The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • At Bay in Uncle Sam’s cabin

    Donald Trump’s “lifeless” comment about the Nigerian president reveals far more about the American president than his Nigerian counterpart: his lack of good breeding, finesse and grace as well as his congenital contempt for the norms of high office. The American president reminds one very much of a pomaded nincompoop. How has America descended so low in the comity of civilized nations! What ails Uncle Sam so grievously that its leader is looking completely unhinged?

    Yet the outrage about Donald Trump’s vulgarity and the notoriety of its brutal capitalism notwithstanding, America remains a land of individual compassion and kindness. It is part of the ironic mosaic of national contradictions that about the same time that Trump was plumbing the depths of moral depravity, America was saying goodbye to one of its finest and noblest sons.

    The son and grandson of admirals, the late Senator John Sydney McCain exemplified America at its most refined and high-minded. Yet in what has turned out to be a dress rehearsal for the advent of Trump, he was humiliatingly rebuffed in his bid for the highest office by party and public.

    In the final analysis, it may well be that the Trump ascendancy itself speaks to the trauma of post-empire stasis and of a globalizing imperium that has reached the end of its tether. Meanwhile, Trumpism, a short hand for surly nastiness in public office, carries all before it.

    It should be of interest to global students of shifting influence that while the American president was busy insulting just about anybody except the wily Russians who seem to have a number on their man, a posse of African leaders was busy paying homage at the Chinese economic shrine. Eight centuries after Marco Polo, the new silk trail leads back to the descendants of Kublai Khan. It is too early to say whether the Chinese dragon will play easy ball to African supplicants or cheerfully slay them at the altar of state capitalism.

    Before taking a full measure of America in its homeward stretch and future global possibilities, it is imperative to cast a retrospective glance at the greatest country the world has seen both in the immediate and distant past. The following essay, written and published in 2004 and well before the advent of Obama and Trump, does just that.

  • And a fine Sunday morning to fellow nine-niners

    It is a cool and glorious Sunday morning and another milestone for those born under the astral and stellar sign of the ninth day of the ninth month of September. Snooper wishes to congratulate fellow celebrants. As usual, yours sincerely will spend the day in bed, reflecting amidst a crushing avalanche of unread and half-read books and newspapers. There is nothing more spiritually fortifying and purifying than meditative solitude.

    Snooper wishes to congratulate all nine-niners on this important day. In particular, we celebrate with the following: Mrs Dolapo Coker, nee Gibson-Roberts, ex Queens College and ex Unife, who at seventy one today is as sprightly and exquisitely chic as ever, Ade Ojeikere, brilliant, cultured columnist and Sports Editor of this paper who was inexplicably left out of the list the last time around, Hon Dipo Akingbade, our beloved in-law, Brigadier Burba Marwa and our up and coming youngsters Chukwuma Kanu in faraway America and Folajimi Oladunni in Nigeria. In celestial absentia, we recall Professor Ojetunji Aboyade and Remi Adesoye, retired permanent secretary and classmate of columnist. May God bless the living and grant the departed eternal repose.

  • America, the anxious

    America gave the world a new type of nation-state. It is a befitting irony that as the nation-state paradigm itself begins to unravel at the seams, much of the rest of the world would enter into contradiction with the most successful expression of nationality—and nationalism—that the modern world has witnessed.

    As a rampant Republican presidency and a refulgent nation continue to confound friends and foes alike, there is a profound anti-American animus abroad. The global liberal intelligentsia are still reeling from what they considered the shocking and inexplicable defeat of the democratic standard bearer in the just concluded presidential elections.

    In much of Western Europe, particularly in France, America’s foremost bete noire, the atmosphere is of funereal gloom and depression. Famously, The Mirror of England wondered how fifty eight million people could be so dumb.

    A lot of this hysteric mush boils down to pride and prejudice on both sides of the divide. It is the jaded arrogance of the old world contending with the blithe contempt of the new. In many respects, it is also the return of the repressed. Four years ago when George W Bush controversially prevailed over Al Gore despite losing the popular vote, many saw a plutocratic conspiracy to crowd out America’s democratic masses from political contention.

    This time around, it was clear that it is the son of the older Bush that has connected with the electoral mystery that is Middle America. Why then must the rest of the world feel it has the right to legislate the destiny of America for Americans? And having conceded that crucial point, why would Middle Americans be so blatantly contemptuous of anti-American sentiments abroad? Is this brilliant rallying to the star-spangled banner a heroic defense of American core values against the tired cynicism of Europe, or the reflex circling of the wagons by a nation under global siege?.

    The case from abroad is arguable enough. As the most powerful and militarily dominant nation the world has seen, and as the richest society in human history, America should lead the world to a more humane and civilized society. This can be done by a more multilateral approach to global issues, less belligerence abroad and a political conservatism that is at once compassionate, conciliatory, less conflictual and more consensus seeking.

    The American riposte to this stinging indictment is equally telling and bespeaks a mutual misapprehension of historic magnitude. The way to a more humane and civilized world is not through liberal flip-flopping or paying protection money to diseased despots but a proactive policy of exemplary retribution which is as retroactively punitive as it is harshly pre-emptive. There must be no dialogue with “the Axis of Evil”. The nations so branded must be militarily subdued and pounded to submission.

    That it is this Samurai code that has found resonance with the American moral majority, particularly after the spectacular siege of September 11, 2001, is no longer contestable, whatever the consternation of the rest of the world. When it was reported that there was a record turn out in the last presidential elections, many were the tele-pundits who thought that the real owners of America were on the march to reclaim their nation.

    Alas, it turned out the other way round. The quiet Americans had turned out to validate the machismo mantra of the son of George Herbert Walker Bush. The world may never be the same again. Is this then the new face of an empire that has been in denial for a long time, or the evidence of a sharp divergence between European democracy and the American mutant?

    America was founded on the ruins of feudal Europe. It was a bold and brilliant attempt by revolutionary visionaries to create humanity anew. When George Washington, its first president, declined another term which could have turned him into a new type of king and the American presidency a monarchical institution, he set America on the path to becoming a radical democracy and the first truly revolutionary society the world has seen.

    This may seem a moot point, but when set within the context that succeeding revolutionary attempts to create humanity anew have often ended up with the founders dying on the throne or mutating into senile and murderous despots, the issue becomes clearer. Take a sample: Lenin-Stalin, Mao, Tito, Castro, Jong, Khomeini, Neto, Cabral, Mugabe etc.

    The dictatorship of the revolutionary vanguard, rather than transforming into a genuine democracy, often becomes a historic nightmare: the privatized rule of the paranoid patriarch or the protocol of berserk elders.

