The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • The Revolt of Homo Economicus

    We return to this arduous and thankless labour this morning, and to a world out of joints. Almost everywhere on the globe, humankind is in bitter revolt against a system that has failed to satisfy their primary yearning for food and shelter. Economic disorganization runs ahead of political organization. The post-empire model of nation-state is suddenly facing its stiffest and most severe test since the Treaty of Westphalia.

    Even the founding Empire, Great Britain, the one that was billed to last forever, is showing signs of finally unravelling at the seams of ethnic particularities. After the latest Brexit fiasco which saw Boris Johnson thumped once again by a clearly distressed House of Commons, the pound sterling took a savage pounding from the American dollar.  The almighty symbol of British fiscal might has tumbled to its lowest value in thirty years.

    So scandalized was a notable British historian and right-wing columnist by this development this past week that he is calling for a commission of enquiry into the national humiliation that the Brexit debacle has become. There will be plenty of room for national enquiries, but that is if Britain survives in one piece.

    There are many who view Britain’s problem as arising from a dearth of visionary leadership and a fundamentally defective leadership recruitment process which revels in paddy-paddy politics and its glorification of mediocrity and mendacity.

    The result is a parliament stuffed with deadbeats, over-pampered paperweights and a leadership cadre groaning under the weight of its own abject incompetence.  Boris Johnson is a prime exemplar of this spectacular collapse of politics as an instrument of social engineering. The other is Donald Trump from a different route and a different process.

    With their back to the wall and faced with economic annihilation, ordinary folks are fighting back. The misdirected anger has led to xenophobia, extreme nationalism and the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and North America particularly in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Poland, the United States, Austria, Holland and in misbegotten enclaves of humanity such as Albania and Bulgaria where a football match was almost halted as a result of race-taunting crowds.

    In many of these countries, the misdirected national anger has led to the dramatic ascendancy of right-wing populist governments.  Many who made their modern reputation as storied frontiers of globalization now find themselves stoking the global ember of racial hysteria on a scale the world has never witnessed before even as they circle the wagon of nationalism against the onslaught of the globalism and globalization they have hitherto championed.

    The global economic bondage foisted on the rest of the world in the guise of globalization has now shown that it is no respecter of territorial boundaries or national identity. What diminishes other nations and sentences their harried and harassed denizens to a life of economic bondage and global peonage will surely come back to the founding falconers.

    In the past fortnight or so, the revolt of Homo Economicus has taken on a decidedly economic hue. Driven to social perdition by worsening economic insecurities, crowds of protesters have stormed the streets of Beirut, demanding for an immediate amelioration of their economic miseries or revolution, or both. They have refused to be placated by a dramatic slash in ministerial salaries and perquisites and an impassioned plea by President Michel Aoun who also hinted darkly that mere street protests cannot topple a security state.

    The same scene has repeated itself in Santiago, Chile, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Tripoli, Libya, Barcelona, La Paz, Algiers, and in crowds permanently confronting mounted police on the streets of Hong Kong which has now been reduced to an economic hulk of its former buoyant self. In this frontier of western civilization which is itself a product of an earlier wave of globalization, Tiananmen Square may be loading all over again. In many of these societies, economic discontent finds perfect outlet in political disaffection.

    When everything has been factored in, it may well be that what is confronting the world is the decline of the nation-state paradigm which has helped to shape the destiny of humankind in the last four centuries or so. This thesis has been mooted several times in this column. Despite the attendant bloodfest and millennial miseries, the nation-state paradigm has helped to push humanity forward in the perpetual drive to a higher telos. But it is beginning to look like a spent force.

    Yet if the old world is expiring, there is nothing tangible in the horizon to replace it. Or it may well be the case of the more things change, the more they remain the same. Despite the global ascendancy of the nation-state paradigm, it is empire-nations such as Britain, America, Russia, Japan and now China that have shaped the destiny of humanity in the last three centuries.

    Hitler’s quest to turn the emergent German state into an empire-nation ended in peril and perdition with Germany being thwarted by the superior nous of the Anglo-American civilization and the munitions and magnificent fighting spirit of the Soviet soldiers who smashed their way to his bunker reducing the whole nation to smithereens in the process.

    It is no secret that Adolf Hitler privately admired the Brits and the Americans. As a corporal in the First World War and as a ruler of Germany and prime instigator in the Second War, Hitler was endlessly fascinated by the superior bulk and sheer size of the average American soldier.

    The irony was not lost on him that it was the descendants of poor and miserable Germans who were forced by economic necessity to emigrate to America in the eighteenth and nineteenth century who had returned to teach the home country a memorable lesson.  Globalization in its homeward journey may yet teach the western world an unforgettable lesson in reverse colonization.

    In keeping with the global play of irony and history’s great sense of humour, the Russians seem to have a new Tsar in Vladimir Putin having driven the Romanov clan out of the Winter Palace. Driven by an injured sense of Slavic nationalism, Putin has managed to put Russia on a sound economic footing after the western-inspired reign of economic terror by the local oligarchs.

    Whatever the misgivings about his autocratic ways, it is to Putin’s eternal glory that he has given post-revolution Russia a new sense of direction, purpose and global punching power. Accustomed to authoritarian father-figures from the days of their ancient Tsars, majority of Russians appear willing to trade the authoritarian excesses of the former KGB supremo for rising prosperity and the feel-good sense that comes from purposeful and patriotic governance. There is no xenophobia and insular malice coming from contemporary Russia. It is the economy, stupid.

    Pretty much the same can be said of contemporary China. Having driven their old emperors out of business, the Chinese now have new mandarin emperors firmly entrenched in the Forbidden City. But the new emperors have their clothes on and their head firmly in place. In what is unarguably the most staggering economic miracle of all time, the Chinese leadership has lifted most of its people from the clutches and ravages of poverty into life more abundant.

    Capitalism and democracy are not necessarily coterminous. While the ancient Greeks taught the world that there can be democracy without capitalism, the Chinese have taught the modern world that there can be capitalism without democracy.

    As its economy overhauls the American economy, China is poised to teach the modern world more memorable lessons in global power-play. As usual with global developments in the last four hundred years, it is in the surviving hell-holes of Africa where there is neither genuine capitalism nor real democracy that this global play of giants is bound to be most gripping and engrossing.

    In the cradle of humanity, the law of uneven development which dictates the dynamics of evolution also applies to the paradigm of the nation-state.  While many developed countries are already grappling with the complexities and possibilities of post-nation emergences, Africa is stuck in the groove with most African nations unable to consolidate or break out of the colonial cocoon of imposed nationhood.  Authentic and organic nationhood is either in retreat or in total abeyance.

    Consequently, the normally tortuous transition from authoritarian, military-bedevilled societies to full political, intellectual and economic modernity has been rendered even more traumatic by weak, undisciplined and unfocused leadership given to lethargic indolence and primitive hedonism. The civil populace which could have acted as a countervailing force and power for good is too weak and enervated, too dazed and disoriented by sheer poverty and bitter ethnic divisions to act in pan-national concert.

    If we take Nigeria as an example, it is obvious that what we have had since 1999 is not democratic rule in any sense of the word but civilian autocracy, a hybrid between full-blown military dictatorship and genuine civil rule. The 1999 Constitution guarantees and underwrites this strange aberration and as long as it subsists Nigeria is stuck in the morass of “elected” autocrats, an ideal breeding ground for former military dictators and their anti-democratic civilian subalterns.

