The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • The Harmattan of Mallam Adamu Ciroma

    This frosty season, Mallam Adamu Ciroma has been on the mind. Ever since the zoning fiasco which brought the Jonathan presidency, the great Mallam has retreated behind the icy fortress of testy silence and furious outrage.  While the controversy lasted, Ciroma had been uncharacteristically vehement in his denunciation of this new-fangled doctrine of necessity.

    He felt it was designed to shortchange the north and ultimately threaten the geo-political equilibrium of the nation. He was after all one of the famed architects of post-military power transfer, staking his prestige and authority to bring Obasanjo back to power. Now, everything has gone up in a bonfire of political vanities.

    Please recall that Mallam Adamu Ciroma is no ordinary northerner. He is one of the most respected and revered northern leaders of this era with a justly deserved reputation for frugality and forthrightness. In a career spanning journalism, apex banking and politics, he has seen his reputation rise as a man of honour and integrity. For many who may not know, Ciroma also wields a witty and drily ironic pen.

    It is also useful to recall that twice in his illustrious lifetime, Ciroma has come very close to clinching the most coveted prize in the land. In 1979, Ciroma was the runaway choice of the younger members of the northern establishment. But the northern old guard who are past-masters of political ambuscade struck and gave the crown to a pliable and diffident Shehu Shagari who had publicly expressed his preference for a senate seat. In the event, Shagari was to fulfill his historic destiny by claiming that he was always upstairs praying while the NPN barracudas were downstairs parceling out the national patrimony.

    Again in 1992, Ciroma was set to see off a determined challenge for the NRC presidential slot from Alhaji Umaru Shinkafi when General Babangida struck, sending principals and principalities packing with classic cynical chicanery. Ciroma took it all in the chin, patiently waiting for the inevitable unraveling of the Babangida Transition Programme.  He did not have to wait for long as the entire country erupted in flames in the aftermath of the annulment of the June 12, 1993 elections won by MKO Abiola.

    That momentous, nation-defining event and current tragic happenings have forced one to think of another harmattan season in the not too distant past. Eighteen years ago, in February 1994 to be precise, snooper was part of a south-west delegation to the north to explore ways of staving off the looming national apocalypse brought about by General Abacha’s ascendancy.

    It would be recalled that in November, 1993, Abacha, exploiting a dubious clause in the decree setting up the Interim National Government headed by Ernest Shonekan, summarily bundled the former UAC kingpin out of office. It was clear even by then that rather than addressing the pressing national issues which he claimed had brought him to power, Abacha himself was nursing other ideas. It was also clear by then that the dominant faction of the Yoruba political class and other progressives throughout the country were warming up to give the goggled tyrant the battle of his life.

    The broad aim of our delegation to the north was to secure a pan-Nigerian alliance of politicians that will seek an immediate termination of military rule. In the charged atmosphere of that period, it was a most dangerous and risky thing to do, akin to bearding the lion in its den. But the aim of the delegation was to persuade the northern political class that all politicians suffer under military despotism, irrespective of tribe, creed or religion.

    It was this delegation that eventuated in the All Politicians Summit. Ironically, it was originally conceived by businessmen, technocrats, leading journalists and a sprinkling of academics and politicians. Some illustrious and departed northern technocrats of Yoruba extraction acted as the arrowhead. It was therefore inevitable, given his stature and strategic importance, that Mallam Adamu Ciroma’s house would be our first port of call after some diversionary sight-seeing.

    It was past midnight on a chilly harmattan evening that the delegation arrived at Mallam Ciroma’s modest and frugally furnished mansion somewhere in the old Kaduna GRA. There were still quite a lot of people in the ante section of the house waiting to see the great one. As usual with a diligent and conscientious politician, the former governor of the Central Bank and former presidential candidate was holding a crucial meeting. There was a near concentric row of those waiting for their turn.

    It was around two in the early hours of the morning that we were ushered into the presence of Malam Adamu Ciroma. There was an austere and sombre dignity, an equanimity about him which reminded one of a medieval Islamic scholar. An ironic, politically savvy grin played around his lips as he eyed everybody with a distant gaze of wan curiosity. The sparks started flying immediately after the mandatory introduction and a brisk exchange of pleasantries.

    It will be recalled that shortly after the June 12 presidential election, Ciroma went public with characteristic forthrightness and fearlessness.  He had noted that he thought Abiola won the election “fair and square” and therefore could not understand what the whole problem was about. But shortly after the annulment, Ciroma took what seemed to have been an acrobatic one eighty degree somersault, caustically noting that the South West was behaving like “a rain-beaten chicken”.

    When he was duly confronted with what seemed to be the incontrovertible evidence of the perfidy of the northern establishment and its complicity in the annulment of the freest and fairest presidential election in the history of the nation, a calm and composed Ciroma cleared his throat as he eyed everybody with benign puzzlement. Yes, he had said that Abiola won the election far and square, but when the same election was annulled by the military authorities and an apocalyptic meltdown loomed, he had to reassess his stance as a patriot and statesman. “We cannot join you in pulling down the entire nation over a mere election, because without a country, there cannot be a democracy”, he noted tersely and with his customary ironic bemusement.

    Those were the words ringing in snooper’s ears in the wake of the zoning controversy that brought Jonathan and after what seemed like the divine abridgement of Yar’Adua’s tenure. “Without a country, there cannot be democracy”. Why didn’t Ciroma and the northern establishment adhere to these words of wisdom?  To be sure, there was something grossly unfair and politically immoral about the disruption of the zoning formula. But there was also a divine immutability about it all which made Jonathan’s ascendancy virtually inevitable.

    Nobody wished Yar’Adua dead. But life must go on. If a certain tradition of orderly succession must take firm roots, the nation cannot afford to succumb to emotional blackmail. Institutions are built by repeated gestures which then become routinised habits burnt forever into human consciousness. Institutions appear so normal and natural that it is easy to forget that they are products of super-heroic human efforts of restraint and flexibility in the greater national interest.

    It is not about Jonathan who so far is proving a fatally unaccomplished leader. Neither was it about Abiola who could have proved that the north does not enjoy a monopoly of presidential incompetence. It is about institutionalizing the principle that the presidency of a modern nation-state is not the birthright of an ethnic caucus.