    George Washington might have been responding to the push and pull of a truly modern society, and the republican zeal engendered by the fact that that at that point in time, there were more lawyers in America than armed soldiers. Whatever it was, it set America on the path of a nation in which institutions and institution-building were more important than the cult of the exceptional individual.

    The military would never dare to take over power in America, and neither would a putative tyrant survive for very long in the White House. The democratic institutions and a vigilant civil society would take care of that. The system may occasionally creak at the joints, there may be a murmur of muted disorder as new and unenvisaged historical realities intrude, but the over-ride gear prevails and America reverts to its default settings.

    The anarchic obverse of this sterling coin is the triumphalist and naïve optimism it breeds, the belief that the nation can even afford to live dangerously, and that everything would be alright eventually. Worse still, every American voter considers himself or herself to be a miniature monarch, a mini-sovereign entitled to determine the destiny of the nation.

    In periods of strife and anxiety, this may turn the presidency itself into an agenda-driven, divisive platform rather than a subtle mechanism for aggregating contending national interests. But again, this is part of the irony of the American dream in which a man’s destination is more important than where he is coming from; in which anybody can technically aspire to the greatest positions in the land without being thwarted by the circumstances of birth. What is important is how far you can push yourself.

    When it works, the American dream is a glorious advertisement for egalitarianism and the democratic empowerment of the gifted and driven individual. When Benjamin Franklin, the Philadelphia publisher and inventor of genius, arrived in Paris as the ambassador of the new nation, he affronted not a few members of the chic Parisian elite with his brashness, his brazenness, his boundless vivacity, his spontaneous bonhomie and his obvious refusal to be fazed by the frigid norms of a frozen feudal fiefdom.

    It was then sniffily observed that it was only in America that such a man could become an ambassador. It was meant as a despairing put-down, but it was also a stupendous compliment to the American dream. As it was in the beginning, so it is beginning to look at mid-day.

    Till date, the French political circles never tire of inveigling against American brashness and vulgarity, their aversion for the finer points of taste, political sophistication and diplomatic savvy, while the Americans are openly disdainful of the cloak and dagger elusiveness and unreliable political somersaults of the European political elite in general, and the French in particular.

    In a memorable diplomatic bust-up, an American secretary of state once famously dismissed his British counterpart as a duplicitous bastard while the Whitehall mandarins eternally wring their hands about the global disaster of having diplomacy conducted by American boy scouts.

    This perilous background of mutual misperception explains the current European –and global—anxiety about the direction of the American nation, and it is a function of a divergent trajectory as the impact of globalization and America’s unrivalled dominance finally hits a world in denial.

    The American success is predicated on relentless and often manic competition: competition among individuals, competition among institutions, competiton among federating states, competition among professions and competition in the family. The working spirit is driven to the threshold of endurance until humans become unfeeling automatons and cyborgs on auto-pilot. Even eating is a competition.

    You do not eat a sandwich but you grab one and ram it down to go back to work. In restaurants, you are asked whether you are still “working’ on the stuff. Compare this with the epic feast of pounded yam eating in Things Fall Apart, the stupendous orgy of consumption at a Yoruba ceremony or the elaborate twenty-four course meal of the French, and you begin to sense that there is no freeloading in Uncle Sam’s cabin.

    Yet if this neo-Calvinist ethos with its harsh protestant Puritanism has produced the richest society the world has seen, it can also turn a nation into a hard and unfeeling monad. America is by far the richest country in the world, but it is far from being the happiest society. The competition and work ethics criminalize poverty, and the poor are looked upon with a mixture of disdain and pity.

    There is a Victorian prudery abroad which often provokes its own sexual pathologies, and there is a zero-tolerance for filth and squalor which often induces an obsessive neatness and primness in public places. A reflex hostility to theocracy prevents a sustained dialogue with Islam and often hardens into a puritanical contempt for the thieving fascist clerisy that dominates the Middle East.

    Yet no one remembers that Islam itself started as a revolutionary doctrine, a new covenant between the ruled and their rulers. A new, bible-thumping fundamentalism of the self-righteous right is in danger of unleashing on the world a technological dark age and a new march of modern crusaders.

    Blissfully unaware of the danger to itself and the menace it constitutes to the global order, America romps on in rampart militarism. Honed by competition, relentless training and ceaseless self-surpassing that has turned its military into the supreme fighting machine of the epoch, buoyed by an embarrassment of riches beyond the compass of human imagination, America carries all before it in a triumphant swing which would have made the Romans wince in envy and admiration.

    It is a shinning city on the hills, and there is no room for doubts, or for the old world philosophers of gloom and prophets of scarcity. This is the city that George Bush, a reformed alcoholic, lapsed playboy and self-reinvented aristocrat with his mangled syntax and disdain for elevated discourse has mysteriously connected to.

    It is a classic odyssey in itself, and a supreme tribute to the power of self-belief and the ability of the human will to prevail over personal failings. Perhaps we are witnessing the stirrings of the first truly post-modern society, a post-primate order in which ordinary people achieve the extra-ordinary. Perhaps it is a prelude to a catastrophic unraveling. Whatever it is, America—and George Bush—should pause momentarily and look back at the old empires of history. If they cannot do this on their own, let them import philosophers from the old world.

    First published in 2004 

     

  • National interests in multi-ethnic nations

    A legal wag genuflecting on President Muhammadu Buhari’s latest executive salvo noted that the former infantry general has finally declared “ a rule of war” on the nation. You can trust General Buhari to shoot straight anytime and at any event, not minding the collateral damage or the offence to audience and nation.

    Where there is a sitting target, there must be a spare bullet. That he was pooh-poohing the very notion of the rule of law and extolling the subordination of personal freedom to national interest and state security before the most distinguished legal audience that can be assembled by any nation did not seem to cut any ice with the straight-talking and straight-shooting general.

    Anybody who did not like what they were hearing can go and jump into the lagoon. The fact that this despotic encyclical was lifted out of context and from a one-off ruling did not matter to the president or his handlers. Overcome by the acrid fumes of sudden ambush, the audience of distinguished advocates and jurists sat transfixed like crusaders’ effigies even as a few smiled back in polite disorientation.

    But recovery from stupor was swift for both nation and embattled legal sages.  Presidential pronouncement drew the ire of some leading members of the bar and many distinguished Nigerians.  Since the inception of the Buhari administration, a cat and mouse relationship subsists between it and the nation’s legal authorities. While very few legal authorities were willing to vouch for the president or fall in line with his authoritarian effluvia, many senior advocates lined up behind the supremacy of the rule of law over executive whimsicalities and eccentricities.

    Legal experts, relying on Riley’s celebrated intervention, argue that rule of law is the father and grundnorm which takes precedence and priority over national interest. Rule of law in which everybody is equal before the law and civil rights are respected by the state no matter the affront is the juridical foundation of the modern nation and the birth of the citizen as opposed to the royal subject. It is an epic paradigmatic shift from the logic of empire, kingdom or fiefdom and without a nation, there can be nothing like national interest.

