The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • Now, it is espirit de crooks

    A day after Senate president and absconding medical doctor, Olubukola Saraki, was discharged and acquitted by the Code of Conduct Tribunal, Okon went in search of the old contrarian and failed legal practitioner, Lambert Alekuso, aka Baba Lekki. It has been a long time. Baba Lekki, in total exasperation with political development in the country, has been avoiding contact with humanity as if they are some Bubonic plague. He had even sent a Swiftian “modest proposal” to the government about how to cull the population of the accursed species known as the political class.

    But shortly after Evans the billionaire kidnapper was captured in his mansion in Magodo, Baba Lekki relocated to the adjacent slum of Olowo Ira to carry out research about what he called “the sociological and economic enablement of criminality in multi-ethnic neighbourhood”. The old crook claimed to have discovered that Evans was about to complete a tunnel which led directly from his house to a nearby police station.

    It was here that Okon caught up with the old codger on a hot and sweltering afternoon as he swatted flies with an ancient horse whisk and cursed his ancestors for imposing Nigerian nationality on him. People were helping themselves to free drinks from a refrigerated truck that had broken down in the middle of the road. Baba Lekki’s spirit soared as soon as he sighted Okon.

    “Baba which kind nonsense be dis. Obodo don scatter and you dey here. Ngbo baba, wetin be no case submission?”

    “Okon, a no case submission is a non-case submission, a legal lobotomy since nothing can stand on nothing”, the old crook replied, frowning with professorial severity.

    “Baba wereeee! All dat na yeye grammar, wetin be case and non-case?” Okon screamed at the old man as he advanced threateningly.

    “Calm down, Okon calm down. You see no case is fraud because there is a case however inchoate but non-case means the whole case is a non-starter since everybody does it. So why do you want to hang the poor boy alone?” the old logician calmly submitted.

    “Kai, baba may thunder strike dem politicians”, Okon raved.

    “You see Okon when cow come sack dem school, wetin you called dat one?” Baba Lekki asked.

    Ëspirit de cow”, Okon whimpered.

    “Ha, ha , dis one na  espirit de crooks”,  Baba Lekki spat and dismissed Okon.

     

  • An unimaginable country

    An unimaginable country

    It is another June 12 anniversary tomorrow.  As belated awareness dawned on the writer, we have had to evacuate the original column meant for today to give room for commemoration and reflection. It has been twenty four years since the freest and fairest election in the history of the nation and twenty three years since the martyrdom of the winner of the election commenced culminating in his mysterious death four years after.

    As the historic day recedes in human memory, the tendency has been for its historic and symbolic import to supplant concrete remembrance. The ardour and passion appear to have waned even among the most vociferous partisans. Yet there can be no doubt that the June 12, 1993 election remains a significant milestone, arguably the most important date in the journey of Nigerians to democratic emancipation after the epoch of external colonization.

    It is a measure of the enormity of the crisis of the Nigerian state that twenty four years after the historic annulment, Nigeria continues to jog in the jungle of political instability as new centrifugal forces threaten to tear the nation apart. You cannot plant yam and expect to harvest cassava. Just as it was twenty four years ago, ethnic fundamentalism stands in the way of the evolution of genuine national consciousness. In a conglomeration of nationalities at different levels of civilization yet to congeal into organic nationhood, ethnic memory of hurt and hate continually imperils the national project leading to a country perpetually at war with itself.

    We have been here before and the omens are not very good. This time around, a sit-down at home order which obliterates the civic and social rights of other nationalities living within the same space has led to an even more dangerous and preposterous expulsion order which abolishes the rights of other citizens to live and prosper freely in any community of their choice. Curiously, this is also coming after a historic election.

    As this column noted last week, in fragile combustible nations hobbled by imperfect federalism and a winner-takes-all democracy, nobody can be sure when shrill platform positions meant for the negotiation of better deals will collide with other equally adamant platform positions which may then explode into a national conflagration. History has shown that narcissistic hubris which propels a person or a group to believe that they are the measure of all things without any regard for the sensitivities of others is a sign of cultural and emotional underdevelopment.

    This ethnic one-upmanship is the bane of Nigeria, and it is at the core of the National Question. All nations are artificial entities willed into existence by the visionary exertions of a heroic few and translated into concrete reality by continuous efforts and ceaseless self-interrogation of the collective multitude. This relentless self-invention often involving arduous negotiations and renegotiations facilitated by a spirit of give and take as emergent realities supplant dominant realities is the difference between organic nations and some of the colonial shambles in Africa.

    As currently constituted, Nigeria is an unimaginable nation. An unimaginable country is an impossible country, impossible because it continues to defy visionary reconstruction along its existing architecture. It requires a new architectural master plan which must boldly confront the contradictions ripping the country apart. It is these contradictions that produced the June 12 tragedy twenty four years ago, the phenomenon of Boko Haram in the north and social cannibalism in the rest of the country.

    And now this looming catastrophe which chillingly recalls the events of fifty years ago? How much more can a country take before hitting the canvas? Twenty four years after its freest and fairest election ever, the nation is still jogging in the jungle.

  • An Evening with President Abiola

    IT was a scene out of the Roman Empire in all its glory and grandeur. The din was impossible, yet there was something sedulous and magical about this display of power at its awesome summit. It was medieval pageantry in Technicolor; a brilliant fusion of the traditional and the modern. A very important man was traversing the highway between mortality and immortality.

    Horses and horsemen collide with outriders and state of the art limousines. State spooks mingled with traditional enforcers dressed like local hunters. An empty gold chariot blasted its way through, heralding the imminent arrival of his imperial majesty, even as a remarkably ugly masquerade which reminded one of an ill-tempered hippopotamus began to press its luck with the crowd. He was Pakaleke, a.k.a the devil of Apataganga.

    From the distance, a dancing procession was approaching. The law enforcement agents were beginning to have problems with the rowdy crowd. As they surged forward, they were beaten back with batons and horsewhips. Everybody was trying to catch a glimpse of the royal carnival. This was not a scene to miss. In his youth and penurious prime, his majesty was known as a dancer and drummer of exceptional endowments. And judging from the royal harem, his prodigious appetite for ravishing beauties remained undimmed by time and tribulation.

    As the dancing procession drew nearer, you could swear that you knew the king somewhere. There was something faintly familiar and yet oddly distant about him; an otherworldly aura of perfect self-control and inner tranquillity. But by now, the lead drummer was getting in the way of the cognitive senses. A brilliant purveyor of social acrimony, he was panning out litigious lyrics with savage delight and with his face permanently contorted in subversive exertion.

    Omo agbon jeje bi eniti o r’obinrin ri

    Beni aya nbe nile; omo nbe nile

    Sugbon obinrin dudu obinrin pupa

    Olorun maje o kuku obinrin.

    And later in response to the din:

    Dami dami dami, Ologundudu

    Dami, dami dami, ariwo majesin

    Kii pa alakara, dami dami dami.

    And much later:

    Gbedogbedo kan o le gb’agogo

    Akanbata o le kan lekun

    Alagbede o le r’ojugun

    Pejapeja o le p’olorun oba

    Oro t’eso pe sobe, pe sobe

    Eyin le so, eyin leso.

    By now as this riotous carnival came into full view, the ever joyous visage, the kind compassionate features, the in your face, devil may care bravura of an Alpha male in full menace, had become unmistakable. He was even more noble of carriage and majestic of mien. Yet like all artists, he had a remarkable sense of rhythm and cadence and was responding to the inner music with a feline suppleness and glorious flair that drew rapturous applause from the crowd. The jaw dropped in awe and astonishment and before you could pronounce the name, the riotous crowd had beaten you to it.

    “It is President Abiola in triumphal procession”, they chanted in unison. The good people of Nigeria, irrespective of race, region and religion, spoke twenty four years ago. And now power is concurring. History shall vindicate the just indeed.

    It has taken a tectonic shift from the template of governance to acknowledge the obvious truth that whatever his personal failings and the objective contradictions of the circumstances, Abiola is a hero of democracy in Nigeria. It is not how you begin that matters but how you end up. The fallen hero may yet be forgiven, but it does not vitiate the claim of the emergent hero.

    Twenty four years ago in June 1993, Nigerians spoke in unison against the barbarity of military rule. Fourteen million of them voted, nine of these for MKO Abiola, charismatic mogul and candidate of the Social Democratic Party. The victory in itself was a political odyssey whose story has never been told in full. Abiola outgunned and outfoxed the military High Command who were expecting a different outcome which would have made their job easier.

