Tatalo Alamu

For Malam Nasir El-Rufai, the diminutive but feisty former boss of the Federal Capital Authority, it is time for roosting chicks. El-Rufai’s oversized ego and self-importance are inversely proportional to his under-sized frame. But even as an undergraduate, he was not beyond a clever resort to self-help and capacity building. Acquiring a couple of platform shoes to boost things, Rufai also acquired the nickname “Giant” in the process.

Poor Giant. It has been a gigantic unravelling. By the time the smoke cleared from his tempestuous grilling by the Senate Committee on plot allocations in the Federal Capital Territory, El-Rufai’s reputation as a squeaky clean patriot and his self-advertised integrity had been so severely battered that he is unlikely to recover from the damning opprobrium. What remained in public view was the clever resort to self-help, the maximum capacity building and the hypocritical and vain grandstanding.

Both El-Rufai and his hostile interlocutors emerged from the rubble of shame and bureaucratic sadism holding the grenade of Mutually Assured Destruction. Neither side was willing to press home. The pint-sized bulldozer was evidently aware that his interrogators lacked the moral authority and ethical superiority to finish him off, and he baited them endlessly and with savage relish too.

But the damage had already been done. Slumming and slugging it out in the squalor of the moral basement, his foes never said they were saints or crusaders. Such rarified and lofty turfs belong to El-Rufai and his equally diminished and demystified patron. Let everybody answer their father’s name.

Readers of this column should have noticed that it hardly concentrates on the individual however exceptional except when such individuals illuminate the social and political process. For us, individuals are products of specific social and historical formations. Such formations are more important than the aberrant personalities they often throw up.  So it is with El-Rufai.

This piece seeks to enlighten us about how a project and process supposedly driven by high-minded and reform-minded apostles of modernisation can also be powered by a feudal and authoritarian mind-set so severe and limiting that it returns to scupper the benefits.

Secondly, we seek to show that no matter how an individual is deluded by his delusions, or manipulated by his own manipulations, such an individual cannot prevent certain give-away lapses that tend to reveal his true character.

By the time Nasir El-Rufai literally crashed on the Federal scene, he had already acquired a reputation for not taking hostages. He talked tough and acted tougher. There was a messianic, if slightly manic, glint to his otherwise cold ruthless stare. The times were rough. The stakes were high. The adrenalin matched the zeal, sometimes leading to wild, unprovoked outbursts and petulant tirades against real and imaginary enemies. But give it to the boy. Give it to the runt-sized tyrant that he had star quality.

At the end of General Obasanjo’s first term in office, there emerged a coterie of reform-minded technocrats who were said to have the ears of the big man. Arguably, Nasir El-Rufai was the blue-eyed golden boy of the lot. He was said to be the lynchpin of the group and its mobilising catalyst.

It was widely believed that El-Rufai was part of the inner caucus of a new group of technocratic young Turks from the north who had vowed to seize the region by the scruff of the neck and drag out of its feudal time warp into modernity screaming and kicking. They were the new missionaries of the Bretton Wood complex, and they would exemplify the saying that a little learning is very dangerous.

But at the beginning, it seemed that El-Rufai could do no wrong. Privatization was the buzzword of the new Economics of compulsory anorexia. The massively corrupt and overfed state with its appallingly inefficient public sector were the twin-culprit. Together, they had stifled and strangulated daring individual initiative and private creative enterprise.

After several attempts to launch public telephony in which the money simply disappeared into the pockets of crooks, the entire country was at last whirring and whizzing with the sound of the mobile phone, thanks to the brisk dismantling of the monopoly of the crook-infested NITEL.

If Proudhon had said that all private property is theft, El-Rufai now said that all public property is a worse form of thievery. As the boss of the BPE, the golden boy presided over the most massive transfer of public property and patrimony ever witnessed in Africa.

No matter the murmurs and whispers of protests, particularly from a sector of the country notorious for its aristocratic languor and princely sedation, the results were there for everybody to see in the telecommunication revolution, the gigantic strides in banking, the explosion in private initiative and the emergence of a new class of super rich Nigerians.

At this point, an influential and powerful Vice President Atiku Abubakar who mounted a sustained political offensive against the lethargic indolence of the old guard protected El-Rufai’s political flanks. Such were the stakes that it was not unusual for the big boss himself to weigh into the ring with customary abrasive contempt. Famously, Obasanjo dismissed Professor Sam Aluko, the respected economic nationalist of the old Keynesian school, as a victim of senility.

Meanwhile in the other sector of the intra-elite war, the golden boy was making hay with his hunting bag bulging with the scalpels of unwary victims. The fear of El-Rufai became the beginning of wisdom. If many found his combination of arrogance and caustic incivility a little off putting, there were also those who secretly applauded his zest and plucky irreverence. The pocket pugilist spoke the minds of many Nigerians when he dismissed the then senate as a consortium of certified crooks.

Still the doubts and dismay persisted. It is said that humility is the homage exceptional endowments must pay to nature and society. For every gifted chap who comes through the grim factory of human endeavour, there are thousands equally talented who went under.

There were many who find El-Rufai’s sense of entitlement as brazen as it is bizarre and baffling, a telling hangover from a feudal worldview in which the privileged few have a right to trample over others not so privileged. This feudal and authoritarian mind-set, so memorably incompatible with the egalitarian tenets of modernity, is the source of El-Rufai’s eventual comeuppance and brisk unravelling.

El-Rufai truly came into his own as the minister of the Federal Capital Territory. But it was also here that the glaring defects of character would cause much misgiving and lead to his eventual downfall. His remaining admirers insist that you cannot have omelette without breaking eggs and that their man has sanitised and brought municipal plausibility to Abuja.

While this is arguable, the social and political costs have been staggering. It would have been better to hasten more slowly until certain safety valves were put in place for the victims of mass displacement and dispersal.

Of course, the need for social amelioration is anathema to the worldview of the feudal-military complex and social justice does not exist in the Neo-con dictionary. But the fact remains that certain social injuries and ancestral feuds threaten social cohesion and harmony for generations to come, requiring despotic brutality and the abolition of the electorate to manage.

As revealed by the committee, the pattern of land redistribution in Abuja shows El-Rufai at his lying and dissembling worst, a nauseating and offensive public spectacle and a specimen of the worst form of official perfidy. It is the most outlandish instance of land racketeering in the history of the country.

What El-Rufai has presided over is not the sanitization of Abuja but the forcible expropriation and redistribution of private and public property to a new class of landed gentry which is incompatible with the logic of modernisation he has so blithely trumpeted. His personal interests and private animosities loomed large in what ought to be public duty.

After the damning exposure, it was obvious that the bubble has burst and that the masquerade has been disrobed. Despite his hollow hypocritical posturing, it was clear that El-Rufai, like his former boss, has suffered prohibitive collateral damage.

In a classic case of dramatic irony, he vowed never to go near public office again. He was merely echoing the thought of millions of compatriots. To echo David Halberstam, Obasanjo’s best have not been the brightest and his brightest have not been the best.

 

• First published in May, 2008.

As El-Rufai unravels….

Stop press:  Okon launches COACOJ

 

 

Tatalo Alamu

 

If the Planning and Organizing Committee of the outgone, Paul Usoro-led Nigerian Bar Association knew what it was getting itself into by extending an invitation to speak at its annual lecture to Mallam Nasir  el-Rufai, the iconoclastic and combustible Kaduna State governor,  perhaps it would have given him a wide berth.

But having extended the invitation, the organization compounded  what appeared to have been an initial error of judgement by allowing itself to be steamrolled by significant sections of the bar into withdrawing the invitation.

By so doing, the premier organization of Nigerian lawyers has ironically allowed itself to be railroaded into El-Rufai’s own narrow and feudalistic worldview in which might is right and in which society consists only of masters and their slaves and nothing else.

In the event, the whole brouhaha has served to inflame ethnic, cultural and regional passions in a way that compromises national security and the rule of law. With the incident as cause celebre, a rogue faction of the NBA has now emerged virtually fracturing the organization along the old regional fault-lines.

It is trite in law that he who comes to equity must come with clean hands. Columnist is very much aware of the compilation by a wide lobby of influential lawyers of the egregious political, ethnic and religious infractions committed by the Kaduna state governor which makes him unworthy of such a noble and heroic platform watered by the blood of civil legal martyrs and avatars.

But this crushing weight of evidence does not obviate El-Rufai’s right to fair hearing. If he does not dissolve into infantile tantrums and puerile grandstanding, it would have been an excellent opportunity to hear him out. The nation has been robbed of that golden opportunity.

The “disinvitation” is a clear assault on the fundamental canon of liberal democracy and a paradoxical hat-tipping to El-Rufai’s own fundamentalist political intolerance and impish disdain for ameliorative and emancipatory politics or plurality of voices in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious nation.