    So far, the argument has taken place in seedy abstractions and legal hair-splitting without much foundation in concrete reality. There are nations and there are nations. The post-colonial nation in Africa is not exactly like its colonial forbears. It is a seething furnace of ethnic, religious, cultural and economic polarities.

    In other words and to employ a philosophical parlance, many African nations are merely nations in themselves rather than nations for themselves. In such circumstances, national interest, rather than being encoded in the national psyche, is embedded in the worldview of the ascendant faction. It is therefore neither fixed nor immutable.

    But what are national interests? National interests are the superior values which drive the collective aspirations of the people of a nation in their march towards self-actualization. It is a distillation or aggregation of core values that binds the nation and is binding on the nationals. For example, America is powered by the notion of American Exceptionalism, a quirky messianism which is bought into by the political elite irrespective of party affiliation. In Britain which is a constitutional monarchy, any major state party advocating for the abolition of the English crown knows that it has committed electoral suicide. In Germany or France, no party, however radical, can call for the return of the Kaiser or the Bourbon dynasty without severe consequences.

    It is obvious that Nigeria, like many other African post-colonial nations, is yet to evolve a set of core values which will drive its national destiny. In the circumstances, it is the interests of the temporary and transient custodians of state power that will continue to masquerade as national interests until the inchoate and incoherent structure coalesces into an organic entity.

    Core values which drive genuine national interest will never emerge in Nigeria until it is ruled by a truly nationalistic and patriotic political class which puts the demands of the nation above ethnic, religious and regional consideration. What we have on going is a mortal struggle among factions of the hegemonic blocs for control of the centre and the humongous national resources. Whenever any of the factions manages to gain ascendancy, it proceeds to mould the nation in its own primordial image without caring a hoot about the injured and the traumatized of the land.

    It is in the light of this epic foundational hiatus that President Buhari’s derisive strictures against the rule of law and his insistence on subordinating individual rights to the exigencies of state security and national interest should be analysed and decoded. It is a veiled reference to those clamouring for the release of retired col Sambo Dasuki and the impounded Shi’ttee fanatics. Unless there is a regime change in the nearest future, anybody hoping to see the prince of the Sokoto caliphate very soon had better forget the idea.

    To be sure, the president is not without his teeming supporters. There are many who are of the opinion that those who steal the nation blind and who in the process have deprived many Nigerians of their economic rights also deserve to forfeit their political rights and personal freedom. Let them rot in detention until the kingdom comes.

    This writer was also initially of that persuasion. Famously, the legal avatar, Gani Fawehinmi, once averred that i if ever a military government were to come to power which brought economic solace and succour to majority of Nigerians, he would look the other way when so called human rights were being trampled upon.

    In absolute misery at the plight of his compatriots and in extreme formulation, Gani, in private conversation, went as far as to opine that the only military leader he would give a nod would be a rumpled figure in tattered fatigues who could not even address the nation out of sheer fatigue from dealing with crooks.

    The nation has come a long way from pining for and pinning its hopes on military messianism which brought neither political advancement nor inclusive economic growth. This is where General Buhari may be misreading the script and the mood of the nation. In the last three years, the Buhari government has not demonstrated much equity and even-handedness in its dealing with those responsible for the economic adversity of the nation. Indeed to be blunt, the foul stench of partisan and primordial proclivity remains in the air.

    This is not the way to aggregate and distil national interest. The spat with Dasuki now smacks more of personal animosity. There is no national interest in the continued detention of El-ZakZaky. Indeed it is against national interest to court the ire of the ferocious and implacable ISIS/ISIL fighting machine. It is more of a Wahabbist/Sunni rally which imperils the nation. And where is the national interest in publicly vowing to jail looters one minute only to be seen the next moment openly fraternizing with frontline economic suspects?

    It is these ethical lapses and political shenanigans that are fuelling ethnic resentment and secessionist sentiments in some parts of the country. With the phenomenon of vote-buying assuming a pan-Nigerian efficiency, the economic pauperization of Nigerians is driving their political pauperization with both development and democracy becoming the principal casualties.

    We cannot continue with state-lawlessness without endangering a fragile nation that has had too many miraculous reprieves. The fundamental problem facing the country since independence is how to distil and aggregate national interests through core values in a multi-ethnic nation. What is the national ideology in relation to Nigeria’s prime position among the Black race?

    This week, the British Prime minister, Theresa May, confirmed earlier report that Nigeria is the global poster boy for extreme poverty and that every single minute seven Nigerians fall below the poverty line. What is our developmental war-cry in relation to a situation of staggering inequality and biblical poverty?

    It is now obvious that General Buhari’s solution to the crisis of nationhood is a conservative, law and order administration which brooks no nonsense in its efforts to re-create the nation as a bastion of right-wing reaction. Hence, his remarkable and sacrilegious gaffe about the rule of law. This is an exact and exacting replication of his first coming as a military ruler.

    Unfortunately and as this column often insists, you cannot step into the same river twice. The National Question has worsened since the advent of military rule. In homogenous nations, law and order governments often work wonder if only briefly. But in ethnically, religiously and culturally polarized post-colonial nations, they fuel a resurgence of ethnic animosities and primordial resentments such as we are witnessing in contemporary Nigeria. Darkness is visible indeed.

    Nigerians themselves will have to choose which way forward. But it is not going to be an easy choice. There are no better guides and teachers than political and economic famishments which are five-star generals in their own right. In many countries of both conservative and radical national ideologies, people choose to forgo personal liberty and political rights for accelerated development which will then lead to liberalization of the political space.

    In others, people choose to forgo economic right for political liberty which liberates the political space and eventually leads to more people being lifted from poverty to middle class respectability. But both options are predicated on national cohesion in which the constant fixture is a patriotic and nationalistic ruling class led by visionaries and not Stone Age despots. With anti-democratic populism in ascendancy, it is going to be a long walk to freedom in Nigeria.

  • Baba Lekki lectures on rule of law

    The ripples generated by President Buhari’s fearsome shellacking of the bar this past week are not about to subside. Partisans of the rule of law and the rule of lawyers have lined up on both sides of the great divide. According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian writer, the greatest test of a doctor is for him to suffer an affliction in his own area of specialization.

    All of which is to say that snooper is bemused by the cruel farce and the schadenfreude of it all. If Nigerians are this passionate about the rule of law, why is it that it is the rule of lawlessness that prevails in all aspects of national life? In almost all spheres of national existence, the logic of might takes precedence over the might of logic. It is not the brief that matters but the briefcase.

