The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • This degraded but degrading Boko Haram

    Once again, the dry Harmattan winds from the North East have brought the unmistakable odour of blood and gore. The atmosphere is thick with gloom. For the umpteenth time, the Nigerian Armed Forces are mourning their gallant fallen. Even by conventional military engagements, the casualty figures are frightening and unbelievable.

    The news from Melete and the 157 Task Force Battalion is quite disturbing. It is a failure of remote and immediate intelligence. The planning and execution show a degree of professional expertise. It also shows that there are still active sleeper-cells of Boko Haram sympathisers in areas they have evacuated. Physical evacuation is not the same thing as the ideological evacuation of a poisoned mind.

    For a rag-tag insurgent force to take down a whole battalion and their commander in a pitched battle ought to trigger some national emergency. Where were the sentries, the scouts, the humints and the long-distance electronic surveillance that ought to have pinpointed enemy activities in the area?  There are horrific videos abroad. The Boko Haram may be degraded, but this latest onslaught is simply too degrading and a wounding and damning riposte to those who think we have seen off this nefarious sect.

    If they are not playing politics with a traumatised nation, the senate is surely right to postpone their plenary sitting on account of this consuming tragedy. There is too much partisan politics in the air. Nigeria requires some fresh thinking and bipartisan efforts to think through this fundamental crisis.

    As far as its formal brief is concerned, the military has tried its gallant best. But as long as the economic, political, ideological and spiritual crisis which spawned this Stone Age sect remains unaddressed, so long will our gallant soldiers continue to be grist to the savage mill of the Boko Haram cannibals until something gives.

    We must now begin to think the unthinkable. Could it be that Nigeria is under some international siege, a global conspiracy to bring it to heel?  The tell-tale signs are unmistakable. We should not be deceived. The Boko Haram organization is an apolitical rogue sect driven by harsh and pragmatic necessity. It will take help from anybody, including the devil himself.

    With the Maghreb an open corridor due to state collapse in Libya and with the Syrian maelstrom unabating, Nigeria is vulnerable to free arms and equal opportunity jihadists transiting all the way from the Middle East and Afghanistan to the West African corridor. This is why we have argued in this column that it is not a wise thing for Nigeria to be embroiled in a multi-dimensional confrontation with armed Islamic sects who have no truck with the territorial assumptions of the post-Wesphalian nation-state.

    The global sharks are out in their number. They have chosen the moment when Nigeria appears most vulnerable with President Buhari and the political class completely consumed about winning the next election. But if Nigeria’s territorial integrity continues to be threatened by the resurgent sect, the legitimacy of the coming election is already hobbled ab initio.

  • On the post-colonial condition (Further clarifications and elaborations)

    The intellectual politics of correctly naming an object or a phenomenon is often as critical and decisive as properly identifying the said object. Take for example, the current debate about restructuring in Nigeria. One would have thought that the elementary meaning of the word as changing or remodelling a particular structure would be so obvious even to a primary school pupil.

    But the intellectual politics of correctly naming and properly identifying a phenomenon has taken over with adamant and implacable opponents of restructuring tasking the proponents to say what they actually mean by restructuring or keep the peace forever. Deliberate confusion is a legitimate weapon in the politics of naming. As it has been noted, language can be used in three principal ways: to express thought, to conceal thought or to replace thinking altogether.

    In a famous encounter, an exasperated British philosopher once asked his opponent who was feigning philosophical ignorance about what it meant to be in pain to hit his foot against a sharp stone. To put it in native Yoruba parlance, it takes only a few minutes for a scantily dressed woman to figure out what Harmattan is all about. To live in a structurally dysfunctional nation is akin to being sent to a penal colony.

    Karl Marx solved the famous Kantian philosophical conundrum about the unknowable “thing in itself” which sets a limit human understanding by insisting that philosophical perplexities are vulnerable to human praxis. Marx had pooh-poohed F.W Hegel’s ascription of the Kantian confusion to some Absolute Spirit in control of human destiny as a prime example of Hegelian mystification and idealism.

    According to Marx, what cannot be resolved at the level of abstraction will be resolved at the level of concrete human action. Wielded hammer speaks poetry. Rounding off his thirteenth thesis on Ludwig Feuerbach with intellectual flourish and scornful bravura, Marx famously thundered: “Philosophers have always interpreted the world, the point is to change it”.

    Yet given what many consider the Marxian revolutionary debacle in Russia, there are those who believe that it was Emmanuel Kant and his theory of the unknowable in human history who had the last laugh over his radical traducer. To start with when the revolution finally occurred, it was a revolution against capital, that is against the classical conditions enunciated by Marx and in a society roiling in feudal backwardness too. Second, praxis led to practical monstrosity and unspeakable human tragedy.

    It can now be seen why the fierce struggle over concepts and key terms, the political contests for meaning in all their Orwellian necessities, even where they appear futile and meaningless on the surface, are an integral part of the timeless crusade for human emancipation from the clutches of feudal backwardness, superstitious idiocies and state-subsidized illiteracy.

    There are many readers of this column who are quite upset by the persistent recourse to the word “post-colonial” to describe the Nigerian and African condition. As far as they are concerned, there is nothing “post” colonial about the Nigerian condition in all its consuming and epic tragedy. For them, Nigeria remains very much a colonial penal colony; a hardship posting for the most unlucky species of the Black race; a purgatorial transit camp of the condemned. Nothing has changed since the formal cessation of colonial rule.

    But to say that nothing has changed since Africa’s formal independence from the colonial masters is to stretch the narrative a bit too far and a flagrant assault on actual reality, however impossible and nightmarish this may be. A lot has actually changed. No human condition and circumstances can remain the same forever; static and stagnant like a fetid pond. You are either moving forward or moving backward. Once again, we remind our readers of this column’s most insistent desideratum: You cannot step into the same river twice.

    The phrase post-colonial tries to capture many things at the same time. It is like shooting at a moving target. It can refer to Africa and other colonized continents after the physical cessation of colonization. It is a new epoch and whether we like it or not, we just have to get on with it. In the history of the human race, the stronger have always attempted to dominate and impose their might and will on the weaker.

    Nobody pays any reparation for colonization. Britain itself was a colony of the Roman Empire. Spain was a colony of the Almoravids for about two centuries until they threw off the yoke, beginning with the conquest of Zaragosa. Holland was a colony of Spain and so was a huge chunk of the South American continent which still wears its Iberian heritage with some aplomb till date

    Brazil was a colony of Portugal and at a point the entire Portuguese royal clan relocated to Brazil, setting up the world’s first tri-continental empire-state. The Ottoman Turks did their bit and were set to overrun the whole of Europe until they were halted in a memorable battle on the plains of Serbia. The Japanese colonized the Koreans and brutalized the Chinese. The important thing to note is that people have always conquered and colonized other people. In the timeless flow and ebb of history, empires rise and fall and the world moves on.

    The second meaning of post-colonial refers to the psychological condition of colonized people after the physical cessation of colonization. It may also refer to the psychological condition of the colonizers themselves. There are many who insist that that the physical cessation of colonization was just a sly nod in the direction of political correctness as it has given rise to a far more vicious, virulent and violent form of economic, political and cultural domination.

