The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • Kidnapping as Allegory

    This past week, the federal authorities briefly lost control of the major highway out of the federal capital to the core north. It was a profoundly symbolic moment for the Nigerian post-colonial state as it seems to buckle under the strains and stress of maintaining law and order in an increasingly distressed nation.

    It may well be a sneak preview of a historic meltdown.  Armed robbers and kidnappers laid siege to the beautiful, scenic plains that unfold towards the iconic city of Kaduna spreading murder and mayhem. According to a major newspaper report, many were unaccounted for after the siege lifted and the acrid smoke cleared.

    The chairman of UBEC and his daughter were abducted after his driver was killed. They were released two days later. Many others were not so lucky. They would have been frogmarched for several hours deep into the forest until they arrived at a modern kidnapping complex; an African Pentagon in the jungle bristling with guns and hardware of the nefarious trade. According to a recent victim, listening posts and sentry nests dotted the route relaying information back and forth.

    The same victim noted that at a point during captivity, a low-flying Air Force plane attempted to bomb the abductors out of contention. But the trigger happy sadists simply lined their victim against the bank of a deep river preparatory to finishing them off should the aerial threat become a reality. It would have been a foolhardy misadventure.

    By the end of the week, in what could be described as the symbolic equivalent of an assault on a national Holy Shrine, the kidnappers struck at the hometown of the president taking with them the District Head of Daura, Magajin Garin Daura, Mallam Musa Umar. It doesn’t get more humiliating than that.

    It will be recalled that a few months earlier, the Governor of Katsina State, Mallam Aminu Masari, had alerted the world that it was becoming impossible to venture out of the immediate precincts of the State House because armed robbers and kidnappers have laid a siege to the wider perimeter.  This is arguably the most damning evidence of official paralysis and state-impairment that we have seen in Nigeria’s post-independence history.

    It is obvious that the demoralised police are hopelessly outmatched and ill-equipped for this new kind of social daredevilry. There is a report that policemen often act as ransom conduit to the kidnappers. A more scary report even suggested that police often pay ransom to kidnappers to secure kidnapped colleagues in what may well be a double-sting operation in which the kidnapping might have been faked in the first instance. We are in the realm of reality as outlandish fiction and it doesn’t get more Kafkaesque.

    By midweek, it was reported that retreating Boko Haram insurgents had slaughtered over four dozen people in Adamawa State. When you add all this to the killing fields of Zamfara and Kajuru in Kaduna State, the renewed activities of killer-herdsmen in the middle belt, ritual savagery in the South West, and the mosaic of murder and mayhem that the country has become, you get a sense that the federal authorities are facing a unique, nation-disabling phenomenon of social, religious, economic and political insurgency.

    This past week in a widely circulated piece, a veteran columnist of The Vanguard newspaper, while chronicling our gradual descent into normlessness, has noted that what is happening in the north is a creeping revolution of the Almajiri underclass who seem to have had enough of their feudal master class.

    He then went on to thump and pooh-pooh the socialist and Marxist fantasy that revolutions can only occur in advanced societies with a well-crystallized and nobly envisioned middle class. To align with his argument and to buttress the point, one can only add that the revolution in Russia was famously dubbed the revolution against capital because it occurred in a backward feudal society of rudimentary capitalism.

    But there is a difference between revolutions and social revolts. There is nothing that has happened in the world so far that has disproved the foundational socialist thesis that revolutions require an organized middle class cadre to pioneer and power it. The lower masses do not do revolutions. Revolutions are a brisk and bloody affair requiring a disciplined and organized upper cadre to canalize and channel the volcanic rage.

    Social revolts by the lower masses can only end in messy and anarchic bloodletting which will eventually consume the entire society as state power gradually implodes, wracked by its own internal contradictions. The controlled explosions currently going on in Algeria and Sudan are possible only to the extent that there is a disciplined and organized civil force in the background controlling and orchestrating events.

    In Nigeria it is strange that all these social disruptions are happening so soon after a landmark election which seems to have settled the question of supremacy between the two major state parties. According to INEC, President Buhari trounced his opponent so decisively and by millions of votes to spare. Yet even before the inauguration, there are ominous echoes of a fundamental rupture within the political class and of a lurch towards regional and ethnic ramparts.

    These are the wages of electoralism, an overt and unwarranted reliance on elections as a mechanism for settling disputes among the political class without addressing fundamental national contradictions. As we have said several times in this column, elections do not resolve fundamental national questions. As a matter of fact, they often exacerbate them, leading to civil wars and national trauma: Algeria in 1992, Nigeria in 1993, Congo Brazzaville, Kenya, Cote D’Ivoire, CAR and now in Venezuela.

    On three different occasions, 1964/65, 1983 and 1993 disputed or aborted elections have led Nigeria to the path of anarchy and disintegration. On the few occasions that federal elections succeeded, they have always been preceded by elite buy in and substantial negotiation until the subsisting pacts collapse, 1958, 1979 and 1999.

    In stable democracies where major national issues have been settled, elections are mere elite mechanism for organizing and choosing state personnel. To that extent, they deploy substantial elite consensus and compliance to sustain the order of illusion and the illusion of order. That is until the nation faces fresh challenges and uncharted waters requiring fundamental re-engineering.

    It is when you have elite consensus on core national values that the less insignificant question of who actually rules is settled beyond controversy. Since the end of military rule, Ghana has oscillated between two political tendencies reflecting deep ideological divisions along the old Danquah versus Nkrumah fault lines but this has never degenerated into an ethnic or regional brawl. But in Nigeria despite the ideological flux within the state parties, elections are barely disguised warfare.

    Politicians must be able to read the political barometer of their society correctly. Otherwise, they plunge their nations into anarchy and chaos. When the hapless and heedless David Cameron called for a national referendum on Brexit little did he know that he was opening a Pandora’s Box of elite indiscipline and loss of visionary nerve which would render Britain virtually ungovernable.

    Readers of this column would remember us warning several times that unless we take some fundamental decisions about the destiny of the nation, Nigeria may become ungovernable for whoever won the presidential election. We insisted that even if President Buhari is returned to power, his renewed tenure would be marked by wild tempests and political volcanoes unless there is a fundamental shift in the paradigm of governance.

    So far, there is no concrete evidence of this shift except for President Buhari’s promissory note of redress and restitution. Meanwhile and well ahead of the inauguration, the voices of rancour and disorder are drowning out the few sober and sane voices remaining. While some notorious agent provocateurs from the north are busy proclaiming from the rooftop the strange new doctrine of northern exceptionalism based on what they consider its electoral majoritarianism , some southern leaders are hitting the rooftop in bitter derision daring General Buhari to do his worst.

    This is not the best way to usher in a new government. Nigera’s fledgling democracy has reached uncharted waters. By the way, is democracy Day May 29 or June 12? As elite rancour persists, as centrifugal forces lay siege to an already embattled state, the ground below is beginning to rumble. Elite cohesion is important for filtering discontents and disaffection. When that platform and buffer zone collapses, the stage is set for a direct confrontation between the affronted masses and the government.