It should be clear from the above that this columnist is not a fan of El-Rufai’s politics or his person either. But fair is fair. Even those who do not participate in emancipatory politics and the often bitter struggle for an open society, or those who deliberately constitute themselves as obstacles to societal progress are entitled to its deliverables and deliverances.

Feisty and indomitable in disputation but occasionally bellicose supine ignorance, El-Rufai is arguably the most controversial and divisive northern politician thrown up by the Fourth Republic. As it was said of another controversial European politician, El-Rufai often comes across as so disagreeable and offensively inured to good taste that even a joke in his mouth is no longer a funny matter.

This column has played host to El-Rufai on two major occasions. The first was twelve years ago in 2008 after his hopes of a major participation in the post-Obasanjo polity spectacularly unravelled with the coming of Umaru Yar’Ádua.  This was in a piece titled, “As El-Rufai Unravels”. Yar’Adua had enough reasons to intensely dislike and suspect the pint-sized political climber.

His dark and Machiavellian manoeuvrings during the last days of the Obasanjo regime and co-authorship of a succession memo straight out of the manual of primitive and anti-democratic feudal politics could not have recommended him to a finely honed democrat like the Katsina nobleman.

Despite this, this column roused in stout defence of Malam Nasir el-Rufai’s rights a year later in September 2009 when the Yar’Ádua’s administration appeared to connive to deny him of his rights to a Nigerian passport in flagrant violation of the Nigerian constitution. This was in a piece titled, “The passport of Mallam Nasir”. In keeping with its democratic credentials, the Yar’Ádua administration subsequently relented.

If he is not too far gone, the hostility and wide revulsion generated by el-Rufai’s toxic brand of politics should be of concern to the Kaduna State governor. The notion that politics is not a popularity or beauty contest is a feudal mantra that relies on voting as ethnic census and anti-democratic populism.  Ordinarily, this should have no place in a properly functioning liberal democracy. But as a nation we are in a strange conjuncture.

It is to be acknowledged that El-Rufai has used this novel template to telling effect in his Kaduna State. But the gory backlash is there for all to see. From Kaduna city to the southernmost perimeter, the entire state is foaming in blood and mayhem. The massive alienation arising from in your face political exclusion and the primordial hostility aroused by the fear of hegemony-driven enslavement has turned Kaduna state into an apocalyptic killing field.

It is unfortunate that both the weak and vacillating apex leadership of the APC and the traditional emirati of the old northern region could not dissuade the governor from this Hitlerite quest for lebensraum in all its atavistic crudity particularly in a multi-ethnic, multi-religion and multi-cultural nation-state brimming with ancestral memory of unrelenting conquest and domination.

It is a measure of that profound alienation and loss of hope in national consensus that normally sedate and temperate southern Kaduna leaders who could have been cultivated and encouraged to lead their affronted people back to the negotiating table are now openly up in arms against both the Kaduna state and the Nigerian nation at large.

If this poisonous politics of exclusion based on ethnic and religious exceptionalism is allowed to seep into the national arteries in the post-Buhari dispensation, the fate of Nigeria may be worse than the plight of contemporary Lebanon.  There should be no equivocation about that one, and Nasir el-Rufai may well be the last Kaiser of Kaduna state.

It was once said of a famous British politician that he was his own worst enemy, whereupon his bitterest political enemy shot back with unremitting bile: “No he ain’t . Not while I am alive!” It is possible that like the Anglo-Saxon politico, el-Rufai is not his own worst enemy.  In a public career spanning two decades, he has done enough to attract hostility and ill-will to himself to last longer than a lifetime.

This morning, we bring you the piece on Malam Nasir El-Rufai first published on this page twelve years ago in May, 2008.

 

 

As El-Rufai unravels….

 

For Malam Nasir El-Rufai, the diminutive but feisty former boss of the Federal Capital Authority, it is time for roosting chicks. El-Rufai’s oversized ego and self-importance are inversely proportional to his under-sized frame. But even as an undergraduate, he was not beyond a clever resort to self-help and capacity building. Acquiring a couple of platform shoes to boost things, Rufai also acquired the nickname “Giant” in the process.

Poor Giant. It has been a gigantic unravelling. By the time the smoke cleared from his tempestuous grilling by the Senate Committee on plot allocations in the Federal Capital Territory, El-Rufai’s reputation as a squeaky clean patriot and his self-advertised integrity had been so severely battered that he is unlikely to recover from the damning opprobrium. What remained in public view was the clever resort to self-help, the maximum capacity building and the hypocritical and vain grandstanding.

Both El-Rufai and his hostile interlocutors emerged from the rubble of shame and bureaucratic sadism holding the grenade of Mutually Assured Destruction. Neither side was willing to press home. The pint-sized bulldozer was evidently aware that his interrogators lacked the moral authority and ethical superiority to finish him off, and he baited them endlessly and with savage relish too.

But the damage had already been done. Slumming and slugging it out in the squalor of the moral basement, his foes never said they were saints or crusaders. Such rarified and lofty turfs belong to El-Rufai and his equally diminished and demystified patron. Let everybody answer their father’s name.

Readers of this column should have noticed that it hardly concentrates on the individual however exceptional except when such individuals illuminate the social and political process. For us, individuals are products of specific social and historical formations. Such formations are more important than the aberrant personalities they often throw up.  So it is with El-Rufai.

This piece seeks to enlighten us about how a project and process supposedly driven by high-minded and reform-minded apostles of modernisation can also be powered by a feudal and authoritarian mind-set so severe and limiting that it returns to scupper the benefits.

Secondly, we seek to show that no matter how an individual is deluded by his delusions, or manipulated by his own manipulations, such an individual cannot prevent certain give-away lapses that tend to reveal his true character.

By the time Nasir El-Rufai literally crashed on the Federal scene, he had already acquired a reputation for not taking hostages. He talked tough and acted tougher. There was a messianic, if slightly manic, glint to his otherwise cold ruthless stare. The times were rough. The stakes were high. The adrenalin matched the zeal, sometimes leading to wild, unprovoked outbursts and petulant tirades against real and imaginary enemies. But give it to the boy. Give it to the runt-sized tyrant that he had star quality.

At the end of General Obasanjo’s first term in office, there emerged a coterie of reform-minded technocrats who were said to have the ears of the big man. Arguably, Nasir El-Rufai was the blue-eyed golden boy of the lot. He was said to be the lynchpin of the group and its mobilising catalyst.

It was widely believed that El-Rufai was part of the inner caucus of a new group of technocratic young Turks from the north who had vowed to seize the region by the scruff of the neck and drag out of its feudal time warp into modernity screaming and kicking. They were the new missionaries of the Bretton Wood complex, and they would exemplify the saying that a little learning is very dangerous.

But at the beginning, it seemed that El-Rufai could do no wrong. Privatization was the buzzword of the new Economics of compulsory anorexia. The massively corrupt and overfed state with its appallingly inefficient public sector were the twin-culprit. Together, they had stifled and strangulated daring individual initiative and private creative enterprise.

After several attempts to launch public telephony in which the money simply disappeared into the pockets of crooks, the entire country was at last whirring and whizzing with the sound of the mobile phone, thanks to the brisk dismantling of the monopoly of the crook-infested NITEL.

If Proudhon had said that all private property is theft, El-Rufai now said that all public property is a worse form of thievery. As the boss of the BPE, the golden boy presided over the most massive transfer of public property and patrimony ever witnessed in Africa.

No matter the murmurs and whispers of protests, particularly from a sector of the country notorious for its aristocratic languor and princely sedation, the results were there for everybody to see in the telecommunication revolution, the gigantic strides in banking, the explosion in private initiative and the emergence of a new class of super rich Nigerians.

At this point, an influential and powerful Vice President Atiku Abubakar who mounted a sustained political offensive against the lethargic indolence of the old guard protected El-Rufai’s political flanks. Such were the stakes that it was not unusual for the big boss himself to weigh into the ring with customary abrasive contempt. Famously, Obasanjo dismissed Professor Sam Aluko, the respected economic nationalist of the old Keynesian school, as a victim of senility.

Meanwhile in the other sector of the intra-elite war, the golden boy was making hay with his hunting bag bulging with the scalpels of unwary victims. The fear of El-Rufai became the beginning of wisdom. If many found his combination of arrogance and caustic incivility a little off putting, there were also those who secretly applauded his zest and plucky irreverence. The pocket pugilist spoke the minds of many Nigerians when he dismissed the then senate as a consortium of certified crooks.

Still the doubts and dismay persisted. It is said that humility is the homage exceptional endowments must pay to nature and society. For every gifted chap who comes through the grim factory of human endeavour, there are thousands equally talented who went under.