    By vehemently and vociferously opposing Jonathan’s succession and subsequently his right to contest in the name of some zoning formula, and by lapsing into a stony silence of bitter resentment thereafter, Mallam Ciroma and the old northern establishment appear to have fatally shot themselves in the foot. Perhaps they unwittingly succumbed to Obasanjo’s deliberately vexatious antics and brilliantly strategic baiting. It is the old game of conjuring numbers and he who holds the presidential aces retains the magic formula. Caliban has learnt very well from Prospero.

    After the unbroken string of northern military autocrats who held sway for almost two decades, after repeated attempts to harry and harass Obasanjo out of office after his first term, after the shenanigans of dark scheming surrounding Yar’Adua’s last days and after the uproar occasioned by the politics of zoning, the impression has taken firm root that Mallam Ciroma and the northern old guard are merely fixated on power at all costs. Yet the industrialization of power without the power of industrializing the nation or a visionary ethos for its rapid transformation has turned out a perilous project.

    Last week after his Siberian sabbatical, Malam Ciroma appeared to have come in from the cold. He was sighted at a parley on the way forward for the north organized by his old military tormentors. This is as it should be. The harmattan is still raging out there. The horses might have bolted from the stable. The north is roiling in spiritual, economic and political discontent. During Ciroma’s arctic AWOL, the north has been taken over by the Boko Haram boys who have rendered the old domain of the old man virtually ungovernable.

    It is a measure of how further power has slipped from their grip that a new northern group convened by Junaid Mohammed is asking Justice Belgore, a scion of the feudal north, not to allow Jonathan to use him for tenure elongation. It is a measure of Jonathan’s open disdain for a once dreaded power mafia that he should respond with contempt and curt condescension, asking not to be disturbed while at work. Some works indeed. It is the eighteenth harmattan of Malam Adamu Ciroma.

    • (First published in April, 2014.)

     

     

    Famous last words

     

    “I’m afraiding”——  Lawrence Aninih as he was tied to the stakes.

     

    “No regrets. We were trying to change the social order”—— Major Kasai at the stakes.

     

    “I was going to be released yesterday until this boy ( Colonel Dimka) came and implicated me”—— Major General  Illya Bissala as he was led to the stakes.

     

    “I’m dying as I lived—beyond my means”. Oscar Wilde on his deathbed.

     

    “This is it!!” An American pilot as his plane went down.

  • History will vindicate the just

    Emmanuel Macron visits the African Shrine

    It has been a very good summer for heroes, and a bad time for villains. Nobody erects memorials for villains. No matter how long they live or rule their memory is covered in the weeds of shame and obloquy. History eventually rewrites the wrongs it has visited on society. Snooper is in a very chirpy mood this morning. But let us not jump ahead of the story.

    It was alleged that when Moshe Dayan, the legendary, one-eyed Israeli general and war-hero, was flagged down for speeding on a high way, the great man looked at his interloper and then wryly noted. “Sir, I have only one eye, so which one do you want me to concentrate on, the road or the speedometer?”

    He got a compassionate discharge. At any point in time, no human being can have a full view of the twists and turns of history. No ordinary observer of unfolding events, however sharp-eyed and keenly focused, could take in the totality of events at any point in time. We are all one-eyed viewers when it comes to the great dramas of existence.

    So, just when you are about to give up on history and humanity as a whole, something or some events happen which serve to reinforce your faith in humankind and which vindicate one’s hunch that no matter how long it takes evil will not triumph over good. Let us begin with a poser which has appeared before on this page. Is there something fundamentally and immanently rational about human nature which allows nations and societies to correct or reverse themselves no matter how long it takes?

    Nations and societies may torture, imprison, exile and murder their true heroes and heroines, while allowing scoundrels and villains to thrive and prosper, but in the long run, justice and balance are restored. Injustice may fill the vacuum that nature abhors as a short-time stop gap, but it is a matter of time before justice reasserts itself. History must eventually vindicate the just.

    It is not entirely fault of society. Those at the frontiers of thought in any society and at the vanguard of consciousness must be ready to pay a stiff price. If you think what has never been thought before, or do what has not been done before, you must be prepared for what nobody has gone through before. Genius is a great disruptive force because it questions the status quo and demobilizes the society with its seeming irrationality.

    Paradigm change cannot occur every day or there will be no paradigm to change anymore. It is mediocrity that stabilizes the society and guarantees order. New insights and novel ways of doing things are often so threatening that human societies resist change for a long time and eventually succumb only after massive historic sweeteners and tranquilizers. When society eventually catches up with those at the political frontiers or its intellectual vanguard, the locus of struggle would have shifted again.

    For any society to survive, then, it must cultivate a cult of heroism, so that the labours of past heroes and heroines will never be in vain. As Louis Althusser famously stated, only the production of new heroes keeps old heroes alive. So, when the time for rectification and restitution comes, society must roll out the drums and cymbals to celebrate its heroes. When the time to celebrate heroes comes, let us joyously sing the praises of our departed heroes.

    So, it has been a good summer for heroes, a summer of restitution. What will Fela Anikulapo-Kuti , Nigeria’s great musician and hell-raising cultural icon, be thinking as he watched the young visionary French president visit the shrine? Derided, denigrated and finally decimated at home by the powers that be, Fela is finally receiving the badge and seal of international approval. The shrine has become a global shrine of culture and self-validation; a major tribute and totem of the brotherhood of humanity.

    For close to thirty five years after he returned to the country from a sojourn abroad, Fela fought the Nigerian society and political authorities with everything he had and eventually fell in action, his body completely ravaged and his mind impossibly tortured. But twenty two years after his death, the civilized world is returning to pay him homage in his shrine and on his own terms, too. If a man stands firm on his beliefs, it is the world that must come round to him.

    Once again, it has taken the international community to compel Nigeria to pay attention to one of its most talented offspring. The building block rejected has become the cornerstone of the edifice. Implacable ironies abound. Impeccably westernized and swankily turned out in his earlier incarnation, Fela could easily have been mistaken for a well-mannered English public school fellow.

