Category: Tatalo Alamu

By Tatalo Alamu

Oh dear, oh dear, how else can a time be more interesting? After years of prowling with intent around the corridor of power—the corridor they never really wanted to leave to face their soldierly obligations to their country— the bullies of old Burma struck again on Monday in a perfectly choreographed dawn coup which left no one in doubt about the awesomeness of their power and capacity for ruthless exertion.

For months, there have been ominous rumblings from the military High Command. They were never satisfied with the power-sharing arrangement which left them with a substantial allocation of seats in the parliament and the veto power in matters of defence and national security. In effect they simply caged in their old nemesis, Aung San Suu Kyi.

Among other military impedimenta to prevent her from assuming full power, there is a subsisting constitutional clause which forbids her from ever becoming president, despite the fact that she is the leader of the largest party by a mile and the reality that most of her compatriots look up to her for guidance and benediction.

Two weeks back, the rumblings from the military headquarters grew louder and more threatening. A voice from the deep military state let it be known that they were not foreclosing the possibility of a coup to correct some democratic anomalies. They seemed to have backed off after the international community cautioned them.

This past week they put all pretences aside as they decapitated all organs of democracy in a dawn coup whose massive show of power struck fear and trembling into the populace. Without any sense of shame or irony, they cited voters’ irregularities and widespread rigging in the last elections as the reason for their intervention. This was an election adjudged by international observers to have been free and fair, resulting in a landslide victory for Suu Kyi and her party.

The military have ruled and wrecked Myanmar for most of its modern existence. Opposition is weak and divided owing to the nature of the society and the deep religious reverence for authority and extant power. Both nationally and internationally, Myanmar’s military have conducted themselves with disrepute and murderous roguery.

They have been slammed for ethnic cleansing of the minority Rohingya people. Having sided with them, Suu Kyi herself did not emerge smelling of rose. Many consider it a dent on her international image and credibility as a celebrated Human Rights campaigner. But this was a reflection of the complicated power play in her country and the abiding concern not to upset the rogue military.

All that has now gone up in smoke and in a bonfire of political vanities. The great lady must be feeling very sore and short-changed. What could have helped is if there was a younger modernizing faction of the military elite ready to look their antediluvian masters in the face and tell them to go to hell.

But this notwithstanding, the international community should come to the aid of the Myanmar people in their hour of need by helping to persuade the soldiers that there is more to the profession than relentless coup-mongering. Joe Biden’s robust intervention should be applauded.

By Tatalo Alamu

We live in very interesting times. We are passing through an unusual phase of human existence. The world as we know it will never be the same again. Covid-19 has blitzed and blighted our lives. So many people have perished and we are beginning to lose count. We, the survivors, wander aimlessly about like a clubbed dog or like shell-shocked victims of a terrible calamity. We only know the beginning of this world-historic catastrophe no one can foretell the end.

To be sure no one could have foreseen this disaster and no leadership however proactive or clairvoyant could have been trained for its turbulent and disruptive anomalies. Yet it is also obvious that the miniaturization and minimalization of leadership which has been the standard fare in post-colonial Africa has now reached the gates of some advanced nations.

How else can one explain the profound irony that it is the era of a destructive pandemic which requires a hands-on, proactive and ethically superior leadership that America, unarguably the leading democracy in the world, should be saddled with a murderous, emotionally challenged misfit like Donald Trump? Or the ideologically expandable old Etonian in the UK who is now confronted with the grim realities of post-Brexit as containers of diary rot away in Dover and unsold piggery proliferate in Yorkshire?

It is also curious that countries that have shown the way forward in this epochal upheaval are always invariably led by women who have demonstrated exceptional leadership and great emotional intelligence. Among these are Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand, the prime minister of Finland, Sanna Marin, Katrin Jakobsdottir of Iceland and the incomparable Angela Merkel.

When she was asked why she was always in the same dress and with unremitting punctiliousness, Merkel retorted that she was elected the leader of Germany and not a fashion diva. On this one at least, the perpetually rumpled and meticulously untidy Boris Johnson has the vote of this columnist despite our reservations about his politics and leadership mettle.

It is now clear that our old values can no longer cope with a post-Coronavirus epoch. The world needs a fundamental reset. We have said it many times in this column that the nation-state paradigm is fraying at the edge and may be at the end of its historic tether. No one is sure of what will replace the model.

The entire world is in a state of traumatic transition. In America, there are states already behaving like nations and in Africa there are nations that have lost all the attributes of nationhood with some already virtual protectorates of the UN. There are secessionist tremors everywhere and in the UK the post-Brexit tensions fuel speculations of inevitable Scotland divorce.

There are endless possibilities and quite a lot of them are not particularly appealing. We concluded the column last week by promising to examine the prospects for Nigeria in a post-covid-19 world. But from the foregoing and despite Nigeria’s capacity for internal combustion the prospects of the nation cannot be divorced from the larger global possibilities.

Despite terrifying the disruption of our normal life by the pandemic, it is obvious that the human species has not learnt its lesson.  A new and more humane set of values and global governance ought to have kicked in by now. As it was in the ancient community, it is imperative to re-imagine the human order so that we can become our brother’s keeper all over again.

Yet in the face of all this, a brutal Darwinism or survival of the richest countries still prevails out there. Poor countries and their impoverished people have no chance of survival except through grit and determination and through herd immunity naturally acquired by the wretched of the earth. It is the global age of the triage.

But what is triage once again? Before we come to this, we must single out for honourable mention, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Ethiopian-born Director General of the World Health Organization. Throughout the Covid-19 crisis, the Ethiopian Health Tsar has projected the image of humane management of a global health crisis with his dire warnings and apocalyptic admonitions usually laced with colourful phrases.

Among these is the memorable coinage, “infodemic” which spoke to the pandemic scourge of fake news and the attendant threat of compromising the delicate management of what is a global health emergency.

Tedros Ghebreyesus at that point in time was locked in a mortal diplomatic confrontation with America over the charge that the organization was too chummy with China. Trump eventually withdrew America’s financial and strategic support for WHO which triggered considerable panic in the organization.

The inelegant and rather ponderous “vaccine nationalism”  seeks to capture the extreme protectionism which led many countries to preclude scientific collaboration in the search for an effective cure for the pandemic and which has now led several countries to foreclose the possibility of sharing the vaccine with less endowed countries. So far, only Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand appears willing to buck the trend.

“Vaccine nationalism” is an inappropriate expression because it seems to treat with diplomatic levity a virulent mutation of the extreme nationalism and xenophobia which has spelt doom for the civilized world. Extreme Nationalism is a comprehensive phenomenon and its vaccine variant is merely an inevitable offshoot of the real thing.

For example, it is now almost certain that it is the destructive rat race among leading nations which has marked the closing phase of the nation-state paradigm which triggered off the pandemic in the first instance, leading to a destruction of the extant world in a way no nuclear Armageddon could probably have done. Unlike the nuke arsenal, humanity has no control over the buttons of a pandemic.