There were many who find El-Rufai’s sense of entitlement as brazen as it is bizarre and baffling, a telling hangover from a feudal worldview in which the privileged few have a right to trample over others not so privileged. This feudal and authoritarian mind-set, so memorably incompatible with the egalitarian tenets of modernity, is the source of El-Rufai’s eventual comeuppance and brisk unravelling.

El-Rufai truly came into his own as the minister of the Federal Capital Territory. But it was also here that the glaring defects of character would cause much misgiving and lead to his eventual downfall. His remaining admirers insist that you cannot have omelette without breaking eggs and that their man has sanitised and brought municipal plausibility to Abuja.

While this is arguable, the social and political costs have been staggering. It would have been better to hasten more slowly until certain safety valves were put in place for the victims of mass displacement and dispersal.

Of course, the need for social amelioration is anathema to the worldview of the feudal-military complex and social justice does not exist in the Neo-con dictionary. But the fact remains that certain social injuries and ancestral feuds threaten social cohesion and harmony for generations to come, requiring despotic brutality and the abolition of the electorate to manage.

As revealed by the committee, the pattern of land redistribution in Abuja shows El-Rufai at his lying and dissembling worst, a nauseating and offensive public spectacle and a specimen of the worst form of official perfidy. It is the most outlandish instance of land racketeering in the history of the country.

What El-Rufai has presided over is not the sanitization of Abuja but the forcible expropriation and redistribution of private and public property to a new class of landed gentry which is incompatible with the logic of modernisation he has so blithely trumpeted. His personal interests and private animosities loomed large in what ought to be public duty.

After the damning exposure, it was obvious that the bubble has burst and that the masquerade has been disrobed. Despite his hollow hypocritical posturing, it was clear that El-Rufai, like his former boss, has suffered prohibitive collateral damage.

In a classic case of dramatic irony, he vowed never to go near public office again. He was merely echoing the thought of millions of compatriots. To echo David Halberstam, Obasanjo’s best have not been the brightest and his brightest have not been the best.

 

• First published in May, 2008.

 

Stop press:  Okon launches COACOJ

Just as we are about to put this to bed, reports came of a new group calling itself Coalition Against Criminals Out Of Jail (COACOJ) with a person calling himself  Commandant Ayahtoni  Hiroshima, aka Cockroach, as convener and coordinator. Lo!! It was the crazy boy Okon.  Fielding questions from eager reporters in a language he called Maggot English, Okon launched into a tirade.

“Ma people, ma people, as dem corovirus of corruption and dem Covid-419 don infected dem Nigerian kontri, he be like if say dem kriminal outside jail come boku pass dem Kriminal inside, so make gobment release dem prisoner inside dem jail kiakia and put dem proper prisoner inside, oderwise katakata go burst for obodo”.

 

Tatalo Alamu

 

 

Just as we are about to put this to bed, reports came of a new group calling itself Coalition Against Criminals Out Of Jail (COACOJ) with a person calling himself  Commandant Ayahtoni  Hiroshima, aka Cockroach, as convener and coordinator. Lo!! It was the crazy boy Okon.  Fielding questions from eager reporters in a language he called Maggot English, Okon launched into a tirade.

“Ma people, ma people, as dem corovirus of corruption and dem Covid-419 don infected dem Nigerian kontri, he be like if say dem kriminal outside jail come boku pass dem Kriminal inside, so make gobment release dem prisoner inside dem jail kiakia and put dem proper prisoner inside, oderwise katakata go burst for obodo”.

 

• Manna from hell

By Tatalo Alamu

“When flies are eating away at a mad man nobody complains. It is when a mad man begins to eat flies in revenge that eyebrows are raised.”—— Yoruba proverb.

The coup in Mali this past week has opened the vista for interrogating and re-evaluating the problems and prospects of the democratisation project on the West African corridor against a background of sharp leadership decline, spellbinding corruption and a rising wave of disaffection and discontent among the youth.

While there is a consensus that military rule is passé  particularly in a country like Nigeria that has gone through the worst ravages of misbegotten military messianism, it is also a known mantra of this column that history never progresses in a straightforward manner. There will always be shifts, abrupt terminations, stalemates, detours, diversions and digressions.

What is important is to keep the eye on the ball. No individual however heroic can stem the tide or argue with the mood of history. It is always better to learn and profit from the currents. Consequently, it appears particularly amateurish and unhelpful to reduce the argument to emotive condemnation of military intervention or anti-military flag-waving. It is far better to put things in their historical and political context.

Almost thirty years to the date in 1991 that the then French president, Francois Mitterand, in a famous speech at La Baulle, alerted the world to a wave of democratisation about to berth on the African continent, it is now clear that Mitterand spoke more in joyous expectation than in acute prognostication.

To be sure, there was a point in the early nineties when history appeared bent on proving the late French statesman right.  Mitterand spoke against the backdrop of two world-historical developments: the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the decapitation of the USSR and actually existing Socialist states.

It was a death pill for dictators on both sides of the ideological divide. African political dinosaurs began falling as if hit by the meteor that was to guarantee their extinction. Among   the early casualties was Matthieu Kerekou, the voodoo-crazed long-standing Beninois dictator, who was toppled in a civil rebellion led by a heroic convergence of anti-military forces.

Next to be sent on exile to Nigeria was Siad Barre, the crackpot Somali despot who had ruled his people with much cruelty and repressive ferocity. It became evident that French-backed dictators such as Mobutu, Eyadema, Nguesso, Buyoya and Emperor Bokassa,  the bandy-legged buffoon who ruled CAR like a Stone Age savage, were about to follow.

But thirty years after, it appears that the initial euphoria has muted and the result more mixed than what was expected. While some countries such as Ghana, Senegal, Botswana, Tanzania and Morocco have held out as some shining beacons of decent democratic rule, others have stalled in democratic momentum while in a few the old autocrats appear to have had their way. It is within this context that we must situate developments in Mali and make prognosis about the future in the light of what is bound to be tumultuous post-Covid-19 reality on the continent.

While international and continental condemnation of the coup in Mali has been rife, the Malians seem to be on a honeymoon with a rogue military that seem to take a perverse delight in upending conventional expectations about a professional and apolitical army.

In the long run, international expectations of a de-politicised military will have to be harmonised with the local conditions that make the abrupt termination of civil rule such a tempting solution to intractable political problems in Mali. While the Malians flooded the streets of Bamako complaining about the dire situation of their country, the international community, not keen on overturning the apple cart of democracy, kept mute.

In the event it turned out that an already putsch-prone military did not need such a long bait to do the needful. Consequently, the coup has raised several interesting posers about the prospects of western-type democracy in Africa and the long-term sustainability in ethnically and culturally polarized nations without a history of elite consensus.

First, it draws attention to the subsisting military question on the continent as a whole. Second, it raises the spectre of a new wave democratic regression on the subcontinent with civilianized despotism often posing as democratic rule.

Third, it serves as a haunting reminder that in established as well as struggling democracies, street protests are often a more potent galvanising force and catalyst for change than parliamentary quietude and docility.

Finally with the evident popularity of the coup and the Malian military regaining momentum as arbiters and enforcers of popular will, the issue of what manner of democracy is best suited for post-colonial Africa has returned to the front burner.  It is the return of the repressed.

It will be recalled that twice in twelve years, mutiny from the same military garrison in Gati, fifteen kilometres outside the capital has torpedoed democratic rule in Mali. In 2012, a military uprising had seen off the government of Amadou Toumani Toure, aka ATT, himself a popular hero of an earlier typically Malian combo of civil unrest and military uprising against the repressive and corrupt civilian regime of Moussa Traore.

It will be recalled that as Traore’s troops were mowing down civilian protesters in a bid to stem the tide of a political tornado, ATT, as the commander of the presidential guard, arrived at Bamako airport in tracksuits to intercept his outgoing commander in chief and inform him that his long inglorious regime had come to a spluttering end. In 1968 and as a lieutenant, Moussa Traore himself had overthrown the government of Modibo Keita, the country’s founding leader.

The coup has shown the weak card held by Nigeria’s former president,  Goodluck Jonathan, as head of the negotiating team sent by ECOWAS. Jonathan had hit a brick wall when opposition forces known as M5-RFP and led by a locally revered religious leader insisted on the resignation of the Malian president, Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, as well as the dissolution of the parliament.

Jonathan had demurred, rightly in the opinion of this writer, on the ground that this would amount to an undemocratic assault on democratic institutions. But in retrospect, it amounts to cradling a dead baby. The Malian military have no such qualms and have now presented the nation and the world at large with a fait accompli.