    In the event, the military still went ahead to annul the freest and fairest election so far in the history of the nation. It led to a five-year low intensity civil war in which many perished and the Nigerian military junta anathematised by the civilised world. Till date, many still carry the traumatic wounds of that encounter.  There were many, this writer included, who were not Abiola’s fans and who never met him on a one to one basis but who chose to fight on the side of truth and freedom. We chose to lose all, rather than be ruled by primitive predators. A nation-state is not a military or feudal fiefdom.

    By now, the din had died down. All the revellers had disappeared. A celestial calm enveloped the universe. In the distance, a few female praise singers could be heard chanting the heroic panegyrics of the first posthumous president of Nigeria and the last Aare onakakanfo of his people. But the late tycoon was nowhere to be found. Even the mad drummer, Ayanlere, with his droopy and dolorous visage, had disappeared. The wild drumming had now been replaced by an Ebenezer Obey classic in honour of the late tycoon.

    Balogun Ojoo, baba Bada, badabarawu

    Ti nbari balogun lehin mi

     Inu mi a dun, ara mi a ya gaga

    Odede lowa tabi yara logbe wa

    T’oba ti gb’ohun mi o

    Masun mawo maa bo, Ologundudu

    Masun mawo maa bo, oko Atinuke….

    Baba Kolawole mi o ire.

    Snooper had slept, joyous but exhausted, with a crushing pile of newspapers . In the last stages of consciousness, this avalanche of printed matter began crushing the neck as it made its way to the bare floor. This was a sure recipe for political hallucination. A mobile handset was beginning to slide down towards the buccal cavity now made more cavernous by sheer exhaustion. Suddenly, there was a door from nowhere and as it opened lo it was the late tycoon resplendent and well-rested smiling his famous cherubic smile. The chief was obviously in a bantering mood as he opened up with his famous fusillade of native wisecracks and witticism.

    “Chief, congrats on your posthumous apotheosis”, snooper opened cautiously.

    “Ah, apoti osi ko, apoti ogun ni.  Oyinbo ti poju .(Haba grammar is too much)  Agboyinbo ki ku le”, the chief replied with devastating wit and local brio.

    “I mean a serving Nigerian president has conceded that you are a hero”, snooper pressed as he suppressed an urge to laugh.

    “Ah you see, I told them you cannot abort a full pregnancy. Ti o  bape titi akalolo a pe baba” the great chief retorted.

    “We must now await the formal proclamation”, snooper continued.

    “Ah leave them. Adie tosu ti o to, ara e lowa”, the chief observed with fortitude.

    “Even Babangida has joined the chorus”, snooper noted with a hint of disapproval.

    “Ah leave Ibrahim out of it. Omo buruku n’ijo tie. Besides, as our people say, makanmakan loye. A man that is being pursued by a masquerade should take heart, because as people of this world get tired, so do people of the other world.”, the chief noted with a deadpan demeanour.

    “Sir, please explain,” snooper pleaded.

    “You see, Ibrahim is not alone in this thing. When a man says he is Dodondawa, you must know that there is a problem, because Dodo o dawa. Enia lowa lehin dodo to fi ni ohun ni Dodondawa” the chief explained with an even more recondite Yoruba saying.

    “Ah chief, how do you mean?” snooper pressed.

    “Wo iwo omokunrin yi ma fitina mi. (Youngman, don’t trouble me) You see, it is like the case of a masquerade who is killed by a lorry and the people are saying that he has to Lagos. Very soon, the mother of the missing will ask for her son”, the chief concluded with wit and calm forbearance.

    Snooper decided to change the topic.

    “Chief, is that not an empty bottle of Stout I am looking at under your bed?” snooper queried in a mischievous tone.

    “Ah, some people came and I entertained them. In any case, when you recite the Qumran up to the point of rabana, omi amala loku.”, he replied with a boyish grin.

    By now snooper could not resist a wild laugh of relish at the great man’s native wisdom and traditional savvy. He was eyeing me with the poker-faced perspicuity of a traditional savant. Here was the Griot-president Nigeria never had.

    “Chief, by the way, have you seen Alhaji Abubakar Rimi?” snooper asked MKO.

    “Ah, is he here? O ntan lo na niyen. You see, it is like the case of the man who was caught in bed with his own daughter in- law. When he was asked what he thought he was doing, the old man replied, well, gentlemen, e ti gbo? Then it is almost over, it will soon be over”.

    At this point, the bed lamp, dragged by the cord of the mobile set, hit snooper on the ridge of the nose, sending him awake with a crushing pain. It was midnight and it was raining heavily in Lagos.

    (A longer version of this was published in 2011)

  • Espirit de cow

    It may well be that we are approaching the end of times as we know it. Strange things are happening which defy reality and common sense. In a classic demonstration of animal warfare, a solitary herdsman in the new Rondel Republic unleashed his arsenal of unruly ruminants on a school and hell was let loose. The staff reportedly took to their heels.

    Not to be cowed into submission, the cows headed for the classroom and promptly began teaching themselves. The pupils fled, abandoning the classroom to its new masters. It was quite a sight. Poor boys and girls, discretion is the better part of valour. The cows may well turn out to be suicide bombers in disguise. And in this part of the world, you never know when cows will shed old habits and become man-eating carnivores.

    Oh dear, oh dear, snooper is very much aware of the fact that in the heat of savage polemics during the last election in Britain, Her Majesty’s Foreign Secretary, the rogue Boris Yeltsin, famously dismissed his opponent as an “Islington herbivore”. Whoops! The city ruminant promptly disappeared after the historic hiding never to be seen in public again. Its hide is now on display in Battersea after the hung parliament.

    In desperation, snooper had turned to Okon to find out what this strange incident portends for a troubled nation.

    “Look Okon, what does this mean? Cows in classroom?”

    “Ha oga, na dat one dem dey call espirit dey cow”.

    “Meaning what?” snooper snapped in irritation

    “He mean say dem cow be spirit.” Okon sneered.

    “Look Okon, they are chewing the curd!!!” snooper exclaimed.

    “Oga cow no dey chew cord, cord na wire, na chalk dem dey chew”, the mad boy replied with a poker-faced relish.

    “And what does this mean?” snooper wondered aloud.

    “Ha oga he mean say education don kaput”, Okon sneered.

  • State Decomposition in Tropical Africa

    State Decomposition in Tropical Africa

    With their mordant wit and understated sense of humour and irony, the British are past masters of the classic summation of a historical event.  At the end of Things Fall Apart with Okonkwo’s body dangling from a tree in an act of ritual suicide and proud defiance, Winterbottom, the colonial District Officer, wondered aloud about how he would title the epic tragedy just enacted were he to be a writer.  “The Pacification of a Tribe of the Lower Niger”, he promptly noted in his diary.

    It was a moment of subversive irony and supreme artistic genius on the part of Chinua Achebe. At least on the literary plane, the colonial fox has been outfoxed by the colonial subject or chicken if you like. It was not the district colonial officer who was speaking. It was the subdued African subaltern rifling through the psychological stronghold of the colonial master and exposing its inner fortifications and the dubious nature of the entire civilizing mission for the world to see and judge.

    Several centuries later, rather than being completely pacified, the people of the lower Niger are still up in arms, proudly resistant and defiantly rebellious against the Nigerian relic of the old colonial state. The funeral pyre is strangely aglow in Nigeria in a manner reminiscent of people watching their own funeral. There are echoes and hints of state seppuku and tribal suicide all rolled into an outlandish fiasco. The endgame of the Lugardian state architecture seems to be with us in Nigeria.

    Two years into the Buhari administration, the crisis of the post-colonial state in Nigeria deepens and the contradictions of the polity multiply with aplomb. The confusion surrounding an ailing president is compounded by the crisis of an infirm ruling party. This is not the time for any spurious mid-term assessment or semantic cavil about how well the administration has fared at a prohibitive cost to national cohesion and unity and under prohibiting circumstances. There are far more urgent issues at stake.

    To be fair, the pressures on this government and the ailing federating units are tremendous. Some of them are not of the making of the Buhari government. But a few of them are of its making, directly attributable to unpardonable lapses of minimum concentration and unforced errors of judgement.

    For the first time in the history of democracy and civilian administration in Nigeria, we have a ruling party openly repudiating a vital segment its own manifesto on which it has campaigned and won the heart of at least a section of the country thus daring an influential faction of the party leadership to go and jump under the train if they like. It was a historic rebuff. But it also presages a terminal fracturing of the ruling party and hegemonic coalition of contraries along regional and ideological lines.

