By Tatalo Alamu

The abduction and subsequent release of over three hundred male students of the Kankara Secondary School in Katsina State right under General Muhammadu Buhari’s nose, takes nothing away from the fact that the Nigerian post-colonial state has become a grotesque charade; an ineffectual comedian that has become the butt of sick practical jokes and sadistic buffooneries.

From Hamilton, the great American founding father and constitutionalist, to Hegel the exemplary German philosopher and loyal votary of the Prussian war state, this cannot be the intendment of the framers of the modern state which in some nations has virtually replaced religion itself as the object of impassioned worship and mass veneration.

Before our very eyes, Nigeria has entered what can only be described as a state emergency mode. This state emergency has been long in coming, but hooked on a diet of false and unprincipled optimism, we have refused to acknowledge the obvious, hoping that it would just go away.

Hobbled by corruption, inefficiency, nepotism, massive indiscipline and the sheer lack of rigour associated with modern governance, the Nigerian post-colonial state is a walking cocktail of congenital infirmities. Within the context of a wider subsisting national crisis, state emergency occurs when the state itself appears powerless and paralysed; unable to project a capacity for self-defence, leaving the terrorized citizens under its watch completely helpless and hapless.

Whatever his subsequent political delinquency, President Donald Trump’s famous war-cry of making America safe again resonated with his compatriots. A nation which cannot defend its borders against external aggression or economic invaders is not worth the name. A state that loses its capacity to protect and perpetuate the territorial land mass assigned to it has forfeited its fundamental raison d’etre. This is the organizing code of the nation-state paradigm.

There are serious implications in this latest daring act of the Boko Haram insurgency and associated miscreants. First rather than being degraded, Boko Haram and its affiliated factions have actually upgraded their capacity for potent destabilization and lethal ability to strike hard and fast. Now going on to its tenth year of active military confrontation, the Boko Haram insurgency is one of the longest running wars anywhere in the world.

With foreign powers in control of intelligence and logistics to the immediate south of Sahara, the insurgency and its affiliates have now succeeded in opening a Sahel corridor of destabilisation and hostage-taking stretching all the way from Central Mali to the Nigerian North Western backdoor through the Niger Republic. Hours after the hostages were released, the Emir of Zamfara only managed to survive an ambush which left many dead.

Read Also: Insecurity: Why Nigeria is under Siege

Given that development, it is now obvious that the North Central perimeter of the nation is within the sect’s rifle sight. In an epic game of overt and covert destabilisation, Nigeria is effectively trapped by hostile forces bent on carving it up or at the very least rendering a large portion economically impotent. With the vast Zamfara State already playing host to banditry and other nefarious activities, the entire north is up for grabs. Something nasty is afoot somewhere.

It will be recalled that shortly before the notorious insurgents struck, the president had vacated the state house in Abuja for his Daura homestead. But he had hardly settled down to enjoy the company of his beloved cows before the Boko Haram struck, carting away hundreds of pupils in a show of open contempt and defiance of the Nigerian authorities.

This criminal heist took some logistical daring and made total nonsense of security both at the national and subnational levels. Surely, it is impossible to pull this off without the sect enjoying some level of local support or an apathetic indifference to government at both levels. The wages of electoral chicanery and the diabolic manipulation of democracy are here with us.

The national outrage even from dye-in-the-wool supporters of the government and traditional conservative bastions of state validation shows that the handshake may be slipping beyond the elbow. Beyond the normal handwringing, the official reaction to this sacrilege has been as tepid as it is discordant.

It is a dysfunctional state at its freewheeling worst. While the presidency insisted that it would not negotiate with terrorists, Aminu Masari, the state governor, hinted that he was most concerned with the rescue of the pupils and would go out of the way to reach out to people who are known to have influence with, or enjoy the respect of, the murderous organization.

In other climes sitting president, in a symbolic show of state affirmation against this heretical assault, would have donned the uniform of commander in chief and headed for the Katsina forest refusing to come back until some progress has been made in tracking the children if not in rescuing them.

In 1982 as a serving Major General and General Officer Commanding the Third Division of the Nigerian Army, Buhari pursued a ragtag Chadian militia that had dared to violate the territorial integrity of Nigeria all the way to their ragged redoubt near Ndjamena refusing a presidential directive to halt the offensive.

Thirty eight years after that sterling display, Buhari has become a poor shadow of his former self. What we have playing out are manifestations of state implosion and terminal presidential exhaustion. But let us caution those who may be bent on foisting another horror show of presidential ethereality on the nation to beware of changing historical tides.

As if to rub pepper in the wound, an Idriss Deby Itno who might have played a minor role in that 1982 invasion of Nigeria is now the undisputed military master of the sub-region. While the tomfoolery about the Kankara abduction was playing out, television footage was released of the serving governor of Bornu State, Babagana Zulum, paying homage to the great fox of Ndjamena who treats Nigerian authorities with barely concealed contempt.

General Mohammadu Buhari appears on the surface to be a victim of a cruel historical hoax. Twice he has ruled the nation both as a military dictator and civilian Caesar. And twice under his watch, the nation has been plunged into a major political and economic crisis that has pushed the state into emergency modes requiring constitutional forbearance in a democratic set up and considerable political savvy in a military autocracy.

In his first coming, the state emergency mode played out against a background of military warlords with the public virtually shut out of the military power play. The revolt coalesced around insiders who felt that Buhari’s political obduracy and lack of wisdom was pushing the nation towards the precipice. Consequently when he was ousted, there were little cheers or remonstrations. As far as the people were concerned, it was a play of giants without a popular audience.

This time around, the revolt against the Daura-born general is powered by a wide array of strange bedfellows including estranged colleagues, concerned youths, veterans of the EndSARS uprising, former insiders, disaffected party members and stalwarts of the ancient alliance who feel betrayed by Buhari’s unyielding ethnocentricity and lack of a truly national perspective. There are also many affronted patriots who are concerned about the nation’s economic and political plight under a man with an astonishingly limited worldview.

The best possible outcome for this state emergency is not a precipitate regime change which may push the nation on an irreversible path of messy disintegration but for a way to be found to allow General Buhari to serve out his remaining term and for elections to be held to bring in fresh personnel and novel perspectives.

Given the current foul mood of the nation and national distemper, an election under a skewed federation may not satisfy most but somebody has to be in charge while the struggle for the soul of the nation continues without any let or hindrance.  Without elite pacting and national consensus which comes from arduous but honest negotiation, this is going to be anybody’s game because we cannot be preaching the virtues of justice, moderation and equity in a de-federated jungle.

