Category: Tatalo Alamu

Clarifications and Elaborations

If one were to resurrect all the victims that history has tirelessly put through the mill, that it has tortured to this day, what an endless procession… Consequently, since he has realized that suffering is inevitable, man should at least be able to give some human meaning to his suffering…..      From The Journal of Witold Gombrowicz

State formation is perhaps the highest innovation of human civilization. Before you can reach for the moon, you must be able to reach to the moaning. It is interesting that at a time when a well-reasoned scholarly paper demanding for a recolonization of Africa on humanitarian grounds has gone viral, Nigerian politicians and state intellectuals are quarrelling about state personnel and the rearrangement of the feeding order.

Citing the inability of the African post-colonial state, African nations and African elites in general to pass muster, the American professor argued for an overt and unapologetic form of colonialism in Africa in order to prevent the human condition from sliding into animal savagery. The international furore can be better imagined with death threats, mass resignations from the board and transatlantic academic missiles flying all over the place.

It is just as well then that this columnist often receives request from the numerous readers for further explanations, clarifications and even elaborations of some of the issues raised in the column. Very rarely do the discussions spill to the column itself.

But shortly after this newspaper hit the newsstand on Sunday morning and well before a columnist with The Punch newspaper and former senior academic colleague made a similar request for clarification of the difference between state capture and state closure, yours sincerely had already adjudged the issue as deserving of a public outing.

These requests and the tone of expeditious urgency with which they are often made speak to the critical ferment in the country today and the fact that there is an intellectual dimension to the crisis of the nation. As we have noted in an earlier column:  “The crisis of the Nigerian post-colonial state is also a crisis of the intellectual class leading to a progressive debility of the thinking and critical faculty.

This is the ultimate designer crisis, tailor made like a Savile Row bespoke suit for clinical disorientation. For without the intellect, there can be no illumination. And without the flash of intellectual inspiration, there is no way to think the way out of the tunnel of abysmal hopelessness.

In this millennial darkness, all are like proverbial blind people clutching at different parts of an elephant and claiming that they have discovered the real thing. Keywords and important concepts such as “progressive”, “conservative” and “reactionary” are lost to the torpid void. Freely bandied about and loosely applied to forestall and even replace critical thinking, nobody is sure what these words mean any more. They have become catch-all slogans emptied of true meaning and essence. The damage of ignorance is only more devastating than the damage of pure mischief”.

To start with, there is nothing intellectually profound or earth shattering about the notion of state closure or state capture for that matter. As it ever so happens in the field of scientific research or intellectual inquiry with so many people subjecting the same data to intense interrogation, somebody was going to make the conceptual linkage sooner than later.

While some of their essential features can be abstracted and subjected to conceptual analysis, it is not possible to grasp the essence of captured states and closed states in abstraction. Like all social phenomena which share identity even in critical differentiation, they can only be understood in their concrete manifestation before being subjected to comparative evaluation.

In its modern incarnation, state capture occurs when a deliberate entrapment of the state and its machinery by corrupt elements leads to state-incapacitation and inability to discharge its principal function as a neutral arbiter of elite disputation. Before it found its way to South Africa to describe alleged interference of corrupt elements with the Zuma regime, the idea of state capture was a World Bank terminology for rogue regimes spawned by the collapse of Soviet autocracy.

But the major culprit was the post-soviet Russian state itself which was virtually captured by oligarchs until Vladimir Putin, a former KGB operative, put them to sword.  In doing that, Putin ensured a firm and complete closure of the post-soviet Russian state which brooks no opposition. Thus we see how a concept loses its cutting edge acuity and vitality to sheer bureaucratisation.

Given this writer’s orientation in political activism and state struggle, our notion of state closure and state capture draws its inspiration from the Gramscian theory of state disbandment through intense deployment of intellectual artillery. As such, strong states with weak civil societies are to be distinguished from soft states with strong civil societies.

Given this important distinction and expanded brief, state closure and state capture are ideologically neutral phenomenon. They can be effected by right-wing forces or left-wing elements, depending on the balance of forces. They can occur as a result of a revolutionary rupture and smashing of the ancient society and old order by a new hegemonic order such as witnessed in the Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions or they can be a result of a reactionary right-wing rally to protect the conservative status quo as seen in Hitler’s Third Reich and General Frank Franco’s triumphant siege.

At the level of superficial semantics state capture appears like a more radical and total version of state closure. Yet in reality while state capture implies a forcible and comprehensive seizure of state machinery, state closure suggests a deliberate and systematic closing off of the state often by pseudo-democratic means.

The two can also be incorporated in one overarching momentum. The Russian Revolution began with cohabitation and collaboration with a quasi-democratic arrangement before the Bolsheviks seized power in the confusion and chaos of a civil war. The Chinese Revolution followed pretty much the same pattern after a violent parting of ways between the communists and the Kuomintang Nationalists which culminated in the triumphant Long Trek.

