The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

On Loyalty: Five exemplary paradigms

Under the spreading chestnut tree, you sold me and I sold you — George Orwell

The concept of loyalty, which is fidelity and absolute faith in an ideal, a set of objectives, or fanatical attachment or devotion to a person or the apex leader in a party, movement, cause or organization, is universal. But its application or applicability varies from society to society and nation to nation depending on how cohesive, organic and well-structured such societies and nations are. For example, in many societies, loyalty is often sealed and cemented by strenuous oath-taking. Betrayal and perfidy are often at the pain of exile or even death. But it is a two-way traffic and not a question of master-slave dialectic. In ancient Yoruba societies, the king was often asked to ‘open the calabash”, a euphemism for ritual suicide, once it was established that his actions constitute a gross betrayal and disloyalty to the greater interest of his people.

   In deeply fissured and ethnically polarized postcolonial nations, loyalty is often brittle and unstable. They are a “free trade zone”; a normative no man’s land in which there is no deeply held principle or fanatical attachment to any person or cause among the political elite except the grub principle or what is known as politics of the belly or more famously as the law of stomach infrastructure. In the postcolonial pabulum or open space eatery, the Cameroonian proverb says it all: “the goat eats where it is tethered”. The Yoruba equivalent is even more poignant: “What the bird eats is what the bird takes off with”. The preaching, sermonizing and hadiths can continue from here till eternity nothing will change until there is a fundamental reengineering of our destructive habits.

   Only the deep can call to the deep, Chief Obafemi Awolowo reminded us. But by that token, only the deeply loyal can be called upon by the deeply loyal. Where nothing is deeply held, nothing can be deeply fashioned or deeply put together. It will come to naught. Around 1958, Chief Obafemi Awolowo took a sharp lurch to the left in his thinking and political praxis, believing that only a socialist reengineering could transform Nigeria from a feudal backwater and deeply unequal society to an egalitarian nation with an all-inclusive redistribution of our God-given resources. The behemoth north rumbled in deep distaste but knew what to do to contain and demobilize the Awo threat. It was not clear at this point whether the Ikenne titan figured out whether his own party was and remained an unstable ensemble of progressive, conservative, royalist and monarchist forces tensely cohabiting together in paradoxical but antagonistic complicity. It was very vulnerable to infiltration and cooptation.

READ ALSO: Eight ways to easily spot a fake phone in Nigeria

Among the leftist Action Group radicals egging Awolowo on was Samuel Goomsu Ikoku, an ideological sophisticate of the old Nkrumah Marxist School who was known to have contested against and defeated his own father in a local election. The crisis of identity in the Action Group simmered on until the 1962 convention in Jos when the party fractured irretrievably. Samuel Ikoku replaced the Secretary General, Chief Ayo Rosiji. Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola who knew something about human nature, particularly its Nigerian franchise, was known to have chuckled that he had never heard of circumstances in which anyone would willingly give its own to an Ikoko. (Ikoko was Yoruba for wolf and a deliberate misprision of Ikoku’s name) Ta ni nje fo mo fun Ikoko? The great orator wondered.

Meanwhile Ayo Rosiji, the ousted General Secretary of Action Group, rather than spend the rest of his political life opposing his leader, the patrician and noble Egba man opted out of politics entirely and devoted the rest of his life to his thriving business. I have it on the authority of a childhood friend from Safebirth Street off Ikorodu Road, Otunba Tunde Onakoya, who was the Managing Director of the Rosiji Group that the relationship between Rosiji and Awolowo remained very cordial throughout their lifetime and each Christmas was marked by a generous exchange of gifts. Talk of nobility in human conduct.

Always finicky and meticulous in his preparations, Chief Awolowo left nothing to chance. Such was the high level of his organizational ability and administrative wizardry that twenty four hours after the military authorities lifted the ban on political activities in 1978, the Ikenne sage announced the formation of a new political party: the Unity Party of Nigeria. Nigerians should have been alerted. In an earlier interview with Gbolabo Ogunsanwo, the famed columnist asked Awo whether he would return to politics when the ban on politics was lifted, the old man chuckled. “Gbolabo, you can only return to what you have left”, Awo parried.

     It was sixteen years after the Jos Convention and twelve years after he was released from jail. In an intriguing twist of fate, one of the new political adversaries lined up against Awo was none other than Samuel Ikoku, his old protégé and ideological acolyte from the Action Group. Ikoku was vehemently opposed to his former leader and mentor. It led to a celebrated spat between the two in which Awo dismissed his former colleague and political godson as a reprobate. In an equally acerbic response, Ikoku ended by asking the federal authorities and security agencies to take note of the barely veiled threat to his life by Chief Awolowo. From there, there was no stopping Ikoku as he descended to the pit of political infamy transiting from a defender of the feudal oligarchy to a full blown cohort of retrogression and right hand collaborator of military despotism.

But if Awo thought that that was it, there were more surprises for the poor man from his own backyard. By 1983, a few of those associates regarded as his blue-eyed boys had gone rogue in protest against allocation of patronage and preferment. One of them had written a pedestrian and wishy-washy chapbook about Awo and Awoism. But the great man lapped it up causing great disaffection among his core loyalists. From a neighboring Yoruba state another favoured associate, a strong man in the real sense of the word and justly celebrated for his prodigious physical and metaphysical exertions, became hysterical and uncontrollable when Awo’s carefully considered succession plan for the state did not favour his ambition. Taken together, these flagrant rebellions and acts of disloyalty which show inability to discipline, domesticate and sublimate the wild ego in the service of a greater cause almost sank the UPN until a military coup put the heavy boot in at the end of the year.

For holistic analysis, we can now bring up a few paradigms of loyalty from other climes to see how they shape up in contention with the Nigerian postcolonial paradigm. One is from Communist Russia at the high noon of Stalinist cruelty and state repression, the other from Hungary as a satellite of the Soviet Union, the third from Nazi Germany as the monstrous system faced its final moment and the last one from Mao and Deng’s China. Taken together, they show how social and intellectual forces shape human history and societal evolution and how human history and societal evolution in turn shaped by human consciousness and psychological alertness.

At the infamous Moscow Trials held between 1936 and 1938 with which Josef Stalin finally put away his greatest rivals and former adversaries in the Communist Party, many following the proceedings were astonished by the grim spectacle unfolding. Rather than berate Stalin and the monster they have put together in the name of Communism, these great individuals, one or two of them far more gifted than Stalin himself, chose to lie against and slander themselves rather than the system they willed into place by extraordinary acts of human heroism. In what must rank as the greatest act of self-abrogation, they all went down without a whimper as the bullet exploded their brains. Later in Hungary, many were surprised that Georg Lukacs, the great Hungarian Marxist aesthetician and culture critic, allowed himself to be thrown into jail together with the puppet Prime minister his known intellectual adversary and avowed political enemy. Lukacs retorted that as long as his enemy was in jail they were in it together but once they came out, they could resume their quarrel.