    This is the sense in which this phrase is often used in this column, In contemporary Africa, the post-colony is a new and far more unsettling version of the colonial penal colony; a human hell on earth where genuine statehood has absconded or abdicated and things have reverted to the Hobbesian state of nature. In its millennial horror and sheer terror, it is Dante’s inferno, the Apocalypse and Amargeddon all rolled into one.

    In its more benign intellectual formulation, the post-colonial condition has given rise to the notion of hybridised or conflated cultures in which the former colonized give as much to their tormentors as they receive in a brave new globalized world. It is not a one-sided grudge match since there are Third World success stories such as Singapore, a former colonial backwater, South Korea, a former Japanese colony and Dubai, a former desert waste dump, just as there are unfolding First World failures.  This is not discounting the enthralling story of a nation like Australia where the pre-colonial, the colonial and the post-colonial jostle for attention within the vast space of a continent-country or a Hong Kong , a First World enclave within a nominally Second World nation.

    There are many who are wont to dismiss these glittering spectacles and the enviable modernist skylines as nothing but dubious razzmatazz masking great inequity and injustice. Indeed less benign are the views of Francis Fanon, the Martinique born psychiatrist, who dismiss the post-colonial subject as an alienated and miscegenated mongrel tottering on the edge of despair and psychic disintegration.

    Yet anybody monitoring the rise of right-wing extremist groups in Europe, the decline of its political and intellectual class and the Brexit rumpus in Britain, particularly the tortured and anguished visage of the outstanding Theresa May last Thursday as she sought to fend off her assailants who had sniffed blood must come to the realization that even colonizing former empires are not exempt from their own unique post-colonial pathology.

    As hordes of immigrants absconding from the concrete hell of the post-colonial state in Africa and the Middle East arrive on European shores, the Age of post-colonial anxiety and unease has also arrived in these nations giving rise to extreme nationalism, xenophobia and racism. What goes around the world will eventually come back to its starting point, freighted with cargo.

    It is however in Nigeria, far more than in any contemporary African country not even the Democratic Republic of Congo with which it is often compared, that pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial tensions come together to produce its most combustible combo. It is here that the most extreme notions of poverty and want combine with pestilential diseases to produce surreal suffering on a scale hardly ever witnessed by human society since the advent of modern civilization.

    There are some friends of this column who prefer to call this peculiar Nigerian condition “Neo-colonialism” following the example of Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere and all the avatars of the decolonizing project. But it should now be obvious that this will not do. In its Greek origin, “neo” means young. Modern usage expanded its brief to mean new or recent. Neocolonialism means new or recent colonialism which does not take on board the epistemological totality of the post-colonial condition in all its contradictory ramifications.

    Yet an even more militant and extreme formulation views the Nigerian conundrum as a function of what it calls caliphate colonialism.  This is a coinage so beloved of many patriots and nationalists who have borne the brunt of military misrule in Nigeria. Yet apart from its usefulness as a weapon of heavy propaganda against the perceived excesses of a particular power formation in Nigeria, this phrase has no conceptual or intellectual value whatsoever.

    A caliphate is a territory ruled according to Islamic tenets by a caliph (Khalifa) e.i a successor of the Holy Prophet and a Defender of the Muslim faith. Although there is nothing stopping anybody from succumbing to grandiose delusions, the whole idea of caliphate colonialism in a modern secular nation-state with a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society and with different loci of power is a classic non-sequitur. Nigeria’s post-independence history is an infallible guide on this. Anybody trying to upset the delicate equipoise, the negative equilibrium will only succeed in bringing the roof down on himself.

    The post-colonial condition is alive and kicking in all its localized and globalized affinities as well as momentous contradictions. In order to overcome its Nigerian mutant through political push-over, it is important to correctly identify its outer form and inner realities.

     

     

     

     

     

  • Gulder don batter him button

    These are dodgy times indeed. The collateral damage of the delinquent behaviour of the political class is mounting every minute. As the Americans will put it, stuff is happening every minute.  In sane and sober climes, a fraction of this stuff will be enough for a declaration of national emergency. Yet the Nigerian cockpit is strangely somnolent, the crew overpowered by the noxious fumes of fatalistic complacency.

    It does appear as if no one is exempt from the fog of confusion that has settled on the country and its dizzying and disorienting effects. Not even visiting foreign dignitaries. The fog is no respecter of royalties even of vintage mint. At the tail end of what appeared a whirlwind but most brilliantly coordinated tour of Nigeria, Prince Charles, the heir presumptive to the throne of England, finally met his comeuppance with the buttons on his coat awfully misaligned, giving the impression of professorial distraction.

    You can trust the old colony. Prince Charles’ bespoke bungle has given rise to frenzied speculations among the uppity natives, the impish descendants of Lord Lugard’s old tormentors. Could it be due to the sultry tropics and their disorienting effects or something more tropicalizing and turpor-inducing, they wondered aloud.

    In a dramatic enactment of what is famously known as the Stockholm Syndrome, many have even ascribed the sartorial howler of the charming prince to a new mode of chic dressing, an informal tip of the royal hat in the direction of the Yahoo boys which is in conformity with the well-known youthful radicalism of the eccentric and outspoken heir to the British throne.

    You can trust Okon and Baba Lekki to fasten like leeches on the current controversy. On Friday morning, the crazy boy walked in with his senile accomplice reeking as usual of illicit gin. Okon’s shirt was buttoned up wrongly in a crazy and ridiculous manner while Baba Lekki’s danshiki was worn upside down. Snooper was trying to suppress his mirth when Okon offered an explanation.

    “Ha, oga na Princess Charles dey cause all dis yeye nonsense. You know say Gulder don batter him button”, the mad boy crowed and burst into a hilarious giggle.

    “Egungun subu o so di’dan”, Baba Lekki began with a caustic Yoruba wisecrack and then switched into perfect English. “You see when a smart masquerade stumbles and falls, he will convert it to an acrobatic display”.

    “Ha baba make I tell you something, na Gulder come hammer him head. Na Gulder go finis all dem white people for Nigeria. He get time like dat one dem Oyinbo man come do business for Nigeria. Dem giam two bottle of dem Gulder beer and him say he wan go take him paper for inside dem hotel room. One hour he never return so dem go look for dem Oyibo man and come find him fast asleep for dem floor with expensive shit all over,” the mad boy sniggered.

    “Okon, you are a fool. Charles no dey drink Gulder, na only Gin and Lime”, the old man crowed with mischief written all over his face.

    “Baba no tell me dat nonsense. Gin and Lime na ogogoro and dem small Lemon”, Okon snapped.

    “Okon, dem give Charles python meat for Benin. Dat one na slow poison”, Baba Lekki intoned.

    “Before or after Gulder?”, the mad boy demanded.

    “Ha you see, Gulder don do him work, python meat go do him work after. My friend Omoruyi say dem Benin people never forgive dem Oyinbo becos dem thief dem Bronze work”, the old crook retorted. It was at this point that snooper quickly back-heeled into his room.

     

  • Falcons without falconers

    The protracted confrontation between the Nigerian post-military state and members of the Shiite Islamic sect poses a grave security challenge for the nation both in its medium and long term prospects. Upper week, the streets of Abuja foamed once again with blood of the members of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria as they engaged the security forces in set-piece battles for three consecutive days.

    About the same time, the military authorities were laying to rest the remains of a retired general who had been killed by an irate mob in obvious retaliation for an earlier bloody infraction by a security contingent. To get to the dismembered remains of the late general, security forces had to drain a pond that had collected in an abandoned mining crater.