    But Fela was no minion or starry-eyed satrap of western civilization. In fact his entire life and that of his illustrious family stretching to three generations can be described as a grand decolonizing project. As narrated by Soyinka in his epic autobiography, Ake, when Fela’s father, the Reverend Isaac Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, famously tumbled off his bicycle, he had vowed to make the white-man pay for the infraction. Yet the lot fell on the same western civilization to rescue his most famous son from the Blackman’s inhumanity to the Black person.

    As the name implies, the shrine is a place of pristine traditional worship and libation to the ancestors, a ringing affirmation of African identity redolent of native mysteries and mystifications. But a science-suffused west needs its mysteries and mysticism, too. There is still a Black hole somewhere and humankind cannot survive on science alone.

    By returning to Fela’s shrine which he first visited as a callow intern in the French Nigerian embassy in 2004, the French president was paying a glorious tribute to the ineluctable force of genius and African civilization. It has taken an African musical “rebel” and not a military Caesar to make this possible. Cultural ambassadorship has proved superior to physical warfare.

    To be sure, there would have been a lot about the activities at the old shrine which would not have been sweet music to the authorities. The conservative military junta would have been irked by reports of deviancy, anti-social posturing and the whiff of freewheeling criminality. Particularly irksome would have been the attempt to conduct a Kalakuta Republic within a Nigerian Republic. To nervous soldiers barely recovering from the trauma of a civil war, this would have been tantamount to another declaration of war.

    But rather than resorting to arson and mayhem, the situation could have been better managed as the inevitable waste product of genius. When he was asked to put Jean-Paul Sartre away for disorderly conduct, Charles de Gaule, the great French military genius and literary avatar, famously retorted that Sartre was also France.

    Great statesman and great writer joyously detested each other, but they both knew that the nation is supreme and there is a line never to be crossed in complementary devotion. Now, it has taken another French president to remind us that our own Fela was Nigeria and Africa. History will rehabilitate the great indeed.

  • And Lumumba goes up in Brussels

    Whilst we are still on the subject of resurgent heroes and rehabilitated avatars, it is meet to report that a statute of Patrice Lumumba, the martyred founding president of the much troubled Congo Republic, has gone up in the heart of Brussels with a square named after him in the predominantly Congolese quarters known as Matenge.

    Fifty five years after he was killed and his body brutally dismembered, the killers of this great son of Africa are owning up to a crime against Africa and humanity. The process of historic rectification began in 2002 with an official apology and an admission that something was not right about Belgian colonial policy in Africa.

    This is an awkward closure to a great reckoning in a vast and chaotic country. But it is the best in the circumstances and Lumumba will have to wait for full rehabilitation from his own compatriots. The well of human wellbeing has been poisoned in the Congo and it will take some time before it is drained of its toxic effluvium. It hurts to think that almost sixty years after, this heart of human darkness is embroiled in permanent civil war with a brigand ruling class and international predators bent on plundering the impossibly rich country to death.

    A callow youth with barely four years of formal schooling, Lumumba lacked the intellectual wherewithal and political nous to understand and appreciate the international immensity and national complexity of the forces ranged against him. His only weapon was his outstanding moral authority and spiritual fortitude. This is not nearly enough in a pool of political piranhas.

    But history will vindicate the just. Lumumba will be remembered for his extraordinary heroism and the outstanding courage with which he faced certain death. His memory remains radiant long after the likes of Mobutu, Kasavubu and Tshombe have been consigned to the rubbish heap of history. It is Lumumba statute that is going up while Mobutu’s vainglorious palaces are in utter ruins at home and abroad. It has been a good summer for heroes indeed.

    On a final note, will the family of the  spy who witnessed the assassination and dismemberment of Lumumba and  collected some of his teeth as “souvenir” please return them?

  • Baba Lekki curses Maradona

    The ripples over the exit of the Green Eagles from the World Cup currently winging its way to a brilliant climax in Russia have not quite subsided. The recriminations have been fierce and unrelenting. Not even the coach, the dour and dutiful German, Herr Gertnor Rohr, has been spared the occasional bombardment. His tactical naivety, concerning the last ten minutes of the match against the Argentines, has come up for stringent and severe scrutiny.

    Nothing spoil—as they say, well except some people’s Estacode and holiday in the sizzling land of Vodka and iconic Tsars. A book has actually been written by a professorial killjoy that demonstrates with exacting statistics that the four-yearly soccer extravaganza actually contributes nothing to a country’s GDP or the overall wellbeing of its people. Soccer is the opiate of poor people and poor nations.

    Snooper is very sure that his bosom friend, Segun Odegbami, aka Mathematical, will be up in arms against this academic sourpuss. Mathematical has been sending snooper some dispatches from Stalingrad full of soccer gems and wisdom. But with Messi and co mercilessly upending the party, the great No7 will now have to find his way back to his rural domains of Orile Wasinmi.

    Your columnist has nothing to add, except a small poser. When will Nigerians and Africans learn the lesson that African magic is no match for scientific football? At the 1974 World Cup, a cynical western commentator observed thus of the Congolese team: “Despite their witchdoctor and a generous supply of monkey meat from home, they succumbed to a 9-0 drubbing by Poland”.

    At the 1982 World Cup in Spain, an observer noted thus of the Cameroonian team: “Since their goalkeeper [the great Thomas N’kono ] was the hero of their qualifying matches, not much is expected of them.” And so it came to pass. Eight years later at Italy 1990, Baba Bamenda, the Cameroonian witchdoctor, spread his grisly fare on a mat hilariously insisting that Cameroon was winning even at the closing seconds of the match when it was obvious that England had prevailed.

    In Nigeria, it is now obvious that the fear of Argentina is the beginning of football wisdom. For many Nigerians, Argentina has become enemy number one when it comes to world cup ousters. Snooper can attest to the fact that the last encounter was not just a physical contention, it was also a metaphysical and occult duel.

    Baba Lekki was in his mystical elements.  Snooper sat glued to the television as the old contrarian shambled in, pole-hugging drunk and swigging from a huge bottle of local whiskey with Okon in tow wildly cheering on the ancient codger.

