nigeria’s forty ninth independence anniversary. Winter is fast approaching in Washington. It is unseasonably cold, and as dawn retreated for daylight, you could smell the sharp and biting Arctic air as if one is trapped in a giant refrigerated tent. Like a practiced flaneur, the celebrated hang-about, snooper has slipped out of his hotel room and is already on Thomas Circle.

Very soon afterwards, you arrive at Massachusetts Avenue. The name itself evokes power and glory; it exudes historic distinction and the very essence of American greatness.  You remember the Boston Tea party and the beginning of the end for Imperial Britain. Empires always begin to unravel at the very moment of their maximum power. You remember the great learning institutions of Massachusetts. That is the intellectual engine room of American supremacy. Armies of ideas clash relentlessly, transforming America and changing the world in the process. You remember the dashing and dazzling Kennedys and their Hyannis Port. And you remember and wish Barack Obama well.

There is nothing more exciting and exhilarating than taking an early morning walk in a historic and powerful metropolis. The power and magic of the great city draw and tantalize you. You are lost in the anonymity of the surging crowd. But somehow you manage to retain your distinct and discrete identity. As you watch, you are also aware of being watched. As you gape and gawp at the modern pyramids, you marvel at the infinite fecundity of the human imagination. You may not appreciate the arrogance and boorishness of many Americans, but this is the summit of human advancement for now, and there is nothing anybody can do about that.

Snooper is a notorious walkabout. Twice in this incarnation, he had been accosted on suspicion of wandering with intent. But ambling about in post 9/11 America in the early hours of the morning has its particular perils. And not when you are very close to the White House, the greatest power complex on earth for now. As the polite and courteous Indian-born driver taking you to your hotel from the airport darkly hinted, there are at least twenty five different undercover agencies operating in the Washington area. Walking is not a crime, but you must mind your body language. The possibilities are quite dreadful and spine-chilling. What if one is suddenly pulled over as a suspected disciple of Ibn Khaldun, the great fourteenth century Egyptian historian, philosopher and cultural theorist? Fear chills the spine. Even as one knocks this out on the computer, you have a feeling that something might trigger off the alarm bell.

But back to Massachusetts Avenue, the fear of being pulled over forces snooper to affect an elegant royal carriage; a Black Edwardian dandy in the manner of the political Liberator and uber-nationalist , Herbert Samuel Heelas Macaulay. True to its name, Massachusetts Avenue is indeed suffused with power and glory. The Avenue houses so many foundations, the power-houses of American restless regeneration. It is only in America that you can have so many foundations, a glorious tribute to the redemptive and restorative power of ruthless capitalism. Money-making can be stretched beyond the limits of logic and human possibilities just to prove a point. But that is where it ends. Sam Walton, the owner of the Walmart chain, was still driving his old banger while making his astronomical sums. And what about Bill and Melinda Gates who are models of rectitude and restraint despite their outlandish wealth?

You walk rapidly pass the John Hopkins University school of Advanced International Studies and the Brookings Institute. Massachusetts Avenue is truly living up to its billing. You are truly in the precincts of some of the major totems of America’s cultural imperialism. The wintry cold begins to bite harder. Against one’s better judgment, one had departed Nigeria without adequate preparations for this mugging weather. Now, one is being gradually mauled into a state of disorientation by the freezing atmosphere. You remember once again that back in Nigeria, it is Independence Day. In anger, you curse the memory of the leaders who have made it impossible for you to spend the day at home in Nigeria and in rest and reflection.

Now, you are passing the Australian embassy and all the pent up demons suddenly erupted. How was it possible for a bunch of no-hopers and scoundrels to create a first-class First World country in a record time while sub-Saharan Africa continues to sink deeper in a historic hellhole? As the cold bites harder and a state of semi-stupor sets in, a dandified and regal-looking man with majestic walrus whiskers suddenly appears to be walking with snooper. He was straight out of Victorian Lagos, and was quite a splendid sight to behold. His diction was English public school with crummy and creamy velvet.

“It is Independence Day, and how are you people coping?” he asked with stentorian authority.

“We are not coping at all”, snooper moaned in distress.

“You must take heart and be bold because nation-building is not a colonial tea party or a one-day wonder”, the old man noted with avuncular pity.

“Take heart, take heart, that is what they all say, but no heart is made of stone”, snooper noted with a churlish whine.

