Category: Tatalo Alamu

AFTER heating up the polity and sowing the seeds of further discord in an already polarized nation, the federal authorities have mercifully withdrawn their contentious Ruga Scheme. We must thank the almighty for small mercies. Despite all its modernist razzmatazz, the Ruga Scheme is not an example of thinking outside of the box. It is a lazy and uncreative rehash of the old Zango manual of graduated occupation.

Apart from its political awkwardness, the whole thing is also freighted with ethical waywardness. It is said that even President Buhari himself was so astounded by the outlandish quotations and the humungous allocations for constructing boreholes in the Ruga paradise that he threw the papers back at the officials in anger. As we have seen with the grass-cutter debacle, not even the immense suffering of the people could provoke compassion and rectitude in hardened bureaucratic buccaneers.

With ethnic nationalism and negative political consciousness on the rise in the nation, no one with an eye to national cohesion ought to have toyed with the idea at this critical juncture in the nation’s history. Had the federal authorities pressed ahead with the scheme, it would have stripped the government of its authority and legitimacy while rendering the two state parties hors de combat. This is an outcome to be viewed with trepidations by patriots.

State delinquency is not a rare phenomenon in post-colonial Africa. This is why the state itself, rather than shaping the destiny of the nation and nudging it to higher telos, is part of the problem. Nigeria has the legendary knack of flirting with suicide only to recoil once it has glimpsed what lies behind the abyss. The French have a word for people who take delight in setting up small fires just to see how they can put it out. Sometimes, the flames get out of hand and may consume everything on its path.

There are many out there who believe that it may be too early to start rejoicing over this Ruga matter. Out of the bag of mischief and state intrigues from whence this came from, there may be many more in the offing. The Ruga Scheme is a symptom of a more fundamental ailment. Removing the symptom does not cure the ailment. Ruga is a shorthand or subtext for a more foundationally threatening problem of what we prose as misfederation.

The real question is whether Nigeria as a single entity will accede to the imperative of political and economic modernity without some millennial violence and without a fundamental rupture of the nation as it is currently constituted. It is becoming more and more obvious by the day that without a visionary political class willing to let go of the feudal politics of entitlement and its historically superannuated mode of economic production, this is an impossible dream.

At some point, we will have to quantify what the Ruga debacle has cost the nation in terms of cohesion and the fashioning of a true national ethos of politics and economic development. But suffice it to note that the genie of rabid ethnicity and cultural polarization is already out of the bottle and it will take considerable efforts to push it back. This is not just a question of an economic impasse or a clash of contending civilizations but a miscarriage of politics in its fundamental sense as the authoritative allocation of values and resources.

But there is no action that does not generate a reaction. The greatest casualty of the Ruga fiasco is official trust. Getting Nigerians to trust the judgement and wisdom of their governments has always been a Herculean task. It may now be well-nigh impossible after the Ruga rumpus.

President Buhari’s more vehement critics and unrelenting traducers believe that the sudden recusal from the Ruga scheme is a strategic ruse aimed at mass deception. The ploy is to lure and lull the unwary to a false sense of security before coming back with greater force. But they must at least grant him the credit that as a retired general he must know when the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against him. Elite hysteria can be very unforgiving indeed.

The Ruga Scheme, because it was not well thought out and because its patrons were not interested in an elite buy in that can only come from a sustained national debate and rational evaluation, has now become a cause celebre for ethnic jingoists and other disaffected malcontents who feed on national acrimony and rancour.

They may yet have their day at the altar of national disintegration. The incompetent attempt to ram the scheme down the throat of everybody has inflamed national passion beyond a tolerable decibel. This is not the way to go in a multi-ethnic cauldron seething with mutual hostilities and ancestral misgivings.

Those who wish this government well have a major task of reining it in in terms of a worrisome incivility and insensitivity to the dangerous fault lines that have hobbled the nation since independence and which have made authentic nationhood a forlorn quest. It is imperative once again to remind  the retired general from Daura that Nigeria is not a feudal enclave and we are no longer in military rule.

The farmer-herder imbroglio is a pressing national emergency. No reasonable government will ignore its horrendous violence and the fratricidal bloodletting it has unleashed on hitherto peaceful communities. Nigeria is foaming in blood. Humankind is principally homo economicus and every human community will fight tooth and nail to ward off what it perceives wrongly or rightly as a threat to its economic and political survival under whatever nation-space arrangement.

The nation-state paradigm is not a sacrificial shrine which must vaporize the wellbeing of its people. It assumed its global ascendancy over all earlier modes of organizing territorial space simply because it came to be seen as the premium mode of maximizing the political and economic potentials and possibilities of its constituting units. Wherever this has proved impossible, the people cry out in terror and anguish. And sometimes they want out.

In any multi-ethnic nation, a solution to a crisis which fails to take into consideration the political realities of the constituting units and which does not appear to treat the survival of all with sensitivity and emotional intelligence is dead on arrival.  The Ruga Scheme is so one-sided and partial that questions are raised about the patriotism of its partisans and their ability to think one Nigeria. What exactly were they thinking about?

What now remains is whether there are still possibilities of bringing back ethnic harmony to this fractious nation so that it can fulfil its manifest destiny as an African model of peaceful multi-ethnic coexistence and the Mecca for the Black Race. As we can see from the retreat into ethnic laagers, the omens are very dire indeed.

The Ruga debacle has precluded the possibility of a rigorous national debate on the increasing desertification of the northern fringes of the country which is pushing herdsmen further and further southward and into murderous conflict with sedentary farmers with countervailing cultural values and the economic implications of this for a nation already bled dry by corruption and an unsustainable political order.

How do we reclaim our land from the Sahara peril, or is this a divine and natural signal that the medieval practice of herdsmen roaming all over the place is no longer sustainable in a modern nation-state and is a veritable threat to economic modernization?  Conquering desert for productive purposes is a modern scientific phenomenon which has been achieved in Israel, Chile, US, China and many other nations.

It is useful to note that countries such as Rwanda and Botswana where cattle ownership was an index of political and economic power have since modernized their cattle production and have become a shining model to behold.  By the way, what is the economic use of useless, uninhabited forests that occupy a third of the total land mass of the nation?

But far more importantly, the Ruga debacle has precluded a debate into what can now be described as the Fulani Question in sub-Saharan Africa. In many African countries, notably Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, CAR and Nigeria, herders of predominantly Fulbe extraction are embroiled in a murderous conflict with African pastoral farmers that is often leveraged into an apocalyptic power struggle by their more politically sophisticated and de-nomadized clansmen.

It is this political dimension that has brought much fear and trembling to Southern and middle belt political elite in Nigeria. Hence the reflex hostility to and instinctive abhorrence of the Ruga ploy by southerners and middle belters. Contemporary African political memory and ancient remembrances are framed by instances of titanic political struggles and the Fulani will to power and domination.

In Yoruba land, political memory braces with the destruction of their old empire, the entrenchment of Fulani fiefdoms in their traditional enclave and the martyrdom of their political leaders at the altar of modern Nigeria. One must recall the Sekou Toure and Diallo Telli tragedy in Guinea and the Ahmadou Ahidjo and Paul Biya tussle in Cameroon which led to a memorably bloody  coup attempt in 1984 as well as numerous uprisings against Fula hegemony in pre-colonial Africa.

These ancient feuds colour contemporary understanding of new political developments. For example, the Ruga project is seen as the proverbial gaining of a foothold before full political mayhem is unleashed. Yet despite the mutual suspicion, there are West African countries such as Buhari’s Nigeria, Macky Sall’s Senegal, post-Yahya Jahmeh’s and Adama Barrow’s current Gambia and Julius Mada Bio’s Sierra Leone in which Fulani people remain in pole positions.

Even in these countries, the entente among political elites can be very fragile indeed. In Senegal well before a Fulani Macky Sall, there was Leopold Senghor, the country’s founding leader and a Christian in a predominantly Muslim nation, who was allowed to rule for as long as he wished until he chose to retire.

The point is that in multi-ethnic nations with fragile cohesion and frail commonalities among the people once the bond of brotherhood forged in national institutions such as the military, politics, federal schools and prelacy snaps, a nation becomes an armed camp waiting for the next armistice. The poisoned well of mutual wellbeing in Nigeria is a very poor material for nation-building.