Hitler’s Third Reich began as a democratic power-sharing arrangement with the ailing and senile General Paul von Hindenburg in nominal control. But in a dramatic civilian putsch famously known as the night of the long knives, the former Austrian corporal went rogue and seized control of the German state and nation with the connivance of the army. In the case of Fidel Castro and General Franco, they simply overwhelmed the state before sealing it off.

Africa has followed very much the same pattern with state closure often following violent state capture as we have seen in Togo, Uganda, Rwanda, Eritrea, Mobutu and Kabila’s Congo, the other Congo often referred to as Congo Brazzaville, Sudan and Equatorial Guinea. In other African countries such as Cameroons, Gabon and Somalia, state closure often routinized by sham elections is the norm of rogue democracies. In Algeria, Angola, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau state closure followed national wars of colonial liberation.

In South Africa, it cannot be said that the Boer supremacists captured state power. With the possible exception of the inchoate Zulu nation, the other native African states are too remote and rudimentary to be accorded this status in modern political parlance. What the Boer overlords seemed to have put in place was a novel type of colonial statehood based on harsh and fundamental exclusion which found its ideological leitmotif in codified notions of racial superiority.

By sheer demographic superiority, the post-apartheid ruling African National Congress seems to have routinized this arrangement with the emergence of a new clan of Black overlords. But they cannot be accused of not holding inclusive elections if and when due. They cannot therefore be logically accused of state capture. It is state closure by any other means.

It is however in contemporary Nigeria that the notion of state closure seems to have reached its most poignant expression in contemporary Africa.  As we said in an earlier piece, “Nigerians are incredible and incorrigible optimists, often clutching at straws in an effort to summon redemption.  The alternatives are just too grim to contemplate. The collapse of their beloved country is not a fate many Nigerians are willing to imagine.

Yet local politics remain a bitter, fractious and cancerous affair which invites the very possibility of the implosion that the Nigerian political elite love to wish away. The Nigerian post-colonial state constantly romances and flirts with suicide, but the power barons find the possibility of national mortality an abhorrent prospect.

Why then is the Nigerian state so prone to sudden closures, which often require considerable national effort to prise apart?  We saw this with Obasanjo. We saw this with Umaru Yar’Adua and his provincial cabal. Jonathan and his henchmen tried their very best until a dramatic intervention of lucidity at the very end saved the nation from the precipice of calamity.

Are we then on the verge of another near-death experience?. Nigeria’s history is replete with electoral nightmares. But electoral nightmares are merely the subtext or shorthand for something more fundamental; a symptom in search of a disease.

As we concluded in the earlier piece: “The humble lesson to be learnt from this is that no matter who is there at a particular point, there are certain structural configurations combined with a pre-colonial mental structure which lend the Nigerian state to zero-sum politics and easy closure. Until these structural and ideological disfigurements are removed, the Nigerian state will oscillate between forced closure and violent reopening before being overwhelmed by circumstances”.

 

Snooper considers himself an Anglophile by education, by taste, by acculturation and by continuous intellectual exertion. There might have been some spats in the past over the nature of British Empiricism and the epistemological strangulation it exerts over the humanities, preferring facile fact-grinding as it does to the rigorous totalization of insights which encourages systematised knowledge. Dickens’ Mr Gradgrind continues to demand for hard facts.

But you must give it to the doughty Brits. All through modern history, there has always been something which makes them emerge winners even when the odds are stacked against them. Perhaps it is the mordant wit and understated humour, or the unflappable cool in the face of adversity, or the genius to conceal genius, or the sheer disdain for fancy theories and highfalutin nonsense over the dictates of sturdy common sense.

Yours sincerely can report that despite the Brexit rumpus, the Brits are riding the storm with customary sangfroid as Theresa May swings and smooches at the same time, daring the continental mainlanders to advance for the sucker punch. Snooper never suspected the old girl of this much pluck and pizazz. Yours sincerely had thought that surrounded as she is by Islington carnivorous herbivores like the rogue and implacable Boris Johnson, it would soon be May Day for Theresa May.

Unfortunately while monitoring the intriguing developments as it concerns Africa, snooper himself fell for a typically British coup. Yours sincerely had long concluded that the respect and courtesy accorded to him by British immigration officials was enshrined and encoded in four magical letters normally embossed on his passport each time he passed through immigration in England. It reads VIPP. Yours sincerely thought it meant Very Important Public Personality.

On a mid-morning flight from Atlanta earlier last week, snooper decided to press his luck by asking a courteous and charming female immigration official what the abbreviation stood for. Settling for a searing stare, the lady informed snooper that the letters actually stood for Visa In Previous Passport.

