Category: Tatalo Alamu

For Akinwumi Isola, scholar, humanist, gentleman-griot and philosopher

Aesopian times are here. And so are Aesopian fables several millennia after the original. The Greek master story teller must be wondering in his grave why Nigerians are bent on giving animals a bad name. When their economic crimes catch up with them, they ascribe it to animals, particularly snakes and monkeys. When their political perfidies catch up with them, they think it is because man is an animal. Aesop gave animals human attributes while Nigerians give human qualities to their animals. So while Aesop humanizes animals, Nigerians animalize humans.

Karl Marx once wondered aloud about the beauty and perplexing nature of ancient Greek art that Aesop so gloriously represents. They put a spanner in his theoretical works and astronomically brainy postulations. If they truly represent the infancy of mankind and the cradle of early civilization, then how come they have continued to give us such aesthetic pleasure and satisfaction in the brave new world of modern technology and civilizational advancement?

The great German philosopher could not answer his own poser. Neither are we about to. And so Nigeria is awash with Aesopian fables: tales that are tall and telling; songs that singe the flesh in their raw volatility. They are not capacity-building adventures of freedom and heroism. They are fabulations that hark back to primitive society where everybody is the enemy of anybody.

This the sad lot of societies burdened by an unhappy consciousness. In this new realm of human necessity, animal derring-do trumps human adventures. Snakes are consuming humongous amount of money. Monkeys are following suit. Rodents are sacking presidential residences. Rats have taken over major hotels.

Ask the self-same Senator Shehu Sani who once condoled with snooper over his overnight ordeal with a live-in rodent in a major hotel in Kaduna. Tithes have been known to disappear in the mouth of church mice leaving men of God bewailing their plight in the hands of the mouse of God. Like Aesopian fables, do these tales also have a hidden import?

Why are Africans such a contrary people, Aesop must be wondering. You give them a tale, they turn it into a teller or a tally for money-spiriting. You borrow them a yarn, they turn into a yardstick for villainy. Even a joke in their mouth is no longer a funny matter. Something truly new often comes out of Africa according to that accursed Roman racist.

Despite his gentle, urbane façade, Akinwumi Isola was a fierce warrior of decolonization; a militant cultural nationalist like many members of his generation. His open personable mien and lush grey beard eminence fronted for an unyielding commitment to make the world a better place. As a scholar of African oral tradition and theorist of its cultural production, he would have seen through the ironies embedded in western cultural chauvinism and exclusivist doctrine of superior artistic attainment.

Animal tales are archetypal folklore that is present in all human societies and at every point in the evolution of civilization and society. They are not the exclusive preserve of western society. Every human society has its unique animal tales. For every Aesop that survived to achieve immortality, there are thousands of equally talented African story tellers who never made it as a result of the brittle and perishable nature of the oral commodity.

Having survived early rural encroachment, Akinwumi Isola, like Aesop, is destined for immortality, an African writer of tales. This is a tell-tale irony which tells its own tale. A writer of tales is a singing writer in a condition of literary encirclement. It is like calling somebody an oral literary artist, a genetic contradiction in terms. As texts, Isola’s stories are frozen and frigid, stripped of the master’s sonorous voice and the sheer musical cadence of the ancient bard. The Pied Piper of Labode is gone forever.

But if both Aesop and Isola are master story tellers, there is also a critical biographical difference between the two. Aesop was a former Greek slave. Isola was never a slave but a proud freeborn. And he was nobody’s fool to the bargain. But modernity also has its travails. As an intellectual and paid scholar, the post-colonial condition in Nigeria in which the great man from Labode village operated was no better than that of an indentured slave in colonial peonage.

In post-independence Nigeria, the intellectual sub-class appears to be particularly despised by the dominant political class no matter its provenance, that is whether military or civilian. Indeed, it is often argued with historical perspicuity that intellectuals somehow prefer the despotism of military rule in Nigeria and their status as a subordinated sub-class because they are better cultivated and more easily co-opted into the massive class and power projects which open up under military rule than the restrictive template and narrow, self-sufficient platform of professional politicians.