    You can trust the crazy duo of Baba Lekki and Okon to cotton in on to the legal miseries of the nation. A few days after the historic bombshell, the old contrarian and failed lawyer shambled in reeking of illicit gin and prohibited substance. He came to call Okon to the bar. Baba Lekki’s bar is a rundown beer parlour at Okokomaiko where the old crook doubles as a part-time legal pundit lecturing disaccredited and unaccredited legal wannabes thrown out of the country’s illegal law schools for want of diligent accreditation.

    “Come foolish Kukuruku boy, I wan test your constitution. A houseboy is not a homeboy and evidence of residence is not resilience of evidence”, the old man drawled with drunken self-importance.

    “Baba, you don come with dem Yoruba wuruwuru again?” the mad boy snorted with mischief as he packed up the dinner he was preparing. By the time they arrived at Okokomaiko, the place was already teeming with legal crooks, con-men, confederates and internally displaced hooligans on a short fuse and shorter leash. The fireworks began immediately. But Baba Lekki chose to ignore the ranting and launched instead into a windy disquisition about why India was disqualified from further participation in the Olympics Games.

    “Na for Indian magic,” the old man began with satanic relish. “For High Jump, dem Indian man say make dem put dem bar as high as dem like. Dem put am for like three storey building and the man come scale am just like dat. But when dem picture come back dem come see the man as him dey walk under dem bar. Dem say make dem no come back again becos even America come dey fear. So na for under the bar dem fire dem”.

    “So oga, wetin dis one come do with dem rule of law?” one man shouted.

    “You see, for African jungle the first rule of law is that there is no rule of law”, Baba Lekki replied with poker-faced malice.

    “Chineke!!! So na dis yeye nonsense I come pay for?” the irate man screamed as he released a torrent of hate-filled vernacular curses.

    “It is the jurisprudence of a living oracle”, a man with deep tribal marks and a sleepy stare mumbled as he fell back into his alcoholic stupor. His drinking crony, a scholarly crackpot from Eruntoto, rose unsteadily to counter the argument.

    “Rule of law depends on the oracles of living jurisprudence and not the jurisprudence of living military oracles”, he screamed and fell on the floor in a drunken heap.

    “So, what is the ruse of law?” a diligent looking indigent student demanded.

    “Ha ayua!! Ruse of law means there is no rule of law, period”, Baba Lekki snapped.

    “Is this not an invitation to anarchy?” a bright-looking boy demanded.

    “Anarchy, my foot. You cannot invite what is already there”, Baba Lekki snorted.

    “Is this not a return to the state of nature?” another wailed.

    “Hobbes is a fool. The state of nature is better than the nature of the Black state”, Baba Lekki sniggered with a sadistic grin.

    “I am leaving. I don’t want this anoya to dabaru my head”, the irate man screamed and walked out. A hush fell on the bar. Then one man broke the ice.

    “Baba, me I no sabi obonge grammar. Wetin be dem difference between General Babangida and General Buhari for korokoro law?”. Baba Lekki’s eyes glowered with mischief.

    “Ha, dat one na correct question. You see, Maradona dey play and him dey dribble everybody until he come dribble himself and come score against himself. But dis one no dey play at all. Na only penalty him dey play. But dis time, he come shoot over dem bar.  So football come disappear.”

    On that note, somebody threw a bottle and the old man took to his heels with Okon in hot pursuit.

  • And Wole Olanipekun, SAN issues a rebuttal

    AS we were about to put this column to bed, an early morning call came from legal luminary and redoubtable advocate, Chief Wole Olanipekun, SAN.  Wole is an old friend and former comrade in arms of this columnist at the student union barricades against military dictatorship in the early seventies. He was a dynamic and thorough secretary of the UNILAG Students Union. Wole was particularly irked by a release making the round which he said was a clumsily glued together rehash of old lectures and interviews laced with malignant fiction from the authors’ imagination for the purpose of mischief and malice. According to the senior advocate, he has never commented on President Buhari’s speech and the language of the release was too unrestrained, too unrefined and uncivilized to be associated with him. When he was asked to issue a rejoinder, Wole demurred, saying that he had already issued too many rejoinders to fake news in recent times.

  • Reinventing the Nigerian State ( For Gabriel Adetunji Ajayi 1947-2018)

    By way of introduction:
    The piece you are about to read was written and published in 2001. Seventeen years after, it remains as relevant as ever. The piece is dedicated to the memory of our friend and former comrade in arms at the iconic battle-joyous Nigerian Tribune, Col Gabriel Adetunji Ajayi, who this week became the latest casualty of the Nigerian post-colonial state leaving behind the remains of his mother in the mortuary. While Gab was heading for the military academy in 1971, I was heading for the University of Ife. In 1995 Gab was sentenced to death while I proceeded on exile. In what turned out to be our last conversation a few weeks back, Gab, a much decorated former combatant colonel in the Nigerian army, was stoically complaining about the prohibitive costs of drugs needed to manage critical post-surgery. Now he is gone. For strategic reasons, we will leave out a proper tribute to this illustrious son of Nigeria till a later date. The atmosphere is just too foul and murky. We are in a delicate situation.

    IN much of sub-Saharan African, the post-colonial state is in a profound crisis of identity and transformation. It disappeared completely from Liberia for most of the nineties only to be replaced by a bandit state organised along the lines of primitive extortion. In Sierra Leone, its ghost presides over a traumatised populace. In Somalia, after a brief intervention of sanity, it is business as usual for the warlords and a return to murderous contention. In the former Zaire, nation and state are effectively defunct.

    There are no citizens or subjects, only refugees, survivors and the dead, to put it in the memorable words of a leading authority.  In Nigeria after decades of military misrule, the state faces a traumatic transformation irrespective of the wishes of its ruling elite. A state with an untrammelled Sharia ethos emblazoned on one side of its flag and the ethics of resource control engravened  on the other faces insurmountable centrifugal forces. It is an epic gridlock because the flag bearers are travelling in opposite direction.

    In a sense, there is a historic justification for this. States are always an unfinished business, a perpetual project-in-progress, and they tend to come under intense pressure as they confront new realities of history and competing claims. Many of them founder in the process and more still undergo a qualitative transformation or mutation..

    The English state moved from a single-nation –state to a state presiding over a forcible union of nations , then to an empire state and back to a multi-nation state. Several centuries later, they are still tinkering with it in the name of devolution. In this sense, a nation’s constitution  is never a finished product, subject as it is to unending amendments, adjustments  and endless reconstitutions.

    Nation-states may be new to Africa but not state-formations. The Songhai, Mali, Kongo,  Bornu , Oyo, Benin, Zulu   Kingdom/empires were state-formations with a high degree of cohesion and sophistication. When the Portuguese arrived at the Kongo Empire at the turn of the fifteenth century, they met a society in many ways politically superior to the one they left at home. They loitered around a bit before they could subjugate the place, not knowing whether its fire-power could match its organisational prowess. This was why imperialism took its time subduing these empire-states, particularly those around the coast.

