The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • Elephant and Castle (The Political Economy of Royal Succession)

    Just in case you are thinking of the huge and sprawling shopping complex to the South east of metropolitan London, this is not about shopping. Or rather let us just say that this is about shopping for a president in a royal jungle. It is about the political economy of succession in an animal farm.  All animals are equal, but some animals are truly more equal than others.

    Sorry folks, we have to return to the feral and furry realm of animals once more. A few weeks back, we had thought that we were done with animal tales. But there are compelling reasons to return to the magic world of crawlies and good old Comrade Napoleon. This is what happens when the tools of conventional Political Science fail dismally to explain or grasp the dynamics of an unfurling political drama.

    Conventional Political Science rests on a set of stable variables for its analytical validity and integrity. To a large extent, you can predict the outcome of the inevitable collision of human and social forces. After all, when you have eliminated all that is impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth, to appropriate the great Sherlock Holmes. But in the post-colonial jungle, nothing is set and everything is variable.  It is the ultimate nightmare of the political scientist.

    You would have thought that only a year after the last presidential election and given the dire and fraught situation of the country, a nasty succession battle would be the last thing on the mind of our political class. You would have thought that amidst country-wide social unrest and given the fact that the north of the nation has virtually imploded politically and economically from the Boko Haram scourge, presidential election would be the last thing on the mind of politicians.

    You would have thought that the conventional wisdom is to fix what is broken first before deciding who should handle it. But you are profoundly mistaken.  This is Nigeria, Blackman’s own country. And who would have thought that at this particular moment the Jonathan presidency would come to resemble the Yar’Adua presidency in its inert and futile probing like a stalled caterpillar and its mix of political and physiological ailments? It is all beyond our human ken. It points at some malignant tricks of some powerful occult forces.

    If anybody had thought that the next presidential election or the impending succession battle would be fought over the Boko Haram plague or how to secure the political stability of the nation by redesigning its grand architecture, they had better perish the thought.  A plantain plantation or Banana Republic does not require architectonic wonder. Just allow the oil to flow and all will be well.

    It may be an economy based on extractive predation, but it is an economy all the same. After all there is demand and there is supply, which is the first law of economics.  Secure the oil rig first and the electoral rigging can come later. This is the political economy of royal succession in an animal farm.

    Last week, there were some significant moves on the chessboard which foreshadow a great battle of will and wits in the coming months. It points towards another epic succession battle. It is a play of giants and both the grass and the grassroots are already trembling. Against the selectorate, the electorate have no chance. The people only vote after the king has been chosen for them. This past week, the elephant rumbled and the castle quaked as if it has suffered a tectonic concussion. Let us return to the elephant and the castle.

    With its mammoth brains, the elephant is gifted with phenomenal memory. It neither forgives nor forgets. Its powers of photographic recall are a tad short of the miraculous. It remembers human faces and scant topographic features. It stalks those who have attempted to harm it with chilling resolve. It often lies in wait for those who would ambush it. When roused to fury and indignation, the elephant is a truly formidable picture of elemental rage and umbrage, tearing at and pulling out everything in sight and out of sight.  Its capacity for absorbing punishment is legendary and even in death—as the Yoruba will attest—the skull of an elephant is no luggage for children.

    In anger and angst, not even the castle is safe and secure from the elephant, more so when the elephant itself has sojourned twice in the castle. A bid to secure permanent residency met with massive popular discontent in which the earth quaked with towering indignation and disgust. The elephant retreated in shame and misery. But it has not forgotten old business or forgiven old businessmen. In military parlance, it is known as discreet evacuation of troops while awaiting reinforcement.

    Last week, Nigeria’s surviving pachyderm from the Jurassic Age, the irrepressible and inevitable General Olusegun Obasanjo, finally roused himself to political battle but from the economic trenches.  With well-controlled indignation and in an act of political marksmanship quite stunning for a man of his advanced age, Obasanjo took the economic policy of his political protégé to the cleaners. The proposed introduction of the 5,000 naira mega-bill, he averred, was not only going to further compound the economic miseries of Nigerians, it was bound to fuel massive inflation.

    All hell was let loose at the castle. This was the political equivalent of Pearl Harbour when the Japanese suddenly overwhelmed the imperial might of America. You would have thought that as a distinguished member of the Council of States and Jonathan’s political benefactor and godfather, Obasanjo had a safe and secure communication channel, a hotline as they say, to communicate his misgivings to the presidency. But this is what late M.K.O Abiola famously described as “high-wire politics”.

    A  succession war is in full swing. The elephant has bared its battle-tested trunk. Knowing fully well that transformation is the kernel of Jonathan’s message and self-declared mission, and knowing fully well that a sound economic policy is the heart of transformation, the great elephant has wrapped its trunk around the presidency’s soft and septic underbelly.

    This is a textbook military operation, a bold Panzer strike at the jugular before the mopping up operation. Once Jonathan is rendered combat-ineffective, it will be a question of time before his limping presidency is taken out of contention. Obasanjo is a past master of the politics of delegitimation. His artillery bombardment of Babangida’s “deficits of honour, credibility and integrity” prepared the ground for the Minna General’s crucial lapse of concentration and hurried exit from power.

    The same gambit led to the eventual unraveling of Alhaji Shehu Shagari, General Mohamadu Buhari and lately the Yar’Adua presidency. In the particular case of Alhaji Shagari, Obasanjo gave a damning and devastating critique towards the end. When the Daily Times deliberately published a garbled and mischievous version, the irate general sent a blistering rejoinder. Abacha who could read the game very well swiftly impounded him, but this did not prevent the goggled one from meeting a similar fate.

    For months, there have been rumours of a final and terminal parting of way between godfather and godson. It was deliberately leaked to the press that Obasanjo was eyeing a Sule Lamido/ Rotimi Amaechi ticket. This was swiftly and hurriedly denied. The stinging economic rebuke is the clearest indication so far that that the Jonathan administration is an object of stringent scrutiny by Nigeria’s power mafia and the report card may not be too flattering.

    Predictably, the presidency has been placed at the equivalent of a war footing. Presidential canine sentries simply tore into Obasanjo. There were even echoes of Michael Okhai Akhigbe’s infamous put-down of the old warhorse as a frustrated farmer. Leading the pack of hounds is Doyin Okupe who ironically was  Obasanjo’s former spokesperson. With patronizing glee, Okupe dismissed his former boss as a private citizen who is entitled to his own views. One can almost hear the bellicose medico smacking his lips in relish. It all recalls a passage from Job: “My desire is that mine enemy hath writ a book”.

    The elephant has the castle within its rifle sight. But the castle is unmoved and unmoving. It all points at a nasty roforofo fight or what the Yoruba call yanponyanrin. The old general may be trying to return to his old political base. But for once in his career, he might have made a fatal political miscalculation with Jonathan. This is because other unstable variables might have crept into the equation. The chap from Otueke is unlikely to go down lightly and meekly.

     

    • First published in 2013.

     

  • Arms and the Nation

    Arms and the Nation

    The Rise of Municipal States 

    Without arms, there can be no nation. But with arms everywhere, there is no nation. No matter how territorial space is organized or named, it is arms that protect a society. But they can also propel it into oblivion. The proliferation of arms and their bearers has exposed the fragility and vulnerability of the Nigerian post-colonial state in a way that could not have been imagined even during a civil war that accounted for the life of two million Nigerians.

    There are arms everywhere in Nigeria. We are not talking about the militarization of the society but the weaponization of the protocols of engagement. From the rule of professional managers of violence, we have now arrived at the reign of managers of professional violence. This is worse than placing a territory on a war-footing. The entire country is under an arms lock-down.

    Even a consuming tragedy is not without its engrossing comic relief. The sight of the governor of Ondo State, the indefatigable and obstreperous Peter Ayodele Fayose, decked out in modern military fatigues among a rag-tag militia bristling with Ekiti yokels and dane-gun-wielding hunters from antiquity provokes a delirium of laughter and underscores the most profound ironies of the moment.