General Babangida’s aborted Third Republic and open-ended Transition programme is a classic example of this massive co-optation of members of the intellectual class under the guise of a major national project of political redemption. There are influential scholarly surveys valorizing this point of view.  It is however worthy of note that only a negligible fraction of the intellectual class who found themselves so co-opted ever found their way back to the originating summons.

Military rule has deepened and problematized the Nigerian ruling class project in a way that could not have been foreseen or foretold, and Ishola was to pay a heavy price for belonging to the wrong social stratum. It will take a future sociologist of power without conscience and confidence to properly analyse why the intellectual labour-provider had become such an object of ridicule and scorn in Nigeria. Suffice it to note that the more de-intellectualized and de-energized politics have become in contemporary Nigeria, the more despised and disregarded are members of the intellectual class.

This is why animal tales and Aesopian riddles are ruling the roost in contemporary Nigeria. Nigeria has become one huge animal farm; a massive slave plantation of inequities on a staggering and idiotic scale. The slaves have become quite restive and everybody is stealing everybody blind. When institutions which safeguard and guarantee civilization have all but collapsed, we are no better than our animal cousins. In fact animals are probably better because they have no illusion or pretensions about the true reality of their existence.

At the beginning of this civilian dispensation, the man who was destined to become its prime mover and principal stakeholder wrote a book which he famously titled: This Animal Called Man. He was bemoaning man’s animal cruelties to other people in Nigeria and the callous indignities he had been subjected to by his erstwhile military subordinates who impounded him and even dared to sentence him to death.

But as soon as he gathered the levers of power for the second time in the history of the nation, he set about creating the conditions which was to lead to the revival of Aesop and the transformation of the nation into a feral zoo of anomic possibilities; an arrant bestiary. It remains to be seen whether he did it to pay back his feudal tormentors or whether he was too psychologically damaged to even appreciate the damage he did to the national fabric. Now as he is about to find out, not even the falconer can summon his own falcon as political anarchy is loosed on the land.

Where and when a great writer and literary statesman falls by his pen, the land his nourished by his insights and uncanny knowledge of the human condition. The truly great writer is superior to the politician and the soldier in this respect. Whoever remembers the rulers of Tsarist Russia at the time of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky? They roused the rabble and belong forever to the rabble.

Akinwumi Isola was a man of exceptional intellectual and artistic clairvoyance. Long before it dawned on us, the great man had seen the vultures arriving to feast on the beasts. About seven years ago, yours sincerely had the honour of inviting Ishola to give a keynote address to a socio-political gathering on behalf of Babatunde Raji Fashola and Lagos State.

After a rousing bravura performance, Isola ended with his own Aesopian riddle.

Ologbo lo jale

Ni won bamu aja

L’obo ba ho

Eleda obo ni koni je k’obo s’ewon.

Translated roughly, it means that it was the cat that stole but it was the dog that was apprehended whereupon the monkey fled. Only the monkey’ maker will save it from unjust imprisonment. Now that the snakes and monkeys have arrived, the great man has slipped away with his customary gentility and good breeding. Not even Aesop could have put up such a class act. May the great man rest in peace.

Once again, and within the very short spate of four years, Nigeria has been thrown into deep mourning arising from the kidnapping and mass abduction of its youth. Hooked by the official hype and hoopla that the pernicious Boko Haram sect has been completely defanged and degraded, nobody ever believed that this damning occurrence was a possibility.

It was all beyond the purview of realistic imagination. After all, it has been said that thunder does not strike twice in the same place. But here is thunder striking twice and with devastating and disarming ease, and in the same Yobe State, too.  The regularity of accidents is a function of the irregularity of the accidented.

So, while we are still searching for the bulk of the Chibok girls, the Boko Haram insurgents have now added the Dapchi girls to their horrific tally. It doesn’t get more eerily chilling than this. Like a historic nemesis, Boko Haram has once again deflowered the flower of our youth and defiled our virginal political innocence about the fate of a country seemingly wedded to calamity. Coming at a time when significant swathes of the country are foaming with blood occasioned by ethnic and religious hostilities, nothing can be more alarming in its apocalyptic possibilities.