With weak and stunted political institutions and without any industrial or economic base to write home about, Mali is one of the most miserable places to be, a living proof that there is hell on earth. Ravaged by ethnic strife, wars and endemic poverty, Mali since independence has alternated  stretches of repressive autocratic rule with spells of military interregnum  followed by corrupt and dissolute civilian rule.

The only exception so far has been the rule of Alpha Oumar Konare, a former teacher of mixed ethnic parentage, who served out two five- year terms from 1992 to 2002 to be replaced by Amadou Toure  who had midwifed the transition programme that saw to the election of Konare after he had deposed  Moussa Traore.

With this dismal record, it is tempting to conclude that the more things change in Mali, the more they remain the same.  Dubbed by some unkind observers as the “Afghanistan of West Africa”, the danger in all this is that Mali may contaminate and infect the rest of the subcontinent with its explosive cocktail of poverty-stricken young population, religious insurgence and a rising tide of Tuareg nationalism that have made large swathes of the country ungovernable.

The French are in effective control of the north of the country while troops of the United Nation are stationed just outside the capital. Governmental order does not extend beyond a few kilometres outside of the capital.

With the military now ruling the roost in Bamako, Mali, in effect, has become a veritable war zone even as its stricken populace cheer up a military that was virtually steamrolled by Tuareg insurgents twelve years earlier but for the active intervention of the French expeditionary force.

With neighbouring Guinea embroiled in a nasty crisis of succession as its president insists on his eligibility for an unconstitutional third term and with rioters returning to the streets of Abidjan as the president reneged on an earlier promise not to seek a third term in office, there is a feeling of Déjà vu among enlightened observers of the subcontinent’s tumultuous and traumatic post-independence history.

It will be recalled that Allisanne Quatarra himself had been denied a shot at the Ivorian presidency on the ground that his parents were immigrants from Burkina Faso. Cote D’Ivoire dissolved into crisis and civil war with its president, Laurent Gbagbo, ending up in Hague for crimes against humanity after an election widely believed to have been won by Quatarra was finagled. In an irony of history, the wife of Gbagbo was seen this week addressing a crowd of protesters against Quatarra’s rule.

For now, all eyes must focus on developments in Mali. In an intriguing development, Mali’s famous religious leader has ruled himself out of any contention for civilian office, post-military rule.  Whether this is a strategic feint to shore up his political capital by creating the illusion of artificial scarcity or a tactical manoeuvre to blindside the watchful western powers remain to be seen.

In an interview, America’s former ambassador to Mali, had hinted that what was most worrisome about developments in Mali is the menacing possibility of the political ascendancy and ascent to apex leadership of a brand of Islamic insurgency as a result of popular disillusionment and discontent with secular leadership.

This may then have a domino effect on already infected and contaminated countries such as Niger, Nigeria, Chad, CAR and Burkina Faso. If and when that happens, the entire West Africa corridor can say goodbye to liberal democracy and the post-colonial state it has created.

This is why it is not always enough to condemn military coups. Underperforming and ailing civilian governments must also be confronted to make them realise the mortal danger they constitute to their people’s secular and spiritual wellbeing.

It can be seen from the above analysis that what Nigeria post-colonial state must fear most is not the possibility of a military intervention but state implosion. This is likely to a spring from a combination of external pressures coming from the protracted Boko Haram insurgency and hostile post-covid-19 realities and internal pressures arising from state debility as a result of incompetence, corruption and nepotism.

The acronym WAWA is from the old colonial saying West Africa Wins Again which was meant to capture the degree of colonial frustration and disappointment with the inability of West African people and culture to conform to and comply with the western standard of behaviour. Try as the colonialists would, the old West Africa system even in its cultural trivia had a way of reasserting itself and essence against Western civilization.

On the face of it, this may look like a most cynical denigration of other people’s culture and way of life however savage and primitive it may appear to outsiders. But it also contains a grain of truth even if it appears initially unpleasant and unpalatable. No matter what the outside world wants or expects of it, West Africa will win again.  This is the real lesson of the coup in Mali.

 

 

Manna from hell

If one were Nigerian authorities, one should now begin to wonder about post-Covid-19 realities and how they are going to impact on governance in this benighted land. As if we are under the additional spell of a metrological curse, rainfall has been rather fitful and in between casting a bitter shadow on agricultural produce along the old corridor of the famed Western Region.

If you are a regular traveller along this busy corridor, you would have noticed that around this time of the year, the vegetation is verdant and luxuriant with farm produce and overhanging fruits as Mother Nature in Africa plays out its allotted role as a spoiling matriarch.  But if you travelled this corridor this past week, you would have noticed shrivelled maize plants and withered vegetation.

It does appear as if creeping climatological changes combined with Covid-19 trepidation which has turned farming into a most hazardous business in the country may end up in the worst famine in the history of the country. If you are a traveller along the Ife-Ibadan corridor this past weekend, you will weep for the country and a people sentenced to a prolonged nightmare as a result of incompetent governance.

It happened just before the approach to the Ishasha Bridge as you bid farewell to the precincts of the historic junction town of Gbongan. As soon as a trailer conveying frozen fish and other refrigerated products overturned and burst into flames right in the middle of the road, stricken humanity from outlying villages began arriving  to help themselves to fish strewn across the road.

It was as if the demon himself had taken over the populace. They came from everywhere:  Oluwada, Ashipa, Akinlalu, Ogbaaga, Kajola, Wakajaiye and Kinkinyiun. The whole place smelled of roasting fish and inflammable materials.

It soon became as surreal as anything that ever came out of the Old Testament and the Book of Revelation combined. Right there in the middle of nowhere and against a background of eerily quiet wild tropical forest, a Fish Bazaar was being enacted. Old men, young lads, fetching damsels, ancient maids and enervated suckling scooped fish with feral relish even as the smouldering carcass of the huge trailer belched smoke and thunder.

It was as if this portion of the road built by the Israeli firm of Solel Boneh had been converted into a thriving fish market. With traffic diverted by men and women of the Road Safety Corps, the passable stretch of the road was clogged with vehicles and passengers who had alighted to help themselves to the manna. It was like a meeting point of absconding war refugees. Bemused and bewildered, the Road Safety people looked on at this bizarre benediction straight out of ancient Israel. A solitary policeman was sighted with his pocket bulging with fish and the day’s offerings.

No, this cannot be true. It was an epic film in the manner of Ben Hur and The Fall of the Roman Empire, or probably a troubulous dream. But it was actual reality which, as Kafka and Trotsky famously noted, can be trusted to progress from farce to tragic monstrosity as things took shape. The hazy twilight of a setting sun and beleaguered humanity against a landscape of withered maize plants added to the sense of fantasy and unreality.

It was a haunting image of a blighted landscape and a famished countryside. If this is what hunger and biblical misery do to people, if this is a sneak preview of post-Covid-19 realities, then we have entered a truly uncharted territory.

On the passing of patriarchs

Tatalo Alamu

 

 

In a society where life is short and brittle, nothing can be more satisfying than being alive to write a tribute to a longstanding friend, colleague and esteemed former comrade in the trenches of youthful undergraduate exertions on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. There is so little to give joy and personal satisfaction these days in Nigeria that when an occasion like this comes along, one must clutch at it like some kind of life support machinery.

Seventy is the full life allotment of every individual. The rest is over-syllabus. By seventy every individual’s report card is virtually ready. We must say virtually because there are a few people who spring a surprise on humanity, whose crowning glory comes after the age of statutory invalidity. But these are mere exceptions to the rule.

The brilliance of the Holy Book on this matter is exemplary: “The years of our life are three score and ten; and if by reason of strength they may be fourscore years, yet most of them are labour and sorrow; for life is soon cut off and we fly away”.

Samuel Ohuabunwa who has just turned seventy is one of the most outstanding and respected Nigerians of his generations. A youthful Biafran battalion commander at the tail end of the Nigerian Civil War, Sam has chalked up enough singular achievements to last three lifetimes. Yet he carries himself with the humility and decorum of the truly distinguished.

Sam exudes the charms and immense restraint that come from iron-self-possession. In almost fifty years of association, one has never seen him publicly lose his temper or engage in a shouting match no matter the urgency or gravity of the situation.

Yet one always suspects that behind the soft alluring exterior lies a steely disposition. There is always something about him which reminds one of the granite determination of his Arochukwu merchant-warrior forebears. If you are not a fool you should know that this is not a man to be lightly crossed.

Fiercely loyal and a worthy and dependable ally, Sam Ohuabunwa is a man of muscular conviction. Yours sincerely should know. He had served under one as the Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the dreaded and occasionally suicidal Cobra News Agency at the then University of Ife in the heydays of students protests against military autocracy and local tyranny at the famous institution.  Unlike most of us who had never seen a gun not to talk of actually wielding one, our man was merely exchanging or changing trenches as the case might be.