    To be sure, it was not that Africa was a haven of peace or a paradise of political stability before colonisation. Neither was it the case that the internal boundaries of its constituting ethnic nations a fixed and immutable affair. Indeed, the phenomenon known as the mfecane and the Yoruba civil wars changed the internal composition of contemporary South Africa and current day Yoruba nation irreversibly.

    One still wonders what might have become the fate of the old Oyo Empire. By the time the British ordered the combatants to go home and fight no more, the empire—or its rump— was already at the mercy of the Ibadan military machine and its redoubtable war-lords. These were the original grandmasters of palace coups.

    Twice, their leading generals unilaterally assumed titles they were hardly entitled to. Once, when the great generalissimo and military genius, Ogunmola , assumed the title of Basorun and told the incumbent Alaafin to go to hell. Again, when Latosa invested himself with the title of the supreme military commander, the Aare Ona Kakanfo, even while there was a living, if helpless, incumbent. But by then, the Ibadan army was the backbone and the heroic saviours of the entire race against the marauding horse men from the plains.

    In the light of the foregoing, and in order to face the reality on ground, it is now imperative to explode certain myths about Africa. First, pre-colonial Africa was not a paradise lost. Second, it was not a state-less lump in which natives luxuriated in rural idiocies. The nation-state might have been a colonial imposition, but some variants of statehood were in evidence. The degree of durability, cohesion and sophistication of these pre-colonial state-formations depended on history and its unfathomable equations.

    This gives the lie to the third myth of pre-colonial Africa as a politically, economically and culturally homogeneous entity. Finally, with the inevitability of war and concomitant dispersal , the ethnic boundaries were not a fixed and immutable affair but subject to perpetual flux. The Fulani have not always domiciled in the northern tip of contemporary Nigeria, and neither have the Itsekiri, the Urhobo and the Ijaw resided in its southern basin from “time immemorial” for that matter.

    Whatever their inherent flaws and weaknesses, the old African states, almost without exception, developed internal mechanisms for hedging and hemming in the overweening excesses of the state and its temporary custodians. The colonial imposition of the alien nation-state paradigm not only destroyed these anti-autocracy disincentives but generated a new form of state enslavement.  The unmediated collision of contrary forces often led to civil wars.

    The grim reality, in the light of such pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial accretions, is that each contemporary African nation has become a unique specimen which will have to solve the crisis of the state in its unique way. Some will falter and disappear. Many will undergo a qualitative transmutation.

    A few will be faced with the stark choice between devolution and dissolution. With the war-cry of resource control renting the air, Nigeria, which miraculously limps along while avoiding the greater human tragedy of the post-colonial state in Africa, deserves a special focus.

    Ever since its test-tube conception and clinically induced delivery, the battle for the Nigerian state has been fought under many guises, diverse fronts and different platforms. The latest, and arguably the most inevitable, is  the contention for resource control.  Such has been the partisan fury, the fierce intellectual bombardment, the emotional blackmail, the towering contempt for the Geneva Convention of warfare, that it is virtually impossible to wade through the trenches without ending up as a hostage.

    In a scene reminiscent of the prescient conclusions of the authors of  The God That failed which argued that the death of communism was inevitable but that the greatest battle would be between socialists and ex-socialists, Nigeria’s former Marxist fraternity have been at each other’s throat. Owing to the ideological occlusion under which such a battle must take place, given the moral and political eclipse on the field of contention, partisans often confuse their base, opportunist motives with noble, altruistic campaign on behalf of their oppressed people or embattled state.

    In the smoke of battle, combatants often confuse friends with enemies and enemies with friends; once and future betrayers of their people’s will to the federal might pose as generals of the salvation army. Needless to add that the end result is often vastly dissimilar from what was set out to achieve.

    So it is that in a provocative monograph , Yesufu Bala Usman, celebrated radical historian, , argued that the  petroleum resources of the Niger Delta derived from the geological debris of his people in the north of the nation washed down across age and time. Bizarre as this may sound, it is still within the bounds of respectable geochemistry.

    But why such arboreal refuse should refuse to be washed into the open sea, why they should get stuck in Peter Ekeh’s homestead, and why they could not have come from the Sahara desert which was once a lush and verdant plain , is a source of intellectual mystery to some of us who retain a measure of admiration for the left-wing prince of Katsina.

    Perhaps the geological garbage was waiting for the federal government littoral suit before it could be safe to venture into the open sea. It may be that this was a mere rhetorical trope that went beyond the content, but for Bala Usman to contend that his people have been in the north of Nigeria since geological time is an affront to the intellectual honesty and fastidiousness for which he made his reputation.

    But let it be acknowledged that Usman’s position approximates orthodox Marxism in all its statist and commandist ferocity, even though there are parallels between this and the absolutism of feudalism. The problem with this orthodoxy is that it could not have foreseen the advent of globalisation, the stunning capacity of capitalism to reinvent its operational procedures and the impact of its own noble critique on the qualitative transformation of capitalism.

    The all-powerful, all-centralizing state is an unavoidable precondition for socialist political and social engineering. The husbandry and judicious allocation of national resources must proceed from this central organ and strong state. Although in Marxist mythology, the state was supposed to wither away, it never did or showed any sign of waning in its controlling ardor. It collapsed with a thud, imploding from its own internal contradictions and the scuttling of human initiative.

    The little local difficulty with Usman’s position is that it ignores or wishes away, the predatory and extractive nature of the Nigerian state , its thieving incompetence and the despoliation and ecological disaster this has wrought on the oil-producing areas of the nation in the last twenty years.

    The fact that the worst culprits of this executive malfeasance are military despots of northern extraction demands tact and sensitivity from the defenders of the status quo,  particularly from that segment of the country if the whole thing is not to degenerate into an intellectual justification of eco-ethnocide. It is this seeming lack of sensitivity and tact that has overheated the polity and led to the war-cry of resource control.

    But then, the Nigerian state did not become an absolutist monstrosity overnight. When General Yakubu Gowon famously announced that the problem for Nigeria was not lack of money but how to spend it, he was celebrating not merely the arrival of petro-dollar , but the vanquishing  of the old regional giants both as centres of political initiatives and as units with outstanding productive capacity. Henceforth, the state doubled as a huge economic almshouse doling out stipends to mendicant-states or paying the public service bill of some Caribbean nation.

    In order to focus properly on the task ahead, it is important to remind our crusading compatriots of the role of many of their noted siblings in the absolutist fiasco, either as conniving super permanent-secretaries, palace intellectuals and propagandists of the super state, regional agitators for self-determination and shadowy decoys for armed destabilisation of the old regions.

