Category: Tatalo Alamu

The life and times of Alfred Ilenre

here are some passages which make the bones to creak and rumble with intimations of mortality. There are some deaths that ignite speculations about the promise of the past and of a great future firmly behind. Some passages speak to the utter despondency of the times, and the needless waste of priceless human assets.

With the death of Alfred Ilenre last month, Nigeria has lost one of its most consistent and impassioned advocates of genuine federalism and equality of opportunity for all Nigerians. The struggle seemed to have defined his existence. He lived this struggle for a better Nigeria and breathed it till the very last moment.

Yet unlike many in his shoes, Ilenre never sought to personally profit from the onerous and back-breaking labour to make Nigeria a better place. Even the official titles which rightly accrued to him as a result of distinguished service he bore with such casual indifference that it could easily have been mistaken for a joke. He was a man who carried self-depreciation to its ultimate logic.

Quiet, self-possessed, self-erasing and ultimately self-sacrificing, he could always be found in the trenches when and where it mattered most and no matter the personal cost and inconvenience. The  expanding vista of that struggle to redeem Nigeria and the huge opportunity cost left no room for equivocation or ambiguity. A man of simple taste and without airs or affectations, it was the content and sheer heft of his contribution that mattered most rather their form or outward ornamentation.

Alfred had been at it for a long time. Despite his humble mien, he was a man of granite determination and muscular resolve. Nothing was going to stop or deter him in his bid to make Nigeria a better and more humane place for its harried denizens. He was there as an intrepid reporter at The Tribune in Ibadan in the heydays of the struggle against political tyranny and as the battle crystallized in the seventies against arbitrary military rule.

Ilenre also participated in the epic resistance against the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election known to have been won by the Yoruba billionaire business mogul, MKO Abiola. He was there in the struggle by the Ogoni people for economic and political self-determination led by his bosom friend and beloved comrade in arms, Kenule Saro-Wiwa who eventually paid the supreme price along with eight of his colleagues.

As the battle to rescue Nigeria took on a conceptual and intellectual hue, particularly with the growing concern about the shape and structure of the nation, Ilenre was in his true elements serving in the uppermost echelons of the Movement for National Reformation(MNR) led by the iconic  nationalist, Chief Anthony Enahoro, EMIROAF as secretary, MOSOP as Saro-Wiwa’s ideological soul mate, NADECO as a home-based leader and in the PRONACO  bid to put advocates of unitarism and rigid centralization on the spot.

It was a noble life devoted to permanent struggle. The last time this columnist saw the federalist notable was at the symposium to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the assassination of Chief Bola Ige held at the Airport Hotel in Ikeja, Lagos at the tail end of December last year. For this writer, it was a bitterly ironic moment. While the political acolytes of the late statesman were nowhere to be seen, it was the likes of Ilenre who kept his memory alive.

As usual, Alfred Ilenre was sitting quietly and anonymously among the crowd and did not come forward until the tail end of the proceedings to felicitate with friends and old colleagues of the timeless barricades. Snooper noticed then that the great man was frail and obviously ailing. The fire had gone out but he remained as militant and defiant of evil authorities as usual. Three weeks after, he slipped out of the ring for the final time. The Edo-born nobleman had joined his ancestors as quietly and without fanfare as he had lived.

The lack of airs and self-importance can sometimes lead to comic embarrassment. In a society where perception overwhelms reality and where self-projection and self-positioning are all that matter, people like Ilenre can suffer double jeopardy: unrecognised and unrecognisable.

To this columnist’s utter embarrassment, Alfred was once detained in front of his house on the suspicion of wandering. Yours sincerely was roused out of bed to disown the intruder who was claiming professional kinship with him. Lo, it was Alfred Ilenre sitting quietly on a cement slab and eyeing his tormentors with a faraway look of superior compassion.

When snooper upbraided the uniformed urchins for embarrassing his former boss, they all slunk away in different directions with looks of incredulity. As if nothing had happened, Alfred went straight to the business at hand. He must have grown used to being embarrassed by the same people he had spent a lifetime fighting for.

It is important to reveal that Ilenre was not in the house on a self-serving or self-saving mission. He was a proud and defiant Ishan nobleman till the very end. He never for once drew attention to his own plight however seemingly parlous. As usual with him, he came at the behest of a beloved friend and mutual acquaintance who was in dire medical straits. The person in question was also snooper’s older friend and mentor during the turbulent days at The Tribune at the turn of the seventies. Such was this man’s nobility of purpose and compassion.

Nigeria wastes its most gifted children. This country sacrifices its best and brightest, making sure that those who survive are nothing but walking apparitions and political calamities. Nigeria destroys its talented ten and first eleven, its most visionary and most humanly evolved scions at the altar of a dysfunctional nation and an even more dysfunctional post-colonial state.