In the run up to the 2015 election, this column repeatedly asked General Buhari whether he thought he could step into the same river twice. The answer to that rhetorical question is now out in bold relief. It is that no one can step into the same river twice. The water is constantly replenished and renewed making stagnation and staleness impossible.

In the thirty years since he was ousted by his colleagues, the National question has worsened in all its crucial dimensions. Mono-cultural reliance on oil and inability to diversify the economy coupled by the dire legacy of a succession of military and civilian despots have distorted the economy beyond redemption.

Inter-ethnic communion and cooperation has worsened as a result of fear of ethnic domination. Resentment against military highhandedness and political meddling persists. The judiciary has been desecrated by military and civilian autocrats. The educational sector, a veritable platform for elite bonding and political consensus building, has collapsed.

In the circumstances, any wise, prudent and cautious person who has found himself in this horrid hole of national infirmities will normally be expected to stop digging. But General Buhari has been digging furiously ever since, to the consternation and apprehension of his remaining admirers and many who were willing to give him a chance. In the process, he has exacerbated the national fault lines with a rabid bigotry that has never been witnessed in the history of this clime.

Those who used to swear by his name as a revered patriot and nationalist have quietly eaten their words. In the old west where he held sway among a sizeable number of the intelligentsia despite everything, that name can no longer be mentioned without casting a furtive glance across the shoulder.

A cruel cynic from the north has actually gone as far as suggesting that Buhari’s self-demystification is in order so that his graveside would not become a posthumous holy site of weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth.   It doesn’t get more savagely dismissive. Such is the tempo and temper of the times we have found ourselves.

But it is important to keep our eyes on the ball now that the Fourth Republic appears to have entered into a terminal crisis. It has taken the blood of martyrs to put the post-military dispensation together whatever its imperfections. Some of these patriots have never recovered from their ordeal and some still carry the trauma of exile, dislocation and dispossession.

The crisis and state emergency arising from President Buhari’s infirmities and the incapacity and inability of both the judiciary and the legislature to do anything about it will grind and crunch its way into a bitter, protracted stalemate with none of the contending factions able to prevail.

In such circumstances, the tendency will be for one of the factions to panic and press the button that will push the nation in the direction of extra-constitutional change with unwieldy disintegration as the most likely outcome.

If on the other hand, the nation’s legendary luck persists, elite negotiation and consensus building among the power brokers might come up with some conditions which will make it possible to ease General Buhari’s bull out of the China shop ending his misery and the misery of the nation. In that regard, his fate will not be dissimilar to that of his famous bête noir and old nemesis, Ibrahim Babangida, who was also famously disengaged by his colleagues.

But this will only be a short term measure and palliatives targeting state impairment and a national emergency. The longer term conundrum is whether the Nigerian state as it is currently engineered and configured has the capacity to drive a vast chaotic nation in all its multi-ethnic encumbrances, spiritual disharmony and economic disequilibrium. Either way, it shows that Nigeria has a date with state engineers or the people’s assembly.

Boswell, clear your mind of cant – Samuel Johnson, English critic and man of letters to his Scottish secretary and faithful amanuensis

Tatalo Alamu

 

 

There is an intriguing relationship between the phenomenon of racism and the evolution of modern citizenship.  In most countries, the notion of citizenship often oscillates between what is known as descent and consent. The notion of citizenship based on descent is characterised by a rigid tribalism. You are a citizen of a nation based on the right of descent that is based on the fact that you are descended from ancestors who belonged to the place.

On the other hand, citizenship based on consent involves a contractual obligation to respect the norms, culture and core values of a nation even where you were not originally a member of the community. There has always been a whiff of racism about citizenship based on racial exclusivity. On the other hand, citizenship based on contractual obligation to core values tends to promote racial harmony and inclusiveness even when it degenerates into destructive nationalism in the face of external threats. Both are the two sides of a coin.

The problem with postcolonial nationhood is the fact that it is a product of a historic coitus interruptus, a massive disruption of organic process. It is akin to forcibly altering the course of a river. The nation-state thus created by colonial fiat is neither a nation in the real sense of the word; nor a functioning state in the classical sense of the concept. This is what is responsible for the subsisting anarchy and ungovernable chaos of Nigeria.

While the rulers routinize the anomic normlessness through their arbitrary cruelty and complete disregard for the rule of law, the people imagine themselves to be citizens when they are actually postcolonial subjects transiting from colonial slavery and serfdom. Denizens of these rogue nations must wage a ceaseless struggle to redeem their humanity and assert their rights as emancipated colonial subjects or work for the swift termination of the slave states as the case may be.

Racism and xenophobia did not begin yesterday and they are not going to end tomorrow. The love and admiration of one’s ethnic particularity to the exclusion of other groups has been part of the human condition since the beginning of recorded history. Xenophobia is an extreme manifestation of racism in which self-love and self-admiration mutate into active hatred and violent dislike of other people. With geographical and cultural proximity, xenophobia often leads to genocide.

In William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, the protagonist wondered aloud in pained anguish about the genetic peculiarities of the Jews which could have made them such object of universal scorn and hatred. With great rhetorical flourish, the notable Israelite demanded to know whether the Jews did not bleed like other people when stabbed or cry when hurt.

Almost two centuries after the great bard of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote this, Samuel Johnson, a proud Englishman, condescendingly demanded from his secretary whether he was a Scot or not. When the latter replied in the affirmative adding that it was a historical fact which he could not help, Johnson shot back. “Sir that is what many of your countrymen cannot help!”

Yet eight hundred years earlier, there were no Americans, no Canadians, no Australians, no Germans, no Britons and no Belgians. Vast stretches of these lands were peopled by their aboriginal inhabitants. Africa was yet to be partitioned into recondite nations. A vast stretch of Spain was ruled by the Almoravids , a warlike Berber group from North Africa, before they were expelled.

Thereafter, competing racism and nationalism pushed the world into hitherto unimaginable spheres of human achievement and civilization through harsh conquest, science and occasionally religion. From this Olympian height of laudable if painful and enviable progress the same racism and extreme nationalism have now pushed humankind to the brink of civilizational collapse.

This morning we have decided to treat a very serious and threatening problem with a touch of humour, levity and irony. After the savage bombardment of this outgoing year, humanity can only take a bit more before the proverbial last straw that snaps the camel’s back. There is a threshold to human pain and endurance.

We are passing through a most interesting phase of human existence the like of which has not been seen since the beginning of recorded history.  We live in a world in sharp transition; a period of revolutionary transformation. No one has seen a year like this. It can be argued that it stole on us like a thief in the night. But all the tell-tale signs and auguries were already there for the discerning.