Deflated beyond recognition, yours sincerely quickly shambled through looking for the nearest exit from Heathrow just in case he was recalled to be told that the letters stood for Visa Invalided due to Public Petition. With these British folks, you can never win.

 

After controversial elections in Ondo, Ekiti and Osun, many Nigerians, particularly members of the opposition, believe that a vicious and violent template is being operationalized for the conduct of next year’s presidential elections. But what is not so obvious to our compatriots is that rigging and allegations of rigging are actually a shorthand or byword for something more fundamental and damning: the perpetual closure of the Nigerian state by ascendant groups.

Nigerians are a funny lot indeed. Most members of the Nigerian elite are incapable of a transcendental vision of humanity, of society and of the nation-state itself. This is why it has been intellectually and emotionally impossible to sustain the very idea of Nigeria as an imagined community of shared destiny and organic values. Yet without these collective aspirations and cohering ideals, nation-growing is an impossible task.

Just look at who has been crying in the past few months as soon as the despotic hammer of the stars of the current national curfew fell on them. They have been yelling and wailing about looming calamity and the road to Golgotha. Yet when the shoe was on the other foot, they kept quiet. When they themselves and members of their immediate family were beneficiaries of state closure, not a word was heard from them.

They lapped it up in a feeding frenzy of wild dogs. Now that the state appears to have been captured by hostile forces, they have been screaming and yelling at the top of their voices. It is as if state capture is a recent development in Nigeria’s history. Those who refuse to learn from the past are condemned to drink from its bitter potion.

State estrangement began in Nigeria with the gradual de-federalization of the federal arrangement negotiated with our former colonial masters in the run up to independence. For the past thirty years, a few of us have been shouting from the rooftop about the phenomenon of state closure in Nigeria. In 1998, yours sincerely published an academic paper in a prestigious journal in America titled “ Closed States and Open Borders: The Fiction of post-colonial nationhood in Africa”. It was a direct response to the political depredations of General Sani Abacha.

The paper demonstrated how the phenomenon of state closure by ascendant groups in post-independence Africa has in turn led to the reality of openly contested national borders with intra-nation civil wars rather than inter-nation hostilities becoming the norm. Nigeria, Ethiopia, Somalia, Ivory Coast, Uganda, Mozambique, Angola, Algeria, Libya, Rwanda, Burundi, CAR, Sierra-Leone, Liberia the two Sudans and the two Congos being prime exemplars.

Perhaps the most classic instance of this phenomenon was Mobutu’s old Zaire. After thirty two years of lording it over the unfortunate people of the old Belgian Congo and stealing them blind in the process, Mobutu, in a moment of hare-brained hubris, decided to expel the Congolese Tutsi with the war-cry that a tree trunk does not become a crocodile simply because it has spent some time in water.

It did not matter to the monstrous tyrant that the Tutsi ancestors had lived in that part of the Congo for over two centuries. When the war-primed Tutsi responded in kind, Mobutu quickly became history. In less than six weeks of bitter fighting, the rebel coalition arrived at the gate of Kinshasa with men and material to spare. The demoralised Congolese army melted away in disgrace and ignominy. The excluders have been excluded.

The sight of the former colonial cook and seminary pickpocket, his body devastated by prostate cancer, being helped to his feet by a frail-looking Nelson Mandela as a safe passage was being negotiated for him on a frigate moored off the Congolese coast even as Laurent Kabila eyed him with barely concealed disdain is a truly remarkable tribute to power dementia in post-colonial Africa.

In 2003 after a controversial and egregiously rigged presidential election in which a post-military civilian oligarchy appeared to have effected a firm closure of the Nigerian state, this writer wrote a public paper warning that such civilian tyranny could not be sustained in a badly polarized multi-ethnic nation. It was titled, On the Closure of the Nigerian State.

In his hurry to “mainstream” his Yoruba people into federal contention, General Obasanjo forgot to carry the main stream along. The result was political turbulence and tumult in Yorubaland. Seven years after, the oligarchy under intense pressure stumbled badly by handing over power to a neophyte who was forced to surrender same after a pan-Nigerian democratic revolt.

It is useful to recall that while Nigerians were mourning the loss of their electoral virginity then and the judiciary was busy reversing the reversible, the alleluia boys were openly celebrating and singing the praises of the new democratic conquerors of the nation to high heavens. The most impudent among them were urging General Buhari to go court if he felt electorally affronted.

Fifteen years after, the wheel has turned full cycle and it is the same General from Daura after being serially humiliated who is in firm control of the fascist terror machine, having gathered the reins of power in an iron clasp. By the time General Buhari finishes with us, the mourning sack cloth would have become something of a national uniform. This is the plight of nations without a structured vision of themselves and a set of institutionalized core values that drives politics.