    On paper, Fayose is the chief Executive of a state. But the fact that he has had to outsource the defence of his state against marauding Fulani herdsmen to a local hunters’ clan is a profound commentary on the state of the Nigerian state and its current security architecture. In a scene straight out of Rabelais, Fayose is a chief executive who has no power over the security forces in his domain. The federal government, which has the power, does not have the wit or will to transform the police under its control to an effective constabulary against violent criminality in the entire nation.  Capability without power parodies power without capability.

    This is as hilarious as it can get as looming hostilities dissolve into obscene farce. When the aggregate of arms available to non-state actors threatens to overwhelm the capacity of the state for proactive violence and punitive retribution, then the nation has all but unravelled.

    Still on a lighter note, one is not too sure of how Dane guns will fare against A/K 47. It may well be that this time around, Yoruba charms will get the better of mala’s tira. But given the evident mismatch of weapons in terms of sophistication and the swift discharge of obligation, let no one raise any alarm when herdsmen are sighted chasing Fayose and his men across the rugged hills of Ekiti.

    It will be recalled that strange things have a way of causing strange wars in Nigeria. In the last major war in which the Ekiti were involved, it was amatorial misadventure of the part of the Ibadan superintendent that triggered hostilities and a war of all against all in the entire Yoruba land. In the current face off, bovine indiscretion or cows’ right of way, may cause the mother of all wars in Nigeria. If cows could lead men to such carnage, then they must be superior to humans in a manner of speaking.

    A society which allows cows to lead it to war must be something else. Still, the conventional international wisdom is that whenever a state loses its monopoly of the instrument of coercion, such a state has lost its raison d’etre. Inevitably, such a nation implodes due to prolonged or simultaneous armed critique from a single focused direction or several hostile quarters; or is overwhelmed by a combination of enervation and existential adversity.

    State monopoly of the instrument of coercion and organized violence in Nigeria has never been more imperilled than at this conjuncture. There is an explosion of opportunities in the arms-bearing industry. Armed gangs roam the streets, the forests, the creeks, the major highways and the urban centres. With their superior weaponry, they often make a mince- meat of local security forces spreading fear and panic among the populace. General insecurity has never been this prevalent in the history of the country.

    More often than not, the ill-equipped, ill-trained and ill-motivated police forces are outgunned and outflanked by criminal elements that often torment and torture them before dispatching them. Consequently and as a result of this, the Nigerian armed forces are increasingly deployed for internal security operations for which they are poorly prepared and even more poorly adapted. By some estimates, the Nigerian military is currently involved in internal security operations in about thirty one of the thirty six states.

    This carries with it very scary prospects. Nigeria never seems to learn from history. It will be recalled that it was the military involvement in the internal security operation to quell the Tiv riots in the First Republic which prepared the ground for the military incursion into politics. There were officers from other ethnic formations who resented the heavy-handed and sledge hammer approach of the military in an internal rebellion against the Hausa-Fulani oligarchy and who vowed that the top commanders must pay for this.

    The good news however as recent scholarly studies have shown is that state collapse is not an automatic phenomenon for nations where the monopoly of the instruments of coercion has disappeared.  Recent Third World scholarship believes that the theory of failed states is a racist scare-mongering and devious agenda setting by western policy planners with the ultimate aim of reoccupation. A state may be comatose, catatonic or exist in limbo for a long time and still manage to be revived or to revive itself.

    For example, Somalia has existed in a condition of stateless anomie for a quarter of century and yet has refused to die. Congo has played hosts to several civil wars in the last fifty years and is currently plagued by many well-organised bandit forces, yet the old Congolese state, otherwise known as Bula Matari (the crusher of rocks) among the natives, survives in a metropolitan enclave around the capital with its capacity for mindless cruelty and proactive wickedness undiminished by attrition and attenuation. In West Africa alone, Liberia, Cote D’Ivoire, Sierra Leone, have all experienced brief or protracted state collapse and have managed to revive thereafter.

    Pound for pound, the Nigerian armed forces remain the best and most formidable fighting machine on the West African coast despite being stretched thin at the moment by various internal security commitments. It plunged to the very nadir of its reputation in the last years of PDP misrule under the corruption-plagued Jonathan administration. But it has since had its morale and fighting spirit buoyed by President Buhari’s disdain for disorder and law and order mantra.

    But the danger is that as the military is increasingly drawn into internal security operations, the proliferation of non-state actors bearing arms with maximum capacity may cause the armed forces a massive demystification or loss of professional mystique and aura of invincibility which may lead to institutional implosion. As the last bulwark of the nation, the anarchy and anomie, the apocalyptic meltdown attendant to this professional unravelling of the most vital state institution in post-colonial Nigeria can be better imagined.

    In a worst case scenario, the humiliation and disgrace of the military due to unending confrontation with equally well-armed and even better motivated rogue fighting units strewn all over the country may lead a new generation of better exposed and more professionally accomplished officers to query the rationale of carrying the can and acting as night-soil personnel for a political class that remains morally, politically as well as institutionally retarded. In the circumstance, the country might witness a return to military rule as a stop-gap device against violent disintegration.

    As we have said several times in this column, the Roman Empire as well as other great human constructs of the past did not die of a single mortal blow to the plexus but of cumulative wounds from a myriad of enemies which eventually upended the historic giants. As we have seen with the example of Somalia, Congo and the old Ivory Coast, the post-colonial nation, rather than swiftly collapsing into its ethnic components when threatened by terminal conflicts, has a way of mutating or metastasizing into something even more dreadful and nastier.

    Unlike the older type European colonial nations which could come apart neatly and surgically, or which could disintegrate without major collateral damage, African nations come as a strange species of nation-states indeed: not intrinsically strong enough to cohere as true nations and no longer discrete and discernible enough to disintegrate into component parts as independent monads.

    One unfortunate explanation for this continental conundrum is that African intellectuals, scholars and intelligentsia rather than coming up with new paradigms of organising territorial space which best suit Africa in the new post-colonial epoch of human transformation are busy aping the old colonial models handed down to them through uninspiring rote and the discursive formation of western institutions. As organic bearers of a new type of human consciousness forged in slavery and colonization, this ought to have been their overriding historical mission.

    In the absence of this conceptual framework and intellectual bulwark, anybody expecting the nation-state paradigm in Africa to follow the western trajectory is living in a fools’ paradise. This is because what has not been conceptually envisioned or intellectually theorized can never come into fruitful being.  African nations created by colonial fiat still have a lot of unpleasant and negative surprises in store for their denizens.

    Consequently, Nigeria’s fate will not be different if elite delinquency eventuates in catastrophic state implosion. The Nigerian state will not collapse in its entirety as a result of the radical rupturing of its authority and legitimacy. Instead the old unified statist and unitarist organogram will give way to a weak and delegitimized centre and swathes of ungovernable territory punctuated by autonomous zones of light and civilized governance.

    These autonomous enclaves of civilization will combine features of fiefdoms, city-states, rogue rumps of nations, libertarian communes and traditional municipalities in their chaotic assemblage. They are likely to remain so until the old state regains its strength and reasserts its territorial authority or some of the autonomous zones muster enough momentum and energy to decouple themselves completely from the sclerotic hulk of the old nation.

    The coming atomization of the nation can already be glimpsed in the swathes of the country that have become ungovernable due to insurgency, terrorism, violent crimes, the menace of herdsmen and other murderous local militia even as autonomous enclaves such as Lagos and its environs, Edo state, Cross Rivers and Kano State appear to be better policed, better surveilled and better governed than the federal aggregate. The future may already be here with us, and it doesn’t wear a pleasant visage.