    We are gradually approaching that point.  Political crisis in Nigeria is fuelled by elite delinquency. The two state parties cannot agree on the way forward. This is what happens when there is no unified vision of the country. The dominant political party has been unable to achieve consensus on who to field for the principal offices of the National Assembly and there is the danger of its dissolving into its regional particularities once again.

    In the circumstances, the coming elections in NASS promise to be as messy and chaotic as they were in 2015. The results may even be more controversial, given the premature focus on the 2023 elections. In the intrigue-soaked chambers, ethnic loyalty trumps party affiliation. We have been here before and the auguries are not too good for fledgling democracy, or the nation for that matter.

    This is one national emergency where presidential good intentions, honesty of purpose and integrity are not enough to halt the drift to anomie and chaos. It is obvious that the kidnappers who struck in Daura have no use or respect for such presidential virtues. As class polarization and feudal contradictions sharpen in the north, the rest of the country has every reason to tremble in premonition. President Buhari needs a generous dose of inspiration in the coming weeks.

  • Baba Lekki lambasts labour leaders on Workers’ Day

    To iconic and historic Epetedo on Tuesday to listen to verbal fireworks as a drunken Baba Lekki and a feckless Okon mounted a makeshift platform to deliver a damning verdict on the state of the nation and the state of Labour leadership in particular. It was around the same premises almost twenty five years earlier that MKO Abiola made his historic declaration against military tyranny prompting his arrest, incarceration and subsequent martyrdom.

    The whole place was bristling with out of work layabout, hawkers and hookers, half-employed flotsam, the certificated unemployable, syndicated kidnappers, equal opportunity pickpockets and other waste products of a dysfunctional society in its last gasps. As he launched one scurrilous attack after another, it was obvious that Baba Lekki had come to bury the system and not to praise it. But rather than grant his wish for martyrdom, the authorities wisely chose to ignore him.

    It was at this point that Okon chose to make his deliberately delayed self-important entry sporting the uniform of ancient bus conductors to wild, spontaneous applause from the star-struck assemblage.

    “Comrade Okon!!! Comrade Okon is here. The lion of Clifford Station has arrived”, the crowd enthused.

    “Ha ma people, ma people. Make I tell you something about dat one. I no be come raid at all at all. Dem no ask me to come before I don dey raid dem well well. So I be Raid Okon”, the crazy boy screamed as he clambered up the makeshift stage with the agility of a cat and to the quiet consternation of a drunken and sagging Baba Lekki.

    “Redi-redi Okon, you no see how dem useless Labour leaders dey do Maradona for us? “ a virtually toothless veteran troublemaker inquired with hardy cynicism written all over his face.

    “Baba Alausa, dem labour people no dey lead, dem dey deal. Some time sef I dey wonder why dem dey call them labour. Na only women dey do labour when dem wan comot pikin. Abi you don see where man dey labour before? Yeye people”, Okon snorted with wild relish.

    “As for….. as for, my pikin”, an old Edo man grunted with savage pleasure. It was at this point that Baba Lekki waded in with heavy duty Marxian dialectics.

    “Okon, point of correction. Those ones you see on television wearing funny uniforms and Aso ebi are not labour leaders. They are a bunch of bourgeois renegades working for government and looking to line their pockets with filthy lucre. They are answerable to no one but their masters in Aso Rock. When they see the real workers, they will run for dear life”. The old man intoned with magisterial severity.

    “Baba, see the plight of government workers in this land”, one man lamented.

    “On that one, I will not lie to you. I am a scholar of sick societies and not a labour propagandist. We have tell ourselves the truth and nothing but the truth. There are no government workers in this obodo in the real sense of the word. As they say in old Russia, people are pretending to work while government is pretending to pay them. Shikena, equation don balance. Liveable pay is the product of believable work. Three quarters of the workforce in the land are just an idle bunch of no-hopers hiding away in sinecure indolence”, the old man thundered.

    “And what about us factory workers?” one irate youth demanded in a rather threatening note.

    “Ah you see, young man, that is another lie we are living. To have factory workers, you must have functioning factories. You can count the number of functioning factories in the land. They have either been shut down or they are functioning well below capacity. Workers can only blackmail owners of functioning factories. Otherwise, they will just close the damned thing down and walk away. So you see, there is no functioning working class in the nation in the real sense of the word. We only have non-working underclasses or jetsam of collapsed industries”, Baba Lekki crowed.

    “Oga, but dem minimum wage no fit buy minimum food, abi your head no correct too?” one angry man demanded.

    “Ah you see, minimum wages are the wages of minimum people devised by minimum government of minimum nations. When you have a maximum nation ruled by a maximum government, you will get maximum wages. Please don’t ask me any further foolish question or I will place a curse on you”, Baba Lekki screamed.

    “Baba, and dem don thieve our pension finish”, one old man whimpered.

    “Nonsense, the real pension thieves are in the National Assembly with their humongous pay and humongous severance package. They need real severance before the nation can move forward. Tell your foolish labour leaders to go after those ones first”, Baba Lekki shouted as he jumped down and began to walk away with Okon in tow.

     

  • The Rise of the Judiciarate

    How elite discontent threatens democracy

    As Nigeria roils in its most combustible presidential electoral dispute since the advent of the Fourth Republic, it is time to understand the role of elite discord in the travails of democratic rule, particularly in postcolonial Africa. The loss or lack of elite amity impacts on certain institutions of the state in a very fundamental way, often opening the door directly to chaos. Unless we focus our attention on this root problem, we will be beating about the bush for a long time to come.

    The judiciarate is a very strange coinage indeed. But it rises to the peculiar circumstances of the Nigerian judiciary. Before now, Nigeria’s electoral destiny was determined by two principalities: the electorate and the selectorate.

    The electorate elects to select while the selectorate selects to elect. No question about which is more powerful. As it was famously observed, it is not those who vote that matter but those who count. But what happens in the case of a tie or a dubious deadlock between the selectorate and the electorate?

    This is where and when the third principality, or what we propose as the judiciarate, kicks in as a tie breaker between the electorate and the selectorate. For the past forty years beginning with the Second Republic, the judiciary has been a looming presence in Nigeria’s bitter and often acrimonious electoral disputes. Despite increasing voters’ awareness and a sharp rise in political consciousness, the judiciarate is increasingly called upon to determine the actual winners of disputed elections.

    In the final analysis, it is the judiciary that counts. And as the National Question bites harder, the state can no longer count on it. Surely what counts so decisively, so finally and infallibly can also become an instrument of political terror, driving the fear of the Lord into the state, particularly if they are not in political alignment.

    This is where the insurmountable contradictions begin. If the judiciary is so powerful and implacable why was its principal helmsman so messily and mercilessly defenestrated by the executive arm? Why are so many of its principal luminaries in tactical retreat?