    It is only under this hybrid monstrosity that the frantic assaults on the rule of law that we have witnessed, the frenzied onslaught on the press and freedom of association, the brazen rigging of federal and state elections, the canonization of thieves and the flagrant subversion of the constitution as seen in the travesty of impeachment that took place in Kogi state last week can be contextualized.

    If it were possible to put a time-frame to these infractions, one is sure that impassive and long-suffering Nigerians will put up with them as a necessary national sacrifice to traumatic transition. Unfortunately, no such timeline exists.

    Yet unless there is executive remorse and contrition countervailed by judicial dismay, legislative discontent combined with popular outrage, the situation is bound to degenerate to social anomie and widespread anarchy which may gravely imperil the nation in the shortest run. Judging by rising incidents of social disobedience and the sullen angry faces staring you down on the streets, the revolt of Homo Economicus may well be underway in Nigeria.

     

  • The Revolution is Remanded

    It would appear that the “Revolution Now” people spoke too soon and probably out of turn. Five days after threatening to bring the citadel down on President Mohammadu Buhari, it was the feisty and irrepressible Omoyele Sowore himself who was quietly taken into custody in the middle of the night. Many of his supporters, including Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, insist that the chap has been abducted by state agents.

    The fact remains that when day broke and except for a few minor scuffles, all was remarkably quiet on the Nigerian front. The revolution has turned out a squib, if not a particularly damp one. Yet only the historically deluded can rule out revolutions from the affairs of a distressed and savagely unequal society like ours.

    •Another protester being bundled into a police van

    Human societies advance through a combination of evolution and revolution, depending on the disposition of social forces. No power on earth can outlaw a revolution whose time has come or abridge its accelerating momentum. Revolutions occur when the evolutionary process for managing human contradictions has reached the limits of its political and social possibilities. It is not a question of prayers or social consultations but of an idea that has reached maturity in the fullness of time.

    On Thursday afternoon, a Federal High Court sitting in Abuja slammed a forty-five day detention order on Sowore to allow the embattled civil rights activist plenty of time to cool down and to engage his revolutionary demons in the solitude of state incapacitation.  Despite what many consider the unjust severity of the order, Sowore remained his defiant and implacable self, taking the battle publicly and directly to his tormentors.

    In the process, Sowore for now appears to have silenced many of his detractors and traducers, particularly the squalid state moles among them who believe that the former student union activist was merely grandstanding and would wilt and wither under state fire.  This was no longer an ordinary act of defiance but an extraordinary rite of passage from juvenile protester to prisoner of conscience.

    As it is, we urge caution on all sides so that we do not end up with a Steve Biko scenario in which the state resorts to the murder of its own citizens in order to impose its physical dominion. This is the point where the government would have benefitted from friendship with influential members of the civil and human rights community in order to stem the tide of an ugly commotion brewing.

    A revolution is a drastic reformatting of time and events by superior time and events. It is not to be lightly toyed with. A revolution is never proclaimed or inaugurated like a democratic assemblage. On the contrary, a revolution is a carnival of organized chaos and supervised anarchy. Nobody is in actual control of the crowd except its own unified consciousness which sweeps and spans the tumultuous tide of human emotions as people surge forward to change their destiny forever.

    If Sowore had hoped to galvanize his numerous supporters and growing admirers by a cult of heroic example, it has turned out to be a very poor and inept reading of the concrete situation on ground with the publisher of Sahara Reporters making out like a saloon socialist rather than a very serious student of the social and political inequities that make revolution inevitable.  For now, the Nigerian revolution remains a pale blip in the womb of time. The revolution is remanded.

    Yet it remains to be said that there are times in the life of a nation when a particular development is nothing but an allegorical commentary on another series of events simultaneously unfolding in the same nation-space. It may not be time for revolution in Nigeria, but it is a sign of severe system stress if a former presidential candidate in a recently concluded national election is calling for a radical disruption of the system in place so soon after the election.

    Whether we like to acknowledge this or not, the Fourth Republic, after twenty years in existence, is undergoing severe stress and strain which requires urgent creative repairs and not kneejerk militarism. All the signals which led to the collapse of the previous democratic experiments are quite visible. Routine and regular elections are usually not an infallible guide of the political health and stability of a society.

    In the First Republic, shambolic and massively rigged elections were still being held in the old Western Region around October, 1965, just about three months to the collapse of the whole Republic.  In the Second Republic, the NPN hierarchs were still celebrating the massive electoral swindle when the military struck to put an end to the chicanery.

    In all these instances and despite the veneer of legitimacy imposed by elections and the substantial compliance with the formal rituals of democracy, the elite consensus on which democratic consensus is anchored has taken a nosedive. As we have said, the Sowore uprising may just be the tip of the iceberg commanding the wrong attention while the real volcano is gathering strength in the background.

    For example, the Atiku challenge to President Buhari’s election is by far the longest running and bitterest presidential electoral dispute in the history of the nation, if the news from the tribunal is to be believed, everything is being thrown in and no room is left for reconciliation. That this battle is being fought between two favoured scions of the northern establishment without any let or hindrance is an indication of the collapse of elite consensus even within the old northern power caucus despite General Buhari’s electoral dominance.

    The mismanagement of post-election bitterness among significant sections of the political elite has resulted in virtual severance of elite commonalities between the South South, the South East and the hegemonic elite formation in the nation. Governor Wike rules very much as if he is the potentate of a sovereign entity with its own distinct identity. If we are now to factor in Sowore’s yellow-shirted urban brigades, something more serious may be loading.

    After twenty years of operation, the political architecture of governance could do with some deeply integrative make-over. Apart from the possibility of several vital elements of the political class going rogue  owing to economic evisceration, the kind of bitterness and rancour emanating from the presidential electoral tribunal that we have alluded to and now the Sowore uprising suggest severe system stress which could imperil the entire democratic structure.

    In sum, the emerging threats to the Fourth Republic can be grouped under five broad headings: Political, economic, cultural, regional and spiritual.  First is the subsisting and persistent Boko Haram threat which represents the most potent revolutionary challenge to the Nigerian post-colonial state ever since its inception. Committed to a theocratic order and waging an armed critique of the Nigerian state for over a decade now, the Boko Haram is more potentially destabilising than anything the organisers of “Revolution Now” could come up with.

    Second is the economic devastation of the northern fringes of the nation as a result of war and endemic mismanagement of resources. This has directly spawned the alternative industry of kidnapping, abductions, ritual hostage-taking and violent robberies. As this social pathology finally winged its way southward, it has occasioned a poisoning of the regional and cultural well of mutual amity with very severe backlash on extant political architecture.

    Third, the overall climate of social, political and spiritual insecurity is fuelling a wave of nostalgic revival of the old template of regionalism and the security architecture which was in place before the termination of the First Republic by the military. This climate of insecurity with the growing mutual loathing and ethnic profiling accompanying it has led some leading pundits to conclude that were the presidential elections to be held at this minute, it would have produced a far more interesting result.

    Finally, the brewing rebellion of the Shitte IMN is arguably the most potent threat to the Fourth Republic both in terms of its local potential and capacity for an international enlargement of the theatre of conflict. By its treatment of the El ZakZaky group, the federal authorities have been toying with savage reprisal from a rogue international consortium of mayhem merchants.

    We have said it many times in this column that Nigeria cannot afford another armed religious insurrection. In addition to allowing their leader to go for medical rehabilitation, something must be urgently done by the federal authorities to de-escalate the conflict with the group. President Mohammadu Buhari will not be in power forever and it is important for the federal authorities to resist projecting Nigeria as a Sunni State which it is not.