As a nation, we have never appeared more vulnerable; as a people, we have never felt more collectively naked. If the almighty Nigerian Armed Forces, arguably the most formidable military machine in Tropical Africa, could be subjected to this systematic humiliation by a rag-tag militia, then something is wrong, very wrong. Something has gone awry in Nigeria.

In the end, perhaps nothing can beat the merciless acuity of General Godwin Alabi-Isama’s characterisation of Nigeria as a traumatized nation. In a TVC early morning show this last Tuesday, the plucky war veteran lamented the general anarchy and anomie threatening to overwhelm the Nigerian firmament. The old Brigadier could not have been more perceptive.

As hostage-taking and mass abduction take the front burner of national discourse once again, it is perhaps appropriate to add that the Nigerian state itself has become a hostage to misfortune. Increasingly authoritarian, it is less and less authoritative with its massive writ over the nation severely circumscribed by malfeasance in all its ramifications.

Nepotistic corruption and its corollary of squalid incompetence reduce the moral and psychological writ of a state leaving in their wake massive alienation and creative contempt on the part of the citizenry even as armed critiques from disaffected groups render huge chunks of the nation ungovernable with the compromised state unable to adjudicate with fairness and wisdom or rein in its own errant employees.

Statism without moral authority and political integrity leads to stasis and authoritarian distemper. As the Nigerian state predates on its own citizens in an attempt to keep the appearance of seriousness and solemnity, it also becomes a prey to monstrous national and international forces beyond its capacity to coerce and forcibly contain.

The state as a hostage is not a funny sight to behold. In order to mask its inner insecurities, frailties and failures; in order to ward off hostile international interlocutors and sundry local predators, the state resorts to comic solemnity. But even its enervated frown is a jocose distortion of the face which provokes howls of hilarity from the populace. In its grim buffooneries, the state becomes an object of infernal jokes; comic put-down and cosmic comedy.

In its utter disorientation and appalling helplessness, the state often brings the burlesque of horror on its own head. In the twenty first century, it is on official record that the Nigerian federal authorities abandoned the presidential sanctuary to rodents, halting presidential proceedings for a whole week. Increasingly, animals come to the rescue of besieged humans.

Snakes and monkeys are said to swallow humungous funds salted away by executive thieves. The serpentine stalkers are now accorded the status of revered royalties in some communities. In this new animal farm, snakes are the superior sub-species. Our poor animal cousins must be tired of this monkey business. Pythagoras, the ace Greek philosopher who first advanced the thesis that the soul of our grandma may happily inhabit an animal—according to Shakespeare—, must be shedding tears of joy in his grave. Haba, since when has it become a crime to come as a snake?

The greatest loser in this comedy of horror would appear to be President Mohammadu Buhari and his re-election bid. In boxing parlance, it is obvious that the president has taken a bad beat. Even an amateur political psychologist can glimpse behind the general’s glacial imperturbability, the trauma and torment eating away at him.

In his quiet sober moments, the general from Daura must be ruing the day he decided to trade the evergreen memory of his first coming for a civilian bid for the presidency in a post-annulment Nigeria whose ethnic equations and historical disequilibrium have dramatically deteriorated.  The magnitude of disaster this time around is likely to offset the magnificence of the first coming.

In its uncanny cunning and the unfathomable cruelties of its tricks, history is a merciless master indeed. This time around too, it has decided to play a cruel trick on the straight, ramrod general. Up till this week and the Dapchi disaster, there were many Nigerians willing to overlook General Buhari’s manifest failings and weaknesses as a leader in the interest of the stability and security he has brought to a hitherto nation-threatening situation. Even his worst critics are compelled to give him stellar grades in the security department and his hands-on approach to the Boko Haram crisis.

But all that seem to have vanished in a bonfire. If the developments can be traced to General Buhari’s mortal enemies, they could not have chosen a more devastating and damning moment to strike. If on the other hand, it is the handiwork of fate, then it is obviously summoning whatever remains of the general’s reserve of courage, resilience and statesmanship. Without this extraordinary reserve of character, the re-election project is fatally doomed, an invitation to greater national calamity whatever the outcome.