“ I understand that….”, the old man began but was rudely and brutishly silenced.

“Don’t understand. I’m cold and feverish. In any case, one of our leaders once referred to Nigeria as the mistake of 1914. I agree with him”, I mumbled rather disjointedly.

“Who said that and when?” the old man asked in quiet alarm.

“Ahmadu Bello in 1953”.

“Ah, you know I left the scene in 1946. In any case, who is Ahmadu Bello? I handed over to Zik”, the old man noted in regret.

“Zik lost command and headed for Enugu. Even Awolowo said Nigeria is a mere geographical expression”, I noted.

“Ah that Ijebu boy again? I knew he was up to no good. I thought he disappeared for good before the good lord recalled me”, the old political wizard croaked with good-natured mischief.

“He went to London to read law”, I replied.

“Ah that meant that he found a way round his bankruptcy? All of you must know that it is too late to start complaining about the size of Nigeria. The sacrifices have been too great. Do you know that I died from the pneumonia contacted in Kano?” the great man queried.

“You left it too late”, I moaned in acute distress.

“What?” the old man asked in disbelief.

“The handshake across the Niger”.

“But the white people wouldn’t allow us to interact. You know I fought them to a standstill”, the old man noted with an expansive flourish.

“May be, they have a point there”, I noted.

“What point could they have had ?”, the old man wondered aloud.

“It was not the first time contact with strangers will prove fatal to you and your family”. I observed with an intellectual frown.

For a long time, the old man eyed the younger man with a mixture of suspicion and wary respect. Then affection and warmth returned to his majestic hooded eyes. “I know what you are talking about, but it doesn’t matter. Out of evil comes great good.  In 1809, the slave raiders from the north sacked the village of Osogun and captured the father of my mother , the great Samuel Ajayi Crowther. They sold them to Portuguese slave traders. But we thank God for small mercies. Without that incident, there would have  been no Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther, no Abigail Macaulay, my mother, no CMS Grammar school,  and no Herbert Samuel Heelas Macaulay, my humble self. Tell your compatriots not to despair and that adversity has its sweet rewards”.

With that the old man vanished into thin air, like the old wizard of Kirsten Hall that he was. I was also beginning to feel warm and comfortable. It was not a question of magic or dramatic recovery. The mundane truth is that we have arrived at our destination on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington and the place is warm and cosy. A different kind of fireworks was already in the works that morning.

By Tatalo Alamu

It has been said that nothing is so thoroughly bad that it cannot serve as a bad example. To that extent, no human being or entity can be so comprehensively useless as to foreclose or foreclude their deployment as an example of how things ought not to be. Future sociologists of deracinated nations will have a lot to ruminate about contemporary Nigeria.

As the nation hurtles towards an inevitable rendezvous with fate, it is showing all the classic symptoms of alienation. In clinical psychology, alienation is the most severe form of self-estrangement, a condition in which there is a total dissociation of personality; a permanent battle for supremacy among contending neuroses. Far from being at peace with itself, the individual is a vast battlefield of countervailing impulses.

In some radical variants of Political Theory, alienation occurs when institutions made by humankind and for the benefit of humanity suddenly disentangle themselves from the hosting body to assume an independent life of their own.

In their disembodied form, the alienated entities take the host as hostage as they begin a reign of terror which has nothing to do with the original inspiration or aspiration. Anarchy and chaos reign supreme. But the afflicted appear powerless to do anything about their parlous state.

The physics of rapid industrialization is replaced by the metaphysics of baleful groaning and utter paralysis.  Everything appears like a monstrous fetish; a primitive ritual without the sorcerer or his apprentice.

In the modern era, the most powerful dramatization of alienation can be found in Franz Kafka’s novella, The Metamorphosis. Kafka himself has been famously described as the classic representative of the Age of Anxiety; a walking distillate of combustible alienation. He was a German-speaking Czechoslovakian Jew. Talk of multiple displacements in the post-Empire epoch.

In The Metamorphosis, Joseph K went to bed only to find out that he had become an insect, a beetle-like dung to be precise.  But since punctuality remains the soul of business, all his subsequent efforts that morning were geared towards getting up to get to work. Meanwhile, the wall clock ticked away with merciless precision reminding the embattled human beetle of its contractual obligation to the deity of modern capitalism.