    There is no way the APC can now go back to the Nigerian electorate without a substantial “reinvention” of its old ethos and ideals. Malami’s arguments against wholesale restructuring are well-marshalled, well-researched and full of candid and cogent facts. But they have put the South West segment of the APC in a tight spot.

    Judging from the discordant notes and murmurs of dissent emanating from its leaders, the South West wing of the ruling APC will from now on have to fight for their political life in a politically alert and sophisticated society known to punish political perfidy with exemplary retribution. The question is why put restructuring on the top agenda if you do not understand what it means or if you are not prepared for its undaunted challenges?

    To compound the woes of the ruling party, you now have an Eighth Senate dominated by its own nominal members behaving very much like a hostile opposition party bent on bringing down the executive as it continues to amend and re-amend state statutes all in a futile gesture of getting even with the executive. Judging from the public reaction to its frantic inanities, the Nigerian public are not in the least impressed.

    The Eighth Senate is feudal perfidy personified and its leadership a classic example of reprobate realpolitik. Unless the executive muster the will and the creative engineering to bring it to heel, something tells this writer that at the end of the day they would have succeeded in destroying the APC from within before staging a mass walk out to return to base.

    The omens are quite dire. So what to do? Unfortunately the options are few and far between. In all probability, the normative and ethical free-fall will play itself out probably leading to the unravelling of the Fourth Republic and with very great portents for the continued survival of the country as a corporate entity. The odour of state decomposition is thick in the air.

    We say this every sense of responsibility. The Nigerian state as currently constituted cannot fight a multi-dimensional and multi-sector war of attrition without being overwhelmed by adversity. With so many sections of the country resorting to structural self-medication in order to stave off extermination by ISIS herdsmen or societal collapse from the menace of kidnappers, terrorists and sundry violent extortionists, we are facing state implosion or the total meltdown of its security organogram.

    As it was in the beginning, so also it is proving to be at this endgame of the post-colonial state in Nigeria. Fifty years ago, the Nigerian political firmament echoed to the din and clamour of secession from the then Eastern Nigeria. The threat of disintegration provoked a precipitate restructuring of the nation into a twelve-state administrative unit by the Gowon administration ostensibly to buy peace but in reality a strategic ploy to surgically excise the minority arteries of the nascent rebellion.

    But it was a proverbial case of too little too late. The ensuing civil war caused unparalleled suffering and a conservatively estimated two million soul. This week exactly fifty years after this epic tragedy and in a classic re-enactment of Karl Marx’s famous dictum , the spirit of rebellion and a people’s quest for self-determination rose like a sphinx from the east again.

    A sit-down at home order issued by MASSOB/ IPOB achieved a near total compliance in the core east leaving the so called elected leadership looking very much like sitting ducks before a shooting festival. Unfortunately, unlike the first time around when the Igbo people were led by the politically refined and impeccably credentialed Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, this time around in an act of internal rebellion against established hierarchy, the separatist platform is powered by educationally challenged stalwarts and agrarian mountebanks. This is what happens when a political elite surrender to mob psychology and the hysterics of internet neurotics.

    It is a situation which makes structured negotiations and elite pacting— a sine qua non for national crisis management—- virtually impossible. In moments of grave national crisis, you can only negotiate with people implicated in the same discursive formation however mutually antagonistic this may appear since all elite struggles for the allocation of resources ultimately coexist in a web of paradoxical complicity. In post-colonial Africa, the more economically under-developed the nation is the more politically over-developed the elite are.

    Yet the truth of the matter is that it is the federal government that has turned Kanu into a folk hero and helped to beatify him in the process. While the initial security concern cannot be faulted, the government allowed arbitrariness and impunity to take over. But as Kanu himself will find out in the coming months, hatemongering and prejudice suffused hysteria are no substitute for statesmanlike wisdom and rectitude in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious nation.

    Blessed are the habitual peace-makers of the elite-formations best historically placed and sociologically advantaged to appreciate the fundamental cultural , economic and political contradictions that have turned Nigeria into an impossible nation. Even when they were derided as “Pakis” by their political antagonists, their leadership has been advocating for a tactical and structural loosening up of the rigid unitarist contraption as the best antidote against inevitable architectural collapse of the nation for the past seventy years.

    Ominously this time around and unlike what happened fifty years ago when a substantial segment of the Yoruba political elite appeared to be die-hard pan-Nigerian romantics averse to the disintegration of the nation despite their tribulations in the hands of rival elite formations, there is an increasing buy-in among sections of the Yoruba political elite for the exit clause or radical restructuring of the nation as the minimum condition for staying together.

    Once and if the increasing clamour congeals into a pan-Yoruba consensus, it simply means that as a corporate entity Nigeria is beyond radical surgery. This time around, nobody is going to stop any group wanting out of Nigeria or accept any plea for a stay of execution when shrill platform positions for the negotiation of a better deal after losing out in a power play mutate into the real thing as a result of sheer crisis fatigue.

    In order to conclude, we must go back to where the rains started beating us. Exactly fifty five years ago this week, the Balewa administration in an illegal and unconstitutional exercise of its oversight function and acting in concert with the usual ethnic collaborators from the South, took over the old Western Region by declaring a state of emergency during a crisis it helped to foment all in a bid to find a final solution to the Awolowo Question.

    But it was the beginning of the end and of Nigeria as a continental exemplar of working federalism and a dynamic developmental model for the rest of the continent. The resulting commotion and political insurrection in the west led directly to a military coup and civil war. An attempt to load the dice against the classical canons and ethos of federalism led to the collapse of the whole architecture. Fifty five years on, Nigeria is still operating what can only be described as unitary federalism and is yet to re-enact the magic of the early years of the First Republic.

    Last week at a symposium in Abuja, the contradictions of hobbled federalism stared the nation in the face again. Fifty five years after functioning federalism was aborted in Nigeria by forces of feudal retrogression acting in concert with Southern collaborators, Malami was busy lecturing the nation about the virtual impossibility of wholesale structural reform of the nation’s architecture owing to the sheer heft of the impedimenta put in place against restructuring by the military constitution of 1999.

    Without any sense of irony a section of the audience, as if on spooky cue, was applauding while others, including professors who have been on sabbatical after being compromised by General Babangida’s  legendary subversive generosity, were insisting that there was nothing like real or false federalism.

    While this may be technically true, it has not occurred to these fellows that one of the cardinal canons of federalism as enunciated by the father of modern federalism scholarship is that no single federating unit must be in a position to exercise oversight or veto power over the rest of the federating units. There is no federation anywhere in the contemporary world which practises the kind of lopsided federalism that obtains in Nigeria. It is a modern slave plantation.

    Since Balewa’s fateful intervention in Western region fifty five years ago this week this has been the reality of governance in Nigeria no matter the hue or provenance of the administration. Whether military despotism or civilian tyranny, it has always been the case of a meddlesome and obstructionist central government acting to stifle and suffocate the local genius of the Nigerian people.

    The war-cry as it echoed again from Abuja last week is that if it ain’t completely broke don’t even bother to fix it. It does not seem to occur to those holding the nation and the entire Black race to ransom that one hundred and eighty million people groaning under the historic yoke of this retrograde torture wrack are broke and broken.

    The pain and collective trauma of most Nigerians notwithstanding, it should now be obvious that restructuring the nation is not going to be a tea party .Those who benefit from the current anomalous structure of Nigeria will not let go without a titanic contention which will shake the continent to its foundation. Their vision is steeped in the empire-state with only grudging concession to the dictates of the modern nation-state.

    But if they care to look beyond their nose, it should be obvious that an endgame of some sorts is here with us. With the entire country convulsed by social, political, economic and spiritual commotion, it should be obvious that the current arrangement can no longer be sustained. What we are witnessing may well be the last tango in Nigeria.

     

  • State Decomposition in Tropical Africa

    State Decomposition in Tropical Africa

    With their mordant wit and understated sense of humour and irony, the British are past masters of the classic summation of a historical event.  At the end of Things Fall Apart with Okonkwo’s body dangling from a tree in an act of ritual suicide and proud defiance, Winterbottom, the colonial District Officer, wondered aloud about how he would title the epic tragedy just enacted were he to be a writer.  “The Pacification of a Tribe of the Lower Niger”, he promptly noted in his diary.

    It was a moment of subversive irony and supreme artistic genius on the part of Chinua Achebe. At least on the literary plane, the colonial fox has been outfoxed by the colonial subject or chicken if you like. It was not the district colonial officer who was speaking. It was the subdued African subaltern rifling through the psychological stronghold of the colonial master and exposing its inner fortifications and the dubious nature of the entire civilizing mission for the world to see and judge.