Lesser nations have been thrown into this conflict of giants as pawns and hostages and this must now bring us back to the concept of Triage. Perhaps a personal example will suffice. A few weeks back in England upon being found spread eagle on the kitchen floor after succumbing to some Covid-like symptoms yours sincerely was told by his son that he would have to be taken to the hospital.

Upon hearing the dreaded word hospital which was the equivalent of a death sentence, your columnist leapt up like Achebe’s famous Amalinze the cat almost hitting the roof in the process. Thereafter, recovery was swift and irreversible. The fear of hospitals is the beginning of wisdom.

The popular myth in the civilized world is that once you are over sixty five and you find yourself in the hospital with Covid-19 symptoms you are kept in a corner and plied with analgesics to ease imminent transition to the land of the unreturnable.

That is the concept of Triage in concrete action. Famously devised by Napoleon’s favourite military surgeon during the dreadful and costly Napoleonic wars, it was meant to prioritize and separate those who are severely wounded in battle and close to death from those who are lightly wounded and are able to make a quick return to battle. Later on the concept was refined to make it less harshly utilitarian.

From all available indications, it is obvious that the concept of triage now operates at the global level with poor nations regarded as surplus to requirement by the rich world. You can hardly blame them. No nation can be blamed for looking out for their precious citizens first and foremost. But this must not preclude empathy and compassion for poor and less endowed nations.

Trumpeters of the Nigerian administration have let it be known that the country could muster ninety five million dollars to procure vaccine for sixty million of its populace estimated currently at two hundred million. Even if this were to be true, this is still a tiny drop in the mighty ocean. You cannot plant cassava and expect to harvest cocoyam.

Had Nigeria not been stolen blind by a rapacious ruling class, it ought not to be looking for money to procure vaccine for its people. Having been effectively bankrupted by spellbinding corruption and graft, Nigeria has found itself compulsorily consigned to the league of the poorest nations on earth. It is not a fate to be envied.

In any case, had the Nigerian university system not been subjected to intellectual molestation and deliberate degradation by a succession of military tyrants and civilian despots, Nigerian home grown scientists in their well-equipped laboratories would have been at the frontline of the race to develop a vaccine for Covid-19.

This is not an empty boast. By the early seventies, University College Hospital in Ibadan was already ranked as one of the four leading medical centres in the commonwealth. Today, it is a very poor and pathetic shadow of its former self.

By contrast, Cuba, an island with a population far less than Lagos and without Nigeria’s prodigious natural resources, is at the cutting edge of the technology to produce the elusive vaccine. It has come up with at least four variants of the vaccine. Despite its parlous resources and America’s economic and military harassment over decades, Cuba invested massively in popular literacy and the education of its citizens. It regularly exports its surplus doctors to western nations.

It is worthy of note that at the turn of this century while Cuba was perfecting its scientific, medical and pharmaceutical revolution through relentless investment, academic galley slaves of the Nigerian decadent oligarchy and its equally debauched organic technocrats were busy drawing up fancy blueprints and frameworks for producing indigenous Nobel laureates, a classic case of putting the cart before the horse.

It would have been so funny were it not so tragic. Almost two decades on, an obstreperous serving governor in Nigeria was until late last week insisting that the whole Covid-19 was nothing but a scam which has no basis in reality. The grave consequences for the people who find themselves under his whimsical thraldom are better imagined.

It all reminds one of the great American Red Indian chieftain who, upon being told that Americans had landed a man on the moon, cheerfully informed his captive audience that it was an impossible fiction and that the Yankees would soon come back to their senses. It goes to show why his people ended up in the Reservation in the first instance in the face of western modernizing onslaught.

But for public-spirited international organizations such as WHO, UNICEF and COVAX COALITION who are rushing in to fill the void abandoned by super-nations, the fate of poor nations is better imagined. Yet as it is with human beings, so it is with nations. Character is fate and no nation can escape the fate determined by its national character.

Vaccine hoarding by rich nations will soon run its course. As we ought to have learnt from the hordes of poor immigrants besieging rich countries, enlightened self-interest should teach us that no amount of vaccine-saturation of rich countries will work as long as there are isolated patches of deprived countries ready to re-infect with new mutations.

By Tatalo Alamu

To the Amororo police station where Baba Lekki was locked in an epic legal duel to secure an order of mandamus for the release Okon after being detained for contempt of court in a case of bigamy. The whole place was like an open camp of miscreants with hardened ex-convicts, pre-convicts and post-convicts all smoking hemp and lambasting the authorities.

Baba Lekki walked in with his usual jaunty confidence. But as he brought out the rumpled legal instrument from a left pocket bristling with all kinds of fireworks including a primitive lighter known in ancient local parlance as monrasana, he was to meet more than his match in the alert and no-nonsense desk sergeant who eyed him with quiet disdain.

“I have an order of mandamus to secure the release of Okon Francis Okon”, the old contrarian announced with a fiery scowl. But to his surprise, the desk sergeant ignored him and continued to pore over a huge file with utmost concentration. After the crushing humiliation of being ignored, Baba Lekki broke into a tempest.

“Officer, I put it to you that you are a blockhead”, the old man screamed. The desk sergeant calmly closed the file he was treating and looked directly at the ancient agitator.

“Sir, abuse is not legal argument. The order of mandamus does not preclude the mundanity of the order itself”, the sergeant repulsed. Baba Lekki was stunned by the sheer intelligence and calm sophistication of the response. He was not dealing with an ordinary cop. A man with a wolfish visage of extreme intelligence, Hannibal Mukoro was not a police officer to toy or tangle with.

Three decades earlier, Sergeant Mukoro was touted and hailed as one of the rising stars of the police force. His forensic brilliance and thoroughness attracted the attention of his superiors and he was promoted inspector ahead of his course mates and pencilled down for a course which would make him a superior officer.

But envy and ill-will intervened. One thing led to the other and he was framed for tampering with evidence. Promoted ex-inspector, he was to spend the next five years in that non-rank until he was restored as Sergeant after much pleading and petitions. He thereafter sank into quiet oblivion while watching lesser mortals climb over him. He had quietly accepted his fate and taken to pools betting and big game hunting.

“What do you mean?” Baba Lekki asked rather belatedly but without much conviction.

“Sir, I am surprised that despite your years in London, you still don’t know that mandamus means we demand. But that is where it ends. We are asked to produce the detainee. It doesn’t say he must be alive. Your man could have succumbed to covid in detention. All we need to do is to produce evidence of body as part of the body of evidence” the sergeant calmly declaimed.

“Not on your life, I say not on your life. I know where you are going. The boy must not die”, Baba Lekki screamed now realising that he was dealing with a satanic state enforcer.

“Calm down, calm down,” the sergeant ordered the old man. “I will release your man if he is alive. But he must give an undertaking to leave Lagos immediately”.

“Na today today I go leave. I no be Nigerian. I be from Ambazonia”, a distraught Okon whined from one of the cells.

“Shut up, you idiot or I will rescind the order”, the sergeant screamed.

“Ngbo Okon no talk at all oo. Madman come pass madman for Lagos oooo!!” the old man moaned as he crashed on the floor completely exhausted.