One man who would be chuckling to himself through all this is former president and retired general, Olusegun Obasanjo. Whether you appreciate his unrelenting meddlesomeness or not, there can be no doubt that the Owu-born former soldier often applies his native intelligence when it comes to apprehending Nigeria’s persistent difficulties.

In a recent outing, Obasanjo zeroed in on what he called the mismanagement of diversity as Nigeria’s greatest problem. No ascription could have been more acute. It can be legitimately argued that Obasanjo himself is a prime exemplar of that sociological dysfunction. When injured, Obasanjo can be a dangerous customer indeed.

Going to the church to preach the new doctrine of Fulanization and Islamization, whatever the merits of the argument, is not a shining example of how to manage diversity. But in Nigeria all is fair in war since state intrigue supersedes national cohesion. It is only after the Ruga debacle that Obasanjo’s gambit can be seen in its full destabilising import. But that does not detract from the perspicacious nature of his observation.

In terms of ethnic integration, Nigeria has become a classic example of a nation in itself that is incapable of becoming a nation for itself; a rogue entity whose components parts can never come together into a coherent whole.

Periodic infusions of divisive schemes such as the Ruga project merely accentuate the divisions and the mutual hostility. Whenever there is a prospect of a pan-Nigerian coming together such as we saw during the June 12 debacle, the political elite do their best to sabotage it and thwart the spirit of the nation.

Fifty nine years after independence the fruits of elite disharmony and deliberate nation-impairment are here with us. The Ruga Scheme shows how a nation can compromise its future through sheer accumulation of ethnic grievances.

Unfortunately for General Buhari, he has been caught too many times, in and out of office, with his hand in the till of the mismanagement of ethnic diversity. To the delight of his bitter enemies, Buhari often allows himself to be caught making special advocacy for his people and region when he should be making a passionate pitch for the rescue of a fallen country.

While many in the country, particularly in the South West, were still willing to give him a chance believing that his sterling qualities in other departments more than offset his ethnic infractions and infelicities, it is clear from the events of the last fortnight that there is a stiffening of resolve in the South West to do battle with his unpopular policies. With the east and the South South already firmly entrenched in opposition, if the South West were to follow, a major political commotion is obviously loading.

It is a pity that things have come to this pass so soon after President Buhari’s second electoral triumph. If it is not too late, the retired general from Daura needs help to nudge him away from destructive cultural fixations which can push the nation beyond the tipping point.

There can be no doubt that the Northern Nigerian Question requires special affection and empathy. But it must be a hardnosed empathy and affection that drag the north into economic and political modernity. If it must be done on its own terms, it cannot be at the expense of other units in the Nigerian Union.

OH dear, oh dear, yours sincerely can always tell when a people are driven by historical desperation to the end of their wits. There is a feeling of ennui and quiet foreboding about.  You sense that catastrophe is abroad but there is nothing you can do about it. As the Yoruba people will put it, the fact that the heavens is about to crash on everybody cannot be the sole problem of a single individual.  It is called reconciliation to fate under duress.

Passing through Great Britain this weekend, yours sincerely could sense that the people of the mightiest Empire the world has seen so far are quietly reconciled to the inevitability of Boris Johnson as Prime-minister. The old Etonian has all but sewn it up. His opponents can only bite their fingers in volcanic frustration. Johnson already has one foot inside 10 Downing Street. The Spectator, a leading British magazine, has a huge banner of a headline in its current edition announcing the entrée of the contrarian charmer. Two decades ago, Boris was appointed its editor to universal chagrin.

Back home, our friend and beloved aburo, Femi Fani-Kayode, aka FFK, the scourge of the Fulani aristocracy and nemesis of the Bororo clan, has also made strong pitch for BoJo letting it be known that they are great friends obviously from luxurious youth. Not only that, Femi has also let it be known that he is “Brexiting” from an unworkable and unviable Nigeria.

You may not like Femi or endorse many things he says but there can be no doubt that he does not do things in half-measures. He may well find Boris as Prime-minister very sympathetic to the project of smashing up a Nigeria constituted by his (Johnson’s) colonial forebears.  There is Shakespearean irony all over. Old Etonian meets old Harrovian over the fate of Nigeria with the scent of roast beef wafting in the air.

But how did it come to this? How did the world come to this sorry pass? It has been said that the Battle of Waterloo was won and lost on the playing fields of Eton where the Duke of Wellington was a pupil. For the second time in human history, Eton is about to determine the fate of humankind and there is going to be a helluva wailing and caterwauling over there. Boris has let it be known that he is going to crack the whip very hard on immigration.  That is just why he is a beloved darling of the defenders of the realm. Even The Economist chafes at that one.

Readers should now go back to the lecture above in which we wagered that due to the pressures of globalization, the west was about cloistering itself in the cocoon of supra-nationality to ward off the adverse effect. But since 2003 when the lecture was written, western individualism has taken over with each country going for broke to protect its people.

Hence the rise of xenophobia and extreme right-wing populism in the whole of Europe and America. Those who enriched their people and nations in the name of globalization are now afraid of the direct consequences, one of which is the globalization of human movement. But this too will pass. The human spirit will always triumph over man-made adversities. All hail King Boris.

NORMATIVE bounds are the absolute ethical and moral limits a nation sets for itself; the irreducible minimum standards required in the conduct of political business; the core values which set the frontiers for the behaviour of political elite accompanied by the institutionalisation of a culture of “naming and shaming” and the entrenchment and enthronement of a patrolling force which metes out punishment to transgressors with abstract and impersonal rigour.

Without such normative bounds, the nation continually trips and eventually topples into the abyss of moral and political degeneracy such as we are witnessing in contemporary Nigeria. In the absence of such a delimiting map anything goes, the most outlandish acts of political and economic brigandage are possible; the most impossible political fiction becomes actual reality in what has metamorphosed into a Kafkaesque penal colony.

The people retreat from the sledgehammer of a malignant state into the fatal embrace of spiritual merchants and other parasitic profiteers masquerading as religious leaders. It is a war of all against all, and there is no comfort zone or refugee camp.

But history waits for no nation. The irony of it all is that while Nigeria continues to wallow in the abyss of unfulfilled nation-states, its original founders are moving in another direction. Having used up the resources of their colonial creations to consolidate authentic nationhood and establish a unique identity as the bearers of modern civilisation, they are now deploying the forces of globalisation in another direction: the post-national frontier.

While post-colonial Africa remains a weak and degraded object of history without a say in its destiny or destination as opposed to a history-making subject, the nations of Europe are moving towards a supra-nationality which curtails a tendency to national fascism even as the United States is being slowly transformed before our very eyes into an empire in denial.

Yet as we have seen with the example of the Asian Tigers, the nation-state remains the most potent site of resistance to this new imperialism, the most powerful countervailing force against modern serfhood. But Africa is again a passive spectator in a great historical drama. Being the most potentially powerful conglomeration of black people on earth, if Nigeria does not get it right, Africa may have already lost out again in the new millennium. This is why the fate of Nigeria is too serious a business to be left in the hands of professional Nigerians.

THE NATION AS A NO MAN’S LAND

As it is currently constituted and governed, Nigeria is a normative no man’s land; a classic example of ethical disorder. In the final analysis, there are no failed nations, only failed states. Except for the odd border skirmishes, Nigeria has not fought any external war to revalidate its territorial integrity.

Yet since independence, its internal borders have been permanently and often violently contested. A civil war, a paradigm shifting coup attempt and a history-defining minority rights movement have tried to violently redraw its borders, and this is not to talk of countless social, political and religious upheavals. All have ended with Nigeria foaming in blood.

Without normative bounds, preserving Nigeria’s national boundaries is an exercise in futility, and only divine luck has carried the nation thus far. But there are grave signals that even divine luck has its elastic limits.

Internally, the authority and legitimacy of the state and its monopoly over the instruments of compliance are being contested by the menace of sophisticated armed robbery, armed insurgency in the Delta region and a slew of ethnic militias. Politically, the hallowed space of the modern state and its fabled secularity is being disputed by the phenomenon of politicized Sharia and its attendant international concern.

The political terrain is as murky and muddied as ever. The absence of a normative order has occasioned the rise of individuals whose sum total appears to be greater than the sum total of the state itself, a modern political absurdity if ever there is any and a negation of the very notion of the state. These individuals annul national elections with impunity, abduct or murder state officials with alacrity, rig elections with audacity and raid the national treasury with tenacity.