But since nothing last for long in the sultry tropics, we can always expect surprises and terminal ambush as the game progresses. The merry-makers of yester years have become the mourners of today just as the merry makers of today may yet become the mourners of tomorrow. Such is the maddening topsy-turvy of post-colonial politics and its sanatorium of the unstable.

A nation, like human beings, cannot afford to live dangerously forever. The current plight of Nigeria as the global poster boy of poverty and misery, the inability of its economic resources to keep up with its ever expanding population and the pathetic state of its infrastructure and political institutions suggest that this Russian roulette of permanent underdevelopment, the revolving door of torture and tyranny cannot be sustained for much longer. Such is the blight of state closure.

Let us recap. State closure occurs when all factions of a political elite view the state as a hostile construct; an alien and alienating entity. This is why every ascendant group since independence has tried to barricade itself in even as it violently wards off all interlopers and interlocutors. The African post-colonial state is a neo-Roman coliseum of battered and bleeding political gladiators.

They duel unto death. The prize money is huge and humongous and it is worth dying for.  Rather than being an arena or site for negotiating  elite conflict about the allocation of resources or adjudicating about who gets what and at what time, the state is a blood-splattered canvas for booty-sharing and score-settling.

As we have demonstrated, state closure, in extreme cases, leads to the erasure and virtual obliteration of the nation itself. This is why many nations, particularly in Africa, have become an inferno of wrecked hopes and expectations. In Nigeria, state closure led directly to the first coup, the civil war,  the Orkar mutiny, the annulment of the June 12 presidential election, General Abacha’s Stone Age despotism, the low intensity civil war in the wake of this, the Sharia gambit, extreme militancy in the Delta and the Boko Haram insurgency.

But even where the nation survives as an entity, the bizarre sense of self-sufficiency, the provincial self-righteousness and the arrogant notions of feudal entitlement arising from state closure, rob the political society of vital nutrients and the injection of critical modernizing talents needed to drive politics and the economy.

Having been a storied victim of state closure himself, one would have thought that General Buhari would have availed himself of two options which would have set Nigeria on the path of state liberalization and inclusive governance: either to restructure the country in a way that removes the humongous resources at the centre which leads to state closure or to come up with a pluralistic vision of the nation which recognizes and deploys the talents of even his worst political enemies in a national project of state salvation.

So far, neither option has been given full consideration. What is emerging is an amoral political pragmatism which deploys economic suspects for political offensives and which effectively puts paid to any moral grandstanding  about sanitising the polity or about the leading a fight against corruption.

Nigeria is a victim of serial state closure. It will take a pan-Nigerian patriot of transcendental humanity, a person of deep philosophical gifts capable of rising above ethnic and religious morass to lift the curfew of state closure. How the contradiction between ethical one-upmanship and political realism plays out  should make the rest of President Buhari’s tenure very interesting indeed.

 

The Road to Yesterday

It was a close-run thing, and probably another miraculous reprieve for a nation that has turned flirtation with suicide into higher art. You never know how close you are to disaster until it actually happens. And you never know how dangerously toxic political gambling has become until it fatally ensnares you with its tantalising possibilities. That is where and when the cheering audience becomes a howling mob.

Now that the Osun gubernatorial election has come and gone, it is time to subject the whole thing to a clinical and antiseptic post-mortem, and without fear or favour. It is just as well that our fifty eighth independence anniversary is a few hours away. For in a profound sense, the Osun election showcases the crisis of governance and democracy-sustained rule that has been with us since independence.

Even more importantly, it also points at the closure of the nation state which every ascendant group since independence has tried to perfect. What must concern us is not the nature of this closure of the post-colonial state but the possibility of final closure of its captive nation and the fact that it negates classical notions of the modern state as a site and arena of resolving elite confrontations over allocation of resources.

In Africa the state is as unsophisticated as it is resistant to modernization. It eventually infects the nation with this virus of anti-modern and feudal grandstanding. As the dominant mode of political production in the nation, those who believe that there are sections of the country that have evolved beyond or historically bypassed feudalism are in for a rude shock given what is unfolding before our very eyes. In the end, no state of affair or society can remain static for very long. You are either progressing or regressing.

To be sure the state has never been a benign construct. If human beings are all angels, there would have been no need for the state or government for that matter. It would have been a pristine and idyllic paradise indeed. But as society evolved, it was discovered at terrible cost that in order to be truly free, humankind will have to part with some of its “freedom”. And since this must apply to everybody with the state acting with impartial and almost abstract rigour, it means that everybody is free to an equal degree.

This is the origin of what has come to be known as the social contract. The citizen willingly surrenders his freedom to the state in exchange for the freedom to self-actualization which would otherwise have been impossible unless security is guaranteed and the limits of individual freedom sharply demarcated.