    “Na today today I go show dem Pampas people dem mothers’ hind and behind”, the old man swore as he headed for the abandoned garage. The television began beaming images of a corpulent but gamey Diego Amanda Maradona waltzing with a delectable Nigerian lady who appeared to be having a swell time with the jowly rogue from the old inner city of Buenos Aires.

    “Dat one na our Moremi who go show dem fat boy say Soponna still dey Nigeria”, Baba Lekki crooned with a sadistic grin.

    Very soon, a huge bale of smoke billowed from the garage as fumes of native frankincense filled the air. This was the nearest you can ever get to a sorcerers’ sortie. Baba Lekki was exultant directing the smoke in the direction of Argentina with a primitive wind vane even as some fancifully attired musicians materialized from the interior.

    In an infamous echo of Baba Eleran, the redoubtable witchdoctor of the great IICC “Shooting Star” team of the eighties, the old wizard began chanting.

    Balubalu nta’dan, balubalu nta’dan

    Y’obale y’obale ni labalaba fi wo’gbo lo

    Amubo amubo ni t’adete.

    Agbejule niti igi oyin

    By this time, the drummers had begun panning out their subversive lyrics, hinting at the disorientation awaiting purblind bats that choose to fly by daytime.

    Messi, gbabi ma gba be

    Gbabe ma gba bi.

    Everything ended in tears and much gnashing of teeth. The surreal party dissolved in disarray as a loud shriek of despair accompanied the final whistle. Once again, Argentina has taught Nigeria a memorable soccer lesson. A crowd of hustlers broke through the area demanding for their money.

    “You see everthin na by lucky lucky, today Nigeria no get lucky”, a tall sprightly Alhaji with a golden voice observed, trying to calm the crowd.

    “Shut up!” an irate urchin shouted at the man as Okon collared an absconding Baba Lekki.

    “Baba, wetin happen now? Sebi you say we go win dem Argentina six tororo?”

    “Ha Okon dis one pass African magic. Na dat mad boy dem dey call Maradona or Manradana. Na him come charm dem yeye girl. Moremi come become Maarele. Na God go punish him mama”, the old crook whimpered as Okon tightened his grip.

    “Baba he get something I be wan ask. How come dem Argentina no get even one black player?”

    “Ha Okon, black no dey dem dictionary for Maradona land oo. Dem don genocide dem dudu people. Dem Argentina don finis all dem black people. Dem kaput dem patapata. If to say na Brazil dem Africa magic go dabaru dem brain”, Baba Lekki sighed.

    “So, how we go win dem when dem no get dem black people?” Okon said as he relaxed his hold on the old man. Baba Lekki promptly disappeared into an adjoining bush.

  • The Poverty of Wealth

    Thinking of Nigeria as a bastion of poverty seems a paradoxical absurdity. Something simply does not add up. How can a nation so prodigiously endowed with natural resources, so impossibly blessed with clement weather, a nation that still has sixty four per-cent of its land mass uncultivated, be fingered as being in the grip of extreme want and poverty?

    But this is the reality that has hit us in the face with the latest report of the Brookings Institute. Nigeria has now become the poster boy for Biblical poverty and extreme privation in Africa. It is the greatest scandal of human development. If Nigeria was put together to explain why brains and ability matter over natural resources and hospitable environment, the explanation cannot be more convincing. Like a feckless and profligate child from a background of immense wealth, Nigeria has been toying with poverty for a long time. It has now arrived with vengeance.

    Poverty is the condition of absolute human want which dehumanizes earthly existence to a feral fiasco. Anybody who has seen human-beings foraging for food in junk yards and refuse heaps, or taking shelter in abandoned dung hills can be forgiven for thinking that only a thin line separates humankind from their animal cousins. Indeed in conditions of war and extreme social stress, the line is often blurred, and humanity slips back into the state of nature.

    For some countries or human societies, it never rains but pours. Problems pile upon problems. While we are still grappling with the problem of a federal executive embroiled in a bitter power struggle with the legislature and the carnage occasioned by the lingering feud between herders and sedentary farmers, while inter-elite disharmony begins to assume an ominous nation-disabling dimension, a more terrifying social and political incubus has crept upon Nigeria.

    With the news this past week from the respected Brookings Institute that Nigeria has slipped behind India with eighty seven millions of its people living below the poverty line, it is clear that the ruling elite in Nigeria has been issued with an ultimatum to come up with a comprehensive blueprint for social amelioration and inclusive growth or face the grave consequences of mass poverty and radicalized pauperization in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society.

    Let the filthy rich gird their filthy loins in this land. Social vengeance does not discriminate. The goal is not justice but bitter revenge. But let it also be said right away that with the messianic populism of its henchman and General Buhari’s puritanical distaste for corruption, this government has its heart in the right place. But without theoretical anchor and rigorous conceptual scaffolding, messianic populism is just mere hell-raising without any foundation in concrete reality.

    On their own, messianic populism and railing against corruption are mere protestations and declarations of desire. They have never lifted any society or nation from the intricate web and trap of endemic poverty. The government’s hasty dismissal of the Brookings report suffers from insufficient intellectual weight and empirical justification .It must therefore be summarily dismissed as lacking in merit.

    To be sure, the thought of Nigeria being unfavourably compared to India may not be sweet music to the ruling party. With its abysmal slums, its fetid streets, suppurating open sewers and sheer human squalor, India often presents a picture of human society at the desperate end of its tether. But nobody ever imagined that it was going to be easy transiting from a superstitious and deeply feudal society to modernity.

    Yet compared to the Equatorial distemper which roils tropical Africa in general and Nigeria in particular as well as the ethnically inspired ego-fuelled politics, India has many things going for it, particularly the placid nature of its people, the discipline and forbearance engendered by Hindi philosophy and a nationalist elite which shuns obscene wealth and its narcissistic display. More importantly, India might have been colonially conquered but it was never culturally and ideologically subjugated.

    Poverty and the poor have always been part of the human condition. It is there in the holy bible as well as the Qumran. No human society has been able to completely eradicate the scourge of poverty. To ever believe that this is possible is to indulge in communist fantasy. Yet every sane and sober society has always come up with a strategy to combat the more extreme manifestation of poverty, particularly the problem of mass hunger and staggering idiotic inequity. This is why both Jesus Christ and the Holy Prophet were social crusaders and avenging titans against injustice and inequity, unlike the prosperity boondoggle of our modern day religious charlatans.