    Several centuries later, rather than being completely pacified, the people of the lower Niger are still up in arms, proudly resistant and defiantly rebellious against the Nigerian relic of the old colonial state. The funeral pyre is strangely aglow in Nigeria in a manner reminiscent of people watching their own funeral. There are echoes and hints of state seppuku and tribal suicide all rolled into an outlandish fiasco. The endgame of the Lugardian state architecture seems to be with us in Nigeria.

    Two years into the Buhari administration, the crisis of the post-colonial state in Nigeria deepens and the contradictions of the polity multiply with aplomb. The confusion surrounding an ailing president is compounded by the crisis of an infirm ruling party. This is not the time for any spurious mid-term assessment or semantic cavil about how well the administration has fared at a prohibitive cost to national cohesion and unity and under prohibiting circumstances. There are far more urgent issues at stake.

    To be fair, the pressures on this government and the ailing federating units are tremendous. Some of them are not of the making of the Buhari government. But a few of them are of its making, directly attributable to unpardonable lapses of minimum concentration and unforced errors of judgement.

    For the first time in the history of democracy and civilian administration in Nigeria, we have a ruling party openly repudiating a vital segment its own manifesto on which it has campaigned and won the heart of at least a section of the country thus daring an influential faction of the party leadership to go and jump under the train if they like. It was a historic rebuff. But it also presages a terminal fracturing of the ruling party and hegemonic coalition of contraries along regional and ideological lines.

    There is no way the APC can now go back to the Nigerian electorate without a substantial “reinvention” of its old ethos and ideals. Malami’s arguments against wholesale restructuring are well-marshalled, well-researched and full of candid and cogent facts. But they have put the South West segment of the APC in a tight spot.

    Judging from the discordant notes and murmurs of dissent emanating from its leaders, the South West wing of the ruling APC will from now on have to fight for their political life in a politically alert and sophisticated society known to punish political perfidy with exemplary retribution. The question is why put restructuring on the top agenda if you do not understand what it means or if you are not prepared for its undaunted challenges?

    To compound the woes of the ruling party, you now have an Eighth Senate dominated by its own nominal members behaving very much like a hostile opposition party bent on bringing down the executive as it continues to amend and re-amend state statutes all in a futile gesture of getting even with the executive. Judging from the public reaction to its frantic inanities, the Nigerian public are not in the least impressed.

    The Eighth Senate is feudal perfidy personified and its leadership a classic example of reprobate realpolitik. Unless the executive muster the will and the creative engineering to bring it to heel, something tells this writer that at the end of the day they would have succeeded in destroying the APC from within before staging a mass walk out to return to base.

    The omens are quite dire. So what to do? Unfortunately the options are few and far between. In all probability, the normative and ethical free-fall will play itself out probably leading to the unravelling of the Fourth Republic and with very great portents for the continued survival of the country as a corporate entity. The odour of state decomposition is thick in the air.

    We say this every sense of responsibility. The Nigerian state as currently constituted cannot fight a multi-dimensional and multi-sector war of attrition without being overwhelmed by adversity. With so many sections of the country resorting to structural self-medication in order to stave off extermination by ISIS herdsmen or societal collapse from the menace of kidnappers, terrorists and sundry violent extortionists, we are facing state implosion or the total meltdown of its security organogram.

    As it was in the beginning, so also it is proving to be at this endgame of the post-colonial state in Nigeria. Fifty years ago, the Nigerian political firmament echoed to the din and clamour of secession from the then Eastern Nigeria. The threat of disintegration provoked a precipitate restructuring of the nation into a twelve-state administrative unit by the Gowon administration ostensibly to buy peace but in reality a strategic ploy to surgically excise the minority arteries of the nascent rebellion.

    But it was a proverbial case of too little too late. The ensuing civil war caused unparalleled suffering and a conservatively estimated two million soul. This week exactly fifty years after this epic tragedy and in a classic re-enactment of Karl Marx’s famous dictum , the spirit of rebellion and a people’s quest for self-determination rose like a sphinx from the east again.

    A sit-down at home order issued by MASSOB/ IPOB achieved a near total compliance in the core east leaving the so called elected leadership looking very much like sitting ducks before a shooting festival. Unfortunately, unlike the first time around when the Igbo people were led by the politically refined and impeccably credentialed Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, this time around in an act of internal rebellion against established hierarchy, the separatist platform is powered by educationally challenged stalwarts and agrarian mountebanks. This is what happens when a political elite surrender to mob psychology and the hysterics of internet neurotics.

    It is a situation which makes structured negotiations and elite pacting— a sine qua non for national crisis management—- virtually impossible. In moments of grave national crisis, you can only negotiate with people implicated in the same discursive formation however mutually antagonistic this may appear since all elite struggles for the allocation of resources ultimately coexist in a web of paradoxical complicity. In post-colonial Africa, the more economically under-developed the nation is the more politically over-developed the elite are.

    Yet the truth of the matter is that it is the federal government that has turned Kanu into a folk hero and helped to beatify him in the process. While the initial security concern cannot be faulted, the government allowed arbitrariness and impunity to take over. But as Kanu himself will find out in the coming months, hatemongering and prejudice suffused hysteria are no substitute for statesmanlike wisdom and rectitude in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious nation.

    Blessed are the habitual peace-makers of the elite-formations best historically placed and sociologically advantaged to appreciate the fundamental cultural , economic and political contradictions that have turned Nigeria into an impossible nation. Even when they were derided as “Pakis” by their political antagonists, their leadership has been advocating for a tactical and structural loosening up of the rigid unitarist contraption as the best antidote against inevitable architectural collapse of the nation for the past seventy years.

    Ominously this time around and unlike what happened fifty years ago when a substantial segment of the Yoruba political elite appeared to be die-hard pan-Nigerian romantics averse to the disintegration of the nation despite their tribulations in the hands of rival elite formations, there is an increasing buy-in among sections of the Yoruba political elite for the exit clause or radical restructuring of the nation as the minimum condition for staying together.

    Once and if the increasing clamour congeals into a pan-Yoruba consensus, it simply means that as a corporate entity Nigeria is beyond radical surgery. This time around, nobody is going to stop any group wanting out of Nigeria or accept any plea for a stay of execution when shrill platform positions for the negotiation of a better deal after losing out in a power play mutate into the real thing as a result of sheer crisis fatigue.

    In order to conclude, we must go back to where the rains started beating us. Exactly fifty five years ago this week, the Balewa administration in an illegal and unconstitutional exercise of its oversight function and acting in concert with the usual ethnic collaborators from the South, took over the old Western Region by declaring a state of emergency during a crisis it helped to foment all in a bid to find a final solution to the Awolowo Question.

    But it was the beginning of the end and of Nigeria as a continental exemplar of working federalism and a dynamic developmental model for the rest of the continent. The resulting commotion and political insurrection in the west led directly to a military coup and civil war. An attempt to load the dice against the classical canons and ethos of federalism led to the collapse of the whole architecture. Fifty five years on, Nigeria is still operating what can only be described as unitary federalism and is yet to re-enact the magic of the early years of the First Republic.

    Last week at a symposium in Abuja, the contradictions of hobbled federalism stared the nation in the face again. Fifty five years after functioning federalism was aborted in Nigeria by forces of feudal retrogression acting in concert with Southern collaborators, Malami was busy lecturing the nation about the virtual impossibility of wholesale structural reform of the nation’s architecture owing to the sheer heft of the impedimenta put in place against restructuring by the military constitution of 1999.

    Without any sense of irony a section of the audience, as if on spooky cue, was applauding while others, including professors who have been on sabbatical after being compromised by General Babangida’s  legendary subversive generosity, were insisting that there was nothing like real or false federalism.

    While this may be technically true, it has not occurred to these fellows that one of the cardinal canons of federalism as enunciated by the father of modern federalism scholarship is that no single federating unit must be in a position to exercise oversight or veto power over the rest of the federating units. There is no federation anywhere in the contemporary world which practises the kind of lopsided federalism that obtains in Nigeria. It is a modern slave plantation.

    Since Balewa’s fateful intervention in Western region fifty five years ago this week this has been the reality of governance in Nigeria no matter the hue or provenance of the administration. Whether military despotism or civilian tyranny, it has always been the case of a meddlesome and obstructionist central government acting to stifle and suffocate the local genius of the Nigerian people.

    The war-cry as it echoed again from Abuja last week is that if it ain’t completely broke don’t even bother to fix it. It does not seem to occur to those holding the nation and the entire Black race to ransom that one hundred and eighty million people groaning under the historic yoke of this retrograde torture wrack are broke and broken.