By Tatalo Alamu

The Fulani Herdsmen’s Question, or what is shaping up into an ethnic apocalypse, has now mutated into the gravest security threat to the corporate existence of the nation. How the hitherto peaceful, placid, sticking wielding herdsmen that we all knew and grew up with metamorphosed into murderous, marauding rapists, and how their ranks were infiltrated by wild unregenerate kith and kin from deep remote forests and transnational ravines is a question to examine and for drastic solution to be proffered if the nation is to survive in the long and short run.

As we have said many times in this column, the humanitarian catastrophe arising from the collapse of Nigeria is better imagined. The entire subcontinent will descend into millennial chaos and anarchy. The sneak preview is already here for all to see: abandoned farmlands, threatening famine, the emergence of new warlords and a restive populace tottering at the edge of despair and desperation.

It is to be noted that President Mohammadu Buhari has at last summoned the courage to acknowledge the fact that Nigeria has slipped into a state of emergency under his watch. But acknowledging the dire emergency is one thing, getting governance itself into an emergency mode away from the current languid and lackadaisical insouciance and obfuscation of reality is another thing entirely.

The national anguish and trauma find strident outlets in calls for the urgent dissolution of the country if restructuring is not available and benign calls for the emergence of a truly transformative leadership that will lead Nigeria away from the edge of the precipice.

Given the momentum and national expectations that swept him into power, this is not the kind of final report card that General Buhari ought to be happy with. In the dead of the night no matter the grandstanding and icy disdain for popular opinion, every ruler must finally confront his conscience.

Take for example the recent decommissioning of the service chiefs. Although belated, this is a skilful move to divert attention from the ethnic maelstrom roiling in the background. It ought to have generated universal applause. But the people seem to have wised up to strategic duplicity and official misinformation.

President Buhari would have been shocked that the move was greeted with only muted approval and even wild recriminations of ethnic bias in some quarters. General Leo Irabor, the new Chief of Defence Staff and an ethnic Ibo from the Ika sub-ethnic stock, was reportedly disowned as a foreigner by some Igbo groups. Contradictory accounts of his religious affiliations quickly surfaced.

This is an indication of how ethnic and religious relations have worsened under General Buhari’s watch and how the National Question has been exacerbated. Coming at a time when the Nigerian Air Force was strafing and bombarding IPOB refuseniks in Orlu and the Ibarapa breadbasket of the Yoruba people was in a state of commotion, the shuffling of military cards looked like a grand diversion.

The Yoruba are wonderful natural structural designers and engineers. They boast of splendid insights into the Nigerian conundrum and design impasse. One of these is the metaphor of the broken drum. Once it is discovered that the drum skin cannot cover the drum circumference, nothing can be done, not even when you recall Ayantoyibo, the master drummer and designer.

The other is of course the metaphor of the trousers that has come up for shorts. No amount of structural alignment or technical adjustment can correct the foundational imbalance. If you like wrap it round or hem it with extraneous stuff. You are only creating more sartorial absurdity for the world to notice. If you are not to continue wasting your time, the best thing is to go for a new design entirely.

This is the state we are in. The problem is that Nigeria, like most other African colonial contraptions, was not designed as a country but as a primitive minefield for extractive predation. The living conditions are appalling and inhuman. The working conditions are worse. The workers are living dead, reduced to a state of torpid apathy and feral squalor.  Out of sheer neglect and brutal maximization of profit, the pits often caved in, burying thousands of them in the molten furnace.

In order to draw attention away from the heinous scam going on, both the colonial supervisors and the postcolonial superintendents have perfected the art of occasionally fomenting uprisings and pogroms in the mine. Readers must be reminded of the weirdly apocalyptic and colourful novels of the nineteenth century British adventurer, Sir H. Rider Haggard.

Written around the time of the Berlin Conference, these novels represent a haunting insight into the future of Africa. In King Solomon’s Mines, there is a journey to discover a mythical mine in the remote heart of the continent filled with outlandish riches and stupendous treasures. In the sequel tiled Allan Quatermain, there is a Black character known as Umslopogaas, a huge powerful cyclops who could have been the precursor of Idi Amin, the Nubian cannibal who seized power in Uganda in 1971.

That is all that has been happening in Africa in the last one hundred and forty years since the Berlin Conference. In arguably the most cruel and outlandish of this systematic genocide of a people, King Leopold, the German-born king of Belgium, simply excised a chunk of Central Africa, the size of Western Europe, which he egregiously and impossibly named the Free Congo State.

By the time this colonial miscreant was persuaded to give up his African free lease in the name of formal colonization, one third of the population had perished as a result of widespread torture and periodic massacre. Many survivors limped and hobbled about without limbs or with stumps of amputated arms. It was truly a glimpse of hell and the utter darkness of the human heart.

At independence in 1960, Congo was a vast chaotic jungle of impenetrable forests without any passable civil service, political institutions or modernized economy. Its leader, Patrice Lumumba, a heroic political neophyte, had only a few years of formal education. He was briskly overwhelmed and promptly murdered.

Sixty one years after, Congo has had only one passable national election, having been ruled by two families continuously for fifty eight years. The ill-starred country remains very much a primitive mines with several private armies and warlords engaged in plunder and rapine of its incredible natural wealth.

In the current epoch of postcolonial Africa, the idea of a continent as a vast, chaotic mine for extractive predation looms very large indeed. But that is without our understanding of the underlying ironies and the political comorbidities. Sometimes the predation achieves a transnational urgency and efficiency.

In a moment of sub-continental turmoil and unrest, Charles Taylor, the rogue ruler of Liberia, simply carved up a huge swathe of territory straddling Liberia, Sierra-Leone and Cote D’Ivoire from where he was extracting timber, cocoa and mineral resources until a multi-national force put an end to the racket.

Ever nattily attired and speaking with fluent vacuity, Charles Taylor reminds one very much of the infamous “manager of the interior” as captured for posterity in Joseph Conrad’s novel of colonial depredation in the Congo: The Heart of Darkness. Calm and elegantly turned out deep in the African jungle while supervising the brutal expropriation of a people on the orders of his colonial master, the manager of the interior is another prophetic colonial trope for the African postcolonial condition.

This is the phenomenon that has now appeared fully dressed on the Nigerian stage. It has been long in coming. It is a fate many had hoped that Nigeria would manage to avoid. Despite its multi-ethnic frenzy, Nigeria has many historical advantages over many other less fortunate African nations which make it a potential conglomeration of the Black race once it gets its act right. Unfortunately at this moment, it is the image of the nation as King Solomon’s Mines that looms large.

Many sections of the country’s political elite who believe they have been shut out of lucrative oil deals by a corrupt feudal oligarchy with a vice grip on the industry have taken to mining and other extractive activities. As a result, significant sections of the country are potted and pockmarked by illegal mining activities. Mercenaries and arms abound, thanks to the rise of ISWAS, the collapse of the Maghreb buffer zone and the proliferation of arms from stateless Libya.