    Needless to add that the pond yielded other grisly secrets. It is a tribute to the sterling professionalism of the military personnel deployed that they went about their duty with calm forbearance, refusing to be provoked by the local distemper and not so subtle threats of occult retribution.

    But as if this was not enough cause for anxiety, a traditional ruler in Kaduna State and his security details were recently murdered in cold blood while returning from a state engagement. This was after a ransom of ten million naira was pocketed by the scoundrels .

    Taken together, these atrocious and outrageous killings are a disturbing reminder of the explosive synergy between inter-community strife and religious mayhem that is fuelling national instability in the country at the moment. There is a poisoned pond on the plateau. The lush plains of Taraba are seething with ethnic and religious tension. So is the fertile valley of the lower Benue. The indigene-settler problematic has never assumed a more desperate volatility in the history of the nation. The falconer has disappeared and the falcons seem to be on their own.

    So as the nation turns and tumbles in the ever widening gyre of anarchy, we will be deceiving ourselves if we imagine for one second that these are little local difficulties without much impact on national politics or without a multiplier effect on the endemic twin-crisis of the postcolonial state and nationhood that has hobbled the polity since independence. The truth is that this horrific bloodletting is driving the nation towards perdition and sure electoral disaster come next year.

    It is understandable, then, if the president says that he is depressed by the spate of killing in the nation.  His implacable opponents will retort that there is no art to know a man’s true feelings from the construction of his face. However that may be, being depressed is not nearly enough for a nation embroiled in an epochal crisis of survival. What is important is to roll up the sleeves to find a solution to the national conundrum.

    Unfortunately rather than finding an enduring solution to the nation’s fundamental problems, the entire political class are focused on the next election. Despite warnings about the evils of electoralism by this column, they have succeeded in conning the entire nation, distracting everybody and diverting precious national attention to the ephemerality of who will prevail in next year’s election. The usual posse of political pundits have promptly arrived on the scene obviously being paid per positive prediction and proactive political prophesy. There is even an international flavouring to the offerings and the offal as the back and forth proceeds.

    Yet despite the contrived catharsis, despite the illusionist fantasia and political extravaganza rolling every minute from the Fordist factory of national deception, it should be obvious to any discerning observer that a political fog is gradually settling in on the country. It is a fog of great confusion that makes it impossible for many to see beyond their nose.

    Visibility is drastically reduced, if not completely eliminated. Unlike four years ago when there was a dominant national hurricane bent on ousting the incumbent government, the situation this time around is so evenly poised as to suggest the radically novel but radically destabilising possibility of a “hung” presidency.

    It may well be that the Ghana model beckons, a situation in which a country is neatly split and perfectly polarized between two opposing political tendencies which results in back and forth alternating governments. But this requires a patriotic political class and a sober populace to manage. Needless to add that it is an ideological polarization which dates back to the old Nkrumah/ Danquah fault lines and Ghana is not as demographically unwieldy and as volatile as Nigeria.

    General Buhari has lost so much moral capital, so much authority, so much ethical gravitas and has made so many unnecessary enemies that going forward to the election, the power of incumbency means little. Yet he retains his principal constituency and his messianic hold on large swathes of the sullen, combat-primed northern masses that are wont to view any thought of his fundamental failure in governance as nothing but deranged dogoturenchi.

    Yet there are equally large swathes of the country, particularly in the South South, South East, the bitterly divided South West and among the vast northern minorities who are likely to demur, viewing the uncritical and worshipping adulation of Buhari’s core supporters as a symptom of anti-democratic populism. The nation is split down the middle and has never been this cruelly polarized along ethnic, religious and regional fault lines.

    In the event, the contending forces are so evenly matched, so precariously poised that we may be heading for a badly and bitterly disputed electoral outcome. Given the numerous flashpoints that we have enumerated at the beginning of this piece, the adamant and implacable opposition of significant power-brokers to the possibility of General Buhari’s return and the malevolent rancour emanating from various party primaries, the country may be walking blindfolded to a political nightmare of unprecedented magnitude.

    Given their obvious lack of a sustaining ideology or a coherent set of beliefs and ideals, the major parties are nothing but political rallies; organized conspiracies to capture and retain power. They have served the nation badly. But there is opportunity in every crisis. Self-purgation is not necessarily self-medication and the polity will continue to witness rowdy realignments and emotional self-expulsions until there is nothing to align or expel.

    Given the current fluidity of party affiliations in the nation, President Buhari ought to exploit the vacuum to find the moral will and the reserves of patriotic energy to rise above the national melee so as to address the fundamental problems facing the country and rein in the centrifugal forces threatening the polity with an apocalyptic meltdown.

    Chief among this is the Shiite imbroglio. The Shiite conundrum reminds one very much of a local saying that he who is ready to die has met the one that is willing to kill. It is a perfect recipe for continuous mindless slaughter of fellow citizens, however ideologically irascible and politically obdurate they may seem. If the slaughter continues on the scale that we have witnessed, it is likely to attract severe reprisals from the international Shiite community or an attempt by its more ferocious military storm troopers to destabilize the nation.

    With the Maghreb already an open corridor after state-collapse in Libya, it is to be hoped that this is not the case. It is unfortunate that the Federal authorities lost an early attempt to dialogue with the sect and to seek a reapproachment with its leadership. Whatever the provocation, Nigeria remains a secular state catering for all its citizens irrespective of religious creed and no matter the loony sectarianism of a few misguided members of the Shiite caste.

    The impression must not be given that the Nigerian state is a principal belligerent in the perpetual proxy war between the Sunni and Shiite faiths. A prolonged confrontation with the Shiite is a very dangerous proposition for a politically fragile nation like Nigeria. El-Zak-Zaky is welcome to his grand delusions that he can replicate an Iranian-type revolution on Nigerian soil. Unlike Nigeria, Iran—the old Persia— is an ethnically, culturally and religiously homogenous country with a continuous civilization that dates back to Antiquity.

    Yet vexatious ants do cause problems inside the trousers. Unlike the Sunnis who as denizens of arid deserts tend to favour rural hostilities and pastoral commotion, the Shiites are past masters of urban warfare and metropolitan mayhem. When armed with sophisticated weapons, their fanaticism and zealotry induces a reckless daring and impulsive bravery which fear no foe and is ready to take suicidal risks.

    It is useful to note that while a Nigerian military spokesperson spoke with chilling finality that the army does not use rubber bullets, a Shiite member was known to have retorted that if the group were to be properly armed, the army would be no match for them. This is stoking the embers of war beyond national capacity.

    With the military already involved in internal security operations all over the nation, an armed confrontation with the Shiite’s well-known appetite for urban insurgency and street to street fighting cannot be an option for a nation already hobbled by internal rifts and division. This is not the time for the nation to start what it cannot finish. The Boko Haram war has been on for almost ten years, bleeding the nation to death.

    In order to avoid further needless bloodshed, President Buhari, in the greater interest of the nation, needs to shelve his reflex hostility and implacable animosity to the sect by assuming the toga of an elevated statesman dealing with recalcitrant citizens. He should make use of respected ulamahs, Islamic scholars and notable emirs to engage the Shiite leader in order to persuade him to see the futility of his infantile delusions. Thereafter, a negotiated settlement involving graduated release should be worked out.