Given the destructive rat-race among leading nations, the xenophobia and the resurgence of right wing populism and homophobic nationalism among the unenlightened hordes of humanity particularly in the so called centres of civilization, there now appears a ring of inevitability about the advent of the virus of mass destruction known as Covid-19. The spectacular pace of scientific advancement appears to have met its match in the limits of human rationality and wisdom.

Forget about the new normal and other hackneyed phrases of reconciliation with historic duress. As we have said once in this column, the only normality that can be imposed on abnormality is the normalization of the abnormal. There should be no quibbling or equivocation about that. The new normal is the old abnormal. The world cannot remain the same again. A tectonic slide of old certainties and certitude appears to be underway.

As the pandemic returns with fury at the approach of cold winter in Europe and America, a feeling of utter helplessness has overtaken the most powerful nation the world has seen. Despite the expeditious arrival of the magical vaccine, America appears to have its back to the world. No one has ever planned for a medical emergency on this scale or for this length of time.

History’s eerie sense of humour is helped along by the fact that the first beneficiary of the vaccine is a nonagenarian preternaturally named William Shakespeare. This is not a morbid joke but the stark truth. In his first incarnation, the great literary and dramatic genius was fingered as a poacher. Nothing lost except a few deer. This time around, the bard seems to have developed a taste for self-impersonation and dialectical somersaults of the Hegelian variety.

But dialectics do not conceal pain and trauma. The glazed and glassy looks on the virtually deserted streets tell their own story. New York has taken a horrific pounding. On the verge of seeing off a human pandemic known as Trump, the other pandemic has returned with a furious vengeance. A funereal gloom encircles New York. There is an icy stillness everywhere. It felt like returning to the abode of the living dead. This is not the familiar New York state of mind.

Less than a fortnight earlier, you were gambolling and frolicking in an open field among the ebullient and happy- go- lucky people of the typical Nigerian rural community. There were masquerades but no mask. No physical or social distancing was offered and none was taken. The contempt for Covid-19 among these agrarian folks was so infectious that you also momentarily lost your scientific cast of mind wondering whether the whole thing was not a grand historical hoax.

Now in New York, you know that it is not a hoax. Nobody is picking or returning your call. People are falling left, right and centre. This past week has been the cruellest and most damning. The scale of human suffering is terrifying. As daylight recedes in the afternoon you get a claustrophobic sense of being in a vast, coffin-like enclosure. There is an antiseptic severity abroad. The odour of formalin and sundry sanitizers pervades everywhere.

But you have to give it to the Americans. They know how to take care of their own. They infuse and instil in them a sense of gratitude and loyalty to a nation that has shown them much love and affection. They are ready to give their life at short notice so that the nation may survive. In nations where supposed citizens are treated as subjects and slaves such as it is the case in the postcolonial jungles of Africa there is no love lost among the denizens or between them and the state.

It is a war of all against all often with the military permanently at war with the people abandoning their primary responsibility of defending the nation against external aggression to an internal campaign of suppression and subjugation against the constituents. The fact remains that there are many African nationals who grow up hating their country as a result of being fed on a steady diet of ancestral memorialization of persecution and injustice.

Lest we forget, what triggered this extended reflection on the changing notions of citizenship as well as the plight of non-citizen dwellers of nominally democratic nation states is a blunt poser raised by a diligent reader of this column. After perusing last week’s celebration of Wale “Wally” Adeyemo, the US Deputy Treasury Secretary designate, the reader concluded that Wale’s remarkable achievement was virtually impossible in the ethnic coliseum that is contemporary Nigeria.

Let us agree only in parts. The malignancy and delinquency of the Nigerian postcolonial state is all pervasive. But there are still some levers of escape made possible because the malignancy is so incompetent and incapacitated by intellectual infirmity that it is incapable of due diligence or elementary self-audit. Consequently, the system continues to throw up stars in spite of itself. This is particularly true of unregulated sectors such as sports, music and fashion.

There can be no doubt however about the steady haemorrhaging of quality citizens and special talents from the Nigerian firmament as a result of hostile habitat and non-conducive environment. This often ranges from military and civilian despotism, wrong demographic in power, hegemonic malice and the reality of a postcolonial state organically rigged against rationality.

This steady exodus of well-trained nationals and skilled professionals is about the most profound sociological reality of Nigeria’s postcolonial existence. It has led to an intriguing redefinition and recalibration of the concept of citizenship with the absconding natives often retaining primordial cultural affinity for their primal origins while their economic and political fealty remains firmly with their new nations.

Often, the grand bifurcation of consciousness and contending multiple loyalties can have unintended comical denouement such as when the American government recently renounced their own citizen, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, for the apex position of the World Trade Organization on the ground that the Nigerian-born international civil servant could not be sufficiently trusted to defend American core economic interests when the chips are truly down.

So, there are citizens and there are citizens? In other words, opportunistic attachment to a particular national flag cannot be equated to serious emotional and intellectual identification with the nation’s core values and interests.

It is like the place of registration of an ocean-going vessel which is often of no import whatsoever when it comes to determining the true nationality of the owners. Many of Ngozi’s local critics have affirmed that despite her considerable international exposure, her stints in Nigeria’s officialdom showed that she was not above ethnic gaming.

The rise of a new breed of international apparatchiks whose allegiance to career advancement supersedes their national identification is an interesting dimension to the shifting concept of citizenship. So also is the phenomenon of enemy nationals who remain behind to wage a war of political, economic and intellectual attrition as a result of radical disaffection and bitterness instilled and nurtured from infancy.

Nigerians have already tasted a bitter dose of the fallout in the massive disinformation and fake news attending to the recent EndSARS imbroglio. Welcome to the brave new world of contested nationhood and fluid citizenship; of closed postcolonial states and open borders.

Sometimes the longer term consequences of citizenship in a flux can be more deleterious than the short term. At the beginning of last century, 1905 to be precise, Donald Trump’s German ancestor, ,Friedrich Trump, was summarily expelled from the Bavarian province where he was born and raised, despite his grandson’s later attempts to obfuscate his ancestral origins and to claim a Scandinavian progeny.

In 1885 as a young man on the make, Friedrich Drumpfs had immigrated to America on a one way ticket and made a substantial fortune in hospitality, brothel-mongering and real estate. Thereafter and around 1901 he attempted to return to his native land to enjoy his fortune with his childhood sweetheart.