It is a sharp convergence of complex issues, or what is known in nautical jargon as a perfect storm, and God help Nigeria in the coming months. The chicks are coming home to roost not just for the northern power elite who cannot be absolved of responsibility but for the entire Nigerian postcolonial political apparatus. The idea of keeping their unlettered and pagan nomadic kith and kin roaming in the jungle as a strategy of containment has now exploded in their face.

The increasing Sahelization of the northern fringes of the country, the rise in illegal mining activities, large scale farming, extractive lumbering, transnational migration of criminal, war-traumatised elements and the resurgence of suppressed ethnic identity particularly in Zamfara, Katsina and Kebbi states have driven into the pristine forests and jungles where the ancient Fulani ruled the roost in primitive splendour and harsh self-sufficiency.

This has caused problems for normal transhumance migration. When confronted with an increasingly hostile environment, human beings tend to relocate and seek greener pastures. With their pristine paradise invaded, the Fulani nomads began a southward migration which was no longer seasonal or occasional. From the troubled north east corridor, they found their way to the lush and verdant valleys of Taraba and Benue with murderous consequences.

The periodic upheavals in Ondo and Ore forests which accounted for the deaths of many prominent citizens including a major traditional ruler now appear in retrospect as a dress rehearsal for the real thing. Through the traumatized Zamfara corridor the full gale has now descended on the old west and among the placid and pleasant native people of the old Ibarapa division where weeks of murder and mayhem culminated in the murder of a prominent agro-industrialist, Dr Fatai Aborode.

The ensuing ethnic maelstrom and fearsome stigmatization almost threatened the foundation of post-independence Nigeria. For now, the conflagration appears to have been doused. But since no one appears to have the visionary purpose, tenacity and moral courage to address the root cause of the issue squarely, no one is sure where and when the volcano will erupt again.

Beyond unhelpful and contradictory presidential directives, no one has come up with a holistic and comprehensive programme for addressing the impasse which is principally a law and order problem. Murderous herdsmen will have to be expelled from the forests and subject to compulsory civic education and re-humanizing retooling.

Nigeria has the legendary knack of suicidal fretting at the edge of the abyss before pulling back. But there is always a price to pay for these state laxities. Something always gives as we saw in 1963, 1983 and 1993 whenever the people of the old West are pushed into roiling ethnic resentment against the antics of their ancient adversaries or the aulde enemy.

Fundamentally, what is starring us in the face is the fact that a modern nation cannot be run like a primitive mine for the sole purpose of extractive predation. This has been the bane of the nation since amalgamation. But even those who stole Nigeria dry in the name of primitive accumulation ought to have discovered by now that life is too hellish in a primitive mine.

The prognosis is bleak for Nigeria. When real organic nations are about to be overwhelmed by internal contradictions and adversity, the organic elites come together to fashion the way out of the conundrum. The problem with Nigeria is that while the mining barons often come together to share the proceeds, there is no real organic nationalist elite group to beat out a way forward from the mining morass.

In the coming weeks, this column will address the Nigerian prospects more closely.

By Tatalo Alamu

It was a most blissful morning in Lagos eerily reminiscent of halcyon days when you woke up in the village to be greeted by the wonderful smell of moin-moin and akara in the vicinity. If you are a  master in this gastronomic matter, you could tell which stage of readiness for consumption the delicacy had reached by merely putting your nostrils to work: from the faintly undercooked to the delicately cooked and on to the grossly overcooked which was usually reserved for the impertinent interloper.

After the midnight rains which clattered on the roof and whined on endlessly, a wondrous calm had descended on the nation. Hopefully the rains would have washed away the last vestiges of the dreadful coronavirus which had turned the live of everybody into a dreadful misery in the last three months or so. The traumatic impact of this plague is such that nobody would be in a hurry to forget.

But Coro virus or no Coro virus, nothing could have bettered the calm tranquillity of this early June morning as yours sincerely curled up in bed watching America unravel on television with sleepy-eyed disbelief. The serenity of the beautiful morning was eventually shattered when Okon barged in resplendently attired in resource control costumes replete with colonial bowler hat and carved walking stick to match. Snooper was bowled over.

“And where is his Excellency heading out to so early in the morning?” snooper asked with affected reverence.

“Ha oga morning sir. I wan quickly reach dem place dem dey call Online make man sign dem comdomless register for dem 12 2/3 Ibadan man. Dem say dem place dey between Mile 12 and Majidun”, the crazy fellow responded with pomp and swagger.

“Ah yes. You turn right at Mile Twelve to connect with Alapere”, snooper noted, hoping to send the chap on a false trail to terminal perdition. But the fellow picked the scent of ambush.

“Ah oga, Okon no be fool o. You wan make dem Alapere police finis man? Those one dem be like dem Obudu red ants. Dem dey fight anything and dem dey bite anything”, Okon noted with a cynical snort sending one to convulsive laughing.

“Okon, but you said you were going to Ibadan to sign the register last week?” snooper inquired.

“Ha oga, dat one na Ogbonge wahala. Dem border police come arrest Okon for dem Ojodu Berger say man don reach Ogun State. Dem useless police just stay near dem Motor Park and dem dey collect passenger money say dem don cross border. Naim I come jump inside ditch and I come tell dem say I don reach Lagos again,” Okon sniggered.

It was at this point that Mama Igosun crashed in eyeing Okon with malice even as she attempted to remove his hat with her walking stick.

“Akanbi, gudu morin o jare (Good morning, please) I know say dis boy na rascal and na proper asinde( madman) I no know whether him be ogbologbo jaguda. He good make you dey on him case before him come bring army robbers make dem come do sababi (evil) to you ooo.” The old woman chanted breathlessly.

“Ha mama, what has Okon done again ooo?”, snooper asked in a very conciliatory tone.

“Are you see. Since I come Lagos, all my knickers and dem corsets dey disappear one by one”, the old woman lamented.

“Ha Iya, I know knickers but what is corsets?” your sincerely asked in genuine ignorance.

“Ha, you sabi knickers but you no sabi corsets, abi? So if you wan pieces all dem Lagos women how you dey do am? Corset na komu. Abi you no sabi komu? Se o mo komu?” the ancient woman screamed in vernacular .( Komu is Yoruba word for brassiere)

“Ah o yes, I know bra, I know brassiere”, snooper hastily assented with a touch of coy embarrassment, before the whole thing descended into village vulgarity.

“All dat one na yeye grammar. Bra ko, bra ni.  All dem corset I buy dem from Lennards, Leventis, Kingsway, Chellerams, Enike Zard, Patterson, Bhojsons and dem I. Mudah dem done steal dem for  high wire”, the old woman wailed.

“Mama Okon may look like thief but he will never do that”, snooper pleaded. Sensing a lull in the hostilities, the mad boy, as accident-prone as ever, put his heavy boot in.

“Ha oga na dat one na wetin dem Fela dey call Hot Pants or pata gbogbona”, the crazy boy sniggered as he eyed mama Igosun with mock pity.

“Shut up. I know say you be thief. Na Akanbi him head no dey well. I dey hear you and dem Ibo boy well well for night becos you think say I don sleep.  I give you seven days. If you no return dem stuff thunder go pieces you before dem eight days. If he no happen no be Akanbi Olukoso born me”, the old woman cursed and swept out.