    Faith-based delusions of grandeur are not amenable to rational discourse. But we must start somewhere and somehow. The alternative is too grim to contemplate. El-Zak-Zaky may well be courting deliberate martyrdom in the hands of the Nigerian state in order to stoke up the fire of future armed insurgencies against the nation. A wise visionary state must deny him the pleasure.

  • Okon is set to remove Rochas’ “erections”

    The Rise and Fall of Rochas’ Rogue Reich, the longest running dynastic soap in the modern history of a fiercely republican people appears to be winging its way to its inglorious finale. The knives are already out on the Imo Capitol, glistening with plebeian malice. The autumn of the premature patriarch is here with us. The woods of Dunsinane have finally arrived at the veld of Emekuku. To wax poetic, the hurly-burly is set to consume the burly bully.

    Unconfirmed reports indicate some uncontrollable and inconsolable wailing and gnashing of teeth emanating from the royal quarters of the penal colony of Imo with hired mourners from Aguleri going into overdrive gear with their sonorous dirges about the tragic ironies of life and the fact that a king among slaves remains a slave among kings. It was added that thereafter a naked man carrying a flaming pot could be seen mumbling some occult mumbo-jumbo, while beseeching Amadiora to break the neck of his traducers.

    But while it lasted, it was adjudged to be the greatest political road show in the history of the nation, full of gaudy pomp and empty pomposity. Never one to do things by half measures, it was rumoured that even the royal palm wine tapper was his royal majesty’s distant cousin once briefly lost to gully erosion.

    This is in addition to about eighteen choice posts of the realm held down by immediate family including the yeoman of a royal wardrobe bristling with gaudy sash and surreal sartorial sorties. How any sane person ever thought he could get away with this royal monstrosity among a people famous for their competitive zeal beggars belief. But then scalding embers of flame have been known to beget cold impotent ash.

    You can trust Okon the crazy one and Baba Lekki, his senile accomplice, to cotton in on the act. On Friday morning, the delinquent duo duly arrived in the house carrying a mock coffin and a huge pouch bursting with incendiary devices. Even so early in the morning, illicit alcohol had already kicked in, and the two were on social rampage, babbling insensate and subversive nonsense. Snooper was having none of that.

    “What is all this nonsense so early in the morning?” snooper growled with the distemper of the sleep-deprived.

    “Ha oga as market don close for Owerri, we wan quickly reach dem Douglas Road”. The mad boy sniggered.

    “To do what?” snooper snapped.

    “As dem don roga dem Rochas man, we wan go remove him erection for Owerri. When opposition don beat man so tey and him no dey stand erect again, him erection must to fall. Na dem Zuma erection I go remove first, make dem Yoruba people use dat one for dem sigidi. I hear say even Zuma sef go kaput for jail as dem South Africa no dey play with wayo people”, the crazy boy crowed.

    “You mean Rochas Okorocha?” snooper quipped.

    “Kai, kai Oko-ro- nsa himself”, the crazy old man intoned. He had pronounced the name with such a lewd and lurid Yoruba inflection that could only have come from a deranged prankster.

    “Oga, some of dem erection don dey fall gradually by gradually, na wetin baba wan say be dat,” Okon lamented.

    “In Building Science, na dat one dem dey call erectum interruptus”, the mad old man sneered.

    “But dem still dey talk. Na inside dem dem Rochas man keep him juju. He get time like dat for Owerri when I been dey check out dem Egbu girl call Charity and I pass dem erection and he come dey talk Ibo. Him say Bia, Nwoke ebe ki ne je?” Naim I come pick real race and I come hide for Okigwe Road for inside dem abandoned trailer.” The mad boy chanted breathlessly.

    “And what is inside this bag?” snooper finally ventured.

    “Na  ljebu gbetu-gbetu for controlled demolition of fake erections”, the old man screamed and got up as if to charge snooper even as Okon scrambled to restrain him. It was at this point that snooper ordered the pair to leave the house or face forcible eviction.

  • Why Nigeria has remained highly disunited and under developed: The uninspiring role of the Nigerian elite in Nation-building(1960-2018)

    Introduction to Intervention

    As the killing plains of Kaduna found their way back into reckoning this past week, as the Abuja highway foamed with the blood of dead members of the Shiite sect and wounded soldiers, and as the search for the remains of a murdered army general ends in an abandoned well in southern Jos and its grisly secrets, the Nigerian Conundrum remains very much on the front burner of the national discourse in all its troubling and tremulous necessities.

    We were going to write on these tragic developments this week when an important critical intervention from a long-standing fan of this column landed on our desk. It is the bounden duty of columnists who stir national controversies to yield space to alternative opinions in order to enrich the discourse and deepen the argument among Nigerian stake-holders. This is what we have done this week with excerpts from the piece.

    By 1960 when Nigeria gained her independence from Britain the prospect of being a great country was bright and high. However nearly sixty years after, the dreams and hopes of the nationalists for independence has not been realized. Poverty, divisions, underdevelopment and backwardness, unemployment, corruption, insecurity and such negative things have been the dominant features. The country has been assailed by many divisive forces, thereby raising doubts about her survival today.

    With the march of history, a nation that started off on the platform of unity and optimism  and with great promise of mighty wealth  and greatness disappointed all expectations. It changed its course of direction, imbibed the wrong values and acquired bad drivers and sailors and went swimming and wallowing in a wild sea of pessimism, disunity and humiliating shame of poverty and underdevelopment.

    Today Nigeria has been declared the world capital of poverty,  and her unity is severely threatened by dark forces of tribalism, ethnicity, religiousness, political bitterness set and driven by its political elite. The consensus is that the country is not only poor and down on the development ladder, also she is highly disunited. As a notable politician has observed, the country has never been more divided than she is today. It has been a long role of disappointment and frustration resulting in self -doubt and crisis of serious proportion.

    They have implanted deep pains in my heart warranting this reflection on why the country is perpetually  poor, disunited  and backward over the years since independence .It is an attempt to show why the promotion of national unity and development  has been so difficult  a task in Nigeria. The uninspiring role of the Nigerian elite in Nation-building(1960-2018) is noted and stressed. It is a wake up call on the governing and managing elite to rise to the challenge of nation building especially by doing the needful for national unity and development in Nigeria.

     

    DEDICATION

    Permit dear reader to say that this occasional essay is dedicated to the great Columnist Tatalo Alamu of the Nation on Sunday for his patriotic zeal, intellectual depth and sagacity and highly infectious  writing. I do not know him but his weekly essays have done enough to keep hope alive about the unity and development of the country and to try to keep her on the right track. Were his ideas and suggestion diligently applied to policy making, the country would have been far better off than it is today.. At least his works concentrated my mind on the national question and largely inspired this essay.

    Few years ago -precisely in 2014  when Nigeria clocked one hundred years of existence as a country, this Nigerian scholar, patriot and columnist wrote a very scathing article that drew attention to the fiscal imbalance that might have  held the country down and backward. Obviously  angry and dissatisfied with the pace and quality of national development  in a land so well blessed by nature with resources of wealth both human and material, he advocated for what he calls ‘fiscal federalism’ to be put in place in Nigeria and went ahead to invite the elites to a public debate and analysis of the Nigerian state with a view to finding answers to our national problem.

