Category: Tatalo Alamu

Once again, Nigeria’s power masters and hegemonic blocs are on the move as a make or mar presidential election approaches.  It is a consuming game of political chess and it has already consumed a Chief Justice of Nigeria in curious circumstances reminiscent of the executive defenestration of the former president of the Court of Appeal. Since neither could be legally fired, the subsisting executive resorted to legally technicality and self-help to suspend them.

It is not a pretty sight.  Political gore has never been. There are pawns and powerbrokers. There are political blocs and political blockheads who think they are at the head of such political blocs. As Viktor Shklovsky, the great Russian formalist and grandmaster once noted, there are many reasons for the oddity of the knight’s move, but the main reason is the conventionality of the game itself.

This last week, avid readers of this column would have noticed a curious item that accompanied the main piece. It was titled Martyrs Arising once again? It was a plaintive plea to former president Olusegun Obasanjo to moderate his tantrums and temperamental outbursts against the government in general and his former subordinate, Mohammadu Buhari, in particular if he was to avoid public humiliation and misguided martyrdom.

The article hit the newsstand in the early hours of the morning. By noon, the old general had struck again.  It was not as if this columnist had any inkling of the letter-writing programme or epistolary itinerary of the Owu chieftain.  But having observed and studied Nigerian politics from the ring side for over fifty years, one could sense when something was in the offing.

The sudden silence from Obasanjo’s camp was profoundly eloquent. With the obvious collapse of his third force gambit and given the enervation and  disorientation that has overtaken his adopted platform, one knew that the old general was bound to come out smoking, and very soon, too.

Has General Obasanjo finally unraveled in a fundamental political sense? Even by the standard of public disdain and disapproval that often greet Obasanjo’s interventions particularly after leaving office, the gale of vicious recriminations and violent abuse that has accompanied his latest literary sortie represents a new low in his public esteem.

The furious condemnation across social and political strata with some calling for his arrest suggest that the general is out of sync with the dominant national mood as well as the dominant political temperament  of his Yoruba compatriots. This is such a pity, coming at a time when the general, in the twilight of what has been a glorious if controversial career, ought to be making amends for earlier political infractions.

From this perspective, the alliance with the regnant rump of Afenifere is seen as deeply opportunistic on both sides, a classic case of chutzpah; a man who has killed his parents asking the court to show mercy on the grounds that he is an orphan. And it has neither made a dent on the public consciousness of his people, nor staunch the tide of relentless opprobrium.

There are political, historical and sociological reasons for this development. The Yoruba people, like most African people who rely on the mnemonic devices of their predominantly oral culture for memory assistance, have the power of recall of elephants. The Owu born general has had it coming for a long time.

While in the past, it has been possible to dismiss his occasional grandstanding as a manifestation of eccentricity to which exceptional individuals are prone, the worsening national question in Nigeria has led to a siege mentality among Nigeria’s ethnic nationalities which brooks no barmy duplicity or attention-diverting political chicanery.

This crisis of nationalities and of the Nigerian nation-state itself can be traced to post-military stress disorder, the inauguration of the Fourth Republic on a faulty constitution and the road taken or not taken by Obasanjo himself. It is to this we must now turn particularly in view of the hysterical and hypocritical mob that supported Obasanjo and are threatening to bring the roof down with their shrill denunciations and hollow grandstanding.

In  September 1999, this columnist wrote a piece in Africa Today in which the thesis was advanced that Obasanjo would use the occasion of his second coming to teach both Afenifere and the AD a terminal lesson in political power play which they are unlikely to forget in a hurry. The fact remains that the political faction of the Nigerian ruling class is no match for its military adversaries when it comes to psychological stamina and the deployment of “shock and awe” military tactics for political domination.

A private transatlantic correspondence over this matter with the illustrious Cicero led to a terminal estrangement between godfather and political godson with the great man retorting that after spending fifty years in politics, he could not comprehend how a mere teacher of literature would deem to teach him how to proceed in politics. The rest is history.

By the 2003 presidential and gubernatorial elections after an infamous kiss and make up reapproachment with Obasanjo, the AD and its master cultural organ allowed themselves to be lured into political somnolence. The result was electoral and political disaster for both. Obasanjo simply steamrolled them all in a massive and fatal anaconda grip.