It was a great platform for pan-Nigerian elite bonding forged in fire and brimstone. Nobody bothered to query where anybody came from as long as you are unwaveringly committed to the cause. Among us were people from different parts of the country. The only language we spoke was the language of freedom and liberty. Many of these youthful insurgents have gone ahead to distinguish themselves in several fields of human endeavour.

As this columnist has noted somewhere else, the emotional intelligence which made many of these undergraduate rebels to connect with the plight of the deprived and underprivileged so early in life stood them in good stead in subsequent exertions and has proved superior to mere book knowledge and hidebound academic intelligence.

Sam was very much at home in this tempestuous milieu. But unlike some of us who were implacable renegades on the margins of respectable society, the Arochukwu-born pharmacist could slip from the fatigues of the guerrilla student journalist to a perfectly crafted suit on his way to a social gathering of Dolfak or one of the highbrow student clubs.

It was a perfectly seamless transition from apprentice insurgent to the gentleman courtier and many of us wondered how Sam did it. His subsequent success in the corporate world shows a man who can multitask or multi-code as the case may be. What is remarkable about all this is the fact that despite his outstanding achievements in the corporate world, Samuel Ohuabunwa has retained the abiding concern for the plight of the poor and the underprivileged of his undergraduate years.

It is a measure of the undergraduate bonding and camaraderie that a few years after leaving university, I ran into Sam around 7pm at the junction town of Kontagora in Niger State. He was heading to Sokoto as a pharmaceutical representative and I was returning to my base in Kaduna. It was our first meeting after university. I had persuaded him to join me on a tour of all the major eateries of the place.

One thing had led to the other. By the time we checked the time, it was twelve midnight, but we both decided to push ahead to our different destinations. Sokoto was four hundred kilometres away while Kaduna was about three hundred and six kilometres. I had arrived in my bed room in Kaduna a little after 3 am in the morning.

There was no way of immediately knowing what fate befell Sam or whether he survived the rigours of the road. But since he subsequently rose to become the Managing Director of Pfizer, Chairman of the Neimeth Group and Director General of the prestigious Nigeria Economic Summit Group, he obviously survived and very well too. About forty three years after, anybody undertaking that kind of journey would be lucky to end up in a mortuary. There was indeed a country.

This morning as a mark of respect and affection for an exceptional Nigerian of uncommon humility, we publish a foreword written for a collection of essays published to mark the occasion of Sam’s sixty fifth birthday five years ago.

Golden thoughts

from a golden man

It gives me great pleasure and extreme pride to write the foreword to this brilliant collection of articles and interventions.  Titled, Sam Ohuabunwa’s Paradigm: thoughts on contemporary national Issues, these essays are indeed a great boost to all those who have been urging a paradigm shift in the way Nigeria is governed.

It is needless to add that the interventions bristle with unusual insights and remarkable clarity of mind about the plight of a gifted but under-achieving nation.  More important perhaps is the fact the lessons are delivered in a simple and effective style, devoid of pomp and pomposity.  For a man of his towering achievements, Ohuabunwa remains a very humble and pleasant person to deal with.

If one were to dissect Ohuabunwa’s personality, one might come to the conclusion that here is a man of great natural gifts combined with tremendous personal discipline. There are some greatly endowed and extremely talented people who can also be a source of great vexation and annoyance by their noisiness and nosiness. Mazi Ohuabunwa  carries his endowments with remarkable decorum  and immense personal charms. Like all people with a sense of inner self worth, Ohuabunwa does not need to loudly proclaim his presence.

This humility of comportment but not cravenness of carriage remains part of the essential persona of a most intriguing personality. Sam Ohuabunwa is unarguably one of the most accomplished Nigerians of his generation. Many who have been hearing his name as a major player in the premier league of Nigeria’s entrepreneurial and industrial elite would be surprised that he is still under seventy and is in fact turning sixty five on this occasion.

Many are those who in the course of a life time would be happy to have risen to the top of the ladder as the chief executive of a multi-national pharmaceutical conglomerate like Pfizer.  Many others would have been filled with gratitude to have ended as the chairman and chief executive of a manufacturing conglomerate like Neimeth.  Still, a lot would have thanked their stars to have ended up as the chairman and Director General of perhaps the most prestigious and influential technocratic think tank in Nigeria: the Nigeria Economic Summit Group.

But for one individual to have occupied these three prestigious posts at different points in the course of a single life is the stuff of fairy tales; a badge of extraordinary personal distinction .It speaks to rare gifts and rarer emotional intelligence.  Without any fuss or funfair, Sam Ohuabunwa has proved his worth and weight in gold.

Arguably a modern reincarnation of his Aro forbears, Ohuabunwa combines the unflappable and indomitable warrior ethos of his illustrious ancestors with their economic sagacity. There is also more than a hint of phenomenal mental energy, discipline and self-restraint running through these well thought out and well-informed articles.

All of which suggests that Mazi Sam Ohuabunwa’s story is still an unfurling narrative; an unfinished work of art. There may be one or two surprises at the final bend of the river. With so many talents to spare, it is not surprising that it is Sam’s literary talents and writing flair that are being finally showcased in this collection.

For a multi-talented person, the power struggle among various talents may leave a particular talent under-developed or under-reported. Many of us who knew Sam in the university over forty years ago fancied him as a talented writer even though he was studying Pharmacy.

Sam was a leading member of the Cobra News Agency, the foremost students’ newspaper which combined ferocity of social advocacy with a scary fearlessness in pursuit of the truth. If the ferocity and rascality was muted in Sam who came across even then and as this moment as urbane and socially engaging , the fearless passion for justice and equity have remained with him till date.

Yours sincerely should know. While I served as Editor- in- Chief, Sam was Deputy Editor in chief. I had no hesitation or reservation in handing over to him whatsoever.  In advocacy and adversity, we had bonded well together and formed a friendship which transcended the narrow confines of tribe, tongue and religion. The old university system in Nigeria provided a platform for elite bonding whose redemptive resources ought to have offered a lifeline to a country crippled by ethnicity and other centrifugal adversities.

But it is morning yet on creation day, and the infectious optimism shimmers through this entire collection as Sam Ohuabunwa frankly and fearlessly engages the issues of the day without losing his sense of perspective or taking advantage of his position as someone who has virtually seen it all as a policy wonk, an insider player and as an entrepreneur exposed to the volatilities and vulnerabilities of market forces in an unprotected economy.

Divided into four sections, chapters one to twelve deal with political issues; chapters thirteen to thirty deal with economic matters; chapters thirty one to forty with the social, while the fourteen concluding chapters tackle the problems of national developments. Taken together, they present a compelling and holistic worldview of a remarkable patriot who is not only concerned about the problems facing his country but is even more bothered, unlike arm-chair critics, about finding urgent and workable solutions to these.

It is the considered opinion of this writer that this excellent collection of articles would find  an enduring place among works meant to ameliorate the human condition and to warm the heart of the Black race about the possibilities of restitution once we have got our act together. In both practical and intellectual terms, this book is a manual for that historic redemption.

On every page, beginning from the first to the very last, Ohuabunwa’s passion for his country and his towering integrity shine through.  Whether he is commending the conduct of INEC and the dignified compliance with electoral loss of the incumbent in the last gubernatorial  election in Ekiti, whether he is dueling with Chukwuma Soludo or Kingsley Moghalu over the economic fate of the nation, whether he is bravely confronting an errant police cop fleecing the innocent at a roadblock or writing an open letter to a newly elected President Mohammadu Buhari,  Ohuabunwa’s passion and patriotism recommend themselves.

Coming from a less centrist platform, one can legitimately demur at some of Ohuabunwa rosy notions of the commonwealth particularly in a structurally disfigured polity like Nigeria. One can also object to the fact that being close to some of the leading players and points-men on the Nigerian political and economic rail-track, Ohuabunwa glosses over their flaws and foibles or chooses to pass over the sheer disrepute in telling silences. This is however an ideological critique which does not detract from the overall quality of this impressive collection.

Ohuabunwa writes with ease, facility and flair, and with the surgical precision of an uncluttered mind.  The result is a very serious work which is also very accessible and reader-friendly. This collection of articles is highly recommended to our policy planners, our political class and bureaucratic elite. May we all live to see the Nigeria of our dream.

 

 

On the passing of patriarchs

 

Some major masquerades have just departed the forested pavilion. As the avalanche of death and dying continues to wreak havoc on our blighted landscape, the Black race mourns its illustrious children. The new normal is turning out to be quite abnormal in terms of human casualty. The appetite of Covid-19 for human victuals remains undiminished despite heroic efforts.

As we have noted in this column once, our perception of death and dying is undergoing a revolutionary shift. In a society that has been subjected to a systematic dehumanization by viral and human pandemics, the old feudal terror code that admonishes us not to speak ill of the dead is becoming passé.