    The response was  warm, positive and insightful. It provided me a better understanding of the inner thoughts and feeling of  the Nigerian elite about the country. Many of them appeared to have fallen to the manipulations of the ruling/ managing elite and accepted their wicked offering  about Nigeria and so blamed the structure including the historical process of becoming a nation state.

    I  disagreed and blamed the ruling and managing elites for the problems of the country especially for failing to do the necessary nurturing and development of the country after birth. They have been notorious for blaming all else than themselves for the country’s problem. Today I still do. They are the country’s leading problem- the real culprit.

    I do not know whether the writer – Tatalo Alamu – who  I later learnt from a reliable source  to be “an eminent scholar and professor in his  field”  while snooping around the country had  a secretariat to collate the ideas generated by the public discourse he initiated, but  I do know that ever since, the call for restructuring of the country got intensified, and has  not waned or left  public consciousness.  I know few more things :  the elite lack the ability to solve problems, and the honesty and skills to do correct diagnosis and analysis of the Nigerian ailments- largely for selfish reasons.

    Consequently, even reasonable, straight forward issues and easily doable things have been left undone. For instance,  the ruling elite have not been able  to review the revenue sharing formulae  which made fiscal federalism a jerky affair in Nigeria, they have  not paid due attention to the constitution  especially chapter two with its nation building and nourishing values. Yet these are simple issues which could be easily resolved by any group driven by patriotism and national interest. Even the  call for restructuring had become incoherent and bizarre bordering on the near impossible or unnecessary.

    Generally, the  Nigerian elite have a lackadaisical  and unhelpful  habit of looking at the other way their country is burning for selfish reasons. This may be so because as  Akinlotan has observed, Nigeria has “irresponsible political elites”…. with “many of them parochial , ethnic champions and …more preoccupied  with gratifying their primordial  tastes and short- sighted needs than worrying about the country’s tenuous future” ( Akinlotan – Appalling presidential  election calculations – The Nation on Sunday October 28 2018).

    In the face of the obvious failings of the Nigerian elites as exemplified say by their  violation of relevant sections of the 1999 constitution for instance chapter two, disregard for extant  rules and regulations of public service of Nigeria with utmost impunity, extreme parochialism, massive corruption, nepotism, promotion of profane values in society, and their general  ineffectiveness in leadership, management and governance, it  seems improper, dishonest and a  great absurdity betraying some elite’ conspiracy to blame the structures or turn attention elsewhere.  Issues of elites’ failure in governance must be addressed frontally because in the final analysis  they are factors that hurt people and impede the unity and progress of society.

    Many Groups had sought to leave the country in the past  not because of poor structure  but because of rough and raw deal from poor governance by the Nigerian elite. For example In 1966  when Isaac  Adaka Boro  declared a Niger- Delta  Republic he cited injustice, sustained policy neglect of the Niger Delta area, denial of effective political participation among the reasons for their action.  Also  in  1967  when Ojukwu declared  a republic of Biafra  out of the old Eastern region  gave similar reasons notably insecurity of life and property of the Igbos in Nigeria,  injustice,  break down of law and  order among others as reasons for secession.

    The important point to note though is that  like other Nigerian groups who had expressed desire to leave the union, these people were less concerned with structure than with the quality and  effect  of  governance on their lives and properties. They expressed a desire to leave the country not because  they were part of the structure put in place by the British  in 1914 but because of the adverse effect of misrule, bad governance, poor management of resources and inept leadership on them.  These are the consequences of the actions of men. If this is true then why pursuing the shadow instead of reality? Why leave the faults of men to deal with idle structures that have no brains and hands to plan and hurt the individual unless so used by man.

    Though I  do not see structure as the bane of the country, yet  I recognize its importance in the success of organizations. We need some to help achieve our goals and objectives. However in the final analysis, men and women make structures  to work either for better or worse. The monumental failure of the Nigerian state can only be understood  in terms  of the deficiency of the Nigerian elite in leadership and governance. It is a  reflection of the huge failure of those in charge of affairs to do the needful for success . While there are indeed many factors or obstacles to national unity and development in Nigeria today, it is clear to me that the Nigerian elites have not been able to live up to the broad challenge of nation – building. And  structure is  perhaps the littlest of the problems.

    Let me  observe  here  as a way of reminder that there  was a time when lop-sided political and administrative structure was a serious problem in Nigeria. That was  during the time of the three or  four regional structure in which one of the regions -the northern region was bigger than  the other two or three regions combined. That was  when we talked about a lop- sided political structure- a time before the 1967 creation of states from four regions to twelve states and subsequently the present 36 states.

    While the demands for  the creation of more states has not ceased till date, there were loud grumblings by the oppressed,  minority agitations for freedom and political participation and  demands for the creation of more regions to address political fears and accelerate development. However  the conspiracy of the elites  prevented the creation of more regions before independence. The  Commission set up to look at the problem declined to recommend the creation of more regions hoping that through good governance the fear of the minority groups of the prospect of perpetual domination and enslavement would be allayed and so be pacified.

    That was what the Willinks Commission  had hoped for but never came to pass because of the misrule and poor governance of the elite. Even then, there were bright spots in the regional structure such as the magical performance of  Chief Obafemi Awolowo in the western region. He was easily the lodestar of that era. With his great feats in meaningful development  of his region, he showed that with imagination, vision, creative ideas, critical thinking, knowledge, skills and hard work, devotion to a given cause,  man the builder can overcome  even a very bad structure.

    The relative success of Awo is a pointer to where focus should be today – the ruling elite especially in governance, management and leadership. I agree  with  Akinlotan cited earlier that no country can develop “without leaders possessing  the appropriate  political and economic ideas”.  And  that “Nigeria will neither  develop nor be at peace, until  that right leader takes office”. As the author emphasized that leader must be “some one who knows what  it means to forge national identity …can envision  the future, inured to ethnic politics, not hobbled by ethnic consideration,…loves the arts, fascinated by science and technology,…can dream great dreams …knows what justice is all about…, has the right instincts… and sound grasp of how the Asian Tigers broke through the development ceiling and how the West  found the future and embraced it’. (Akinlotan 2018a cited earlier).

    In short that leader must be knowledgeable, skillful, well informed, capable especially of  differentiating  between  truth and falsehood. Perhaps the  essential point to stress here is that  we lose heavily when we turn away due attention from the real problems that ail the country to  to focus on inanities such as structure or the process by which Nigeria came into being. It has not been helpful to the cause of national unity and development.

    Unfortunately many lies have been told  about Nigeria’s disunity and underdevelopment and wrong steps taken on the national unity and development lanes by the Nigerian elites. They need to be corrected.  One of the tasks of this occasional essay is to draw attention to some the wrong steps taken in the past and  show the falsity and weakness in  many of the claims about Nigeria  especially that of cultural diversity arising from the 1914 amalgamation being the cause of disunity.  Some of the falsehoods have been peddled by the Nigerian elites  for so long that they have tended to wear the apparels of truth. Sold to our collective consciousness through endless  repetitions,  they tend to becloud focus and divert attention  from reality, blur vision, hinder truth and hamper creative thinking. But largely, the major problem has been with the failure of the elites  to observe the basic principles which account for the greatness of nations as summarized below.

     

    • Dr Abhuere FNIM, is of Centre for Child Care and Youth Development, Abuja

  • Royalty and Politics

    Looking at a king’s mouth, one would think he never sucked at his mother’s breast”, observes an old man in Things Fall Apart . Last week, the good people of Oyo town, distinguished Yoruba sons and daughters as well as numerous Nigerian well-wishers, rose as one to pay homage to one of Nigeria’s most illustrious monarchs ever.