The Yoruba electorate in all likelihood voted for Obasanjo to continue in office while also voting for the AD to retain its principal constituency. You can only sell that fudge to a conventional politician and not a battle-hardened general who has no time for head-splitting political complications. Obasanjo simply romped through both party and cultural patrons.

His sense of humour unaffected by the rigours of presidential office, it was said that Obasanjo held down  Chief Segun Osoba to a sumptuous breakfast in very convivial circumstances at his Ota farm while electoral heist was going on outside. By the time the tsunami subsided, its violent waves had swept off all the South West AD governors with the exception of Governor Bola Ahmed Tinubu who had refused to sleep with his eyes closed.

Even at that it was a close run thing for Lagos state and certainly not for want of federal endeavor. For a few days after the election, the INEC electronic board was displaying prefabricated result which gave victory to Funso Williams by a slight margin until it was hurriedly taken down. Before elections, INEC was ready even with the results.

Yet there was no sense of remorse on the part of the Obasanjo regime with its alleluia boys asking those who felt electorally aggrieved to seek judicial restitution. They have forgotten that the wages of electoral misrepresentation include inability to correctly assess your true electoral worth and real standing with the people you have shortchanged.

Buoyed by the dazed quietude it had induced in the west arising from electoral shock, the Obasanjo regime was to inflict a worse electoral disaster on the region in 2007 as it schemed to forcibly impose Umaru Musa Yar’Adua on the country. Such was the magnitude of the heist this time around that even the beneficiary cried foul.

The string of judicial reversals of electoral robberies in Osun, Ondo, Ekiti, Edo and the organized judicial catalepsy which robbed  Abiola Ajimobi of his legitimate victory in Oyo state attest to the fact that the old Western region never really lost its progressive orientation. The purported victory of the PDP four years earlier was a major political scam perpetrated by a man nursing a historic grudge against his own people.

In 2011, the Yoruba electorate returned the full compliments to Obasanjo and his cohorts by making sure that the retired general was humiliated in his neighbourhood and his daughter resoundingly trounced. In that electoral cycle, the Yoruba voted for Jonathan and ethnic justice over the equally valid and competing claim of social justice championed by General Mohammadu Buhari.

But by then, the new messiah from the north and his teeming supporters had introduced a new volatile equation into Nigeria’s political and electoral dynamics. Having contested and lost presidential elections twice as at that time, it was obvious that Buhari’s volatile multitude was not keen on any shabby appeasement. This was how yours sincerely described the phenomenon.

The political ferment in the core north has taken on an intriguing but deeply disturbing coloration which should be of concern to theorists of post-colonial politics. Anybody who has watched a Buhari rally in recent times, or the crowd waiting to receive him in public places must come to one conclusion. This is not an exultant crowd waiting for a political emancipator. This is a traumatized mob waiting for a messiah. There is a feral frenzy to these fellows; there is the manic glint of the politicized fanatic in their eyes; there is an all consuming raw anger which is implacable in its thirst for vengeance; there is a wild and merciless ruthlessness of resolve which does not recognize the template and rubric of law and order, or its corollary of logic and rationality. Law and order have come a sorry pass because they are not always at the service of justice and equity. Unhappy indeed is the land that needs a hero.

Till date this frenzied multitude subsists as Buhari’s core support. A political mob however humongous does not win elections. It will simply burn down the polling booth and walk away.  It did just that in 2011 just as this writer predicted.

But by 2015, a fortuitous alliance with south west progressive elements cashing in on the epic national resentment of the fumbling incompetence and the languidly purblind nature of the Jonathan administration taught the mob how to protect its vote, how to spruce up its messiah and turn the hitherto unelectable to become electable in a publicity blitz the like of which has never been seen in the electoral history of the nation.

The current conundrum with its hazy irrationality can now be tackled in a series of questions and answers which shows how and why the status quo even with its mounting liability will prevail next month. Why did the South West progressives go into alliance with the conservative north when it could have linked up with other progressive forces in the north? This is simply because such an alliance is nothing but a quixotic quest for power and an electoral nonstarter based on subsisting power configurations.