And then on to the last days of Hitler and Nazi Germany. As shells from Russian tanks exploded on the streets of Berlin turning the city into a vast apocalyptic rubble, the dazed and embattled Fuehrer summoned Josef Goebbels, his beloved confidant and favourite intellectual , to his lair and ordered him to prepare for the challenges ahead by taking over the structure remaining. But Goebbels who was described by Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper as “maniacally brilliant” knew stark and irreversible defeat when he saw one. He defied his leader and declined the offer, arguing in his last testament that he did not wish to be caught up in the “delirium of treachery” welling and swirling against his leader. Instead of complying, he gathered his family together in a room gave the children, all six of them, poison vials and then shot his wife and himself. Thus ended the life of one of the greatest propagandists of all time.

Let us end this with a story of hope and human redemption, and it is from Communist China. Deng Xiaoping was a friend and loyal comrade of Mao Tse Tung. They marched together during the long trek, and suffered untold hardships and deprivations together. But after the Communist triumph, he soon fell out of favour with the Communist hierarchy and was repeatedly purged, disgraced, ignored and humiliated. He was shunned and sidelined by the leadership of the party with Mao’s connivance. During the Cultural Revolution, he was purged again and sent to work as a factory hand for four years. He was denounced as “a capitalist roader” second only in the hierarchy of national villains. But Deng was a great survivor. He could see what Mao could not see. China was an ancient civilization with a thick overlay of antiquated dynasties and countervailing aristocracies. While Mao was the quintessential revolutionary who favoured great disruptions, terminal ruptures and complete annihilation of the old order, Deng was the quintessential conciliator and system stabilizer. He was cultured, well-read and from a more aristocratic background of land owners than Mao. But he also knew that without Mao’s revolutionary animus and anger against the old feudal order, there would have been no Chinese revolution. When he finally maneuvered his way to power, Deng harbored no animosities against his old tormentors and detractors. With his great intellect, he offered a new roadmap which opened the route to great prosperity and national revival without reversing or undermining the basis of the new communist order, particularly the speedy trial and summary execution of economic miscreants and other saboteurs. This is the foundation of the great Chinese reawakening we are witnessing. If Mao is the revolutionary visionary of a new China, Deng is the architect of its modern prosperity and global relevance. It is an exemplary paradigm of contrastive personalities united by their loyalty to a higher ideal.

June 1, 2025
And big Don downs “em all

Perhaps the title of this piece should have been, Unquiet Flows the Don. Readers might have heard of the captivating novel, And Quiet Flows the Don, a stirring epic about life and love in early Soviet Russia. The Don is a mighty river in Russia which almost centrally lacerates the region. This time around, another Don seems to have erupted in North America, flowing unquietly and uneasily through the precincts of the American White House sweeping and uprooting everything along its path. The Don is not a river but the big Chief, the Capo di tutti capi of all America, the new Taoiseach of the United Tribes of North America and law giver plenipotentiary to all habitants of the land therein. The Don is a great hulk of a person who reminds one of a massive anaconda lurking in the deep Amazon River basin. It is not a creature to be toyed with at all. Thrice within a spate of two months, one has seen it take down and gobble up three presidential games from Africa, Middle East and Europe and perhaps the most famous educational institution on earth. How any digestive system could take in such a menu of disparate metabolic imperatives remains a miracle.

Last month as Volodymyr Zelensky, the feisty Ukrainian president, strolled jauntily through the lawn of the White House for a scheduled briefing, one had a premonition that one was about to witness a high-tech presidential lynching followed by ritual burial. First, Zelensky committed the sartorial error of appearing in military fatigues. This was like triggering the alarm bell of psychological insecurity. Zelensky was hoisting the twin flag of courage and native nationalism and no one wants to be reminded of what they are not. Who does the uppity little fellow think he is, one could almost hear the Don grumbling like an upset child? The demolition commenced without any formality. It was more like grilling a prisoner of war. Surrounded by a crowd of hostile interlocutors and with the Don himself hen-pecking and hemming him in, Zelenskyy had no hell of chance. By the time he was thrown out, he appeared disoriented and thoroughly ruffled. The Arab king, a trained fighter pilot and tested soldier, whose mother was also British like the Don’s, got a massive slap-down before back-heeling.

READ ALSO: Ileya, four other popular festivals in Nigeria

Next to fall was Cyril Ramaphosa, the urbane, cultured and amiable South African president. Eager to please, Ramaphosa was soberly suited and bore the depressed mien of a bankrupt banker. It was to no avail. South Africa has been punching above its weight at the ICC. Suspicion should have been roused when a few minutes earlier some high-tech honchos were seen wheeling television sets into the Oval war-room. The mugging and muzzling began immediately with the anaconda moistening over the cranium of the poor fellow with manic relish. Ramaphosa winced and grimaced like an African wildebeest about to be swallowed. By the time he was spat out, the old trade unionist could barely walk upright and could be seen heaving and sighing with relief.

Here is a travel advisory for feckless and heedless African leaders trying out their luck with the Big Don. Do not approach his dreaded vicinity without your Isanusi or principal juju man and with the full complement of traditional African charms such as Gbetu-gbetu, Okugbe, Onde, Kanako, Afeeri, Ayeta, Ikunpa, Igbadi, Eedi, Balu- balu and Egbe, the king of all amulets which will transport you back to your bedroom once the anaconda topples you over with its harpoon tail. It is all shaping up to something not very nice. But then even the first nation founded in a set of ideals needs this kind of massive disruption to shake it out of complacent lethargy.

June 1, 2025
The Nigeria/ Burkina Faso tango: Some historical notes

Always historicize”, advised Fredric Jameson, the great American literary theorist, philosopher and historian of human consciousness. It was his polite way of insisting that there are no human circumstances that cannot be greatly simplified by making history the point of analytical departure. The deployment of history not only enlightens, it also illuminates the discussion at hand and provides invaluable insight about the way forward. When you acquaint yourself with the history of a particular issue, you are halfway towards a perfect understanding of the main drivers of contention.

For some time now, there appears to be no love lost between the Nigerian government and the Burkinabe military authorities. Although things remain at the level of a cold war or what is known as diplomatic froideur, there is no guarantee that the simmering tension will not escalate into a full-blown confrontation given the propaganda blitz unleashed from Burkina Faso and the antics of a misguided section of the Nigerian political elite and social media miscreants hoping to tip the nation into the anarchy of simultaneous combustion. The fact that Russia and its controversial Wagner Associates now renamed as the Russian Corps are also rumoured to be the directing patrons of a well-coordinated effort to undermine western-style democracy and its most important outpost in West Africa should be a source of concern.

After the unraveling of the mighty Soviet Empire, a triumphant Western diplomat famously dismissed its Russian rump as little more than a Burkina Faso with nuclear weapons. The irony is upon us with the real Burkina Faso now armed with nuclear warheads of destructive propaganda supplied by the selfsame Russia. Of the three Francophone West African countries that went rogue and ditched ECOWAS to form the association of Sahelian states, Burkina Faso appears to be the most vehement and vociferous in its anti-Nigerian stance. This mutual antipathy can be traced to a widening gulf in ideological outlook between the two countries whose origins date back to an earlier epoch.