    From the above analysis, it can be seen that the Fourth Republic is hostage to misfortune on many fronts. These threats range from the residual, that is, those conflicts already in place before the advent of the present administration.  The eminent, that is those contradictions that have achieved centrality with the arrival of General Buhari on the scene, and the emergent, which are conflicts that are a direct result of the peculiar governance style of the retired infantry general.

    It is unfortunate that despite these multi-pronged threats to democracy and the wider implications for the corporate survival of the nation, the federal authorities have always relied on naked force and knee-jerk militarism to head off the threat.

    Yet the more the government relies on its authoritarian resolve to stamp on the conflict, the more there is a possibility of the conflicts assuming an incendiary cultural and regional dimension which could sunder the country along ethnic and regional fault lines.

    As the nation enters uncharted waters of economic, political and spiritual insecurities in the coming months, it is this possibility of an unravelling at the seams that ought to concentrate the mind of the authorities rather than the threat of revolution by Sowore and his band. They are just the harbingers of more interesting times ahead.

    After twenty years of operating an authoritarian Law and Order semi-military set up in civilian garb, it is now time to boost and energize the structures of civil governance in Nigeria in a way that emphasizes the virtues of conciliation, compromise and consensus imperative for peace and stability in a multi-ethnic nation wracked by tension and mutual hostilities. The alternative is a complete relapse into an authoritarian right wing despotism sustained by military might rather than extant democratic structure.

    If the problem of the last twenty years can be ascribed to the pains of a nation in traumatic transition to political and economic modernity, then it ought to be obvious that no nation can be a permanent toddler in the global scheme of things. No nation can continue to blackmail the international community with the permanent prospects of future greatness. It is either that greatness comes now or international irrelevance beckons.

  • Animal Times in Nigeria

    To Awonriwon Private Zoo on the outskirts of the Ejigbo swamp close to where the best and brightest officers of the Nigerian Armed Forces perished in September, 1992. It was to attend an interactive session put together by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. This being the season when animals seem to be outmanning humans in certain key departments, it will be wise to know where the trend is heading.

    We may well wake up one morning to discover that animals have upstaged humankind in the struggle for the control of the universe. It will surely be interesting to wake up only to find men being ordered about by a freckled Gorilla chieftain whose mournful and dolorous visage betrayed a deadly and sadistic delight in cracking the whip on human hide.

    Incidentally this is not the first time that animals will assume a vast centrality in the affairs of human beings. The ancients were sure that after death humans often assume the form of various animals in seamless transition. Pythagoras, the ancient Greek philosopher, actually opined that the soul our grandmothers may happily inhabit a goat.

    Caligula, the old Roman emperor, did not need any philosophic corroboration. When things turned rowdy and nasty in the Roman senate, the resourceful tyrant did not have to wait for any confirmations that human beings are animals and should be treated as such. He quickly sent forth his favourite horse as senator to “lively” up proceedings. There was a bit of biting and scratching but no one was seriously hurt. The horse kept its title as distinguished senator.

    Now recall that most recently, a fierce and implacable tribe of rodents dislodged the presidency from the Nigerian presidency without a fight. The column of tough combatants was reportedly heading for the city centre in battle formation before it turned back and headed for the adjoining ravines. The presidency declared a week of prayers and offerings before normality—or is it abnormalitycould be restored. Last week, it was widely reported that snakes swept out Ondo lawmakers from their parliamentary redoubt.

    When yours sincerely sighted the Ondo state governor at a birthday party during this past week, it appeared his entourage had been reinforced by a strange personage looking very much like a native snake charmer. The governor’s ample side pockets bulged fearfully with what looked like serpentine stowaways and yours sincerely was ready to make a dash for his life. Having known the chap as a trouble maker in the university, you cannot put anything past the later day legal luminary.

    At the interactive session, the lead presenter was to be none other than Baba Lekki who had dusted up all the legal authorities for a memorable intervention. You have to give it to the old man. He may be a loony crank, but he doesn’t do things by half measure. He had turned the entire house into a legal supermarket for disused law books and other arcana of the trade. The last time he was asked to give a valedictory lecture in Ibadan, the students began throwing missiles into his third sentence. He had spent the opening sentences lampooning and lambasting their fathers.

    Baba Lekki had titled his intervention, On Man’s inhumanity to animals. As a famous Black nationalist, one can understand why this is a matter of life and death for the old Lion of Amunigun. He began by quoting Pliny the younger: “Something new always comes out of Africa. In the month of June, Africa lived up to that billing for good or bad. Humans left animals behind a long time ago”.

    The human species has always trumped its animal cousin in the race to civilization. The paths digressed millions of years ago when the bigger brains of humans began to have telling effects in the race to dominate their environment. Ever since humanity has recorded stunning and astonishing successes in the race to master nature.

    But there are times when animals come from behind to seize the initiative, when their power of empathy and capacity for compassion put humans in the shade, or when their capability to learn and profit from the environment prove superior to human initiative. Both examples come from gorillas in African habitats.

    It was discovered that gorillas in their natural environment on a park in Central Africa when handed a cell phone could actually do a selfie, proud and erect and with a winning and winsome smile. Whoever thought that animals lack the power of communication and self-projection? In the other significant development, a gorilla in the Kano Zoo is alleged to have swallowed naira currencies to the tune of millions.

    The gorilla seemed to have developed a sweet tooth for local currency just as the Nigerian elite have developed a sweet tooth for sweet crude. Put together, the two incidents show just how the other hominids can learn and profit from the technological excellence of the human race while also falling victim of man’s ethical depravity and moral infamy.

    For the good people of Kano, this is a terrible shame. In the middle centuries, the ancient metropolis was without any doubt the greatest trading emporium of the Black race. With trade links and routes to what was then the epicentre of human civilization, the great caravan trail stretched all the way to the Middle East through Mali and North Africa. Now in the twenty first century, the same Kano is playing host in its zoo to gorillas that swallow currency with gastronomic aplomb.

    It is a grim metaphor for the collapse of real commerce and civilization. But Baba Lekki is having none of that nonsense. He was to lead evidence to show that twice in recent history, animals have been called upon to bear the brunt of crimes by humans. The first time it was a snake that swallowed national currency in Benue.

    This time around, it was a gorilla in Kano. It is a classic example of man’s inhumanity to animals. Even the famously ambidextrous Kano State governor could not resist a smile of mirth at the whole development. In exasperation, Baba Lekki called out a dozing Okon.

    “Okon, what is the figure of speech in which a man takes on the form of an animal?” the old man demanded.

    “Ha Baba, dat one na Iberiberism or onomepataricious”, the mad boy retorted with a sleepy stare.

    “Okon be serious, this is not the time for mandibular walkabout. Animals are under serious assault from the human race”, the old man screamed.

    “Baba no vex. You know say he don tey when dem fail me for school cert again. But I sab dem figure of speech when animal wan be man, dat one na anthropopotamus or beast of no nation as dem Fela man go say”, the crazy boy drawled. For a moment, his bumbling inanity seemed to have tripped and unsettled the old man. There was indeed a figure of speech like that called anthropomorphism. Unable to resolve the conundrum, Baba Lekki wailed aloud.

    “So, is this a case of animals becoming human or humans becoming animals?”

    “Ha Baba, na dat one dem fine fine yellow girl for dem Bayelsa Oyinbo television dey call Animal Farm.”Okon crowed with satanic delight.

    But once on the sagging rostrum, Baba Lekki changed tack and headed in the opposite direction of the argument. Given the old man’s propensity for devious ruses, this might have been his original intention. The old man sagged and lolled his way to the makeshift podium even as he shrugged off calls from the irate crowd to finish off the true thieves who had ruined the country.