Second, why does the dominant political mood in the South West seem to favour a continuation of the tactical alliance with conservative elements in the north despite the appalling record of this administration on the change it has promised, on security, on the restructuring mantra so dear to the Yoruba people and despite its nepotistic challenges and the fact that it deliberately shuts out true Yoruba progressives from the administration in order to maintain its conservative strangle hold on the nation?

The answer is that realpolitik suggests that you do not change a set of contradictions maturing in a particular direction for a new set which can only lead to an ambiguous journey ending in a paradoxical reinforcement of the status quo. This administration might have failed in its promise of fundamental change but it has also got many things right. The Yoruba people will not take what does not belong to them but they are tired of permanent political martyrdom at the shrine of modern Nigeria.

As for restructuring, it should now be obvious after four years of passionate debate that given the structural configuration of the nation, restructuring is an integral part of the National Question which cannot be procured on the electoral battlefield but through arduous and intricate pacting and substantial elite buy in and consensus. Without this, it is going nowhere.

For now, General Mohammadu Buhari remains the only northern Nigerian with the requisite sacred aura, authority and prestige that can lead his people out of the historic, political and economic cul de sac they have found themselves. If he wins next month, the wild tempests on the way will persuade him that no historic figure however powerful can stand in the way of national change without becoming a casualty himself. In a polity structurally rigged against rationality, superior political pragmatism often comes with a hint of irrationality and only the deep can call to the deep.

As for former President Olusegun Obasanjo, President Mohammadu Buhari needs exemplary political skills to handle his old military commander. It was through Obasanjo’s instrumentality that Buhari himself was recused from a political posting which would have ended his military career. Buhari should avail himself of De Gaulle’s thesis about sacred monsters, that is historic personages so severely flawed but who cannot be avoided or ignored. May Nigeria’s legendary luck hold in the coming months.

 

TO Ibadan and the sprawling Recreation Club for the wedding reception of the daughter of Felix Adenaike, journalistic colossus and brilliant editorialist in his heydays. Felix, together with the feisty and forthright Peter Ajayi and Akinrogun Segun Osoba, the ultimate newshound, ruled the journalistic roost in Ibadan in the golden decade spanning the seventies and eighties. They were known as the three musketeers.

Those were the days when men were men and journalists were real journalists, not the half-baked flotsams and jetsams we have these days. Across the road from Adamasingba, yours sincerely used to slip into a block of offices to engage the great and much missed Cicero himself in intense political duels. That was after drinking Baghdad tea at Sabo. Often exasperated, the great man would exclaim: “Ori e ti wa yi patapata bayi ooo”. (Your mind has given way completely).

It was great and good seeing the three musketeers graying gracefully and with the gravitas conferred by advancing years. Having shed much weight over the years, Peter darted all over the place like a youth having much fun. Felix was in his ebullient elements, showing what a good and loving father he was. As for the Akinrogun, the Aladire of Igbore, was as prettily dainty as ever. One day we shall have the time to talk about the Osoba dress sense bringing into public view those two brilliant pictures of a youthful and supremely elegant Osoba that adorn his sitting room in Ikoyi.

It was great to be reunited with the old warlords of Nigerian journalism, particularly the brilliant and scathing Gbolabo Ogunsanwo. Even though snooper delayed his entry until sunset, he still managed to cause a stir. Our friend, the amiable gubernatorial wannabe, Senator Ajibola Ajimobi, cut through his beer with the swash and swerve of an old Ibadan warrior, and with plenty of earthy humor to spare. Here is wishing the three musketeers long life and prosperity.

• ( First published in 2007)

 

The Deep State calls out Walter Onnoghen again

An apocalyptic drama is unfolding in the Nigerian judiciary and by extension the Nigerian political firmament. It is in the nature of human polities to bump into unaccustomed stress and tension as history unfurls. But there are tensions and there are tensions. With the executive order freezing the accounts of the embattled Chief Justice of the Federation, Walter Onnoghen, and calls for his immediate resignation from notable quarters, the federal authorities have effectively placed the Supreme Court on a war footing.