    The history of humanity is also the history of human struggle against poverty and socially or politically inflicted deprivation. Injustice is a bye product of human advancement. As part of the socialization of humankind as a higher species, it became evident that certain societies and certain individuals were always going to be more adept at deploying human labour to valorize natural resources.

    But this does not mean that those less adept should be allowed to perish or face extermination from sheer want and human fecklessness. The poor may not produce, but as history as shown, they can procure social convulsions. The rich cannot peacefully enjoy their rich cuisine without catering for the palate of the poor.

    In the animal kingdom, it is the Alpha male, due to sheer physical prowess and superior intelligence, that provides solace, succour, security from hunger and marauders until it is dethroned by a more powerful wannabe. Things are pretty stratified and set in marble. A lion cannot give birth to a mouse. Nature does not succumb to abnormalities when it comes to security and the food chain.

    In modern societies, the state is the Alpha male. As socialization proceeded apace, division of labour kicked in. From the revolt of Spartacus, the great slave leader of ancient Rome, through the thirteenth century Magna Carta, the great revolutions that concussed Europe, America and Asia, the most momentous upheavals in human history have been struggles against want and injustice.

    Many modern societies, with ancestral memory frowning and rumbling in the background, have learnt their lessons from these epic rousing of the human spirit. Before the advent of colonization and nascent capitalism, it was easier to address the problems of hunger and extreme want in essentially communitarian and traditional African societies. Nobody was allowed to go hungry. The extremely poor were accommodated in the social scheme and could always scrape by. The Yoruba people famously noted that once hunger is banished from poverty then poverty is dramatically diminished.

    But the insinuation of the capitalist logic of development with its new forces and relations of production as a corollary to the imperative of human advancement has spawned a new concept of ownership and a vast new global tribe of deprived and hungry people completely delinked from the food chain and without much prospects of social amelioration. Hordes of the economically disabled are routinely unleashed on society by the new mode of production. These are the people famously referred to by Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born psychiatrist, as the wretched of the earth.

    To be sure, this is not a problem peculiar to Nigeria and Africa. An extant survey famously indicated that the best period to live in England was in the mid-sixteenth century or the Elizabethan Age. It was a period of literary, cultural and philosophical renaissance in which food was available to everyone. But soon thereafter as the Industrial Revolution began to take firm hold of the society, the sparks began to fly eventuating in royal decapitation in England. In the subsequent French Revolution the scarcity of bread featured as the principal leitmotif and casus belli.

    The western countries have learnt their lessons. They have come up with nationalist elites that do not toy with the plight of the poor or the business of poverty amelioration no matter their party affiliations or ideological hue. In Britain, France and the United States, whenever right-wing conservative governments, insisting that wealth must be created before it can be shared, go too far in their social brutalization of the poor and in rolling back the state, you can be sure that they will be replaced with left-wing governments with a sense of social justice and state responsibility to the wretched and afflicted of the land.

    Unfortunately, Nigeria has proved incapable of throwing up such a nationalist elite or a durable democratic state with structured and disciplined political parties that will correctly read the mood of the people. When Nigerians in their collective anger dismissed the PDP government in 2015, they thought they were electing a genuinely reformist left of centre party capable of redressing the thieving incompetence and social depredations of the ruling party. Three years later but for the anti-corruption drive and feeble capacity-rebuilding, their hope and expectations have not been met.

    Going forward and as a way of plotting our way out of this historic eclipse of the greatest Black conglomeration on earth, we can now summarize with the Brookings report and the Indian paradigm in mind. Firstly, the objective reality suggests that mismanaged oil wealth has turned into a social and political doom for Nigeria with unearned wealth in private pockets fuelling obscene disparities between the very rich and the very poor which in turn propels savage anger, social rancour, ethnic malice, insecurity, the rise of deviant behaviour and social cannibalism.

    Second, Nigeria is prey to an unproductive and endemically corrupt political elite which relies on rent-seeking and predatory extraction. Consequently, it is incapable of adding elementary value to our immense natural resources, not to talk of coming up with visionary capacity-building for engineering growth and boosting knowledge production through the judicious husbandry of human capital.

    Finally, Nigeria is held hostage by a dominant political caste trapped in a feudal time-warp which is bent on dragging the rest of the country down the alley of medieval servitude and prehistoric peonage. Given the current political shenanigans and fixation with elections, unless urgent reformers rise up within its midst to rescue it from its historic miseries or sympathetic strangers combine to nudge it in the right direction, the Northern Question will continue to loom large in the consuming tragedy of the Black race that Nigeria has become.

    India does not export oil. Unlike Nigeria, India is a fairly homogeneous country without the religious, ethnic and cultural fault lines which exacerbate political, social and economic tensions in Nigeria. The killing plains of Jos, Benue and Taraba, which are a function of colonial malice combined with cultural, religious and economic rigidity, are simply unimaginable in contemporary India. The Indian political elite shun obscene wealth and its garish display. This allows them to think productively about the plight of the nation.

    Finally, India is blessed with an old feudal caste which sees the way forward in embracing the future and not in hugging the past. At independence, Pandit Nehru, a self-assured scion of the old Indian nobility and a Cambridge graduate to boot, decreed that if Indians could not produce their own clothes or come up with their own indigenous automobile, then let them continue to trek and walk naked.

    It can now be seen why India with its humongous population is making steady progress in rescuing its people from the poverty trap while Nigeria is not. The Brookings report is a wakeup call and a warning signal. If care is not taken, Nigeria will soon be declared the worst place to live on earth. That would be a real shame, if we still remember what that means.

  • Apocalypse in Lagos

    Whilst we are still on the issue of how unmerited wealth under-develops a nation, it is meet to comment on the events of last Thursday when Dante’s Inferno visited Lagos. It was a scene out some horror film; an apocalyptic nightmare. Where were you on Black Thursday? Yours sincerely was caught in the combustible cauldron of fumes and human fulmination finally making it home on foot at ten in the night having left Lagos for Alausa at 4pm.