    “Baba, we sab dem thieves. Dem snakes and dem gorilla no dey thieve. Na dem politician dey thieve and dem JAMB people”, one man screamed.

    “Ha baba make una no go there. Dem Ijamba people don fail me sotey and dem steal money finish”, Okon wailed.

    “Even monkey sef dey return money. He get one time like dat when dem Abakaliki monkey steal dem women bag for market. As dem woman dey scream “ego garrim ooo, ego garrim ooo” and dey roll for ground, dem monkey come pity am and him come return dem bag. But these yeye people monkey kind pass them”, another man raved.

    “Baba, make una wire dem animal thieves well well today oo”, Okon warned. There was so much anger and poison in the air. The crowd swooned with ecstatic expectations as Baba Lekki cleared his throat. He then dropped the bombshell that threw the crowd into mass confusion.

    “My people”, he began with poker-faced solemnity. “I am not interested in all this talk about man’s inhumanity to animals. I think what we have here is a case of animals’ inhumanity to other animals”, the old man paused to gauge the effect of his declaration on the crowd before continuing.

    “What?” somebody raved.

    “Burukutu don smash dis yeye man’s head”, another noted.

    “You see”, Baba Lekki continued without being fazed, “the problem is that the real rulers of this country are animals”.

    “Yeparipa!!!!!” one old man screamed.

    “Baba, dis one na pabambari. It is gaju. Make una finis dem patapata”. A sinister-looking gap-toothed old man crowed as Baba Lekki renewed his offensive with a daring poser.

    “Or have you ever seen another country driven to civil war by cows before? You see these are not ordinary cows. These are abami cows. Among them are Lord Lugard and his wife and the entire British royalty and military High Command”, Baba Lekki concluded with a flourish and lumbered out of the hall.

  • Okon is remanded

    AS the date for the celebrated trial of Okon for bigamy drew nearer, the house has been a beehive of activities with well-wishers and sympathisers coming and going. Some notable lawyers have shown up waiving their hefty consultation fees as a gesture of respect and solidarity with the embattled boy. The entire house had been converted into an Efik sanatorium milling with small creek crooks, drunken hell-raisers and other miserable specimens of humanity.

    Snooper had been wondering why all the fuss about the crazy lad, as if he would be the first person facing the prospects of some spell in prison for amorous misconduct. But the immoral adulation seemed to have gone into the boy’s head. At a point, the mad boy even had the temerity to ask snooper to excuse them in view of the delicate nature of the discussion.

    “Not on your shameless life!” snooper screamed as he was about to be evicted from his own house. One became convinced that a spell behind bar would not be bad thing for Okon, at least this would allow for snooper to reorganise and get on with life.

    The most entertaining but infuriating visitor to the house was Baba Lekki. He would arrive every morning carrying a basket of law books on his bald head and swigging directly from a bottle of illicit gin. Having fortified himself, he would proceed to lecture his captive audience on why bigamy was non-justiciable in an amphibious and bigamous country like Nigeria.”If you live on land and in water at the same time, bigamy is impossible to prove”.

    You could see that he had been refining even this position when one morning, Baba Lekki finally dropped his legal bombshell. “Coming to think of it, the charge of bigamy cannot be sustained against you on grounds of spirituality and nationality’, the old criminal exploded.

    “Baba, how dat one come be now?  You don come with dem jaguda grammar again?”, an anxious but cynical Okon snorted.

    “You see, you cannot charge a spirit with bigamy. As you are Ebora Calabar, the charge is null and void. Secondly, since your grandfathers were from Bakassi, Nigerian laws do not apply to you since you are not a Nigerian”, Baba Lekki proferred.

    “Baba how dat one go be now as I don contest for president?” Okon asked  half-whispering.“How many of the other presidential candidates are Nigerians?” Baba Lekki snapped.

    On judgement day, the house was invaded at dawn by all sorts of ruffians, riff-raff and ragamuffins on the margins of society. They began chanting solidarity songs from the June 12 struggle, daring anybody who cared to listen to send Okon to jail.  When the mad boy suddenly appeared dressed like an Efik chieftain, the crowd went completely gaga. They seized Okon and began carrying him shoulder-high towards the court. Could this be the commencement of the Nigerian revolution, snooper wondered.

    The entire route was lined with well-wishers singing Okon’s praise and asking the God of retribution to deal with his tormentors. The adulation soon led to a fatal dose of delinquent confidence. As soon as the mad boy entered the court room, he sighted a familiar light-skinned policeman on duty .The cop bore a comical resemblance to a recently deposed governor.

    “Ah yellow, you still dey force? I think say dem Sunami don reach una like your tolotolo brother for Agodi. But no forget say you owe me small change from last time ooo”, Okon snorted as the hitherto serene courtroom exploded in laughter. The cop completely ignored Okon. But while they were still trying to restore order, Okon’s eyes lighted on the aging president of the court and his geriatric assistants. One of them was dozing away while the other was battling kola nuts with missing incisors.

    “Chei, na dis Old Peoples Home dem dey call b-gamey court for Yorubaland?” Okon sneered.

    “Who is this fellow?” the old president scowled with impatience and indignation.

    “Sir, he is here for bigamy?” the court clerk replied.

    “And what is brigamy?” the dozing old man asked. The president, a no-nonsense former boxing champion and lay preacher, ignored his colleague and faced down Okon.

    “Youngman, what is your name?” the old man demanded from Okon.

    “I be man, but I no be Young. I be Etubom Okon Anthony Okon”, Okon retorted.

    “I see. Tunbomu Okon. But where is your tunbomu? (drink-sieving whiskers in ancient Yoruba parlance)” the old man asked, trying to inject some humour into the tense proceeding. But Okon remained implacable.

    “Baba, make una remove dem cotton wool from dem ear. I say I be Etubom. I no be Tunbosun, na dem yeye Yoruba singer dey bear dat kind nonsense name”, Okon shouted at the old man.

    “Okay, Etibomb Okon”, the old man sneered but now with ill humour.

    “He be like if say your old head no dey soak petrol again”, Okon blasted. At this point, the old man completely lost his cool.

    “This is a rude and mannerless fool. Let him be remanded in police custody until he has purged himself of contempt”, the old man thundered and rose to his full length as he hammered the gavel on his desk. The fair-skinned cop fell on Okon and wrestled him to the ground. Three other cops surfaced from nowhere to apply reasonable force. The crowd began dispersing immediately. Okon cut a very sorry figure as he was being led away.

    • First published in 2011

  • The Yoruba Question in Postcolonial Nigeria

    How time flies in the Nigerian crypt!!! A few weeks back, in preparation for his eightieth birthday which actually came a week after, Nigeria’s notable political play-maker, newspaper baron and reporter extraordinaire, Akinrogun Segun Osoba, gathered the cream of Nigerian society together for the launch of his memoir at Eko Hotel.

    As usual with Osoba, the whole thing was put together with meticulous and painstaking attention to details, brimming with class and conviviality.  Not known to give anything to chance or mere happenstance, the celebrant himself was known to have slipped out of the venue in the early hours of the morning after supervising the dress rehearsal.

    In the event, it turned out to be a movable feast with the hall overflowing with movers and shakers of contemporary Nigerian society. You must give this to Osoba, there is nobody in contemporary Nigerian journalism or politics who can boast of his vast connections or his capacity for high-wire networking and nocturnal carousals in the deepest sanctuaries of power. Smart, knowledgeable and dependable when it comes to protecting and respecting the integrity of his sources, the Egba-born chief is also a man of immense personal charms and cultivation.