    The Alaafin of Oyo, Oba Lamidi Olayiwola Adeyemi, had turned eighty. Looking every inch as regal, as resplendent and as royally distinguished as ever, Oba Adeyemi is in a class of his own among monarchs. It was carnival time in the land of Sekere and Dundun music.

    The event was a moveable royal feast worthy of the epic munificence with which ancient Oyo monarchs entertained their honoured guests in olden times. It was also a classic enactment of the Yoruba abiding fealty to their traditional institution, no matter the advent of ambiguous and traumatic modernity. As royalties collided with royalties and spiritual fathers jostled with secular notables to honour the great monarch, you had a sense that this was the Yoruba nation at its chivalrous and cohesive best.

    Snooper should have been there. A personally signed and royally embossed invitation card had arrived a week before the commencement of the week-long fiesta. But the pressure of work and a mix-up about Alaafin’s itinerary from palace sources sent yours sincerely on a wild goose chase a day before the concluding book launch at the International Conference Centre in Ibadan.

    Given the obvious distress and disorientation of the post-colonial state in Nigeria and the rest of Africa, irony and counter-factual fantasies pervaded the entire ceremony. What would have happened had the old Oyo Empire survived its tribulations in the hands of local jihadists who up-ended the empire and the colonial invaders who finally smashed up its institutional architecture? You get the sense that while the celebrations were going on, the redoubtable Yoruba intelligentsia was also thinking its way through what has become a classic colonial cul de sac.

    At the ripe age of eighty, the Alaafin has already passed into legend in his life time. How do you begin to write about a living institution? If there is any lesson to be taken away from the life of this exceptional monarch, it is that grit, determination and rigorous royal husbandry pay spectacular dividends.

    No other Oba could have come better prepared for the throne. The unmistakable branding and occult assignations of future royalty having been positively identified by his late father, Alaafin Adeniran Adeyemi, the young prince at a tender age was farmed out to live with other royalties in order to imbibe the arcane rituals of royalty and its cloak and dagger politics. The death of his beloved mother at an early age and the need to insulate the future Oba from domestic hostilities would also have weighed heavily on the mind of his wise father.

    The finished product is a perfect embodiment of learning, culture, wit and royal scholarship. The Alaafin is a living treasure of Yoruba history, his memory and power of instant recall a tad short of the miraculous. To add to an already formidable survival kit in the merciless ring of royal and anti-royal politics, the future Alaafin took on martial art and boxing, a trade he plies till date in the privacy of his palace.

    Even the great monarchies of ancient Europe would have secretly applauded this well-rounded education of a future African king. Like his ancestors who went to bed with their daggers fastened around the waist even as the sheath served as pillow case, the Alaafin is not the one to shy away from battle.

    Due to the violence-suffused and blood-soaked nature of their recent history as people of multi-national empire, the Yoruba are often reluctant to start a fight. They have seen too many desperate and bloody scrapes in the last three hundred years of their history. But woe betides anybody who mistakes their civility for cowardice or their restraint and happy go lucky nature as tantamount to a lack of appetite and aptitude for fatal confrontation.

    Perhaps it needs restating that the Oyo Empire was a child of providential necessity. Despite the protracted bloodshed on the Ife plains that accompanied the Oduduwa ascendancy, the subsequent revolution of centralized authority and decentralized governance in Yorubaland was achieved through a combination of persuasion and diplomatic negotiation rather than outright conquest.

    It was when Oduduwa’s people arrived at the northern most fringes of the Yoruba nation and found themselves immediately surrounded by hostile and implacable non-Yoruba people that they were forced to hone their martial instincts. So successful was this militarization of the psyche and martial mobilization that it led to offensive pre-emption and the founding of a new empire.

    Given the signal failure of the post-colonial state in Nigeria to deliver this kind of protection to its captive-subjects and the poverty of education of its political elite, it is not surprising that there is a soaring nostalgia among many Yoruba people and other denizens of old kingdoms in pre-colonial Nigeria for a revalidation of traditional rule as a therapeutic succour for the deep psychic wounds and political destabilization inflicted on Africans by colonial rule and its post-colonial incubus.

    In a gushing tribute to his newly enthroned monarch, the Obaro of Kabba, Oba Solomon Dele Awoniyi, in this paper this past Saturday, Segun Ayobolu spoke highly of the visionary drive, the administrative and managerial capacity of the new Oba. The column concluded by endorsing Basil Davidson’ famous but controversial thesis that at the end of the colonial era power ought to have been “returned to acknowledged African chiefs and kings” who “were often persons of genuine authority and expertise who drew their status and prestige from a long, pre-colonial history….”

    This is a historical impossibility, a heroic but romantic view of history akin to trying to step into the same river twice. Given its immanent logic, and whatever its ideological constructs about “dual mandate” and “civilizing mission”, western civilization was hardly a benign and benevolent intervention in Africa. It was primarily a mission of economic predation and only secondarily of political redemption. The global order does not wait for anyone to get their act together.

    In order to facilitate its project of imposing a new order on a “lost” continent by engendering a total disruption and destruction of its old traditional structure, it was a historic necessity for colonialism to create a new class of African elites to man the foreign system so created by imperialist fiat. Any traditional ruler is welcome as long as they buy into the new project of western modernity. And they will have to slug it out with new entrants into political reckoning with fresh energy and drive to spare.

    As a living symbol of his people’s past grandeur and glory, the Alaafin has been able to straddle the perilous gorge between modernity and tradition with wisdom, wit, self-effacing panache, an acute presence of mind and exemplary political pragmatism. It is a tough act to follow, like the dazzling gyrations of a master trapeze artist on the high wire. Forty seven years after mounting the throne of his ancestors, Oba Adeyemi remains firmly in the political and royal saddle. His doting and admiring father would be applauding from the imperial ceiling.

    Like a terrible yoke, history must weigh heavily on this enlightened traditional ruler, and it has not always been a happy history. The burden of remembrance is often accompanied by the pains of recollection. It could not have escaped the Alaafin how a new Islamic order from the desert fringes of the country and without any valid claim to superior civilization beyond religious fanaticism and cavalry mobility toppled an internally weakened and bitterly polarized Oyo Empire.

    According to knowledgeable sources, the reigning Alaafin, already wounded in battle, was captured by the marauders and taken to the house of a rogue Yoruba warlord in Ilorin where he was grotesquely tortured into renouncing his traditional faith before being given the Khashoggi treatment by his savage interlocutors. It was a horrific execution. The warlord in question suffered a similar fate in a power tussle shortly thereafter.

    A century and three decades after this momentous event which sent the empire on a tail-spin, it was the turn of the reigning Alaafin Adeniran Adeyemi, the father of the current occupant of the throne, to taste the bitter pill of the clash between traditional authority and colonial legitimacy predicated on imperialist disruption of the old order.

    To give teeth to the new order, the Macpherson Constitution vested direct political power in the new power elite,  an arrangement which suddenly saw the Alaafin subordinated to the Chairmanship of late Bode Thomas in the Oyo Divisional Council. A bitter confrontation soon ensued with Bode Thomas accusing the Alaafin of rank insubordination for not standing up to greet him.

