The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • Okon shops for Arsene Wenger’s replacement

    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.

  • So long, Lancey, 1948—2017

    So long, Lancey, 1948—2017

    This past Friday, in the idyllic rural paradise of Ijesha Isu Ekiti, the remains of Ebenezer Moyosoretoluwapesefunmi Ogundipe, a.k a  Lancey, were committed to mother earth before a scanty crowd of admirers, friends, family  and well wishers who had come to pay their last respect to one of Nigeria’s most gifted children.

    It was not as if Moyo would have resented the absence of the chattering and nattering class. As a matter of fact, he would have relished it as the ultimate irony of a nation that pays scant compliment to genuine talent; a nation that has little or no regard for its most genuinely gifted children. Long before he died, Moyo had seen through the social, political, intellectual and spiritual hypocrisy of a nation that canonises mediocrity at the expense of merit; a nation permanently rigged against rational procedure and reason. He would have none of it. He made his own rule and stuck by them.

    He was not going to be fazed by the social conventions of a philistine society he held in sublime contempt. In fact in his last years, he seemed to have relished cocking a snook at societal norm and its sartorial etiquette often turning up at the odd society event he chose to grace with his presence in his custom made tradesman jeans and open shirt, quietly soaking the inanities of the high and the mighty with a poker-faced delight.

    Beyond his ears, a few murmured and muttered their embarrassment. Some of his old acquaintances  that had made some money and fame in the intervening decades steered clear of him. Others preferred to point at him from a distance as if he was a bearer of a deadly contagious disease. A mutual lady associate dismissed it all as the antic of arrested development, of a boy who refused to become a man. Lancey couldn’t give a hoot about the objections. Many of us were willing to lionize and fete him even if he chose to appear in pajamas. We knew what drove him.

    Having sworn to the oath of self-seclusion and recluse-like existence, Lancey stuck to it, particularly after he returned to Nigeria after a long hibernation in the US. Not even many people knew he was back and was teaching in joyous obscurity at Bowen University in Iwo. A man of immense gregarious charms, Lancey could also be an obsessively private person. It was hard to lure him out of his liar. But snooper succeeded twice.

    Once after a funeral in Ilesha, he was cajoled into following yours sincerely to his country home together with his childhood friend, Chief Ishola Filani, a.k.a I-Sho, the PDP juggernaut. Thereafter followed three days of eating some rural delicacies and drinking, listening to the animals chatter all night and the birds singing at the break of daylight.

    Each morning, the scantily clad Ekiti nobles looking like stalwart farmhands would start raising hell, demanding breakfast and traditional respect for elders from snooper who had obediently vacated the master bedroom for them. Yours sincerely finally sent the duo forth with the firm assurance that they must not return very soon. When you connect with Moyo at the right angle, he was such a delightful human being with no airs or pretensions.

    A man of spectacular endowments, Lancey was too self-assured to care about what they think about him.  Poet, painter, sculptor, playwright, filmmaker, raconteur and University professor, Lancey  was  a prodigy even among prodigies. As it has been famously observed, talent does what it can but genius does what it must. Lancey did what he thought he had to do.

    The word genius is not to be lightly invoked, particularly in a society that cares little for genuine talent, not to talk of the very summit of human endowment. Yet the word genius comes popping up in several tributes to Moyo by friends and admirers. Akin Oyebode, his old schoolmate and titan of International Law, describes him as “a self-effacing genius who demonstrated traits of greatness at an early age and who definitely made his mark before his transition”. Niyi Osundare, his friend and classmate at Christ School, concurs in a deeply moving obituary.

    But if Moyo Ogundipe had little time or regard for the local scene with its hustlers and wannabes, its diabolical conspiracy against artists of genuine worth, he was quietly scornful of the international scene and its hollow rituals.  A moving tribute by his younger friend and mentee, Moyo Okediji,  a professor of African Art at the University of Texas at Austin,  explodes like a simmering volcano:

    “The perfect artist, he was never a hustler….But he did not realize that contemporary art is not about talent or brilliance; it is about who could shout the loudest, who sleeps with whom, who knows you, and who  you know. It is about mediocrity, sycophancy and frivolity, wrapped in the cover of racial, gender and sexual discrimination”.

    Having plied his trade in America for several decades, the younger Moyo should know. It will take perhaps another century to properly evaluate the horrendous damage the west has inflicted on African intellectual self-esteem and the integrity of its artistic production. But Lancey took it all in his stride refusing to care a hoot for local and international recognition knowing that in the fullness of time all injustice done to genius will be fully restituted.

    Having made up his mind to shun the society and its chicanery, Moyo retreated to Iwo to teach in a  private university  and mentor the young ones. Perhaps he was hoping to catch them young before the Nigerian Disease caught up with them. He might have succeeded beyond his own expectations, given the outpouring of emotion among the students’ community on his demise and the gale of tributes testifying to his inspirational leadership.

    Lancey would have been surprised to have himself described as a leadership candidate and would have fixed them with a look of quizzical bemusement. He never considered himself a leader of anybody or any group. He was not interested in leading anything. He considered himself a free artist of a free world.

    He never quite outgrew a fierce independence of spirit and a Bohemian contempt for formal structures and conventional politics. Yet anywhere he berthed, whether in secondary school, or at the NTA  Ibadan where he was an inspired and inspirational manager of human resources and fountain head of creative innovations, he always attracted a sizeable crowd of admirers and disciples who aspired to walk like him, dress like him or adopt his unique gait of thespian royalty.

    It was at the old University of Ife where his political star shone the brightest when he contested for and won the post of Secretary  General of the Students’ Union in 1970. It was a landmark election which swept away the cobwebs of the geriatric order that had dominated student unionism in Ife since the inception of the university. With the telegenic and aristocratic Egba Owu prince, Sunmade Akin-Olugbade as president, Remi Olowu nee Komolafe as Vice President and Bola Ladapo latterly Bola Awe as PRO ,it was as if Kennedy’s Camelot had come to Ife.

    With Ogundipe in the driving room of change as Secretary and with Akin-Olugbade electrifying the students’ crowd with his superior phonetics and dazzling mannerism of delivery, the administration laid the foundation and the template for radical and purposeful Students’ unionism for which the university would become famous in the next two decades. At the end of it all, not a whiff of scandal surrounded the Sunmade Akin-Olugbade administration which also set the benchmark for accountability and integrity in students’ administration.