This is arguably the first time in the history of the nation that relationship between two vital branches of government has suffered such a sharp deterioration. And this is the same Chief Justice that will preside and adjudicate just in case the forthcoming elections, particularly the presidential sweepstakes, get really controversial. It doesn’t get more interesting.

But there are two sides to a coin, even if it is a bad coin. As we have noted in this column on several occasions, the grim fact remains that Nigeria is in the grip of a profound organic crisis of the state which embroils all its principal organs—executive, judiciary and the legislature— in a war of all against all fought in a Byzantine maze of intrigues and mutual hostilities.

In the Fourth Republic, the principal organs of the state have been working at hostile cross-purposes rather than in dialectical countervailing tension which ensures stability and the integrity of the state. It is however with the coming of General Mohammadu Buhari that matters have come to a head and under the glare of public scrutiny for that matter.

What began as furtive rumours, with the Nigerian presidential authorities denying any knowledge of Walter Onnoghen’s judicial travails has now snowballed into a full blown judicial crisis with the swift seizure of his bank accounts by the federal government. In the interim, Walter Onnoghen has had his day in court, albeit in absentia. In the circumstances, it is difficult to see how Walter Onnoghen can continue to function as the nation’s chief judicial helmsman with his reputation irreversibly damaged and his integrity substantially impugned.

There are many who view this development as substantially therapeutic for Nigeria’s judicial process if only because it opens up the judiciary’s diseased and septic innards for hostile public scrutiny. Yet there are many others who believe that it’s a historic affront and unwarranted desecration of the judiciary for the cynical purpose of enforcing complicity and judicial compliance as the executive steamrolls the entire nation into electoral submission.

Whichever way one views it, the revelations show how the entire Nigerian society and the judiciary in particular has become a gargantuan moral sewage choking and suffocating the entire nation with its noxious effluvium. No nation can thrive or survive with this level of systemic and structured corruption. It has been famously observed that if Nigeria does not kill corruption, then corruption will kill the country.

This is the point we have reached. But the mode of corruption is equally as critical as the corruption of the mode of fighting corruption. We have equally reached this point. At that point, the whole thing becomes an amoral power ploy in which political warfare against perceived enemies takes the front seat as against the stated objective of sanitizing the country.

Given the current balance of forces and the hegemonic powers in contention, it will amount to a foolish error to confuse strategic deployment of offensive means with mere tactical manoeuvres on the chessboard. It has been noted that in an organic crisis of the state, once nationalist forces appear too weak, too enfeebled and disoriented to impose a solution on the crisis, it will be done for them by sectional and regionalist forces claiming to act on behalf of the entire society.

And so the deep state in Nigeria has called out Walter Onnoghen . Having escaped its fangs once with the Justice Esho Panel recommendation that some judges should be relieved of their responsibility, it a pity and an act of carelessness bothering on self-immolation that the Chief Justice of Nigeria should lay himself so open to its cunning ensnarement. In the matter of the Esho Panel, It was legally and legitimately argued that the indicted judges were not given a chance to comment on their indictment.

But if the current indictment is not a case of reckless contempt for accountability, it is surely one of brazen disregard for the new protocol of transparency however flawed its modus operandi.  How anybody thinks they can get away with this, with the security forces primed for punitive and proactive prying beggars belief. Surely, old habits tend to die hard. But what is a deep state?

In its classic origins, a deep state is a shadowy concatenation of power or a state within a state. According to Wikipedia, it is derived from Turkish derin devlet. Given what has come down to us as the legendary capacity of the Ottoman Empire for Byzantine intrigues, one should not be surprised. A deep state “ is a form of clandestine government made up of hidden or covert networks of power operating independently of a nation’s political leadership, in pursuit of their own agenda or goals”.

“The intent of the deep state can include continuity of the state itself, job security for its members, enhanced power and authority, and the pursuit of ideological objectives. It can operate in opposition to the agenda of elected officials, by obstructing, resisting and subverting their policies, conditions and directives.”

The rulership of a complex, complicated and rich country like Nigeria is too important to be left to its formal rulers. This is why the post-colonial presidency in Nigeria often looks like a royal infirmary of reluctant rulers, accidental rulers, accidented rulers and supine viceroys. When it was said that President Mohammadu Buhari did not know of the arraignment of the Chief Justice of the federation until Saturday, that was the deep state acting in paradoxical affirmation of the stated objective of the government.