    On the one hand, the onerous burden and added responsibility of being the nation principal electoral adjudicator has added immensely to the prestige and grandeur of the judiciary. Yet on the other hand,  it is precisely at the point of grandeur and glory that the judiciary’s vulnerabilities and infirmities appear in bold relief for all to see. It is a damning paradox and this is what is responsible for the tragedy of Walter Onnoghen and his fall from grace.

    Onnoghen, an otherwise brilliant and soberly-comported jurist, showed that he was a callow amateur on the political chessboard. There were rumours of a creeping partisanship and of being sighted where he ought never to have been sighted. He was beginning to prematurely flex his muscles in a mistaken belief in the power and omnipotence of the judiciarate.

    There were rumours of compromising phone calls and allegations of unhealthy chumminess with a powerful governor. It was the scary prospects of his adjudicating wrongly in what promises to be the greatest judicial showdown of electoral adjudication that led to Onnoghen being summarily unhorsed from his high horse.

    Power neophytes may scoff at the sheer bloody-mindedness of it all. But these things matter to those who take power seriously. And it did not begin yesterday. At the turn of the nineties shortly after the publication of former president Obasanjo’s Not My Will , snooper sat down to lunch with a very distinguished Nigerian who had played a very prominent role in the electoral abracadabra that led to the emergence of Alhaji Shehu Shagari as the president of the Federal Republic in his majestic north London pile.

    Obviously irritated by some of the revelations in the book, the great man suddenly blurted out: “ Now that Obasanjo is running his mouth all over the place, what if I were to bring out my own confidential files which show that……. “(Details withheld ). It shows that contrary to public disinformation, the military junta knew well beforehand that the electoral showdown of 1979 was going to end at the Supreme Court.

    The 1983 elections showed the judiciary wielding its utmost powers in what is in retrospect a dress rehearsal of the current powers of the judiciarate. A major gubernatorial electoral verdict was reversed to avoid further conflagration. The electoral umpire arrived in his Benin ancestral homestead in a military tank. The putative governor himself fled to Lagos in disguise as the electorate rose to welcome him.

    In the old East, the drama was equally riveting. On the day of judgement, the redoubtable C.C Onoh was seen prowling and pacing up and down the court’s corridor even as he munched banana and groundnut waiting to see which judge would have the folly and temerity to reverse his mandate. In Imo state, Samuel Mbakwe, a former Colonel in the Biafran Reservist Force, dispensed with mere formalities and simply went to the radio station to declare himself elected for a second term. A gun slide, as General TY Danjuma famously put it, followed the NPN landslide. But that was that.

    The aborted Third Republic was full of significant surprises. For the first time in the history of the nation, the electorate as Nigerian masses had a full measure of the selectorate as military and civilian oligarchy. The selectorate had already selected. But in a flagrant breach of the rule of engagement, they began stonewalling. It was obvious that they were not interested in democratic election but the perpetuation of oligarchic rule. The Nigerian people told them to go to hell.

    The military state went into full panic mode. In desperation, the junta turned to the emerging judiciarate for a life line. It obtained a black market injunction from an Abuja High Court which forbade the election to hold. In a controversial broadcast to justify the annulment, General Babangida cited the various law suits which he said were capable bringing the judiciary to ridicule and public infamy.

    He had completely forgotten that his own ouster decrees had expressly forbidden judicial interference in the conduct of the election. It was the military state itself that was bringing the judiciary to public ridicule and infamy. In retrospect, it was a remarkable benchmark in the pilgrim’s progress towards demystification, dishonour and disgrace.

    But you cannot cure leprosy with skin ointment. As the Fourth Republic unfolded, it became obvious that the grave symptoms had developed into a full blown ailment. The judiciarate was in full bloom, like a monstrous flower. It was also at this point that the judicial vulnerabilities began to manifest in sharp relief. Curiously enough, it coincided with the collapse of the Obasanjo Settlement of 1998/1999 which made it possible for the Abubakar military regime to transit to a civilian regime with some honour and a semblance of equity.

    It will be recalled that in 1999, strong remonstrations and pressures from all sides of the political divide persuaded Chief Olu Falae to drop his judicial challenge to Obasanjo’s victory at the polls. Many felt that this early challenge to civil rule might open the backdoor for ambitious military officers who were yet to be persuaded that the party was over. It showed the substantial degree of elite buy in to the new democratic dispensation.

    By the end of 2003, particularly after General Olusegun Obasanjo decided to annex the South West in an electoral blitzkrieg the like of which had never been seen in the history of the country, the old western component of the détente disintegrated. It was also about this time that a vicious battle for political supremacy commenced between Obasanjo and his deputy.

    But despite this and the spate of assassination of leading figures, Obasanjo managed to keep the lid on the roiling cauldron through a combination of intimidation, cajolery and sheer force of personality. It was a battle of political and psychological stamina, not talk of mental alertness. Four years after the departure of the military, Nigeria was back in the full default mode of political belligerence.

    By 2007, after Obasanjo, as a parting gift, managed to impose Umaru Yar’Adua on the nation in an electoral heist which has since entered the history books as the worst election in the history of democracy, the lid was blown open. Politically sensitive and acutely aware of the crisis of legitimacy which heralded his tenure, Yar’Adua wisely refrained from the fray.

    It was then left to the judiciary to clear the electoral mess. Their Lordships were compelled to add Mathematics to their core competence and professional proficiency. Beginning with the brilliant judgement of the Edo Tribunal led by Justice Umeadi which restored the mandate of Adams Oshiomhole, judicial reversals of purported electoral victory followed in Ondo, Osun, Anambra and Ekiti in no particular order.

    At the federal level, presidential elections were fiercely disputed from 2003 through 2007, 2011 and now in 2019. There were two dissenting minority judgements in 2003 and 2007 by messrs Nsofor and Oguntade. Both, courtesy of General Buhari, have since become Nigeria’s ambassador to the US and High Commissioner to  UK respectively.

    As it wades deeper to clear the electoral mess, the judiciary is sucked into the vortex of corruption and sleaze revealing the moral and ethical infirmities of many of their lordships. . The deep entanglement of the Nigerian judiciary in politics has been its greatest undoing to date. The debasement of politics has spread its tentacles to other state institutions.

    The debasement of politics occurs when there is no substantial elite consensus or fundamental amity among political elite about the core values that drive national goals. In such circumstances, anything goes and everything is game. Successful democracies are driven by elite unanimity about where the country is headed.

    Where elite consensus is lacking as a result of multi-ethnic politics or where a hegemonic group decides to appropriate the political patrimony of the entire political class in pursuit of sectional interests, the road is open to centrifugal forces from below to lay siege on the state. There are written and unwritten rules of engagement. Anything short of that leads to a political jungle of Hobbesian dimensions such as we are currently hosting in Nigeria.

    Since we like putting the cart before the horse, it is useful to point out that the sanitization of the judiciary cannot proceed without a deep cleansing of our errant political culture. Until we come to our senses, there will be many more political and judicial casualties.