    This kind of horror is unthinkable in India, in the Asian tigers and the developed nations of the world. Nigeria is becoming one vast abattoir. This is the time we need to be frank with ourselves. There are two ways of looking at the Thursday tragedy. First, it is a failure of official policy. In civilized countries, the bulk of petroleum products and other inflammable materials are not transported by road. It is a sure recipe for demographic disaster. Those who cannibalized the national shipping Line and the old Nigerian Railway Company have the blood of innocent Nigerians on their head.

    Second, this is a failure of infrastructure and national capacity-building. The Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, the principal arterial route out of the major port and economic capital of the nation, opened to traffic over forty years ago. Since then the population of Lagos and the number of vehicles plying this route have quadrupled.

    Nobody has thought of alternative express routes out of the besieged megalopolis or a Tankers’ beltway at the very least. Meanwhile, the secondary routes leading out of Lagos have been abandoned. With the obvious failure of regional integration staring us in the face, individual states can only do so much.

    But even in this pervasive adversity, we must thank the almighty for small mercies. Justifying the huge outlay the Akin Ambode administration has expended on local security and traffic emergency, the Lagos State Rapid Response Squad swung into immediate action. This is not a question of hearsay as yours sincerely was trapped for hours.

    Amidst the noxious fumes of roasting flesh and burning carcasses of vehicles, these people were at it, re-routing and redirecting traffic, on foot, in special motor cycles and in cars even as they firmly sealed off the locus of disaster. Their stern presence and prompt attention of police also prevented criminality and delinquency.

    We must also commend the basic humanity and decency of the average Nigerian wayfarers. As soon as disaster struck, their concern and generosity of spirit kicked in with several commuters in cars, buses, motorcycles and on foot phoning other commuters and communicating alternative routes away from the inferno. While still trapped in the car, yours sincerely received distraught calls from all over the world as selfies of the carnage went viral. It was learnt that concerned residents of adjoining estates quickly mobilized their denizens for emergency evacuation.

    May the soul of the departed rest in peace.

  • Party Trauma in Tropical Africa

    Going into a make or mar convention, the lingering incoherence and disorganized nature of the ruling APC appear to have infected every aspect of governance in Nigeria. Once again, budget appraisal and implementation are the principal casualties. With President Mohammadu Buhari flaying the National Assembly for unhelpful and unwarranted loading of the budget, and with its leadership replying in turn that it is no rubber stamp collective, it is obvious that the last has not been heard about the organic crisis state parties in post-military Nigeria.

    Arguably the most critical misfortune that can befall a fledgling democracy is the mutual estrangement of the legislature and the executive. This is more so where most members of both arms of government are supposed to belong to the same party. It is a tested template for political anarchy. Although we run a presidential system, the different factions of the APC are behaving like adversarial parties in a parliamentary democracy.

    In the climate of mutual recrimination and overweening concern for private interest, Nigeria must worry that neither the executive nor the legislature remembered to put in the one billion dollar earlier appropriated for arms procurement. This money is neither a security vote nor a gratuitous donation to the executive. And it is neither in the 2017 budget.

    It is this open-ended voodoo budgeting, lacking in rigour and rationality and covertly encouraged by both arms of government, which gives room for legislative brigandage, bureaucratic criminality and executive venality. Nigeria is a creation of perpetual conflicts and the more it tries to paper over the cracks and the crisis of modernity, the more it erupts in the most unlikely of places.

    Going forward, it is obvious that without a genuinely modernizing elite that will deepen the foundation of democratic rule and strengthen the scaffolding of its political institutions, Nigeria is a nonstarter. Whether this inevitable modernization will take place after a radical surgery for its neo-feudal state or a drastic restructuring of its antiquated national architecture remains to be seen. Either way, or both ways, it is obvious that party structure in contemporary Nigerian politics is in a state of traumatic stress.

    The APC has been at it for only four years. Yet it is showing all the signs of being another Aboliga, Ayi Kwei Armah’s celebrated man-child, which grew up to full manhood on the day it was born only to die later the same day. The PDP ruled for sixteen years with virtually nothing to show for it. Like its NPN forbear, it was conceived as a pan-Nigerian congregation with the aim of securing stability and elite cohesion. But lacking in ideological soul and genuine nationalist motivation, both swiftly degenerated into neo-patrimonial cartels of primitive looting and state banditry.

    Before we look for a redemptive route out of this peculiar mess, we may have to broach the big question. Given the ease and facility with which parties decompose in Tropical Africa, and in the face of authoritarian traditional overlay and the phenomenon of Equatorial despotism in which the rule of strongmen overrides the rule of law, can we say that certain African societies are not intellectually and temperamentally equipped to grow structured political parties?

    As we have noted several times in this column, the ANC was founded in 1912 and did not come to power until the early nineties. Yet it did not disintegrate or splinter into its components parts. Under majority Black rule, the ANC has grown from strength to strength managing leadership tussles with aplomb and political sophistication.

    In Zimbabwe the ruling party, backed by the military, recently ousted its veteran leader and father of the nation, Robert Mugabe, in a textbook political putsch which will be discussed for years to come. Neither the party nor the nation fissured. Everything was over in a matter of days and the nation returned to normality. Two Sundays ago, the son of the current president of Zimbabwe gave the western world a riveting account of how he and his father escaped Mugabe’s killer squads as they fled through the Mozambican border into South Africa.

    In Namibia, the ruling party has been at it since independence almost thirty years ago with several changes at the top. The party remains as cohesive as ever. When its veteran leader returned to the nation from exile after the struggle for independence, his mother who had not seen her son for over twenty years, was just one of the women clutching bouquets at the airport. Thereafter, she did not assume any bogus extra-constitutional title.

    But as soon as you cross the tropics from the Namib Desert and head towards Equatorial Africa, things begin to assume a more colourful and fantastical dimension. It is political burlesque at its most outlandish. Contradictions abound. You begin to encounter the guerrilla “democracies” of Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, the two Congos and Chad ruled by tested warlords.  The inchoate “democracies” of Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Sudan, Egypt and Algeria dominated by the military oligarchy and of course the dynastic autocracies of Togo, Gabon and Morocco.