    The pain and collective trauma of most Nigerians notwithstanding, it should now be obvious that restructuring the nation is not going to be a tea party .Those who benefit from the current anomalous structure of Nigeria will not let go without a titanic contention which will shake the continent to its foundation. Their vision is steeped in the empire-state with only grudging concession to the dictates of the modern nation-state.

    But if they care to look beyond their nose, it should be obvious that an endgame of some sorts is here with us. With the entire country convulsed by social, political, economic and spiritual commotion, it should be obvious that the current arrangement can no longer be sustained. What we are witnessing may well be the last tango in Nigeria.

     

  • The invention of Lagos

    The invention of Lagos

    Rethinking Nigeria with Chief Femi Okunnu

      For the past three and half weeks or so, the state of Lagos has been seized by a cultural and political extravaganza the like of which has not been seen anywhere in the history of the country. A series of events to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of Lagos State has turned into a grand carnival of urban renewal and collective euphoria.

    To be sure, all this has not been without the faint murmur of disapproval from certain quarters. There are those who believe that in a condition of economic meltdown and crippling national poverty, this is good money thrown away in a Vanity Fair. This is to be expected from a very articulate and politically sophisticated people.

    But on the whole, it has been a historic showstopper; a moveable feast rich in culture, history, traditional politics and the economics of perpetual self-invention. Lagos does not do things in half-measures. It is not for nothing that Lagos is also known as “Eko for show”.  See Lagos and marvel. “Go to Lagos, young man”, was the traditional war-cry of self-actualization from the hinterland.

    In the event, if Lagos had not existed, it would have had to be “invented” as a tribute to the capacity of the Black people to rule themselves or to ruin themselves accordingly. The story of Lagos provides redemptive tropes for the whole of Nigeria and how a nation of heterogeneous tribes and diverse people can successfully congeal and cohere around a central idea of political freedom and economic liberation for all its denizens.

    In an inspired and brilliant intervention at the lecture to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Lagos State held at the Eko Suites last Wednesday, Alhaji Femi Okunnu , SAN and former Federal Commissioner in the military reign of General Yakubu Gowon, rued publicly as to why the rest of the country cannot be like Lagos. The answer is blowing in the wind and in the womb of time and history.

    Okunnu went on to name two notable Nigerians, Phillip Asiodu and Allison Ayida, as being instrumental to the creation of Lagos state. Neither is of Yoruba origin. According to Okunnu, since Nigeria has been ruined by his generation, the highly regarded legal luminary called on the teeming youths in the hall to rescue their country and redeem the original dream. It was a call to youthful arms in a moment of revolutionary desperation and disappointment.

    But nothing that is destined to endure comes easy. As a city and now a globally indexed megalopolis, Lagos has also had its share of tribulations and adversities. It has survived a naval bombardment from a British Frigate moored off the Marina, a civil war triggered by royal succession, the much earlier displacement of its original ruling caste by Edo warriors, political turbulence, civil unrests, revolts against colonial rule and savage post-independence military uprisings which have framed the contours of modern Nigeria.

    Lagos, like an invincible heavyweight slugger, has taken it all in the chin and has remained standing. Originally known as Eko, it was renamed and invented as Lagos by Portuguese adventurers who were reminded by its topography and ecology of a similar place in their metropolitan homeland. The name has stuck as a result of sheer imperial cultural aggression. Yet in an engrossing historical irony, Lagos is now more famous and globally celebrated than its original forebear. Such are the wonders of history.

    Unlike Nigeria, Lagos has no doubt been helped by its racial and ethnic mix which has infused a political, economic and cultural virility and power into its being the like of which has not been seen on the West African coast. After the first wave of Awori settlers came the Egun from Badagry and parts of what have now become Benin Republic, Ghana and Togo. Other Yoruba came from the hinterland followed by the Nupe, the Hausa, the Ibo, the Efiks and others.

    A foreign menu was introduced to this local diet with the infusion of returning former slaves and their descendants from Europe and Sierra Leone. They were joined by Brazilian émigrés, former slaves and their offspring who had obtained manumission upon the declaration of independence from Portugal by Brazilian nationalists after a civil war of liberation, and a dash of Cuban returnees.

    These western educated and acculturated former indigenes completely revolutionized and reinvented the politics, literary culture and education of the native tradition they met on ground turning the whole place upside down. With their radical journalism and irrepressible pamphleteering, Lagos eventually became a hotbed of political and intellectual insurrection against colonial rule and the racist assumptions of the entire imperialist mission.

    In the case of the returning former Brazilians with their skilled artisans, talented workmen and enterprising entrepreneurs, they pioneered an economic, cultural and architectural revolution which took the rustic former fishing and farming community by the scruff of the neck and dragged it into western modernity with a dash of old Iberian grandeur. Some parts of Lagos reminded one of little Havana or Rio de Janeiro.

    One of these Brazilian immigrants who arrived in Lagos as a boy speaking only Portuguese became so fabulously wealthy that his riches became a subject of outlandish mythical speculation. In his old age, Da Rocha was said to emerge promptly on his balcony at the stroke of noon to throw coins at secondary school boys.

    Another returnee, James Labulo Davies, the son of Sierra Leonean recaptives, had taken part as a British naval officer in the bombardment of Lagos only to reinvent himself as a leading Lagos businessman and major philanthropist of his time. This gifted and visionary adventurer pioneered the fiscal revolution of the colony when a deal struck with Messr Alli-Balogun in the old cowry system was paid for in modern currency, saving the renowned merchant from a financial meltdown.

    Thus the modernization of Lagos was not without its momentous contradictions and immense ironies. So westernized and Anglicized had these returning luminaries become that they no longer regarded themselves as belonging  to the indigenous tribes they had left behind. They had become a new breed famously and implacably dismissed as negro-Saxons by Edward Blyden. In a remarkable encounter, one of them pointedly told Reverend Henry Townsend that they regarded themselves as middle-men between the British and the Egba people.

    Yet from within their rank also came Herbert Macaulay, the great Black nationalist and father of modern Nigerian politics. A descendant of freed slaves, so refined was Herbert Macaulay in manners, so polished was his diction, so exquisite was his sartorial taste, so distinguished and imperious of carriage was this African nobility that he was known as the Black white man or “oyinbo alawo dudu”. Yet he identified completely with the local populace and their political aspirations and was ready to defend them at grave personal risks and heavy political costs.

    So what makes Lagos tick? And why has it proved impossible for this magic to be replicated in the larger Nigerian society?  History we can still access, but not lost time. Yet in order to recoup lost time, we must return to history in order to learn the correct lessons and pinpoint where the rain started beating us. This was precisely what happened last Wednesday when the organizers of the “Lagos at Fifty” put together a formidable array of pundits to do justice to the topic: Lagos yesterday, tomorrow and the future.

    The keynote speaker, Hakeem Olumide Danmole, a prominent professor of History and distinguished Islamic scholar, did more than justice to the topic. Danmole is scion of an illustrious Lagos family and comes from the finest pedigree of omoluabi Lagosians. An hour into the lecture, Danmole was still warming up and puckering with a poker-faced relish. But he had already established and secured all the parameters for the discussion to follow.

    In an engrossing and intriguing intervention, Alhaji Okunnu, makes a compelling case for Lagos Exceptionalism without really saying so or being aware of the great irony of the situation. He plotted the Lagos trajectory with brilliance and aplomb. With his deft touch, history came alive in the hall.

    All the bare facts were there: the beginnings as an Awori settlement later joined by the Egun, the centralization and modification of the ruling system by Benin warriors— despite an existing Ilaje counter-narrative which insists that the Edo warriors were worsted and taken prisoners at Itebu Manuwa— the renaming by the Portuguese, the naval bombardment which saw Kosoko worsted and banished into exile in Epe, the forcible acquisition as a crown colony and British Protectorate which gifted Lagosians with British citizenship while other Nigerians were regarded as subjects, the oscillation of Lagos between a splendid insularity and grudging commonality with the Yoruba hinterland and the rest of the country and of course events and intrigues leading to the creation of Lagos state.

    In retrospect, it was easy to see why Lagos could not be replicated on the canvas of a gigantic multi-ethnic nation bristling with colonial mischief and miscue. Whereas in Lagos ethnic diversity and different racial mix led to virility and potency, it has led to massive state paralysis in the larger Nigerian nation. The failure of vision on the part of Nigeria’s post-independence political elite, their lack of tolerance and inability to grasp the need for compromise, conciliation and elite pacting in a multi-ethnic nation with self-regarding nationalities in varying stages of collective hubris has led to a war of all against all.