     

  • Okon is man of the year

    All hell has been let loose since a loony organisation calling itself Society for the Promotion of Good Values named Okon as their man of the year. Before the letter arrived, Okon has arranged for it to be framed by a local Efik photographer known as Edem Rainbow Edem. Rainbow usually arrived with an old-fashioned camera set on an ancient tripod, bowing supinely and beaming gratuitous smiles at everybody. In his cowboy hat and ill-fitting grey suit with white shoes to match, he was quite a sight in the vicinity. At a point, the entire household was taken over by ethnic Efiks smelling of aromatic Schnapps and periwinkles. At this point, snooper cursed the day he recruited the mad Calabar boy as cook.

    On the day of the investiture, the whole house looked like a mini Jamestown with Efik exotica all over the place. There was a particularly uppity septuagenarian attorney looking very much like Olauidah Equaino. It was like a human museum of colonial Calabar. The proper investiture almost never got underway as Okon stormed snooper’s room in the early hours of the morning fuming and complaining. The letter read; “We request the company of Okon….”

    “Oga dem yeye people be 419 people. Dem no say I no get company. Which kind company nonsense be dat one? If I be Yoruba man dem go ask make I go get company?” Okon screamed.

    “Okon, they are simply inviting you. Illiteracy is a disease,” snooper said, smiling.

    “Oga dem see you there with your bukuru and dem no fit give you award”, the mad boy retorted sharply and saucily as he stormed out. Soon afterwards, the television people arrived to interview Okon who was by then leglessly drunk. It was at this point that he was joined by Baba Lekki who had just been released from police custody without any charges being preferred against him. It was a scene out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. (Watch Out for Full Interview.)

     

    • ( First published in December, 2007.)
  • Herdsmen of the Apocalypse

    Herdsmen of the Apocalypse

    Finally, one can put an ethnic tag to the mysterious militia murdering people at will and disappearing into the vast shadows in the agrarian nerve-centres of the nation. It is a Fulani death squad. The unspeakable has finally arrived at the gate of the unmentionable.  These are extremely dangerous times in Nigeria. Apocalypse has never been closer to our shores.

    In an extreme manifestation of what we often describe in this column as an organic crisis of the state, everything seems to be coming together all at once for Nigeria—in a manner of speaking.  Even for the strongest and most durable of nations, when a persisting political and economic crisis suddenly joins forces with ethnic and cultural hostilities fuelled by ancestral resentments, it is a perfect storm.

    But we must avoid alarmist and hysterical railings at one another which only raises the national temperature without providing a way out. To move back away from the minefield requires extreme caution. To move forward requires unusual determination.  Any miscue at this point may unleash dangerous forces of disintegration.

    It is important to advise President Mohammadu Buhari that the same stubbornness and obstinacy which might have served him so well as head of state during the military epoch of Nigeria’s post-colonial transition can no longer be regarded as political virtues in a post-military era of acute political, ethnic and economic polarization of the nation.

    Before he is successfully branded as an enemy of his people, it is necessary to remind General Buhari once again that you cannot step into the same river twice. Whatever his natural aversion and distaste for politics, he ought to know that once he chose of his own free will to vie for elective office, he has chosen to play politics and not military war games and destabilising psych-ops against sections of the country.

    We must repeat that these are dangerous times for the nation. We appeal to patriots who are disgusted and affronted by the politically-challenged antics of this government and its dangerous mind-set that one does not have to belong to General Buharis’s party or be a member of the cabal he is reputed to surround himself to offer the way out of the genocidal maelstrom threatening to engulf the nation. Genocide is an equal opportunity terminator which does not have the time or the patience to finesse multiple identities and party affiliations.

    Yet the irony of it all is that it is only now that we have been able to put an ethnic tag to the mysterious and ghoulish militia murdering and maiming its way through a huge swathe of the nation’s territory that the problem of restitution really begins. But this ethnic categorization and the clarity it brings to the resolution of the crisis has come at a stiff price.  Rather than bringing shame and remorse to the guilty party, it has led to a stiffening of resolve and a shameless bravado which have in turn provoked remarkable sabre-rattling and war-cries on the plains of the Nigerian middle belt.

    Readers of this column would have noticed a studied reluctance to put an ethnic label on the nomadic terrorists. In fact, this is the first time, the column would do so.  There is a deep and touching cultural resonance to this reluctance which had been widespread up till this moment. It is a sign of the rustic goodness and goodwill among native Nigerians which is customarily mismanaged by government and those who believe that they are bearers of a superior culture which exempts them from native norms.

    The usual narrative is that the normal Fulani herdsmen that people have grown up to sighting in the deep forest or grasslands do not behave in this bloodthirsty and fiendish manner. They came across as shy, friendly, kind and honourable people, polite and self-effacing almost to a fault. Nobody wanted to disturb or disrupt this placid and idyllic picture of the peaceful and kind Fula herdsman even when emergent realities from the forests were pointing at some diabolic developments.

    In a society conditioned to a high degree of inter-ethnic harmony and peaceful co-existence among the various ethnic groups, the pictures of death and gory dismemberment coming from the field represent a radical rupture of perceptual habits. The possibility of the peaceful Fulani herdsman being responsible for the gory massacres was too horrendous to contemplate.  At a point, we even had to resort to an invention of mysterious militiamen from the Middle East via the porous Maghreb. These are the symptoms of a society in a state of traumatic transition.

    For most Nigerians as well as the denizens of the old world and its archaic values, the tendency is to live in denial; a collective state of child-like daydreaming and regression into a  phantasmagorical world of delusion and deception in which uncomfortable truths and reality are pressed out to be replaced by saccharine versions.  This strategic elision of the truth as a way of evading social responsibility and confrontation with evil is a function of societies rooted in ritual and magic as the order of existence rather than hurtful science.

    But we cannot run away from modernity forever. There must come a time when emergent realities collide with the old ways of doing things, when a society descends into critical and even mortal disorder as old modes of reproduction enter into dangerous contradictions with new imperatives of productions and when all this lead to a momentous restructuring of personalities in line with new dictates of  civilization.

    Societies which refuse to offer their own terms and template for modernization are often at the mercy of its hostile forces which then proceed on their own terms and temperament. The murderous confrontation between sedentary farmers and nomadic herdsmen in Nigeria in all its bestial savagery and apocalyptic violence is a function of this encounter between a hapless society in a state of chaotic flux and the forces of involuntary modernization. But it can get worse if the necessary precautions are not put in place.

    It should be recalled that despite critical pressures on land occasioned by farming and grazing, the old Central African kingdoms of Rwanda and Burundi under the ruling kings or Mwamis existed in a state of relative peace, stability and cohesion until the forces of involuntary political modernization in the guise of adult suffragette and electoral democracy arrived to disrupt the idyllic coexistence among the Tutsi overlords and the Hutu, Twa and pigmy tribes.

    Even at that, studies have shown that this development could have been traditionally managed but for the arrival of disaffected Belgian colonial officers who insinuated the bitter class divisions in their own country into the politics of the colonized territory. The result was genocide and an apocalyptic meltdown which became the closing shame of the twentieth century.

    This is why General Buhari has to be cautious in the political choices he makes in the coming months. Although clashes between sedentary farmers and Fulani herdsmen preceded the current incumbency of the retired general and have been with us for close to a decade and half, it is in the last two years that they have assumed a frightening and alarming proportion.

    However tenuous and weak the link may be, there are those pressing the claim of a link between the rise in the murderous menace of Fulani militiamen and the resurgence of Fulani political supremacists around the presidency of General Buhari. Disaffected critics and analysts point at the lopsided appointments which continue despite heavy criticism and the fact that the retired general reacts with a disproportionate sledgehammer and proactive violence to the least ethnic provocation from other parts of the country while treating the menace of the Fulani herdsmen with cavalier cool and even towering indifference.