    There was always something about this charismatic and tantalizingly talented fellow which stood him out from the crowd. He had what is known as star quality. Star quality can be improved upon and honed to perfection, but you are either with it or you are not. It cannot be faked or duplicated. It is the ability to do ordinary things in a way that makes them look unique and extraordinary.

    It is the magical power of defamiliarization, of making the familiar to become unfamiliar in the crucible of genius, a creative neurosis which some ancient Russian fathers believe holds the key to the power of poetry itself. From the ordinary language known to everybody, the great poet creates extraordinary language which extends the frontiers of the language until everybody gets there only to find that the poet has moved on.

    The restless quest for excellence and perfection often turns the committed artist into a compulsive-obsessive character.  An arch perfectionist by nature, Moyo was also notoriously reclusive, despite the easy, charming manners and urbane insouciance making him a difficult and virtually impossible person to live with on a day to day basis. Each work has to be honed to perfection. It is the finished and polished gem that the world knows and not the pains and trauma that go with their gestation and production.

    What made this unique man tick? If you look at the picture with his parents and older brother, it is the portrait of the young man as an artist specially marked for divine grace. Even as a boy, Lancey already had star quality. One can already glimpse the self-assurance of the man. Given the enormous age differential between him and his brother, it was obvious that the artist was seen by his parents as a special gift from God, hence the name: Moyosoretoluwapesefunmi.  I am glad about the bounteous gift that God has granted me. The Christian name, Ebenezer, has a ring of firm, filial finality.

    There is a lot about the psychology of the adult which can be glimpsed from the socialization of the kid. The truth of the matter is that unlike most of his contemporaries who emanated as village yokels from rustic, agrarian background and who have managed to fill the vacancies created by Chief Awolowo by sheer dint of brilliance and back-breaking diligence, Lancey came with solid and impressive middle class credentials. His father, Paul Anjorin Ogundipe, was one of the early graduates from Ekitiland and was a senator in the First Republic. In the picture, he was clutching a prized possession: a transistor radio. It is a far cry from the eighth  senate of the Fourth Republic.

    There was nothing more for this illustrious son of illustrious parents to prove. And there was no need for primitive accumulation.  The Ogundipe have already been made. There was nothing more to struggle for. In the history of modern revolutions, the most determined and frenzied assaults on middle class values have always been mounted by scions of the middle class: Lenin, Leon Trotsky, the great Russian revolutionaries who constituted the bulk of the Bolshevik , Fidel Castro and Che Guevara must come to mind.

    This is why in Nigeria , the bulk of social reformers and radical redeemers come from the established and much storied Yoruba middle class. We must recall The famous Kuti family, the Thompsons, the Fawehinmis, the Sapara-Williams, the Macaulays, the Braithwaites, the Aka-Bashoruns, the Dares etc.

    As Moyo Ogundipe joins their departed forebears in this Hall of Fame, may God grant all of them sweet repose. Their story is the story of how a new class rises, settles, solidifies, atrophies and then unravels only to be redeemed and reinvented by revolting scions.  Adieu and so long Lancey.

  • Eze Ayodele Fayose goes to court

    Eze Ayodele Fayose goes to court

    And whilst we are still on the subject of the Ottoman presidency and its endgame, it is meet to report certain developments in the polity which may point towards or foreshadow future developments. It may well be that the famous and much rhapsodized handshake across the Niger which eluded the gnarled ancestors of the current political class is finally here with us.

    It was quite a sight this past week to watch his Excellency, Eze Peter Ayodele Fayose, the Eze gburugburu of Oshokoland and Sarkin Tulasi of Ado Ekiti, appear in court to fraternize and felicitate with Nnamdi Kanu, the embattled Biafran agitator. Fayose was resplendent in the flaming and fiery red cap of the Igbo chieftain and his man pikin be man pikin body language. Even by the normal fare of the Theatre of political absurdity this was quite an outlandish scene.

    Without wasting anybody’s time, the Yoruba eze began shooting straight from the hip. The enfant terrible of Ekiti politics is a joyful agrarian who has no time for big grammar or recondite logic. He has beaten the so called political elite of his state many times before and he will beat them hands up or hands down any time any day and anywhere.

    With minimum concession to political literacy or historical logic, Fayose proclaimed his state to be an integral part of Biafra. The referendum can come later. There may be some method to the madness. Fayose may well be understudying the dynamics of mob psychology which has seen the entire Igbo political arena overrun by mobocracy or the rule of the political mob. Let the Yoruba political elite take note.

    But fair is fair, and snooper is not a political coward afraid to speak his mind. When the current farce unravels everybody will have to bear their fathers’ name. Political containment is better than futile firefighting. Had certain gentlemanly agreements reached with Fayose been scrupulously adhered to in the true spirit of omoluabi, Fayose would have been inside pissing out rather than outside pissing in. Meanwhile, Oshoko is welcomed to Biafra. The last time snooper googled his Afao Ekiti homestead, it was Aflao, a border town between Togo and Ghana that popped up. If this is not a horoscope of Hegira or the second flight into exile, we wonder what it is.

     

  • Ottoman presidency in Nigeria

    Ottoman presidency in Nigeria

    Nigeria is in a state of flux. There is a feeling in many quarters that the real endgame may be here with us. From the longer perspective, it simply means that regime change itself is a minor part of a more complicated historical game the end of which it is impossible to speculate. While this unfolds, the palpable national anxiety is compounded by renewed anxiety about presidential health. We must pray for General Muhammadu Buhari. But if the history of presidential ailment in Nigeria were to be our infallible guide, the auguries are not cheerful.

    Yet all this may well be a shorthand for something else, a symptom of some ailment more fundamental and the kind of political system foisted on us. The explosion in national awareness of the past twenty five years has led to national disquiet which clashes fundamentally with the template of rulership. In a polity powered by negative equilibrium, awareness is the revolutionary father of malice and malignancy towards the state and its principals.

    It is therefore important for those who are rooting for a comprehensive restructuring of the nation to also undertake a rigorous study of its salient features, particularly the nature of the Nigerian post-colonial state. This is so if we do not wish to merely reproduce the current structure of unitarist tyranny and replicate the tragedy unfolding in the old Sudan where a break-up of the country has resulted in more millennial misery and trauma for the people.

    All modern presidencies combine state pomp and pageantry with a certain paternalistic power and potency. Charles de Gaulle famously noted that the French presidency should be like an “elected monarchy”. Without caring a hoot whose ox was gored, the crusty old warrior proceeded to rule France with monarchical sternness which grated badly on some of his compatriots. It was a tradition that goes all the way back to King Louis and the post-revolution emperor himself: Napoleon Bonaparte.