  • The hunchback, killer lover-boys and other gory tales

    As one outlandish occurrence follows another, the most sensitive among Nigerians are beginning to experience what can be described as horror-fatigue. Is it end of time in Nigeria and are we witnessing some apocalyptic endgame? Just a single one of these events is enough to send a sane and sober society on a tailspin.

    But they are coming at us fast and furious, from all angles and from many dimensions of human bestiality. What then is the purpose of human civilization and governance in this clime? We have roused the beast in us. Something is happening to human nature in Nigeria which is worthy of global attention. With the collapse of human institutions, we are gradually reverting to the default setting of our animal cousins.

    While worthy Nigerian ambassadors are doing their very best to showcase to the world the marvellous potpourri of cultural and intellectual possibilities available to this prodigiously talented nation, many others are bent on dragging us back to the Stone Age. While the law enforcement agencies try their bravest best to rein them in, they devise new methods, and they come up each day with fresh satanic strategies of state-evasion.

    Every day, survivors of kidnapping gangs regale us with tales of their ordeal in all their horrific and brutish details. Many are made to drink their own urine or watch the non-compliant being summarily shot. A female captive revealed how she was force-marched along with others for twelve hours until they reached a modern kidnapping complex in the forest. There were informants and sentry posts dotting the route. The trauma must be abiding. These people surely mean business.

    What do we make of the boy who sold his hunchback mother to ritualists for seven million naira? The deranged savages wasted no time in slaughtering the poor woman. How can this boy live in peace for the rest of his life? In Ondo State, two lover boys murdered their lovers in quick succession and were promptly arraigned. While we are still mourning those beautiful girls, a third Romeo struck setting ablaze the entire homestead of his estranged lover. At the last count, the casualty figure stood at eight family members. Police are still on the trail of the lunatic urchin.

    Meanwhile, there has been no further judicial or police report about the case of those who cruelly murdered the daughter of a retired general in a Lagos hotel after luring her from the social media to certain death. If there is no fishy business going on, the police authorities ought to regularly showcase developments in such cases as a subtle threat to other miscreants. The culture of police silence on such matters lends credence to wild conspiracy theories and allegations of connivance with evil.

    The culture of impunity breeds murderous rascality. Every society, fundamentally threatened as ours, must put in place stringent measures to halt the advance of anti-social barbarity such as we are currently witnessing in Nigeria. The disdain for the code of Hammurabi in certain quarters is nothing but liberal claptrap and disguised western hypocrisy. Developing societies must entertain no such immoral luxury. Anybody who commits a serious crime must be made to feel the full weight of the law. Let Rotimi Akeredolu do the needful and sign the warrants on his desk.

     

  • Atiku disarticulated

    Electoral Tribunal as Pandora’s Box

    The 2019 Presidential Election Tribunal is turning out to be something else. It would have been quite amusing but for its nation-disabling possibilities. This one began as a piece of wild rumour. An excellent outing of a sadistic imagination. Then it began to gain furious traction. Finally it turned out to be true.

    A major pillar of the federal authorities’ defence against the allegations by Mallam Atiku Abubakar that the last presidential poll was hopelessly rigged and serially compromised is the serious allegation that Atiku himself has rigged his nationality by claiming that he is a Nigerian whereas he is not. Since Atiku has reached for their balls, they also headed for his jugular.

    It is a major bombshell. Surely, if a man is not a Nigerian, it will be difficult for him to insist that he has been rigged out of an election of Nigerians, by Nigerians and for Nigerians. This is one of the planks of integrity of democratic rule. That is unless in the brave new world of globalization, the very idea of nationality has become a sham. It may yet be, but not so fast.

    So it is then that what began as another senseless spin from Nnamdi Kanu’s  macabre smithy of malarial concoctions has now been given full legitimation by the federal authorities.  Suffice it to say that if the allegations are to find favour with our lordships, it means that a person who has served as a major paramilitary functionary of the Nigerian state, a serial presidential contender dating back to 1993 and a vice president of the nation for a walloping eight years has become a non-Nigerian or better still an unNigerian, technically a stateless person. It doesn’t get any more fascinating.

    With a stroke of the judicial pen, Atiku would have been completely disarticulated, like an articulated lorry that has unravelled spilling its murky contents all over. Without any doubt, this presidential electoral dispute is fast turning out to be the most rancorous and ill-tempered in the history of the nation. It is electoral tribunal as a Pandora box.

    It recalls with haunting terror the brilliant judicial summarisation of the drama surrounding the deportation of Alhaji Shugaba in the Second Republic. According to the presiding judge, the unlawful deprivation of citizenship and the summary deportation is tantamount to “civil death”.

    In 1979 despite strident allegations of a stolen presidency by Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s fanatical supporters and the infamous twelve two-thirds abracadabra, the electoral tribunal of that year never strayed from the ambit of legal technicalese and jurisprudential sword-crossing.

    Forty years after, the nation is witnessing the nastiest and most polarizing presidential dispute in its electoral history. Nigeria’s luck is that this is taking place between two most favoured and influential scions of the northern establishment, northern stars of the same religion and the same ethnic extraction. Except for the fact that the leadership stakes and the order of preferment in both the north and the nation has reached a point of irreconcilable contradiction, both General Buhari and Alhaji Atiku ought to know what is really at stake and begin to act with wisdom.

    It speaks to a fundamental rupture in the northern leadership structure and an even more fundamental flaw in the British colonial nation-making that has witnessed appalling suffering and misery brought upon natives on the Indian sub-continent and the African continent in the last three hundred years.

    It is a known fact that Atiku’s parents, from Sokoto and present-day Jigawa State, journeyed to settle in Jada. It was an open migratory field which has seen criss-crossing and nomadic restlessness all over West Africa. It was a borderless space. The only border recognized then was the border of civility and good neighbourliness.

    There is no problem querying the validity of the League of Nations and subsequent UN trusteeship which ceded former German territories in Africa to friendly countries and the legality of the 1961 Plebiscite in which former British Cameroonians elected to join Nigeria while their French Cameroonian counterparts chose to remain in Cameroon.

    But we might as well go the whole hog to question the 1914 Amalgamation itself which collapsed and conflated Crown citizens and subjects as well as an indigenous free city-state together in an unholy and unhealthy colonial brew. It is now a known fact that beyond economic exploitation, the Brits had no master roadmap for their colonies. You cannot blame them. Nobody can give what they don’t have.

    Theirs was a simpleton’s formula based on experience. Just get a master-nationality to whip the rest of the folks into line and let them get on with it thereafter. In the colonial imaginary, order is superior to justice or equity. Since every crisis presents its own golden opportunity, this may as well be a golden opportunity for a heroic and visionary reconstruction of the sclerotic hulk of aborted nationhood that Nigeria has become before our very eyes.