    Perception may eventually approximate to reality, in which case General Buhari may go down as a tragic impostor. No amount of good he would have recorded in other departments such as the fight against corruption, the incipient agricultural revolution and the return of fiscal and electoral sanity to the nation could offset the political villainy of condoning ethnic cleansing. In some extreme quarters, there are even whispers that the retired general may yet have his date with the World Court at Hague once his tenure is over.

    This is not the way to build a nation. In fact, it is the surest way to ruin it and terminally too. Away from raw and primitive anger, let us return the discourse to the template of objectivity, science and modernity. There are two things responsible for the dark development between sedentary farming and nomadic cattle rearing. First is the increasing desertification or sahelization of the northern parts of the country which puts the pressure on herdsmen to roam further and further afield which then launches them on a collision course with farmers tending the land.

    The second development is the worsening economic situation in the country which has led to a dramatic rise in incidents of cattle rustling and coordinated armed attacks on herdsmen. Unlike before when herdsmen used to be armed with long sticks, cattle rustling and encounters with armed robbers have led to a weaponization of the trade on a scale which could not have been imagined.

    So, while dwindling grazing opportunities removes the customary Fulani reserve and sensitivity from the herdsmen, encounters with miscreants have toughened them to a point where they have scant regard for human life.  As a Fulani elder and celebrated ethnic jingoist puts it: “ If a Fulani herdsman takes a particular route this year and he returns by the same route the following year and you say there is no way through, then there is bound to be trouble”.

    What we can see in all this is a clash of civilization, of culture, of mutually unintelligible modes of production and a crisis of economic values accentuated by dwindling opportunities and increasingly scarce resources. In the past, these contradictions could be absorbed by the oceanic plenitude of farmlands and limitless grazing opportunity as well as by the profound economic possibilities of a nation with a great future ahead of it. Alas, all that has ended in a bonfire of vanities leaving in their wake mutual recrimination and savage anger about the state of the nation.

    In the light of this, the establishment of grazing “colonies” may solve the problem in the short run but not as a long term solution. Grazing colonies can only produce colonized cattle. What is playing out with all these “solutions” and the semantic games we play with them is a fundamental evasion of social responsibility and concomitantly of the subsisting National Question. The question is: what are those herds boys doing roaming the forests with AK47 when the dictates of political modernity and economic modernization suggest they should be in school?

    When the question is posed this way, the uncomfortable political and economic truth begins to stare us in the face and we can as well conclude that the herdsmen have been training their guns on the wrong people. That may be why they are sent out farther afield in the first instance.  Despite its political hegemony, the north is sitting on a political and economic box of explosives which may yet consume the whole of the country if care is not taken.

    But since this is a profound matter of political habitus and cultural peculiarity, it demands considerable sympathy and sensitivity.  As it has been famously noted, no matter how much we try to ignore history, history in all its alienating necessities will not ignore us. Once again, the Fulani herdsmen tragedy has shown us why we can only postpone a radical restructuring of the country’s political architecture at our own peril.

    Restructuring is inevitable once Nigeria failed to throw up a radically nationalist and modernizing military class which would have forcibly homogenized and ground into conformity the contending cultural, political, economic and spiritual peculiarities. In the process, some core values would have been distilled willy-nilly for the nation.

    In the face of this missed opportunity, only a radical restructuring which allows key ethnic and cultural components of the nation to resolve their contradictions on their own terms will do even if this were to eventuate in a confederal arrangement for the nation. With gargantuan contradictions which continue to dog and hobble our match to authentic nationhood, confederalism which guarantees stability and relative prosperity may well be the nation’s saving grace.

    For the sake of emphasis, these contradictions include and are not limited to the following: feudal enervation and exhaustion in the face of the dictates of modernity, laissez faire indolence and aristocratic fatigue in the face of aborted modernity, social cannibalism arising from an attempt to run before walking and the ritualization and romanticization of primitive animal husbandry as a way of avoiding and evading the challenges of modernization.

    As we are discovering with the current herdsmen calamity, an organic crisis of the state may take its time to manifest but its fall-out does not waste time in hitting us in the face directly once it reaches full maturity. This is the time to find a solution to a tragedy that may yet consume the entire nation in its next visitation.

     

     

     

  • Our Father in Abuja

    Our Father in Abuja

    Our Father in Abuja

    Civilian Prefecture in Nigeria

    The earth quaked in political circles in Nigeria this past week as President Mohammadu Buhari in his New Year broadcast struck at the restructuring train virtually crippling and derailing the forward coaches. Yet as if in cruel mockery of General Buhari’s bravest efforts, some of the old demons which warranted the undying clamour for restructuring persisted in tormenting the nation, what with the return of herdsmen to the killing fields of the Benue and the inability of government to come up with a rational template for petroleum products pricing forty one years after.

    To be sure, only those who could not read the rustling tea leaves would have been surprised by the presidential outburst against restructuring and its proponents. The retired general’s body language and sheer truculence on the matter left no one in doubt that he did not share the enthusiasm of many of his compatriots for the wholesale restructuring of the polity. But this was the first time he would be throwing his hat into the ring.

    Famously, the Nigerian president told his fellow citizens that he did not think it was the restructuring of the polity that matters but the political process and how this is shaped by human agency. It was a strong and testy riposte meant to put the intellectual sophisticates and implacable ideologues of restructuring in their place. But it left in its wake many unanswered questions and the debris of raw and offensive prejudice.

    Coming at a time when he has virtually made up his mind to contest for the presidential election once again come 2019, it was a calculated and strategic intervention, meant to rouse friends and foes alike.  Taciturn, ascetic, self-possessed and rarely talking out of turn, Buhari would have pondered with his key strategists the implications of coming out so boldly against restructuring particularly as it involves a key component of the geopolitical ensemble which swept him to power and the electoral implications.

    By cultural orientation, professional training and ideological outlook, Buhari has been conditioned to view the world from a statist, unitarist and highly centralized prism. The military world does not entertain the notion of diffusion and dispersal of authority which flows from a unified command; neither does the rigid, stratified and stiffly hierarchical worldview of a feudal empire. Everybody must know their place and that is what conduces to order and stability.

    Yet despite all this, it will be a great irony of unfolding history if the cultural and military-derived attributes of discipline and ethical valour which make General Buhari a priceless national asset in this season of political and economic chaos also debar him from contention going forward to a politically decentralized, prosperous and peaceful Nigeria.

    This is not the first time Nigeria would be suffering from the vagaries of what we propose as bi-polar bifurcation of leadership abilities. For example as we have seen with General Obasanjo, the iron-willed fortitude, psychological stamina and capacity for surprise and dissimulation which make the Owu general indispensable to the demilitarizing project also turned him into a veritable threat when it came to deepening the democratic process.

    By pre-empting the outcome of a party committee on restructuring, General Buhari has cast himself above party laws and principles as well as their countervailing institutions.  This is as anti-democratic and as dictatorial as it can get. Of what use now is the outcome of the committee deliberation when the party presumptive and pre-emptive flag-bearer has come out openly to disown the principal item on its deliberative agenda? What was the use of setting up the committee if it has always been known that the National Assembly is the sole authority for constitutional amendment?

    This presidential patriarchy, so patronising and spiteful of all known democratic norms, is a reminder of the immense cultural obstacles that militate against the deepening and expanding of democratic space in the nation. The combination of empire mentality and Oriental despotism in a post-colonial nation state which this column once described as the Ottoman presidency is now gradually mutating into a civilian prefecture in post-military Nigeria. In a prefecture, the prefect is the supreme ruler; in a school, the senior prefect is in a class of his own.

    It is however not surprising that President Buhari has his defenders and supporters who share his contempt for the whole restructuring mantra and who view genuine and structured devolution of power as surplus to the requirement of good governance and economic progress. In a revealing intervention, the Arewa Consultative Forum not only endorses the president’s position but sees it as a compromise between confederalism and unitarism.