By Tatalo Alamu

Suddenly everybody is in a Minneapolis state of mind. As the light went out briefly in the White House penultimate week and as its unhinged occupant reportedly fled to the bunker, you get the sense that it is Mayday in America. The country of the Mayflower Fathers is fast unspooling leaving in its wake a bitterly contested sclerotic hulk.

It has been a defining moment for God’s own country. America has been shaken to its foundation. It is like living through a nightmare. As the embers of anger and raw revulsion turn their iconic cities into smouldering ruins, Americans would be wondering what has hit them. There have been race-related riots before, but nothing like this in its intensity of passion, scope and uncoordinated fury.

Toussaint-Louverture , aka the Black Spartacus, great descendant of African slaves, will be chuckling in his grave. Shortly before he was abducted with his entire family and taken to France, Toussaint had admonished his French interlocutors not to substitute the aristocracy of class which they had vanquished in France with an aristocracy of race.

Interdicted, humiliated and summarily dismissed as a serving general of the French Army, Toussant cried out: “Without a doubt, I owe this treatment to my colour. But my colour, my colour, has it ever prevented me from serving my country with diligence and devotion?”

His pleas fell on deaf ears. Disgraced, separated from his family and his proud tunic of a serving French Army general yanked off and replaced with prison uniform, Toussaint succumbed to a cruel and horrific death in a lonely cell in Fort de Joux on the morning of 7 April 1803. His repeated complaints of cold and insanitary Sconditions were dismissed as the mischievous mumbling of an old Negro. The certifying medical officer, in a Kafkaesque turn of phrase, noted that he was “truly dead”.

There is no mistaking the apocalyptic resonance of this with contemporary events in America. The racist notion that Black people have no threshold of pains and are generally inured to physical brutalization has just played out in Minneapolis. There was something atavistic about the chilling, slow-motion execution of George Floyd by a sadistic cop.

But while French feet could be held against fire over certain egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution, the founders of America were hard men who had no qualms about the aristocracy of race and the manifest destiny which led their forebears to create civilization anew on the plains of America and away from the ashes of feudal Europe.

Yet despite this ingrained notion of racial superiority, the American founding fathers were also radical intellectuals and visionaries who held the belief that all people are created equal, despite some inherent genetic liabilities. A Thomas Jefferson for example, whose views about Negro ability was infamously dim, was also known to have acquired a harem of Black slaves whom he impregnated at will and with equal opportunity relish.

There is no country or human society that is completely free of discrimination based on race, tribe, caste, class or religion. But in a society founded on the visionary ethos of democracy and human equality, the contradiction between radical precept and actual practice, the gap between telos and reality and between ideal and actuality are to be bridged by continuous struggle and unyielding human exertion.

In fairness to the Americans, that struggle has taken up most of the last three centuries and has witnessed a momentous civil war, horrific massacres of native Americans, emancipation of African-Americans from slavery, race riots, civil rights campaigns, protest marches for the rights of all American to vote and be voted for, affirmative action in colleges, the rise of extreme and murderous right-wing clans and a countervailing upsurge in a radical Black prelacy and the election of an American president of African extraction.

As it is the case with most struggles, nothing can be vouchsafed or forsworn. The progress cannot be linear or straightforward. While there has been a general rolling back of the frontiers of oppression and naked injustice, the spectre of deeply entrenched discrimination, structured racism and institutionalized bigotry remains.

The psyche and psychology of an average American cop, irrespective of race, remain predatory, persecutory and adversarial instead of being friendly and placatory. As a result of racial profiling, preconceived notions of criminality and deeply entrenched prejudice, an average Black person before the law is an endangered species.

About sixty per-cent of the vast multi-racial American underclass spawned by a hostile and discriminatory economic climate and with virtually no hope of bettering their condition in life are Black people. With such structured social discrimination and political disempowerment, many analysts have concluded that African-Americans have merely exchanged actual slavery for a more subtle and sophisticated‘ form of enslavement by the American state.

These are the underlying conditions or comorbidities that have brought America to the gates of hell. With an economic crisis on hand and with the fatalities of the Covid-19 disproportionately weighted among the Black populace and with a divisive and polarizing president stoking the fire of inequities from every conceivable angle of possible combustion, Americans never realized how close they were to the tipping point until a rogue cop delivered the perfect storm that fateful Monday.

Things will never be the same again in America no matter what happens in the November election. If the monstrous bible-wielding charlatan who does not attend church services is returned, it will hasten the contradictions and the resolution of the crisis by sending America on a terminal tailspin. But if the American people find the collective strength to rise above the bigotry and racism that has disfigured the nation, then the process of healing a fractured country will commence.

In viewing the future reconstruction of this troubled land, it is useful to point at some landmines ahead. For those who read historical signals, there is something eerily prognostic about the crowds that have been massing in major American cities in the last fortnight and the solidarity they have received from many world capitals.

Let us look more closely. Neither wholly Black nor White; neither predominantly male nor female; neither old nor young; neither rich nor poor and neither driven by religious passion nor secular boredom, it is a trans-category crowd with a unified consciousness of evil and injustice. It is the pan-America crowd at its most dangerous and devastating. It will be foolish to imagine that it will just peter out like that.

On the other hand, it is not yet a revolutionary mob. It has no obvious leader or discernible leadership cadre. Beyond its revulsion with racism and institutionalized injustice, it has no coherent agenda or identifiable programme of radical political reform. It is driven by unstructured anger and is not interested in storming any Winter Palace or torching The Bastille. It complains but it is still very much a compliant mob.

But all that may change in the coming months if the economic and political crisis worsens. In order to plot this choreography of eventual chaos, it is useful to remember that despite the deplorable conduct of Mr Trump and his attempts to further polarize the nation for electoral profiteering, the problem of America politics transcends party and colour lines.

Despite the fact that the Democratic Party is generally regarded as the party of the coloured people because of its left of centre politics and pro-poor posturing, actual effects of policies may not bear that out. For example, the grim and fearsome state rollback and the prosperity it often unleashes in a developed economy like America may, on the overall aggregate, benefit more people in the society despite its inherent inequity and entrenched discrimination.

The fate of the visionary Obama Healthcare Policy is instructive. In a curious twist of fortune, Barack Obama is often fingered by many African-Americans as not doing much for their actual condition beyond his soulful, stirring rhetoric and exhortations. As they say in Nigeria: “ na grammar we go chop?”

The fact remains that had Obama been a pure and autochthonous African-American, his chances of being elected would have suffered considerably. Even at that and despite the fact that he could “pass”, Obama had to stitch together a brilliant rainbow coalition which bore him aloft to the White House. Once in office, Obama found himself a nonplussed hostage of a deeply entrenched system of racial privileges so rigged against reform that it can only be changed by an electoral revolution.

It is an engrossing irony that the Democratic Party, the party of change and liberal reform, is the classic example of group resistance to change and reform and a telling reminder of how far revolution is away from American politics. Once a Presidential aspirant of the party begins to tout some radical reforms, he is immediately consigned to the lunatic fringe of the party where he will eventually expire.