    What then is resource control? It simply means the  self-management—and mismanagement—of resources by the authorities in whose domain such resources are located. Such authorities then determine and decide what goes in to the national coffers from their resources based on need and the imperative of development.  On the face of it, it is a simple, logical and straightforward business.

    But on another level, it is not as simple because it ignores the overbearing reality of the modern Nigerian state molded in the image of its colonial forebear where the constitutive components surrender their economic and political rights in exchange for certain expectations from the central authority. All states are by nature and instincts  centralizing forces. Even the old African empire-states extracted tributary from vassal-states, satellites and their immediate constituent assembly.

    Being its arterial lifeline, the custodians of the Nigerian state would not be nearly as dumb as not to vest the issue of resource control firmly within the exclusive preserve of the state.  The duty of the judiciary is to interpret the constitution and not to change it, hence all appeals to it are forlorn, null and void.

    In the light of this, three options are open to those clamouring for resource control. First, to strategise for an upward review of the resource allocation formula from its current thirteen per cent, which can be achieved through a legislative amendment.  Second, to join forces fully with advocates of a sovereign national conference which will overhaul the constitutional impediments to Nigeria’s march to greatness.

    Thirdly, to continue to heat up the polity until  protests mutate into an armed critique of the state or a guerrilla insurrection in which the initiative will pass from them on to more radical oppositional forces. Given the ever  present factor of enlightened self-interest and the privileged insertion of the executive arrow-heads of resource control agitation in the current hegemonic politics as members of the dominant conservative party, one would have expected them to use their leverage to achieve the first option. That they have not shows one of three possibilities:   a political gambit that might have gone too far, severe pressure from below , or an apostolic radicalisation of Damascus-like proportions.

    Whichever way the drama unfolds, it should now be clear that the cry for resource control, the agitation for a national conference, the rise of ethnic militia and even the Sharia gambit are nothing but a shorthand for a greater ferment:  the contradictory struggle to reinvent the Nigerian state. How to domesticate the errant state to suit the aggregate Nigerian reality, how to humanize it and make it responsive to the yearnings and aspirations of its captive-subjects, is the battle royale of our time.

    The current assembly —and even republic—may do their bits and pieces but being products of the old Nigerian state in its last gasps, it is obvious that the major brief is beyond their historic will and capacity.  After decades of economic and political violence against its own nationals, the old Nigerian state suffered a fatal cardiac arrest on June 23, 1993, in the process of annulling the collective will and aspirations of Nigerians.

    In the face of such a historic watershed, it is no use hiding behind the constitution. A constitution aggregates the sovereign will of the people of a country. When that will changes as the current ferment demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt , so must the constitution. Let the regents of the current transition note that and commence the process of realigning Nigeria with civilization and the twenty first century accordingly.

    • First published in Africa Today, March, 2001.

     

  • On the origins of the present crisis

    As the senate versus executive stalemate threatens to snowball into a full blown constitutional crisis, it is now imperative for Nigeria once again to step back from the brink. The signs of anarchy and revolutionary disorder are already with us. The streets are tense. There is a foreboding stillness in the air, presaging some thunderous deluge.

    This nation is too precious to the Black psyche. In order not to be embroiled by petty political schemes, in order to regain our sense of perspective, we must go back to where the rains started beating us. To do this, we must go back to the origins of the Fourth Republic. To be sure, Nigeria’s endemic crisis of nationhood predates the Fourth Republic going back all the way to the founding anomaly of the nation.

    But as the most recent elite contraption for navigating the crisis of nationhood and as the origin of the current incarnation of the crisis, the Fourth Republic is the most appropriate benchmark for an analytical dissection of the national impasse. Exactly twenty years after the mysterious death of General Sani Abacha, the post-military settlement now appears to have reached the limits of its historic and political possibilities.

    It is unfortunate that Nigeria has remained mired in a foundational crisis a century and almost one decade after the amalgamation of the protectorate at a time when other nations are taking revolutionary leaps forward, at a time when the civilized world is grappling with the problems of poverty eradication in the face of population explosion, eco-disaster stemming from mismanaged industrialization and spiritual disharmony arising from shifting demographic trends.

    The Fourth Republic was born in crisis and from crisis. For a tell-tale sign, look no further than the fact that the operators knew nothing of the contents of the operative constitution until after the departure of the military. Technically, it means the elections were held in a constitutional vacuum. As this writer noted then, military constitution turned out to be “ a patchwork of incoherent rambling, with the sole aim of indemnifying the departing military….a recipe for future chaos”.

    As a barely reconstructed military autocrat but one with immense personal drive and volcanic energy, Obasanjo took the constitutional remiss to heart and came to the messianic conclusion that if the party is too important to be left in the hands party people, the senate is also too important to be left in the hands of senators. He therefore proceeded to tinker and tamper with the structure and personnel until both institutions reached the point of exhaustion.

    Parties proliferated and so did internally displaced politicians and former senate leaders. Yours sincerely stumbled upon one of these senate presidents one early morning at a Nigerian restaurant somewhere close to Elephant and Castle in London wolfing down steaming pepper soup and piping pounded yam and came to the conclusion that Nigeria was doomed. Miraculously or probably owing to Nigeria’s legendary luck, Ken Nnamani managed to evade Obasanjo’s searching binoculars. The rest, as they say, is history.

    In a sense, then, the ruling APC is a victim of its own strength and success. The gale of defections which facilitated its ascendancy and catapulted it to the state house also signalled the irreversible fracturing of party identity and affiliation in the Fourth Republic. It is a sign of the times and nothing can bring it back. You cannot eat your cake and have it, just as you cannot harvest cassava and expect to harvest yam.

    This is where the strategic snag comes for the APC. It is dangerous to fight a new battle with old weapons of contention. If the party had been more politically cohesive and ideologically vibrant, Bukola Saraki ought to have been expelled for anti-party activities or at the very least sanctioned once he crossed the party line. But divided personal interests and the inchoate and incoherent nature of its formation kept the ruling party from unity of action and unanimity of purpose.

    In the politics of the mirror, you see what you want to see and the rest is optical illusion or mere chimera. Famously, the newly elected president himself noted that he belongs to everybody and belongs to nobody. So, what is the beef with Saraki acting out the script that he belongs to all parties and no party in particular depending on where consuming ambition is best served?

    With the shattering of party formation and identity, the political structure of the Fourth Republic has gone into terminal coma. What we have are civilian camps of feuding political warlords. Perfidy has become the norm. There will be more defections when the bugle sounds for the commencement of renewed hostilities. This is why it may be tactically perilous to attempt to remove Saraki at all costs. There is enough judicial and political resentment in the air to sabotage that and President Buhari himself has not helped matters by his own acts of constitutional infractions.