But certain codes of conduct remain impregnable, such as honour for the honourable dead. In the past fortnight the larger Black community has lost three of its most accomplished sons to the grim reaper. First it was Senator Ayo Fasanmi, pioneer pharmacist, fiery Action Group Youth leader, distinguished senator of the Second Republic, implacable progressive lodestar and prodemocracy titan.

In a lifetime of relentless struggle, the hard choices that fell on Senator Fasanmi’s laps could be sometimes awkward and inexplicable to the political novice. But there can be no doubt that he breathed his last in the service of his Yoruba people and the Nigerian commonwealth at large.

Next to depart and almost around the same time are the illustrious duo of Ambassador Walter Carrington and Chief Elderman Nathaniel Folarin Coker, pioneer permanent secretary in Lagos state, old Grammarian and epitome of Lagosian good breeding and superb manners.

Walter Carrington was America’s envoy to Nigeria during the most turbulent and traumatic period of Nigeria’s post-independence history when the dark-goggled tyrant ruled the roost in despotic and psychopathic delirium. But such is the cunning of history that the moment also threw up its perfect ambassador and iconic activist envoy.

A Harvard Law School graduate with an illustrious pedigree dating back to the Civil Rights movement, the suave and urbane Carrington pitched his tent with the Nigerian people in their struggle for emancipation from a vicious colonial army of occupation, thus causing much consternation and alarm in the innermost diplomatic sanctuary of America.

In the cloak and dagger world of modern diplomacy, the home country has a way of sanctioning envoys that go rogue and off message. America and France have been known to sacrifice their ambassadors “in the greater national interest”. Carrington was lucky to escape with light repercussion.

As for Pa Folarin Coker, he belongs to the finest breed of civil servants and community leaders ever thrown up by this country. Snooper recalls that in September 2001 after yours sincerely delivered the eighty fifth anniversary lecture of the Yoruba Tennis Club, the old Lagosian got up and asked the audience to thank the speaker for his contribution to civilization.  The compliment is now formally returned to you sir in posthumous celebration of true excellence and distinction.

 

• Okon reiterates his demand for security vote

By Tatalo Alamu

Whereas inequality, or gross disparities in economic income and political outcome, is a marker of backwardness, it is the aggregate of equality enjoyed by all members of a nation which determines how civilized and advanced such a nation is. In the march to greater equality, all human societies began from the ground zero level where brute force prevailed over right.

But while some societies progress, others falter and fall by the wayside while a few never took off, abandoned to a life of wanton savagery by history and civilization. As far as the markers of equality are concerned, it is the Scandinavian countries, followed by Northern Europe, New Zeeland, Finland and North America which show the way forward for humanity.

In the most sophisticated of these societies, humankind has tempered the worst excesses of human nature. Gender disparity and political inequality are virtually non-existent and life is marked by a politeness and pleasantness which make them feel like Elysian oases in a global desert of human strife and rancour. Equality boosts human productivity by removing all barriers to self-actualization while liberating genius and creativity.

To be sure, these societies did not get to where they are by judicial docility or parliamentary equivocations. Often, human progress is enacted against their temperate antics and complicity.  Equality is invariably the product of what a transformative American scholar in a 2017 book described as the “Four great Levellers of History”. These are: 1 Mass –mobilization warfare. 2 Transformative Revolutions 3.  State Collapse. 4 Catastrophic plagues.

Walter Scheidel wrote just before the Covid-19 pandemic which has now disrupted and distorted this century. But what is most frightening is the fact that all the four conditions, either in their embryonic formation or fully dressed garbs, are now present in contemporary Nigeria. We must bear this in my mind as the nation stumbles inexorably towards a horrendous rendezvous with fate.

On Wednesday this past week, members of the group known as Revolution Now returned to the streets—and the trenches—to remind us of unfinished business. They were met with full force by the police who forcibly disbanded them in Lagos while laying a pre-emptive siege to them in the capital city of Abuja. About the same time, the federal authorities raised the penalty for Hate Speech from half a million naira to five million naira.

This goes to show that much as we have tried to rein it in, the phenomenon of Hate Speech remains very much with us. About the same time all this was happening National Security Adviser, retired Major General Babagana Monguno, appeared on television to inform the nation of the resolve of the Federal Authorities to “rejig” the entire security apparatus of the nation. Note that the NSA deliberately avoided the use of the much-ballyhooed phrase “security architecture”.

About a fortnight earlier, the entire security machinery of the government went into overdrive gear warning soldiers about the dire consequences of mutiny and rebellion against constituted authority. This was in response to a call by the chairman of a minor party for the Rawlings treatment to solve Nigeria’s intractable political problems. This is what the Ghanaians call “the Junior Jesus solution”.

All of this reflects the level of frustration and desperation in the land at this moment and the grave nature of national conflicts that seem to defy all conventional solutions. With a resurgent Boko Haram openly and boldly returning to the sites and scenes of earlier crimes against humanity, with banditry, marauding, kidnapping and abducting prevalent in most places and with intra-ethnic conflicts in Southern Kaduna and the Middle Belt assuming a genocidal dimension, the situation is dire indeed.

Very few nations in modern history have survived this explosive cocktail of conflicts. In the interim and in addition to confounding poverty, Nigeria has now become a global poster boy for a dysfunctional society with many nations urging their nationals to give it a wide berth.

Social cannibalism, or the total disregard for the sanctity of human life, is rife. It is a miracle that the stressed and badly stretchered Nigerian Armed Forces have not been overwhelmed by adversity or fractured into ethnic and religious particularities.

But this miracle cannot last for much longer if the season of anomie persists. Since all normal political palliatives appear to have failed to make a dent on the crisis, it is time to begin to think out of the box.  A problem that is inconceivable demands solutions that are inconceivable, according to a famous German philosopher.

While efforts must be made to retrain and retool the military in the evolving paradigm of counter-insurgency operations and asymmetrical warfare, it must be stressed that it is in the total overhaul of Nigeria’s social and political paradigms that the battle will be won or lost. As it is at the moment, the Nigerian political project is threatened by massive disequilibrium.

It is a crisis of inequality in all its economic, social and political dimensions. A deeply ingrained inequality permeates all aspects and facets of Nigerian contemporary life. There is inequality in wealth distribution which strangely enough has little to do with actual wealth production.

There is inequality of ethnic and demographic configuration, inequality of social opportunity, inequality between gender and inequality of leadership recruitment. There is inequality spawned by the contradictions of caste and class. Finally there is inequality of democratic aspirations among Nigeria’s constituting nationalities.

These inequalities fuel national insecurities and the widespread discontent and disaffection which constantly threaten the very foundation of the nation. The situation has not been helped by what appears to be the virtual homogenization of the Nigerian political class and post-military party formation. In such circumstances, it makes it very difficult to hope for a resolution of the national crisis at the altar of democratic negotiation.

This political dystopia breeds bloodletting on such a Homeric scale that it makes the country look like a primitive site of mass sacrifice. Not even the hominid ancestors of humankind kill off themselves with such sadistic and psychopathic relish. The truth is that any society so structured against social and political fairness will know neither peace nor prosperity.

Societies transiting from varying modes of feudal production to some form of modernity are marked by grievous forms of inequality.  To most of their habitants, this structured inequality must appear natural and divinely ordained. Any attempt to disrupt the stable arrangement will look like an anarchic irruption which must be resisted with all the force they can muster or some modernizing insolence which must never be contemplated.

Where such societies are now boxed together under the rubric of a single nation with many other nationalities yearning for greater equality, it is a veritable bedlam of permanent chaos and anarchic bloodletting such as we are currently witnessing in Nigeria. Unless there is a superior force or a master law-giver that forcibly homogenizes the local differences or one that resolves the contradictions in favour of loose cohabitation, anarchy must prevail.

The pre-colonial gains of some of these societies and the strength of their traditional institutions have been wiped out under the template of the modern nation-state. As we have noted in this column once, some of these people were already feeling and intuiting their way to some form of modernity and modernization before succumbing to a historic set back. But there is no need crying over spilled milk.

By forcibly bringing the conclave of a thousand ethnicities together under the umbrella of a nation-state at par with developments elsewhere, the British colonizers might have been serving as a potent force for good. But owing to pettiness and animosity, they fudged the assignment by rigging the power calculus of the emergent nation in favour of the group least amenable to the rigours and rationality of the nation-state paradigm.

The result is a war of all against all such as we are witnessing, with various power groups attempting to capture central power in a bid to mould the new nation in their own image or bend it to their will according to the dictates of their political culture. In the unequal struggle for the soul of the nation, it is the most militarily dominant and most politically cohesive group that invariably comes out top but with a lot of anti-developmental baggage.