Before them the state is prostrate and the nation is powerless. A noted sociological analysis has spoken of two publics in Nigeria: the one a pre-modern space still regulated by traditional authority and its enduring code of conduct, the other a postmodern Pandora Box of ethical mayhem teeming with felons and amoral zealots.

To these we must now add a third public: the privatised public: a transvaluator  of values in which all manner of social obscenities are foisted on the nation. This is the realm of national contagion, of a pan-Nigerian pandemic in which corruption and graft have assumed a transnational efficiency, in which tribe and tongue may differ but greed and gluttony do not; a rainbow cartel of influential crooks and criminals. Having closed off the Nigerian state and barricaded themselves in, the cartel members have hung up the notice: “eating in permanent progress”.

Any wonder then that the larger society is characterised by widespread insecurity of life and property, lawlessness and arbitrariness and the political space permanently overheated with no credible order of succession, no credible election, no credible party, no credible mechanism for effective change of political guard and no credible and effective alternative? The crisis of democratic governance in Nigeria is also the crisis of core values.

In the absence of a normative order, political disorder is the order. It can now be seen from the foregoing that the threat to the territorial integrity of Nigeria is internal rather than external. One cannot talk about territorial boundaries in the absence of normative bounds.

The endemic crisis of nationhood in Nigeria underwrites the crisis of democratic governance. Any solution to the latter, be it power shift, rotational presidency, one term tenure, etc, is a futile and feeble whistling in the dark without a solution to the former. A closed state hermetically sealed from normative restructuring has open borders. What then is to be done?

TOWARDS A NORMATIVE MAP FOR NIGERIA.

It has been observed that the first time intellectuals attempted to change the world rather than interpret it, the result was a tragedy of world-historic proportions. But this cannot preclude reasoned arguments and the proffering of solutions. The unexamined life is not worth living. The first urgent national task before committed Nigerians is also a humanitarian service to the Black race.

How do we dislodge those who have closed off the Nigerian state and barricaded themselves in before they eat themselves to death or expire at the banquet of self-engorgement without fouling up the entire nation? How do we obtain restitution and remission from them without appearing to cut off our nose to spite our face? If they are to be put on trial for contributing to the economic and political adversity of the nation, we are likely to run into an ethical conundrum.

We are dealing with not just a failure of leadership but also a collapse of the political elite. There are no tyrants without those willing to be tyrannised over, and there are no dictators without those willing to be dictated to. No one has misruled Nigeria without the active collaboration of the dominant sectors of the political elite and the larger society: intellectuals, leading journalists, religious leaders, traditional rulers, student leaders etc.

The list is long and lengthy. If anybody is to be tried for contributing to the economic and political adversity of the nation, a case can also be made for arraigning those who have contributed to the intellectual, spiritual and cultural adversity of the nation. Here, we are likely to encounter the Kigali impasse in which the prisons cannot contain the accused.

Yet somewhat and somehow, the national will must be summoned to deal effectively with the pandemic of graft and official banditry. Being the product of a corrupt and utterly corrupting electoral process, the current dispensation cannot logically and politically be expected to transcend its own origins and antecedents without provoking a calamitous backlash from the very forces that ensured its ascendancy in the first instance.

They should accept our sympathies. But this raises the fundamental poser as to whether corruption can be clinically eliminated under the current paradigm of democratic governance foisted on the nation by a military oligarchy in disarray and disorderly retreat.  He who comes to equity must come with unsoiled hands, since no straight furniture can be made from crooked timber.

This is where the profound moral difficulties facing the current government in its anti-corruption drive must be contextualised and appreciated. But what must not be condoned is the government’s recourse to ad hoc and arbitrary measures in dealing with corruption. The current efforts are too unsystematic and haphazard to satisfy the yearnings of average Nigerians for equity and social justice.

At best they could lead to a miscarriage of justice. At worst, they revive fears of petty personal agenda and a spiteful and vindictive settling of personal scores. The solution, it seems, is to make an example of the outstandingly debased while letting off the smaller crooks with a warning.  At the very least, those who have been found to have misruled Nigeria before and who are still nursing the dream of a triumphant return should be firmly informed that they constitute a normative menace to the nation.

For in their hubris they risk pushing the nation in the direction of revolutionary anarchy and insurgency. Having denied Nigerians their democratic and economic rights, they must also be willing to sacrifice their democratic rights in order to set Nigeria firmly on the path of righteousness and rectitude. If they continue to push their luck, they risk the possibility of mob justice at the very least or the eventual dismemberment of the country they hope to preside over in a worst-case scenario.

Already, there are disquieting signals that the ordinary people are beginning to see through the smokescreen of elite chicanery. As this apocalyptic momentum proceeds apace, the danger to democratic governance cannot be over-emphasized.

As an intellectual and ideological underpinning of the current efforts, the Federal Government, as a matter of national urgency and emergency, must inaugurate a Normative Bounds Commission consisting of respected patriots, which must come up with an ethical charter for the nation. Among other things, this august body must answer the question of what is and why is Nigeria and its manifest destiny as a Noah’s Ark for a black race trapped in the abyss of the Fourth World.

One of the duties of this commission will be to re-examine the distribution of National Honours which as at now reminds one of the undesirable honouring the unenviable; a veritable proof that there may indeed be honour among thieves. In enshrining our core values, the commission must set for itself the task of modelling roles and rolling out the models of patriotism and rectitude who still abound both within the country and its traumatised diaspora.

It must also come up with the machinery for cultivating a cult of heroic example for the directionless youths of the nation. Finally, it is the task of this commission to redesign and reinvent the Nigerian state. The failure of the post-colonial state in Nigeria and indeed sub-Saharan Africa stems from the fact that it was not invented for the constituting people. By drawing a normative map for Nigeria, we will also for the first time be remapping Nigeria for Nigerians and eventually for the black race.

Concluded. Maiden lecture of the Centre for Demilitarization and Constitutionalism, December 23, 2003.

NORMATIVE bounds are the absolute ethical and moral limits a nation sets for itself; the irreducible minimum standards required in the conduct of political business; the core values which set the frontiers for the behaviour of political elite accompanied by the institutionalisation of a culture of “naming and shaming” and the entrenchment and enthronement of a patrolling force which metes out punishment to transgressors with abstract and impersonal rigour.

Without such normative bounds, the nation continually trips and eventually topples into the abyss of moral and political degeneracy such as we are witnessing in contemporary Nigeria. In the absence of such a delimiting map anything goes, the most outlandish acts of political and economic brigandage are possible; the most impossible political fiction becomes actual reality in what has metamorphosed into a Kafkaesque penal colony.

The people retreat from the sledgehammer of a malignant state into the fatal embrace of spiritual merchants and other parasitic profiteers masquerading as religious leaders. It is a war of all against all, and there is no comfort zone or refugee camp.

But history waits for no nation. The irony of it all is that while Nigeria continues to wallow in the abyss of unfulfilled nation-states, its original founders are moving in another direction. Having used up the resources of their colonial creations to consolidate authentic nationhood and establish a unique identity as the bearers of modern civilisation, they are now deploying the forces of globalisation in another direction: the post-national frontier.

While post-colonial Africa remains a weak and degraded object of history without a say in its destiny or destination as opposed to a history-making subject, the nations of Europe are moving towards a supra-nationality which curtails a tendency to national fascism even as the United States is being slowly transformed before our very eyes into an empire in denial.

Yet as we have seen with the example of the Asian Tigers, the nation-state remains the most potent site of resistance to this new imperialism, the most powerful countervailing force against modern serfhood. But Africa is again a passive spectator in a great historical drama. Being the most potentially powerful conglomeration of black people on earth, if Nigeria does not get it right, Africa may have already lost out again in the new millennium. This is why the fate of Nigeria is too serious a business to be left in the hands of professional Nigerians.

THE NATION AS A NO MAN’S LAND

As it is currently constituted and governed, Nigeria is a normative no man’s land; a classic example of ethical disorder. In the final analysis, there are no failed nations, only failed states. Except for the odd border skirmishes, Nigeria has not fought any external war to revalidate its territorial integrity.

Yet since independence, its internal borders have been permanently and often violently contested. A civil war, a paradigm shifting coup attempt and a history-defining minority rights movement have tried to violently redraw its borders, and this is not to talk of countless social, political and religious upheavals. All have ended with Nigeria foaming in blood.