    Readers of this column will confirm that we once cautioned Atiku about the dangers of taking on an embattled post-colonial state with his flanks terribly exposed. The modern Nigerian state is the equivalent of what is known in the old Congo as Bula Matari or crusher of rocks. As somebody who has wielded its power once and with maximum ruthless efficiency too, Atiku ought to know better.

    There are many who insist that Atiku’s current difficulties could be traced to his former boss and current patron, General Obasanjo who in his rendering of accounts wrote devastatingly and with acerbic scurrility about Atiku’s mystifying provenance and ambiguous paternity. Obasanjo thought he was settling accounts with posterity. But posterity has a way of stealing upon us with amazing celerity.

    No one at the moment is sure of what damning evidence of state-disrupting and nation-combusting activities the federal authorities have against the Adamawa politician to have led them to raise the stakes so dramatically and devastatingly. There are hints and echoes of Atiku-induced foreign meddling and of a Venezuela-like ambuscade of the state in the horizon. But it remains to be seen whether questioning his very nationality does not amount to killing a fly with a sledge hammer.

    In the past week, snooper has listened to some of Nigeria’s finest legal minds argue about the pros and cons of the allegations about Atiku’s nationality. While they all made eminent sense as far as the legal nuances and finer jurisprudential complications are concerned, none of them spoke to the nation-disabling possibilities of having a former vice president, a whole people and a vast swathe of prime land suddenly confronted by loss of nationality. The messy post-restoration politics of the Bakassi Peninsula is still very much with us.

    Famously, there used to be a certain Governor Michika from Adamawa State who always threatened to go back to his people on the other side of the border with Cameroon should Nigeria continue to displease and disappoint him. But that was mere political bluff and bluster.

    The people of Jada and environs who have been law-abiding citizens of Nigeria would certainly feel the psychological trauma of sudden statelessness. Ahmadu Bello whose vigorous campaigns in the area tilted the balance in favour of Nigeria will be weeping in his grave. Regional political cohesiveness and granite political alliances do not seem to last for long in these climes.

    To be sure, African countries are no stranger to controversy when it comes to the nationality and sub-nationality of some of their rulers. Till date, there many who insist that the late Ghanaian leader, Ignatius Kutu Acheampong,  was a Nigerian marooned in Ghana. In fact some people maintained that his middle name Kutu was a corruption of the Yoruba name Kuti. There were rumours that Kwame Nkrumah himself was of Ivorian descent.

    Up till date nobody knows where the founding leader of Malawi, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, actually came from. While he was alive, the topic was off airing and off the record, except you want to be fed to crocodiles. It was said that when he finally succumbed to senile dementia, Banda often lapsed into a strange pre-colonial Southern African dialect which was straight out of Sir Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mine. 

    Coming home to Nigeria, speculations about the actual nationality of at least three of the past rulers often surface at enlightened gatherings. But nobody ever begrudged the fact that Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi’s father was of Sierra Leonean extraction while Sani Abacha was fingered to be of Chadian provenance. First generation Nigerians of Sierra Leonean parentage have been known to surface at the uppermost reaches of military intelligence in Nigeria.

    Ironically it was rumoured that it was bitter animosity arising from a dispute about ethnic nationality and state of origin between two bosom friends and senior military officers jostling for promotion that was to lead to a memorable bloodbath and savage reckoning when one of them eventually emerged as military leader of the nation.

    On the wider continent, the nationality question can get very nasty indeed. In Cote D’Ivoire, the attempt to deny the Ivorian nationality of the current president, Allasane Quattara, led to disintegration and a bloody civil war.Having served as the country’s Prime Minister and top technocrat, the former high-flying international bureaucrat was summarily excluded from vying for the top job on the grounds that he was the son of itinerant nomads from Burkina Faso.

    Laurent Gbagbo, the former ruler of Cote D’Ivoire, was subsequently indicted for war crimes and jailed by the International Court sitting in Hague. In the old Zaire, Mobutu was to pay a high price for summarily expelling the Congolese Tutsi whose ancestors have lived in that corner of the Congo for over two hundred years. The Zairian war-cry was that a tree trunk does not become a crocodile simply because it has spent some time in water.

    We have not yet reached this dangerous point. But this is how it starts and utmost care must be taken. As it is noted, however much we choose to ignore history, history will not ignore us. It is interesting that the much ignored and much derided National Question keeps rearing its head in the most dangerous and unexpected of places however firmly we keep the lid sealed. This is the crux of the problem and not a mere electoral dispute.

  • The passing of a Yoruba literary titan

    Procrastination, it is said, is the thief of time. Never postpone for one second what you can get done and over with at that moment. Never revel in the African malady of the oceanic plenitude of time which sets premium and primacy on the notion that there is always time. Time is not going anywhere. It is when you are ready that you are ready. But time actually goes somewhere. If we were to compute the time the Black race has wasted on frivolity, what a timeless tragedy that would be!!

    The late and legendary Yoruba leader, Sir Olaniwun Ajayi, used to admonish snooper after some indulgent raps over truancy that having an old person is akin to boiling yam. It needs constant attention and rechecking. It was a lesson from the depths of Yoruba philosophy that yours sincerely never took to heart.

    Now, the chicks are coming home to roost. After passing up several golden opportunities to be with the old man in the mistaken belief that there was plenty of time, after postponing several planned trips to the great man in his Oyo ancestral homestead citing one emergency on the political front or the other, it is with a heavy heart that snooper, like a delinquent ward, announce the passing of an avid reader and admirer of this column, Pa Oladejo Okediji at the ripe old age of ninety.

    He died as quietly and as unobtrusively as he lived. Not for him the avid self-promotion and cultural grandstanding of some. Yet he was a remarkably gifted man; a master story teller with an amazing fecundity of imagination. He was easily the most outstanding writer of the Yoruba detective genre.

    So sure was he of his literary importance that he did not see the need for self-importance; so assured was he of his place in the pantheon of Yoruba cultural heroes that he did not see the need to inflict himself on the public. He was a class act, in the ancient tradition of the Yoruba savant and cultural cognoscenti. May his noble soul rest in perfect peace.

  • The Autumn of the old Arab Spring

    It has been a tumultuous week in Khartoum. With three leaders within a week and with the disgraced and deposed military tyrant Omar al-Bashir ending up in a prison in central Khartoum, the altars of tyranny are crumbling fast in Africa. The remaining African political dinosaurs are left cowering in their demented liars. It is surely a question of time.

    What we fingered in this column a few weeks back as the demographic nightmare of demoralized and unemployed youths all over Africa is being turned into a huge political dividend, a sure fire and potent formula for social revolution. The gainfully unemployed youths are coming for us. Youth is a stuff that will no longer endure.

    It began in Tunisia with a well-credentialed but unemployed youth burning himself to death. In Egypt, they are the sure fire recruits for Islamic fundamentalism and the political militancy which toppled the hare-brained heirs of Nasser’s revolution against feudalism. In Sudan, the young girl whose image went viral baiting the military to do their worst even while urging the people to storm the Sudanese Bastille was obviously in her twenties. Death was obviously the farthest thing on the mind of the joyous minstrel.