In many western societies, the emphasis is on the contractual nature of the social contract with the citizens reserving the right to withdraw legitimacy from an errant state, whereas in a country like France with a background of people’s revolution, the emphasis is on socialization or the immanent will of the masses to determine the destiny of the nation. “The people is sublime”, Robespierre famously chanted until his turn came at the guillotine.

The Osun election was a democratic cliff-hanger; a nail-biting nerve-tweaking political thriller that held the nation in rapt attention. In the supplementary election, never has the fate of the nation and a politically volatile people depended on a few yokels or denizens of some remote agrarian communities. The situation was not helped by the rise of fake news.

A product of what is believed to be a revolt against the corruption and partisanship of the mainstream media, the phenomenon of fake news extols the power of corruption and partisanship to glorious new heights. Every temporary advantage the dissemination of false news conferred on its patrons is almost immediately countermanded by equally fake news claiming the opposite in a war of untruths which often leaves the entire populace in dazed stupor.

In a sense, the Osun gubernatorial election revealed more about a lot of us than we are willing to admit. You cannot grow a democratic culture with a preponderance of non-democrats. It is quite revealing of our commitment to the fundamental tenets of democracy that we were willing to crucify a man who for a moment incarnated and embodied the democratic aspirations of his people and was a vessel of sub-ethnic revolt against overarching tyranny and political injustice on the grounds of being a mere dancer and a famously feckless one for that matter.

But the fact remains that even if Ademola Adeleke were to be an empty cavorting goat, the will of the people and their democratic choice must be respected. There is no point equivocating about this or lamenting that the people are about to be taken to an Awurebe disco by a dancer of political misfortune.

As we have seen with Trump’s America, this dismal dumbing down is a periodic reaffirmation of people’s power. Although there is always the possibility of the whole thing degenerating to “mobocracy” or rule of the mob, it is one of the contradictions of modern democracy which has to be managed by a far-sighted political elite.

As usual with all major political crises in their polity, the Yoruba political mob which always arrives punctually to take charge of its destiny and destiny of the people whenever it senses elite disorientation and political fatigue hovered portentously in the wings ready to pounce. Their most forward units and assault troops are yet to retreat sensing that it is not over yet until the APC cleans up its act in Lagos.

The APC should count itself lucky indeed that the isolated ripples of disaffection among many of its leading stars and the capillary estuaries of malevolent dissatisfaction with its leadership have not yet translated into a massive tsunami of discontent. But like a fire moth bent on incinerating itself, it has been flying too close fiery flames. Even in partisan politics, there is a limit to living dangerously.

The Osun gubernatorial primary could have been better handled. Despite the cover of direct primary, it was as shoddy, inept as it was bizarrely contemptuous of sub-ethnic sentiments and sensitivity in a politically volatile state. You cannot shave a person in their absence. Neither during the primary nor the post-primary crisis did the party demonstrate elementary political wisdom or exemplary philosophical sagacity.

Yet it ought to have been clear to the party that the old Osun Province was the intellectual and political engine room of progressive politics in Yoruba land with a proud and lofty people not willing to be pushed around by anybody or subjected to existential indignities. It is in Osun that the mosaic of Yoruba sub-ethnic groups finds their most potent expression of fierce independence of spirit. Anybody willing to politically subjugate or economically humiliate them is up against a people who regard political hostilities as a joyous pastime.

The APC will have to make up its mind whether it prefers winning pointless political battles rather than winning the war for the affection, admiration and respect of the politically discerning Yoruba people. Insofar as it is widely regarded in respectable Yoruba circles as nothing but a democratic doppelganger of the much-hated and reviled PDP, its fate appears to be sealed.

Unless the APC raises its game there is no hope of its being remembered as a legacy political party in the manner of classical ideological formations such as the Nigerian Youth Movement, the old NCNC, the iconic Action Group and the much adulated NEPU. In retrospect much thought and proactive planning went into the activities of these associations.

But if the inchoate internal structure, lack of higher seriousness and ideological clarity of the ruling APC is to blame for its current fumbling and wobbling and its resort to self-help and voter intimidation, a substantial part of the blame also goes to the PDP whose earlier depredations have made it impossible for the APC to strike out boldly and imaginatively on its own without resorting to the excesses and political brigandage which have made the PDP a byword for ethical infamy in the annals of party formation in Nigeria.

In the light of past performance and current achievement, the future looks very bleak for party formations as the sole vehicle of rapid structural transformation of Nigeria. Given the fact that both the PDP and the APC are proving to be nothing more than two sides of a very bad coin at the moment, the electorate is forced to resort to self-help and mob rule begins to look like an increasingly viable alternative to elite delinquency.

This is precisely where the danger lies. Several times in the past Nigeria has embarked on this journey to yesterday with perilous consequences. Let us recall only one instance. Chief Augustus Meredith Adisa Akinloye was a famous politician of the First and Second Republics. He was the chairman of the NPN. The son of a wealthy cocoa merchant in Ibadan, the tall aristocrat lawyer was a brilliant and caustic observer of the unfolding political scene. He was known to have given the Afenifere cognomen to the pan-Yoruba cultural group.