The wall clock has become a master symbol of human alienation from its own designers. Honed to precision by western technology for ease of business transaction if not exactly invented by it, it has now assumed a life of its own as a terroristic contraption regulating human existence with unrelenting modern rationality without any further reference to its originating summons.

Nowhere is the concept of political alienation more germane and apposite than in postcolonial Africa. Here, and particularly in Nigeria, the nation-state paradigm which was imposed on Africa by the colonial masters to regulate and rationalize the chaotic pre-colonial fiefdoms and expired empires had disembodied itself from the notions of the modern nation to become a terror machine in its own right, spreading fear and mayhem among trembling denizens and unhappy captives.

Those who still believe, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the Nigerian union of disparate nationalities  is divinely ordained or an indissoluble nuptial which no human being can do anything about are the most afflicted victims of this form of alienation. They need to be pitied provided they are willing to come to terms with their affliction.

In the name of their sick and psychotic notion of the nation, they inflict unspeakable horror and crimes against humanity against compatriots. Human life no longer matters. It is their disembodied notion of the nation that does. If the Nigerian crisis degenerates into wanton bloodshed as a result of their medieval arrogance and obtuseness, they may yet have their day at the International Court for crimes against humanity.

But as it has been famously observed, a man can make for himself a throne of bayonets, whether he will be able to sit on it is another matter entirely. This past week, the heat of national alienation seems to have finally reached the presidential kitchen shattering General Mohammadu Buhari’s glacial imperturbability and unflappable mien.

For those who have been warning about the mismanagement of ethnic diversity in Nigeria which has escalated during the current regime, it may be sheer fun laced with macabre humour watching the Nigerian presidency roiling and roasting in a national conflagration of its own making. But for many die-hard Nigerian patriots, it is a distressing sign of a dire national emergency.

Having returned from peace-making abroad over the Malian debacle where he appeared glum-faced and forlorn, General Buhari was immediately confronted by the festering crisis at home. This was against the background of escalating stagflation, the death of the former Army chief and his aides in an air crash and the wanton destruction of government properties in the east as a result of what has snowballed into well-heeled guerrilla insurgency in the troubled region.

Receiving a report from the INEC boss over the obviously orchestrated torching of the properties of the electoral body in the South East, General Buhari finally blew his top, noting that those misbehaving in certain parts of the country were obviously too young to know the travails and loss of lives that characterized the Nigerian civil war.

The president then concluded with chilling resolve: “Those of us in the fields for thirty months, who went through the war, will treat them in the language they understand. We are going to be very hard sooner than later”. Twitter, the international media conglomerate, promptly deleted the tweet from the presidential handle sparking off a global media fire fight with the Nigerian authorities which culminated in Nigeria’s government banning Twitter from the nation.

General Buhari’s anger and frustration are quite understandable. The wanton destruction of life and property, the targeted elimination of security forces by rogue non-state actors in the old Eastern region, is quite unfortunate and a direct challenge to the authority and legitimacy of the Nigerian postcolonial state as currently constituted. A man with a military cast of temperament and regimented mind-set is not expected to take this lying low.

Unfortunately, this is a propaganda war the federal authorities can never win. If anything, the testy and unmeasured responses can only attract more international opprobrium for the Nigerian president. Twitter, like all western medium consortiums, is founded on the tenets of western liberal democracy, however repulsive and insensitive to the plight of fractious nations this might appear.

By deleting but not suspending his Twitter accounts, the global media octopus is sending a dire signal to the Nigerian presidency. But the situation has now been compounded by the Twitter proscription. General Buhari would from now on have to watch his back. This is the treatment normally reserved for leaders that the western civil and political society has grown tired of. They are preparing a Yugoslavian scenario for Nigeria.

It is a sad day when the Nigerian president hugs the international limelight of notoriety with an outlaw and political deadbeat like Donald Trump, the disgraced American former president who has just been banned by Facebook for two years. It is worthy of note that recently, and against the run of play, Britain granted the right to asylum for members of the proscribed IPOB.

Yet it would have been another matter entirely if the entire country were to be solidly behind the retired general. Unfortunately despite the hoopla and alleluia chorus about infrastructural revamp, the country has never been this divided and sharply polarized with several important segments so disillusioned and disappointed that they want out. It is not the thought of happy grandchildren that fuels wars and revolutions but the memory of defeated and enslaved ancestors.