    In other words, while confederalism is seen as a bridge too far on the road to eventual separation, unitarism is seen as inevitably leading to forcible secession because its stifling concentration of power in the centre can unleash violent disintegrative forces. Despite the blarney about process, this is a frank affirmation of the current status quo of unitary federalism. Failing that, it is a cagey and cautious approval of offhand and ad-hoc devolution of power as against a comprehensive and holistic restructuring.

    This is a classic demonstration of what cultural antinomies or incompatibility of habitus can do to people in a multi-ethnic nation. An antinomy is an insurmountable contradiction. A cultural antinomy occurs when strong ethnic prejudices and primordial sentiments prevent people from seeing other groups in the same nation space in an objective and neutral light.

    If the leading lights of ACF can conduct some historical research, they will discover how leaders from a particular section of the country in the run up to independence and subsequent military rule oscillated between confederalism and unitary rule depending on the balance of force. When the power configuration is ranged against them, they opt for confederalism, but as soon as they gather the levers of power into their hand, they move for unitarism.

    Behind every process there is a structure.  There can be no process without a structure however hidden. It is a dialectical interaction in which structure conditions and in the last instance determines process and procedure. To deny ideology is itself an ideological position. Consequently, to deny a particular structure is to betray the influence an older operative structure in the background. The fact that General Buhari is averse to a particular mode of restructuring simply betrays an ideological and political adherence to an earlier form of structuring——which in this case is unitary federalism.

    As a veteran of four different types of government in post-independence Nigeria and having presided over two of these, it should be obvious to the retired general that had Nigerians left it to mere participating in process without questioning the underlying structures which permit autocratic and corrupt governance, it would have been impossible to see off the military at the time we did or to stamp out General Obasanjo’s tenure elongation scheme.

    General Buhari himself has been a major beneficiary of this persistent national alertness. Had Nigerians left things to mere participating in process, the kind of electoral tsunami that swept off the Jonathan administration and brought the man from Daura to the gate of the presidency after three failed attempts could not have materialized at the time it did.

    Yet his electoral triumph notwithstanding, it should now be obvious to President Buhari that the middling and meagre successes of his various wars so far against corruption, graft, indiscipline, state larceny and chronic shortages of petroleum products is a reflection of an underlying structural disequilibrium rather than a failure of process per se. Of course, where the structure is faulty, the process must fail accordingly.

    The retired general must ask himself why forty one years after he railed against shortages of petroleum products in the nation as Minister for Petroleum products in the Obasanjo military regime, we are currently faced with a worse manifestation of the crisis. In a structural gridlock, the more things change, the more they get worse.

    Almost half a century later, passing the buck to a National Assembly which is itself an organic outgrowth of the structural deformity is like asking a patient to provide a cure for his own affliction. A young man at the queues at the end of the seventies would have become an old man at the same queues. There must be a limit to collective national gluttony for punishment.

    There are many people who either out of genuine but reprehensible ignorance or sheer intellectual dishonesty claim they do not understand what restructuring means. But they surely understand the persistent fuel queues which has turned life in Nigeria into a permanent misery, the permanent blackout arising from the overloading of the federal grid with absurd responsibilities and the run on the Exchequer which has turned the country into a hell-hole for its citizens despite Buhari’s bravest efforts.

    It is not as if these woes will disappear overnight in a restructured Nigeria, but it will mark the strategic rebirth of a new nation away from the strangulating and stultifying morass of a unitary federalism which has underwritten neither political stability nor economic revolution. It will also mark the first time since independence that a comprehensive structural reworking of Nigeria’s governance architecture has been undertaken by the heirs of the political ancestors who gathered in London sixty years earlier.

    For those who can read political horoscopes, the magnitude of the coming political storm can be glimpsed in the quality of instant opposition to General Buhari’s declaration, the sharp objection to his point of view and argument and the critical geo-political zones involved. Despite the president’s preference for process and gruff disdain for advocates of restructuring, it ought to be obvious to him that the whole idea of restructuring contains a combustible mix of regional politics and ethnic passion which may not be lightly toyed with.

    As for the old battle-wise West, one can safely predict that all is not going to be quiet forever on the fabled front, even though for now that is how it appears. Discounting Afenifere’s habitual sledgehammer, it is only from the region that reactions to Buhari’s controversial pronouncement appear dimmed and enveloped in discreet strategic silence. This is necessarily so in view of the subsisting alliance which however fractious and unstable still represents the major political ace of the dominant Yoruba group.

    But from his speech, it is obvious that General Buhari does not care much about the political sensibility or sensitivities of his political allies. Neither does he appear to weigh the effect of his pronouncement on their political mortality. This is a political minefield for many of those who laboured to win over critical Yoruba votes to his side.

    Consequently if past history holds any political augury for the future, one can safely surmise that South West notables who nail their flag to General Buhari’s mast or endorse his gratuitous assault on a subject so dear to the Yoruba nation like restructuring may well be toying with political and social defenestration.

  • Okon publishes his own obituary

    The year has taken off with dangerous excitement and political portents.  While living people are collapsing and dying on petrol queues, dead people are resurrecting as Board Chairmen. With a gruesome partiality for macabre metaphor, Baba Lekki had dismissed the Federal board list as an example of political necrophilia so beloved of political sadists and sadomasochists. In Yoruba parlance, when living men tangle with masquerades, it is no longer possible to separate live limbs from dead torsos.

    On Friday morning, as the airwaves filled with news of fresh decapitations by herdsmen, Okon sauntered into the living room brimming with jaunty self-confidence.

    “Oga, he good say you don wake sef. I wan quickly reach dem Nation paper make I pay them make dem publish my obituary”, the mad boy announced with glorious self-belief.  Snooper took a deep look at the crazy boy.

    “Are you dead?” snooper asked in alarm, as he tried to figure out the scam.

    “Ah oga, no be like dat at all. Dem Abuja APZ boys say when dem publish obituary say I don quench dem go make me Board Chair”, Okon recounted.

    “Oh my God!!!”, snooper screamed before realising that Okon might be setting him up.

    “Oga, leave Oga Jesus out of dis one ooo,” the crazy boy crooned.

    “So, chairman, when is your inauguration?” snooper demanded with a merry frown.

    “I no go die first? You see na step by step, die first and dine  after”, the boy retorted.

    “Oh my God!!! This country is a huge racket”, snooper exploded in huge mirth.

    “You see Oga, dis one no be matter of racket. Everybody dey do am. He get one Yoruba man who don die like dat and him name dey list. So as him wife dey cry and she come mention board list, dem coffin come dey do gbigigbigi and ogbologbo Yoruba man come jump out”, the mad boy crowed rolling on the floor with mirth.

    “So what happened?” snooper demanded.

    “Ah oga, na cunny man no die, cunny man no bury am. Dem Abuja people say make him produce obituary. Abi if you say you don die before before and you no die again, wey your obituary? Naim dead man say him go kill himself again! “ Okon said as the mad boy convulsed with laughter.

    “Okon, how come many PDP people and non-party men are on the list?” snooper asked.

    “Ha oga, politics na chop make I chop. Pounded yam and egusi soup no dey wear party label”, the mad boy concluded with native wisdom.

     

     

  • Goodbye to this peculiar logjam

    Goodbye to this peculiar logjam

    The Nation in Traumatic Transition

    As the year 2017 disappears into the graveyard of dead calendars, it is time once again to reflect about the fate of living nations, particularly our beloved Nigeria. As this outgoing year finally recedes into oblivion, Nigeria has shown the world once again why its death and summary dismemberment will be an apocalyptic mess for humanity, or why its dramatic rescue from the jaws of self-willed destruction will be an elixir for Black people. All these are consistent with the symptoms of a nation in traumatic transition.