At the height of the political acrimony between the NPN and other opposition parties, but notably the UPN, Chief Akinloye famously observed that there were only two parties in Nigeria: the military and all the other parties. It proved fatally prophetic. But now with the military mercifully receding into remote background, and since you cannot step into the same river twice, one can safely say in the light of recent developments that there are only three parties in Nigeria: the judiciary, the people and all the other parties.

Going forward, it is now imperative for APC as the ruling party to facilitate a qualitative differentiation between itself and the other main parties in order to present Nigeria with a clear choice in terms of concise ideology and coherent programme. This is the political merchandise that sells a party and recommends it to posterity. Otherwise, there is really no party but a well=oiled platform to capture and retain power.

Beyond the current political muscle flexing and the muzzling of internal opposition, enlightened self-interest and what the French call la longue duree ought to suggest to the party hierarchs that this is a task that can no longer be postponed if the party must save the country from creeping political anarchy. The APC must improve on its leadership recruitment mode, its mechanism for resolving internal dispute and its mode of preferment and patronage. This is the only way to forestall the near disaster that Osun was.

 

Okon was embedded at Iyanfoworogi

As the mother of all Yoruba electoral wars shaped up in Osun with the supplementary voting of last Thursday, Okon has been embedded in a place called Iyanfoworogi from where he was sending valuable dispatches and critical intelligence from the war front. Nestling among low hanging breadfruit trees from which it probably derived its name, and in a lush, verdant and most alluring pristine paradise, Iyanfoworogi is the nearest thing to nirvana.

To get to Iyanfoworogi, Okon journeyed through some ancient Yoruba farmlands, from Oru, Awa, Ijebu Igbo to Mokore, Araromi Owu and turning sharply to the right before  Orile Owu through thick virgin forests and Area Five to arrive at Iyanfoworogi at dusk. The mad boy immediately began sending subversive dispatches indicating the balance of forces and the strength of the contending forces.

“Oga I been dey hear gbigi-gbigi and gbaga-gbaga. I been dey hear dem shootin and dem shouting. I been dey hear dem shakabula guns wy ’ I come ask dem wethin dey happening and they come tell me say na dem hunters dey do festival. But you know say Yoruba Yoruba people, dem head no correct at all. When dem one catch person them go say dem dey go Mushi when dem dey Apapa”, the boy responded immediately.

“How are you eating?” snooper texted.

“Ha oga, no joke. Him get one woman like this who dey ask me whether I wan chop bearded Congo meat and I tell am say if meat come get beard, dat one na helele and she come dey look me as if I no get better sense. But pounded yam from breadfruit boku here. Naim dem people dey manage as dem no fit do better work”, Okon responded with supercilious arrogance.

“Okon, you are fool. How can there be pounded yam from breadfruit?” Snooper gently upbraided.

“Oga, dat na Yoruba wuruwuru for una. Wayo too much”.

But a few hours later as D-Day approached the security situation in the axis deteriorated swiftly as hell was let loose by some hoodlums shooting at everything and everybody in sight. Okon took evasive action and escaped through the hills towards Fagunwa’s mythical Igbo Olodumare.

“Oga na real war ina Babylon. If dem Yoruba people dey fight elections like this, wetin dem go do when dem real war begin? Dem PDP people come kidnap us for village and dem APC people come kidnap dem kidnapper. So overtake come overtake dem overtake and dead body come get twin”.

It was indeed a bruised and battered Okon who emerged in Lagos three days after with his body covered in weeds, figs and shrubs.

“Oga , I no go fit go cover election war for Yoruba land again. I come escape through dem Omisore dem father palace for Garage Olode  through dem bush path and I come find myself near dem Ife palace. Dem dey do dem funny festival again and dem Yoruba people wan capture me and dem wan whack man again. I come tell my leg say if he no fit carry me fast, he go end up as pepper soup for dem Yoruba pot. Na him I come follow herdsmen reach Lagos through dem Shaki” Okon stuttered in evident pains.

“So how about the election?”.

The mad boy crawled towards snooper and whispered. “Oga, dat one na wetin dem Fela man dey call authority stealing”. After this, Okon collapsed from sheer fatigue and exhaustion.

With African leaders swarming The Forbidden City in Peking in search of soft loans and other economic incentives, the phrase Yellow Peril has now taken on a significant new meaning in the parlance of African political economy. The Chinese Exclusion Act, a xenophobic construct famously espoused by racist nineteenth century America, is now giving way to The Chinese Inclusion Act in many African nations.