    It was a proxy confrontation between the AG and the NCNC. But for its frank political undertones and partisan furies, the misunderstanding could have been easily resolved. After the mysterious death of the Action Group stalwart events moved to a cataclysmic climax. Following the finding of the Floyd Commission of Enquiry, Oba Adeniran was deposed and banished into exile in 1955 and he died five years after in 1960.

    A decade later and at the turn of the seventies, the same Yoruba disunity and elite power rivalry almost cost the Alaafin the ascension to the throne of his forefathers. The smell of intrigues was overpowering. Even after the then Prince Adeyemi’s nomination was ratified and given the seal of approval by the Western Nigeria government the murmurs of disapprobation persisted.

    Read also: Alaafin Lamidi Adeyemi glides to 80

    It led to the brief closure of The Nigerian Tribune on the order of the military government of the then Brigadier Adebayo. To register its displeasure, the newspaper was about to publish a fiery editorial titled “We shall be back to Square One” when security men pounced on the premises. Yours sincerely fled through Oke Sapati, Minor Seminary before descending on Oke Padre in the early hours of the morning.

    In all this, and despite the presence of enemy forces, the Yoruba have remained their own worst enemies. Atavistic feuding stretching back to seven generations, elite rancour, petty malice and collision of bloated egos remain the order of the day. In a post-colonial coliseum of permanent hostilities, you cannot blame your adversaries for exploiting your weakness.

    In the jungle of hostilities and injustice that is post-colonial Nigeria, every ethnic group leverages on its strengths and advantages as countervailing strategies of survival and self-preservation: while the north directs its political and military aggression against the nation and the east replies in kind with economic aggression, the west responds with an intellectual aggression which leaves nothing standing in the wake of its relentless bombardment.

    It is a recipe for perpetual chaos and the nation as post-colonial hell. And it could go on forever or for the foreseeable future until there is a nationalist political class with the vision and will to make Nigeria a safe and humane habitat for all its citizens.

    This is where a man of Alaafin’s immense stature, royal prestige, political pragmatism and universal appeal could make the difference. At eighty, the great Yoruba monarch has earned his spurs and epaulettes. All the accolades and encomiums have been richly deserved.

    As a concluding project to a reign of glorious distinction, Alaafin should now devote his grandeur and remarkable intellectual energy to finding an answer to the Yoruba Question within the Nigerian Conundrum. Here is wishing Iku baba Yeye many more years on the throne of his illustrious ancestors.

  • Okon set to take over NHIS and naked women in Abuja

    With the ugly drama at the NHIS in Abuja snowballing into an ethnic melee, Okon has drawn up a comprehensive plan to take over the troubled agency. A day after escaping political assassination in the hands of irate Arogbo-Ijaw nationalists canvassing for the immediate restructuring of the country, Okon began banging the bedroom door.

    “Oga, I wan quickly reach dem Abuja and dem National Hell Insurance Scam, make man kill two stones with one bird, as dem Yoruba people for Ilasamaja  dey say”, the mad boy opened with a strange gusto. It was seven in the morning and Okon was already reeking of Burukutu and ancillary illicit beverages.

    “Meaning what?” snooper snarled

    “Oga, dem problem for National Hell Insurance Scam be say dem greedy Yoruba and Ibo people no allow mala to finish eating before dem come begin to shout and to torment trouble. Mala never whack reach four billion and dem come dey shout. Life na eat and let eat. Or as dem Ibo dey say, biri kem biri. Live and let live. So I go take the rest money and ask dem ALMB people to take over dem building”, the mad boy snorted.

    “What is ALMB?” snooper asked in alarm.

    “Ambazona Liberation Movement of Bakassi”, the boy replied point blank.

    “I see. After you ran away from Egbesu boys?” snooper jeered.

    “Ha oga, dat one he get as he be. Na juju  come pass juju. Dem Egbesu come send dem big wasp which come strike man for forehead. Naim I come pick race and I come reach Iba and dem LASU for UNILAG. My head still dey cry even now. Na dem PDP and dem APC send dem Ijaw boys. We don ask make dem Ineck  deregister dem for campaign violence but dem say na only soldier party go remain after dat”, the crazy boy chanted breathlessly.

    “So how are you going to cope with police tear-gas?” snooper demanded.

    “Ha, Oga, solution dey for tear gas. You see that sack I dey carry? Na dem leaves from dem plant dem Yoruba dey call efinrin. When dem godogodo police fire dem tear gas, just put efinrin into your korokoro eye and na police go run”, the mad boy sneered.

    “What is your other business in Abuja?”

    “Ah oga dat one na serious business. He get one Ijebu woman like dat and him say he wan go demonstrate naked naked for Abuja over dem primary. Him go meet Okon naked naked for Abuja. So when naked man come jam naked woman for public, na iron lady come meet iron bender be dat. After dat she no go go Abuja again”, the mad boy sniggered and began a most suggestive dance. Snooper promptly drove him out of the room.

     

  • Politics and Letters

    There are times when politics takes over everything in a writer’s life to the exclusion of the finer sensibilities of literature and cultural criticism. It is virtually impossible to remember literature in the midst of hand to hand political combat. The man of letters and the mind that creates suffer immeasurably in the hands of politics.

    You kid and delude yourself that you can always return to literature in a saner and better time. But such a time never comes. In the roiling cauldron of tropical politics, the bugle of permanent political hostilities banishes the bugaboo of literary endeavour. Until you fall by your pen. If art is a jealous mistress as it has been famously observed, politics is a vicious master indeed.

    In the Third World, the obsession with politics is the father of all obsessions. It permeates and infiltrates everything in its capillary malignancy. Everything else takes a bow before politics. As Karl Marx famously avers, political criticism is not just a passion of the mind but the mind of passion itself. Like the Quran in strict Islamic cultures, the uber-text which strikes dead all literary fancies and fantasies in infancy, politics also kills literary aspirations in post-colonial Africa by sheer profusion and protusions into everything.

    Why write and get yourself in trouble when all answers are already encoded in the book of the holy Prophet?  On the other hand, why write when political engagement provides all the answers to the tragedy of the Black person? As the British War poets of the incredibly savage First World War would discover: There is a limit to how much you can write from squalid trenches or from hurling grenades at the political establishment from the permanent barricades of Nigeria.

    Yet with a slew of tributes to departed literary and cultural titans still outstanding——Ben Obumselu, Abiola Irele, Isidore Okpewho, Oyin Ogunba, Francis Oladele, Norman Mailer,Vidia Naipaul, Philip Roth,  Aretha Franklin and now Moses Olaiya— one begins to feel like a delinquent ward who has been remiss in his principal responsibility.

    So politics will take a back seat this morning as we set out on a literary excursion. It was said of a major political figure of late nineteenth century Russia that he was just a minor political hack during the epoch of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. It was the seminal revenge of letters over politics. This morning, columnist begins to make amend with a tribute to the great Trinidadian-British writer, Sir Vidal Naipaul, who recently joined his ancestor by republishing an encounter of ten years ago when the great man and his wife visited Nigeria.

  • The Dragon Can Dance (An Afternoon With V.S Naipaul)

    Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul is a prose writer of merciless clarity and precision. In its citation for an overdue Nobel award for Literature, the 2001 committee praised Naipaul for his perceptive narrative and the incorruptible scrutiny with which he dissected the drama of human existence. But Naipaul is also a literary slugger with a reputation for not taking hostages. Trailing him to his Lagos redoubt is an odd assortment of the scalps of literary fools who have fallen victim of his keen sword.