    But amidst the din of rejoicing and celebration, it was the Association of Sudanese Professionals powering the revolt in the background that supplied the missing political links. It has urged the military to dismantle the Sudanese Deep State left behind by decades of bestial tyranny. They obviously know what they are referring to.

    Only the deep civil and political society can call out the Deep State. As we have said in this column, the Deep State is a state within the state, an empire within an imperium; the latent backbone of manifest reality. It has already aborted the Tunisian Revolution and scuttled the Egyptian Spring replacing both with a gerontocracy cut from the old loins and renewed military tyranny respectively.

    If care is not taken, and with the international patrol rallying for order rather than justice, the Sudanese Revolution as well as the Algerian uprising may go the same way. It is the autumn of the old Arab Spring.

  • Arms and Nations

    The recently concluded series of federal and state elections in Nigeria was marked by strident allegations of military highhandedness and partisanship. The army was said to be in bed with the federal authorities. In the highly weaponized Rivers State, a confrontation between military personnel and heavily armed militiamen left many dead and scores wounded.

    Whether it is military officiated democracy or military assisted democracy, the very idea of the armed forces actively intervening in the process of democracy, or  assisting in steering electoral disputes away from nation-threatening crisis will be seen by many as a quaint anomaly if not a violent oxymoron. Bullets and ballots are not supposed to mix.

    But often the reality on ground is more sobering, sometimes pointing in direction of what is known in philosophy as overdetermination, which is more complex than simple cause and effect or the more familiar linear causality. It is rather an ensemble of contradictions jostling for contention. If you are going to transit from a military-dominated authoritarian society to an imperfectly democratic one, then you must take into cognisance the heavy-handed presence of the military in the background.

    In the light of this and for the sake of further illumination, perhaps it is time to extend the concept of disambiguation as it is known in other field of studies, particularly psychology and literary studies, to studies of the democratic process. To disambiguate is to rationalize by unbundling, to make something clearer by stripping it of ambiguities.

    If we agree that democracy is a journey rather than a destination, then it should be obvious that there are no perfect or ideal democracies anywhere in the world. As many scholars have concluded, what we can have is the degree to which each society approximates to certain universally accepted norms of democracy, such as periodic elections to gauge the mood of the nation, a free press, freedom of association, freedom of religious worship and adherence to the rule of law.

    But even here, contradictions abound. It is never a done deal. Some societies trade off certain notions of the democratic ideal for others. An intensification of one dimension is marked by a relapse in others. For example, a scrupulous adherence to the tenet of periodic elections may be accompanied by a lack of freedom of association and a ferocious repression of the press. A devious, anti-democratic despot in civvies may actually put all notions of democratic rule to sword while singing the praise of democracy to the high heavens.

    Consequently, while advanced liberal democracies are characterized by a high degree of fidelity to the fundamental canons of democracy, emerging democracies of the Third World and formerly existing Socialist nations are often marked by regression, sharp retreat and unconscionable relapse to their authoritarian default setting.

    In the light of this, the notion of “hybrid democracies” can be applied to the multifarious and endless possibilities inherent in emerging democracies. Within this democratic typology, it is possible to isolate features and the democratic potential of each society and to make educated guesses about the future. A rogue democracy, depending on the degree of deterioration, can also become a morbid democracy.

    This is not an exercise in democratic point-scoring, but an attempt to understand the specific dynamics of different societies and how these condition and determine their mode of insertion in the global democratic process. Rather than a blanket condemnation of the military as an essentially anti-democratic institution, their patriotic and nationalist role in certain societies may be better understood and appreciated.

    In virtually all the colonial nations of Africa where “national armies” originated as instruments of imperialist predation and colonial pacification of the native people, they have continued to behave true to type and in absolute fidelity to their originating summons. This is in sharp contrast to national armies which originated as a result of national struggles for independence from colonial rulers.

    For example, the modern Indonesian army originated in the turmoil and turbulence of hostilities between the native Indonesians and the Dutch colonialists. The Vietnamese army emerged victorious from wars with the French and the Americans. On the eve of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman Turks were lucky to have a certain Colonel Mustapha Kemal Attaturk who did not wait for imperialist cartographers before carving out the modern Turkey nation and subsequently going on a modernizing rampage.

    The modern American army was a product of the American Revolution against British imperialism. It was to the eternal credit of the American military that George Washington, its founding Commander in Chief, declined suggestions that he should become a life president, thus striking a mortal blow at feudal monarchism in the new country.

    Many American generals have since become president of the nation. But they dare not toy with the constitution or the institutions that breathe life into the nation. America’s most decorated general ever, the iconic Douglas MacArthur, was to find out to his own peril in a bitter confrontation with President Harry Truman.

    In all these nations, the army as an authentic product of the society always acts in organic concert with the spirit and soul of the nation.  This is in sharp contrast with postcolonial Africa where the colonial army usually acts against the wish and the will of the people. In a landmark development in Nigeria, the army in 1993 annulled the freest and fairest election in the history of the country, an election in which fourteen million Nigerians voted and nothing happened, except that the country is yet to completely recover from that heist.

    You cannot give what you don’t have. This is not a question of Africa being the Dark Continent or its nations playing hosts to savage military brutes. It is a question of implacable fidelity to the iron law of institutional development. Some significant but countervailing developments on the much besmirched continent attest to this fact.

    In Zimbabwe last year and Algeria this past week, national armies did the needful by removing ossified and doddering leaders who have become a menace to their respective countries without firing a shot and without attempting to take over the reins of power. This was the only way to kick start the frozen dialectic of history and the aborted momentum of democratic rule.

    It will be recalled that both armies are product of nationalist struggles against imperialism. The backbone of the Zimbabwean army consists of the storied veterans of the struggle against the old Rhodesian White settler-class. They may be slammed for internal pacification such as witnessed during the invasion of Matabeleland. But they were there for their country when it needed them most.

    The modern Algerian army evolved from the protracted and brutal war of independence against France. It was a war fought with appalling brutality on both sides. But the indigenous military force never wavered. In 1992, the Algerian military was there to prevent a hostile takeover of the country by Islamic fundamentalists which would have put the nation firmly in the orbit of Iran with dire consequences for the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa.

    The origins of what we once described in this column as “Guerrilla Democracy” in Africa can be traced to colonial armies that have outlived their usefulness and had become an obstacle to their nations. In Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda, the old colonial armies had to be destroyed by guerrilla insurrection before the nations and the post-colonial state can be reconstituted.

    The unfortunate result is the emergence of former warlords who are mortally afraid of their nations sliding back into chaos, anarchy and even genocide once they leave. In these hybrid democracies, economic freedom, security of life and rising national prosperity supersede the formal tenets of classical democracy. It is an awful trade off but that is the reality of the nations.