But the rise of counter-hegemonic production of knowledge, the advent of separatist agitation, the change in the demographic in favour of volatile youth, the growing national rebellion against stultifying incompetence and the crystallization of a major armed critique within its own region, are threatening this hegemony. Much as it has tried to hang on to power through raw cunning and murderous deception it is now besieged and confronted by opposition from all imaginable angles.

This is why twenty one years after the departure of the military, Nigeria currently resembles an anarchic jungle with the political elite neither able to consolidate on the gains of civil rule nor sufficiently motivated to move beyond the charade and chicanery of empty electoralism in order to face squarely the real problems confronting the country.

The rowdy stirrings we are witnessing on our streets, the murders in our forests, the carnage in Southern Zaria and the Middle Belt, the resurgence of Boko Haram, the arrant bestiality and wanton cruelty that have engulfed the nation in recent times bear witness to this spreading anarchy and its toxic pathologies. America has now sounded the warning that Al Qaeda has already insinuated itself into the conflict and is fully embedded. The vulture never misses the smell.

It promises to be a major collision of altars the likes of which has never been seen on the continent of Africa. If Nigeria is to survive in its present format, it will need to be completely rethought, reimagined and re-envisioned.  Anything short of this will merely accelerate the inexorable descent into a bottomless pit.

Old solutions and grandstanding rhetoric which promise a lot and deliver nothing in the long run will no longer do. What is required to head off the apocalyptic nightmare is visionary leadership and far-sighted statesmanship. Unfortunately, that appears to be in very short supply at the moment.

 

 

Okon reiterates his demand for security vote

A day after the latest outing of the amorphous group known as Revolution Now was thwarted by heavy-handed police presence, yours sincerely sat in his study meditating about the plight of good old revolution in the hands of revolutionary apprentices and novices of state implosion.

It was a far cry from the storming of the Bastille by an irate French mob or the scaling of the Winter Palace by a hardy Russian proletariat primed to punitive exertion against a decaying feudal behemoth. But it was a good reminder of unfinished business and how vulnerable to sustained assault the Nigerian post-colonial state has become. Something must give eventually, and we live in interesting times.

Thinking about all this, one recalled an event from the French Fifth Republic and General Charles de Gaulle its prime instigator and law-giver. After one of the numerous attempts on his life was foiled, the great French leader was promptly ferried away in a blaze of gunfire.

But the car taking him to safety suddenly suffered a tyre deflation which made De Gaulle a sitting duck had his assailants been more diligent in pursuit. Upon being dragged out of the car, De Gaulle wryly noted that those who were trying to save his life were as incompetent as those who were trying to kill him.

It was at this point that Okon barged in without any prior invitation. As the Covid-19 scourge appeared to be miraculously receding, Okon was in an upbeat mood. Life was gradually returning to normal or what is now known as the new normal. The markets are thriving again and Okon is back to his sharp ways and pickpocketing bravura.

This morning as if immensely aware of the latest controversy in the country’s political circuits, Okon waded in with his ribald jokes.

“Oga, good morning. He don reach time for power shift oo”, the mad boy announced looking stern and unsmiling.

“Which power shift?”snooper growled at the mad boy in good humour.

“Oga, I say make I come tell you say dem don bring back NEPA and I dey go switch them generator  from up to down. Abi no be dem power shift dem magomago mala dey complain about? “ the mad boy sniggered.

“Stupid boy!!” yours sincerely hissed at the crazy fellow. But before you could say Jack Robinson, Okon was back to mount a full offensive after switching off the generator.

“Oga, he be like say faint wan catch me and I never thief anything today”, the mad boy groaned clutching his stomach in a mock fainting fit.

“Meaning what? Okon, you better be serious or I will bundle you to the Covid centre”, snooper threatened as Okon quickly came to his senses.

“Ha oga no be like dat, no be like dat at all. He get one Niger Delta elder like dat who come faint as him driver take am pass National Assembly. But as he come reach Covid hospital, he come quickly wake. Dem Covid people no dey waste time for burial”, the mad boy crowed with sadistic relish, sending his boss on a swooning fit of laughter.

“But oga I wan tell you again dat I no fit go market again unless I get security vote. I no wan quench for Yorubaland. “ Okon lamented with a wistful look.

“Okon, just tell me why you think you deserve security vote”, yours sincerely responded, trying to humour the loony fellow.

“Ha oga, he get one, two, three, four ogbologbo group like dat I must to settle. Otherwise monkey go go market and him no fit return”, Okon moaned.

“Name them one by one “, snooper demanded.

“Number one na dem Awawa Boys. Dem get tollgate for outside market. Dem go detain and beat you if you no drop something. He get one Yoruba trader like dat who wan do Shakara for dem. Dem beat am sotey he come shit all over him  body. Kai oga I still dey smell ewedu for him Yoruba shit”, the mad boy snorted holding his breath in disgust.

“Number two”, yours sincerely called out.

“Ha number two na Sergeant Pepper. Dat one na real hot pepper. Na one craze Yoruba soldier and him head don knock patapata. Him de live inside container for market. Him say he don fight for Burma and snake bite come reach him head. Him dey beat people anyhow and if him ask for money and you no give am him go shout: abi you wan commit Kirikiri? Kai I no fit again.”

“Number three”, snooper shouted trying to suppress his mirth.

“Na Market Force. Market Force na one giant Ibo woman with white beard. I no fit look am for face. Na him dey determine market price. Him beat one mala with him turari and mala come faint. One day like dat I see am and he come ask me, abi na me you dey vibrate your lizard chest for? I come pick race, oga”, the crazy boy chanted.

“Number four”

“Number four na Mama Igosun…na..” Before Okon could finish the sentence, the old Amazon leapt into the room from God knows where. As she made to grab the boy, Okon ducked and scurried away.

Baba Lekki fields questions at Okon’s investiture

By Tatalo Alamu

There can be no politics without an ideology however rudimentary or elementary. Ideology, or a coherent set of ideas, drives politics even in its most simplified form. In Politics and Ideology class, you are taught that even the denial of ideology is an ideological stance often masking collusion and complicity with the status quo.

The bane of contemporary politics in Nigeria is its lack of ideological clarity. Ordinarily, politics should be driven by ideas and ideals. In the absence of these clear cut ideas and ideals, the contest for political supremacy becomes a special power project and the parties themselves mere platforms for capturing power.

There is an ideological meltdown in our contemporary politics. There is now little or nothing remaining to distinguish between the two major parties. They are peopled by the same type of people and the same worldview .One appears to be what the Germans call the doppleganger of the other and its great mirror-image. But in the politics of mirrors, even the mirror itself can be tampered with.

This observation is not made in condemnation but in fidelity to truth and objectivity. Only by the most generous leap of faith can we describe our major parties as authentic vehicles for genuine national aspirations. As a matter of fact as things stand, they have become veritable obstacles to the development of a pan-Nigerian consciousness.

However when you constantly short change others, you are likely to end up short changing yourself. In the absence of issue-driven politics, the populace lapse into apathy, frustration and indignation which fuel communal violence, criminality and a widespread hostility to politics and politicians.

As we can see, the attenuation of developmental ideology in politics has severe consequences. First it leads to a devaluation of politics itself as the prime vehicle for ordering the goals of society and shaping the history of humanity.

Second, it opens the back door to some lower forms of human existence by encouraging ethnic exclusivity or tribal exceptionalism, primitive bonding and a relapse to the predatory world of the hunter-gatherer. In the absence of social and political justice and the institutional framework undergirding it, human beings tend to retreat to the safety of primordial identities and clan politics.

There are many African countries, far more blessed with visionary leadership, that have left behind them this jungle of prehistoric existence. Leopold Senghor of Senegal was a minority Christian in a predominantly Muslim country. But through heroic and sterling leadership, he was able to forge an authentic country from disparate ethnic entities.

When the former president of Senegal after two-terms of fourteen years attempted another term in office, the entire country rose as one single unified voice to send him packing. Nothing has been heard from the deluded old man ever since. The political graveyard is indeed filled with the bones of indispensable men, as Charles de Gaulle famously observed.

Sometimes it is the heroic struggle of the people themselves that creates a country out of an amorphous mass. As the name implies, South Africa was never conceived or created as a country with a unified identity. It was the epic struggle of the indigenous people against Dutch settlers and of the native people and the Dutch settlers against British colonists with an Indian subaltern class thrown in which created a rainbow country.

A country is defined in dynamic action rather than by political conception or colonial fiat. Having settled the question of authentic nationhood, the political elites, rather than being embroiled in ethnic gaming and separatist sabre-rattling, can then devote their time and attention to social justice and the amelioration of the plight of the desperate populace. This is either through radical intervention or conservative tiptoeing.