Without normative bounds, preserving Nigeria’s national boundaries is an exercise in futility, and only divine luck has carried the nation thus far. But there are grave signals that even divine luck has its elastic limits.

Internally, the authority and legitimacy of the state and its monopoly over the instruments of compliance are being contested by the menace of sophisticated armed robbery, armed insurgency in the Delta region and a slew of ethnic militias. Politically, the hallowed space of the modern state and its fabled secularity is being disputed by the phenomenon of politicized Sharia and its attendant international concern.

The political terrain is as murky and muddied as ever. The absence of a normative order has occasioned the rise of individuals whose sum total appears to be greater than the sum total of the state itself, a modern political absurdity if ever there is any and a negation of the very notion of the state. These individuals annul national elections with impunity, abduct or murder state officials with alacrity, rig elections with audacity and raid the national treasury with tenacity.

Before them the state is prostrate and the nation is powerless. A noted sociological analysis has spoken of two publics in Nigeria: the one a pre-modern space still regulated by traditional authority and its enduring code of conduct, the other a postmodern Pandora Box of ethical mayhem teeming with felons and amoral zealots.

To these we must now add a third public: the privatised public: a transvaluator  of values in which all manner of social obscenities are foisted on the nation. This is the realm of national contagion, of a pan-Nigerian pandemic in which corruption and graft have assumed a transnational efficiency, in which tribe and tongue may differ but greed and gluttony do not; a rainbow cartel of influential crooks and criminals. Having closed off the Nigerian state and barricaded themselves in, the cartel members have hung up the notice: “eating in permanent progress”.

Any wonder then that the larger society is characterised by widespread insecurity of life and property, lawlessness and arbitrariness and the political space permanently overheated with no credible order of succession, no credible election, no credible party, no credible mechanism for effective change of political guard and no credible and effective alternative? The crisis of democratic governance in Nigeria is also the crisis of core values.

In the absence of a normative order, political disorder is the order. It can now be seen from the foregoing that the threat to the territorial integrity of Nigeria is internal rather than external. One cannot talk about territorial boundaries in the absence of normative bounds.

The endemic crisis of nationhood in Nigeria underwrites the crisis of democratic governance. Any solution to the latter, be it power shift, rotational presidency, one term tenure, etc, is a futile and feeble whistling in the dark without a solution to the former. A closed state hermetically sealed from normative restructuring has open borders. What then is to be done?

TOWARDS A NORMATIVE MAP FOR NIGERIA.

It has been observed that the first time intellectuals attempted to change the world rather than interpret it, the result was a tragedy of world-historic proportions. But this cannot preclude reasoned arguments and the proffering of solutions. The unexamined life is not worth living. The first urgent national task before committed Nigerians is also a humanitarian service to the Black race.

How do we dislodge those who have closed off the Nigerian state and barricaded themselves in before they eat themselves to death or expire at the banquet of self-engorgement without fouling up the entire nation? How do we obtain restitution and remission from them without appearing to cut off our nose to spite our face? If they are to be put on trial for contributing to the economic and political adversity of the nation, we are likely to run into an ethical conundrum.

We are dealing with not just a failure of leadership but also a collapse of the political elite. There are no tyrants without those willing to be tyrannised over, and there are no dictators without those willing to be dictated to. No one has misruled Nigeria without the active collaboration of the dominant sectors of the political elite and the larger society: intellectuals, leading journalists, religious leaders, traditional rulers, student leaders etc.

The list is long and lengthy. If anybody is to be tried for contributing to the economic and political adversity of the nation, a case can also be made for arraigning those who have contributed to the intellectual, spiritual and cultural adversity of the nation. Here, we are likely to encounter the Kigali impasse in which the prisons cannot contain the accused.

Yet somewhat and somehow, the national will must be summoned to deal effectively with the pandemic of graft and official banditry. Being the product of a corrupt and utterly corrupting electoral process, the current dispensation cannot logically and politically be expected to transcend its own origins and antecedents without provoking a calamitous backlash from the very forces that ensured its ascendancy in the first instance.

They should accept our sympathies. But this raises the fundamental poser as to whether corruption can be clinically eliminated under the current paradigm of democratic governance foisted on the nation by a military oligarchy in disarray and disorderly retreat.  He who comes to equity must come with unsoiled hands, since no straight furniture can be made from crooked timber.

This is where the profound moral difficulties facing the current government in its anti-corruption drive must be contextualised and appreciated. But what must not be condoned is the government’s recourse to ad hoc and arbitrary measures in dealing with corruption. The current efforts are too unsystematic and haphazard to satisfy the yearnings of average Nigerians for equity and social justice.

At best they could lead to a miscarriage of justice. At worst, they revive fears of petty personal agenda and a spiteful and vindictive settling of personal scores. The solution, it seems, is to make an example of the outstandingly debased while letting off the smaller crooks with a warning.  At the very least, those who have been found to have misruled Nigeria before and who are still nursing the dream of a triumphant return should be firmly informed that they constitute a normative menace to the nation.

For in their hubris they risk pushing the nation in the direction of revolutionary anarchy and insurgency. Having denied Nigerians their democratic and economic rights, they must also be willing to sacrifice their democratic rights in order to set Nigeria firmly on the path of righteousness and rectitude. If they continue to push their luck, they risk the possibility of mob justice at the very least or the eventual dismemberment of the country they hope to preside over in a worst-case scenario.

Already, there are disquieting signals that the ordinary people are beginning to see through the smokescreen of elite chicanery. As this apocalyptic momentum proceeds apace, the danger to democratic governance cannot be over-emphasized.

As an intellectual and ideological underpinning of the current efforts, the Federal Government, as a matter of national urgency and emergency, must inaugurate a Normative Bounds Commission consisting of respected patriots, which must come up with an ethical charter for the nation. Among other things, this august body must answer the question of what is and why is Nigeria and its manifest destiny as a Noah’s Ark for a black race trapped in the abyss of the Fourth World.

One of the duties of this commission will be to re-examine the distribution of National Honours which as at now reminds one of the undesirable honouring the unenviable; a veritable proof that there may indeed be honour among thieves. In enshrining our core values, the commission must set for itself the task of modelling roles and rolling out the models of patriotism and rectitude who still abound both within the country and its traumatised diaspora.

It must also come up with the machinery for cultivating a cult of heroic example for the directionless youths of the nation. Finally, it is the task of this commission to redesign and reinvent the Nigerian state. The failure of the post-colonial state in Nigeria and indeed sub-Saharan Africa stems from the fact that it was not invented for the constituting people. By drawing a normative map for Nigeria, we will also for the first time be remapping Nigeria for Nigerians and eventually for the black race.

Concluded. Maiden lecture of the Centre for Demilitarization and Constitutionalism, December 23, 2003.

The Resistible Rise of the Right

OH dear, oh dear, yours sincerely can always tell when a people are driven by historical desperation to the end of their wits. There is a feeling of ennui and quiet foreboding about.  You sense that catastrophe is abroad but there is nothing you can do about it. As the Yoruba people will put it, the fact that the heavens is about to crash on everybody cannot be the sole problem of a single individual.  It is called reconciliation to fate under duress.

Passing through Great Britain this weekend, yours sincerely could sense that the people of the mightiest Empire the world has seen so far are quietly reconciled to the inevitability of Boris Johnson as Prime-minister. The old Etonian has all but sewn it up. His opponents can only bite their fingers in volcanic frustration. Johnson already has one foot inside 10 Downing Street. The Spectator, a leading British magazine, has a huge banner of a headline in its current edition announcing the entrée of the contrarian charmer. Two decades ago, Boris was appointed its editor to universal chagrin.

Back home, our friend and beloved aburo, Femi Fani-Kayode, aka FFK, the scourge of the Fulani aristocracy and nemesis of the Bororo clan, has also made strong pitch for BoJo letting it be known that they are great friends obviously from luxurious youth. Not only that, Femi has also let it be known that he is “Brexiting” from an unworkable and unviable Nigeria.

You may not like Femi or endorse many things he says but there can be no doubt that he does not do things in half-measures. He may well find Boris as Prime-minister very sympathetic to the project of smashing up a Nigeria constituted by his (Johnson’s) colonial forebears.  There is Shakespearean irony all over. Old Etonian meets old Harrovian over the fate of Nigeria with the scent of roast beef wafting in the air.