    The accolades, encomiums and delivered tributes were raining down fast and furious this temperate mid-morning. For Osoba, it was a canonization of sorts as a doyen of journalism and as a political don. In a public career spanning almost sixty years during which he reached the apex of his chosen profession (journalism), and his adoptive career, (politics),  Osoba can be said to have seen it all. In the process, he has survived crippling controversies and damaging rumours. As the Chinese will put it: If you stay long enough at the bank of the river, the bodies of your enemies will wash by.

    It is a measure of the vast centrality of Osoba to the Yoruba Question in the combustible postcolonial conundrum that Nigeria has become that his remarkable rise in the politics of his beloved nation should be used to illustrate, illuminate and interrogate the plight of Yoruba dwellers in the postcolonial space named Nigeria.

    In a chilling advertisement of unresolved contradictions and political palavers to come, Osoba’s birthday bash was preceded by a nasty public spat with Chief Ayo Adebanjo, the Afenifere grandee and political pugilist exemplary.

    As it is well known, Pa Adebanjo is a rough and ready veteran of the old Action Group ‘up and at em’ school of political hostilities. He does not take hostages and neither does he believe in the Geneva Convention for handling political prisoners. Like old Joe Frazier, aka Smokin’ Joe, Papa comes swinging in relentless political attrition. Luckily, Osoba himself was a boxer in his youth.

    Yet the public spat between the two notable Yoruba sons indicate the tortuous trajectory of ethnic politics in the last twenty years of post-military Nigeria. The spat would have been unthinkable in the months after the demise of General Abacha, Nigeria’s most ferocious military dictator and maximum ruler till date.

    At that point in time, the Afenifere, as a result of its leading role and sterling contribution to the liberation of the Yoruba race from Nigeria’s military despots, had the entire Yoruba nation under its writ and authority. Its firm sway was unchallenged and unchallengeable except by the politically suicidal. Its leader, Abraham Adesanya, who had escaped Abacha’s bullets by the whiskers, was universally acknowledged as the leader of the Yoruba people at home and abroad.

    Osoba had escaped Afenifere’s severe sanctions by the skin of his teeth over what was perceived as his colluding and collaborative stance towards the much despised military oligarchy. Osoba’s retort was that as a tested politician who had to survive to fight another day, he needed to warehouse his teeming supporters by aligning with one of Abacha’s leprous parties.

    Unable to overrun or overpower Osoba politically, the old men agreed to a power-sharing truce which saw them imposing his deputy. It was a typically Yoruba fudge which was to repeat itself in Osun, Lagos and Ekiti in different variations and variables and it shows in bold relief the clash of political values and the monstrous contradictions of a people caught in the vortex of a multi-ethnic nation in traumatic transition.

    The subsequent elections ended in a massive victory among the Yoruba people for the Afenifere-powered AD. But as it often happens to the ascendant Yoruba leadership after each successful mobilization of the people, the wheels began to come off the train shortly thereafter. As an unstable ideological coalition and ensemble of irreconcilable personal ambition, the dominant Yoruba post-independence leadership has never been able to manage the spoils of victory.

    In bitter defiance of an Afenifere leadership that he felt had betrayed him and had sought to destroy him politically, Bola Ige, brilliant orator, poet and master political strategist, went his own way and joined the Obasanjo government first as Attorney General and later as Minister of Mines and Power. He was assassinated in December,2001. By then, the cracks had widened and a splinter group emerged filled with Ige loyalists.

    Thereafter, a tense truce obtained between the core leadership of Afenifere and the AD governors. It was a case of a nuclear deterrent borne out of the logic of mutually assured destruction. With military precision and devastating ingenuity, Obasanjo was engineering a massive internal fracturing of opposition parties and AD was to bear the brunt of the offensive.

    By early December 2002 when yours sincerely came home from his United States’ base to unveil his latest novel, it was obvious that all was not well with both the Afenifere and the AD. But the tense truce somehow prevailed. At the ceremony graciously and gracefully presided over by Governor Osoba for which this columnist remains eternally grateful, all the great Afenifere leaders were in full attendance: Pa Abraham Adesanya, Sir Olaniwun Ajayi, Chief Ayo Adebanjo, Senator Cornelius Olatunji Adebayo, our former teacher at Ife, and their numerous loyalists.

    The Yoruba forest quaked and rumbled with the presence of these political pachyderms that morning at the iconic Airport Hotel, Ikeja. It was perhaps the last great public sighting together of these Yoruba titans. Despite the stress and strains of untoward political developments, Pa Adesanya was particularly in his elements with his wisdom-laden witty repartees and heavy-duty innuendoes hinting of the need to inject new blood into Yoruba leadership and the urgency of broadening the process of leadership recruitment.

    But fourteen months later on March 15, 2004 when yours sincerely returned to deliver the maiden Afenifere lecture, all the pretences had disappeared and full-scale civil hostilities reigned supreme in Yorubaland. A political tsunami triggered from Aso Rock had swept off all the AD governors including Osoba but with Bola Ahmed Tinubu as the lone survivor.

    The falcon could no longer hearken to the falconer and bitter recrimination was loosed on the Yoruba nation with the Afenifere grandees accusing the AD governors of insubordination and perfidy and with the governors charging back that it was the old men who betrayed the party and the Yoruba nation to Obasanjo’s wily machination.

    A blossoming romance between the old men and Gbenga Daniel, Osoba’s presumed electoral conqueror, could not have been designed to smooth ruffled feathers. The old men retorted that Daniel was a staunch member of the Afenifere group right from his days as a youthful student of the University of Lagos.

    It was perhaps the proverbial last straw. By 2007, everybody had gone their different ways with Osoba teaming up with Tinubu to form the AC while the remaining Afenifere faithful floated a party called DPA which adopted General Buhari as its presidential flag bearer. Meanwhile, Daniel happened to have belonged to the PDP.

    Two weeks ago, in an engrossing irony which underscores the harshly expedient nature of contemporary Yoruba politics,  Justus Gbenga Daniel sat resplendent in the front row of the crowd that came to honour Chief Segun Osoba having teamed up with Osoba to dislodge Ibikunle Amosu and his nominee from his Olumo redoubt.

    But while all this is going on and while Afenifere sustains its blistering anti-Buhari broadsides, it is the much berated Obasanjo who is gaining traction and making inroad into the heart of the Yoruba political mob with his campaign against the “Fulanization” of the nation and the mismanagement of our ethnic diversity by the Buhari administration.

    It is clear from all this that all is not well once again and the Yoruba nation is at the proverbial political cross-roads. Obasanjo must be chuckling to himself when Yoruba governors, in what is known in legal parlance as an overstatement of insecurity, exploded at their Akure summit that they were not bastards. Well….

    It shows the phenomenal pressures building up on all sides. The closeness of the last presidential election in the South West betrayed a Yoruba ambivalence about a paradigm-changing handshake across the Niger which has brought national relevance and strategic visibility to many of their children but which has also eventuated in poverty, general insecurity and looming famine as a result of the activities of murderous Fulani herdsmen and the tardy response of the federal authorities.

    Like all nationalities that have found themselves boxed into a multi-ethnic cauldron of seething hostilities and mutual incomprehension, the Yoruba are equally traumatized by the Nigerian conundrum. The result is a certain ambivalence and vacillation when it comes to the Nigerian project. As people of empire, it has been wired into the Yoruba DNA to have a conservative reverence for the state as the ultimate guarantor of order, peace, security and stability.