But the Bavarian authorities were having none of that nonsense. He was denounced as a draft dodger and a serial defaulter in his obligations to the Prussian state. His weepy and sentimental appeal was rejected and a swift deportation order was issued.

The ancient Trump departed Bavaria with his young wife carrying the pregnancy of Fred, the father of the future American president. If the German authorities had allowed him to stay back, the trajectory of modern American history might have been different.

Given the proclivity of his future grandson for fascism, at best he could have joined Adolf Hitler and General Erich Ludendorff in the Beer Hall putsch of 1923 or he could have disappeared in the infamous night of the long knife episode in 1933.

Now, see what his descendant has done to America. There are citizens and there are citizens indeed.

 

Tatalo Alamu

 

There is something like grief-fatigue. When so many good and great people have passed and you no longer know how to mourn the dead. Death and dying have become so cheapened that life itself begins to resemble a grisly posthumous joke. Often, you recall that it has been quite a while that you last saw somebody only to be rudely reminded that you will never see them again. Welcome to the year of the mass-obituary and overcrowded departure halls.

The news came out of the blues like a thunderbolt. You were in the ancient town to pay your last respects to an illustrious son of the soil who was the latest to succumb to the grim reaper. Everything appeared dead: no light, no glow-worms, no properly working phones, no internet connection, no functioning Wi-Fi. With so many fallen slabs and decaying obelisks, even the old cemetery at the edge of the town appeared to be dying.

And yet you remembered that fifty years earlier, the same town was so brightly lit. At that period, the prospects of approaching Christmas festivity warmed the spirit and made the heart to glow. Hope and optimism lit the fuse of human yearning. The air then was stuffed with the aromatic smell of Harmattan-chilled palm wine which trumps even the most vintage of champagne brand.

But this morning in the ancient junction town, there was funereal gloom everywhere. The nation is regressing to the Stone Age of human existence. As you fumbled your way towards the sitting room, the dead telephone screen suddenly   glowered and a rogue solitary message appeared on the screen. It was from High Chief Niyi Alonge, and it was terse and to the point: Gbolabo Ogunsanwo died this morning.

For the next ten minutes, one drifted aimlessly around the sitting room in lonely agony trying to soak in the magnitude of what had happened. The mind wandered to the fact that Gbolabo Ogunsanwo had once graced the same sitting room with his august and lordly presence.

Together with Ayo Opadokun, the veteran human rights campaigner and NADECO chieftain, they had journeyed all the way from Lagos in affecting solidarity to grace the funeral ceremony of one’s older sister, the late Iyalode of the town. Years earlier, the duo had also been in attendance at a private family gathering to celebrate one’s diamond jubilee.

Anyone who had known the two gentlemen would know that these were hard men grilled in the no-hostage, “up and at em” Action Group school of agitprop politics. But they also had the milk of kindness and generosity of spirit flowing through them. They both took their friendship very seriously.

Gbolabo Ogunsanwo had an intimidating aura about him and a magnificent presence. Tall, swarthy and broad-shouldered, immensely self-confident and robustly good looking, there was a hint of elitist snobbery somewhere. He walked and carried himself forward with the swagger and self-assurance of the old Ijebu segment of the Yoruba aristocracy.

There was something about his imperial and imperious carriage which could rub lesser mortals the wrong way. He was one of those men whose effortless air of natural superiority could be quite daunting to many. But he also had an infectious sense of humour and his crackling laugh could be heard for miles when he was truly in his elements.

But despite his charisma and undeniable star quality, it was his pen that brought him to national attention. He was a master of the written word. He wrote with a peculiar feel and flair for the English language which would have made the owners wince in envy. His column was strewn with literary allusions which spoke to a literary imagination. This ought not to have been a big surprise. He read English at the university and was the best graduating student in his final year.

Known to his many admirers as the Elvis Presley of journalism, he wrote with guts and gusto and was the past master of the abrasive put-down and devastating turn of phrase. Yours sincerely remember him dismissing a serving British minister of the early seventies, Sir Reginald Maulding, as given to Mauldin sentiments. A less fortunate former colleague was bluntly advised not to mistake “a ministerial toga for an opportunity for mandibular walkabout”.

It was elegant and combative journalism at its very best, delivered in joyous, surging prose. He was not given to lofty abstractions, concept-chopping or dense dialectical disquisitions. His forte was not the analytical rigour of the political scientist or the argumentative prowess of the philosopher of the human condition. If this made the writing very accessible and immensely popular, it also strikes at the core of journalism as a perishable commodity best suited for instant consumption.

With Gbolabo Ogunsanwo, Nigeria has lost one of its finest writers and most gifted children. His death throws up the awkward and troubling question of the problematic relationship among various segments of the Yoruba postcolonial elite. Whereas the feudal culture of the north allows it to identify its gifted and most promising scions right from youth and nurture them to political stardom, the reverse appears to be the case with a Yoruba world in turbulent and traumatic transition.

In this ethnic coliseum, the intellectual elite dislike and disdain the political elite while the political elite fear and disapprove of the intellectual elite except those they can bend to their will. The economic elite are scornful and contemptuous of the political elite while the military elite hold all of them in violent contempt and fearful derision. The result is often political chaos and a war of all against all in which everything available is weaponized.

Gbolabo Ogunsanwo himself often regaled friends and associates with his bitter experience in Yoruba politics. His talents and gifts naturally attracted the keen attention of Chief Obafemi Awolowo who brought him in to his innermost political circle. There was nothing the Ikenne titan loved better than quality argument and Ogunsanwo could be quite uproariously argumentative.

But one day after a particularly testy exchange with one of Awolowo’s famous political associates, Ogunsanwo began visiting the toilet with increasing urgency and a burning urge to urinate. After the eighth visit, it was a sweltering and groggy Gbolabo that managed to drag himself back to his seat whereupon Chief Awolowo called out his associate by his first name. “Tu omokunrin yen sile”, Awolowo ordered his associate in Yoruba. ( Release the young man).

A ritual of obeisance and submission was performed on a prostrate former editor whereupon Ogunsanwo suddenly regained his health and vivacity. Surely if the young man knows how to argue with elders and political superiors, he ought to have fortified himself with necessary metaphysical accoutrements. A Yoruba proverb put things with ominous clarity. “Enu agba o ko’le, enu omode o ko ilepa”. A youth who insists on flooring an elder must be ready to kiss his grave first.

Later in life, Ogunsanwo complained that the strategy moved from metaphysical impairment to fiscal disempowerment with Chief Awolowo’s political associates who had found their way to power making sure that they denied him the financial wherewithal to pursue an independent line of action.