    Unfortunately, the failure of politics and modern governance in Nigeria and of the political class as a national lodestar leads Alhaji Okunnu to a curious leap of logic. So disdainful of regular politicians has the elder statesman become that he pooh-poohs the very idea of restructuring claiming not to understand what the whole thing was all about.

    Yet his story of the invention of Lagos is nothing but a chronicle of relentless structuring and restructuring by the colonial and military authorities as historical and political exigencies demanded. Even then, while it can be argued that the restructuring of the national space into a twelve-state administrative unit by the Gowon administration on the eve of the civil war was nothing but a strategic ploy to deprive the burgeoning Biafran rebellion of regional sympathy and support, it can also be advanced that the earlier creation of the middle-west region from the old west was part of a plot to weaken the already vanquished Awo and put him in his place.

    So often in Nigerian history, genuine restructuring coexists with malign structuring. But while this politicization of restructuring is to be regretted, it does not obviate the fact that when undertaken with integrity, restructuring optimizes governance and service delivery. Restructuring does not replace and is never intended to replace good governance and visionary leadership.

    On the contrary, it is meant to facilitate this by devolving responsibility and burden from an already overcrowded and overwhelmed central government in a situation of mutual hostility and suspicion.    By so doing, authority and legitimacy are returned to federating units thus creating the conducive environment for explosion of local talents and a democratic decentralization of national genius in what is an iron cage of stifling and suffocating unitary confusion and national paralysis.

    In the absence of an overriding national ethos such as it is possible in organic and homogenous nations, or mega-cities homogenized by centuries of continuous co-mingling, restructuring and the devolution of power from the centre allows each unit of the nation to develop at its own pace and with its own local resources without threatening national viability.

    If anything at all, the events of the past two years and the second advent of General Buhari tend to support the overarching imperative of an urgent restructuring for the nation. Despite a historic regime change and the collective clamour of Nigerians for change, it is clear from recent developments that Nigeria is yet to produce a politically coherent and ideologically unified counter-hegemonic alternative political elite.

    In the absence this elite nationalism, the crude and forcible homogenization of a country of contending nationalities and uneven economic development can only lead to unending civil wars and permanent hostilities. In retrospect, it can now be seen that this garrison mentality of a unified command under one central authority such as can be seen in countries with a militarized political elite or residual feudal tradition is what has crippled Nigeria and many African nations and aborted the march to modern nationhood.

    If there is any lesson to be taken away from the emerging miracle of Lagos and its golden jubilee anniversary, it is that all  countries need the constant restructuring which allows individual units to develop according to their own pace and internal resources. Secondly, the success story of this roiling African megalopolis, particularly the explosion of economic possibilities such as witnessed in the Fourth Republic, showcases the fact that a multi-ethnic nation can no longer be powered by a univocal vision but by a multivocality of visions.  The success story of Lagos in the last eighteen years is standing rebuke to centralized civilian tyranny in Nigeria and the hegemonic  assaults of unitary federalism on the nation’s federating units.

  • Power and Politics in Nigeria

    Power and Politics in Nigeria

    Last week, a major political event passed without Nigeria and the Yoruba political society feeling what ought to have been its tremendous impact. It was the thirtieth anniversary of the passing to glory of the late Ikenne sage, statesman, philosopher, economic genius and political visionary, Obafemi Awolowo. Unarguably the greatest Yoruba son of the last century, Awo was also without doubt one of Africa’s most intellectually talented political figures of the post-colonial era.

    The Ikenne remembrance was attended by family members and a band of fanatical devotees which included surviving disciples of the late political titan particularly the Afenifere grandees, many well wishers, stargazers and political wannabes. But it was an occasion shorn of the pomp and pageantry normally associated with political power in Nigeria.

    Although it can be argued that the Awo brand remains the supreme political talisman in the Yoruba political world, it must now be obvious that a brand does not remain the same forever in terms of power and potency. It must undergo qualitative changes in the volatile and combustible world of politics, even as it must test its strengths against emergent brands, sometimes in an oedipal struggle between fathers and children.

    Three principal reasons can be advanced for the muted remembrance of the late titan. First, as Awo retreats into remote legend with the tribe of those who have come into actual contact with him dwindling fast, it is the potency of his ideas and vision of Nigeria as a prosperous and egalitarian nation that matter most. Second is the gross politicization of the brand which has seen it worsted in the struggle for political power with more vibrant and more politically alert emergent brands. In the brutal world of Nigerian politics, loss of power often comes with loss of prestige and principality.

    Thirdly and finally, the Awo commemoration was quiet because of critical developments in the nation. For those who can see, it is obvious that a dark cloud has descended on the Nigerian political firmament. It is full of portents and sinister foreboding. For those who can read political horoscopes of impending disaster, this one is palpable in its astral malignancy. Like a band of merry somnambulists, Nigerians are sleepwalking to a major political catastrophe with eyes wide opened.

    First is the harsh reality of presidential ailment which in an abiding climate of kleptocrats and political cut-pockets has put a lid on purposeful governance and productive politics. This has in turn sparked off a nasty and barely disguised succession battle the like of which nobody has seen in this clime before. Compared to the Umaru Yar’Adua succession debacle, this one promises to be the mother of all political hostilities.

    This obsession with politics as a zero-sum game played out in the mischievous attempts by some elements in the presidency to “coordinate” and coerce Acting President Yemi Osibajo out of full presidential power and responsibility through sheer semantic brinkmanship. The whole drama speaks to the quandary of an idle and unproductive political elite which does not believe in economic self-actualization but which sees access to power as a life and death struggle for personal enrichment.

    The second development is actually more worrisome in terms of the scale and scope of its possibilities. This was the statement widely created to the Chief of Army Staff, General Tukur Buratai, that some elements in the civil and political societies were already approaching military brass hats with the possibility of calling out the troops for a military intervention. In a curious but instructive development, the British High Commission in Nigeria also weighed in frowning at the thought not to talk of the possibility of military intervention at this stage in Nigeria’s political development.

    The dour, taciturn Buratai is not known as an officer with an ambition beyond his professional purview. He enjoys widespread reputation as a courageous commander on the battlefield and off the battlefield as a serious, apolitical professional soldier. But his sudden outburst against civilian interlopers needs to be subjected to more stringent scrutiny and rigorous evaluation to establish its veracity. This is not the time to fly a kite or to throw up a red herring as a smokescreen in order to foster something dark and sinister on the nation.

    As a military phenomenon for disorganizing and reorganizing state power, coups have become globally passé, the relic of an authoritarian past in which autocratic tyrannies rule the roost. The last military coup in Nigeria took place twenty four years ago when General Abacha sacked the Shonekan travesty and installed himself as the maximum ruler of the nation. Subsequently, the close involvement of the Nigerian military institution in the political ruination of the country has cost the Army its national prestige and respectability.

    Twenty four years after, Nigeria is still grappling with the dire consequences of the annulment of the June 12 1993 Presidential election and the cost to national unity and cohesion. Despite the advent of the Fourth Republic, it is clear that all is still not well with the nation. The National Question has certainly taken a turn for the worse and rather than binding national wounds elections have actually exacerbated them and opened up national fault lines.

    Given the self-demystification of the military class, the implosion of its messianic conceits and the intellectual interrogation of its constant deployment as a power proxy by a dominant section of the Nigerian ruling class, it is strange that anybody would still be thinking of using military advantage to influence the outcome of political struggle as it has been done in the past.

    But nothing can stop the politically desperate and it is impossible to legislate against coups. In Third World countries and societies transiting to full democracies, nothing will stop a coup whose time has come or a coup that is an own goal against the run of play. Consequently and given the parlous state of the country, those who may be pushing for a coup may be pushing for the last putsch in Nigeria.

    Given the fractious state of ethnic relations and goodwill even among Nigeria’s major nationalities despite a nominal alliance between two of them, any coup day announcement irrespective of origin or bequest is likely to trigger an exit clause among the other nationalities leading to a precipitate disintegration of the nation. Nobody should quibble and equivocate about this.

    In this regard, a nation is like a human organism. Once its grievous wounds are left unattended to over a period of time, it will die a natural death. This is why the greatest nations on earth are constantly tinkering with their constitution, working towards what the Americans memorably call a more perfect union. This is why this ceaseless striving towards perfection often involves tinkering with the political alchemy of the nation itself in a way that throws up a new type of leadership such as it happened in France recently to the echoes of a glorious national catharsis.