    Going by this worldview, order and stability are to be cherished over and above anarchy and social cannibalism. In more than a thousand years of relentless experimentation with statehood in its clinical and classical feudal mode, the Yoruba have evolved away from some of their near neighbours who have had to forge a different route despite physical closeness and geographical proximity. This is a source of abiding tension and mutual irritability, often leading to accusations of betrayal and perfidy.

    The subsisting reverence and affection the Yoruba people have for their monarchs show the lingering ideological efficacy of the old formation despite the cessation of its material and political basis. Last week, it was the Alaafin of Oyo, Oba Lamidi Adeyemi, who issued a yellow card to the federal authorities as a result  of what he called the nation’s slide into anarchy and general disorder. It shows the progressive libertarian streak of the Yoruba nation coming to the fore as they warm up for a final confrontation over the destiny of the nation.

    Yet in all this, there is need for utmost caution so that we do not goad our people to the altar of mindless slaughter in the hands of a Nigerian post-colonial state which has turned out to be the ultimate fascist terror machine. This is not the time to start issuing unenforceable orders. Sheer desperation is not a strategy but a sign of political impotence.

    This time calls for visionary leaders and strategic thinkers. While not being a military leader, Chief Obafemi Awolowo was an exemplary politician and strategic thinker whose choices of political action were always guided by an acute awareness of the balance of forces at play. This he demonstrated during a grave period of Yoruba history in the aftermath of his release from prison and the terrible events emanating from the two coups of 1966.

    Rather than resorting to empty sabre-rattling, those who consider themselves Awolowo’s true heirs must go back to the events of that period and learn appropriate lessons of history. According to a great Chinese general, the best victory in war is the one won without firing a single shot. Here is wishing Chief Segun Osoba many happy returns of the 15th of July.

  • Napoleon Bonaparte and Talleyrand

    “ONE thing that makes me wonder whether there is any God presiding over the affairs of man is the fact that while good people perish, evil men flourish. Take for instance, Talleyrand. He is most likely going to die in his bed “. Talleyrand duly died in his bed many years after, long after Napoleon had succumbed to gastric cancer in detention camp on the Island of St Helena. For centuries, Napoleon’s fatal affliction was attributed to arsenic poisoning by his English conquerors. When Talleyrand was told of Napoleon’s death, the rogue statesman and extraordinary emissary famously described by Napoleon as “ a piece of dung in silk stockings”, dismissed it as an item of news and not a great event. “I am an atheist, thank God”, Oscar Wilde, the rogue Anglo-Irish genius, famously concluded.

  • Ominous Clouds Rumbling Across Nigeria

    ONCE again ominous clouds are rumbling across Nigeria. The lights are going out and may not return for a long time. It is not yet Christmas, but fireworks and huge firecrackers are abroad, dazzling and dazing in their fearsome intensity. Unlike the ominous clouds of the past, these ones are coming with a big difference. All the contradictions are coming together—political, economic, cultural, regional and spiritualat once. It is a perfect storm in Nigeria.

    If there is still anything worth saving about this unfortunate and tormented country, this is the time to pull back from the brink. Unfortunately, never has the country been this badly divided and bitterly polarized. In the absence of genuine statesmen, the space for rational discourse has been taken over by people of doubtful or dubious states of mind and traumatized individuals who cannot care a hoot about the import of their utterances and pronouncements.

    Like a malignant demon, the Nigerian tragedy feeds on tragedy and more tragedies. It has now taken the gruesome murder of Funke Olakunrin, the daughter of the revered Afenifere leader, Pa Rueben Fasoranti, to make everybody realize how close the nation is to the brink.  The nation has pushed itself to the edge of the precipice.

    While separatist howls reverberate across the south, supremacist grunts emanate from the north. Meanwhile, moderate, middle of the road Yoruba patriots are beginning to take an audit of illustrious Yoruba women assassinated in the struggle to rescue Nigeria from the path of perfidy and perdition. The middle ground is beginning to disappear.

    This column commiserates with Pa Fasoranti, a fine gentleman and a refined statesman if ever there is any remaining on these shores. Snooper commends the noble forbearance and calm fortitude of a nonagenarian patriot who has borne the brunt of evil governance in post-colonial Nigeria, from unjust detention and torture by the military authorities after the fall of the Second Republic, routine political persecution for his belief and now the brutal dispatch of his beloved daughter.

    It is curious that no one has claimed responsibility for this dastardly crime. But the presence of military grade weapons and the professional ruthlessness of execution suggest that Nigeria may be playing host to transnational rogue militias offloaded from the Maghreb and their local mutants waging a combination of economic and spiritual terror. It is the last sigh of the Moors.

    The situation has not been helped by the clumsy management of the crisis by the federal authorities who are behaving as if they have something to hide, and the inept attempt at pushback by the police. First, they claimed they have apprehended the culprits only to swiftly retract this. We urge caution and calm at this precarious period when danger signals are flashing for the nation. We also ask our leaders across the political divide against insensitive and provocative utterances.

    The subsisting problem of the nation is not about who elected President Buhari or who did not but our perennial inability to fashion some core values out of this ethnic, regional, religious and political maelstrom which will power national goals and aspirations. Without this foundational understanding, there can be no national development or the entrenchment of genuine democratic ethos.

    This column has been shouting from the roof top that elections do not resolve national questions. In fact, they often exacerbate them. Last year, we wagered that whoever won the presidential elections under the prevailing circumstances may find Nigeria ungovernable. It is not elections that move a nation forward but elite consensus or pacting. Without elite consensus, there can be no democratic consensus.

    Elections are mere mechanisms and rituals for choosing state personnel in countries where there is substantial agreement about the national destiny.  In the absence of this agreement, elections become very divisive, with the outcome bitterly contested and with legitimacy and authority becoming very elusive. Without elite consensus there can be no democratic consensus. This is the bane of Nigeria since independence.

    In the coming months, President Buhari will discover that his messianic self-righteousness notwithstanding, he does not enjoy the mandate to bend Nigeria to the iron will of a primordial vision of the country which canonizes poverty and morbid frugality. The anti-corruption drive would have become a huge joke eliciting nothing but howls of bitter derision and costly sniggering. He will then either retreat further into an ethnic cocoon or become frankly repressive, a situation that will further aggravate the subsisting crisis.

    The selective and partisan outbursts of the government on certain national issues even as the loud silence on other germane issues reverberates across the land do not help its case. The Buhari government has been its own worst advocate in the court of public opinion. It is impossible at this precarious point in our national evolution to attempt to impose any hegemony on the nation based on ethnic, religious or regional supremacy without provoking extreme countervailing reactions from other locations of power in the country.

    Unfortunately for this government, perception is often reality. This is the basis of the current tension and disquiet in the nation with affronted southern elite groups training their intellectual and social media fire power on a north which reacts with a sense of siege and growing encirclement. The unease in the land is palpable and God helps the nation in the coming months.

    The subsisting situation is eerily reminiscent of the last days of General Buhari as a military ruler of Nigeria after the campaign to sanitize the system had unravelled in its primordial naivete with the nation badly polarized and bitterly divided and with what was generally perceived as the authoritarian insensitivity of the Buhari military administration driving the nation to the edge of the cliff.

    At that point in time, two civil war heroes, General Alani Akinrinade and the late Brigadier Benjamin Adekunle, began openly canvassing for confederacy in fierce objection to what was seen as the stifling unitarism of the Buhari administration.  After openly calling on the Buhari administration to bring to justice the real depredators of the nation, Wole Soyinka, the imminent Nobel laureate, forswore any further dialogue with what he dismissed as a deaf government and then proceeded on a quiet, undeclared self-exile.