The plight of Bernie Saunders bears revisiting. Twice in recent Democratic Party presidential primaries, the party presumptive nominees simply had to wait for the maverick billionaire to expend himself on his radical reforms before pouncing on the poor man. Like its British forebear, American politics rely on incremental, conservative advances rather than radical, revolutionary leaps.

But as the crowds massing in American main cities attest to, even incremental, conservative reforms can evaporate and disappear in a stalled momentum leading to anarchy and chaos. This is the perilous conjuncture America has arrived at. It is not due to the absence of visionary men and women but the presence of an overpowering structure wedded to a vision of the past.

No nation can continue to be wedded to a vision of the past without the present imploding. America needs to be prised apart from some inglorious and unedifying aspects of its past. The surging crowds will help in creating the right atmosphere and enabling environment. But the change will not come from the street.

We need to be reminded that whenever the radical and egalitarian energies released by protests in America run afoul of the political allergies of the ultra-conservative White supremacist group that claims to own the nation, it always responds with assassinations. Nothing in the behaviour of some of Mr Trump’s core supporters suggests that this is about to change. That is the real problem with America.

But there is nothing in the recent and remote history of human society to suggest that such murderous villainy can last forever. There may be light at the end of this dark American tunnel——eventually.

By Tatalo Alamu

Column and columnist wish all our readers a happy new year. For Nigerians, it has not been an easy decade or happy 2020 in particular. Everything that could go wrong went wrong. With its strange percussion and zodiac rhyming, 2020 was the ultimate year of astral suffering and stellar malignancy; a perfect storm of human retribution.

In a cosmic irony, Nigerians for decades have been looking forward to last year as the year of magic liberation from poverty and want. Several moons awhile, pundits and experts were assembled who plumped for the year with scientific exactitude and mathematical precision. But it all turned out a damp squib. The last word is that the date has now been slightly revised to 2050. Since yours sincerely does not hope to be alive by then, those around can get on with it.

With a resurgent pandemic howling in the background, a badly mismanaged economy gasping for breath and elite consensus about the future and destiny of the nation as remote as ever, no new year could have come with more miserable prospects. Yet there can be no doubt that this is a make or mar decade for Nigeria; the decade when Nigeria will have to fulfil its destiny as a haven for the Black race or go into oblivion as a failed nation.

At this moment, the omens are very dire. Politically, economically, socially and spiritually, the nation has never been in a worse shape. In the north there is rising disaffection about the worsening economic plight and widespread insecurity occasioned by banditry, insurgency and an increasingly bloody revolt against the old hegemonic caste.

Angry question marks are put against the ability and capacity of the president to deal with the situation. For a man who had enjoyed cult-like following and messianic adulation among the masses and underclass of the region, these caustic dismissals and growing wave of denunciation is a cruel political denouement.

In the west, there is a rock solid disaffection with the nation as structurally configured. Widespread insecurity has now become the bane of its hitherto peaceful and productive countryside. The new alliance has not produced a happy synthesis or the healthy and productive synergy of contrasting worldviews. The mismanagement of ethnic relations has left a bitterly polarized and fractious polity.

In the east, old bitterness and civil war wounds persist more than fifty years after. No lesson seems to have been learnt from that epic tragedy. The amputation of the third leg of the ancient tripod of countervailing influence and authority has left a mass estrangement and alienation from central authority in the place. In the rural areas, there is a fanatical attachment and adoration of IPOB which seems to be waiting for the signal to exit Nigeria.

Rather than facing the future with wide-eyed naivety and fatalistic submission to the will of superior mystical forces, it is important at this point to press the pause button in order to avail ourselves of a backward glance. At least if we don’t recognise where we are going, we must know where we are coming from. According to old Yoruba ethos, when a child stumbles, he looks forward but when an elder falters, he must cast a backward glance.

The past is indeed a trove of memorable ironies and a veritable treasure of political surprises. Many of the people that we build as heroes today are villains of yesteryears, whereas many of the people we seek to demonize and weave a tapestry of vicious calumny around are authentic heroes of Nigeria and Yoruba people whose derring-do when the nation was under siege will become part of the heroic folklore no matter what may be considered their subsequent failings.

No nation or society is exempt from this whirligig of heroic fortunes and the shifting fate of political actors. As he was about to be arrested in one of the great Stalinist purges of the thirties, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a much decorated Soviet war hero and arguably the most revered Russian soldier of his time, expressed surprise that they had sent a lowly officer to intercept him.

The officer in turn looked at his most distinguished superior officer with pity and surprise and then briskly saluted. “Comrade Marshal, we live in interesting times. Yesterday a hero, but today nothing. That is the dialectic of history”, the officer noted before taking the marshal away never to be seen in public again. He was only forty four. His last recorded words: “I feel as if I am in a dream!”

Events of the day do not spring from a vacuum but from a groundswell of other countervailing events. Let us now look back at our history and to 1999 to get a sense of perspective and why there is so much rancour and bitterness in the contemporary Nigerian polity.

In article written for Africa Today, the London-based magazine, to commemorate Nigeria’s thirty ninth independence anniversary, this writer predicted that Obasanjo was in a position to teach the Afenifere elderly caucus a memorable and unforgettable lesson in political power play.

By the end of September that year, the retired general, a brilliant political strategist with a military and authoritarian cast of mind, had finished consolidating his grip on the levers of power. This process which combined feigning with strategic wanderlust to confuse opponents actually began in February when he was elected president of the nation.

With the respected and no-nonsense Theophilus Danjuma protecting his military flank and Mohammed, the quietly efficient and suave Ilorin spymaster, imposing himself on domestic matters, Obasanjo felt confident enough to turn his attention to pressing political matters.

True to prediction, Obasanjo began a well-coordinated campaign of destabilization against the two major opposition parties. Through disinformation, misinformation and outright state cajolement, he was able to engineer an internal fracture of the AD and ANPP. The PDP was waiting to collect the stragglers. For a James Ajibola Ige who saw the danger, his attempt to return to his regional base to re-organize a party that can be said to be his baby proved a bridge too far. He was killed.

Many will insist that Ige himself had been used to destabilize his own party by going over to Obasanjo without proper clearance from its grandees. Ige would insist that he was paying the party back in its own coins for siding with his junior and party subordinate, Chief Olu Falae, during the infamous D’Rovans fiasco. In any case, there would have been no point asking for a clearance that would never have been granted.

Looking back about two decades after, one cannot but shudder at the bitter hatred and corrosive animosity these old men nursed against themselves. Insiders who know the details must be trembling in recollection. Given the endlessly adversarial nature of Yoruba politics and contempt for emergent hierarchy, there is no point in hoping that this will never happen again.

In retrospect one must wonder at the strategic value of Chief Ige’s libertarian last minute rally in the face of Obasanjo’s relentless unitary offensive. My political hunch is that Obasanjo would have gone into political alliance with the Afenifere grandees against Ige and the west would have been centrally split just as it is at this moment.