Watching Brazil’s former president, Luiz Lula da Silva, a.k.a Lula, field question on global television this past week is quite revealing of the intra-elite tensions and unresolved conflicts that can beset a country with a history of slavery and colonization.  With its vast multi-racial underclass, its teeming mass of former Black slaves, its impoverished indigenous populace and its privileged and pampered white settler class, Brazil is a deeply divided country.

Lula’s main regret was that he could not secure another term in office to finish what he started before the conservative faction of the political elite took their country back. In what is regarded as a modern miracle of social engineering, the former shoe-maker and dedicated socialist lifted more than forty million of his compatriots from the trough of poverty. The only other feat to rival this in modern times is the relentless poverty alleviation scheme of Chinese state capitalism.

But what is interesting and should serve as a lesson to the developing world is the fact that rather than being bitter about his personal fate or bemoaning the ouster of his ruling party Lula was acutely aware of the historic bifurcation of the political consciousness of the Brazilian elite which predisposes them to oscillate between rearguard conservative politics and transformative radicalism.

This same split consciousness or ideological polarization is evident among the elites of most Latin American countries, particularly in Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Colombia where periods of conservative visioning are usually followed by interludes of visionary radicalism only for the people to tire of breakneck transformation.

The historical evolution of modern western societies is also marked by this oscillating swing between socialist transformation and liberal conservatism. Modern Britain has swung between Labour’s socialist engineering and the surefooted conservatism of the Tory party. The same thing can be said of USA, France, Germany, Spain and post-Garibaldi Italy.

It is this ideological oscillation or what Karl Polanyi has described as the Double Movement that has characterized political developments in liberal democracies since the Second World War. It is a dialectical tug of war in which forces for the marketization of the economy find their vision stoutly opposed by those who seek to rein in the market forces in order to protect the populace against the vagaries of the market.

Such is the elite cohesion and shared assumptions about the destiny of the nation in these countries that whatever their fundamental disagreements about how to take the country to the next level, they do not go about undermining the supremacy of the state or disrupting the harmony of the society.

Indeed, opposition parties tend to build on the achievements of their rivals rather than seek to destroy them. No Tory government would have attempted to dismantle the great Welfarist system put in place by the post-War Labour government, just as it would have been unthinkable for the succeeding Republican Party to undo Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society Project.

Africa—and Nigeria’s—problems would have greatly diminished if its post-colonial politics were to be structured around ideological contestation rather than primordial identity politics where ethnic grandstanding is the order of the day. But we are dealing with deeply fractured societies in which the political elites are bitterly polarized across ethnic, religious and cultural divides.

These are nations yet to coalesce around an existential ideal and with political elites so fractious that getting them to agree on anything is a virtually impossible task. In such circumstances much depends on rigorous pacting before some substantial elite consensus about power-sharing can be arrived at.

This is what is known in other climes as consociational politics, an attempt to bridge ethnic, religious and geopolitical cleavages in order to arrive at an acceptable and equitable power-sharing formula. Without this, the nation is permanently on tenterhooks with strident calls for its dissolution by irate stakeholders who see no further sense or reason in prolonging its misery.

Nigeria’s two post-military democratic experimentations have been marked by sustained negotiations among the political elites. The first one lasted four years between 1979 and 1983 while the second has lasted twenty one years. Consequent upon the tragic annulment of the presidential election of June 12, 1993, the attempt by the military to broker peace and cobble together a winning coalition led to the successful birthing of the PDP government which ruled for sixteen years.

In 2015 this dominant coagulation of hegemonic forces supervised and nurtured by the old military oligarchy came spectacularly unstuck against more potent political forces spearheaded by the man who had maintained a messianic grip on the north and the emergent political major domo of the volatile and combustible western region. It was the first time in the post-independence history of the nation that an opposition group had trumped the hegemonic bloc at its own game.

Six years after and five years into governance, the coalition is still holding, but the ideological vacuum that first surfaced after the coalition’s greatest triumph has now returned to haunt it. Pundits have always predicted that this was the surest route to political paralysis among contending possibilities.

It is against this backdrop of relentless intrigues and cloak and dagger politics that the uproar generated by Mallam Mamman Daura’s recent call for the abrogation of the zoning formula and what is known as “turn by turn” presidency should be situated.

In a long career spanning bureaucracy, journalism, business and politics, the Daura-born man of timber and calibre has managed to insinuate himself into the crevices of national political consciousness as an influential member of a shadowy cabal of power brokers. But more important in this dispensation, the octogenarian older relation of the president has emerged as the nation’s first nephew whose word is almost law.

No one is sure whether this is some elaborate bluff and bluster, a testy kite-flying , a red herring thrown into the mix or even an explosive  combination of all three. The politically weak and strategically obtuse for whom the message is meant are already shouting foul from the rooftop while others with political nous and “cujones” are maintaining a discreet and tactical silence, even as they quietly hedge their bet.

On the face of it, Mallam Daura may be heroically pitching for true merit and meritocracy against the mediocrity and mendacity of zoning which has critically impaired the nation’s development. But coming at a point when the north is about to exhaust the maximum two terms allocated to it under the zoning formula, it could also be a rearguard affirmation and revalidation of primordial identity politics and the most scandalous instance of nepotistic governance it has birthed in the post-independence history of Nigeria.

The most objective way of viewing this is to subject Mallam Mamman Daura and the tendency he represents to searching historical scrutiny. First, while playing politics with appointments and preferment, they have held formal politics and party-growing and nurturing in utter contempt. What is important is to milk the party cow without caring a hoot whether the cow survives the ordeal.

Second, and in fairness to them, they have never been apostles and advocates of consociational politics and elite pacting in a badly fissured polity. In 2003 against the run of play and in flagrant disregard of Obasanjo’s right of first refusal, they pushed the Daura-born general into the ring against his old commander in chief with disastrous results.

They repeated the same thing in 2007 and 2011 against the mood of the nation. Having exhausted their national stock of goodwill, one will not be surprised if they try their luck again against the pan-Nigerian commonwealth come 2023. Left with only the ideology of ethnic supremacy, with their man gradually fading and their talisman obviously waning, they will find themselves pitted against the spirit of the nation they have abjured and desecrated for so long.

Baba Lekki fields questions at Okon’s investiture

 

Ts we were crawling into bed, the full investiture of Okon Anthony Okon as the Babajiro of Yanmuyanmu took place at a colourful ceremony at Orile Yanmuyanmu on the ancient route to the old capital of Oyo Empire. Dressed in traditional regalia and adorned with the ancient Akoko  leaf, the impossible boy was quite a sight to behold. An elated and tipsy Okon took a look at snooper and yelled: “Oga, se you sabi say I don become your oga now?”

An embarrassed and crestfallen snooper quickly disappeared into the crowd before the mad boy could compel his master to pay him traditional homage. God forbid this desecration and abomination. Rather than prostrating for Okon, snooper would be willing to join his ancestors. If this was what things have turned into, the country has truly gone to the dogs.

As snooper was ruminating in humiliation, Okon suddenly mounted the rostrum to give his acceptance speech. After thanking his childhood crony, the Oniyanmu for the honour, Okon suddenly launched into a tirade against leading traditional rulers in the country for selling their souls for a mess of pottage.  Their palaces, the mad boy thundered, will be converted to museums of atrocity for future generations to behold.

By this time, the inevitable Baba Lekki had miraculously surfaced by Okon’s side, heckling the hecklers and cheering Okon on in his social abomination. He was impressive in his native Kembe and traditional Abetiaja cap. As the stale palm wine and prohibited weeds burgled his brains, he became more and more offensive and abusive of authority.  The crazy old man began singing in drunken revelry.

A moye yi je

Iwonna, iwonpapa  iwonna

A moye yi je

Iwonna iwonpapa iwonna

At this point, two heedless and feckless reporters from a local newspaper approached the old man.

“How do you see today’s investiture sir?” they asked him.

“I don’t see nothing. This is bourgeois jiggery-pokery laced with feudal phantasmagoria”, the old man shot back in perfect English.

“What?” the two chaps exclaimed almost at the same time. Thinking that they had a perfect copy, they quickly turned the argument into politics.

“Sir, the senate has just announced a ten per-cent cut in salary”, one of them noted warily.

“I see. What is their cut? “ the old man shot back again.

“I said ten per-cent sir”, noted the reporter.

“No, no, no!  It doesn’t work like that. Mr Reporter, you are a fool. The question is how much cut the crooks took before agreeing to a cut in salary. They must put all the figures on the table, otherwise they are just using Abu’s money to entertain Abu”, the old man snarled with much vitriol as he began to crawl away. “By the way, I don’t want to see myself in your bourgeois rag sheet, you hear?” he screamed at the boys.

 

(First published in  May, 2009.}