   Yet it was not always like this. Even when they cannot reverse the nation-state paradigm imposed on them by colonization, African elites must resist the temptation to turn their countries to autonomous enclaves and personalized Bantustans which can never aspire to the organic coherence of true nation-states and which makes them very vulnerable in an increasingly disordered global order. Before the advent of colonization, the entire West African subcontinent was a vast, culturally continuous and economically contiguous ”free trade” zone. A niece who had been posted to Guinea by her multinational conglomerate was surprised to find herself accosted in downtown Conakry by a group of people speaking some old and pristine version of Yoruba language amidst the gaudy Francophone veneer of the city which made things eerily unsettling. Another cousin who originated from Nigeria but became an American citizen and noted professor of Francophone Studies found himself posted out to the University of Burkina Faso as a member of the American Peace Corps. An ebullient and gregarious character who has since tragically departed, he regaled everybody with his nocturnal forays in some dark alleys of Ouagadougou drinking palm wine and listening to old Sakara music among Yoruba-speaking natives a few of them with signature tribal marks. Talk of a native who had gone double native. And what of the Aku people of Gambia, Yoruba descendants of liberated slaves sent from Sierra Leone to man the Gambian civil service whose sonorous singing of Egungun ballads could send tears to the eyes?

Despite succumbing to different colonial rationalizations by Britain, France, early Germany before they were expelled and Spain, the post-colonial history of most of these countries did not diverge very much, as if the original African genes could not be suborned by colonial adversity. It was the same history of endemic poverty, corruption and the mismanagement of ethnic and religious diversities eventuating in violent military coups and rampart disorder. In this regard, Nigeria and Burkina Faso have a lot in common.

The dominant ethnic group, the warlike and fiercely independent Mossi people, resisted French occupation for decades until 1901 when their parched and dusty capital Ouagadougou was invaded and violently pacified. Independence in 1960 came within a few months of each other. Maurice Yameogo, the founding Upper Volta chieftain, ruled very much like a traditional African chief for the next six years with corruption, graft and instability very much the order of the day until he was deposed in a military coup by Colonel Sangoule Lamizana. Lamizana was himself overthrown by Colonel Yare Zerbo who later succumbed to Major Jean-Baptiste Ouedraogo, a military surgeon.

   Meanwhile despite the epidemic of coups, the landlocked, resource poor country remained wracked by poverty and corruption with the dazed and disoriented populace tottering on the edge of despair and terminal disillusionment. While the people remained bitter and resentful, the officer-corps at the mid-ranking and junior levels became radicalized. But unlike in Nigeria where things took an ethnic and regional turn in the armed forces, the Burkinabe armed forces as well as significant sections of the elite became polarized along ideological lines with the military becoming a battle field of contending ideas in a world in which the Soviet bloc itself was in a state of terminal turmoil with the advent of a starry-eyed reformer known as Mikhail Gorbachev.

   It was this roiling cauldron that threw up a youthful idealistic military officer, Thomas Isidore Sankara. To stabilize his regime, Ouedraogo had decided to appoint a prime minister from the left bloc. His choice was none other than the young charismatic major with the star quality who was immensely liked and admired by the rank and file. It was a fatal error of judgment. Disagreement soon broke out between the two over the direction of the country and Ouedraogo had his deputy arrested and put under house detention. To break the deadlock, troops from the fabled and dreaded Po Garrison and their commander, Blaise Compaore, an acolyte and childhood friend of Sankara, marched on the capital from over eighty miles to free Sankara and install him as the new president.

Read Also: ‘ECOWAS’ institutions to leave Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger’

   This was where fate conjoined the two West African countries in a way and manner that could not have been greatly understood at the time. Sankara was a military revelation. The word “cool” could have been invented for the iconic paratrooper. Tall, dashing, thoughtful, polite, deeply compassionate with a calm, unflappable mien, Sankara was the ultimate designer revolutionary officer. When he visited Nigeria around this period, the strappling swashbuckling major with his holstered service pistol was the cynosure of all eyes inviting swooning adulation from men and women alike to the quiet embarrassment of his military hosts and ranking generals who were all conservative law and order military traditionalists and regime survivalists. Alarm bells began to ring in all the power sanctuaries of West Africa and beyond. This was the mad boy who would put everybody in trouble. Francois Mitterrand, the French president, described Sankara as a cutting edge that cut too sharply. Felix Houphouet-Boigny , who was related to Blaise Compaore by marriage, began fretting in Cote D’Ivoire. General Babangida who had earlier warned junior officers that their regime would not tolerate “undue radicalism” could not have found it funny. Sankara’s goose was cooked.

After Sankara was violently eliminated in a daylight military putsch masterminded and spearheaded by his bosom friend, a thick pall of gloom and grief descended on West Africa and beyond. JJ Rawlings, Ghana’s ruler and a close friend and ideological acolyte of the fallen major, mounted a seven-day national vigil for the departed ruler. But Nigeria showed its hands by openly and undiplomatically welcoming Compaore’s envoys, the two majors who were part of the triumvirate that ousted Sankara. This was while they were being shunned and driven away from several African capitals with Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia particularly devastating in his putdown. General Olusegun Obasanjo equally dismissed them as purveyors of military perfidy and treachery. But nemesis caught up with Major Zongo and Major Lingani a few months down the line as they were summarily executed for plotting to overthrow Compaore.

After that, there was only one master law-giver and autocratic tyrant in Burkina Faso. Unlike Sankara, Compaore is no starry-eyed ideologue but a harsh pragmatist, ruthless schemer and master power player who knew how to secure the levers of power and keep the populace in close leash. He had no illusion about human nature. He was known to have privately rued that Sankara was a softie leftist and he was making too many concessions to the populace and civil rights groups which undermined the very basis of military authority and opened the backdoor to anarchy. For the next twenty seven years, he put Burkina Faso through the torture wrack until 2014 when the usual combination of civil uprising and military insurrection sent him scampering across the border. More civil unrest and a few more military coups down the line, enter the young and energetic Captain Ibrahim Traore. But is he the new Sankara, an avenging angel ready to deliver his country from the crushing weight of historic misrule?

Not quite. And not so fast. Despite his menacing bearing and gung-ho militarism, it is obvious that the young captain lacks the visionary elan and sublime intelligence of Thomas Sankara, otherwise he ought to have known that he is a mere pawn on the international chessboard of a Russia making a ruthless pitch for Africa’s mineral resources. Sankara, an avowed Africanist, was nobody’s puppet or poodle dog. Russia itself has since transited from a Communist superpower to a hyper Slavic, ultranationalist nation spreading terror and hysteria in Africa and many of its former vassal states.

The barrage of misinformation and AI-generated impressions portraying the youthful Burkinabe leader as a superman and new African avatar are completely misguided. The lure of military messianism and the revolutionary ardour that convulsed Nigeria and many African countries a few decades ago have waned considerably. It may yet creep back but not in the current configurations. Burkina Faso itself is a standing rebuke and ringing indictment of such misplaced hope. The young man from Waga has many things going for him. But for now, he should remove the bullet-proof encumbrances and settle down to real work.

May 25, 2025
The Good Samaritans of Heathrow Airport

There are times when even a chronic agnostic and cheery non-believer is compelled to accept the possibility of miraculous intervention in human affairs and the fact that there may be some benign and benevolent higher authorities directing the affairs of humanity towards some higher telos. Even when it appears to topple into universal chaos and disorder, human history is too well-structured and infused with immanent logic to admit the possibility that life is nothing but a series of freewheeling non-events or that history is just one damned thing after another, a process without a subject as noted by Louis Althusser, the great French philosopher and Marxist theoretician. Althusser himself would later kill his beloved wife and longstanding collaborator after a domestic argument and was promptly committed to a mental asylum.