When David Babachir Lawal, the former Secretary to the Government, famously asked what the presidency meant after he was told that he had been fired, he was showing a remarkable insight into the mysterious workings of the deep state. Up till that moment, Babachir Lawal would have thought that he was an integral part of the Ottoman presidency.

The deep state is an imperium in imperio. It can be roused to act in antagonistic concert against the stated wish of the state itself in order to protect its own pristine interest. Till date nobody is sure who actually ordered the botched invasion of the national assembly, or is really behind Bukola Saraki’s mysterious emergence as the senate president in the first instance.

The omnibus warrant order is usually “orders from above”. Variously known as “ the cabal”, the “Kaduna mafia”, the “Langtang mafia”, the “caliphate”, “Third Course” and the “confraternity”, the mini-state within the state has been there in all phases of Nigeria’s post-colonial history to protect their group interest and to protect the state provided their interests coincide.

This is the awesome state power ranged against Walter Onnoghen bent on putting the Chief Justice of the federation to political sword. The timing may be deplorable, given the ominous proximity of national elections. But those who are denizens of the coliseum of power play are hardly constrained by the demands of time and space. These are the luxuries of apprentices of power.

Walter Onnoghen has hardly been his own best friend in this matter. His plea of ignorance and forgetfulness is as lamentable as it is lacking in judicial honour and integrity. Given the deadly cat and mouse situation that subsists between him and the presidency, a development which led to the initial reluctance to confirm him as the nation’s preeminent judge, he is one person who ought to know better. It is akin to a person being prepared for execution by burning going to soak himself in gasoline.

If Mr Onnoghen’s day ever comes in court, that will be a national show-stopper indeed. Given the linkage of all bank accounts through the BVN, all bank transactions are just a computer click away from massive outpouring and seminal incontinence. It would amount to a brazen lack of judgment and even suicidal daring if evidence is led to show that his lordship has been “obtaining” despite the prevailing hostile climate of harsh retribution.

But that day in court may never come. Not being legal neophytes, it is unlikely that Onnoghen’s tormentors do not recognize the fundamental deficiency of the case against him as currently touted. The CJN cannot be legally tried without recourse to the NJC. And even with that, he cannot be legally removed by the president without obtaining the assent of a two third majority in the National Assembly, an impossibility given the current configuration of power in that legislative conclave.

It may well be however that that the intention is not to dock the Chief Justice but to maim him psychologically and politically in a way and manner that renders him completely combat-ineffective, a limping liability to the judiciary. If that is the brief, they have succeeded extremely well beyond their remit. As things are at the moment, the Chief Justice stands totally defanged and demystified, shorn of the aura of credibility and integrity without which he cannot discharge his judicial duty and obligation to the fatherland.

What remains here is to see whether Justice Walter Onnoghen will find the residual courage, the strength of character and the nobility of patriotic purpose to do the needful and save himself and the judiciary from further punishment and indignity.

In the same country, we have seen a furious ethnic mob laying a siege to a federal high court to prevent the trial of a ranking federal official on charges of embezzlement and criminal self-enrichment. The culprit returned to his native domain to be crowned monarch and to reign as an impressive philosopher-king ever since. Echoes of Peter Ekeh’s famous two publics?

If he chooses to fight on to the bitter end, boosted and bolstered by the support of the South south governors and the encouragement of a sizable public opinion driven by ethnic and cultural affiliations, we may have entered a new phase of the organic crisis of the state in which amoral judicial power confronts equally amoral political power. Apocalyptic anarchy beckons and God helps the nation.

 

AS dark clouds begin to rumble across the political landscape once again, yours sincerely is forced to uneasy ruminations about the fate of the fatherland. There are periods in the history of a nation when the present begins to bear an uncanny resemblance to the past. History repeats itself but not always with the same personages or the same circumstances and even consequences.

In a famous comparison of the two Bonaparte—Napoleon and his nephew Luis—- which has since gone down as one of the most brilliant and sustained pieces of political polemics in modern history, Karl Marx averred that history repeats itself, the first time as a tragedy but the second time as a farce.