    At the beginning of the Fourth Republic, there was at least a semblance of party structure and identity formation. Although this cannot be compared to the First and Second Republics, it worked for some time before it came to grief. The old AD approximated to the AG and UPN of yore with Yoruba progressive and traditional libertarian politics at the core of its ideological soul.

    But as it came to pass in the First and Second Republics, this splendid self-isolationism was bound to come into fatal contradictions with the nationally dominant unitarist and anti-federalist momentum of military-engineered and autocratically enabled democracy. With the Saraki PDP tendency having evacuated the APC like the enemy sojourners that they are, what remains is an unstable potentially explosive wedlock of mutually contradictory political tendencies bristling with recuperating progressive elements and conservative neo-feudal die-hards.

    So, however much we abhor Saraki’s reptilian tactics, however much we deplore his underhand antics, it must be understood that the Ilorin strongman is a product of his time and template. He who comes to equity must come with clean hands. The APC itself is a product of the ethical and ideological meltdown of the Fourth Republic. A masquerade that farts into its own muffled robes has a feat of endurance ahead of him.

    Had the APC turned out to be the great reforming party of its original billing, it ought by now to be at the commanding vanguard of those championing a structural overhaul of the party structure in the Fourth Republic as well as a comprehensive review of the nation’s fundamentally misaligned political and economic architecture. But that will be the day, if General Buhari’s unhelpful off the cuff marks are anything to go by.

    While many other nations are taking great developmental strides towards the self-actualization of humankind, what we are likely to have is what we propose as a management of mismanagement in which the nation continues to fumble and wobble with some divine reprieve always around the corner. But a person named Folorunso must not tempt fate by climbing a palm tree with banana straw.

    There is too much tension in the land. Toppling Saraki by all means may provoke a constitutional storm which can snowball into a political meltdown. A way must be found to manage him until the next elections when the law of the more dominant war-lord or the logic of the bigger rigger will kick in. as the case may be. Common sense must dictate this inevitable comeuppance.

  • Okon to appear for Alapansanpa

    Barely recovered from food poisoning and gastro-intestinal disorder, Okon has been up in arms against the entire system once again. When the old Calabar rogue is not complaining about the perpetual and perennial darkness, he is busy railing about the numerous crises in the land wondering how much longer it would take for the president to appoint a minister of crisis management or a secretary for crisis consolidation.

    “Oga, make them appoint Basil Nwokenta make him help them panel beat all dem crisis. Na him dey help dem with dem accident vehicles for Tin Can Island. Nigeria come get accident so tey even accident tire for Nigeria. He be like if say na madman dey drive dem vehicle sef”, the mad boy moaned to no one in particular.

    “Okon, what do you think about this amnesty and amnesia business?” snooper taunted the mad boy.

    “Oga I sabi Milk of Magnesium. I no sabi amnesty or amnesia. Armels na bus we dey take reach Agbanikaka for dem better days. If Soyinka wan chop bushmeat make him tell us, I fit cook dat one, but I hear say na Aparo him like well well”, the mad boy crowed.

    But the father of all troubles was just around the corner. Two days after Alapansanpa, the famed Ibadan masquerade, was arrested for affray, stealing, inflicting bodily harm and for conduct prejudicial to public order, Okon appeared in the sitting room dressed like a semi-masquerade so to speak.

    “Chief Okon, I presume” snooper cooed, trying to humour the dyspeptic clown.

    “Oga, I wan reach Ibadan, make man Iiberrate dem Alapansanpa”

    “I see”, snooper mumbled in quiet alarm.

    “Dem yeye magistrate go suffer. Dem no fit catch dem thieves who dey show dem face and who come dey live for dis world. Na dem ara orun dem fit catch”.

    “Okon, please what is your locus standi in this matter?” I shouted in alarm.

    “Ah oga, I don tell you say locusts no dey stand. Dem dey bite”, Okon retorted.

    “They say Alapansanpa broke some windscreen”, snooper noted in disapproval.

    “Na dem screen dem go blame for dat one. If him screen well well he no fit break”, the mad boy retorted again.

    “What about the mobile he stole?” snooper screamed at the mad boy.

    “Oga, you don answer your own question. Mobile is supposed to be mobile, abi no be so?” Okon taunted with malicious relish.

    “So, what is the address of the person you are defending?” snooper asked.

    “Oga, now you don see why dem magistrate no get common sense at all? Egungun no get address for obodo, na ara orun. The man dem come detain na Lamidi of Alekuwodo and him be barber for Agbeni. Alapansanpan don return to heaven and if dem want collect dem money make dem go meet am for heaven”, Okon replied with a devilish smile as he walked way.

    • First published in 2008

  • Democratic Demarche in Nigeria

    Damn your principles, stick to your party—Benjamin Disraeli
    Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me— George Orwell, 1984

     IN modern diplomatic parlance, a demarche is an international writ or an order issued by a sovereign authority signifying an intention to commence action over a particular matter. If we extend this to the realm of local politics or national affairs, it could mean the commencement of a signal move on the political chessboard by one of the factions in contention which could significantly alter the existing balance of power or precipitate a realignment of existing forces at the very least.

    History will not be denied its occasionally sadistic pleasure at the expense of foolhardy humanity. When a political class chooses to be delinquent in its collective responsibility to a nation, history has a way of returning the compliments by subjecting its tormentors to its own unique torture.

    Just about when you thought the theatre of defection and desertion was about to reach the crescendo of absurdity, its highest decibel of political imbecility, the transfer market suffered a tragic hiatus. Arms were brought to bear on the medium of transaction. What began as a routine free leasing of political mercenaries ended up looking like an exchange of economic hostages.

    In the early hours of last Tuesday, democracy suffered its worst ambush in Nigeria since the Fourth Republic began. State arms and their bearers laid a siege to the legislative citadel of the nation in a hare-brained attempt to force changes on the leadership of the senate. In the aftermath, the nation became more politically polarized and bitterly divided with elite consensus on core national matters even farther away, making the prospects orderly elections quite a forlorn hope.

    If this siege was a well-heeled plot to imperil democracy and civilian rule, then questions must be asked about the mental health of the conspirators, for the execution left much to be desired. It was carried out in the most risible and infantile manner, suggesting instead a casual overreach on the part of the anti-democratic but cerebrally challenged elements that swarm the innermost redoubts of General Buhari’s power sanctuary.

    The real details of this epic fiasco may now be lost in the bitter recriminations and the frantic official pushback that followed. But no matter how ineptly executed,  an armed rebellion against the state is nothing but treason and ought to be treated as such without any further mealy-mouthed equivocation and double speak. But then Nigeria is a country of magical détente and ruling class impunity where disregard for state norms and presidential directives are treated with bemused equanimity.