    But one can be sure that when the people eventually get tired of this authoritarian democracy, the nationalist armies, listening in to the mood of the nation, will throw their former benefactors on the track. This is the difference between armies that evolved out of the need to protect the people’s right and armies founded on the need to suppress the people’s right.

    This is the best theoretical context to discuss the controversial involvement of the Nigerian military in the last election. In fairness to the Nigerian Army, it has been on its best behaviour after retreating to the barracks twenty years ago having exhausted its historic and political possibilities. There have been occasional lapses such as when the old institutional bugbear of authoritarian intolerance and repressive brutality return to haunt it. But on the whole, the threat of military intervention has receded to the remote background.

    What is confronting the Nigerian military is what is known in psychoanalysis as the return of the repressed. In the Rivers State, the military confronted well-armed militia men whose principal preoccupation is not just electoral mayhem but state decapitation or state incapacitation as the case may be. It was a recipe for industrial bloodletting and only caution and restraint averted what could have snowballed into a national meltdown.

    Twenty years after the military withdrawal from formal politics, the National Question has worsened. Nigeria is embroiled by a security nightmare in which several parts of the country have become no-go areas as a result of insurgency, ethnic conflagration, religious insurrection, kidnapping and a looming economic maelstrom arising from lack of responsible and responsive governance.

    The background reason for this is the fact that the political, social, historic and economic structure which permitted military overreach in 1993 remains intact and untouched. The political class is heavily dominated by the military and their paramilitary subalterns. But as it is said, anybody can make a throne of bayonets for himself. But whether he will be able to sit in it is another matter.

    Unless we go back to basics and where the rains started beating us, a million elections cannot resolve the quagmire. As a minimum condition for ameliorating the misery of the nation, President Buhari must set in motion the machinery for a comprehensive overhaul of the security architecture of the country. Drawn into internal security operations in about thirty two states, the army is overstretched and occasionally outwitted by rogue masters of asymmetrical warfare.

    It is also obvious that the military is institutionally ill-designed to undertake internal security operations,  despite the reality of a hopelessly demoralised and ill-equipped police force. There is an urgent need for a buffer force to undertake internal security operations. If anything, what the military operation in Rivers State has done is to further alienate the people from federal authorities.

    If we want to preserve our fledgling democracy, we must always bear it in mind that it was military resentment against internal security operations among the Tiv people that ended the First Republic. Meanwhile, this column welcomes the intemperate and unwise tyrant, Omar Al-Bashir of Sudan, to the club of better forgotten African military despots. With three leaders in forty eight hours, Sudan may well be a case of what Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, Nigeria’s iconic gadfly, famously dismissed as “Army Arrangement”. But it is morning yet on creation day.

  • Okon is liberated at Clifford Station

    AS the longest running election in the history of the nation finally ran its ponderous course, the much-storied Clifford Police Station had become a bee-hive of activities. Baba Lekki was up and about running rings around the bewildered desk sergeant as he argued vigorously for Okon’s unconditional release from police custody failing which he would trigger a hitherto unknown clause in the Amalgamation which would send the entire country on a tailspin.

    “Sergeant, I put it to you that you are a bloody fool”, the old man suddenly screamed and stormed out before the stunned sergeant could respond.

    The place was teeming with electoral offenders without the benefit of an Electoral Tribunal. Ex-detainees easily outnumbered current detainees they are hoping to bail out. The main cells having rapidly filled up with electoral scoundrels, the vast courtyard had been converted to an open cell bristling with wayward humanity.

    One fellow who had been accused of impersonating a famous presidential candidate and extorting money on his behalf was protesting his innocence to the high heavens and insisting that he would talk only if a certain Mahmood presented himself for cross examination.

    “And who is this Memudu this jibiti man is talking about?” a fellow detainee growled in exasperation.

    “Mahmood Yakubu, the Fedeco man. This is the last election the Zamfara bandit will be allowed to conduct in this country!” the irate man screamed.

    “But he is not from Zamfara. He is from Bauchi”, a detainee with a strange girl-like voice whined.

    “If he likes let him come from Ngwar Banawa”, the short man fumed. It was at this point that a man who claimed that he was originally apprehended for cow rustling but that the charge had been amended to vote-rustling began protesting.

    “Ranka shi dede, dualla, helf we ask dem Gobment yalla dem cow dey vote or yalla Babamangoro fit become baba maigoro?” the man noted in a cheerful murder of both English and Hausa languages.

    But the most hilarious was a Yoruba Christian medium who was arrested for swindling the wife of a former vice president and leading presidential candidate on the pretext of burying live cows to procure electoral triumph for her husband.

    “I went to Yola to collect my balance”, the man announced to no one in a fake Lagosian accent.

    “What work did you do?” somebody demanded.

    “I asked for five hundred cows and she gave money for only fifty. Ten of them died on the road. Six died of hunger. Five died of human hunger. Thirteen perished as stomach infrastructure. Eleven were confiscated by police for wandering and the rest were captured by Boko Haram”, the old rogue whined without any sense of irony.

    “So, why were you arrested—or is it the cows that arrested you?” one detainee asked.

    “Thank you my brother. The Yoruba say if trap fails to catch, you must release bait. So I went to ask for balance. The maiguard ask me for the name of the woman I am looking for and I tell dem it is Titilowonina and they pounced on me and beat me well well. Then the police came”.

    “Oleeee!!! Oleee!!! Oleee!!!” The entire compound erupted. Amidst the din and chaos, the rampaging mob seized hold of the station emptying all the cells of their criminal contents. As the decrepit generator powering the station spluttered and expired in terminal gasps, everybody, including the policemen, fled in different directions.

  • Artificial Intelligence and Dumb Societies

    As the civilized world with its ruthless knowledge society races to the frightening frontiers of artificial intelligence, one cannot but shudder at the fate of dumb societies stranded at the level of Industrial Evolution.  Dumb societies are perpetual victims of human civilization; perennial subjects in the dialectic of historical development.

    While the knowledge society is increasingly resorting to robots to perform complicated chores, the denizens of dumb societies are famously looking like robots de-humanized to a point where they can no longer boast of elementary social intelligence. These are the sites of the most horrific crimes against humanities in recent times. And it can get worse. Robotized humanity is no match for human robots.

    This is because robotized people become so de-sensitized that they cannot get the political or social order right. They are ruled by a primitive conclave bypassed by human evolution everywhere else. They must leave in order for the societies held hostage to live. But leaving is often a complicated and messy departure, complicated by human ambition to dominate and the vagaries of colonial cartography.

    Artificial intelligence is the product of human intelligence at its cutting edge. The complicated mathematics is not for the rote learner or note-regurgitating professors. It demands thinking out of the box. In order to access higher civilization, humanity must strive to continually humanize nature by conquering and dominating it with weapons fashioned by human brains.