    But even then, something new always comes out of Africa. At the level of state-formation, post-colonial Africa is full of genetic and generic wonders which often compel one to reach for the most extreme formulation to capture what is going on.  On the same continent and roughly around the same historical epoch, there have been kings, emperors, marshals, sheikhs, sultans, prime-ministers and military presidents all in a colorful parade of buffoonish roguery and state sadism.

    An Ottoman presidency is a complete contradiction in term, a modern anomaly. But where a post-colonial state combines certain features of empire, particularly in its penchant for stealth, secrecy, Byzantine intrigues, internal colonization and militaristic ardour with the paraphernalia of modern governance, you begin to see something like an Ottoman presidency.

    Famously described in its terminal decline as “the sick man of Europe”, the Turkish Ottoman Empire was much more than this. At the zenith of its glory, it was the ultimate war machine: primed for permanent and perpetual conquest. It was relentless and unremitting in war, pushing its soldiers to new frontiers of human valour and indomitability. Variously described as a “Jihad state” or “a predatory confederacy”, it succeeded in redrawing the map of Asia, Central Europe and North Africa until Russian artillery and modern warfare from the Hapsburg Empire finally figured out what to do with its ferocious fighters.

    Unfortunately for Nigeria, while the Ottoman military machine was mainly directed at external subjugation, the Ottoman presidency in Nigeria is historically primed and conditioned for internal conquest and the pacification of affronted nationalities boxed into a colonial cage of roiling contraries. Originating as a colonial army of occupation, the Nigerian Ottoman presidency has succeeded very well in its historical remit of containing combustible nationalities in a series of memorable mayhem that has framed the modern history of the nation. Lord Fredrick Lugard must be smiling in his grave.

    This past week, at ironically the same time Nnamdi Kanu, the would be Igbo messiah and putative neo-Biafran secessionist, was being granted virtually impossible bail conditions which have since been met, Babachir David Lawal, the interdicted SGF, was also finding an answer to his famous question after being grilled for several hours by a presidential committee within the same storied confines of the same presidency where he had wielded enormous power and influence as a tenured member of a power camarilla.

    As the ultimate clearing house for appointments and for preferment, the Adamawa born former military cadet had reputedly wielded enormous clout and influence. But when he was informed of his summary eviction from office, Lawal, a consummate master of elaborate bluff and bluster, shot back at his tormentors with a landmark retort: “Who is the presidency?” By now, he would have had an inkling of what hit him.

    If he still doesn’t get it, we must now let him know. Like the Ottoman state of yore, the Ottoman presidency is an abstract and anonymous terror-vending machine, unseen but all-seeing, defined by the power of intimidating material absence boasting of concentric layers of power courtiers, courtesans and couriers  reinforced by a capillary network of spies, spymasters and sundry spooks. It is a site of deadly intrigues and dangerous power play. You can never run faster than the bullet meant for you, and just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they are not going to get you. If you watch your back too often, you leave your bosom unprotected.

    Power is not served ala carte. It is useful to note that the executioner’s blade had hardly dried when a shortlist of Lawal’s possible successors began making the round. You cannot be squeamish about stepping on dead bodies and the charred hulk of recent gladiators. It is impossible to rise if somebody does not fall.

    It is not for mere expediency or shy symbolism that the post-Lagos site of power in Nigeria is known as Aso Rock. So many backs have been broken on the rock. In colonial Congo, the state was also known as “Bula matari” or the crusher of rocks. That one crushed so many bones, beginning with the fifteenth century annihilation of the inhabitants by the Portuguese and their forcible transportation to Brazil through the slave port of Luanda, the nineteenth century genocide of King Leopold of Belgium which wiped out a third of the population and the twentieth century saturation pogrom of Mobutu and the Kabilas.

    In fairness to President Mohammadu Buhari, although he combines steely aloofness with the remote and forbidding hauteur of a typical Ottoman emperor, he is not the originator of the Ottoman presidency. He has merely seized its awesome potentials with the same disciplinarian frugality and military fierceness of his first coming. It remains to be seen how far he can go in his second coming with his martial temperament in a changed and far more dangerous polity beset by the resurgence of ethnic animosities and regional polarization.

    In retrospect and with the benefit of hindsight, it was not for the mere sake of nomenclature that General Ibrahim Babangida deliberately appropriated the title of military president of Nigeria. Why didn’t he call himself military prime-minister, for example? But that would have been an incongruous nullity. Prime-minister, as the name suggests, is only principal among ministers or primus inter pares.

    A sophisticated soldier immensely aware of the totems and tropes of power in Africa and its capacity for unleashing refined and brutal violence on the populace, Babangida did not want to leave anybody in doubt that he had gathered the levers of Ottoman power for himself and would be willing to use it whenever the occasion demanded.

    A man who described himself as belonging to an elite breed of professional managers of violence and men who were trained to dominate their environment, there should be no surprise that the Babangida tenure was characterized by much tumult and turbulence: coups and rumours of coup all punished with brutal severity; ethnic and religious uprisings summarily suppressed culminating in the historic annulment of a presidential  election which violently voided the will of fourteen million Nigerian voters.

    The general and the military Shogunate overreached themselves on that one by being clever by half. There was no need for any election. Elections are meant for free citizens in a modern nation. An Ottoman presidency carrying the genes of illiberal empire is genetically incompatible with free choice and elections because there are no citizens, only pliable and compliant subjects. General Babangida and his cohorts could have saved the nation the pains and trauma by quietly engineering a military succession. This was what happened eventually after using Ernest Shonekan as a hapless decoy.

    In the case of General Sani Abacha, he did not need to wear a mask to power, apart from his celebrated goggles. The masquerade without a mask is the father of the masquerade with a mask. After summarily impounding a former military head of state and his powerful deputy Abacha left no one in doubt as to who the new law-giver was. Thereafter he retreated to his palace to mop up stragglers with the self-assurance of an Ottoman emperor who knew that power flows from the bayonet-fixed gun. “ Oga no dey read paper”, one of his Yoruba sidekicks infamously pronounced.

    Yet this was the same country ruled in the run up to independence and six years into independence by a parliamentary arrangement of a prime-minister and four co-equal premiers. But even then it was obvious that this was a liberal British system superimposed on a shaky foundation of illiberal values itching for a return to its real Ottoman provenance.