    As it is at the moment, Nigeria reminds one of a badly wounded elephant cut to pieces but still shambling and lumbering towards an inglorious finale as it emits a fearsome rumble. The Nigerian political elite have neglected to bind the wounds of the nation or dress its suppurating gashes. Now it has gone fearfully septic and everybody is waiting for the end.

    One man who would have viewed developments with a dark frown was the late titan from Ikenne. Awolowo understood that a nation is a permanent project to be kept in a state of constant repairs. More than any other politician of his age, Awo wrote copiously about how to improve the political architecture of the Nigerian conglomerate and how to return the nation to the path of genuine federalism. He was shunned and scorned.

    But as he ponders the state of the nation from beyond, what would have puzzled Awo the more is the fact that we are back to fifty years earlier and to an event in which Awolowo himself played a significant national role as the leader of the Yoruba and as a broker and binder. In May 1977, the nation had its back to the wall and had to choose between forcible restructuring or forcible break up as insisted upon by the then Colonel Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu. Awo swung it and his people in favour of a united Nigeria.

    Fifty years after and thirty years after his translation to higher glory, Awo must be wondering whether it was all worth the epic sacrifice in the light of subsequent events, particularly the rigged elections of 1979 and 1983 which terminated his own political career, the annulment of the 1993 presidential election, the death of Abiola in prison, the imposition of Obasanjo, the wastage of Bola Ige and many other Yoruba icons, and the current political melodrama involving none other than his own grandson-in law.

    But it must also be understood that for Awo, it was a hard and bitter choice, between the devil and the deep blue sea and between two sets of political predators. If Awo viewed the northern predators with disdain mixed with wary apprehension, he was even more scornful in his distaste and disapproval of the hegemonic pretensions of the eastern leaders who appeared more interested in subjugation than cooperation and cohabitation in a truly federalized nation.

    Fifty years after, the nation is back to square one and exactly the same spot with the loudest clamour for secession once again coming from the east, with the north exercising executive power and with the west acting as strategic arbiter in a political duel onto death. Perhaps on further reading and reflection, Awo could have come to the conclusion that it is not worth anybody’s while to keep a country, however rich and promising, together in a condition of modern political slavery and permanent economic servitude.

    People make history but not under the conditions and circumstances of their making. Given their own royalist antecedents, the Yoruba tend to view the feudal time-warp in the north with far more sympathy and understanding than their turbulent compatriots to the east. Yet their progressive politics and belief that history cannot be arrested makes them natural allies of their eastern co-nationals.

    In the last fifty years, the cost of this in-between and go-between political sensibility of the Yoruba people have been particularly prohibitive turning them and many of their illustrious scions to targets of hostility and canon fodders of recent Nigerian history. This cannot continue. A nation cannot exist on a foundation of political injustice and economic tyranny without something giving.

    The time has come once again for western Nigeria to play a decisive role in the destiny of the nation. Unfortunately for the people, unlike the time of Awo when one single exceptional individual had a pan-Yoruba mandate and the mantle of authority and legitimacy, there is no such thing at the moment. At the moment, the Yoruba political world is marked by rancor and infighting.

    But if a political consensus appears to be crystallizing in the horizon, it is that the Yoruba, no matter the alliance at the centre, will no longer allow themselves or their most illustrious children to be used as sacrificial lambs for the perpetuation of a depressing racket like Nigeria. Snooper is old enough in this game to know that once the Yoruba people reach a consensus, their leaders must find a way to align themselves with the dominant mood of an ancient nation. “ Since I am their leader, I must follow them”, Winston Churchill famously rued. Interesting and dangerous times are here again.

  • Okon raps Emefiele

    Godwin Emefiele is a chap cut very much to snooper’s taste. Yours sincerely like Central bank governors who do not induce panic and who get on with the job with the staid soberness of a traditional banker and glum bureaucrat, shorn of intellectual pomposities and attention-seeking controversies. But Okon is not impressed. After the bottom was knocked out of his latest money-making scam, Okon was inconsolable in his anger against the system.

    Last Friday, the loony fellow walked in looking desolate and devastated.

    “Ha oga Okon, what is the matter?” snooper asked with a scornful grimace.

    “Oga wetin remain? As dem Magu people don reach business, make man dey find him way back to Itigidi or Biakpan sef jeje, no wahala, but God dey sha and if him no dey na…..”

    “ What is the matter, Okon? “ snooper jumped up as he cut short the crazy boy from uttering a heinous blaspheme.

    “Oga, abi you know hear sef? Dem don blow whistle on dem whistleblowers. Dem mala boys don spoil business. Dem come throw dem inside Kaduna Kirikiri. Wetin concern mala with 419? Dem no sabi nothing,” Okon lamented.

    “Okon, look for another scam. Whistle blowing is a stupid job.” Snooper snapped.

    “Ha oga, I been dey come to dat one. Dis Emefiele man, na ogbologbo igbo 419 be dat one. Him dey announce everyday say  foreign exchange dey come down but price of yam no dey come down for market. Abi which kind yeye nonsense be dis one?” the mad boy screamed.

    “Ha, for the price of yam to come down, you must roll down your sleeves and go and farm. If I were in power, I would have driven all the useless scoundrels on the streets back to the farm”, snooper raved.

    “Ha oga, in dat case me I no be farmer. I be ordinary houseboy. Na Yoruba people be farmer and dem no dey produce nothing. Na palmwine dem dey drink for farm. And dem wan fight mala. Hunger go wire una senseless when dem mala cut off dem yam supply”, the mad boy sniggered as he recovered his malicious gusto.

    “Okon, go and find something productive to do”,snooper shouted as he slammed the door against Okon.

  • Necropolitics in contemporary Nigeria

    Necropolitics in contemporary Nigeria

    A British diplomatic wag sent to the Russian Imperial Tsarist Court on the eve of the Russian Revolution was asked what system of governance he thought the Russians practised.  It was a form of autocracy moderated by assassination, the witty ambassador calmly responded.

    The British master spook surely knew what he was talking about. Pyotr Stolypn, the last Prime Minister of Tsarist Russia, had just been murdered in a wave of regular political killings which marked the period. If the notable diplomat were to be asked the same question about contemporary Nigeria, he might have noted that Nigeria is practising a form of feudal democracy moderated by death, dying and national death-wish. It is also known as necropolitics.

    A feudal democracy is a form of governance with the outward symbols and appurtenances of democratic governance but which retains the inner content of the ancient feudal order in its substance. It is particularly noticeable in Nigeria and many contemporary African countries where the march of political modernity has been stalled or aborted and where the resistant traditional structure of feudal tyranny has staged what is known in psychoanalysis as the return of the repressed.

    Needless to add that even in Africa this is not a unique phenomenon. It comes with its own peculiar local baggage and national coloration. In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, the old nonagenarian wizard of Harare and permanent medical tourist to the East, has just taken a flight to Singapore for medical attention looking very much like a mummified emperor straight out of Sir Henry Rider Haggard’s fiction. In the old Congo, the younger Kabila is stalling and stonewalling after twenty one years of brutal exertion.

    Contemporary Nigerian political stage is a brutal and hard place indeed. No hostages are taken and no respite is offered. The political coliseum echoes to the din of savage contention and agonistic exertion. Since there is no minimum national consensus to drive developmental politics and the birth of a humane ethos, all is fair in war. It is a joyous battle field and mortal enemies occupy the same trenches. The parties have already evaporated leaving in their wake a battlefield without discernible fronts. The local commanders are retreating to their regional redoubt for the final solution.

    Hopefully, President Mohammadu Buhari will now get the rest and the urgent medical attention that many of his compatriots believe he needs and badly deserves. A sick president is a sick president. No amount of palace chicanery and medical shenanigan can remove that depressing reality on the ground. Future historians will assess the further damage done to the president’s health by the decision of his handlers to hold him as a hostage to medical misfortune.

    It is all in the nature of the zero sum politics we play. The Nigerian presidency has been so badly politicized that anything is game. No advantage must be surrendered, even if it means toying with the health of a man who has given his best to the nation within the limits and limitations of his God-given endowments. It speaks to the nature of contemporary Nigerian politics in all its soullessness, its brutal dehumanization and loss of empathy.

    As a grim, gaunt and obviously exhausted General Buhari sullenly walked past his Praetorian Guard last Sunday evening like a war commander about to join the most critical battle of his life, one cannot but notice a sad, gloomy atmosphere. There was something very depressing about it all. A stubborn and dogged fighter, it was obvious that this was not the kind of dark denouement the president would have envisaged on his second coming.