    It is therefore quite appropriate and wondrously symbolic that the drama of living and dying of a nation should find perfect congruence in the medical and existential odyssey of the ruler himself. 2017 was the year General Mohammadu Buhari visited the gate of heaven and came back to tell the story. This is as near to the fabled resurrection as anybody can imagine. President Buhari, having survived the most crippling and devastating of human afflictions, should claim the bragging rights of a superman. There is indeed something gloriously improbable about the remission of ailment.

    Nobody ever gave him a chance, certainly not those who were already sounding the death knell of the remarkable man from Daura.  It was indeed a fearfully gaunt and spectral President Buhari that walked past a core coterie of mournful and distraught aides that afternoon as he departed for England. Even in the glowing sunlight, the atmosphere was dark and funereal. It was like a presidential cortege of morbid portents.

    While ailment laid siege to earthly power, the whole place was shot through with conspiracy theories, some of them so outrageous that they would have eliminated the possibility of orderly succession and poisoned the well of national wellbeing forever. Among the northern power jingoists, there was a feeling of déjà vu . They had been here before and within a very short time, too. This time around, they were not going to take it lying low. It was either the north succeeded the north or the country itself can go to blazes. The nation was back to the starting line of its fifty years of solitude.

    But President Buhari rallied and fought back illness with remarkable willpower. It was an amazing comeback. By surviving, Buhari probably saved his country from a nasty succession debacle and possible disintegration. So improbable was the comeback and its tremendous impact on the political trajectory of the biggest Black nation on earth that close to the end of the year, the president was already hinting of virtual re-election come 2019 to a mammoth crowd of loyal worshippers in Kano.

    Yet such has been the impossible twists and turns of fate that by the end of the year, the president has become a subject of opprobrium and critical assailment in many parts of the country particularly the volatile urban centres as a result of the return of long queues of vehicles at petrol stations and the attendant hardship visited on the people. The idol of market forces has returned to confront the idol of the tribe.

    In the event, it is a great irony that despite the remarkable reservoir of public goodwill for his government and the messianic adulation of northern masses for General Buhari who they behold  with mystical awe, the Buhari administration is ending the year in the way and manner it began it with public approval dipping precariously. It is all about the political and economic choices the government makes and how this is linked with developments elsewhere in an increasingly interwoven and interconnected world.

    If anybody had thought that the defeat of ISIS/ISIL by Iraqi and Kurdish forces and their virtual elimination from Syria by an incongruent alliance of Syrian, American and Russian forces would lessen the impact and threat of the Boko Haram scourge in Nigeria, such a person can be excused on the grounds of political innocence.

    The fact is that defeat in the Middle East and the collapse of Libya into stateless anomie might have freed more fighters for deployment through the open Maghreb to the Nigerian theatre in an increasingly borderless confrontation among diverse forces of Islam in the first instance, and between them and the western-oriented paradigms of nation-state and market economy.

    The interconnectedness of this global war cannot be wished away and in underestimating this dimension, the Nigerian authorities appeared to have been rash and incautious in declaring the Boko Haram scourge as completely degraded.  It is this strategic error of information management and dissemination that has led to the national uproar about the one billion dollar requested to prosecute the Boko Haram war.

    This international dimension of the conflict, particularly as it pertains to the violent collision and confrontation between the values of the Islamic world and the tenets of modern western civilization, is what certain power brokers in Nigeria wish away because it puts the Boko Haram conflict in grim global perspective. But as this column continues to insist, however much we choose to ignore political reality, political reality will not ignore us.

    There are two things going for the Buhari administration in this conflict which cannot be said about the previous tragically delinquent government of Goodluck Jonathan and which deserves commendation. First, is the dramatic improvement in the fighting quality of the Nigerian Armed Forces under General Buhari’s proactive leadership.

    Unlike before, they have carried the battle to the Boko Haram insurgents and put them to rout. As a result, the armed forces have suffered stringent casualties which included some of their best and bravest officers. This has no doubt boosted national morale and confidence in the capacity of the Armed Forces to defend the territorial integrity of the nation.

    The second development which is worthy of even greater applause is the recent decision by the government to put together a team of Islamic scholars and Quranic experts for the purpose of educating and re-educating the populace in the North East of the nation about the true tenets of Islam and the pernicious nature of sects like Boko Haram. Yet it is curious that little official publicity is given to this obvious breakthrough in the campaign against Boko Haram.

    Whatever the reason for this meagre publicity for a laudable programme from a government which is not averse to blowing its own trumpet to the point of openly squabbling with those who dispute its claims, it is heart -warming that it is now being recognized in official quarters that the battle against Boko Haram is more of a battle for the mind rather than a battle for the mine-field. The human mind is more dangerous than a minefield when it is polluted by the wrong ideas. It is the wrong ideas which propel men and women to maim without mercy and kill without compunction.

    Our respected Islamic clerisy may also want to enlighten us as to whether there is no ideological consanguinity between the Boko Haram sect and the strain of Islam imported from Sunni Saudi Arabia which is the hegemonic ideology of the northern Nigerian master-class. Boko Haram may just be a more extreme and pernicious variant of this brand of Islam. There is no point in choosing the order of precedence between a jaguar and a cougar. They both kill with extreme relish.

    In its hankering after a purer and  more pristine version of Islam which in all its theocratic essence is as anti-modern as it is anti-nation-state paradigm as well as its extreme reliance on murder and political violence to settle political scores, there is not much to choose between Wahhabism and Boko Haram. Boko Haram is the dialectical mirror image of Wahhabism and a startling replay in the north East of Nigeria of the Islamic uprising that overwhelmed the North West two centuries earlier. Ironically but for the modern Nigerian state, there would have been nothing standing between Boko Haram and victory.

    This is why in the Islamic world dominated by this creed, the need for urgent and radical reform has taken the front burner of national discourse. Developments in Saudi Arabia which have pitched the rampaging and reformist crown prince against the old conservative princes of the Ibn Saud feudal dynasty are an indication of rising social and political discontent. Nigeria cannot be an exception to global trend.

    As a country with a powerful and dominant Sunni enclave, there is no way Nigeria can avoid being enmeshed and embroiled in the wider international conflict. The ferocity with which the Buhari administration has tackled the local Shiite threat is an indication that Sunni supremacy in Nigeria will not brook any challenge to its authority and hegemony by its main rival.

    Yet it is not the Shiite sect that is the more immediate and pressing threat to national stability in Nigeria. It is the inability or unwillingness of the Buhari administration to deal with contending worldviews about how to structure a multi-ethnic nation politically or arrange it economically for the benefit of the greatest number of Nigerians. As we have seen with the return of huge fuel queues in our cities, a development which has ruined President Buhari’s Christmas celebration and put a dampener on his ratings, unfinished business will always return to haunt a nation.

    As long as the fundamental problems of corruption, cronyism, clientelism and a morbid aversion for the redistribution of national resources remain, there will always be a shortfall in the circulation of petroleum products no matter the periodic price increase. The arbitrary and indefensible quadrupling of the price of petrol which was thought to be the final solution less than two years ago has turned out a damp squib.

    Nigerians put up with this bizarre quantum leap because of their faith in the new Buhari administration. But it was not even a solution, not to talk of a final solution. It was a fudge which allowed General Buhari to continue to think he is an economic nationalist even as his messianic populism imperils necessary structural reforms while a feudal clientelism gets in the way of a complete deregulation of the economy. Economic unitarism is more socially explosive than political unitarism.

    As a new year knocks on the door, it is imperative to think our way out of this national conundrum. This is why many people are calling for a national dialogue about the state of the nation. As it is at the moment, Nigeria is a series of autonomous enclaves of civil, economic, political and spiritual disorder yoked together by a disordered federalism.

    If anything, the outgoing year has taught us why Nigeria can no longer be organized along the old line. The earlier we take our cue from historical developments around us and from internal developments within the country itself, the better for everybody and for a gifted nation in traumatic transition.