But how did it come to this? How did the world come to this sorry pass? It has been said that the Battle of Waterloo was won and lost on the playing fields of Eton where the Duke of Wellington was a pupil. For the second time in human history, Eton is about to determine the fate of humankind and there is going to be a helluva wailing and caterwauling over there. Boris has let it be known that he is going to crack the whip very hard on immigration.  That is just why he is a beloved darling of the defenders of the realm. Even The Economist chafes at that one.

Readers should now go back to the lecture above in which we wagered that due to the pressures of globalization, the west was about cloistering itself in the cocoon of supra-nationality to ward off the adverse effect. But since 2003 when the lecture was written, western individualism has taken over with each country going for broke to protect its people.

Hence the rise of xenophobia and extreme right-wing populism in the whole of Europe and America. Those who enriched their people and nations in the name of globalization are now afraid of the direct consequences, one of which is the globalization of human movement. But this too will pass. The human spirit will always triumph over man-made adversities. All hail King Boris.

“A nation is defined by its normative bounds and not its territorial boundaries.”

Mapping the realm: The Architecture of governance

AS Nigerians, we live in unusual and ethically challenged times. The old moral compass with which the various nationalities that make up contemporary Nigeria negotiated politically turbulent waters and inclement weather has disappeared in the crucible of time and enforced evolution. Rather than being seen as politically primitive and backward looking, the political charter and memoranda of association of some of these people bespeak a sophistication and sensitivity to social nuances which would have been the envy of the most socially and politically advanced societies in the world.

But within the context of a multi-national nation-state, such ethical apparatuses have lost their power and efficacy. With nothing to replace them except the faint promise of modernity, the falcon no longer hears the falconer, and anarchy beckons.

Having heroically fought off a creeping military despotism, the people of Nigeria have suddenly found themselves trapped in the murky waters of the Bermuda Triangle of ethical voidance. But rather than despairing and becoming despondent, this should be seen as one more manifestation of what is known as the cunning of history, as one more challenge in the march to authentic nationhood.

There is no deus ex machina, and no one is coming to solve the problem for us. There cannot be a more auspicious time to determine the ethical destiny and destination of the country. Therefore if the very idea of territorial boundaries and normative bounds within the context of  governance and democratisation  sound quaint and anomalous, let this serve as a pointer to the urgency of the matter at hand.

The question may be asked: Why should we be talking about bounds and boundaries when we should be addressing the seemingly more pressing issues of electoral reforms, grass root empowerment, political rascality among the ruling class, devolution of power, local government restructuring, the regulation of political parties within the context of economic deregulation, the flagrant monetisation of politics within the ambit of accelerating general poverty of Nigerians, and the ethnic census that often goes by the name of voting in post-colonial Africa?

There can be no doubt that all these are urgent and pressing national issues. Yet a closer and deeper look however suggests that they are a mere political sub-text, a superstructure masking a deeper political structure— or lack of it.

The problem with solving Nigeria’s problems lies in an enduring fascination with symptoms rather than the actual disease, and a tendency to put the cart before the horse. It is important then to put the endemic crisis of governance and democratisation in a proper perspective and order.

Thus whether the problems manifest as a malfunctioning post-military polity, whether they appear as a nation-crippling ailment, whether they are pathologies signalling the imminent miscarriage of the democratic process, or whether they combine to make the nation itself unworkable or democratically ungovernable in the last instance, they must be seen for what they truly are: the symptoms of a greater disease.

Consequently, while political actors quarrel and wrangle about zoning, rotational presidency, open ballot, power shift etc, the wise men and  women of the country must remain focused on the total picture and its structured nuances which often elude gladiators in the heat and passion of the political arena but which ultimately condition and colour the nature of success in the same field. Any scheming, power-obsessed maniac may plot to preside and perpetuate himself in a technically failed state but, in the end, such efforts are bound for the footnote of history.

A nation, just like the democratic project, is a permanent work in progress. There is no ideal democracy anywhere in the world, and nation-building is a continuous process which can only terminate when the nation-state paradigm itself mutates into something else. And has history has shown, this itself can never be a globally uniform affair.

But the democratic and nation-building projects presuppose a firm and durable foundation on which to build upon. Just as the building of a house does not conclude with the procurement of an architectural plan, the occupation of a territorial space does not a nation make. It is a mere declaration of nation-building intent. Indeed where that occupation is forcibly undertaken and against the fundamental will of the constituting people, where the occupation produces a potentially explosive cocktail, the visionary prowess and imaginative gifts of the leaders are often tested to the limit.

The preliminary conclusion from the above is that a nation’s territorial integrity is not an eternal given, bound as it is by historical and social circumstances. Without normative bounds, there can be no national boundaries. A nation without normative bounds may have national boundaries but it is only a territorial space waiting for more serious claimants with a superior project.

The history of the modern nation-state is replete with nations that have disappeared, nations without accompanying states and states pretending to rule over non-existent nations. Each is a macabre fiction often enacted over the biblical sufferings and agonies of captive people. What then are the normative bounds without which there cannot be said to be a nation? To answer the question, we must first address what constitutes a nation in the first instance.

CONSTITUTING THE NATION

When the Nigerian authorities recently conceded a substantial portion of the Bakassi Peninsula in accord with the World Court ruling, they wittingly or unwittingly exploded certain myths with which succeeding Nigerian rulership have constantly negotiated the Nigerian nation and which ironically betray the limited resources of creative nation-building available to Nigeria’s post-independence ruling elite.

First, the myth that the territorial integrity of Nigeria is a sacred, sacrosanct and inviolable given. Second, the myth that Nigeria is created by an act of divine will. Finally, the myth that Nigeria was created for its inhabitants and not an arbitrary act of colonial masters who had acquired the military power and coercive means to territorialize and de-territorialize Africa at will at a particular point in her history.

The World Court ruling itself remains an affront to natural justice as it rubbishes the very notion of social, economic and political kinship. Yet not to have acceded to the verdict would have been to turn Nigeria into an international outlaw and a pariah in the comity of nations. Therefore the act of deferring ought to be commended for its statesmanlike sobriety and rectitude. But what the whole episode showcases is the continuing power and potency of the post-Westphalian nation-state paradigm, the vice-grip of its ultimate consolidators and why Africa remains a fundamental hostage to political misfortune.

But there is also a sense in which the World Court ruling could be seen as a manifestation of the failure of the Nigerian nation, of its stunted and atrophied institutions, of its aborted destiny as a haven and a Mecca for black people, and of its swift descent into a hell-hole on earth.  Success has many fathers but failure is a forlorn orphan.

Yet in another and more philosophical sense, all nations are artificial constructs. But some are more artificial than others, particularly post-colonial nations created in the image of their colonial founders. They are nothing but flawed mirror-images of a flawed picture. In the absence of a divine decree, most nations are precariously held together by certain myths, legends and national illusions.

The very idea of a national community is a grand illusion. But without the great myth of a national community, of an imagined commonwealth of like-minded citizens and people, there can be no nation.  Such myths are strengthened by shared pains, shared national calamities, shared triumphs and a shared faith in the immanent destiny of the nation. It is from such momentous encounters that the storied core values of a nation emerge and are subsequently codified.

When the English subjects wrested the Magna Carta from King John in 1248, they commenced the normative mapping of the emerging nation-state. It was an epic journey that was to culminate via a revolution, savage wars, bloody upheavals, intellectual, spiritual and literary rebellions in full citizenship, liberal democracy and the right to free association and property.

It is to be noted that at that point, the Welsh were yet to be subjugated. Neither had the Scots been forcibly co-opted. But once incorporated, they all participated in the normative cartography and the sanctification of the grundnorm of what was to become  modern Great Britain. Over eight centuries, the territorial boundaries of the nation have gone through drastic remapping, but the normative bounds have only slowly transformed into the Rock of Gibraltar on which the British nation is founded.

Today, no one tells a British government or its ministers when and how to depart. The norm is very clear.

As the founding fathers of America sat down to give the citizens of the new nation a founding charter, they knew precisely where they wanted to take their  people: a new nation shorn of the feudal   privileges which had been the bane of the Europe of their forebears, and a new society governed by merit and innate ability.