For the oldest continent, the yellow imperative is the cornerstone of economic wisdom. Comrade Yuan is set to acquire many more African mistresses. There is a 1954 film known as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. The current movie should be known as Several African Brides for One Chinese Suitor. The Yellow route out of underdevelopment and peonage has never appeared morecompelling. But it comes with its unique perils.

Almost twenty years after Tony Blair, the then British prime-minister, described Africa as the scar on the conscience of humanity, the situation remains very much the same. Many others believe that things have turned nastier. Donald Trump, the foul-mouthed American president, described Africa as a shit-hole. The Blair initiative has come and gone. The English physician has disappeared. But the African patient is still very much a denizen of the Emergency Ward.

Enter then the Chinese dragon. The Chinese are actually no strangers to Africa. Artefacts and antiques from the ancient Mombasa museum in contemporary Kenya suggest Chinese presence and activity around the Horn of Africa between the sixth and ninth centuries.

The Chinese were reputed to have built the greatest ocean-going vessels of the epoch, with their huge masts unfurling in the skies like monster clouds. By the tenth century, Imperial China was regarded as the greatest power the world had seen. This was centuries before America was founded and when much of Europe was in primitive upheavals.

But it was around this period that China began a steep descent into irrelevance as a result of a protracted power struggle between the feudal dynasty and the mandarinate. The country was closed off to external influence. China emerged from the throes of its own self- inflicted isolation only to be confronted by a European version of modernization and modernity which was as economically punitive as it was colonially exacting. China became a whipping boy of Japan, Mongolian invaders and the European powers. England exploited the opportunity of a trade dispute to annex Hong Kong.

In a historical if not exactly cultural sense, it can be seen that Africans and the Chinese have a lot in common. Both are ancient people, with a history stretching back to the rise of human civilization. Both have suffered in the hands of newer and more militaristic civilizations that have subjected their populace to periodic pogroms and economic brutalization. Both have endured summary dismemberment in the hands of invaders.

This is where the comparison must end. Unlike Africa, China has risen from the ashes of destruction and humiliation to emerge as an economic, industrial and military global power. Seventy years bar a few months after the communist revolution of 1949, China is set to surpass the US as the biggest and fastest growing economy in the whole world. In the process, it has succeeded in lifting more people out of the prison house of poverty within the shortest possible timeline in the modern history of humanity.

This is a secular miracle, as stunning as it is staggering. It has been achieved through national discipline, thrift and collective self-denial by a proud but humiliated people who have vowed never to be subjected to such miseries and indignities again by their tormentors. African freeloaders will discover to their shock and chagrin that there is no such thing as free lunch in Peking. Even freedom is not that free.

China is unlikely to throw away its hard-won national prosperity and economic surplus to some profligate African countries without stiff economic and political conditionalities. You cannot love your prodigal neighbours more than yourself. Nigeria and its fellow African supplicants will discover that borrowing is no alternative to burrowing deep into the land with your sleeves rolled up.

The Chinese method is more subtle but ultimately more devastating than the western mantra of fire and brimstone. They will not supervise the loans they have granted you in a humiliating, patronizing and in your face manner. But they will arrive at the appropriate time to collect penalty and apply conditionality. You can ask Malaysia, Zambia and Zimbabwe.  Despite the IMF bluff and bluster, there may well be harder taskmasters than the Bretton Woods institutions. After all, China visits exemplary retribution on its own economic miscreants.

This is where we reach the developmental conundrum for under-achieving African nations. Despite its stupendous wealth, China remains very much a second-tier technological power, its indigenous technology still lacking the cutting edge precision and Teutonic thoroughness of the Germans, the flamboyant flair of the French, the almost manic attention to details of the Japanese, the endlessly inventive and self-surpassing brilliance of the Americans and the finicky, perfectionist genius of the Nordic Europeans.

But it works for them. This has much to do with national character and the individual path to modernity and modernization. Every country must choose its own indigenous path to technological excellence, depending on the stage the subject-object dialectic has reached. You can crash the gear of developmental progress, but you cannot obliterate the fall-out as it is evident in contemporary Chinese industry. They are contented and historically conditioned to consume what they produce.

African countries supplicating at the Chinese altar for mendicant largesse will soon discover that no amount of Chinese mega-loans will furnish a country with its own national plan for industrial and technological take-off. Every country must come up with its own national plan for economic emancipation and technological take off as rigorously laid out and painstakingly executed by its local and indigenous talents. You can borrow technological ideas but they will have to be domesticated and adapted to local needs.

In the end, the development of human infrastructure must take precedence over other infrastructural necessities. It is the development of human infrastructure that powers the development of human societies from time immemorial. This is what is driving the knowledge society and what is now known as the new Industrial Revolution.

Again, it must be stated that this is not a new phenomenon in the evolution of human civilization, depending as it does on the state and stage of the subject-object dialectic. The ancient kings of the emergent nations of Spain and Portugal as well as the numerous Italian city-states who invested in their sailors and encouraged exploration of new routes and the discovery and opening up of new territories were actually investing in human infrastructure without being aware of what they were really up to.