    There are two things going for the Southern African democracies which are lacking in Tropical Africa. First is the complete absence of military incursion which has allowed the political institutions to thrive, particularly in Botswana, the fourth Southern African country. Secondly, protracted wars of national liberation in South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe and to some extent Mozambique, have foisted on the nations an indigenous nationalist elite which, whatever their other faults, have been forced to think of the nation first and only secondarily about ethnic affiliation.

    Given these historic handicaps, it is obvious that we have to go back to the drawing board in order to strengthen democracy in Nigeria. A sure fire approach is to embark on a radical restructuring of the political architecture of the nation in such a way that will remove the statist logjam and the overconcentration of power at the centre. As we have said many times, this competitive federalism will not only unleash the energy and creative genius of our various people, it will also direct attention away from the violent, winner takes all struggle for central authority.

    With its feeding bottle forcibly removed, the old PDP has nothing more to offer in terms of re-envisioning the nation and reinventing its party politics. Yet it is obvious that the APC dominant fraction also nurses a deep animus towards a comprehensive restructuring of the polity, despite occasional harrumphing by its Southern subalterns. Given that reality and what we have stated several times that restructuring requires substantial elite buy in, the contention has been forcibly dragged back to party politics and elections.

    As its fascist clearing house prepares to steamroll the rest of the country into electoral compliance through the power of incumbency and the control of the security apparatus, it is clear that the APC, despite its emergence from a purportedly different ideological direction, is travelling the same route as the dominant parties of the early republics as well as the accursed PDP of the Fourth.

    This may be seen as a personal triumph for the conservative elements in the party. But it is a hollow triumph, and it cannot endure given the ethnic configuration of the country. This power pragmatism in which electoral promises are made only to be ignored, in which public pledges of cabinet reshuffle are casually made and casually rebuffed grates badly on more libertarian lobes.

    More importantly, a situation in which a substantial number of resentful party faithful are corralled into meek submission out of the fear of judicial retribution is bound to come into violent collision with extra-party forces demanding genuine democracy and authentic electoral integrity in the days ahead.

    We are already beginning to witness the stirring of this radical maelstrom in the number of disaffected party members deserting the mainstream parties and the rising number of independent candidates demanding for a national platform to pursue legitimate political ambition and aspirations. Given the fractious and ego-driven nature of national politics, it is unlikely that this disparate multitude of nay sayers will jell into a coherent bastion of militant opposition very soon. But when they eventually coalesce into coherent disaffection, state parties may find themselves imperilled.

    Given this background, if APC still hopes to be the political party that will save the nation from further trauma, it will have to urgently reinvent itself. The ruling party cannot continue in this disorderly and dysfunctional manner. If it retains its earlier dominance in vital sections of the country, it is because a clear and viable alternative is not yet in the horizon. But dominance is not the same thing as hegemony as dominance can crumble with the twinkling of an eye while hegemony is more entrenched, longer lasting and better sustained.

    Its convention this weekend may well be the vital shot in the arm that the party badly needs. A change of leadership in the party hierarchy is in the offing. Adams Aliu Oshomhole, the putative pretender to the throne from the periphery of old Edo Empire, is poised to replace John Odigie-Oyegun from the metropolitan centre of the same empire.

    Despite the veneer of Socialist hell-raising, Oshiomhole is in reality an astute deal-maker and pragmatic wheeler-dealer to boot. He is also an outstanding political strategist. It is expected that he will try to bring the disparate factions of the party together, a task that eluded the otherwise cultured and dignified John Oyegun. Oyegun’s problems can be linked to the fact that he developed strong personal interests against the strong personal interests of his original benefactors.

    It is hard to see how a man of Oshiomhole’s strong and competitive personality will also not develop strong personal interests in the course of managing a riotous and unwieldy amalgam of countervailing personalities. But he will be starting on a better and cleaner slate. Despite his endorsement by the presidency, he is also quite chummy with the ACN fraction of the party.

    How this will pan out depends on how far the dominant conservative wing of the party with its jaded anti-democratic populism can be persuaded to embrace political modernization in the larger interest of the country as well as its own interest. Oshiomhole has his work very well cut out for him. For now, APC remains in the trauma ward.

  • Okon sends Dariye off with detergent as Baba Lekki celebrates Mama Ewa

    With Joshua Bichi Dariye kissing the judicial canvas after being poleaxed by the relentless and implacable Justice Banjoko, the list of executive convicts appears to be lengthening. There are reports that some of the prospective prisoners are considering fleeing into exile or some more terminal form of self-deportation.

    Jeez!!!! Does anybody remember a legendary Lagos magistrate of the sixties known for his zero tolerance for criminality and social misdemeanour?  Magistrate Ogunmuyiwa, aka Baba Ewa, was a dreaded scourge of criminals and social deviants. Any minor infraction invited maximum penalty.His nickname probably came from the fact that black beans was the staple diet of prisoners in those days, and Baba Ewa piled it up on them.

    According to Baba Lekki, Baba Ewa has resurrected in Abuja to drive the fear of the lord into state criminals. To protect Mama Ewa, Baba Lekki has been consulting some crack herbalists for the charm of amuniti. As usual, Okon has been in the thick of things, berating the government for not being punitively proactive. The morning after Dariye was convicted, the crazy boy barged in waving a copy of a daily which captured the former governor heaving and sobbing after the law finally caught up with him.

    “Oga dis go serve as dem detergent to all the crooks and criminals”, the mad boy screamed. Snooper noticed the grammatical howler but chose not to correct in case it might encourage the mad boy.

    “But oga see dem yeye government, when you wan praise dem for better thing dem go do dem Abasha again. Why dem dey close border against rice. No be against them politicians dem for close border. I hear say one of dem dey dig tunnel from Shaki to Kutonu. Kai dis Yoruba people sef!!!”

    “Okon, leave me alone. I am not interested”, snooper snapped. But rather than dissuading the mad boy, it actually encouraged him to inch closer.

    “Oga I no say na becos of that una fat friend who dey come thief my soup after him wife don beat am finish. I wan make dem Abuja woman giam two hundred years as detergent”, the mad boy said and stormed away.