     

     

  • Stepping into my son’s shoes

    It is not yet the twelfth night after the birth of the greatest one. That is when all the decorations of Christmas are traditionally removed and the world settles back to the drudgery of routine and the New Year. Christmas  is truly the season of festivity and jollity; of regeneration and rejuvenation. And whilst we are still on this subject of renewal and revival of the body and spirit, it is meet to report on some secular developments which seem to confirm the spiritual importance of the season.

    Whilst still a professor and travelling theorist in the US, yours sincerely was captivated by a short story which became standard fare on the menu for fresh undergraduates learning grammar and comprehension. Titled Arm wrestling with my Father, it was an engrossing cameo of the supreme moment when the balance of physical power changes in every family and the father who used to carry the son upstairs has now become the expiring hulk to be carried into bed by the same son. The son has become the father.

    Last Monday on Christmas day, yours sincerely experienced something close to this radical epiphany. The British Airways Flight 0074 from Lagos touched down at Heathrow Terminal Five and was firmly met by freezing weather provoking icy tears and much clattering of teeth. As if this was not enough, immigration officials laid siege to the entrance of the plane. Past masters of the elegant psychological offensive, they might have surmised that there must be something dodgy and irregular about people who choose to be airborne on Christmas day.

    Having successfully bested them with his imperious swagger and disobliging frown, snooper was getting into his full stride when his left foot hit the escalator railing and he could feel something snapping and coming unglued. It may be due to the cold or a long layoff or a remote control missile from the rogue immigration, but seconds later virtually all the lower sole came off the shoe on the left foot leaving yours sincerely hobbling and humping towards the passport control like a demented giraffe.

    If the passport control people saw through one’s discomfiture, they did not let it on. They simply waved one on. It was on getting to the son’s pile that the plot began to thicken. Snooper explained his plight to the boy, who immediately led him on to the master bedroom where he opened a vault with a deft flick of his thumb.

    Lo! It was the equivalent of a leather war chest: row upon row of upper market designer shoes in swanky and gleaming condition. Snooper pointed at a classy pair which he thought would do just as well, but the chap politely declined pointing out sniffily that it was not a brand for casual tramping. Snooper was grateful to be allowed to settle into the next best thing , a cool maroon brogue.

    As we stepped out later to do some light shopping at the local mall, the irony did not escape yours sincerely that he was stepping into his son’s shoes. It was a profoundly sobering moment. The son had become the father. Just as it happened with his own father some forty something years earlier, the economic and social balance of power had shifted forever between father and son. It was a double-barrelled irony that this was happening on Christmas morning, and in a foreign clime, too. The young shall grow indeed.

    Does snooper feel any pangs of jealousy, anger or resentment? Not at all, only a feeling of helpless bliss and calm serenity. This is the moment every normal parent hopes to live to witness, when the son becomes the father of the man and the daughter becomes the mother of her mother. Happy New Year to all our readers.

     

  • Hoping against Hopelessness

    Hoping against Hopelessness

    Party Regeneration in Tropical Africa

    Nothing lasts in the tropics. It is the iron law of nature. In the sweltering and sultry heat, things grow fast and die fast. Living organisms procreate and proliferate quickly rising to their greatest potential before noon only to perish with the same speed by night fall. Great political parties rise before our very eyes only to begin openly decomposing. We have been here before. Only the silence and stillness of sudden death survive us.

    Not even the greatest monuments endure. The prodigality of nature is wired into the prodigality of tropical humanity. Even the most prized goods have their short shelf life. Monuments and milestones to posterity disappear like an august mirage. Who can ever remember or point at the tombstone of Mansa Musa, the great but profligate fourteenth century emperor of Mali Empire? Where are the empirical legacies of the fabulously rich of African history? Who is keeping the fabled beads of the illustrious Moremi of Ife?

    In the long and short run, geography truly matters. It may well have to do with the geography of the place. In the tropics, Mother Nature plays a spoiling role to stump the imagination and the human capacity to master its environment. Everything grows in copious and prodigal abundance. Little human cultivation is required of the denizens. The tropical lassitude permitting, you can pick up the bounties of nature at will, just like your hunter-gatherer ancestors. You reap where you did not sow.

    If this does not get in the way of a transition to full modernity, one must wonder what does. When Samuel Adepeju Aluko, the notable Nigerian economist, was asked why the Nigerian economy had not collapsed despite the best efforts of its kleptocratic ruling class, the meticulously provincial economist famously retorted that the economy could not collapse as long as the people can jump into the bush and hunt down wild rodents and dig up wild-growing cassava tuber with ancestral relish.

    A quarter of a century after Aluko’s sobering prognosis, the informal economy in Nigeria continues to trump and make nonsense of the formal economy, making it impossible to codify or scientifically evaluate real economic performance and genuine growth. The informal economy becomes the real economy and the source of the mysterious survival and sustenance of the people in the face of harsh deprivation. Yet until the informal economy is formalized and finessed through organic developmental process, economic modernity will continue to elude the nation.

    With the youth of tropical Africa voting with their feet, the economic disequilibrium is bound to get worse. As the youth are lured away by the prospects of better fortunes in foreign climes, the rampaging momentum of globalization and the advent of new technologies impose their own solution on the problems of primitive economies giving rise to social deviancy, high-tech hacking of banks, internet scams, techno-kidnapping, the ritualization of poverty and other forms of social cannibalism.

    Yet despite the bleak prognosis, there may well be some light at the end of the Nigerian tunnel.  Nothing concentrates the mind of nations better than the prospects of death and disintegration. This being the season of compassion and charity, we could do with some of these virtues in Nigeria.

    Despite its languid and uninspiring take off and whatever the internal contradictions and ethical somersaulting, charity demands that even its worst critics appreciate the efforts of the current government in fighting corruption and in trying to put the economy on a sound footing of agricultural self-sufficiency. In recent times, no government has done as much as the Buhari administration to drum it to the Nigerian populace that we must consume what we can produce.

    The progressive hue, hype and hoopla of its provenance notwithstanding, it is obvious that General Buhari is running a conservative, law and order administration. This in itself is not a political crime. The APC is an amalgam of conflicting and contradicting tendencies. It would have taken a political wizard of exemplary skills to weld these conflicting tendencies seamlessly together.

    But as we have seen, politics is not General Buhari’s forte. What is now important is to lay the ideological cards that drive governance on the table so that others with a contrasting ideological vision of the country can also put their template on the table for Nigerians to judge accordingly. If a nation were to survive in the long run and make accelerated economic progress, the less emphasis on tribal exultations and religious grandstanding the better.

    Forging national ideological consensus matters. Ideology determines the preference for a particular type of politics. This in turn influences the economic orientation of government. For example, while there can be no doubt that President Buhari’s conservative nationalism and law and order worldview has led to the degrading of the Boko Haram scourge, the lack of fundamental clarity in the economic sphere has led to periodic shortages of petroleum products which have in turn compounded the misery of the people.

    Fortuitously even in the hot and sultry tropics, there seems to be the possibility and prospects of life after death. A dead party like the old PDP can suddenly resurrect and begin to hint of a menacing return to customary duty post. Despite the obvious fact that a leopard cannot change its spots, it will be foolish and foolhardy to dismiss the prospects of the former ruling rally, particularly in a nation in which elections are often an ethnic census conducted without recourse to any guiding ideology or formal party principles.

    There is no point in pleading the danger of mortality to a person who has escaped from heaven, or what the Yoruba call an Ayorunbo.  Both the resurrected PDP and the openly ailing APC face formidable and monumental obstacles if they are to transform into authentic political parties and veritable agents of national transformation.  First, they will need to come up with coherent ideologies for rescuing Nigeria from the stasis of political and economic underdevelopment.

    Second, they will need to take a harder look at their mode of leadership recruitment. Thirdly and lastly, they will need to look at their preferment and patronage mechanism which is currently skewed in favour of primordial proclivities and eccentric whimsicalities. Indeed on this last note, the PDP seems to have done better than the APC in its distribution of patronage and preferment.