In other words, it was not just a case of Luis Bonaparte being a political buffoon, this was how even his great and illustrious Uncle Napoleon would have appeared had he shown up at that point in time, a farcical clown and figure of endless fun and comic derision. There is time for everything and you cannot step into the same river twice.

In an engrossing gloss on this remarkable passage, Terry Eagleton, the great British Marxist literary theorist, noted that Luis Bonaparte was not just a regressive caricature of his famous uncle even Napoleon himself would have been a caricaturing regression of his former imperious and no-nonsense self if he had chosen to appear at that material point in French history.

Shortly after General Sani Abacha kicked out the Ernest Shonekan-led Interim Regime, yours sincerely ran into Patrick Wilmot, the famed sociologist who was abducted from the ABU Staff Club at night and summarily deported by the military authorities. Snooper asked him what he thought the portents were for Nigeria and the difference between the goggled general and his military predecessor.

“Ha, you are going to have problems with Abacha. The difference between Abacha and Babangida is that Abacha is not intelligent enough to know fear”, Wilmot shot back with his customary furrowed frown.

In 1994 as the Abacha catch-all despotic dragnet began to unfurl on the entire nation, snooper wrote a column for The News magazine titled: Martyrs Arising.  The article prophesied that as a result of the inexplicable working out of national contradictions, both General Olusegun Obasanjo and his former deputy, General Shehu Yar’Adua, who were known as unrepentant military dictators, might yet end up as democratic martyrs and awkward heroes of the struggle against military tyranny in Nigeria.

A few months after, both Obasanjo and Yar’Adua were summarily impounded and sentenced to death in a phantom coup plot, Obasanjo more for his subterranean partisan manoeuvres than for daring to criticize Abaca, and Yar’Adua for setting up a democratic ambush for the ferocious Infantry general at the National Conference. Yar’Adua perished in Abacha’s Gulag while Obasanjo survived to become the first democratically elected president of the Fourth Republic.

Is history set to repeat itself? It is a pity that President Obasanjo has chosen to don the toga of a partisan politician all over again after publicly disavowing same. This is the time the nation would have benefitted immensely from his well-judged statesmanlike interventions in its political process.   Whatever we may say or think about the Owu chief and his penchant for impetuous fury, there can be no doubt that he has paid his dues to the nation.

Now as the nation enters uncharted waters, it is even more piteous that  Obasanjo has allowed his anger with General Buhari’s celebrated intransigence to becloud his judgment and lure him back to partisan politics. With that move, the old general has  effectively boxed himself into a political corner at the very time the nation needs him to leverage his national clout and international prestige as a modulating and moderating influence in the affairs of a fractious multi-ethnic country.

Obasanjo would have been more effective criticizing Buhari from the state box of higher patriotism and statesmanship rather than from the murky waters of partisan politics. It is a political misjudgment which may yet haunt the great but flawed titan from Owu if the nation dissolves into the ungainly chaos of a hung presidency in the coming weeks.

 

The death of a notable statesman cannot be described as fortuitous by any stretch of the imagination. But there is something nationally fortuitous about the passing of the great statesman last week at the ripe old age of ninety two. It affords us an opportunity for what we propose as retro-perspective.

Unflappable, cool, calm and self-effacing to the end, Shagari was a class act among the old political class. But he was not anybody’s wimp. Soft spoken and cultured, he could also reach for the big stick when necessary. While thanking Chief Awolowo for drawing his attention to the woeful plight of the economy, he ended with a caustic putdown, noting that as it was characteristic of the Ikenne titan, what was meant as a private correspondence was already in the public domain before reaching him.

His death marks a watershed in Nigerian political history. Virtually all the great political actors of the First Republic and in particular, the NPN camarilla of the Second Republic have now joined their ancestors with the exception of Joseph Wayas, the Senate President of that fabled republic.

Augustus Meredith Adisa Akinloye, the wily and redoubtable chairman of the party, Dr Abubakar Olusola Saraki, the majority leader, Alex  Ekwueme, the urbane and cultured Vice President together with party functionaries and intellectuals such as Umaru Dikko, Mallam Adamu Ciroma and Dr Ibrahim Tahir have all gone to answer the call of their creator.