It is worthy of note that Twitter was probably forced to delete the presidential tweet as a result of being swamped by a tsunami of protests from outraged and affronted Nigerians in and out of the country.  By making a barely veiled reference to vanquished Biafra and the savage nature of the last civil war, the president tactlessly touched on raw nerves, reviving ethnic animosities in an already inflamed polity and ancestral memories of persecution.

This is more so when it is widely believed that he has not found the pluck and courage to address the issue of his marauding ethnic kinsmen who have decided to put the entire country to sword leading to even more widespread bloodshed, mayhem and looming famine. Modern governance is predicated on integrity and squeaky cleanliness. Do not come to equity if you have soiled hands.

It is not hard to see where bungled elite harmony and the mismanagement of ethnic diversity are leading the country. It has led to growing radicalization of hitherto sedate and statesmanlike ethno-cultural organizations. Nothing concentrates the mind more than the thought of looming political extinction. This week, it was reported that Ohaneze, the Igbo apex ethno-cultural organization, has petitioned the United Nations about the plight of the Igbo in contemporary Nigeria.

This externalization of the national crisis is an ominous departure from Ohaneze’s normally cautious and cagey engagement with the federal authorities. It is an admission of growing frustration and despair over the National Question.

Stunned into action by the spectre of looming political irrelevance and finding its constituency evaporating as IPOB seizes the Igbo political imagination, Ohaneze is fighting for its political life. In the old east, IPOB is now in power while the ruling parties are in government or government houses as the case may be.

The national emergency cannot be more concerning. In the west, the secessionist clamour is growing daily acquiring more respectable and hitherto mainstream voices and a fierce Diaspora lobby fuelled by abstract idealism.  This past week, a Yoruba traditional ruler made an articulate and well-reasoned plea for decoupling the Yoruba people from Nigeria.

The danger for the current Yoruba political elite is the possibility that given the parlous plight of economically disempowered underclasses that are becoming increasingly restive, things might degenerate into messy class warfare. There are lots of burgeoning rogue cells out there in pristine forests with rudimentary military training waiting to take advantage of state collapse.

If General Buhari already does not know, we beg to inform him that the embryonic outlines of the Second Nigerian civil war are already here with us. But what is probably occluding his vision is the fact that it is not going to be the symmetrical warfare for which he is trained in military academies. As at this moment, Nigeria is plagued by asymmetrical forces which despite their mutual hostility and contradictory ideologies are in paradoxical complicity to unhorse the state.

But there is still something play for. If we are going to be ruthlessly honest with ourselves, Nigeria is a product of elite failure with the dominant and hegemonic group most guilty. But everybody has played their unheroic bit. It is a tragedy with very few heroes. In its current messy state, even if Nigeria is split into a thousand new nations, they will be nothing but a proliferating atomistic mess. Nothing will come out of nothing.

We must not bequeath this mess to our children in whatever form despite the inflamed passions and separatist catcalls. We must begin the process of dis-alienating the messy and chaotic amalgam that is Nigeria as currently constituted. It is going to be a Herculean task.

But it can also be a learning curve for our barons of disintegration dreaming of an Eldorado once Nigeria is Balkanized. Proliferating identities is a human phenomenon and a strategy of survival in all human societies. Those who cannot handle big nationhood will never be able to handle small nationhood.

This is a task that calls for a visionary statesman and not somebody with a military mind-set dreaming about expresso conquests and summary subjugation of people with different cultural outlook and antithetical modes of political, economic and spiritual production. Given the proliferation of arms and their bearers in the nation, the Nigerian post-colonial state has passed the point where it can impose a military solution on the Nigerian crisis of nationhood.

If he still has anything left to offer the nation, General Buhari must immediately begin the process of healing and national reconciliation, a procedure of disalienation, by bringing all the warring sides to a negotiating table. To achieve this, there are two urgent national imperatives.

First, in order to restore legitimacy and authority, he must be seen to have taken off his gloves against rampaging herdsmen who have turned the nation into a living hell. Second, he should carry out an immediate cabinet make over and rid himself of the deadwoods who have become a menace unto the government and the nation.

These are obviously tall orders for a man with a stubborn fidelity to ethnic particularity and whose sense of loyalty to the old feudal code appears to preclude a sense of obligation to the larger nation. But we must caution that where national mediation fails, international arbitration must surely follow.