    The rumoured civilian coup by a ragtag Yoruba militia, the unconstitutional take over of the old western region, the wanton deployment of the military forces in internal security operations and the blatant rigging of elections do not suggest a national psyche rooted in the finer values of modern liberal democracy. The military usurpation of January 1966, Ironsi’s unitary “unification” and the resulting reprisal coup of 1966 took the logic of the illiberal state to its ultimate frontier. Hence, the formal consecration of the Ottoman presidency in the 1976 constitution as engineered and remotely controlled by the administration of General Obasanjo.

    Two concluding facts must proceed from this analysis and they both point at the inevitable decline of the Ottoman presidency in Nigeria and its lack of viability in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious nation-state. First, is the obvious fact that the Ottoman presidency is not made for purely civilian rulers. Unlike the military class, the civilian faction of the ruling elite lacks the psychological stamina, the military nous and the political balls to operate an Ottoman presidency. The plight of Ernest Shonekan, the ill-starred Umaru Musa Yar’Adua and the hapless and luckless Goodluck Jonathan must concentrate our mind.

    Second, like the Ottoman Empire in terminal decline Nigeria is also very vulnerable to external factors in combination with internal disquiet. The role of external forces in the ousting of Babangida, the strange death of Abacha, the checkmating of Obasanjo’s Third Term ambition and the deposition of Goodluck Jonathan, all point at a nation at the mercy of external pressures. With the failing health of a well-meaning but politically challenged president, Nigeria is beginning to look like the sick man of Africa.

    While we still have the luxury of contemplation, this is the time to begin to think through the prospects of Nigeria in its post-Ottoman presidency stage. With agitated ethnic groups on the boil, with heinous religious sects on the march and with all kinds of social pathologies ravaging the very foundation of the nation despite General Buhari’s  bravest efforts and military cast of temperament, it is obvious that something will have to give. It is the last sigh of the Ottoman presidency.

     

  • The fall of David Babachir Lawal

    The fall of David Babachir Lawal

    We must thank God for little mercies. In the end and after a lot of dithering and obfuscations, the general finally summoned the reserve of courage and moral rectitude to do the right thing. Unfortunately, this was after considerable damage had been done to the government’s ethical template and the platform on which the Buhari administration rode to power.

    There is little political wisdom in watching a cancerous growth spread to vital organs of the body simply because the leadership does not want to succumb to the moral lynch mob.  Certain things are simply too ridiculous and embarrassing to stand the test of modern governance. A scandal is a scandal.

    There is no point equivocating about an unfortunate an error of judgement or lapse of moral imagination. Whichever way one looks at this sordid development, the grass-cutter scandal is a major embarrassment to the Buhari administration and everything it purports to stand for. When a government begins to shift its own erected goal posts of probity and integrity, it invites national ridicule and obloquy.

    Perhaps in the dead of the night and after all the futile grandstanding and insensate dismissal of objections, Lawal would have had time to rue the very sloppy self-betrayal which led him to influence the award of a contract for bush clearance to a company he had considerable interest either by remote ancestry or indirect affiliation. It was a very messy thing to do. You can never procure material satisfaction with the currency of national misery. It was an act of unpardonable cruelty compounded by poor judgement.

    Perhaps it is only in Nigeria that the plight of people internally displaced and turned homeless by war and social affliction can be turned into a bazaar of exploitation and get-rich scams. It shows how far social cannibalism has eaten deep into the fabric of a normless post-colonial nation. An otherwise affable and obviously engaging personality, it is hard to see how the “suspended” secretary to the federal government will live down the shame and public opprobrium. His technical dismissal must now afford him an opportunity to reflect deeply on the vicissitudes of public life and how remarkably brittle and unreliable public adulation can be.

    It is a pity that David Lawal had to go in this shabby manner. That he had to be pushed rather than fall on his sword willingly and with courage does not suggest nobility of purpose or honourable rectitude. Yet in a more profound and fundamental manner, his tragedy speaks to a more troubling institutional failure: the lack of a cult of heroic example and the culture of honourable resignation in our public life. In more civilized climes, a whiff of scandal or unacceptable conduct are often enough to prompt honourable resignation.

    Unfortunately, we live in a society in which more often than not, nomination to public service is seen as part of a patrimonial network of tribal largesse and ethnic spoil-sharing. In such circumstances, the lone office holder is often more of a victim than a victor operating under the protocol of unseen and unyielding elders rather than personal principles. In such circumstances, resignation can only be contemplated at the pain of death and exclusion since it is tantamount to cowardice and a wilful voiding of the chances of the larger ethic consortium in a joyous kleptocracy.

    As a minority candidate among minorities in a fractious multi-ethnic polity, nobody could have imagined the kind of pressures David Lawal faced to stand his ground and damn the consequences. Heavens will not fall and nothing will happen eventually. After all, corruption and official are malfeasance not the exclusive preserve of one ethnic group. Boy, you need to develop cujones and great immoral courage. Those who are screaming at the roof top are screaming to have their chance at the national till.

    Until we develop some core national values which will drive public policy rather than what Peter Ekeh, the great Nigerian sociologist, has famously described as a culture of the two publics in which the national theatre is seen as an alien coliseum of ethnic gladiators where anything goes, we will continue to jog in the jungle of anarchy and misbegotten primitive acquisition. This is the real lesson of the grass-cutter scandal.

    But it is morning yet on creation day, provided we are willing to learn the correct lessons. This country needs a new Administrative Order which will instil rigour and rationality into the public service. Somebody will have to take the bull by the horn. Human institutions are not handed over to societies from heaven. Institutions are creations of strong and dispassionate leaders acting in concert with the most progressive section of a patriotic and nationalist elite class.

    There can be no doubt that General Buhari has the discipline and courage to instil a new Public Order for this country, but certain cultural and ideological inhibitions, particularly an unstated aversion for political modernity and a predilection and peccadillo for making nepotistic appointments into sensitive offices, do get in the way from time to time.

    This may be his own way of protecting his back, particularly in a volatile and unstable polity. But it did not help the first time around and it is unlikely to at any point in time. There is a rumour that when the chief civilian security officer of the Buhari military regime was hauled into detention room with his deposed and traumatized principal by the coupists of July, 1985, he was so completely plastered and leglessly soused that he could barely utter a sensible sentence.

    What the APC needs are strong, countervailing forces who could look the president in the face and tell him he is wrong. No matter how determined and personally principled a leader is, he will labour in vain if certain structures and infrastructure are not in place. In prebendal politics, nepotism is the first principle and massive corruption is always the end-product.