In the early hours of Tuesday, April 22nd, yours sincerely arrived at Heathrow Terminal Five after a peaceful and uneventful flight on British Airways from Lagos hoping to connect the early BA flight(117) to New York which leaves at 8.30 am. Having spent the previous fortnight in Lagos haggling and arguing with various travel agents and sundry interlopers over the skyrocketing airfares out of Lagos, it was a tired and completely worn out snooper that made his way to the BA lounge for a quick nap. It turned into a deep slumber. The last thing one could remember was ruing the fact that if an Economy ticket to New York from Lagos was now hovering over the five million naira benchmark, one may be witnessing a funeral pyre and the last snapshot of the ancient Nigerian middle class. One may now have to explore the possibility of journeying by sea via Las Palmas or by overland through the dreaded Sahara desert.

In what seemed an eternity later, a rather cumbersome fellow lugging an outsize suitcase lost his balance and bumped into one forcing a retreat from the world of dream. It was an hour to departure time and flight was already boarding. One scrambled up to head for the gate. This was when the drama began. The fabled Green Card could no longer be found in the breast pocket where one had thought it was kept safe and secure. A wave of panic set in as one frantically searched everywhere, scouring any loophole or pocket in the jacket and eventually removing the nonsense to the mild consternation of many. The briefcase was upended with all its archaic exotica and ancient receipts from last century. Alas, the American talisman was nowhere to be found.

Read Also: Two injured as training aircraft crash-lands at Ilorin airport

Meanwhile the monitoring screen, like the cruel and unkind clock in Gregor Samsa’s room which mercilessly ticked away while the owner had become a huge bug, indicated that the flight was about to close. In acute frustration, one decided to head for the gate which was at least ten minutes away to report himself. The flight formalities had been concluded and only a few officials remained with one of them hollering at one from a distance and asking whether one was going to New York.

“Yes, I am going to New York but I have lost my Green Card”, yours sincerely moaned upon getting to the gate.

“We have it”, one of them, a kindly looking gentleman, calmly announced.

“Did you hear me? I just told you I lost my Green Card!” yours sincerely yelped at the fellow thinking that he didn’t understand him. At this point, a lady stepped forward.

“And we told you we have it. You dropped it in front of Nando Restaurant while passing earlier and it was brought to us. Now please go and board because they were about to remove your luggage”, she said gingerly placing the card on the desk. It was too good to be true. One was about to sink to the floor in exhaustion but managed to hold himself. Here is thanking the good Samaritans of Heathrow for this miraculous reprieve and wishing them the joys of early summer.

May 25, 2025
The Pope of Good Hope

Reimagining a new world order

It is a wonderful irony of history that the papal conclave in Rome should choose as the new pontiff, Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, who , at 69, is the 267th occupant of the throne of St Peter and the first American ever to be so elected. The Roman Catholic conclave and its grizzled cardinals are consummate past masters and poker-faced gnomes of global geopolitics and its great, irrational dynamics. There are many shrewd observers who believe that this is not a play of irony at all but a compelling game of bridge enacted at the highest echelon of global politics. As the new pope, Leo X1V brings to office the exalted virtues of humility, compassion and nobility of worldview. In a world sent reeling and gasping for breath by the combustible and disruptive politics of another American, these are values so antithetical to the worldview of Mr Donald Trump that one can be forgiven for wondering whether it was the same country that threw them up.

Yet they are. Both president and pope represent two antipodal possibilities of leadership in the same society and the promise of redemption once a society gets it right. Consequently, no human society, nation or race can be written off on the basis of current misdirection or misapplication of national genius. It is the triumph of hope and human salvation over the horrors of actual existence. It is to be noted that unlike Mr Trump who comes with overwhelming military, political and economic capability to impose his will on a global scale, the pope is armed only with his moral authority and the leverage of outstanding personal example. It is the might of example over the example of might.

It is a long time ago when Josef Stalin as the undisputed master of the Soviet Empire and arguably the most powerful man in the world at that point sucked at his famous pipe and wondered aloud about how many divisions a sitting pope could muster. This was in response to diplomatic murmurs that the pontiff was very unhappy about Stalin’s conduct. Among the communist triumvirate that took over power after the Russian revolution Stalin, a failed seminarian, was the most militant and open in his hostility to formal religion. In a story possibly apocryphal, it was said that when Stalin after becoming the undisputed master and law-giver of the Soviet Empire returned home to his native Georgia, his mother, a feisty Georgian matriarch, reportedly crowed that it was a pity the great man failed as a priest.

READ ALSO: FULL LIST: World’s 11 most powerful passports in 2025

The old woman may have a point. Long after the Soviet Empire had collapsed and disappeared in the sand of time, the church, particularly the Roman Catholic empire, is still standing and waxing stronger. Despite the great political turbulence occasioned by ever-shifting geopolitical dynamics, despite the occasional resort to underhand economic deals and fiscal dodginess, despite the frailties and peccadilloes some of its priests, the Catholic church has fought along the side of the people particularly in predominantly Roman catholic nations such as Brazil, Portugal, the Philippines and East Timor in their struggle against autocracy and indigenous tyranny. Its great Jesuits and brilliant priests have contributed greatly to the expansion of the frontiers of knowledge and learning, opening new vistas in science, astrology, astronomy, geophysics and philosophy. For every Copernicus and Galileo persecuted, there were great pathfinders such as Augustine, Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, Spinoza, Ignatius of Loyola and several other lesser known grandees of human thought and development such as the liberation theologians of Latin America. Almost six centuries later, the voice of Bartolome de las Casa, the local Catholic Bishop of Chiapas, continues to ring out from the grave about the horrendous atrocities committed at the Spanish mines of Potosi leading to the extermination of the indigenous populace and captive Africans who were dragooned to work the mines.

This is the great tradition and the heroic forebears that have thrown up Pope Leo and his illustrious predecessor, the much revered and much beloved Pope Francis who originally hailed from Argentina and was a man of cosmopolitan distinction who labored greatly to enhance the status of the poor, the underprivileged and the under-represented of the world. Pope Leo himself did some back-breaking work among the poor and the wretched of the earth in Peru. Such was his devotion to his congregation that he took up Peruvian citizenship and for a long time many were wont to think of him as a Peruvian rather than as American-born. Such is the solidity and organic coherence of this noble tradition that Pope Leo has reaffirmed his commitment and adherence to the path taken by his noble predecessor. His opening gambit has not disappointed those who expected him to be a champion of the poor and he has made a pitch for the global underclass and voiced his concern about the horrific carnage in Gaza and Ukraine and the plight of their hapless denizens in his usually calm demeanour.

This quiet stubbornness and insistence on what is right, just and fair for everybody, this steely obduracy about speaking out against injustice and about the appalling condition of the human species and the growing abridgement and outright abrogation of freedom of speech in an America lurching to the far right is bound to push the new pope on the path of conflict with the new authorities in the land of self-evident truths about the unalienable rights of humanity. The fact that the new pope is American-born heightens the contradictions and poetic ironies. For it gives him greater clout than his predecessor could ever dream off to act as a countervailing voice against the new autocrats of Europe and the authoritarian fiasco brewing in his own backyard. This is probably why the conclave pushed for him in a moment of inspired calculation. Since this is essentially a battle of will and a duel of wits, matters are not expected to get out of hand, but if they do, one can hear the American royal protagonist screaming: “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?” This is just as it happens in Murder in the Cathedral. It will not be the first time a pope is in mortal danger because of his steadfast convictions.