    If a revolution is not exactly a tea party, a literary commotion is not a storm in a tea cup either. When the late American hell-raiser, Norman Mailer, famously dumped Gore Vidal on a pile of pancake with his furious fists, Gore Vidal rose to his full height and retorted that words had failed poor Norman again.

    This afternoon as you walk into the plush pile of Wale Edun, the financial guru and courtly aficionado of the arts, you do not know whether the old bruiser from Trinidad is crouched behind a chair ready to detonate a verbal grenade over some earlier literary infraction. The picture of poor snooper being helped to his feet by a bemused Edun or being hauled out of the swimming pool by good Samaritans after a historic fistfest loomed large in the tropical imagination.

    But surprise, surprise. Instead of the snarling old literary refusenik, you are warmly welcomed by a courteous, affectionate and even solicitous elderly man with a distinguished halo. He is joined by his equally affectionate and vivacious wife, the journalist of Afro-Pakistan extraction, the former Nadira Khannum Alvi now Lady Vidiadhar. Where is the old literary bruiser, you ask yourself. Where is V.S Naipaul? Where is the old devil? So, the dragon can dance? Will the real Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul please stand up?

    Before you get an answer, you must ask yourself why a writer globally celebrated for his cosmopolitan rootlessness should be playing host to a writer concretely and consciously rooted in his African and Yoruba heritage. And in Lagos of all places. Colonial mystery meets postcolonial riddle in the leafy suburbs of Ikoyi, Nigeria’s former premier European quarters.

    It was not snooper that chose to meet Naipaul. On the very first day the couple arrived in Nigeria, Naipaul’s wife had drawn the husband’s attention to a recent piece on this page about the travails of the contemporary post-colonial intellectual of African extraction. It was a brilliant read, according to her. She was particularly impressed by the comic deflations, the merciless scrutiny, the way Lord Trevor-Roper was dragged into the scholarly melee and the tantalising play of ironies across rigid racial divides.  Sir Vidia quietly concurred. A cub of the old literary contra from the dark continent? There are more sublime ironies in tow.

    The whole encounter began on a note of touching irony. Snooper was on a short retreat in England when the call came from a notable Nigerian politician who informed him of the developments. As a result of garbled transatlantic transmission, snooper thought he was told that a visiting “Nepal” Nobel laureate would like to meet him.

    Snooper immediately thought of a revered figure like Amartya Kumar Sen, the great Indian economist. But why would a celebrated economist want to meet snooper when the columnist cannot even manage his own economy? Or perhaps the Nepalese were looking for a place to warehouse their royalty recently dislodged from the historic palace in Kathmandu.

    All doubts evaporated as soon as snooper got back to Nigeria. It was not a Nepalese laureate. It was the real McCoy himself, as the Americans will say. It was the great and enigmatic V.S Naipaul, a man as elusive as the Abominable Snow man of Mount Everest legend.

    It should be obvious that Naipaul was not in Nigeria to be interviewed. As the great writer eyed the younger man with a mixture of weary curiosity and disobliging courtesy, it became clear that Naipaul was not in Nigeria to find answers. The ensuing encounter provides a rare insight into the Anglo-Trinidadian hell-raiser hardly seen by his western admirers and Third World detractors alike.

    So, let’s get this clear. An afternoon with Naipaul will not solve Nigeria’s many problems. It will not reduce the scandalous level of corruption and the official thievery that has turned Nigeria into a gigantic hellhole of hapless humanity. Although he writes with the miraculous precision of a Swiss watchmaker, Naipaul is not a miracle worker of that sort.

    What may help is the meticulous and elaborate brutality of his insights into the joyless history of suppressed people. No one, not even his own people who lost a great empire and then allowed themselves to be transported to Latin America as indentured slaves, are spared by the probing scalpel. As Naipaul puts it with wounding clarity: “The world is what it is: men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”

    You are finally ushered into the presence of the great man of letters. You feel it was a unique historical moment to behold the great Sir Vidia himself and you say so. But Naipaul, used to the antics of the literary luncher and the seductive wiles of the scholar-squirrel on the make, demurred. “You don’t have to say all that”, he said with avuncular dismay. Perhaps the old bruiser was warming up for the sucker punch, snooper thought with an ironic grin on his face.

    His wife who loomed large in the magnificent study filled with rare books stepped in to ward off the looming skirmish. “This is a great country. Your people are so cultured and polite”, she notes with genuine admiration. The husband gladly concurred. Trying to bait the old literary devil, snooper noted that the politeness of the average Nigerian might well be a rub off from England, the country of good manners. “But that is fast changing now”, husband and wife said almost at the same time.

    History and family tradition weigh heavily upon V.S Naipaul. His father, brother, nephew and cousin were all published writers. But none of them made it to the promised land of true literary greatness. Naipaul’s father, memorably captured for posterity in A House for Mr Biswas, succumbed early in the cesspool of racist injustice and discrimination that was colonial Trinidad. In the case of the son, early exile to Britain and scholarship to Oxford set the singing bird free forever.

    It was perhaps inevitable that the conversation would drift to the subject of writers and exile. It was also inevitable that Naipaul would seize the moment to go for the jugular of his old literary adversary and duelling foe: Chinua Achebe.

    Like the late Edward Said who dismissed Naipaul as a witness for western prosecution and a rabid purveyor colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies, Achebe views Naipaul darkly as a writer of malignant fiction completely fixated about the notion of western superiority to the exclusion of everything that is noble and admirable about colonised people.

    Naipaul blood warms at the mention of the auld enemy. His eyes twinkled with merry mischief. “Hasn’t he spent enough time in exile?” he asked without any hint of irony and with a wry distaste. He was informed of the tragic circumstances surrounding Achebe’s exile and the sheer logistical difficulties constraining his return. Nevertheless, the grand old man of African fiction has been making timely and sterling interventions in his beloved country’s political process, even rejecting honours from a civilian dictator of notorious venality.

    Naipaul appeared sufficiently chastened and sobered by the startling revelations. Nigeria must have been quite a learning curve for the grand old man of letters. There is something to be said for writers who refuse to give up on their country and on humanity. The last bend in the river may not be the final bend, after all. Mobutu and co may steal our resources blind but they do not exhaust the grand and heroic possibilities of Africa.

    As a parting shot, snooper informs Sir Vidia that the post-colonial state in Africa may already be dead on arrival, but it is a corpse worth fighting over because if the enemy wins, not even the dead are safe, as Walter Benjamin would put it. Snooper then chronicles for Naipaul the travails and tribulations of the Nigerian writer in the hands of a berserk post-colonial state, travails which include murder, torture, detention, exile and the fact that the person talking to him may actually be a political ghost existing incognito in his own fatherland. The old man’s eyes welled up in subdued admiration.

    It was time to take leave of the great man of letters. Ignoring the old man’s protestations, snooper signs for him a frazzled copy of his second novel which was described by a European reviewer as an over the top assault on military tyranny. African generosity will not permit that. Outside the lush magnificent villa, the tropical birds were singing. With all its horrifying faults, it is great to be a Nigerian.

    Ten years after this encounter, the old literary panther took his final bow from the coliseum. May the soul of Sir Vidia rest in perfect peace.