On October 1st this year, it will be exactly forty years when Shagari took over the reins of power from the departing military with this star-studded team brimming with political, intellectual and political distinction. The opposition, led by the seminally cerebral Chief Obafemi Awolowo, was no less star-spangled bristling with the best and brightest of the land.

These were the men of timber and mahogany that the shy, diffident and provincial former school headmaster from Shagari village had to preside over and put under some leash. Yet Shagari himself had openly confessed that his highest ambition was to be a senator rather than president. But to the shadowy power brokers, this was the man they were looking for precisely because the best qualification for the presidential job was lack of presidential ambition.

It was to end in a dire fiasco. Four years and a few months later at the tail end of 1983 even as Shagari was still savouring a controversial triumph in a presidential election widely believed to have been rigged, the military kicked down the entire edifice. There was open jubilation throughout the length and breadth of the country.  Cries of “happy new year; happy new regime” rent the air. There were harsh words for a regime widely adjudged to be corrupt, irresponsible and utterly bereft of any noble vision.

President Shagari himself did not escape the bitter public recrimination. Although absolved of personal corruption and self-enrichment, he was nevertheless widely dismissed as weak, indolent, incompetent and vacillating, in short a poor presidential material for a nation in a hurry to develop and deepen democracy. It was said by quarters close to him that Alhaji Shagari was so badly wounded by these nettling barbs that he vowed never to read Nigerian newspapers again.

But by the time he completed his earthly sojourn last week, Shagari has been completely rehabilitated in public esteem. The entire nation rose as one to pay homage to a departed political colossus; a statesman of unrivalled personal dignity and uncommon humility.  In some quarters there was even open condemnation of the military coup that terminated the fledgling democratic experiment and renewed calls for the trial of the perpetrators.

The million dollar question is this: was military intervention in the Nigerian polity an unnecessary detour and diversion simply to sate the appetite of adventurers in uniform and satisfy their whim, or the inevitable working out of some historical logic at play?  To take the latter perspective is to take the longer view of history in which military rule is seen as a virus that had to work its way through the Nigerian system just as it has happened in many other countries.

From this point of view, military rule must exhaust its political and historical possibilities before proving itself manifestly unviable as a rational mode of conducting the affairs of a modern nation-state, more suited to the pre-dawn of political modernity rather than its later stages.

For proof of the inevitable degeneration of professional ethos and the progressive deterioration that must accompany military rule in a modern nation-state, seek no further than a comparison of coup day broadcasts in Nigeria to gauge the stage the dialectic of self-demystification has reached. Whereas the Nzeogwus, Mohammeds, Abachas, Buharis, Babangidas were upbeat, full of patriotic fire and thunder and bristling with gung-ho messianism, the Abdulsalaam Abubakar midnight address in 1998 betrayed terminal weariness and professional disorientation.

The military had its back to the wall and had reached the end of its historic tethers.  It will be foolish to rule out anything in Africa but twenty years after, despite ever present temptations and objective conditions that would have been considered tailor-made for military intervention, nobody in his right sense would dare call for a military intervention. And the military institution appears to have learnt its lesson.

What is at play in all this is not some historical mystery or some working of some inscrutable metaphysical deity imposing rationality on the affairs of humanity but what we propose as the spirit of the modern nation-state which brooks no absolutist diktat or feudal chicanery.

The spirit of the modern nation state is the spirit of human liberation and of political and economic emancipation for those confined to its territorial canvas. Wherever its seed is buried and no matter by whom, it germinates to overwhelm all obstacles on its way to fulfilling its manifest destiny of pushing humanity to a higher telos. It is to its working out in Nigeria that we must now turn.

It has been observed that Nigeria is a profound tribute to the self-subversive genius of the colonial imaginary. If Nigeria had not been willed into existence by the colonial imagination, it would have had to be created by the decolonizing imperative as a challenge to the Black imaginary to forge a new type of nation out of the roiling cauldron of multi-ethnic and multi-religious dynamism.

Unfortunately, things have not yet worked out that way. Nigeria is not yet a nation for itself. But this is not for want of trying. Nigeria’s history is replete with grand and heroic gestures to forge in the smithy of colonial contradictions a new commonwealth of Black souls. Indeed if we are to take a long view of history, we may discover that Nigeria has been fortunate to some extent.