Without any iota of self-irony and in a revelation laced with blindness and insight in equal measures, Donald Trump has let it be known that he was responsible for the election of the new pope. As we can see from the preceding analysis nothing can be closer and farther from the truth at the same time. The pope might have been elected because of Donald Trump but not for the reasons he thought as he is bound to find out in the long run. As we have noted in an earlier column, it will be unfair and unwise to demonize the American president just because of what he is. Donald Trump is a product of the American society and its regnant contradictions. From a particular transactional prism, much of what he has to say is true and telling. Even in the most liberal and generous of traditional African society, there is a saying that they will not continue to invite you to communal dinner if you have nothing to contribute. As Franz Kafka would have put it, “it is not that what you say is untrue but it is so harsh”. Economically beleaguered countries must get their act together.

As a young nation and fresh society, that is if we discount the decimation of the indigenous populace, America has been spared the pathologies of old traditional societies and their memory-encrusted traumas. This vigour and freshness of vision are what have borne the new nation along as it traversed new political and economic territory, leaving older nations stranded behind. But like a mysterious and mythical bogey, the old world and older civilizations often disturb and destabilize America’s self-assurance and swashbuckling confidence by the imponderable deviousness of their ways and their unfathomable political resilience. In dealing with this bogey, America oscillates between extreme calculated cruelty and stupendous child-like generosity. This is what has brought Trump as a final solution.

In re-imagining a newer and better world away from the current meanness of spirit and horrific destruction, it is the America of oceanic plenitude of resources which it was willing to share, the America of the massive and paradigm-changing Marshall Plan that rescued Europe from economic ruination, the America that left thousands of its own behind in Parisian graves as it fought to rescue Europe from the clutches of fascism, the America of the Peace Corps and ASPAU and the America that lent its enormous resources to prodemocracy forces in Nigeria in their struggle to rid their nation of military despotism that must come to the fore of the human imagination.

This is the America that threw up the current pope with his nobility of purpose, his compassion and charity towards all. There are millions of Americans like him out there. But we must not get carried away by the euphoria of premature triumphalism. The pope’s voice does not carry any economic weight, nor does he have troops at his command, as Stalin famously reminded his papal forbear. His is the force of overwhelming moral authority and outstanding example. This is what should matter in a re-imagined world. We say welcome to the Pope of Good Hope.

May 18, 2025
Okon heads to the east to join wonder-boy

Despite the recent presidential charm offensive and promises of wondrous sweeteners, all is still not well in the land of the rising sun. There is still a lot of turbulence in the air. With the dreaded IPOB threatening another massive lockdown which will shake the entire beleaguered enclave to its roots, there is reason to believe that something nasty and sinister is in the offing. Like an old metrological savant, yours sincerely has been monitoring the inclement clouds with mounting concern and anxiety wondering whether it will all fizzle out or end in a malignant downpour. IPOB and its trigger-happy affiliates have promised to honour and celebrate the departed icons and heroes of its struggle even if it means putting the entire region on a war-footing. How it expects the authorities to sit idly by and watch this challenge to the legitimacy and authority of the state remains a source of profound mystery. The only problem is that the Nigerian security forces are fighting off too many challenges to the sovereignty of the state on many fronts.

All of a sudden, Okon crashed into the living room and dropped a heavy bag on the floor, disturbing the peace and harmony of the hour after the gentle drizzles which went on all night. A startled snooper sprang up on the sofa. But before one could say a word, the crazy boy opened up.

“Ha, oga no vex at all. I wan quickly reach dem old Orlu Province make man join dem Biafran volunteer group”, the mad boy announced with flourish and excitement. The heart warmed and glowered at the prospects hoping that this time around the lunatic will meet his terminal comeuppance.

“General Okon, welcome to the front!” yours sincerely noted with a cynical guffaw.

READ ALSO: Issues in Lagos APC LG primaries

“Ha oga, I no be general at al at all. Dem general no fit shoot and dem dey run even from dem rabbit. I be Commander Gburugburu from Oji River”, the mad boy shouted. At this point, the ancient generator that had been working all night suddenly hissed like a mad camel and then went dead.

“Ha oga, you see yourself now? We never chop meat for dis house for six months now. Na so so Yoruba insect and dem ancient mushroom. Now dem generator don kaput. Even dem Biafran people no dey treat dem old officer like dis. At least dem still dey supply dem with monkey meat and manpower. And….” At this point, yours sincerely tried to hush up the crazy fellow and his subversive ranting.

“Wo, Okon shut up and face your own problems. By the way, you never said you are Ibo and a member of IPOB”, yours sincerely noted with a blackmailing frown.

   “Oga, na double-barrel question you dey ask me. I no dey answer double-barrel question”, the mad boy retorted.

   “So, how are you going to get to IPOB heartland?” snooper demanded from the crazy fellow.

    “When I reach Uturu Junction from Afikpo, I go cross to Ihube in Okigwe and from there I go reach Isuochi from the backdoor and then on to Mbala and Agwuata,” Okon reeled out as if reading from a war map. His knowledge of the Igbo heartland was so compelling and detailed that it set off a quiet wave of panic in yours sincerely.

    “If I had known that I have been harbouring a rebel insurgent in the house, I would have invited these people to come and take you away a long time ago..” yours sincerely moaned as fright and premonition set in.

“ Ah oga no be like dat ooo. No be like dat at all. I no dey fight oo. I no be soldier. I just dey supply dem with fresh palm wine from Itigidi and Biakpan. You no say na my papa dey sell better palm wine for Calabar. Even dem Awolowo dey come drink palm wine for dem place after dem mala capture am. At time, dem old Yoruba witch go disappear and him go reappear just like dat”, Okon sang.

“Shut up, Okon. Awolowo was a teetotaler “, yours sincerely screamed at the mad ruffian.

    “Taller dan who? Oga, Awo na short man, him no tall pass nothing”, the crazy boy retorted and then winked. “Oga, I no be dem IPOB. Na dem mad boy for Anambra who dey fire and wire all dem Ibo women who come invite me make I become him assistant. Him say work dey boku and Ibo women plenty yanfunyanfun and dem go pay me for direct gbam and for assist”. On that note, snooper threw a shoe at the urchin which sent him packing.

May 18, 2025
Contested sovereignty and the postcolonial state

In a significant pushback by the forces of civil and political society against a brutal and obdurate postcolonial military state, Admiral Augustus Aikhomu, General Babangida’s deputy and Vice-Chairman of the Armed Forces Ruling Council, once famously rued that nothing the government did seem to impress the adamant opposition that appeared so cohesive and unrelenting in its criticism and adversarial postures. “Honestly, one just has to continue doing what one feels is right and good for the nation without minding what they feel or say”, thus mournfully concluded the gruff elderly sailor from the old Edo Division. This was after opposition forces had made a short shrift of his attempts to confuse the nation by making a dubious distinction between “misapplication of funds” and “misappropriation of national resources” in a case of crass corruption and abuse of office involving a state governor.