    But when nature strikes back to dominate humanity all the gains of human evolution are steadily reversed. The result is petrified humanity; dumb societies at the end of their historic tethers, gripped by superstitious idiocies and primitive rituals. Anybody who has seen a tsunami in action will appreciate the futility of sacrifice or sea-worship in the face of climatological adversity. Future archaeologists of human derailment will have a field day assembling evidence of civilizational collapse.

    The disruptive influence of scientific advances and artificial intelligence will soon be here with us. For dumb societies that are unable to find work for their teeming workforce, the labour market will shrink dramatically. Certain mundane chores will be taken over by robots. Robots will perform medical operations and point-device car repairs. Petroleum predation such as beloved by the Nigerian ruling class will cease because there will be no buyers. Keeping stolen money in bank vaults will become a vain and forlorn exercise. The only capital you need is human capital.

    Sometimes the technological advancement works to the benefit of everybody such as when backward and laggard societies are driven to parlay the gains of scientific revolution occurring elsewhere to the advantage of their moribund societies. For example, the GSM revolution which is not indigenous to Nigeria has allowed the nation to leapfrog the Age of landlines to the Age of Mobile technology.

    After decades of stealing money meant for developing telecommunication infrastructure, the Nigerian ruling class was granted a fortuitous reprieve by developments elsewhere. The Age of mobile phones has led to a dramatic expansion of Nigeria’s telecommunication infrastructure in a way and manner that could not have been foretold.

    But it has come at a terrible price. Or let us say it has been a mere displacement of contending national pathologies. Despite the GSM revolution, Nigeria remains one of the few countries with such a volume of communication without a functioning land line. With the help of massive government infrastructure, this remains the only technology that would have made telephone easily available to the teeming masses.

    Since people must communicate anyhow, Nigeria’s lower social masses often resort to all manner of outlandish underhand deals in order to procure the magic mobile set. This ranges from black market shenanigans to outright stealing thus fuelling the national pathology of corruption and sleaze from a totally unanticipated direction.

    When you ask an average workman how he came by his expensive mobile set, he is likely to respond that “Oga, God is in control”, thus echoing the infamous “Se debrouiller”—or we dey manage—slogan of Mobutu’s Zaire. The security personnel guarding you by the daylight is probably an armed robber by the night. You cannot plant cassava and expect to harvest yam.

    Yet it is not as if God designated some races as special people or branded some nations with the stamp of extraordinary genius. If anything, the Brexit debacle and the wayward inanities of the British House of Commons as well as the untoward advent of Donald Trump in America have shown the world that no nation or human society has a monopoly of malignant ineptitude or social turpitude. This time around, the western old boys’ network or what has been famously dismissed as a “chumocracy”, has truly scraped the bottom of the barrel.

    What these “special people” or genius nations had going for them for a long time is militant self-belief and the power of transformative ideas. When the Portuguese arrived at the old African Congo kingdom around the middle of the fifteenth century, they met a society that was far more socially and politically advanced and ethically sophisticated than the one they left behind at home.

    They loitered around a bit hoping to make contact with the mysterious military force that undergirded such a mighty empire. Alas, there was no such thing and within the next hundred years or so, most of the inhabitants were captured and transported as slaves to the new colony of Brazil through the new slave port of Luanda. The rest is history.

    It has been noted that the Brits behaved very much like ill-informed thugs and low-grade hustlers in their Indian and African colonial possessions. But this does not tell the whole story. They were thugs and hustlers with militant self-belief and a sense of modernizing mission. At a point during the famous revolt by the native Indians that lasted for one year from 1857, the rebels had the entire British Raj with their back to the wall.

    But the Indians lacked the power of militant self-belief and a transformative ideology to push their rebellion to its logical conclusion. They could not have returned to the splendid decay of their superannuated feudal regimen or their monkey deities. They proclaimed an eighty one year old doddering Urdu prince as the new Raj of “Hindustan” and that was all.

    This failure of mission allowed the British to rally and to slaughter the rebels with appalling cruelty and callousness reminiscent of the Spanish destruction of the Inca civilization. Men are hanged not because horses are stolen, but so that horses may not be stolen.

    What made the difference between medieval Europe and their later overseas possessions was the Age of Enlightenment with its power of radically transforming ideas about the destiny of humanity and the place of humankind in the universe. The splendid irony of the Age of Enlightenment was the fact that it was the sacking of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks which led to the influx of philosophers, astrologers, astronomers, scientists and engineers to Europe. Their enlightening ideas allowed Europe to overcome the Dark Age of medieval tyranny and institutional cruelties.

    The Age of Enlightenment had its twists and turns. In one of its most amusing turns, it was said that Empress Catherine of Russia, immediately after the death of her husband, sought the help of European philosophers and thinkers to bring feudal Russia at par with European countries in terms of freedom and liberation, particularly as far as the vexed Serf Question was concerned.

    The relic of Peter the Great was torn between severe repression as was prevalent in Russia which could trigger a revolution or graduated freedom which could bring chaos and anarchy. The lot of Enlightenment mentor duly fell on Denis Diderot, the great French thinker and philosopher. Diderot arrived in Moscow in freezing winter with his bones creaking. The impish and gamey Catherine duly noted to confidantes that she had to put a chair between herself and the Frenchman to prevent his wild gesticulations from reaching the most delicate part of her anatomy.

    In the event, it was the subsequent French Revolution that provided practical answer to the Serf Question as hordes of absconding French noblemen and priests sought refuge in the Russian capital. The Russian bear recoiled in terror at the prospects of human liberation. It would take another century and a few decades for a group of indigenous Russian intellectuals who had internalized the lessons of European Enlightenment and had given it a peculiarly brutal local stamp to kick-start the Russian Revolution.

    In all this, the only thing that separates dumb societies from successful societies is militant self-belief and the power of transformative ideas. This has been the case from time immemorial depending on the stage of human evolution. The battle of batons among European countries in almost a thousand years reflects this balance of intellectual forces with Portugal and Spain taking early lead as Holland, Britain, France, Germany and the Nordic countries gradually overhauled them.

    In the past six hundred years of relentless global decline, Africa as a continent has experienced this surge of militant self-belief and transformative ideas only once and it was during the decades of independence struggle which lasted from the forties till the nineties of the last century.

    This was the epoch of the decolonizing project which induced self-belief in Africans and produced a crop of transformative African leaders such as Zik, Awolowo, Nkrumah, Senghor, Nyerere, Lumumba, Cabral, Neto, Samora Michel, Nasser and Nelson Mandela. Their sense of mission and vision provided the ideological leitmotif for the transformation of a much-abused continent.

    Unfortunately as postcolonial stasis settled in on most African countries, the militant self-belief disappeared and the power of transformative idea waned. Africa became the Dark Continent once again. Nigeria, which by virtue of its population and prodigious human capital was supposed to serve as the hub of Black renaissance, disappeared into a long night of military despotism and feudal tyranny from which it is yet to recover. Africa itself is yet to wake from the historical nightmare of global irrelevance. A lost continent is waiting for its lost country.