After Obasanjo’s blitzkrieg struck them in 2003, the remaining Afenifere elders were so distraught and inconsolable.  It was humanly impossible to contemplate the level of political betrayal and the magnitude of their political evisceration. They had gone into a tactical alliance with the wily Owu warrior based on what Obasanjo sold to them as his political persecution and humiliation by the northern power masters.

This was akin to waving the proverbial red rag at a rampaging bull and it made the Afenifere elders to leave their flanks exposed and unprotected. By the time the smoke cleared, Afenifere had been dislodged from its Yoruba stronghold leaving it with only Lagos State where the governor had gone rogue on them.

With his gun still smoking years after, Obasanjo’s description of the plight of the old men in his memoir after he had put them through the meat grinder was as savage as it was unsavoury. It was obvious that the retired president still held the old men in deep and abiding contempt.

There may be no morality in politics but there is something like accurately gauging the mood of one’s people, particularly in a multi-ethnic nation. While it was obvious that the Yoruba nation in 2003 would definitely have preferred Obasanjo to continue as president, the deep silence and traumatic disquiet that greeted the steamrolling of Yoruba land suggested that they would have preferred the political ascendancy of their local party to remain in place.

But Obasanjo was having none of that nonsense and political gobbledygook. You cannot be half in bed with somebody. It was a cruel dilemma for the Yoruba elders. This political obfuscation and equivocation which can be mistaken for sophistication of choice is at the heart of the Yoruba conundrum in contemporary Nigerian politics.

Having been caught in bed with the retired general, Afenifere lapsed into political somnolence only to emerge in 2007 supporting General Buhari and claiming much later that it was on the ground that he was advocating restructuring. This claim is suspect. The real reason was that its party, DPA, was so structurally and organizationally enervated that it could not successfully field a candidate even at the ward level.

The question remains to be asked as to why an Obasanjo would be so brutal and dismissive of the progressive political leanings of his own Yoruba race to the extent of attempting to wipe this tendency out without any trace. The obvious answer is that there was no love lost between him and the leadership.

There may be more to it all. According to a state insider and presidential cohort of the period, throughout Obasanjo’s first term, (1999-2003) the Owu general was constantly prodded and reminded in whispering tones by select northern elders never to forget that he was a man without a political constituency who owed his ascendancy to the north his own people having sensationally rejected him.

Obasanjo took this to heart and made a bitter resolve never to allow this to happen again as long as it was within his power to prevent. As a diligent and dutiful student of feudal democracy as practised in Nigeria, he knew that elections were determined by the selectorate and not by the electorate and that the stunning electoral landslides were nothing but state-corralled verdicts which must stand as long as the state is standing.

It was this power and primacy of the state in electoral adjudications that the former president deployed to devastating effect in 2003 in an electoral blitzkrieg the likes of which has not been seen in the history of the nation. Even in the South West, the nation’s bastion of political combustion and volatility, such was the scale of the heist that people were stung into a benumbing silence.

There was now nothing that could prevent a resurgent and rampart Obasanjo from determining the electoral destiny of the nation. After the Third Term gambit failed, the Owu warrior was determined to instal Umaru Yar’Adua as the next president of the nation at all cost. This time around, the magnitude of the electoral manipulations was such that it launched the country on the path of fitful electoral reform through the instrumentality of the main beneficiary of the fraud: Umaru Yar’Adua.

Obasanjo had taught his northern tormentors a memorable lesson in power play. But it was all at the expense of deepening the democratic process and putting the Fourth Republic on a strong and sound footing. If one is not sure about what Obasanjo felt concerning Yar’Adua’s apparent backsliding, his withering dismissal in his memoir of the late president as an ungrateful wretch must lay the ghost to rest.

By 2007, the South West had grown so bitter and resentful about this desecration of democracy and electoral infamy that it girded its loins to fight back. A violent protest in Oshogbo, Osun State was violently put down. There were quiet rumblings in Ibadan where it was clear that the late Abiola Ajimobi had trounced the man declared as winner. In Edo State, the forward assault units of Adams Oshiomhole’s army of the people were getting restive over a clear case of electoral larceny.

It was left to the much maligned Bola Ahmed Tinubu and his acolytes to coordinate this resistance to civilian tyranny and desecration of the electoral honour of the people of the old west. Having survived abject electoral manipulations in 2003, Tinubu emerged in 2007 from the rubble of PDP’s tsunami to spearhead the struggle against the creeping feudalization of democratic process in the west in particular and Nigeria as a whole.

It was a costly struggle with many martyrs and unsung heroes. Five years later, by 2011, all the old western states, minus Mimiko’s Ondo state which claimed an affiliate working class political tendency, were all united behind the progressive banner. It was the finest hour of an activist judiciary determined to halt the electoral rot. One by one, the bastion of electoral evil fell: Edo, Osun, Ekiti and now Ogun and Oyo through electoral conquest.

It was a costly victory. Apart from those who paid the supreme price, many had their business enterprises destroyed forever and their familial ties severed. Before any inquest can be held about subsequent events, the Yoruba nation must first honour its heroes who stood between them and the terror machine of a unitary state that has spiralled out of control.

Nigeria is in a bad shape, with the old west perhaps the most psychologically devastated. It is obvious that we need a fundamental reset. If we truly intend to have a dialogue among ourselves, it cannot begin with exclusion which is a negation of the fundamental tenet of dialogue. Dialogue cannot rest on settling old political scores or stigmatization based on being politically outsmarted.

Here is wishing our readers a happy new year once again.

By Tatalo Alamu

For my maternal uncles, Oyedeji and Oyekanmi, who perished in the smallpox plague of 1945

Every now and then, the entire world is jolted by a significant event which alters reality forever; or which gives the business of living and dying a startling new perspective. How do we describe this outgoing year? It was a year of monstrous deaths and sudden departures such as the world has never witnessed. It was the year a malignant virus felled mighty armies and mightier nations.

Up till the time of writing, friends, colleagues and associates are still falling left, right and centre. A few days earlier, it was the turn of Professor Tunji Oloruntimehin, urbane historian, polished raconteur and most clubbable intellectual of the highest pedigree. And then there was Bayonle Ademodi, a professor of Chemical Engineering and solid grassroots progressive organiser of the Afenifere hue. Somehow, the hand was beginning to feel numb and calloused from writing obituaries.

You remember the last time you sat down at the famed University Staff Club at Ife to have a conversation with Oloruntimehin. You had briefly returned from sabbatical abroad in September 1989. And there at the lobby of the club was the affable professor cheerfully reminiscing about the tyranny of military arbitrariness which ended an otherwise illustrious academic career a few months earlier.

Even though professors were better paid than the highest and most decorated permanent secretary in the sixties, university staff sought and obtained permission to be treated like civil servants and accorded the same entitlements. But somebody somewhere with a loaded sense of humour and long memory triggered the exit clause which stipulated that all civil servants must retire upon attaining the age of sixty or after putting in thirty five years of service, whichever came first.

And so Oloruntimehin who started teaching at the age of fourteen after his primary school education and had merged all his years of service suddenly found himself at the threshold of retirement after clocking thirty five years of service at the age of forty nine. This was a time when professors in other climes had just started warming up. He took it in his stride.