Shortly thereafter as the battle between democratic forces shaped up into an epic showdown which would culminate in the annulment of the freest and fairest election in the history of the nation and its tragic aftermath, General Ibrahim Babangida, the old Minna fox and master of dribbling incursions into enemy eighteen, showed up on national television after a meeting of the ruling council to brief the nation about the outcome of the council’s deliberations. Wearing a gloomy visage of contrived frustration, Babangida informed his compatriots that a pressing item on the agenda was to discuss whether to hand over the government to civil society forces who thought they knew how to govern the country better. It was a tense and testy moment for the nation. When pressed further, Babangida retorted ruefully and adamantly that it was the truth. It was a military blackmail from the pit of hell. Whoever heard of a military cabal suddenly hand over power to its civilian adversaries without some bloody encounters? The military would later hand over power, but no longer in circumstances of their choice or in condition of their provenance.

Almost four decades and a spate of communal upheavals , abortive military putsch, religion-based insurrections and nation-wide protests against the economic distress of the nation, the battle of will and wits between voices and forces of democratic pluralism and the Nigerian post-military state continues in several guises. It is to the credit of the prodemocracy forces that despite heavy casualties, the military finally retreated to the barracks. But as it is to be expected of a society transiting to political modernity, vestiges of military-inspired political autocracy and traditional authoritarianism remain. In postcolonial societies, the reorientation of political consciousness is always the hardest task, requiring deliberate cultivation and acculturation. Swelling the ranks of the ruling dominant party with stragglers and defectors and other political destitute does not lead to a new political culture. It is like working to answer; a reenactment of the old feudalist ethos in modern politics which always leads a nation to peril as it has happened twice in Nigeria’s history. This is why the debate about whether Nigeria is about to become a one-party state is a non-event; a non sequitur, the reverse gear of genuine and authentic elite consensus.

Unfortunately, punditry and informed commentary in Nigeria is often taken over by those who seem to lack fundamental capacity for rigorous thinking and the scholastic training for formal argumentation and systematized thought-processing which you found in intellectuals and politicians of an earlier epoch many of who did not even attend universities as well as in their tested well-trained bureaucrats. Instead of marshaling their points and laying out their argument in a sober and polished manner all you find is arid emoting and political incivilities which grate on the well-bred but which may sound to them like poetic eureka. While we are all at it, what is more unfortunate is that history and events do not wait for any society to solve its national problems or resolve its crippling contradictions.

Otherwise, why has contested sovereignty become the norm in several African countries despite the drive towards further democratization in the last three decades? In these postcolonial countries, overwhelmed sovereignty, partial sovereignty, negotiated sovereignty, partial territoriality and contested state identity have been the order of day with asymmetrical warfare and occasional symmetrical set-pieces that have brought the postcolonial state in Africa to utter ruin and disrepute. In many of these countries, ungoverned and ungovernable spaces surpass the writ of formal governance. In South Sudan, the protagonists are on the verge of returning to the killing fields of equatorial torpor despite a subsisting power-sharing arrangement.

Sudan is effectively partitioned as the RUF establishes formal state presence in Western Darfur after two years of horrific bloodletting. An armed critique of the befuddled gerontocracy that has ruled Cameroon since 1981 is ongoing in the English-speaking Western region of the country. The state in the Democratic Republic of Congo is effectively defunct. In Nigeria despite the advent of democracy, particularly after the summary execution of the Boko Haram sect leader in 2009, the group mutated into several murderous factions and armed affiliates that have put the fear of the Lord into everybody, particularly along the Katsina-Zamfara corridor. The Benue-Plateau axis is on the boil again while the east erupts periodically in sectarian violence.

Read Also: Tinubu receives special envoy of Qatari Amir at State House

One can imagine the ruinous impact of these multiple and multi-dimensional conflicts on the nation’s food security which is critical to the mood of any nation and the government’s drive to reset the economy which is critical to national wellbeing. Nobody will come to our aid. The Americans who came in the early days of the Boko Haram left in a huff, citing the possibility of compromised intelligence and security concerns. As it has turned out, there were too many rogue elements in the field including Americans themselves. This is what happens when a nation’s internal demons lead it to become a prey for international gaming. In retrospect, the global shenanigans surrounding the emergence of these shadowy and virulent sects might have signposted the decaying of the old international order and the drastic reset America is currently undergoing in the hands of Donald Trump.

Apocalypse now, or the Pope of Good Hope?

May we all live in interesting times, the wily and eternally inscrutable Chinese people admonish. We surely live in interesting and unpredictable times. The world is passing through a period of strife and stress in which there is a radical discontinuity between the certainties of the past and the wild implausibility of the present, or between the events of the past and the eventualities of the present. The current epoch is marked by a convergence of conflicts and conflagrations which leaves no part of the globe untouched. With its fulcrum unhinged, the world thrashes about in different directions like a beached behemoth that has reached the end of the road, spreading fear and panic everywhere. Meanwhile, as Israel pounds everything in sight into submission, the old map of the Middle East is being forcibly redrawn before our very eyes with the old powers too tired and enfeebled to do anything about it.

The 1948 conflict over the establishment of a Jewish State, the 1956 Suez Canal conflagration, the 1967 war and the 1973 Yom Kippur confrontation, though of a savage and brutal nature was over in a matter of days. But the current Gaza expedition which was triggered by Hamas’ palpable indiscretion has lasted almost two years with an inch by inch high-tech annihilation of Gaza Strip by Israel. Before our very eyes, Israel has transformed from a war-prone nation to the first modern war state and colonizing imperium. The old western power masters in their wisdom must be wondering if they didn’t lower the Israeli cat too early among the Arab and Persian pigeons. That is if they do not have their own internal demons to contend with.

For a long time, attention has been focused on the Westphalia nation-states and the struggling paradigm of nations they have spawned particularly in the Third World and in the so called Second World. But with the continuing chaos in post-colonial Africa, the fiasco in the western world and the horrendous melee in the Middle East, attention is now shifting back to the State Question, that is the nature of the institutions and the quality of the manpower assembled to preside over the affairs of humanity and the equitable distribution of its resources. The reaction to this epochal crisis of the state has been as intriguing as it is interesting.

While Africa in the main remains trapped by the institutional paralysis and structural disequilibrium that have made it impossible for its talented First Eleven to come to power and governance, many nations in Europe and Asia have gone back to the drawing board to rediscover its most gifted elite-class. While a “colonial” nation like Canada has set formal politics aside to hand over the reins of power to an Harvard and Oxford-trained, intellectually gifted economist and technocrat, America, the founding nation of liberal democracy, has allowed the ball to slip from its sight and with that the American political mob has finally elected its own leader. With Donald Trump famously and sacrilegiously donning the episcopal mantle of the pope after the burial of the globally revered pontiff, we may be witnessing the final funeral rites of liberal democracy as we know it. Now that we have an American-born pope, Donald Trump will soon realize that the joke is on him.

How did humanity come to this sorry pass? Is humankind not a victim of its own amazing successes as it evolved away from the Hobbesian state of nature to acquire the trappings of a modern society? Our species has chalked up amazing successes on the road to the modern society, making it to surpass anything that has been before or is likely to come after even with the discovery of “life” in outer spaces. But we must always bear in mind that this ascendancy was achieved at the cost of momentous brutality and utmost cruel exertion. To secure a breathing space, our species had to hunt down and drive into extinction lesser and weaker hominids until the world was made safe for primitive humanity to roam about freely about in search of its own destiny. As Charles Darwin brilliantly demonstrated, survival of the fittest is the first principle of evolution of the human organism. Every ascendant civilization is built on the ashes and massive destruction of earlier civilizations. Every preeminent nation and its people have put other eminent nations and their people to sword. There is a Viking in every one of us. This is unfortunately what is playing out between Israel and its neighbors with the world looking askance in spite of the horrific carnage.