This daring vision, a radical and revolutionary peep into the future of civilised mankind, was enacted over an America that was yet to include many of its contemporary states. They were not incorporated into a normative void. Indeed a radical American philosopher propounded the thesis that it was the manifest destiny of the new nation to bring a new type of governance and economic relations to the modern world.

At birth, Nigeria was a normative orphan. Its founding charter was the notorious ‘dual mandate’ propagated by its colonial primogenitor, Lord Fredrick Dealtry Lugard whereby the economy of the new territory was to be administered to the ‘mutual benefit’ of the colony and its metropolitan colonizers.

Embroiled in a battle to gain political control of the new nation, none of its modern founders saw the need to map the normative bounds of the emergent nation. They were all working at cross-purposes as it is usually the case with all ethnically and religiously polarised nations. For its two most paradigmatic leaders, Nigeria was at best an unworkable contraption.

Their historical memory circumscribed by the folkloric horrors of unabating ethnic wars, both Awolowo and the Sardauna saw the nation in terms of unfinished pre-colonial business. For Awo, the nation was at best a mere geographical expression. For the Sardauna, Nigeria was the mistake of 1914 and his grandfather’s filched empire.

By the time Chief Obafemi Awolowo, arguably the most intellectually endowed of them, got round to propounding his vision for a democratic and egalitarian Nigeria, it was already too late. Caught up in the political turmoil and sectarian bitterness of the time, his efforts became indistinguishable from a vote-catching gimmick rather than a normative intervention in the political process.

Not even the most radically pan-Nigerian of the whole lot, and the one who carried the least historical baggage ironically because of the lack of a centralising authority among his people, could come up with a founding order for the nation. Steeped in the political shibboleths of the American Civil Rights Movement and the liberationist African American rhetoric of America’s deep South, unwilling and unable to seize the day, Nnamdi Azikiwe could only come up with flamboyant but ultimately unhelpful tropes such as ‘economic determinism’, “political resurgimento”etc…

Immensely unaware of the irony of his own situation but acutely perceptive to the end, the grand old man of Nigerian politics would later ask for the “grundnorm” behind the infamous annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election. The point is that the annulment itself is a grave symptom of the absence of a normative order in the country.

Having missed the boat at its birth and inception, Nigeria has continued to flounder in a normative vacuum which is the mother of all political disorders.  Not being philosopher-kings or ethical warriors, none of the military and political leaders thrown up by the dysfunctional system could boast of the intellectual and spiritual wherewithal to provide a normative map for the nation.

Those of them who had the humility and courage to ask for intellectual assistance were too enmeshed in the desperate game of personal survival and too smart to set what would have become a fatal trap for their power project.

But as we have seen from examples from other lands, this is not just a failure of political leadership it is an elite failure in all its intellectual, philosophical, spiritual and literary ramifications. If there is no King John or an Oliver Cromwell, there has also been no Milton or a John Locke or a Thomas Beckett for that matter. A nation’s leadership is nothing but a reflection of the sum total of its political elite.

• To be concluded next week.

 

The Arabs hold that to flee your fate is to rush to find it. There are moments in the life of a country when the road not taken return to haunt with a savage insistence. A substantial part of the future is embedded in the past. In such circumstances, memory seems to play a grand trick. These are moments when what is happening cannot be distinguished from what has happened; when the past appears fully dressed as the present. This is the price a nation must pay for recurrent crises in which what has come to the fore is a mere variation of what has gone before.

In such a situation, it is often important to step aside sometimes and look back in order to gain fresher insights into the present. While never overlooking the grave dangers to the society arising from new variations of ancient problems, one must also never succumb to the ethnic projects and projections of those seeking political profits from the miseries of a nation.

Hysterical scare-mongering and neurotic hectoring by those who have found themselves outwitted in the power struggle can never be a substitute for a calm, rational evaluation of the dilemma of a nation. You cannot browbeat people who have been in this thing long before you. When the cloud of delusional grandstanding clears, the problem will still remain.

It was in the process of deciding what to write about this week that yours sincerely stumbled on this piece which contains some unusual reflections about the state of the country which are still very relevant and crucial today sixteen years after. Titled Remapping the Nation: National Boundaries and Normative Bounds, this is the maiden Democracy Lecture of the Centre for Constitutionalism and Demilitarization delivered by yours sincerely on December 23, 2003 at the Airport Hotel, Ikeja, Lagos. We have decided to publish the lecture and its recommendations because of the relevance to the soul searching about the future of Nigeria.

 

We live in interesting times. Facts are no longer sacred or sacrosanct. Neither is the truth. Ordinary people prefer to have their truth simple and uncomplicated. But that is no longer possible in an increasingly problematic world.

A set of facts can be processed by interested parties in such a way that they produce alternate realities which distort the original facts. The truth can be handled in such a way that attenuates or even obliterates the original truth. Welcome to the brave new world of alternate realities and post-truth.

In the aftermath of the June 12 settlement, Nigeria has been caught in an epistemic warp reflecting ancient fault lines and making nonsense of the very legacy of the best election in the history of the nation.  It is bad enough. But it can be worse. After twenty five years of living in denial, Nigeria has finally come to terms with its self-inflicted injury.

Yet there are significant sections of the country that have refused to assent or applaud. To them, the whole celebration this past week was nothing but hegemonic abracadabra designed to foster the illusion of order while ethnic injustice remains the order of the day.

To others, it is a scam because the current federal government is itself a product of electoral fraud. And to a few state actors, the canonization of 2Abiola is an unnecessary disruption of the order of state confidentiality upon which the modern state is founded and which must not be lightly disrupted.

These anxieties reflect implacable divisions in the land. Yet like the typical Nigerian paradox, the praise is encoded in the damnation. The state cannot remain stagnant and unresponsive to the yearnings and aspirations of its constituent people. The character of the state alters in confrontation with radical realities. The Nigerian colonial state, like the old army of occupation it spawned, cannot remain stuck in the habits of colonial cruelties and crude repression.

What President Buhari has done amounts to a radical rupture of the old order; a breach of the protocol of state confidentiality. For a man who is not known to be a radical in any sense of the word, in fact a man who evokes conservative solidity, this is quite a big deal. It is a remarkable game-changer for Nigeria. This is a confirmation of the hunch that the most remarkable and radical changes in Nigeria are likely to come from Northern power players who are not afraid of looking the traditional supremoes in the eye and telling them to take a walk.

By naming the Abuja Stadium after Abiola, the hero of the June 12 struggle, General Buhari has struck a blow in the heart of annulment. For reasons of self-imposed political correctness, it is arguable if any southern leader would have had the guts to do this. This is an act of spectacular courage. What Buhari, a rebel member of the establishment, has done is to carry the battle to them. Let the memory of Abiola torment them each time they drive round the capital city.

On June 12, 1993, the Nigerian state entered into fatal contradiction with the Nigerian people. The critical issue was whether the military can maintain an electoral overlordship over the nation despite the clear subordination of military to civil authorities in the constitution. It was an epic confrontation between the Nigerian Army and the army of Nigerians. In the process, the army exhausted its historic and political possibilities and was forced to retreat to the barracks.

But the damage has been done. Once a nation misses its way in the jungle, it continues to wade deeper and deeper into dangerous territory.  Today, incalculable political, economic and spiritual damage has been inflicted on the nation. The National Question occasioned by the annulment has worsened. Ethnic conflicts have become the norm in the country.

The quality of election has declined. Banditry and kidnapping have escalated beyond the imaginable. Perhaps if the nation had come to its senses earlier, the now implacable centrifugal forces would have been reined in. The political elite have never been more badly divided or sharply polarized.

It is this dire retrogression in many aspects of our national life that has given rise to counter-narratives and alternative truths about the true state of the nation. For example despite the withdrawal of the military, the political climate is pervaded by autocratic intolerance and highhandedness. Corruption is rife and regional resentments have reached a boiling point.

What is obvious is that despite the canonization of Abiola and the recognition of June 12, 1993, the nation is still beset by many problems.  It is doubtful if Abiola himself would have had a place in the current climate of feudal preferment and paddy-paddy patronage. But the journey of a thousand miles must begin somewhere and with a single step. The events of this past week represent such a moment and the possibility of a new beginning. President Buhari has every right to soak in the plaudits.