  • Caliphate and contradictions

    Caliphate and contradictions

    The ghost of Ibn Khaldun

    If Adelabu Adegoke, the gifted stormy petrel of pre-Independence politics, were to be alive today, perhaps he would have penned another classic called Nigeria in Second Ebullition. It may well be the case that there is a more profound nation-defining struggle in the offing obeying only its own circuitous logic. An ebullition is a sudden and violent outburst, or -let us call it— a commotion of unusual vigour.

    At no point since independence, and certainly not since the advent of the Fourth Republic, has Nigeria been gripped by commotions on all front, be it communal, economic, spiritual, political, ideological and even intellectual like this. Yet it is also the case that at no other point in Nigeria’s history of civil governance has a more self-conscious super-security state presided over the affairs of the nation than this period.

    However, it could also be that in the brisk unravelling of the old order, the seeds of regeneration can be found. Last week, in a brief off the cuff remark, President Mohammadu Buhari was said to have noted that Nigeria faced a greater problem after Boko Haram. The vicious sect might have spawned even more vicious mutants. Boko Haram appears to have leveraged itself into the global bloodstream of anti-western, anti-capitalist and anti-nation theocratic Islamic militancy that is convulsing the extant international order. Consequently, Nigeria might have been dragged into the vortex of global insurgency.

    It is not enough to militarily defeat or degrade the Boko Haram sect as an effective fighting force.  This is not just a battle for the minefields but a battle for the mind. The embattled mind also has its own minefield where ideas opposed to the mind-set are summarily vaporized. So far, despite the sterling valour of our troops, we have not shown enough political resolve to combat the intellectual, ideological and spiritual disequilibrium which has produced the Boko Haram insurgency in all its theocratic malice and genocidal irrationality.

    This foundational problem of a post-colonial state without ideological anchorage or national core values will simply not go away, or disappear by military fiat. Rather, it will manifest in other spheres giving rise to multiple fliers of impending implosion if there is no attempt at restitution or if the government were to develop a weak will in confronting what has now effectively become a consuming national emergency.

    Given the humongous scale of national larceny evident in stupendous cash stashed away in the most unimaginable of places, why would the hardy, thrifty and evidently abstemious Boko Haram notables not hold us in bitter contempt together with our jaded notion of the modern secular nation where anything goes? If we are not ready to redistribute prosperity and inclusive growth, the pernicious sect has shown that it is ready to redistribute poverty and inclusive discomfort no matter the outrage.

    And the discomfort is fast spreading. There is a multi-pronged battle for the soul of the nation. Given the ideological occlusion under which such battles for the soul of a people take place, not even the principal actors are completely conscious of what is known as the cunning of history. The new fronts are as interesting as the principal combatants.

    From the Funtua-Malunfashi- Katsina sector, Nasir el-Rufai, the pint-sized and implacable governor of Kaduna state, has seized the executive wing as well as the legislative arm of his own party by the jugular, first firing an acerbic memo of virtual disavowal at the presidency and lately by virtually upending the legislative cartel of Yakubu Dogara and the paddy-padding House of Representatives. From metropolitan Kano, the Emir, Mohammadu Sanusi 11, has joined the fray in a series of withering dismissal of the entire northern ruling class which is as unusual as it is confounding to the uninitiated.

    Taken together, these political whirlwinds portend a ripening of the Northern Question as an integral part of the National Question. Whether the solution to this profound question of conflicting regional and national identity will be imposed from outside or found within, or whether they can ever be resolved within the current structural configuration of the nation remains to be seen. But they point at the political ferment of a country in the grip of profound ebullition.

    If these political gladiators are jockeying and jostling for political ascendancy with an eye to the immediate future, if they are positioning themselves for the presidential sweepstakes of 2019, they may discover to their chagrin that it doesn’t quite work like that. The north is in a combustible state and it is not going to be a walkover for self-anointed messiahs no matter their feudal provenance or royal pedigree.

    In the event, we need not be delayed by Malam el-Rufai since he is already in power and government by the grace of the Buhari phenomenon. El-Rufai has himself admitted that he had no political base except the one made possible by the Buhari momentum. It is the Emir that is beginning to look like a most dangerous customer for the old northern establishment and its power masters.

    The irrepressible and indomitable Emir of Kano, formerly known as Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, a notable polemicist and intellectual pugilist in his prime, has been causing some tremulous tremors among the northern power mafia of late. They view with consternation and indignation his attempts to disrupt the old, stiffly hierarchical order where everybody must know his place and placement and where emirs must maintain a stiff upper lip and a rigid posture of impassive royal hauteur. They resent his withering critique which lays bare the staggering inequity behind the regal plumage and stylized footwork.

    His interlocutors are not persuaded by this unroyal hell-raising. They see him as a dangerous and excitable opportunist who does not care a hoot about a feudal order that has brought stability and order to the whole north as long as he is able to satisfy his ambition. In any case, what else is there to achieve, they ask. After being gifted with the throne of his ancestors, why is all not quiet on the Kano front? From their body language whenever and wherever Sanusi is present, it is clear that all is not well in the House of Usmanu Dan Fodiyo.

    But this froideur completely misses the point. The Emir of Kano is a dogged careerist for sure. But he may also be responding to political stimulants and existential pressures beyond his ken. Nothing last forever, not even the most durable thrones. Empires, kingdoms, nations rise and fall while history marches on relentlessly.

    What is important is for change to be managed in such a way that it does not eventuate in violent upheavals or bloody commotion. When and if it does, both the poor and the privileged will find themselves in the same “one chance” vehicle. The Boko Haram insurgency ought to have been a divine showcasing of how a little local difficulty can snowball into a dire national emergency and how the rich are not exempt from biblical misery when the zero hour descends.

    Despite his implacable tirades against the old northern establishment, there are many who believe that the emir is merely grandstanding or astutely positioning himself for enhanced royal status in an unyielding feudal order. It is argued that in many instances he himself remains complicit in the political, economic and social devastations of the north that he inveighs against so brilliantly and passionately. Some sections of the north may be worse than Afghanistan but this did not start yesterday.

    Going forward, charity demands that we give the emir the benefit of the doubt. A notoriously complex man who can act the prince and the pauper-pariah at the same time, it may well be that the powerful contradictions thrown up by an empire in severe decline may be reflected in the powerful contradictions of its surviving power players.