May 11, 2025
Reinventing the postcolonial state

What is now imperative for humankind is to find a way to further civilize itself and humanize the historical process through a benevolent State that drives the human propensity for plunder and predatory carnage underground into the abject cellars of wild hominids from which it evolved. Based on the massive evidence before us, religion and pious worship can no longer do the magic. We hesitate to say that religion has become part of the problem.

The discovery of the state in the evolution of humankind and society is a startling innovation of political genius which laid the foundation for the emergence of the post-hunter-gatherer society and a more orderly and standardized commune with division of labour taking deep roots. This was the embryonic origins of modern civilization as we know it. But over succeeding millennia and centuries as human society grew more complex as a result of human genius for innovation, the state grew more powerful and overarching , often attempting to invade and regularize all aspects of human behavior. This has led to powerful pushbacks from forces of civil and political societies often eventuating in massacres, pogroms, epic slave revolts such as we had in the old Roman Empire and revolutions such as have occurred in the US, France, Russia, China, Cuba etc. These epochal events which led to the overthrow and extirpation of the old ruling classes and ancien regime and the inauguration of new ruling classes often lead to deep changes in state and the nation. But in almost all of them the deep foundations of authoritarian tyranny and repressive severity remain with the state. The traditional family structure with its autocratic patriarch and implacable law-giver projects onto the state the subliminal anxieties of humanity.

The human organism with its complex motivations and impulses so countervailing even in the same person that it is beyond belief is not an easy person to rule or to suborn. Even the illiterate masses have ideas of their own and rightly so. In some quarters, it is asserted that if humankind were to be angels, there would be no need for government. In its efforts to stay one foot ahead of the masses and to put the gilded throne beyond the reach of the furious mob and mutinous multitude, the state develops exotic and quixotic ideas of its own. In the early twentieth century, in their response to the global economic crisis, some western countries adopted an ideology which seeks a total control of politics, the economy and society through relentless mobilization and appeal to crude nationalism. It all ended in a historic fiasco with Spain still managing the politically ruinous consequences up till this moment while the Italians personally accounted for their leader, Benito Mussolini and his mistress. Hitler committed suicide.

Read Also: The party athwart the movement: why socialist political parties perform so woefully in elections in postcolonial Nigeria

In post-independence Africa, many of the leaders and founding fathers of their nations sought to impose a one-party state on their nations as a way of containing the centrifugal forces in the seething, multi-ethnic and multi-religious furnaces they inherited from the colonial rule. But it was to no avail as the experiment dissolved into ugly ethnic confrontation and violent military upheavals. In the few African countries that survived the blitz, such as Senegal and Tanzania, it was because their founding fathers were wise enough to leave behind a structure open enough for countervailing succession. In Nigeria, the political tension, military coups and an eventual confrontation between forces of civil and political society and brutal military rule which ended with the soldiers retreating to the barracks.

Unfortunately and despite the euphoria, it would appear that the vestigial structure of a repressive military state which blitzed the Nigerian landscape and sent the whole nation into a terroristic tremor remains undisturbed. Despite the advent of open and competitive democracy and the ongoing reset of the economic categories of the nation, the unresolved questions have led to contested sovereignty on many fronts and open challenges to the authority and legitimacy of the state in multiple theatres of conflicts across the nation.

The solution lies in a reinvention of the postcolonial state in Nigeria which will strengthen the capacity of the armed forces to deal with local and international emergences, push for a more inclusive governance and a structured egalitarian distribution of national resources across board, address the problem of corruption which has pushed the nation and its armed forces to the edge of the abyss and lay the foundation of a new beginning. In doing this, it must also attempt to dredge and drain the deep well of national resentments against the state. This is no doubt a huge task but the earlier we began to face the real issues the better.

May 11, 2025
Between apotheosis and Apoti Osi

As the wave of defection from sinking parties and upended dugouts approached the scale of a furious tsunami, there is a feeling that the APC has arrived at its apotheosis, a moment of divine beautification when everything seems possible, when a political party carries all before it, and when every potential opposition appears to have crumbled. Its leading lights are wearing a smirk of self-satisfaction. They are justified. Never in the history of the nation has a party capitalized so mercilessly and benefited so profitably from the structural and ideological debilities of its rivals. And never has a single party become so dominant that it looms so large in the horizon. The only remote comparison one can think of is the PDP at the height of its glory when the party became a Leviathan sweeping all before it and brooking no opposition in the ordinary sense of that word. Its hierarchs boasted of a sixty-year Reich during which it would rule the roost uninterrupted and unchallenged.

As things stand, the APC has bested its most formidable rival in all its hegemonic possibilities. The entire country has been reeling with shock and surprise. It is purely uncharted territory. Never in the history of the country have the citizens had to contend with a one-party state. As if to underscore the scary portents, a group of leading civil rights campaigners came out during the week, vowing to oppose every inch of the way any attempt to foist a one-party state on the nation because of its multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-religious polarities. It was like drawing a line in the sand. Dear readers, there are moments when the analyst feels that history repeats itself with such a wounding acuity and that truly the more things change the more they remain the same.

Read Also: Six Asian countries with cheapest visa fees for Nigerians

Exactly ten years ago after its historic triumph over the PDP, this column issued a travel advisory to the APC asking it to immediately put certain things in place if it were to avoid the dismal fate of its most formidable rival. This is what we are republishing this morning and even to the writer himself, it reads chillingly like the chronicle of an overreaching boa constrictor foretold, with the horns of an impala it had ingested sticking out of its own ruptured abdomen. But before we go, it is appropriate to leave with a delightful vignette from the nation’s history.

After a historic rally in a notorious enemy territory, the late premier of the old Western region, the urbane, witty, mentally alert and most perspicacious Samuel Ladoke Akintola was hailed by many as having achieved an impossible political feat. A leading pro-government columnist of the time called it the apotheosis of SLA and his party the NNDP as the liberator of the Yoruba race. When his confidant, personal assistant and troubleshooter Adewale Kassim, an Ijesha prince who was later to become a notable sovereign in his rural idyllic domain, drew Akintola’s attention to this and signposted it as a sign of a major shift in political fortune, the master word-juggler and exemplary verbal duelist chuckled and then noted with wry cynicism: “ ‘Dewale, apotheosis ko, apoti osi ni.”

May 4, 2025
After the biggest party

(The rise and fall of the PDP)

It was a messy and dismal end. There are some deaths that are dignified and ennobling in their calm fortitude and heroic defiance. But not this one. The PDP has died as it lived: beyond its means and probably beyond the means of the country as well. A presidential capitulation quickly snowballed into an anarchic retreat and a rout ending in an electoral massacre on the scale of a Homeric battlefield.

We will be counting the principal political casualties for many years to come. State orphans abound. The sixty year Reich has become the sixteen year wreck. There are no mourners in this Sambisa forest of the quick and the wounded; only rotund vultures and pot-bellied hyenas having a field day. It is an Eliotsian wasteland, and April is the cruelest month.