Rather than expending valuable energy and resources in a re-election bid which is taking the nation nowhere except to the edge of the apocalypse, President Buhari may find it more profitable to spend the remaining part of his tenure on a spiritual, political and historical stocktaking which may yield the insight as to why the procedure he has adopted this time around and the type of primordial personnel he has chosen to work with have failed him and the nation miserably.

As this column has noted several times, this is not the time for election-mongering. This is the time to look at the fundament turning the nation into an unviable project and an ungovernable entity in progress. As long as the current organogram of the nation subsists, no government at the federal level can or will succeed.

The forces holding Nigeria hostage are legion and for the sake of analytical clarity they can be isolated into some major segments. First, it is obvious that somewhere, there is an international conspiracy bent on dismembering the nation, fracturing it into a collection of anomic statelings and autonomous tribal enclaves which may spell doom for Africa and the Black race as a whole.

To fight this menace on a unified front, you need the emergence of a truly nationalist pan-Nigerian ruling class such as appeared briefly in the run up to independence and which disappeared in the sectarian chaos that led to the first coup. But as we have discovered after forty years of civilian reconfiguration of the nation, no unified nationalist class can emerge from the current structural chaos of the nation.

Consequently, this leads us to the second and major hostage taker of the Nigerian post-colonial state. This is the statist gridlock that has turned Nigeria into a vast political garrison with civilian subalterns thinking they are emancipated citizens. As it is currently configured, Nigeria is an architectural nightmare; a magnificent but uninhabitable edifice that is also a continental health hazard because no one knows what will finally bring down the roof.

This structural misconfiguration has a logical and genetic offshoot in the security architecture of the nation which renders both state and nation very vulnerable indeed. A security architecture which is as lopsided as it is severely limiting and self-constricting can never excel in the surveillance responsibilities necessary to secure the sustenance, stability and ultimate survival of the nation. More dangerously, the sealed state it superintends is open hostage to internal and international adventurers bent on bringing the nation to its heels.

We can see this security nightmare in the service rivalry, the professional perfidy, the fierce mutual distrust and the open trading of blame and tackles between the police and the military in the aftermath of the Dapchi tragedy. Either through internal sabotage or superior local surveillance, it is obvious that the Boko Haram people were aware of the movements of Nigerian troops and knew the precise moment to strike with devastating precision.

In the course of his telephone intervention this past Tuesday, General Alabi-Isama bemoaned the summary abrogation of the old E-Branch of the Nigerian police by the military authorities. Because it is closer to the ground and could mix and slum it out with the local populace, Police intelligence is often superior to military intelligence in civil espionage and it could be critically counterproductive if it is not deployed as a result of service resentment and rivalry.

More than fifty years after, one continues to marvel at the E-Branch report of the Nzeogwu mutiny in all its painstaking and chilling clarity as well as its superior fidelity to actual facts. Not even the most elementary details escaped the constabulary spooks. In the aftermath of the Orkar coup of 1990, it was obvious that the police were aware of the suspicious stockpiling of arms in Ikorodu but decided to let the military authorities fall flat on their face as a result of service resentment.

Several decades after, the security nightmare continues to haunt the nation and has now brought international shame and obloquy in the aftermath of a double-whammy mass-abduction of innocent pupils. When it becomes the remit of the United Nations to appeal to local insurgents to free abducted pupils from murderous captivity, the nation itself is not far away from a UN trusteeship.

What a day that would be for the most populous and prestigious Black nation on earth! If this looming catastrophe does not concentrate our mind, one wonders what will. In the event, the most pressing hostage problem in Nigeria is the fact that the hegemonic feudal ruling class has allowed its fear of modernity and modernization to take it hostage and it has decided to take the rest of the country hostage along.

This is perhaps the most serious hostage taking ever witnessed by the Black person. It is proving far more devastating than the slave trade. As long as the situation persists, Nigeria will remain a captive nation. Nothing, and in particular this bogus federalism, will work. No election will survive the initial euphoria. As its vital components begin to feel the heat of terminal decline and desuetude, many will want out. The most daring colonial experience in nation-formation that the world has seen will be crying for euthanasia.