    In what was regarded by political strategists as a coup de grace, the inevitable General Olusegun Obasanjo, in a widely circulated lecture at the University of Ibadan, lambasted those who think they are the owners of Nigeria, urging them to immediately retrace their footsteps. But the falcon no longer hearkened to the falconer. A few weeks later, the Buhari administration became history.

    Thirty four years after the more things change the more they remain the same, as they say. Nigeria seems to be stuck in a historical groove with pretty much the same cast of actors and the same cause celebre but this time cloaked in civilian garb. Obasanjo is back in the trenches against the self-same General Buhari while Soyinka appears to be slowly winging his way to the muddy trough despite the profound personal animus between the two titans.

    In the case of General Akinrinade, having fought with troops and without troops and having discovered the major difference, he will not be lightly pressed into battle this time around by anybody. With General Obasanjo, it is elephant and castle once again. The pachyderm from the ancient Owu ravines once again has Aso Rock within the sights of his telescopic rifle. But this time around, the nation should brace itself for the endgame.

    To tease out the ironies and contradictions in all this is to be confronted by a recurring Nigerian paradox of power tussle. The trio of Obasanjo, Soyinka and Akinrinade welcomed the Ibrahim Babangida administration with open arms with Akinrinade going on to serve as a minister in the government.

    Yet at the end of the day when Babangida annulled the freest and fairest election in the history of the nation, they all turned against him. But in a great irony of history, they all saw hell in the hands of Abacha, Babangida’s real successor. The goggled one impounded Obasanjo who was only lucky not to have been executed while driving the other two into harrowing exile.

    With the current animosity towards Buhari from Obasanjo and the growing disenchantment of the Nobel laureate with the administration, the wheel seems to have turned full circle.  Yet It ought to be clear by now given the futile back and forth of the last forty years, and the fevered change of state personnel that something more fundamental than mere change of guard is wrong with Nigeria.

    There are certain structural contingencies about the way Nigeria is configured which make it impossible to produce an exceptional Nigerian with the visionary dynamism and heroic nationalistic courage to push the nation in the right path. The same structural debility afflicts party formation and an electoral process in which riggers take their turn to rig national consensus depending on the subsisting balance of power.

    The nature of heroism lies in its cumulative heft and constant striving at the behest of a nation and not in the odd, system-driven political misjudgement. We should not be too anxious to rubbish our old heroes even where it is obvious that their modus operandi and brand of heroism can no longer recuse Nigeria from pressing catastrophe.  Heroes are always age-bound and situation-specific.

    Those of our leaders who could always see much further into the future have always warned us that this grand chicanery cannot be sustained forever. It is either the population explosion and the rise of social misfits by their millions put the entire nation in grave jeopardy or the explosion in counter-hegemonic knowledge as a result of globalization fatally imperils the status quo.

    In the light of the preceding analysis, it should obvious that General Buhari is not the problem with the nation. The way Nigeria is must be the problem. Any leader emanating from the same perverse structure who is deluded enough to think that he is Njgeria’s magic wand is likely to meet a similarly distressing fate.

    We may all have to thank the retired general from Daura for helping to drive the contradictions to their logical conclusion.  Unless the current descent into anarchy leads to something radically new, all one can see beyond the horizon are funerary pyres aglow. One must shudder at how many lives have been wasted to sustain the horrific torture chamber that is about to expire.

  • Okon is Chief Whip

    COMEDY comingles with tragedy in brilliant Technicolor in this magical land. It feels like the last days of the old Roman Empire. Just when you think you have had enough of tragedy some amazing comic relief comes your way willy-nilly. Just as yours sincerely was taking a delightful snooze and catching up on newspapers after the dreadful developments of last weekend, Okon and Baba Lekki shambled into the master bedroom early on Friday both reeking of stale palm wine and bush meat.

    But more alarming is the fact that they were both carrying a huge bundle of premium grade Atori whips or what is known in ancient Yoruba lingo as pasan.  The whole house suddenly looked as if it was about to be invaded by a bicentennial egungun or one of those dreaded ancestral terrorists whose mere presence provoked spine-chilling fright.

    “Okon, what is going on? Are you now a follower of Alapansanpa or Anikulapa?” yours sincerely demanded eyeing the duo with restrained mirth.

    “Ha, oga, no be like dat at all at all. I no dey follow dem yeye Yoruba masquerade . He get time like dat when police come arrest one like dat for Mushin becos him dey fire ganja for corner. As dem dey take am to station he come dey cry say , ha ara orun nlo, ara orun nlo, so dem people ask him to shut up, abi no be from heaven him say he come from?” Okon sniggered.

    Okon, I hear you. But what is this occasion? Why all these whips?” snooper asked trying to prevent himself from bursting into wild laughter.

    “Oga I wan quickly reach dem Abuja. Dem yeye honourable and sanitor don dey misbehave again. Dem say make I come be dem chief whip.So, I wan go wire dem well well. He get one of dem like dat from Adamawa who dey slap women any how. When I wire him well well him go smell him own buttock catch fire. That boy with wuruwuru hair I been dey fear make him no come slap Senator Oluremi. Na mad dog  and na me go cure him madness”, Okon raved.

    “But Okon what is your own in this matter? What is your locus standi?” snooper demanded no longer able to withhold a ringing laughter.

    “Oga several times I don tell you say locusts no dey stand. Dem dey bite. Na Yoruba people who no fit fight dem mala dey say locust dey stand. You see, enjoyment and feferity don finish Yoruba people. Make dem no try nonsense with mala becos mala no dey carry last”, Okon crowed with malice as snooper pushed out the delinquent duo.

  • A Diplomatic Scuffle in Washington

    THE brief diplomatic scuffle between London and Washington ended with the self-dismissal of the British Ambassador to the US, Kim Darroch, on Wednesday. It was the best and wisest course of action to take, the ambassador’s position having been rendered untenable and unsustainable by Donald Trump’s tweet that he was no longer welcome in the White House. In political circuits, this was the equivalent of a diplomatic red card.

    Despite the strong backing of his home government, the ambassador’s position was rendered all the more precarious by Boris Johnson, British Prime minister presumptive, who rumbled ominously that he could not rule out firing Darroch on coming to power. In the event, Darroch did not wait to be dismissed. He jumped, and a distinguished ambassadorial career has ended up in ruins.

    The mercurial Boris Johnson has now moderated his position, claiming regrets over the departure of an exceptional envoy who has served his country with distinction in a career spanning forty two years. Diplomatic insiders claim that the embattled envoy had to fall on his sword when he discovered that he may not enjoy the confidence and support of the incoming Prime minister.

    It is a typically British political execution exemplifying the saying that from time to time, Britain often relishes the public defenestration of its finest public servants in order to encourage the others. The Brexit rumpus and current political uncertainties in the western hemisphere have claimed another major scalp.

    The diplomatic dogfight began quietly enough on Sunday with the leakage of Darroch’s cable by The Mail On Sunday of London by an insider who is a rabid partisan of Brexit. In language shorn of diplomatic niceties, Trump was dismissed as wacky and incompetent while running a dysfunctional administration that is both clumsy and inept.

    Anybody imagining that the vain and narcissistic Donald Trump would take this lying low is living in a fool’s paradise. Hamurabi does not have a monopoly on the franchise of swift and instant revenge. A master of the rapid response school not known for turning the other ear, the pugnacious and rambunctious American president quickly returned fire, dismissing the British envoy as a very stupid person.