Not even the greatest political soothsayer could have foreseen this distressing disintegration and death of the greatest party in Africa. One of its shrewd and astute founding fathers, in a moment of embattled lucidity, had cautioned that this was not a political party but a rally. A rally is just a collection of different mobs on parade. If there is food, the mob will stay quiet. But if there is no food, the mob will quickly dissolve into its component units, all heading in different directions.

   After the greatest party comes the great hangover and headache. An army founded on the principles and ideology of loot can never survive the removal of its feeding bottle. The same fate also awaits any political party founded on such nefarious axioms. But we cannot afford to gloat too much on the horrid demise of the Nigerian behemoth. Like a festering corpse abandoned by even close relations, the PDP has become a national and public health hazard.

Read Also: Eight degrees that can land you a high-paying UK job

   The methods, means, principalities and instrumentalities by which this maladroit mammoth met its timely end will be studied and analyzed by students of politics in multi-ethnic societies with self-cancelling pluralities of power fulcrums for years and generations to come. They are beyond the standard fares of conventional post-colonial Political Science. But it is also important for the Nigerian intelligentsia both at home and in the Diaspora to study and analyze what went wrong as a guide to the future in all its gripping immediacy. We are not out of the wood yet.

   In the long run, the PDP was a child and victim of the circumstances of its provenance and progeny. It was an army arrangement. It was never conceived as a genuine and organic political party or mass movement. You cannot give what you don’t have. The army does not do mass movements, except in battle formations. That is a contradiction in terms and offensively pejorative of its constituting ethos. The army thrives on hierarchy and rigid differentiation. All animals are not equal, and some are even more unequal than others. This is the pecking order of nature itself. Democracy is a product of human evolution away from the state of nature, but even then for democracy to thrive there are certain undemocratic institutions that must be permanently in place.

   Like its NPN forebear which met the same fate in a military putsch, the PDP was not conceived as a conventional political party, but as a gargantuan coalition of big people and power brokers whose influence and authority would be so all-encompassing as to guarantee national stability and ward off the centrifugal forces which have hobbled Nigeria since independence. In the event, the PDP was just a variation of an old theme by very much the same military aristocracy.

On the face of it, it was a patriotic and nationalistic move. You cannot blame the military for being unable to envision a society beyond its own regimental and ideological purview. The Babangida political experimentation with a two-party system threw up a wildcat and a political maverick that could not be relied upon to guarantee military interests which under the long gestation of despotic rule had become national interests. In an attempt to forcibly liquidate the contrary forces, Abacha almost ended up liquidating the whole country.

   Under clever guidance and astute remote control, his successors were not about to make the same mistake. It is easy to forget that General Abubakar Abdulsalaam, in his first broadcast to the nation after General Sani Abacha’s demise, promised solemnly to see the Abacha transition programme to its speedy conclusion. But after being swiftly countermanded by those who put him there, a contrite general announced a new transition programme.

But just as you cannot step into the same river twice, no two historical conjunctures can be completely alike whatever their outward similarities. 1998 was not 1993. If the military hierarchy had bothered to take a peep into the political horoscope, they would have noticed that population-wise, Nigeria was becoming a much younger country and the demographic condition was about to change forever. The relentless forces of globalization had led to a radical democratization of the means of violence as well as the methods of mass enlightenment.

   In the event, the logic that led the military to an Obasanjo also led to the eventual disintegration of the ruling party. Having exhausted its historical and political possibilities, the military hierarchy had to look for a safe pair of hands and a bluff retired general to cover its retreat to the barracks. The PDP opening convention was a classic case of a textbook military operation as the founding fathers of the party were muscled out by sheer military might. Obasanjo famously took his delegates to the convention in a sealed train and tellingly bivouacked outside the city.

   In the circumstances, the organic growth of party and the deepening of the democratic process were left in the hands of a man who by training and temperament is an authoritarian autocrat who had no truck with democratic niceties. When the retired general famously asked the Turaki of Adamawa whether he could obey simple instructions, many thought it was an eccentric joke. Atiku himself would later find out to his political peril that the Owu warlord meant every word.

As for the deluded remaining founding fathers of the PDP, they soon found out that military khaki is not civilian brocade. As Obasanjo went for their political jugular, they began deserting the temple, one by one and two by two as the occasion demanded. The fiery autocrat next turned his caressing attention to the main opposition parties, engineering such momentous fissures that none of them survived the thunderous implosion.

   If the PDP ever had a soul it fled at the Jos convention. In other words, the party died in vitro. It was a mere vehicle for demilitarization which quickly transformed into a fascist terror machine for maintaining a hegemonic stranglehold on the nation. As Obasanjo has brilliantly demonstrated, it takes two to play at the fascist game of hegemonic domination. The same logic of the despotic suborning of a nation which made it possible for a military cabal to impose Obasanjo on the polity also made it possible for Obasanjo himself to impose two successors on the nation without heavens falling.

The game could have gone on for quite some time, but for the dramatic intervention of hubris so overweening that it is beyond the ken of human comprehension. Yet it was a matter of time, with the PDP becoming a stalled behemoth unable to move itself or the country forward and with its monstrous proboscis sucking life out of the nation.

   But only the bold and deeply cunning can call to the bold and deeply cunning. It took an inchoate and incongruous alliance to have the measure of the PDP in the remarkable political plot that brought the unflappable and wonderfully poker-faced Aminu Tambuwal to the speakership of the House of Representatives

At that point in time, political neophytes, particularly the traditional carrion feeders of the South West otherwise known as mainstreamers who did not know where the game was heading ,thought that the ACN had thrown away their pot of amala. But the PDP had been pole-axed and it was only a question of time before the mammoth would crash on the canvas with a resounding thud. As the end approached, even the wily patriarch openly tore his membership card.

There are great lessons to be learnt from the rise and fall of a party that constituted itself into a nuisance and menace to the Nigerian polity. Despite the national euphoria that greeted the dethronement of the ruling party, the future is full of dark forebodings. Unfortunately if care is not taken, the same fate awaits the now dominant party. This is what should concern all patriotic Nigerians.

As it was in the beginning, so it seems at the end of the beginning. Like the PDP, the APC remains an inchoate and incongruous alliance; a mere vehicle to capture power teeming with contrary characters and mutually contradictory elements all in a state of antagonistic but paradoxical complicity. In trying to outsmart and outwit the PDP, it has had to be like the PDP; or at best its veritable doppelganger. In other words, there is no qualitative difference or deep ideological divergence between the two parties.

This is a veritable source of a coming anarchy. The ranking APC hierarchs must now find within themselves the deep reserves of strength and character to give the party a soul and a capacity for organic growth which will drive change and accelerated development for the country as a whole.

   Luckily, they don’t have to look very far for a driving template. The APC already has their two leading chieftains as shining exemplars of the power of a missionary envisioning of a new society. The APC should fuse the pragmatic Democratic Welfarism of a Bola Tinubu with the instinctive messianic populism of a Mohammadu Buhari to evolve a left of centre party whose developmental strides will resonate with Nigerians and the Black Race for generations to come. This is the only way to avoid the fate of the PDP.

First published in April, 2015

May 4, 2025