    But if the Emir of Kano were to be a visionary prophet, this would have been the time to wish for a northern version of the Yoruba bourgeois class that he so mercilessly assailed in his younger incarnation as the problem with the nation. The Yoruba middle class has acted as a vital bridge to political and economic modernity between the residual feudal class and the Yoruba multitude and as a blunting instrument against the severity of social eruptions. In an irony of ironies, a faction of this bourgeois class was to be influential and instrumental in Sanusi’s own royal ascendancy and would play a stirring role in the current inter-region experimentation.

    Why has it been impossible for the north to come up with this regnant bourgeois class acting in concert and in sheer critical mass? It is not because the west is better or superior to the north. It is due to the historical and social forces at play. The Yoruba middle class owes its origin to four interlocking factors.

    First, accessibility to the coast which made contact and interaction with western civilization inevitable.  Second, the centuries old battle of will and wits between empire and its forward-looking subjects. Third, the sacking of the old Oyo Empire which spawned new social and military forces with no ties to the old order and the resulting demographic turmoil which led to a reconfiguration of the entire  Yoruba population.

    Finally, conquest by a western power and the rapid buy-into by a Yoruba people wracked by revolutionary convulsion and social tempest. Defeat can also open up new vistas for a conquered people. It is not defeat that people must fear but the atrophy of the human will and spirit.

    The north, on the other hand, was geographically, politically and economically structured in a way and manner that blocked off these possibilities. Indeed the revolution of Uthman Dan Fodio consecrated in the north a radical theocracy which belonged to the classical formation of Islamic feudalism. If this authoritarian feudal order guarantees political stability and superior cohesion over the rest of the country, it also undermines rapid economic development and modernization in the long and short run.

    As a result of this peculiar structure, the Northern Question looms portentously over the National Question. Under the current structural configuration of the nation, and short of unilaterally and unitarily handcuffing the rest of the country, it is hard to see how the north can be made to catch up with other sections of the country. This cannot even be contemplated without provoking a severe backlash which can result in the fracturing of the country.

    The absence of a durable and organic middle class as a buffer zone and safety net leaves the northern feudal ruling class at the mercy of its restive peasantry. President Buhari may have had a visionary glimpse into the immediate future and what it forebodes. As long as the conducive conditions of poverty and mass immiseration prevail, there will always be radicalised sects feeding off the insecurities and millennial underdevelopment.

    At the moment, Nigeria is like a four-wheel vehicle with the front and back wheels facing different directions in perfect misalignment. There is bound to be a lot of friction and commotion but no movement. This is why those who advocate for a radical restructuring of the country which will allow the north to solve the problems of underdevelopment and modernization on its own terms and deploying its own residual strengths should be seen as genuine friends of the north.

    The likes of Emir Mohammed Sanusi 11 have their work cut out for them. If there is any Ibn Khaldun, the great fourteenth century Egyptian progressive historian and philosopher of Asabiya and cyclical change who anticipated Spengler and Karl Marx out there, this is the time to step into the ring of post-colonial ebullition.

  • Okon and Baba Lekki in rowdy Easter celebrations

    There are more matters for an April morning—— to misappropriate the great bard of Stratford Upon Avon. William Shakespeare himself was no stranger to poaching, having been once famously accused of poaching deer from a government Reservation. There were rumours that the supreme deity of dramatic literature poached other things as well. But that is not before the board, as they say in the arcane lingo of bureaucratic mischief.

    With Okon, it is one trouble per day. A  week to Easter, snooper stumbled on the mad boy with Baba Lekki in festive mood surrounded by several kegs of fresh palm wine. The duo were already the worse for drunken wear. Snooper tiptoed away to avoid unnecessary commotion, but the mad boy was having none of that.

    “Oga come join us now. Man no be wood, even Tiger Wood sef no be wood”, the mad boy hollered and winked at his accomplice.

    “Okon, what is all this nonsense”, snooper charged.

    “Oga no be nonsense. Na pammy now and you know say na Palm Sunday”, the wicked boy sneered.

    “So, where did you get all this palm wine from when you are not a tapper?”

    “Ha oga dat one easy. As dem militant dey chase police for Majidun bush, gbuam, gbuam na him palm wine man come pick race na him I come take wine for protected custody”, the mad boy snorted. Sensing that the Okon may also take his master into protective custody, snooper held rapid conversation with his legs.

    A week later on Easter day, the mad boy had dramatically raised the stakes. As he was approaching the kitchen, snooper saw Okon and Baba Lekki scrambling away with Okon’s mouth swollen in gluttony.

    “Okon, what is that in your mouth?” snooper called out.

    “The boy him get menu-gitis”, Baba Lekki crowed.

    “I am not talking to you stupid old man”, snooper screamed. By this time snooper had reached the kitchen only to find the place littered with egg shells. By which time, Okon had also recovered the initiative.

    “Oga na poached egg for Easter. Abi no be so dem dey do for England?” the crazy boy snorted.

    “I hope this is not from my kitchen” snooper shouted.

    “If he be poached egg where him go come from?” Okon demanded.

    “Poached egg is poached egg, abi you no go school?” Baba Lekki sniggered as he dragged Okon out into the street singing and dancing. Happy Easter to you all.

  • Sagay stings like a bee……

    Sagay stings like a bee……

    What irks our elder brother and former teacher, Itse Sagay, so grievously these days? A day hardly passes without the former Law teacher releasing a fearsome bazooka at some luckless foes or enemies of the people. The fear in cowering circles is that the elegant and patrician looking Warri nobleman may unleash a grenade in what his bemused principal famously described as the other room one of these days thinking that the enemy is hiding under the duvet.

    Not since the days of Gani Fawehinmi has Nigeria seen another feisty legal gladiator taking on all comers and crouching to deliver a lethal sucker punch. Gani took no hostages. No one was spared the sharp thrust of his nettling tongue, not even his Ondo kinsmen. It will be recalled that when Chief Alex Akinyele made some derogatory remarks about him, Gani came back like old Smoking Joe. “It shows the kind of fools Babangida would make minister”, he thundered. Exeunt the PR maharaja with his Ondo native multi-colored muffler in smoke.

    With his permanent disobliging frown and moody brio, Sagay was a star Law lecturer at the then University of Ife and tantalisingly charismatic to boot. He went on to distinguish himself as an iconic professor and Dean of Law at the University of Benin crowning it all with a silk and distinguished practice. He has been able to combine all this with notable human rights advocacy as well as consistent progressive politics.