“My brother, see the way they managed to get us out of the system”, he lamented with customary conviviality taking a sip from his glass of beer as if he was lapping at a bar of pristine honey. Five years later in 1994, yours sincerely spotted the professor slugging it out amidst a crowd of rowdy commuters at the Marina Quayside. One had gladly consented to take him to his architect daughter’s place somewhere in Ikoyi or Victoria Island. It was the last time we would see.

Just to remind us that before this pandemic, there were other pandemics of a political, economic and academic nature. But it is obvious that no one has seen anything like this one in living memory. The viral visitant has even mutated to a more vicious variant which is far more infectious if not more deadly.

A doctor friend, who is in the most exposed frontline of the war against the pandemic in Britain, rumbled ominously that the mutant monster had already compromised about twenty three prophylactic possibilities of the new vaccine. While other countries were scrambling to ban all travels from Britain, the British authorities were claiming that South African visitors had brought the viral hag to Britain in the first instance.

Meanwhile in full tribute to the forces of globalization, the dreaded virus has finally reached the most remote human settlement on earth, the Chilean Antarctica, where the Chilean authorities have deployed emergency forces. It is fear and trembling from Patagonia.

To get a scale of the magnitude of the disaster that has befallen humanity, in one single day in December the combined figures of those who fell to the dreaded virus in New York city alone far exceeded the casualties of the infamous 9/11 blitz of 2001.   On another day, more Americans died from Covid-19 and associated complications than the entire casualties arising from the Pearl Harbour fiasco when the Japanese imperial navy overwhelmed the American naval base.

The retreat from Dunkirk by British forces steamrolled by the German Wehrmacht, the subsequent attempt to obliterate Britain by the NAZI Luftwaffe and the carpet bombing of German cities by Allied air force did not produce such horrendous human casualties. It has taken a mere virus to flatten the entire modern world militarily, economically and spiritually.

In an irony of ironies all the humungous spending on nuclear armaments and cutting edge military technology of instant annihilation have come to naught in the face of an invisible enemy which has now shown a remarkable and deadly capacity to mutate and reinvent the order of battle thus making nonsense of human ingenuity and capacity to outwit and outpace unforeseen dangers.

In America which prides itself as God’s own country, if only a miniscule of funds expended on military hardware had been invested in health care for all, scientific developments might have been able to anticipate or even blunt some of the more deleterious effects of the raging pandemic. There is mounting evidence in that direction.

And if only a portion of the money earmarked for war-gaming and astronautic vanity projects could be re-routed to programmes of social and economic inclusiveness, the underclass in many western nations, particularly the racial minority, might have been better able to withstand the ravages of Covid-19 pandemic.

In the event, our streets have been deserted and emptied of life. It is like a long funeral procession without humanity. The stillness and utter vacancy of the hominid species that had dominated life in the last five hundred thousand years at least is overpowering. This is an apocalyptic glimpse, a sneak preview, of how things may appear after human beings might have vaporized themselves out of contention as a result of sheer fecklessness and wanton folly.

New York penultimate week was like a city of the quick and the dead as casualty figures kept mounting. The funeral homes themselves were gasping for breath. In London this past week, there was a saturnine melancholy everywhere as the stoic and glacially imperturbable English temperament finally came face to face with the depressing possibility of another complete lockdown. The light was far away from the tunnel and it felt like being entombed in a vast necropolis.

The global economy has taken quite a pounding, sending most nations on a fiscal tailspin. As the deep distress to many industries finally manifest, the prospects of a quick and immediate recovery appear to recede, leaving dazed and dumbfounded citizenry stranded in many countries.

Struggling Third World economies like Nigeria which appeared to have been on the verge of recovery after years of wanton mismanagement have now been pushed to their worst recession in recorded history. The situation is so dire that there are indications that it may trigger a social and political implosion the like of which has not been seen in the history of the nation. Nigeria already had what may well be a dress rehearsal with the EndSARS protests in October.

Perhaps it is time to begin to tease out the ironies and the pleasant paradoxes in this dark and dismal tale, this chronologue of a global catastrophe. As dire as the situation appears, it may not actually be the end of the world. There are certain points in history when some hard and bitter lessons had to be taught to humanity to help us achieve a fundamental reset.

It is akin to the process of creative destruction when the clutter of civilization appears to become an impediment to the very advance of civilization itself. In such circumstances something has to give. This is why despite the brutal decimation and horrific destruction of certain countries and civilizations, a newer and better country and civilization always appear on the horizon. Post-war Germany, China and Japan are great examples.

If we compare this current plague with earlier pandemics in human history, we ought to be  cheered and astounded by the speed and capacity of response both at the national level and the level of international organizations. A country like Nigeria which lacks the medical capacity and facility of developed countries made up for this shortfall by the sheer heroism and bravery of the frontline staff.

Perhaps something can be said for this innate capacity of the Black person for kindness and compassion. About seventy five years ago, my late mother, during a smallpox epidemic that ravaged Yoruba land, had elected to follow her afflicted older brothers to the smallpox sanatorium in an adjoining forest from the town despite being told that it was a sure death sentence.

On the only occasion she ever spoke about this family tragedy, she informed me that the condition in the sanatorium was so appalling and the suffering so distressful that it could not be described. It was a fetid and horrendous mess.

On the final stretch, she lapsed into a frightful coma with her brothers in what is known in local parlance as eburu, a horrid hallucination of the terminally infected caused probably  by inflammations and swellings of the brains which ended in death. But she came to and was ordered to leave by the herbalist.

It is a mark of the advancement of civilization that smallpox has now been eradicated. Coming back to our current affliction, it is also a profound irony that the race to the discovery of the vaccine for Covid-19 and the actual discovery owe a lot to the much-maligned gale of globalization and the destructive competition among leading nations powered by nationalism and racism.

It was globalization with its virtual abolition of time and space which was responsible for the swift spread of the pandemic to every corner of the globe. As we have seen this past week, not even the Chilean Antarctica has been exempt. The cross-pollination among human species and the sharp rise in international communion have brought out the most liberating aspect of the phenomenon of globalization.

Finally, it must be admitted that although globalization, by widening the scale of economic inequality, actually pushes nations into misguided populism, narrow nationalism and even xenophobia, the destructive nationalism and cut-throat competition so engendered have been pivotal in the race to find a vaccine for Covid-19.

The race is still on as to which of the emergent vaccines from many nations have been most effective and efficacious against the virus particularly in the light of its rapidly mutating capacity. Out of the germ of self-destruction comes a beautiful weapon of self-preservation.

From the above, it can be seen that there is still a lot to fight for in the struggle to redeem humanity and the race to save human civilization from going into extinction. America recently demonstrated the human capacity for heroic and redemptive self-correction by throwing out Donald Trump. It was a collective heroic exertion.

If the world can avoid a nuclear Armageddon in the coming decades, it will be easier to concentrate on the global issue of political and economic inclusiveness. Here is wishing our readers a happy new year.