 

It was a scene out of the Roman Empire in all its glory and grandeur. The din was impossible, yet there was something sedulous and magical about this display of power at its awesome summit. It was medieval pageantry in Technicolor; a brilliant fusion of the traditional and the modern. A very important man was traversing the highway between mortality and immortality.

Horses and horsemen collide with outriders and state of the art limousines. State spooks mingle with traditional enforcers dressed like local hunters. An empty gold chariot blasted its way through, heralding the imminent arrival of his imperial majesty, even as a remarkably ugly masquerade which reminded one of an ill-tempered hippopotamus began to press its luck with the crowd. He was Pakaleke, aka the devil of Apataganga.

From the distance, a dancing procession was approaching. The law enforcement agents were beginning to have problems with the rowdy crowd. As they surged forward, they were beaten back with batons and horsewhips. Everybody was trying to catch a glimpse of the royal carnival. This was not a scene to miss. In his youth and penurious prime, his majesty was known as a dancer and drummer of exceptional endowments. And judging from the royal harem, his prodigious appetite for ravishing beauties remained undimmed by time and tribulation.

As the dancing procession drew nearer, you could swear that you knew the king somewhere. There was something faintly familiar and yet oddly distant about him; an otherworldly aura of perfect self-control and inner tranquillity. But by now, the lead drummer was getting in the way of the cognitive senses. A brilliant purveyor of social acrimony, he was panning out litigious lyrics with savage delight and with his face permanently contorted in subversive exertion.

Omo agbon jeje bi eniti o r’obinrin ri

Beni aya nbe nile; omo nbe nile

Sugbon obinrin dudu obinrin pupa

Olorun maje o kuku obinrin.

And later in response to the din:

Dami dami dami, Ologundudu

Dami, dami dami, ariwo majesin

Kii pa alakara, dami dami dami.

By now as this riotous carnival came into full view, the ever joyous visage, the kind compassionate features, the in your face, devil may care bravura of an Alpha male in full menace, had become unmistakable. He was even more noble of carriage and majestic of mien. Yet like all artists, he had a remarkable sense of rhythm and cadence and was responding to the inner music with a feline suppleness and glorious flair that drew rapturous applause from the crowd. The jaw dropped in awe and astonishment and before you could pronounce the name, the riotous crowd had beaten you to it.

“It is President Abiola in triumphal procession”, they chanted in unison. The good people of Nigeria, irrespective of race, region and religion, spoke seventeen years ago. And now power is concurring. History shall vindicate the just indeed.

It has taken a tectonic shift from the template of evil governance to acknowledge the obvious truth that whatever his personal failings and the objective contradictions of the circumstances, Abiola is a hero of democracy in Nigeria. It is not how you begin that matters but how you end up. The fallen hero may yet be forgiven, but it does not vitiate the claim of the emergent hero.

Seventeen years ago in June 1993, Nigerians spoke in unison against the barbarity of military rule. Fourteen million of them voted, nine of these for MKO Abiola, charismatic mogul and candidate of the Social Democratic Party. The victory in itself was a political odyssey whose story has never been told in full. Abiola outgunned and outfoxed the military High Command who were expecting a different outcome which would have made their job easier.

In the event, the military still went ahead to annul the freest and fairest election so far in the history of the nation. It led to a five-year low intensity civil war in which many perished and the Nigerian military junta anathematised by the civilised world. Till date, many still carry the traumatic wounds of that encounter.  There were many, this writer included, who were not Abiola’s fans and who never met him on a one to one basis but who chose to fight on the side of truth and freedom. We chose to lose all, rather than be ruled by primitive predators. A nation-state is not a military or feudal fiefdom.

As the carnival drew nearer, snooper thought that Goodluck Jonathan ought to be commended for finding the inner strength and resolve to acknowledge the obvious, unlike his mentor and benefactor who, consumed by hatred, irrational envy and petty venom, could not even bring himself to pronounce the name of Abiola. The greatest beneficiary of the June 12 struggle could not abide its greatest martyr and casualty even in death. But as it has been noted, a man may make for himself a throne of bayonets, whether he will be able to sit on it is the question.

Now that he has taken the tentative step, snooper wondered, Jonathan should be encouraged to go the whole hog in order to bring the necessary closure to this open sore of the modern Nigerian nation. Abiola should be declared a posthumous president of Nigeria with commensurate edification. Truth is constant and steady and no matter how fast a lie travels ahead, it will eventually be overtaken by the truth.

But judging from the mood of the crowd, If Jonathan does not immortalise Abiola, a future government will after the current farce must have run its course. This is a historic wager which will come to pass soon, no matter what anybody does or fails to do. Jonathan should ask himself why the sudden and vociferous cries for electoral reforms even after his principal had famously and characteristically pooh-poohed the idea. Electoral chicanery, just like annulment, leads to a breakdown of government and governance, not to talk of international derision and opprobrium.

By now, the din had died down. All the revellers had disappeared. A celestial calm enveloped the universe. In the distance, a few female praise singers could be heard chanting the heroic panegyrics of the first posthumous president of Nigeria. But the late tycoon was nowhere to be found. Even the mad drummer, Ayanlere, with his droopy and dolorous visage, had disappeared. The wild drumming had now been replaced by an Ebenezer Obey classic in honour of the late tycoon.

Snooper had slept, joyous but exhausted, with a crushing pile of newspapers containing President Jonathan’s proclamation about Abiola’s heroic stature. In the last stages of consciousness, this avalanche of printed matter began crushing the neck as it made its way to the bare floor. This was a sure recipe for political hallucination.

A mobile handset was beginning to slide down towards the buccal cavity now made more cavernous by sheer exhaustion. Suddenly, there was a door from nowhere and as it opened lo it was the late tycoon resplendent and well-rested smiling his famous cherubic smile. The chief was obviously in a bantering mood as he opened up with his famous fusillade of native wisecracks and witticism.

“Chief, congrats on your posthumous apotheosis”, snooper opened cautiously.

“ Ah, apoti osi ko, apoti ogun ni.  Oyinbo ti poju .(Haba grammar is too much)  Agboyinbo ki ku le”, the chief replied with devastating wit and local brio.

“I mean a serving Nigerian president has conceded that you are a hero”, snooper pressed as he suppressed an urge to laugh.

“Ah you see, I told them you cannot abort a full pregnancy. Ti o  bape titi akalolo a pe baba”, the great chief retorted.

“We must now await the formal proclamation”, snooper continued.

“Ah leave them. Adie tosu ti o to, ara e lowa”, the chief observed with fortitude.

“Even Babangida has joined the chorus”, snooper noted with a hint of disapproval.

“Ah leave Ibrahim out of it. Omo buruku n’ijo tie. Besides, as our people say, makanmakan loye. A man that is being pursued by a masquerade should take heart, because as people of this world get tired, so do people of the other world.”, the chief noted with a deadpan demeanour.

“Sir, please explain,” snooper pleaded.

“You see, Ibrahim is not alone in this thing. When a man says he is Dodondawa, you must know that there is a problem, because Dodo o dawa. Enia lowa lehin dodo to fi ni ohun ni Dodondawa” the chief explained with an even more recondite Yoruba saying.

“Ah chief, how do you mean?” snooper pressed.

“Wo iwo omokunrin yi ma fitina mi. (Youngman, don’t trouble me) You see, it is like the case of a masquerade who is killed by a lorry and the people are saying that he has gone back to heaven. Very soon, the mother of the missing will ask for her son”, the chief concluded with wit and calm forbearance.

Snooper decided to change the topic.

“Chief, is that not an empty bottle of stout I am looking at under your bed?” snooper queried in a mischievous tone.

“Ah, some people came and I entertained them. In any case, when you recite the Qumran up to the point of rabana, omi amala loku.”, he replied with a boyish grin.

By now snooper could not resist a wild laugh of relish at the great man’s native wisdom and traditional savvy. He was eyeing me with the poker-faced perspicuity of a traditional savant. Here was the Griot-president Nigeria never had.

“Chief, by the way, have you seen Alhaji Abubakar Rimi?” snooper asked MKO.

“Ah, is he here? O ntan lo na niyen.”

At this point, the bed lamp, dragged by the cord of the mobile set, hit snooper on the ridge of the nose, sending him awake with a crushing pain. It was midnight in Lagos.

 

• First published in June, 2010.