    But even at that, his most implacable critics and political enemies were not about to give him a respite. His letter to the senate transmitting presidential authority to now Acting President Yemi Osinbajo was mercilessly scrutinized and scoured for any sign of lexical ambiguity or what is known in Semantics as amphibology. When the ill-framed and awkward phrase “coordinator of ministers” was chanced upon, it was joyously pounced upon as a sign of bad faith and unwillingness to let go. It took the sensible intervention of the senate president to douse the rising tension.

    So where do we go from here, in this atmosphere of hate and mutual loathing which may eventually trigger something more nasty and apocalyptic while we are pretending that all is well? A necropolis is a vast humongous cemetery of dead and expired souls. As the term implies, necropolitics is the politics or politicization of death. Unlike the contemporary usage pioneered by Achille Mbebe which views necropolitics as the power of the sovereign to determine who live and who die, necropolitics, like politics itself,  often comes with country-specific fidelity  as well as its own internal logic and rule of engagement.

    In Nigeria, necropolitics is democratized in such a way that it outflanks the sovereign or ruler embroiling virtually everybody in a wish for the death of the sovereign and a national death-wish. It is a specific communal ailment, a national pathology— or political leprosy if you wish —which hardens the heart, deadens the feelings into utter insensitivity and atrophies the senses robbing virtually everybody of their humanity in a national orgy of mutual loathing and hatred unto death.

    This estrangement of common sense and total denudation of human feeling has turned Nigeria into a political lepers’ colony before our very eyes; a country teeming with burnt-out cases and hard, unfeeling people; emotionally calcified and psychologically castrated de-humans that cannot give a hoot about the humanity of others.

    It is a miracle that this national festival of hate and its genocidal frenzy has not degenerated into the real thing. But we are trying our very best. Nigeria has been on the road to Kigali for such a long time that it is only due to some divine arm-twisting that we have not arrived. The transformation of politics to necropolitics has been with us for some time. Many have ascribed it to the hardening of feeling and the sheer malevolence on the part of the rulers themselves rather than the innate wickedness of the people.

    The repressive ferocity of General Abacha’s rule did not prevent widespread speculations about his imminent demise owing to a cocktail of ailments. When it eventually happened as a result of a different type of cocktail, there was widespread jubilation in some parts of the country. Even before General Obasanjo took office, there was a widespread rumour that he had passed on. The old soldier responded in kind by lambasting and cursing his traducers.

    In a more scholarly ambience this writer has noted that in feudal societies, death was generally seen as the scourge of the ruling classes, firm, unyielding and unanswerable. What the people could not remove, death eventually does for them. Yet in the ideological crucible of the feudal order death was often magically transformed into a critical and crucial ally of the ruling class. However much we may hate a particular ruler, his death does not translate into loss of hegemony or the end of his kind. The king is dead but long live the kingdom.

    It is however with the second coming of General Mohammadu Buhari that necropolitics has reached its highest decibel in the history of the nation. It has been accompanied by shrill hysteria and a no-holds-barred cyber-savagery which many must find diminishing in its disproportionate fury and abject hate-mongering.

    Many have laid the blame on the doorstep of the Daura-born general and his politically challenged antics. When accused of mounting hate propaganda against the Buhari administration, his traducers often retort that since Buhari by his policies and body language treat them as the “other”, they have no alternative than to respond in kind. The result has been a climate of hate-filled bigotry and the elevation of speculative regicide to an obsessive national past time on a scale that has not been witnessed since the civil war.

    There can be no doubt that since the advent of the Fourth Republic, the National Question has taken a nasty turn in Nigeria. Rather than binding national wounds, elections, in the absence of core national values and elite consensus, have tended to exacerbate the injuries. In the absence of this fundamental elite agreement about the destiny of the nation even the historic handshake which produced the landmark transfer of power from a ruling coalition to opposition forces is beginning to fray at the edges.

    This is nothing but a recipe for national disaster. In the light of the foregoing, the million dollar question must now be broached. Is Nigeria being nudged towards an apocalyptic meltdown the like of which has never been witnessed on the continent? It depends. As a country of contraries and immense national contradictions, two things are currently going in favour of the country.

    First, the democratization of necropolitics in Nigeria is principally a product of negative nationalism among the constituting nationalities. Consequently, the kind of repressive autocracies that is rife in many parts of Africa where an almighty sovereign holds the power of life and death over his subjects can no longer be reproduced in Nigeria. The sovereignty of subversive expression in Nigeria, however harmful and deplorable in its particularities, is an expression of the sovereignty of the people over the ruling sovereign.

    Second, it should be clear by now that the nation is powered along by a negative equilibrium, a micro-pluralism of power in which competing and countervailing centres of power cancel out each other and make it impossible for any despot to stay put or for any group to lord it over the nation on a permanent basis. Any regional power bloc entertaining the hegemonic delusions of holding the nation to ransom forever should perish the idea. Even in its current structural disarticulation Nigeria is too big and unwieldy for that.

    In conclusion, it should be obvious that Nigeria is not going anywhere in its current structural configuration. The negative atmosphere, the mental and psychological stamina required, the psychic op needed will take its toll on the bravest and most determined of military generals. This is why the current clamour for a peaceful restructuring of the nation is part of a struggle for political modernity. If the Nigerian political elite fail to seize the initiative, it will be done for them in a most unpleasant manner.

     

     

    Okon shops for Arsene Wenger’s replacement
    For Akinlawon Ige—a soccer aficionado– @ 65

    The real month of May is here with us, and it is more matters for a May morning, as William Shakespeare famously put it. You cannot beat the bard of Stratford Upon Avon when it comes to uncanny insights about the human condition. More than five hundred years ago, the great dramatist could foresee that the nascent Industrial Revolution with its insatiable hunger for raw material would eventuate in colonization which will in turn produce major global economic contradictions the least of which is the phenomenon famously described as unequal exchange.
    But as the Prospero-Caliban duet has emphatically demonstrated, Shakespeare was also immensely aware that unequal exchange in the economic department may actually lead to equal exchange in the verbal department. The old empire often strikes back in mysterious ways. When you gift a man with a new language, his first act of defiance and rebellious independence is to curse you back in the acquired language with much guts and gusto.
    Snooper hopes that this lengthy disquisition about colonization and its disquiet will put readers in the right frame of mind about what Okon the rogue cook is doing poking his nose into the issue of a new coach for Arsenal Football club in faraway England. But just as colonization has produced its contradictions, the actual colonial conquest and the endemic crisis of identity it has fostered on Africans have also yielded fantastic cultural dividends. Why are we so blessed!!!!
    In Nigeria today, the youths know more about what is happening in the English Premier League than what may be happening in the field of politics. They know all the coaches and the coached. They even know the uncoachables and the unsignables. In an infamous mix-up, when some youths were asked whether they know Obafemi Awolowo, they responded that the only Obafemi they were aware of was Obafemi Martin, aka Oba-Goal, the famous footballer. They view learning and reading as leading to entrapment in the poverty web whereas football leads to fame and fabulous riches.
    On Wednesday, Okon barged into the living room covered in feces, looking as if he had survived a fall into a pit latrine and oozing with an offensive odour like a walnut fairy.
    “Okon, what is all this nonsense, and where are you coming from?” snooper asked covering his nose.
    “ Oga na Yoruba shit. I go dig dem Yoruba NIA man’s house see whether dem dollar for Ikoyi apartment remain. Naim I come fall inside shit tank. You know say Yoruba shit na wicked shit after dem don take gbegiri soup, akara, bushmeat…..” the mad boy whimpered as snooper cut him short.
    “ Just shut up, you hear and go and clean yourself”, snooper screamed.
    “ No oga na change I come change make I go back. I go clean when I don come back. Even dem whistle I wan blow come fall inside shit tank. Kai dis wicked Yoruba people. Na juju dem man dey use. He get one big tortoise who dey guard dem house…” the mad boy drooled on.
    “ Okon, you will leave this house at once. By the way what is that paper bulging from your pocket?”
    “ Ah dat one na dem shortlist for Asiere Wanka, abi wetin you dey call dem Arsenal coach? We don tire for him tuketuke coaching. Make him go home, abi na by force? He get two Nigerian coach I dey eye like dat. One na Ibrahim Shukushuku, na him dey coach dem Benue Warrior when three Yoruba players come kaput for field. That one he go show dem oyinbo people African pepper. The second na Emmanuel Vampire, dem dey call dat one Air raid or ten-ten. When dem wound him player and carry him out, him go ask him own player make dem reduce dem tally. So dem know wetin Vampire mean. He get one match for Enugu like dat only six players remain so dem referee come pick race. Na him go finish dem premier league.”
    On that note snooper drove the mad boy out with a broomstick.