The famed columnist fingered a former UPN governor who had denied him a certificate of occupancy over a parcel of land whose ownership he thought he had perfected as his chief tormentor in this regard. In the brutal world of politics, elementary political survival dictates that nobody furnishes a potential terminator with the weapon of choice.

As it is in politics so also it is in journalism. You must watch your back until your back begins to ache and your vision begins to blur. There is no paddy for jungle as they say in Nigeria and just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they are not going to get you. There was a touching naivety and shortage of fundamental political nous about the departed great journalist.

By the end of 1974, Gbolabo Ogunsanwo bestrode the world of Nigerian journalism like a colossus. His personality was as captivating as his column was enthralling. The Sunday Times he edited with aplomb and brilliance reached a magical benchmark of over five hundred copies a week in February 1976, a stupendous feat by any global standard of the time.

At that point in time, there was nothing stopping Ogunsanwo from reaching the very summit of the organization. The entire nation was his oyster. The normal succession route was for the editor of the Sunday paper to accede to the editorship of the daily at the appointed hour. Having acquitted himself so well, everybody thought it was a question of time for Ogunsanwo.

By a quirk of fate and fortune, the unforeseen intervened. The military sacked their boss, General Yakubu Gowon, in a palace coup in August, 1975 while he was attending an OAU conference in Kampala. At the appointed hour, the two great intellectuals who edited both The Daily Times and The Sunday Times were nowhere to be found or seen. Instead, it was the master reporter and relentless newshound that carried the day.

Tipped off by a late Ogori general, Segun Osoba, a man of urban ubiquity, tireless social networking and reportorial sleuthing, worked his phone and contacts all night to get the details of the coup. Not only that, he braved the odds to get to the office after midnight to make sure the headline reflected the new reality. It was a major scoop.

So impressed was Alhaji Babatunde Jose by this feat of journalistic excellence that he promptly promoted Osoba, at that point the Deputy Editor, to the editorship of The Daily Times kicking Areoye Oyebola upstairs while leaving Ogunsanwo undisturbed at the Sunday Times.

Even though he was the one that pioneered the visionary Graduate Employment Scheme of the Times Group, Jose had himself risen through the ranks and was very fond of underdogs who excelled and surpassed themselves. He was himself a master social networker with impeccable connections. Although there was a hint of self-reversal about it all, Jose had made the point that the great newsroom is not a coven of supine and retreating intellectuals .

It was at this point that the falcon could no longer hearken to the falconer. A great gale of resentment and rebellion swept through the organization. Gbolabo Ogunsanwo teamed up with Areoye Oyebola and others to write a petition against their boss for his dictatorial and autocratic handling of affairs in the Times group. In the ensuing furore, Jose had to relinquish his chairmanship at only the age of fifty. His lifelong labour had been essentially completed.

But this was not the end of the story. According to his memoirs, Walking A tightrope, Jose noted that as he was about to conclude the formalities of handling over to the new chairman, Alhaji Aliko Mohammed, the austere gentlemen took him aside and told him that he was not going to allow his rebellious tormentors have the last laugh. Thereafter, a gale of retirements reverberated through the organization, sweeping off Ogunsanwo and the others.

A colourful and flamboyant journalistic career has ended in political mishap. Now in retrospect Ogunsawo at thirty two or thereabouts had also concluded his essential life labour. The rest, including half-hearted forays into business, a stint at publishing, a near derisory presidential run and a fiasco at the now rested Compass was as anticlimactic as it was nearly tragic.

There is one last anecdote that is quite revealing of the late journalist in his essential humanity and the awkward enclosures and encumbrances of his later years during which he became an ordained pastor of the Redeemed Church. Shortly after this column signed on, yours sincerely got an early morning call from an agitated and disturbed Ogunsanwo. “ Some el Qaeda suicide squad journalists have invaded the nation. Have you been reading one Tatalo Alamu in The Nation?” he hollered in his grand baritone.

When yours sincerely answered in the affirmative and feigned ignorance about the identity of the writer, Gbolabo ordered immediate investigation, asking one to report back to him post haste. A few days later, yours sincerely called him up to say that all investigations pointed in his direction and that many were already whispering his name as the pseudonymous writer.

“Ah won ti fe pami niyen!!!,” the great journalist screamed into the phone and the line went dead. (Now, they have decided to kill me!!) When the true identity of the person became known, he let out his prolonged crackling laugh wondering aloud how the tell-tale clues could have eluded him.

In sharp departure and for the sole purpose of elucidation, shortly after the column debuted, Aremo Olusegun Osoba, ever the master newshound, simply collared snooper at a public function and bluntly informed that it didn’t take him three weeks to find out the identity of the writer.

Despite all the triumphs and tribulations, it is Gbolabo Ogunsanwo’s crackling laugh and his essential humanity that remain with this writer. Not even death can take that away. May the great soul of this master journalist rest in peace.

By Tatalo Alamu

By the time he succumbed to Covid-19 a little over a fortnight ago, John J Rawlings had become arguably the greatest living Ghanaian political figure and a legend in his own right. But the reverence and adulation were not universal. There were some polite murmurs of disapproval. Ignatius Kutu Achaempong’ s daughter penned a scathing disavowal accusing Rawlings of denying her fatherly love and affection from the age of six.

Forty one years after the events of June 4, 1979 Ghana remains a deeply divided society with its political elite centrally split along the old Nkrumahist versus J. B Danquah fault lines. Until his death, Rawlings was never able to secure the universal affection of his compatriots.

While the masses hailed him as Junior Jesus and the equivalent of a secular saint, Rawlings was reviled by a section of the Ghanaian elite as a bloodthirsty monster who desecrated the sanctity of human life. Some dismissed him as “Junior Judas”.

Revolutions are a terrible business. They spread horror. They bespeak drastic disruptions to the normal cycle of human life. It is a total repudiation of existing scheme of things and extant order. The prevailing circus has reached the limits of its possibility and could only prolong human misery. For Leon Trotsky, it didn’t even matter how it all ended as long as human awareness is heightened and consciousness raised even if farce and melodrama have dissolved into tragedy itself.

Yet for many others revolution represents unproductive bloodletting and the mere exchange of one form of hopelessness for another. Stolypin, the last democratically elected premier of Russia before the Bolsheviks steamrolled everybody, shouted from the rooftop: “We want a great Russia, but they want a great bang!!”