    Even by the standards of diplomatic disputes and demarche, this was very strong language indeed. After the limping and exhausted Teresa May administration weighed in on the side of its ambassador defending the universal rights of envoys to send back to their home governments clear and candid evaluation of their hosts, Trump went into overdrive gear with his famous tweet calling the ambassador a pompous fool. Not done, the American president promptly supplied the coup de grace with a cruel personal taunt of Teresa May’s Brexit bungle.

    This is diplomatic fencing at its most vicious and blood-curling, particularly between two countries that rhapsodise their special relationship. It will be recalled that last month on a state visit to Great Britain, Donald Trump, in a clear breach of diplomatic protocols and international norms, openly canvassed for Boris Johnson even as he was embroiled in a nasty spat with the Mayor of London. It was an unwarranted intervention in the personal affairs of a sisterly country.

    Throughout her ordeal in the hands of Trump, Teresa May, the outgoing British Prime-minister, kept a typically British stiff upper lip and remained gracefully demure even as Donald Trump went on a rampage. There are die-hard conspiracy theorists of the cloak and dagger school of diplomacy who believe that the ambassador’s stinging rebuke was a retaliatory rally against Trump’s political and diplomatic hooliganism.

    It is a new low in the special relationship between Britain and her former colony. There has been the occasional dust up such as when General Haig, the former American Secretary of State, was said to have famously dismissed Lord Peter Carington, the British Foreign Secretary, as a duplicitous bastard. The British aristocrat was known to have responded that this was the problem with leaving diplomacy in the hands of Boys’ scouts.

    But despite the occasional stress and strain, the special relationship has kept up over the centuries. Diplomatic historians are already dredging up comparisons with 1856 when the 14th American President Franklin Pierce openly accused Britain of recruiting Americans to fight on its side during the Crimean War. It doesn’t get more sour and sullied.

    In the rarified world political intelligence, diplomatic cables are often written at the summit of the language. In the hands of masters of the genre, they are a wonderful delight to read and a source of rapturous felicity: witty, concise, bristling with lapidary precision and soaring with epigrammatic brilliance.  In many quarters, they are regarded as works of art in their own right, to be relished and treasured by its aficionados.

    But that now seems to belong to another world with the crisis of globalization and the attendant rise of right wing populism and xenophobic governments in the western world and the subsequent mutual self-loathing and hateful recriminations.

    With such desperation and fear of tomorrow, the west has become a bear at bay thrashing about and lashing out at everything. With those they consider as immigrant barbarians arriving at the banquet, there can be no room left for cultured language and cultivated speech even at the apex of governance.

    In many respects, Donald Trump is an archetype of this millennial meltdown, this brave new world in all its unworthy and graceless perorations. The feisty and fiery American president is the master of a new type of politics of impolitics; a connoisseur of verbal violence and crude lack of empathy. In a matter of weeks, he will inherit a devoted sidekick in a Boris Johnson who is only marginally less aggressive and divisive as he is contemptuous of consensus.

    For these new hard men and hitmen of the right, consensus is an overpriced canard of the cringing and the craven. As far as they are concerned, the world has never been driven by consensus but by coercion and crass compulsion. They may be right, but if this is a peep into the emerging world order, humanity had better forget about civilization as we know it.

    The nasty diplomatic slugfest between the American president and the outgoing British ambassador offers a grim reminder of the terrible fate that awaits an exhausted and isolated Great Britain once it has exited the European Union. With nowhere else to turn having abjured its European neighbours, Britain will find itself prostrate in desperate and impecunious importuning even as a merciless Uncle Sam tightens the screw.

    The normal diplomatic protocol is for a country to a have a free hand in naming ambassadors of its choice to another country to represent its interests. But with a Britain powerless and paralyzed by Brexit, America has now unilaterally reversed that global order by insisting that only British envoys who conform to and comply with the bizarre taste of the sitting American president will be welcomed in Washington.

    Pre-Brexit it was canvassed by right-wing populists and xenophobic politicians that Britain was in danger of becoming a mere vassal state of the EU. The great irony is that post-Brexit, Britain is now likely to become a craven vassal state of a bullying America. The order of precedence between a vassal state and a slave state should be very clear.

    We are certainly not far from the New World Order according to Donald Trump. Henceforth, only countries with the economic buoyancy and ideological cujones will be able to look Washington in the face and tell it to go to hell with its envoys. In a revealing diplomatic howler which shows a child-like infatuation with raw power, the American president had even let it be known that Nigel Farage, the far-right hustler, will not be a bad British envoy to America. The poor fellow had reportedly snapped that he is not a diplomat.

    If gold can rust, what will iron do? One must shudder at the fate of Third World nations, particularly African countries that seem to have nowhere else to turn. Having mismanaged their God-given resources thus reducing their countries to a beggarly status in the process, they will find in Donald Trump an implacable taskmaster.

    It may well be that we all need this right-wing chastisement to bring us back to our senses. For now, Britain appears to have shot itself in the leg with the Brexit imbroglio and must be prepared for the consequences. Once again, welcome to the world according to the Don.

  • A Beautiful Life: Yetunde Alatede Ajike, 1971- 2019

    Snooper commiserates with our senior friend, iconic actuarist, hero of press freedom during the dark days of Abacha and avid reader of this column, Chief Ajibola Ogunshola, the Baaroyin of Ibadan and his beloved wife, Chief Mrs Iyabo Ogunshola, on the passing of their beloved daughter, Yetunde Alatede Ajike Oghomienor (April 23, 1971- June 26, 2019) after a brief illness.

    Since the news of her translation broke a fortnight ago, it has been an emotional rollercoaster for many of us with stunned disbelief morphing into dazed acceptance. She was a rare gem; a person of great kindness and exemplary generosity of spirit who showed a passionate commitment to the uplift of her society in particular and humanity in general. Even in the most adverse of circumstances, she sought the best for her beloved country.

    Named after her illustrious paternal grandmother, Madam Janet Alatede, who was one of the richest women in the history of Ibadan, she exhibited very early in life the same extraordinary resourcefulness, gritty determination and unrivalled capacity to see opportunities where others see obstacles. Despite her early exit, the monuments she leaves behind for posterity will survive for many generations to come.

    It was only last October that virtually the entire Aboderin/Ogunshola clan gathered in Atlanta to celebrate the nuptials of Yetunde’s younger brother. Yours sincerely was there to rejoice with the family. It was a great gathering of a distinguished tribe. Yetunde was there in all her radiant beauty and disarming civility. As usual, she took a firm but gentle control of events and was quietly orchestrating proceedings from the background. Nobody could imagine that she would depart this sinful world in a matter of months.

    In one of our private conversations, she told snooper that she was interested in going into politics in order to affect the course of Nigerian politics. To that effect, she had begun quietly mobilising  and had become quite active in many discussion groups and civil society organizations. Only God knows where that could have led her. There goes one of the great women leaders that Nigeria never had.

    There are people who impress by the manner of their life while others impact great lessons by the manner of their dying. Yetunde was a great exemplar in life and in the heroic dignity with which she embraced the inevitable. She was possessed of the warrior-spirit of her illustrious ancestors on both sides of the family and she fought death bravely, closely and almost to a standstill until it proved a bridge too far.

    In death her family has taught us how to reconcile with profound loss with heroic dignity and noble forbearance. Watching the two young children she left behind return from school after her funeral last Thursday and into the stoic but warm embrace of their grandparents was a truly moving experience in grief management.

    Yetunde, you left too soon but yours was a truly beautiful life. Yours was a truly ennobling passage through these shores and here is wishing you a sweet repose in the bosom of the almighty.