( Excerpts)

 

This past week, in what is perhaps the most worrisome externalization of Nigeria’s endemic crisis of nationhood, a group of notable Nigerians took their grievances about the state of the nation to the British House of Commons. How they hope to secure sympathetic hearing from the same people whose ancestors and forebears implanted the problem in the first instance strains belief.  However that may be, the list is rich in dark ironies and a compelling tribute to elite disaffection.

Among them are two of the nation’s most illustrious career soldiers ever: General Theophilus Yakubu Danjuma, arguably the most powerful Chief of Army Staff the nation has thrown up, and Major General Zamani Lekwot, a much admired officer and Kataf native who barely escaped the hangman’s noose after the Zango Kataf uprising.

The list also includes Solomon Adun Asemota, SAN, a notable lawyer and ethnic rights activist who has been quite visible in the restructuring lobby, and Elder Moses Ihonde, General Yakubu Gowon’s school boy fag and trusted confidante, as well as many other distinguished and illustrious Nigerians.

Ethnic memory, or recurring memorialization of attributed injustice, is a powerful elite tool for shaping and directing a people’s consciousness and perception particularly in multi-ethnic nations wracked by tension and mutual hostilities. But it is not restricted to developing nations alone.  They can also frame the politics of advanced nations. As it has been famously noted, it is not the thought of happy grandchildren that breeds revolutions and social revolts but the memory of enslaved grandparents.

In the run up to the negotiations which produced the notorious Treaty of Versailles after the defeat of the Germans in the First World War, a serving American diplomat was so unnerved by the relentless and implacable hostility of the French leader to the Germans that he was forced to ask the French President : Sir, have you ever been to Germany?”

Georges Clemenceau, aka, the Tiger, was so incensed by the seemingly innocent question that he jumped on the table and screamed: “Never, but twice in my lifetime, Germans have been to Paris!”  He was referring to the 1870 Prussia-France war when France was humiliated and 1914 when the hardened no-nonsense Germans duly arrived at the gates of Paris.

Clemenceau was spared further humiliation by honourable death. In early 1940, the Germans duly arrived at the gates of Paris once again and this time around, they stayed for almost five years until they were kicked out by General Charles de Gaulle and the combined allied forces.

The Germans just kept coming until they exhausted themselves and pretty much everybody else in the process. It led to direct partition of the German nation in the hands of the Americans and the Soviets. Having learnt their lessons that the world does not owe them a living space or lebensraum, the Germans were treated to a generous rehabilitation programme by the victorious Allies.

Pretty much the same fate was to overtake the Japanese. A proud, industrious and warlike people who had beaten their neighbours, including the Chinese, silly, it was apparent that the Japanese Imperial dynasty and its Shogunate military caste never lived down the humiliation of Commodore Perry and his fleet, a memorable event which forced them to open up trade with the emergent American superpower.

It took a brutal military campaign and the virtual obliteration of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to eventually bring them to heel. But having learnt their lesson not to inflict further humiliation and indignity on the defeated, the Americans treated the Japanese people with generosity and sympathetic understanding. As a fall out of Japanese occupation and colonization, the Koreans have what they call the Museum of Atrocity, a grim memorabilia of fossilized mayhem and enduring national outrage.

Even in the most developed nations, ethnic rancour and resentment have no sell-by date and can endure across many generations. The Yoruba people, with their elephantine memory and capacity for long-distance feuding, hold that twenty year old pounded yam can still burn with scalding intensity.

In Great Britain after four hundred years of the union, majority of the Scots still want out. Having voted to remain in the European Union, they have seen their wish thwarted by the larger British populace. The looming Brexit implosion may yet provide them with a compelling leitmotif and the perfect storm of national disintegration.

Ethnic baiting and profiling remain rife in the country of good manners. There are times when only the blue-eyed English public school boy or girl will do for the highest office in the land. Neil Kinnock was constantly dismissed as a Welsh windbag until he packed up his papers to surface in the House of Lords famously described as proof of life after death.

Gordon Brown was elbowed out to give room to the son of Abe Blair. Even as Prime minister, he was harried and hounded until he gave up the political ghost having been dismissed as being “psychologically flawed”. Till date, the moody and morose but exceptionally brilliant Scot is still sulking in the background.

Among contemporary Nigerian political elite, it seems as if the fear of the Fulani, or what former president Olusegun Obasanjo recently described as the twin virus of Fulanization and Islamization, is the beginning of wisdom. This is arguably the most incendiary summation of the Nigerian condition by a former Nigerian Head of State and weeks after its destabilising and devastating impact continues to be felt throughout the polity.

Since all is fair in war, there is no point speculating about Obasanjo’s motive. A wily political warrior and master of strategic delegitimation, Obasanjo has chosen his time, weapon and theatre of engagement very well indeed. The result has been a sharp escalation of ethnophobia in many parts of the nation and the fear of systematic extermination by a particular ethnic group.

Ethnic resentment is one thing but active ethnophobia is another. When care is not taken, it sets the stage for genocidal reprisals on a scale that has never been seen in the history of the nation. The entire landscape seethes with tribal tensions like a Papua New Guinea jungle bristling with head hunters and primitive bloodsucking human vampires. It is no longer a question of when the national bloodfest will start but how it will commence.

As a result of rising economic insecurities, the fear of famine owing to the termination of farming in many parts of the nation, the looming social implosion in the north of the nation arising from centuries of medieval peonage and the murderous carnage unleashed on many parts of the nation by herdsmen and other toxic vagrants, the image of the peaceful, friendly and amiable Fulani herdsman that we all grew up with is being replaced in the imaginative furnace of the nation with the image of a blood loving ogre whose soul preoccupation is murder, rape and rapine.

Significant sections of the country are already lost to ethnophobia. In the larger west where there is a tradition of calm fortitude and philosophical equanimity, there is a growing elite and popular buy in which may eventually put the nascent democracy in acute jeopardy.

We are setting ourselves up for a historic combustion which will put paid to the nation as we know it. A resort to self-help is gradually taking the centre stage as Hutu-like reprisal squads appear in the horizon even as private travel advisories go viral from the South West. The odour of death and chrysanthemum is thick in the air.

So, what is to be done as anarchy and anomie stalk the land? It can be argued that in their struggle for economic primacy and extractive predation, the Nigerian political elite have finally succeeded in poisoning the well of communal and organic wellbeing in the nation.  Many of the current protesters are beneficiaries and accomplices of the economic and political tragedy they have helped to put in place.

But it will be futile to deny that they have been helped along in their current quest by collective memory of ancestral resentment. For example, the Yoruba memory vaults stirs uneasily with the destruction of their old empire and the subsequent murderous activities of marauding slave raiders that put entire communities to sword.

However, even in organic nations and more so in multi-ethnic nations brimming with economic, political, cultural and spiritual polarities, there will always be a particular group with the greater will to power and domination. It is an iron law of nature and human evolution.

The Fulani oligarchy is undoubtedly the most politically successful group in the history of Nigeria, owing to their greater cohesion, group discipline and coherent ideology of conquest and domination. It is these attributes which suggest a superior social order and its ruthless capacity to maintain law and order that endeared them to the colonial masters. In the colonial imaginary, order is superior to social justice and political equality.

But in this particular instance, the price of success is colossal failure. In their messianic hubris to bring political civilization and religious refinement and purity as they see it to the “pagan” tribes of the nation, they have unleashed millennial atrocities and historic bloodbath on many sections of the nation.

Yet since you cannot give what you don’t have, they have left the country in a terrible shape and in the process they have laid bare the savage contradictions in their own domain. But far more serious, rather than bringing order they have brought anarchy and disorder to the nation because of their poor understanding of the dictates of the modern nation-state.

But rather than affronted individuals setting up reprisal squads which can only eventuate in genocide, the north should be coaxed and helped out of its historic cul de sac in the interest of the greater humanity that binds and bonds all of us. To this end, and as this column has repeatedly advanced, only General Buhari has the prestige and aura to prevent the north and the nation from imploding. However, the inflexible stance and sectional bias in his first coming do not suggest an acute awareness of the historic burden placed on him by circumstances.

For starters, President Buhari must find the pluck, the visionary courage and the maximum military power to expel his errant kinsmen from the forests of the South. After that we must all find the political will to sit down to find an acceptable and equitable solution to the political, economic and spiritual menace threatening the nation with extinction.