And what a great bang it was for Tsarist Russia!! It was said that the historic lot fell on Joseph Stalin to drive barbarity out of Russia with sheer barbarism. In the event, progress and evolution that must come willy-nilly are gear-crashed in a momentous bloodbath. The measured evolvement of human society is sent on a tailspin, like a Caesarian evacuation of premature babies.

But despite all that, nobody has been able to ban revolutions or decree them out of existence. Revolutions obey their own strange rhythms and even more bizarre time-table. Sometimes they obey the logic of events. But most times they occur against the run of play, such as the Russian Revolution which shook a feudal and backward Russia to its very foundation against conventional Marxist expectations. It has been famously dubbed “the revolution against capital”.

Revolutions also bring out the best and finest in human spirit, the spirit of heroic daring and resistance against tyranny and evil; the noble spirit of altruism and self-sacrifice. Think of Spartacus, the heroic and eponymous leader of the Roman slave revolt. If Spartacus didn’t exist, he might have had to be invented by poets and philosophers alike. Many think he was actually invented.

There was always the human need to invent men and women of extraordinary capacity from down below doing unusual stuff. Think of ordinary men and women storming the Bastille prison, and of L’ Overture Touissant , the great African leader of the Haitan Revolution, who asked the French not to substitute the aristocracy of class they had overthrown in France for an aristocracy of race.

Think of Captain Thomas Sankara who had engineered a near perfect bloodless transformation of the Burkinabe people only to be felled in a hail of bullets by counter-revolutionary forces sent by his friend and confidant. Think of Colonel Muammar Ghadaffi who led his people from the dunes of Bedouin wretchedness to the portals modern civilization in one generation.

Paleontologists have concluded from their study of fossilised remains that even geological developments proceed with a combination of revolution and evolution. While for most times things settle into a comfortable rut and routine, revolutionary eruptions often alter the landscape in a dramatic manner and in ways that could not have been anticipated.

The same dynamic is also at work in the revolutionary transformation of certain societies. As Lenin, arguably the greatest revolutionist of them all, has observed: “There are decades when nothing happens and there are days when decades happen”. Such was what happened in Ghana between May 19th, 1979 when Rawlings was first put on trial for insurrection and 4th of June when he was sprung out of jail to become Head of State.

It has however been observed by sociologists of revolutions that the social and psychological impulse behind most revolutions are two-fold : the passion for social justice and the thirst for political vengeance. Both are evident of the contradictory nature of human beings and the capacity to host both noble and ignoble passions.

There was evidence of both in the Ghanaian revolution. A man like General Afrifa who had been out of office for almost a decade before the revolutionists struck had been pencilled down for elimination owing to the fact that he had cautioned the Ghanaian authorities about the danger of televising the trial of Flt Lieutenant John Rawlings during which the embattled air force officer railed against the system and the massive corruption that had overwhelmed the entire society.

John Rawlings was an unlikely messiah. He might have been a natural rebel but he was hardly a revolutionary. Intellectually he did not appear to be particularly gifted or outstanding. Despite occasional grandstanding about Fanon, it is hard to believe that he actually read or assimilated the socialist texts forced on him by Major Kojo Buakye-Djan. But there is no doubt that he was a brilliant and charismatic opportunist who mastered the ropes and took on board new developments as novel realities unfolded.

What Rawlings also had going for him was profound courage and an aversion for injustice which turned him into an avowed critic of Ghanaian society. His growing up as the son of a single mother and an absentee Scottish father must have fuelled his burning indignation against the hypocrisy and cant of genteel society, particularly its uppermost crust.

The Ghanaian society of the seventies was no doubt a very corrupt and venal society. It had already earned a scathing indictment in two celebrated novels by its most gifted and outstanding writer. In The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Why Are We So Blest? Ayi Kwei Armah portrayed a society in the grip of advanced ethical paralysis with all institutions completely debauched and no saviour in sight.

But as corrupt and venal as the Ghanaian society was at that point in time, it was not any more so than the Nigerian, Congolese or Sierra Leonean societies. Ghana however boasted of an entrenched and well-developed middle-class whose westernized roots dated back to the eighteenth century. It was from its ranks that the leading political lights of colonial Ghana emerged. It was also from this middle class that the radical military officers who were to become the nemesis of ancient Ghanaian military aristocracy emerged.

They had dominated the middle ranks and upper middle cadres of post-independence Ghanaian military institutions. Unlike the upper cadre of military institutions like say Nigeria whose group cohesion was based on regional, religious and ethnic solidarity, the cohesion of the Ghanaian mid-ranking officers was based on class affinity and affiliation.  They viewed the societal rot with the same optical lens and came to the same damning conclusion.

If anybody thought that the revolt of the mid-ranking officers was a fluke, the grim turn of events that morning would have been enough to dissuade them. In a symbolic ritual of regime-collapse, the Chief of Staff of the Ghana Armed Forces, Major General Odartey Wellington, was summarily shot for being rude to the leaders of the revolution. Thereafter, the old order swiftly crumbled. While mopping up operation was going on, Rawlings had taken to the skies to display his aviation skills.

In all three former military heads of state and many top military officers were publicly executed. It was a development that sent shock waves through top military and political circles on the continent and the world at large.

After his second coming, Rawlings’ decision  to steer a more pragmatic, middle-of-the-road course brought him on collision course with the putative military leader of the original uprising, the more ideologically oriented Major Kojo Bouakye- Djan, together with many socialist cadres who had supported the uprising. Like all revolutions, this one also began devouring its own children.

To many observers, Rawlings’ willingness to hand over power to a democratically elected government in Ghana after a few months  was a sign that what had taken place in the country was not a well-thought out and well-coordinated revolution but a vengeance-motivated revolt of mid-ranking officers against their better-heeled superior officers.

In fairness to the former Flight Lieutenant, neither during his brief stint as military head of state nor during his subsequent return to power as civilian leader was his incorruptible mantra plagued by allegations and insinuations of personal corruption. He was completely in charge of his family while his taste appeared to be modest and his needs minimal.

Rawlings’ decision to forcibly terminate civil rule in Ghana in December 1981 against the run of play appears in retrospect like an historic afterthought and the evidence of a virus that was yet to work its way through the system. Yet it was during this stint rather than his first coming that the former Flight Lieutenant appeared to have laid the foundation of an equable democratic polity with functioning institutions.

Today, despite the bitter divisions and continuing polarizations of Ghanaian society, its democracy appears to be light years ahead of its surrounding neighbours with periodic and seamless transfer of power between contending hegemonic factions while the nation can boast of a sane and sober polity in which corruption has been curtailed if not drastically reduced.