    After decades of being spitefully ignored by evil governance in Nigeria, Sagay’s time finally came when President Buhari tapped him to chair the important PACAC. The Warri legal warrior immediately swung into action slaying legal fools after legal fools. No one could question his patriotic fervour even if you question the wisdom of committing his considerable political and social capital to the quixotic venture of seeking revolutionary justice in a non-revolutionary conjuncture.

    Sagay’s legal carpet-bombing has brought him on a collision course with former students and colleagues alike who could not understand why he could not understand that the legal system could not be lifted clean off its material base and social provenance. In other words, the western legal system inherited by Nigerian can never be deployed as an instrument of fighting social oppression. It is actually there to protect entrenched privileges while throwing the occasional morsel of meat in the direction of radical whippersnappers.

    Snooper hopes the chicken is not coming home to roost for his beloved former teacher. A phoney revolution can also consume its own children. After slamming the senate for daring to summon him, Sagay seemed to have drawn the considerable ire of the ranking grandees of the ruling APC who cautioned the legal titan not to make more enemies for his principal who is seeking an amicable resolution of the executive versus senate imbroglio from a position of weakness. Not to be outpointed by mealy-mouthed and meal-mouthing politicians, Sagay retorted with a withering dismissal of the APC echelons, harshly reminding them that he was not serving at their pleasure.

    With the whole anti-corruption war suffering from deep structural flaws and lack of an integrative intellectual scaffolding, with the EFCC reeling from drastic reversals in the law court and with the presidency back heeling from frontal confrontation with the senate, Professor Itse Sagay may well be an endangered species. In a haunting premonition, the political compromise which he detests so much may see him quietly eased off or promoted to irrelevance.

    That would be a national tragedy.  Despite his choleric candour which rubs many the wrong way, despite his hectic hectoring which often comes close to psychological bullying, Sagay represents the best foot forward of the Buhari administration. Perhaps he should talk less and grant fewer interviews. That office requires an intellectual mystique and a protective aura which reassures everybody that justice is being done.  The problem is that in old age, Sagay does not want to be seen as being used to rubberstamp or justify an elaborate chicanery, a ritual of deliberately aborted justice. Unfortunately his options are few and far between.

  • The tempest this time

    Like all ethnically and politically fractured societies without a visionary elite to manage its contradictions, Nigeria is permanently on the boil. It seethes with malignant natives and enemy nationals. It is an apothecary’s cauldron roiling with mutually hostile elements. To close it up is impossible and actually unwise. To open it up is to invite mayhem. It is all like watching an active volcano and wondering how the next explosion would pan out. From a safe distance, it is a great sport of some sorts.

    Nigeria is a democracy powered and anchored by a non-democratic elite class. That is the ultimate contradiction of post-imperial nationhood. In the circumstances, it is impossible for genuine democracy to flourish. Neither is it possible to gauge the true aspiration of the people nor their adequate response to certain political development—- until it is possibly too late.

    The Nigerian political elite do not believe in popular vote, adult suffragette, the electorate and all that western liberal nonsense. To them, party supremacy and internal discipline among freely associating adults is a pious myth which has no room in the grim, agonistic reality of African politics. Combining the worst manifestation of western autocracy with traditional tyranny, they deprive their own people of fundamental freedom.

    But as it so often happens in the history of societal evolutions, humans have always found a way around roadblocks and checkpoints that thwart their political aspirations. Democracy is essentially an elite game endorsed and valorized by the people. But sometimes as a result of elite perfidy combined with sheer carelessness, the people are forced to intervene directly and take their destiny in their own hands. This is akin to invading the pitch and absconding with the ball or abducting the referee. In some extreme cases, the entire field is torched or the chessboard smashed to bits.

    Those who view lightly last Monday’s demonstration at the precincts of the senate must be living in a world of delusion. The crowd was purportedly protesting against the suspension of Senator Ali Ndume for six months. No matter the provenance of this crowd, the omens are quite disturbing. It hints at popular rebellion and the people’s readiness to take their destiny in their own hands. It is a sign of an approaching tempest.

    Unhappy is the land without any culture of shame. And we must pity the nation whose political elite thrive on impunity. It is a profound tragedy for country and people. Any nation originating from the rubble of western colonization whose elite are not sufficiently homogenized or have found the sufficient will to agree on core values that will drive the country will neither achieve democratic rule nor development.

    While the next political volcano was rumbling in Nigeria, the South Korean people were taking down another of their rulers with customary gusto and absolute unanimity. These people do not take hostages. Thrice in living memory, they have brought down their leaders, including generals, and subjected them to the will of the people. One of them took his own life in the highest form of remorse known to humankind while two of them were paraded down the streets of Seoul in a ritual of disgrace and humiliation.

    Both Nigeria and South Korea are victims of different brands of colonization. The old Korea was impounded by the Japanese High Command while Britain formally colonized what eventually became known as Nigeria. Japanese colonization of Korea was legendary in its savage cruelties and high-octave arbitrariness. Yet the kind of constant political restitution that has become standard fare in Korean politics has never happened in Nigeria. The people are usually slapped down having been stolen blind. Why is this so?

    After formal colonization, Korea retained its pre-colonial identity and culture. The Koreans might have been humiliated and brutalized by Japanese occupation. Yet the Korea that came out of Japanese colonial furnace was not radically different from the Korea that was thrown in. In any case culturally speaking, Japan is not vastly dissimilar to Korea in their oriental parities. On the other hand, what came out as Nigeria was not what went into the colonial cauldron as various nationalities, cultures, tribes and fiefdoms. While Nigeria was created anew in the colonial smithy, Korea remained essentially the same until it was partitioned by a new imperialism.

    In the event, what Korea and many oriental societies have going for them which is absent from contemporary Nigeria is a culture of shame and abhorrence of impunity. It is this singular ethical malaise which is responsible for the political and economic tragedy   of contemporary Nigeria where many seem at home with impunity and shamelessness. It is also the bane of many African societies. Many African traditional societies that had a pre-colonial culture of restraint and disincentive for anti-social behaviour have found themselves ground into conformity in the normlessness of the post-colonial garrison.

    This is a double jeopardy. In the same western societies that we try to ape and mimic, members of the ruling circles, no matter how highly placed or distinguished, are routinely and ritually sacrificed once their complicity in political and economic adversity is established beyond reasonable doubt. The critical importance of this self-purge and symbolic self-culling is that it preserves the honour and integrity of the ruling class as well as its sustainability in the long run. A British wit famously observed: Every now and then an admiral is quartered to encourage the others.