  • Ondo agog for the Ademuleguns

    To the cultured and pleasant ambience of Ondo metropolis this last Friday for the final burial rites of Madam Juliana Ejiola Ademulegun, nee Awosika and relic of the late Brigadier Samuel Ademulegun, a military top notch who was assassinated during the first military putsch on January 15, 1966,  and beloved father of the media mogul, Kole, among other outstanding children.

    Snooper always finds Ondo city deeply fascinating and its people highly civilized with a hint of aristocratic swashbuckling. With their imperial carriage and lordly disposition, one often wonders how they arrived at that strategic corner piece of Yorubaland and where they came from. Something simply does not add up. With Ondo royal blood running deep in his own veins through his paternal grandmother, yours sincerely should know.

    This cool rainy Friday, it was as if the entire town poured out of its ancient redoubts to honour its most illustrious military son and one of its most distinguished families. It has been a good month for Ondo town. First, another illustrious son of the town, Gani Fawehinmi, famously described by this columnist as the legal Spartacus, was being posthumously decorated by the federal authorities for his noble and heroic stirring at the behest of a great nation stricken and brutalised by military rule. Now as if by some divinely ordained circuitous closure, the people of Ondo were saying goodbye to the wife of the highly regarded military chieftain fifty two years after he was murdered in bed.

    As it was to be expected, the atmosphere was exultant and triumphant. If only the dead can look back. Right from the church through the reception, it was clear that the Ademulegun children had cultivated the cream of the society. It was a glittering spectacle, shorn of the pomposity and pride of prevailing power. This was the old Yoruba High Society putting up a spectacle while quietly and calmly putting everyone in their place. The Yoruba people surely know how to put people in their place.

    The ancient crooner, King Sunny Ade, did not disappoint with his electrifying guitar and masterful footwork. You begin to wonder when age and accumulated physical overdraft will slow down this Ondo prince  but it is obvious that the septuagenarian lad is not for turning yet as he capered and cantered to his own infectious lyrics.

    Snooper found himself in a vantage position to observe the high and mighty of the society, courtesy of his former Higher School Certificate student at Federal Government College, Kaduna in the mid-seventies, Gbenga Ademulegun. How art the young grown!!! Gbenga has since gone on to higher things including executive directorships of two major banks. It has been a show-stopper and moveable feast from Ondo. It is good to be good.

     

  • And it Rained in Lagos (At the Mercy of National Contradictions)

    There was always something mystical and metaphysical about June 12, 1993.  It makes one to shudder at the fate that awaits those who conspire against the immanent destiny of this potentially greatest conglomeration of Black people. Twenty five years ago, no remarkable rainfall was recorded in any part of the country. But as soon as President Buhari made historic restitution last Tuesday, a rumbling deluge which reminds one of the wailing of a hysterical woman fell on Lagos.

    In the end, it came against the run of play. A week after praising to the high heavens the principal military muscle behind the annulment of the freest and fairest election in the history of the country, President Mohammadu Buhari suddenly discovered the will and visionary resolve to honour the winner and more significantly to apologize to the nation for that epic infraction of the national will by his old constituency. By so doing, the ramrod general has managed to cauterize—if not completely heal— an open and festering sore of the nation.

    This is one of those supreme moments of history roiling with intriguing ironies, when nobility of purpose trumps personal limitations and national contradictions to gift a traumatized nation the possibility of a new beginning. In a momentary lapse of dialectical rigour, an otherwise heroic and feisty Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka pleaded with General Buhari to stop confusing the nation. But how is this possible? The confusion and contradictions will and must continue while we are appalled and we applaud in equal measure.

    As somebody famously stated, we may all have to thank contradictions. To the extent that contradictions are a dynamic expression of the push and shove of contending and conflicting forces in a multi-ethnic nation, they can only be engaged and cannot be avoided. Contradictions are not necessarily evil or amoral, even though they appear to be. Nations and people must learn to profit from contradictions even as they rock and tug at their very fabric.

    The June 12 1993 electoral debacle was a product of a national contradiction between the military state and the nation: whether a dominant and authoritarian military caste can also assume electoral overlordship and veto power over the people, and whether the Nigerian Army is superior to the army of revolting Nigerians. With the retreat of the army to the barracks in 1999 and the Buhari Declaration of June 12, 2018, the contradiction has been resolved in favour of the Nigerian people. So, nations move forward but in a rather unpredictable manner.

    In the end, perhaps nothing can beat the description of the annulment by the federal authorities as a product of elite conspiracy and collusion. The irony of it all is that the recognition of MKO Abiola is itself another instance of elite conspiracy and collusion, but this time around in the right historic direction. With the coalition that brought him to power fast unspooling and with his electoral fortunes taking a severe dip in critical constituencies, General Buhari needed a masterstroke.

    But one man’s lucky dip is another man’s unlucky decline. The Buhari Declaration marks the final implosion of the Obasanjo Settlement of 1998. Nothing can revive a dead donkey. The principal actors are in disarray. Those who put Obasanjo in power twice are about to remove him from pedestal. With his back to the wall, the crusty old warrior is unlikely to go down without a major uproar.

    Yet General Obasanjo had all the time in the world and the personal authority to lay the ghost of the unjust annulment. But his fear of the northern power establishment and what appears to be an animus for Abiola led to the gravest political error of his remarkable career. Without batting an eyelid, the same establishment has reversed him and put him on the slab for political skinning.

    Sweet indeed are the uses of adversity. What we are witnessing is the struggle for the entrenchment of a new hegemonic power bloc. Without the collapse of the Obasanjo Settlement, this would have been unthinkable, and without the ascendancy of the coalition that brought in General Buhari, this would have been impossible.

    If there is anything constant in this contradictory churning of events, it is the need to be strategically broadminded enough to profit from the negative side-effects of historical developments. Let this serve as a travel advisory to those playing a dangerous game with cold-blooded power mongers as well as isolationist power neophytes without a coherent strategy.

    Although annulment from military direction appears to have had its day, certain conditions which predispose a nation to oligarchic power seizures and annulment by other means still subsist, particularly the overconcentration of power at the centre and its harsh unitarist worldview. This is not the time to take the eyes off the ball. As it has been said of chess, the conventionality of the game is the very reason for the oddity of the knight’s move. And it rained in Nigeria.