It is noteworthy that while the phenomenon of Third Term has reared its head in Nigeria, Guinea and recently in Ivory Coast, no post-Rawlings leader in Ghana has toyed with the idea despite all the temptations. Respect for the constitution is of paramount importance.

In the light of this, it can be argued that Rawlings revolution fundamentally altered the political equation in Ghana and changed the course of the nation’s political development for the better. There has always been some socialist murmurings and modesty of outlook about Ghanaian political leadership which goes back to Nkrumah’s legacy and which contrasts sharply with the buccaneering opulence of the Nigerian political class. But whether this is worth the orgy of bloodletting and the traumatic shock inflicted on the Ghanaian society is another matter entirely.

Ghana can be said to be lucky in the sense that the Rawlings revolution did not entail a root and branch extirpation of the ancient Ghanaian society. Simply because Rawlings could not be considered an intellectual heavyweight, he was spared the dogmatic and doctrinaire assurance that would lead to epic tragedy elsewhere. He later turned coat.

The grand irony may well be that it has taken a revolution to entrench the middle class values in Ghana which are a sine qua non of liberal democracy. In Ethiopia, Col Haile Mariam Mengitsu’s scorched earth policies and revolutionary blood-mongering eventuated in the bitter partitioning of the nation and a fourth civil war. In post-revolution Libya, the gathering of hostile forces against Muammar Ghadaffi has led to stateless anomie and the virtual splintering of the nation.

To justify the blood-soaked canvas which enabled this startling transformation, revolutionists often retort that there is no way anybody could make omelette without breaking eggs. But there are also many who argue that the transformation of human society is possible without any resort to massive bloodletting.

It is obvious that this back and forth about the desirability of revolutions would go on for as long as human history itself subsists.  But since no one can ban revolution or decree its occurrence out of the routine pattern of human existence, it is also clear that revolutions in one form or the other will be with us for a long time to come as long as there is tyranny, injustice and corruption. May Flight Lieutenant John Rawlings rest in perfect peace.

By Tatalo Alamu

On and off the field of soccer, Maradona was a tantalising prospect. Rather short, squat, built like an early Russian tank and with stocky thighs primed for gravity-defying raids on enemy territory or the most sublime of passes, Maradona is arguably the most complete attacking footballer of all time. He was marked forever by the great unstable dynamics of genius which often combined petulance with endearing roguery.

This column joins the good people of Argentina in mourning the loss of their favourite son and much beloved national icon, Diego Amanda Maradona. By the time he fell to sudden cardiac arrest after surviving a blood clot in the brains, Maradona had already passed into national legend as a soccer treasure, a cultural institution and a great symbol of Argentine Exceptionalism.

For a man who erupted from the slums of Buenos Aires armed with nothing but a prodigious soccer talent and an impish personality that was ever ready to cock a snook at authorities, Maradona did very well for himself and his family. Nothing would have pleased the former pickpocket more than seeing his own coffin draped in Argentine national colour as his star-struck and appreciative compatriots file past.

Because of his limited and middling education, Maradona avoided the tendency of casting his lot with a prevalent political orthodoxy or some anti-establishment political movement. This apolitical neutralism endeared him even more to the average Argentine who came to regard him with a cult-like affection. He was the ultimate soccer divinity.

Maradona lived and breathed Argentina. The diminutive soccer star inherited all the prejudices and petty aversions of his fellow country people, chief among which was a volcanic dislike for their giant neighbours across the River Plate. As far as the mercurial and unstable soccer legend was concerned nothing could please him more than thumping the naturally talented but technically unsound Brazilians in the field of soccer.

In pursuit of continental hostilities Maradona once famously attempted to rough up the great Pele on global television before the two prodigies were briskly separated but not before the Argentine stormy petrel threatened to beat Pele up the next time they met. The former cutpurse from the slums of Buenos Aires could not hide his disdain for Pele’s urbane comportment and pretensions to cool elitism.

But it was perhaps for the Brits who had bested his country in war and civilization that Maradona reserved his bitterest contempt and fear. When he was asked which of his two famous goals against England in the 1986 World Cup he liked better, Maradona plumped for the first one which he likened to picking the pocket of the English. Yet the second one is regarded by soccer experts as arguably the greatest individual goal since people invented football.

At the 1990 World Cup an obese and jowly Maradona, now well past his sell-by date, resorted to diving and falling at short notice just to shore up the declining fortunes of his country. Even match officials were advised to steer clear of the human debris in case it decided to hit the ground at short notice. Now Maradona has taken the final dive. May his great soul rest in peace.

Tatalo Alamu

 

In Nigeria the mortal conflict between an imperial colonial state and the inchoate nation it has spawned is taking an eventful turn. Beginning with the decolonization struggle in Africa, the colonial nation has been rising against the colonial state which has been forcibly coupled to it by the colonial authorities.

In many of these African nations, it has led to a brisk overwhelming of so called national armies. In Nigeria right from independence, the state has never been a site for the mediation of competing elite interests. Rather, it has been a theatre of blood and extraordinary human suffering with coups, counter-coups, wars, civil upheavals and a religious insurgency which has lasted eleven years.

But it is in the last six years of post-military rule that things appear to be heading for a violent decoupling of the state from the nation. This is precipitated by a forcible takeover of the state by hegemonic extremists bent on bending the entire nation to their anarchic and anachronistic will. It is in keeping with the final working out of an organic crisis that different factions try their hand in imposing a solution on the crisis.

The right wing solution of autocratic intolerance and purblind arrogance of power by the Buhari faction of the APC has led the country once again down a narrow alley of self-immolation. The result is freewheeling disorder and ungovernability. It should now be obvious to other factions in the ruling coalition that they are mere accessories after the fact of feudal coronation or at best surplus to requirements.

But it does not really matter. Consensus, conciliation and compromise are jaded virtues of liberal democracy. What matters is holding on to the levers of power and deploying its malevolent apparatus for the suppression of the will of the nation. There are enough mercenary collaborators and “progressive” traitors strewn all over the country to sustain this cruel hoax.

In both military and civilian despotism, the illusion of order is required to perpetuate the order of illusion. Unfortunately, this is not the picture available to the outside world. Fake organs of news dissemination abound and so do organs of state misinformation. An entire generation is growing up not knowing what to believe and not believing what they know. Welcome to Orwellian dystopia.

While the tomfoolery about turn by turn succession is going on as seen in the recent defection to the ruling party by David Umahi, the governor of Ebonyi State, a former United States envoy is dismissing Nigeria as “a prebendal archipelago” run by a criminal cartel.