    If Nigeria were to be a medical patient undergoing psychiatric evaluation, it would be obvious that the nation is showing all the symptoms of post-military stress disorder. The trauma of military rule is yet to vacate the national psyche. Whimsical cruelty and arbitrary behaviour on the part of the rulers are compounded by excessive submissiveness and superstitious masochism on the part of the populace.

    The Fourth Republic began with the summary abolition of the electorate by a civilian administration brimming with military machismo. Voting was not as important as the allocation of votes. But just as this was dying out as a result of national and international pressure, an economically induced electoral self-abolition became the norm.

    As a result of permanent pauperization, people became conditioned to selling their votes to the highest bidder. Of all the horrors of post-colonial Africa nothing can be more appalling than this form of self-disenfranchisement. It speaks to systematic immiseration and deliberate impoverishment as a state weapon of mass control. Nothing can be farther from the fundamental gaols of democracy. It is electoral suicide ritually enacted at the polling booth.

    Yet it should also be obvious to anybody watching the drama on Tuesday that there is a limit to what a nation can take and a limit to a people’s seemingly elastic capacity to withstand punishment in the hands of servants of the people who see themselves as masters of the realm.

    The restiveness among the crowd and the unprecedented national ire that greeted the show of shame should serve as a warning signal about the growing consternation with the way the country is currently administered. If the people are too disillusioned to defend the tenets of democracy, they will be forced by circumstances to defend their basic human dignity in the face of unwarranted assault.

    So, what to do, going forward? Going forward also means looking backwards. There are two important lessons to be taken away from the legislative fracas of Tuesday which must form the basis of new realities as far as post-military Nigeria is concerned. First is the complete demystification of arms and their bearers in the sovereign order of the nation. Nigerians have lived with armed men and their weapons of mass repression for so long that they are no longer afraid of or fazed by the arms-bearing class.

    This could cut either way, depending on how the lessons are taken. It could lead to a massive opening of the democratic space which allows for a true liberation of the Nigerian nation or, if denied, it could open the door to revolutionary upheavals in which the state loses its monopoly of the weapons of coercion to non-state actors. This is already happening in many parts of the country.

    The second take-away is evident disappointment and even consternation of majority of Nigerians with the direction politics has taken in the Fourth Republic in general and the stoic incompetence and general lack of direction of the Buhari administration in particular. In the subsisting circumstances, it simply means that even if General Buhari were to win the next presidential election, he will be forced to govern under a condition of ethical, intellectual and political siege.

    It doesn’t get more politically paradoxical than this. The South West political actors who exploited their decade-old dominance in the region to team up with General Buhari and his northern power mongers could not have bargained for this. But the Yoruba are too politically shrewd to be led by the nose by anybody. They knew what they were doing, if not exactly where it would lead.

    In giving its nod to collaboration with the “auld” enemy, the dominant consciousness of the Yoruba people at that particular point was exploring new political possibilities that could lead to fresh perspectives on the National Question by opening up the frozen dialectic of Nigerian history. As people of empire, the Yoruba hate political disorder and economic anarchy.

    It is not by accident or coincidence that those who championed this reapproachment were people of heroic antecedents, many of those who in the past have been willing to lay down their life at the behest of nationality and nation. Only people with such background of self-sacrifice could have persuaded the Yoruba people.

    It is important to put things in this perspective in order to confront the fatuous, opportunistic and despicable criticism emanating from right-wing quarters of political retrogression that the Yoruba have been sold into slavery. Those who have never stood for or fought for anything in their life are now parading themselves as champions of some nebulous Yoruba cause and as new Tarzans of primitive identity politics in a modern, multi-ethnic nation-state.

    In a wild breach of political taboo, they have taken to slandering and defaming some of the most illustrious scions that the Yoruba race has ever sired. While one can understand the plight of those who have routinely sold their soul in the past,  it is unfortunate that some old Yoruba patriots of sterling antecedents have found themselves stranded by choice in this boat of perdition as a result of political misadventure which they are yet to live down. The Yoruba people know their true leaders and will speak with one voice once the need arises.

    To be sure, when the smog of the current contention clears, it will be found that there are a few Yoruba patriots who have expended their social capital defending the indefensible and justifying what can no longer be justified. In a turbulent multi-ethnic society, the deliberate fragmentation of ethnic consciousness can lead to some strange sub-ethnic elite politics indeed, after all some Yoruba people remain grateful to General Abacha for creating new states. Others will remain grateful to General Buhari for liberating them from local tyrants whatever the means.

    It is however in the department of branding and brand loyalty that the Buhari administration suffers most from the anti-democratic disaster of last Tuesday. Brand loyalty is a two-way affair. It is not a question of blind loyalty and obtuse passion. For any brand to retain the loyalty of its subscribers, the brand must also retain its fundamental integrity and unimpeachable character.

    One of the root causes of brand disaffection with the current regime is its inability either to reinvent itself or effect some crucial and critical changes in what is generally perceived as the harsh and hawkish innermost core of the Buhari administration whose economic worldview remains resolutely feudalistic even as its politics is patrimonial. It is widely believed that this mind-set, which broadly corresponds to General Buhari’s own worldview, has made it impossible for the Daura-born general to make a dent on the nation’s more fundamental problems.

    But all that is solid often melts into thin air. The harsh dialectic of historical development often forces the hermetically sealed to open its wares for inspection. This is the brutal lesson of the anti-democratic fiasco of last Tuesday. In an irony of ironies, twice in the last two years the engine room of the Buhari administration has been prised open by unconditional and uncontrollable forces of history. The first time during the Babichir Lawal affair and now in the events also leading to the dismissal of Mallam Lawal Daura.

    In both instances, we see an unconditional surrender to the involuntary forces of economic and political modernization. In the case of David Babichir Lawal, the feudal formation in which his consciousness is steeped did not allow him to see the moral contradiction in awarding his company a contract in questionable circumstances.

    In the case of Lawal Daura, his feudal mind-set fostered an implacable disdain for separation of power and even the whole concept of democracy. The result has been a double comeuppance which has led to a structural dislocation of the pecking order in the innermost sanctuary of power. General Buhari must be feeling completely stripped and very vulnerable indeed. It will amount to a tactical indiscretion to remind him of how it came to be on the two occasions.

    In the modern history of humanity however momentarily powerful the forces of feudalism may appear, never have they triumphed over the forces of modernization in the long run. The history of Nigeria cannot be different. Last Tuesday, the forces in bitter contention for the soul of Nigeria squared up to themselves once again in their intricate and overdetermined formations. The Fourth Republic is turning out to be quite a consuming endgame indeed.