    In Nigeria, the reverse has been the case. Impunity and lack of shame reign supreme. Even after they have been caught with their hand in the public till, even after they have become the object of public odium and ignominy, Nigerian officials stall and stonewall employing every legal technicality in the profession to evade or avoid the natural consequences of their criminal conduct.

    In the circumstance, law has come to the aid of sheer lawlessness. To put it bluntly, rather than underwrite order, law is in the service of disorder. And lawlessness becomes the father of social disorder. Whenever and wherever legal justice thwarts social justice, it is an open invitation to anarchy and social anomie. The ethical foundation of the society begins to give way. It is a very scary prospect for any society.

    The current ascendancy of President Buhari is anchored on the expectations that he will right the social rot and bring to heel those who have contributed to the political and economic adversity of the nation, just as he attempted to do in his first coming. Once again, it is proving to be an Utopian fantasy.

    It might have been a tad politically naïve or even delusionary to expect such radical and even revolutionary restitution within the context of regular and conventional politics, particularly in an ethnically and culturally polarized polity. On the other hand, it may well be the case that whereas there is a convergence of political animus between patriotic forces and the general, they are actually responding to different stimuli and ideological inclination.

    People fight the same battle but with different motives and motivation. And it is rarely what they have fought for that comes to be. This will not stop history from moving on. This constant striving for a better society even when the odds are overwhelming stacked against one is what Antonio Gramsci famously characterized as “optimism of the will and pessimism of the intellect”. Your keen mind tells you that as long as certain fundamental things are not in place, this society will never walk the path of rectitude and righteousness. Yet your spirit tells you it would amount to suicide to give up.

    As the Buhari government appears to buckle under the weight of the same political contradictions that swept it into office, as the law courts pile crushing defeat upon crushing defeat on its hasty and incompetent arraignments, the messianic toga begins to wear very thin. This is the regularization of the irregular or the normalization of the abnormal. The government has raised expectations it can never meet and revolutionary hunger it can never assuage.

    There is bound to be a severe backlash. The APC should now go back to the drawing board. The coming months are bound to be rocky and turbulent indeed, what with the party leadership quietly returning to its political vomit having been taught an enduring lesson in the politics of permanent underdevelopment by a rogue senate. The only hope is if there were to be a dramatic improvement in the economy which it can then leverage as proof of its fundamental honesty and integrity.

    The opposition forces have sniffed blood. No ruling coalition in the country has ever been more vulnerable. The general from Daura is human after all, with his own peculiar frailties and astonishing foibles. Yet given the levers of power and hard security it has gathered and accumulated to itself, it will take a violent pan-Nigerian political upheaval to unseat the APC at the next election. But this cannot be discounted given the rising tide of ethnic and religious discontent in the country. God helps us when this hyperactive volcano erupts again.

  • The resurrection of the Living

    The resurrection of the Living

    State paralysis and national development

     

    The season of regeneration is once again upon us. Actually, the rainy season is also spring time. It is the time everything springs and swings back to life. With its becalming rains and fragrant flowers, it is the season of renewal and rejuvenation, when nature corrects itself as an almighty healer. It soothes. It heals. You always know it is spring when you taste the first succulent flesh of the aromatic mango fruit. The harsh harmattan is fast receding. Cautious optimism returns. Hope springs eternally in the human heart.

    But there are times when the living also tend to die alive. This past dry season has been quite hard on Nigerians. Our long suffering patience and faith in government have been tested to their elastic limits. Poverty and hardship bared their murderous fangs. Tempers flared on the streets and in the innermost recesses of the other room. Ethnic relations deteriorated. It has been said that Nigeria is a nation of thirty six unviable states. Pundits were beginning to add the father and primogenitor of them all as the thirty seventh unviable proposition.

    Communities that have been at prosperous peace with one and other for centuries tore into each other like ferocious ants. And lightlessness became the leading light of the nation compounding the searing heat with stupendous darkness. The berserk and the besieged collided. The nation’s burden was compounded by a mysterious presidential ailment which gave room to morbid rumours and scary scenarios. For a moment, it seemed as if the dreaded apocalypse is here with us. Call no nation lucky until it has carried its luck to eternity.

    But like Mother Nature itself, most nations tend to have an inbuilt self-correcting mechanism which returns them to the path of rationality irrespective of actual governance. There are encouraging feelers from the economic front with the naira clawing its way back to some relevance. After a period of somnolent disorientation, the Central Bank seems to be on top of its brief. Some economic regeneration seems to be in the air. If you think this is small beer, compare this with the fate of the Zimbabwean dollar as it breathes its last under the sclerotic clutches of the old wizard of Harare.

    To be sure, all is still not completely well, particularly on the political front. There are still some major concerns about the state of presidential health and President Buhari’s mental and political alertness. Or how else does one explain a situation in which the senate seems to hold the presidency in a pin-fall with the executive pleading for mercy and the resultant paralysis of the state and official business?

    But let this distressing disarticulation of the state not put a damper on the feel-good atmosphere of the moment. At least General Buhari is showing signs of regaining his old bounce. His presidency may yet be redeemed if he experiences a radical epiphany in the coming months. It is as sure as daylight that this senate will soon get its comeuppance, if not from the presidency but from the populace. It looks like this epic collision of national will and selfish guts can no longer be postponed.

    Given the dismal realities, the question whether the approaching spring will bypass the state in Nigeria may well turn out to be a benevolent plea for a stay of execution. Either in its colonial actuality or post-colonial incarnation, the state has acted to thwart the collective economic aspiration of Nigerian people or constituted itself as the major impediment to the progressive political ambition of the people. The state at the centre has become the enemy of the nation.

    But when a route to human development is blocked by hostile accretions, it opens up other avenues for societal emancipation. When Karl Marx famously predicted the withering of the state as the ultimate goal of socialist engineering, little did one know that this daring prediction might find circuitous fulfilment in post-colonial Africa. In his revolutionary delusion and Utopian fantasy, the great German philosopher actually believed that socialist engineering would have so reformed humankind and forced them to abandon their wayward impulses that there would be no need for formal governance.

    In the absence of formal governance in many parts of Africa, particularly in Nigeria, certain developments are unfolding which point the way forward in a way that deepens and complicates the Marxian conundrum of a vanishing state. Either through state-driven accelerated development as we can see in Lagos State or through the sheer explosion of human ingenuity which bypasses the state as it is evident in many parts of the country, something is about to give. In the past one week, Lagos played host to both possibilities. We must now critically examine these developments and their implications for both voluntary and involuntary transformation of Nigeria.