    Luckily and fortuitously again, help seems to be coming from an African country which seems to have escaped the vagaries of the sad tropics. South Africa is located just below the Tropics of Capricorn and it is this accident of geography that seems to have led the Boer settlers to forcibly occupy the land in the first instance.

    The election of Cyril Ramaphosa as the ANC leader is a classic instance of party regeneration in contemporary African politics. It is the triumph of system and institutions over individuals however powerful and influential. In a tough and keenly contested election, the former trade union leader and iconic veteran of the struggle against the Apartheid regime, trounced the former wife of the outgoing leader and president, Jacob Zuma. The ANC is now poised to overcome whatever damage inflicted on party and country by Zuma’s serial shenanigans.

    In recalling the triumph of Cyril Ramaphosa, it will be useful to bring up two important facts. First, Ramaphosa was originally Nelson Mandela choice as his successor. But Mandela was overruled by the ANC old guard who might have been swayed by old loyalties to their fallen colleague and comrade in arms, Govan Mbeki, Thabo Mbeki’s much esteemed father.

    It could also be that they felt that the dour, solid and cosmopolitan Thabo Mbeki was a steadier and more stabilising hand than the hard-hitting and ideologically implacable Ramaphosa. Second, the ANC was formed as a protest movement against injustice and not a political party which accounts for its enduring discipline and cohesion.

    The ANC was founded in 1912. But it did not come to power until the nineties. It had endured many storms, bleak exile and the imprisonment of its core leadership, yet it did not come apart at the seam. Despite the artillery fire and relentless bombardment of a hostile and savage apartheid government and the mendacity and treachery of the international community, the ANC did not fracture, neither was it for once factionalised into regional, ethnic and religious components.

    Rather than seeking explanations in metaphysical nonsense, the secret of ANC’s great coherence and cohesion as an African party is there for all to decode rationally, logically and scientifically. It inheres in core cadre discipline, exceptional leadership qualities and committed followership. When he was released from jail, an interviewer asked Nelson Mandela whether he did not see the South African presidential lodge as his next destination. Mandela retorted that as a loyal and disciplined party man, he would be waiting for the next assignment from his party and if he was asked to be a janitor he would be there happily manning his post.

    After the Mandela presidency when Thabo Mbeki, was chosen as successor and party leader over the competing and probably more pressing claims of the local leadership that bore that bore the brunt of state violence under apartheid, the party did not fracture into its ethnic, regional, racial and religious components.

    Rather than hugging the limelight with Mbeki, the likes of Matemela Cyril Ramaphosa were to find a new vocation in business and international financing. When Jacob Zuma emerged as party leader and inevitable president despite his colourful antecedents and omnivorously heterosexual exploits, the party grandees chose to stand by him rather than risk the potential ethnic and regional backlash his political defenestration might provoke.

    A party that is not known for anything will be remembered for nothing. The great parties of western democracies go through endless and ceaseless self-inventions but the ideological fundament remains. There is a limit to power pragmatism. Even in advanced liberal democracies, ethnic profiling and racial colouration often rear their ugly head. But it is never done at the expense of party coherence and cohesiveness.

    When the British Labour Party showed a preference for the English golden boy Tony Blair with his Teflon trifling and centrist fudging over his former mentor the dour and psychologically suspect Scotsman Gordon Brown, they did it without threatening the overall cohesion and coherence of the party. With his rigidly socialist worldview and Presbyterian hardihood, Brown held little appeal for an increasingly discerning electorate.

    It was a typically British coup engineered with flawless timing and precision and with the fabled panache of Perfidious Albion. Blair would go on to win three elections in a row for Labour before being virtually elbowed aside by his fuming and brooding former mentor. The rest is history and the ascendance of another Oxbridge English golden boy David Cameron as prime minister. On the other hand, when the Conservative party elected the gifted but unprepossessing William Hague as its leader, a backbencher noted with malicious gusto :”And now they have even elected a foetus to rule us!” or words to that effect.

    In his last days in parliament, the great Winston Churchill was cautioned by a young and talented Conservative front bencher against washing the party dirty linen before the enemy. Churchill rounded on his youthful interlocutor. “Youngman, that is not the enemy, that is Her Majesty’s loyal opposition”. Now pointing at the conservative backbench, Churchill roared. “My boy, the enemy is behind you!”

    We have a lot to learn from the great democracies of the west as well as the South Africans.

     

     

     

     

     

  • Okon forms c with Baba Lekki

    (An old classic from the Okon chapbook.)

    As the presidential sweepstake stalemates into a geopolitical duel, political incontinence and foul distemper has taken over the land. Okon has been adding fillips to the disorder in his own unique ways. When he is not running abusive commentaries about the political elite, he is busy excoriating the major ethnic groups for bringing Nigeria into disrepute.

    One sultry afternoon, Okon stormed out of the house after a heated exchange with Mama Igosun vowing to form his own party. He had asked the tough matriarch which party she would vote for in the coming election.

    “Mabolaje Grand Alliance”, the old woman replied with a frown.

    “Mafoluku abi wetin you call am?  Which kind Yoruba Secret Society be dat one again? Abi na fuku dis mama think dem dey chop for party?”, Okon snorted.

    “Na your papa dey Mafoluku. Na dem party of dem Adelabu, dem Akinbiyi and dem Akinloye. Abi no be dem Gbomogbomo (kidnappers) party your kobokobo people dey do for Ikot Olosi?” Mama snarled, eyeing the mad boy with angry disdain.

    “Chei! Dem dead Yoruba troublemakers again! Nigeria don kaput.” Okon lamented bitterly.

    “Wo tinba la orogun yi mo e lori waagba”, Mama cursed and charged at the mad boy.

    You can then imagine snooper’s consternation when the half-crazed dustbin woman charged breathlessly into the sitting room to announce that Okon was on television fielding questions. And lo there was the crazy one dressed like a resource control chieftain running rings round everybody.

    “Etubom Okon, thanks for coming again. It takes a lot of courage. It…” the adorable lady interviewer opened.

    “See me see trouble ooo. I never come once and you don dey say again. Let me tell una, dis yeye thin no dey take courage at all”, Okon retorted with devilish hoopla. The poor girl squirmed in embarrassment. At this point, Baba Lekki staggered in thoroughly drenched with incontinence reeking of cheap illicit gin and shivering like a rain-beaten chicken. Okon took a scornful look at the human fiasco and burst into deranged laughter.

    “You see, make una throway salute for baba oo. Him dey come from Ikorodu Island. Him come reach Majidun by boat and him come swim the rest,” the mad boy crowed.

    “What is your name sir?” the other lady asked Baba Lekki.

    “I am Lambert Adesokan, the Elegiri of Alekuso, Inter-LLB”, Baba replied promptly.

    “Sir as they say, let charity begin at home..” the first lady began.

    “Ah dem Ibo girl again! Dem Charity be dem Ibo girl wey im papa dey wire. When dem ask Ibo man why him dey wire him own daughter him come reply say Charity must to begin at home”, Okon sneered.  The interviewers ignored the mad boy.

    “Sir, what is the name of your party?” one of them asked baba.

    “CAN. Comedians Association of Nigeria.” Baba replied.

    “What is your motto?”

    “Toyota Landcruiser”, Okon jumped in again and was ignored.

    “And where is your party manifesto?” one of the lady’s asked sniffily and prettily.

    “Nonsense. I don’t do bourgeois chicanery. A people’s party needs no manifesto. The educators need to be properly educated”, Baba Lekki spat in perfect English.

    “Sir, what is your view of MEND?”

    “MEND na emendation, so one mend equals ten emendations”, Baba growled.

    “Come no be dem Okah boy com drive Babangida from dem Dodan before, before?” Okon screamed. At this point, the station succumbed to a massive power cut.