Despite being sorely tempted, it is to the eternal credit of our colonial masters that they did not attempt to still the hand of the historic clock by carving out Nigeria as a grand feudal empire structured around an oligarchic caste but as a nation-state of throbbing multi-ethnic and multi-religious contradictions even if they loaded the geographical and demographic dice in favour of a privileged section of the new nation.

The nation-state is never a given reality. It is an imaginary construct of imagined possibilities even where the originators were acting with hostile and malign intent. It is against this utopian benchmark that citizens must labour and struggle in order to fulfil the manifest destiny of the nation. Nation-building is a process and not a destination; a permanent work in progress.

There is no promised land, only hard work and more hard work. As we have seen with the current turmoil in Europe and America even the great nations of the world, after all the revolutions and momentous uprisings against unjust rule, still experience periodic stress. Just like the old USSR, resurgent Russia with its pan-Slavic hyper-nationalism is still troubling and tormenting the west.

In Nigeria, the spirit of the modern nation-state has been at play ever since the amalgamation of the old regional protectorates and even before. It can be seen in the militant journalism and cultural nationalism of the Lagos coastal elite who gave Lord Lugard and his brother quite a roasting. It can be seen in the fiery decolonizing politics of Herbert Macaulay and his heroic pilgrimage to London at the behest of Eleko Esugbayi.

It can be seen in the radical feminism that powered the Aba Tax Riots, in the fiery rhetoric of the early Zik, in the progressive politics of the Nigerian Youth Movement before it dissolved in an ethnic fireball, in the heroic elite compromise and consensus that made independence possible, in the “Wetie” resistance and the Agbekoya Movement against elite tyranny , the Tiv uprising and even in the fundamental spirit and impulse of Biafra.

Going forward, the rousing spirit of the modern nation-state can be seen in the pan-Nigerian solidarity that conjured the miracle of June 12, 1993 against all odds and in spite of the hostile climate fostered by military cynicism and nihilism. It can be seen in the guerrilla journalism spawned by the phenomenon and the NADECO resistance, the revolt of the Ogoni and the ensuing Niger Delta insurgency.

Anybody or group of people in the twenty first century trying to turn Nigeria into a tyrannical fiefdom or a feudal suzerainty  will have these innate and seemingly inert forces to contend with. They will not rest or be forcibly rested until Nigeria achieves its manifest destiny as a free, truly democratic and prosperous nation-state or is dissolved in the process if this proves unattainable.

This is why we have said that irrespective of who wins the coming elections, the victors must gird their loins for an unabating democratic tempest and turbulence. Elections are a mere game of numbers and they do not resolve fundamental national questions. This requires a more substantial elite consensus which cannot be procured on the electoral battle field.

As a reality check, we can compare Nigeria’s fate in this post-colonial epoch with the fate of other colonial behemoths in Africa to see how far we have come and how the spirit of the nation-state has fared. While old Ethiopia and Sudan have both suffered partitioning after protracted civil wars, the old Congo has just had its first real election in over fifty five years.

Ethiopia and Eretria are struggling to find commonalities and their feet after a protracted period of mutual hostility and post-civil war bitterness. Sudan has dissolved into a moribund and embattled Islamic oligarchy in the north and vicious military banditry in South Sudan. In fifty five years, Congo has been ruled by only two families: Mobutu and the Kabilas. In contrast, Nigeria has been in a state of permanent commotion which does not brook tyranny or incompetence for long.

Let us round this off with a rousing anecdote. Two weeks ago, I asked a longstanding friend, Barrister Soji Awogbade, why there is no popular talk about state corruption in Saudi Arabia even as there is growing popular resistance against the evil in Nigeria. “It is because Saudi Arabia is a monarchy”, he shot back.

We must thank God for small mercies and the spirit of the nation-state in Nigeria.  On a final note of personal forecast, the major party that nails its mast to the struggle against corruption, no matter its impure motive or imperfect procedure, is in substantial compliance with the dominant mood of the nation and is likely to prevail. What happens thereafter is a totally different matter. Happy New Year to all our readers.