Almost at the same time, the CNN carried a report which was a stinging repudiation of the Nigerian official version what happened at the Lekki tollgate. Contrary to the state deodorized version, the CNN footage was dripping with gore in a terrifying carnage which cannot do Nigeria’s international image any good.

The government of General Mohammadu Buhari is at the lowest ebb of its national and international credibility. How do we begin to pick our way through the pieces? Unfortunately, the government does not appear to see how it is mired in dire straits. It is even oblivious of the fact that it has very weak economic cards to play as a result of the dramatic economic decline of the nation under its watch.

Rather than going for a rapid de-escalation of the pervasive tension in the nation, the government appears to have convinced itself that it is time for a massive clampdown in a show of force which betrays panic more than confidence. While vowing that it would never allow the EndSARS protest to repeat itself, it has gone ahead decimating the ranks of the protesters’ leadership, suborning their bank accounts through a dubious court order while imposing travel restrictions on them.

This is not the mind-set of somebody suing for peace but the mind-set of a military Caesar going for pacification, the mental conditioning of an Ottoman presidency going for broke in its last throes. It is the final desperate dice of medieval tyranny. It is the last sigh of the Moor, as Salman Rushdie would have put it.

Yet the administration appears to have forgotten that the EndSARS imbroglio stole completely upon it, like a creeping coup to which it has no answer. The protest completely outsmarted the combined force of the entire national security apparatus. Because of their deployment of counter-hegemonic savvy, there is no guarantee that they will not do it all over again.

So what we have on hand is a classic confrontation between the colonial state and the emergent postcolonial youth of Nigeria. The colonial state has kept the old people of Nigeria weak and divided, employing all sorts of divide and rule tactics and turn-by-turn feeding frenzy to prevent them from acting in a pan-Nigerian concert.

But while the post-colonial nation remains inchoate and incoherent, unable to transform into a true nation for itself, the colonial state appears to have met its match in the emergent post-colonial multitude; the educated youth and the uneducated hoodlums whose experience has imbued them with the right historical consciousness to leapfrog ethnicity, cultural and religious divides.

It is possible that the hegemonic faction of the Nigerian ruling class, in an intervening moment of lucidity, has come to recognize the dangers that this emergent pan-Nigerian armada pose to its continuing incompetence and misrule. Hence the panic-driven frenzy of repression and authoritarian muscle-flexing. These are not the type of people they can cajole or hoodwink with the promise of presidential ticket. They do not want to rule Nigeria under its current configuration.

It is too late in the day. The genie is already out of the bottle and there is no human force that can put it back. But the question must now be posed. Why has the colonial state in Nigeria find it impossible to ally and align itself with the hectic stirrings of a new nation and what is promising to be a turbulent transformation to modernity from an inchoate nation to a nation for itself ?

The colonial state was born into imperial and imperialist predation and bred by predatory extraction of resources and open rent-seeking. It is an army of occupation which has retained fidelity to its originating summons and has kept faith with looting and plundering as its fundamental preoccupation. It has reached the zenith of its aspiration in presiding over plunder and can neither develop nor transform a nation unless it is transformed itself.

This is the Nigerian conundrum and it shows in the abysmal economic and political decline of the nation in the last six years. Beyond the charade of periodic elections in which choice is already overridden by selection, nobody can argue that democracy has been deepened or advanced in the last twenty one years of post-military rule.

But why it has not occurred to us that without effective modernization of the country the military itself would remain in colonial demobilization, without innovative nous and cutting edge awareness of the society it is ordered to garrison remains a source of mystery. The state is better surveilled by non-state actors than it is capable of surveillance of the entire nation.

Rebel groups seem to have access to superior weaponry and technology. The military authorities have themselves cried out that the army is involved in internal security operation in about thirty three states in the nation. This only leaves out three states. If the last combustion in Lagos is anything to go by, no one can be sure when and where the next eruption will occur. The situation is dire. The nation is bleeding on all fronts.

Large swathes remain ungoverned and ungovernable. In a situation reminiscent of Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the state has completely disappeared in these anarchic redoubts leaving the local people at the mercy of wild warlords who kill without any compunction.

Nothing can beat the description of the former American envoy. An archipelago is a chain of islands surrounded by vast open seas. In other words, the state in Nigeria only maintains fitful presence in some parts of the nation leaving vast open stretches in a state of nature. With so many country homes abandoned a man’s castle is no longer his home.

But the fitful presence is just enough to give the illusion of order if only to facilitate rent collection and extractive predation. In other words although the state has lost its power of superior coercion, its capacity to provide security for the people and hence its fundamental raison d’etre, it is kept barely alive enough to fulfil its founding mission.

The colonial state in Nigeria now resembles a living apparition with enough residual capacity to strike terror into the heart of the living dead. Once the operators retain enough presence of mind and ability to anticipate untoward social convulsions, the show can go on for a long time because there is nothing actually beyond the horizon except anarchy, chaos and unproductive bloodletting.

The collapse of the EndSARS protest and the ensuing carnage gave us a glimpse of what lies behind the horizon. But what is more astonishing is the lack of governmental clarity of mind and the inability to anticipate unusual social trends despite all the warning signals and shouting from the rooftop by concerned patriots and other well-wishers. It presages more violent eruptions around the corner.

Despite all the hype and hoopla, EndSARS could only have acted as a great disruptive force. It lacked the fundamental capacity for regime termination and could only have prompted more potent forces in that direction. For all its techno-savvy and organizational bravura the movement lacked mission clarity, political gravitas, ideological cujones and ethical acumen. Revolutions and revolutionists are made of sterner stuff.

But they have succeeded in punching a big hole in governmental confidence and self-belief. It can no longer be politics as usual in the country. Politics is in urgent need of renewal and the nation itself is in more urgent need of the constant reconfiguration which renews national faith and self-confidence. The EndSARS debacle showed how badly politics has been delegitimized with massive popular bypass of traditional and modern authority.

Unfortunately, the ruling party has woefully failed itself and the nation in its own self-declared bid to give the country a befitting structural make-over. What is playing out is the gargantuan mess occasioned by that historic dereliction of duty. Had the country been peacefully reconfigured to allow for greater devolution of power and responsibility, we would have been talking of taking the next steps in the modernist transformation of the polity.

Social forces do not remain static and stagnant. The equilibrium of social forces which allows for peaceful restructuring of the country may no longer subsist. Depending on what the government does or refuses to do in the coming months, we may begin to hear increasingly strident calls for a total repeal of the 1999 Constitution or demands for a national referendum which will allow the people of Nigeria to determine their individual destiny.