It was this, in combination with other forces, particularly the sacking of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks and the enforced exit of thinkers, philosophers, poets and scientists that led to the Age of Enlightenment and the emergence of a rudimentary version of Western modernity. Even when their civilization is often accompanied by barbarity, as Walter Benjamin famously noted, western civilization has never looked back from that point. The most famous African ruler of this epoch, the fabled Mansa Musa, embarked on a journey to Mecca with all the gold in his dominion.

Here comes the unfortunate snag, the insurmountable contradiction or what is known as antinomy in philosophical parlance for Nigeria and modern African nations. A political elite that is structurally and ideologically rigged against putting its best foot forward, against selecting the best leadership material from among itself to drive national development is not in a position to drive the husbandry and development of human infrastructure. We can wait until the kingdom come and this will not happen unless there is a paradigm-shifting recalibration of the nation’s fundamental architecture.

China, Russia, Vietnam and Cuba overcame this foundational problem through a recourse to revolution which abolished the old structure; England and France through a combination of revolution and evolution; and other European countries together with America through meritocratic democracy which emphasizes individual merits over paddy-paddy shenanigans and kabukabu democracy.

In the process of encoding the tenets and rituals of meritocratic democracy in the national DNA, the western nations also developed educational institutions that are critical and germane to the production of the right leadership cadre as well as the development of human infrastructure. There is no way anybody can think of democracy in western nations without thinking of their leading educational institutions and their roles in leadership development and the harnessing of human infrastructure.

We may heave and haw about this cultural elitism embedded in democratic practice. But the idea of a freewheeling democracy is itself a pious fiction, unless we are thinking of mob rule, which is a different cup of tea altogether and a direct invitation to anarchy. In Nigeria, rather than nurturing them as important bulwark of democracy, we destroy our iconic secondary schools and fabled universities.

Talent is a terrible thing to waste and there is always a terrible price to pay for intellectual pogrom. Anybody who thinks that history happens in the main in an ad-hoc and haphazard manner can be forgiven for not knowing their historical onions. The price is political entropy or permanent disorder which periodically rocks the nation to its very foundation until something gives. Unless we turn our thinking inward to address these foundational issues, no amount of Chinese loans will set the country on the path of rectitude and righteousness. That, unfortunately, is the tragic fact.

 

Your piece on National Interest and Rule of Law makes interesting reading. As usual you are probably the only commentator that has placed (President) Buhari’s statement in proper context. Yeah, “It is darkness visible indeed”.

I want to recap the editorial my late father caused to be penned and personally signed by him at the height of (General) Yakubu Gowon’s similar issue.

It was William Styron who wrote a book titled, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, but we will not be quoting from his book. Rather, we will liken the present situation to what obtained in the runoff to the collapse of the Gowon regime, when corruption stank to the high heavens and the press was embroiled in anti-corruption crusade against the military regime. At the height of the debacle, the Inspector General of Police, acting as His Master’s Voice, issued a warning to the press and the judiciary, promising them dire consequences if they persist in their anti-corruption crusade. On that note, the Daily Times, which was championing the crusade, came out with a front page editorial on September 11, 1974, captioned: Darkness Visible. Among other things, the editorial ended with this line: “When the Press is threatened and the judiciary is warned, it is darkness visible.”

Today, we say from this Minibar, that “it is darkness visible when the people are uncertain about their future, when their security is threatened and their daily bread is not guaranteed. It is darkness visible when our whole political future lies in the hands of rascals who have stolen our patrimony. It is darkness visible, when the future of our children and our children’s children looks increasingly bleak. It is darkness visible when lies, innuendoes and half-truths are being sold to us and being forced down on us regardless of our state of intelligence. It is darkness visible when we are increasingly being colonised in our own country and being turned into hewers of wood and drawers of water”. HAPPY  SUNDAY.

• From Babatunde Jose

 

Thanks for yours of last Sunday. For me Rule of Law should be supreme. It is even in the interest of national interest that the rule of law should prevail. In the final analysis national interest is another name for the individual interest of the ruler—— the aggregated cherished values of the ruler. His hatred becomes the national hatred. He defines what is the national interest and here only the rule of law can put some brakes. Hitler’s hatred for the Jews which led to their monstrous killing in the national interest comes to mind.

We must be wary therefore when a ruler suddenly begins to place his interest——beg your pardon, national interest above the rule of law—the very basis of all sane society—more so  in a democracy. In a word, the very first step towards dictatorship is a chorus of national interest by the ruler and his Adviser. Is it true that the prisons are being renovated?

 

• From John Abhuere, former director, NYSC, is of the Centre for Child Care and Youth Development, Abuja.

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