For people like Ilenre and their beloved country, the past was far more promising. Our paths first crossed at very beginning of the seventies at The Nigerian Tribune newspaper, then at Adeoyo in Ibadan. While snooper was just starting out as a cub and mere ammunition boy, Ilenre was already established as an ace investigative reporter.

Although the military coup had disbanded the warring children of Oduduwa about four years earlier, The Tribune still looked very much like a war camp, a redoubt of political insurgency or the Headquarters of political hara-kiri brimming with journalistic suicide squads, recuperating political hit-men, intellectual snipers, enforcing auxiliaries and domestic storm troopers.

These were hard men. It was a common sight to espy amulets and dangerous charms dangling ominously from rumpled pockets. A fellow in the production department known by the nickname of Alekuso was said to have seen action during the early days of Adelabu and the Mabolaje Grand Alliance. Openly defiant and contemptuous of authority, Alekuso’s pocket bristled with all kinds of fireworks like a hunter on an expedition: matches, lighters or what is known in local parlance as monrasana, pellets, flints and other local conductors of thunder and electricity. He must have been a travelling freelance arsonist in an earlier incarnation.

It was impossible to work in that environment without fully subscribing to the Awo cause and credo. The atmosphere smelt Awo, breathed Awo and spoke Awo. It was ideological mobilization at its most potent and unyielding, underwritten by the old Action Group war-cry of permanent and eternal vigilance: “Gbogbo’ gba e standby….”  Like the epic personage that he was, the spirit of Awo suffused the place but Awo himself was nowhere to be found. It was eerily reminiscent of Bakayoko, the hero and presiding deity of Sembene Ousmane’s novel, God’s Bits of Wood.

The siege mentality was nurtured and encouraged by burgeoning signs of military dictatorship. Although the combustible west had known relative peace and stability in four years of military rule, there were still some flashpoints of civil disorder such as the Agbekoya rural uprising which metastasised into the urban terrorism that saw to the summary decapitation of the reigning Shoun, or paramount traditional ruler of Ogbomosho.

This was the social and political milieu in which Alfred Ilenre rose to reportorial stardom and which also shaped his later national prominence and visibility as a militant advocate and staunch campaigner for civil rights and self-determination for ethnic nationalities. He never looked back from that moment.

Just as it was said of Karl Marx that he needed a sustained sojourn in a socially and industrially more advanced country like England in order to grasp the full contradictions of capitalism at work, Ilenre’s sustained immersion in the political and economic dynamics of the old west and its epicentre must have furnished him with insights as to how the most economically and politically advanced section of a country can be imperilled under the baleful spell of unitary federalism.

Despite the loss of some of its most illustrious pathfinders in recent decades, the struggle to redeem Nigeria must proceed apace until victory is won. Alfred Ilenre has fought a good fight and has gone home to his maker. May his kind and noble soul find eternal peace.

A Political Primer of Kleptocracy in Nigeria

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second  as farce.”  Like many of his pained compatriots, Sonala Olumhense, one of Nigeria’s most committed and politically engaged literary notables, would have nodded in warm approval of Karl Marx’s famous dictum.

If a nation insists on going round in circles, history must repeat itself. Just as it happened the first time around and despite its equally enviable strides in many departments, particularly fiscal discipline and relative public sanity, a fundamental failure of politics is beginning to haunt the second coming of the iron general from Daura. There is an eerie and chilling feeling of Déjà vu in the air.

If history teaches us anything at all, it is that it doesn’t teach the Nigerian political class anything. Towards the end of 1984, Stanley Macebuh, unarguably one of the greatest public communicators that Nigeria has produced, published one of his finely honed, elegantly cadenced pieces urging the then Buhari administration to level up with fellow Nigerians in order to avoid a rupture of affection.

Titled, Barricade At Dodan Barracks—or something close to that, it was a passionate plea for the open society against the military instincts of habitual secrecy and lack of transparency in the conduct of public affairs. Months earlier, this columnist had written a piece countermanding a purported military ban on seminars by the Buhari administration, insisting that he was heading for the next available seminar. It was titled, A Seminar to end all Seminars.

Matters are coming to a dangerous head once again. This past week, Sonala Olumhense took the Buhari administration to the cleaners in a well-syndicated piece. Apocalyptically titled The End of Buhari, and the APC, it was a blistering Philippic rumbling with bile and rage against General Buhari and his acolytes.

This is political divorce, Nigerian style: messy and traumatic. It is a hostile and implacable putdown, bristling with invectives and mournful brio. A former ardent fan of the regime, it is obvious that the Edo-born writer is bitterly disappointed with an administration that rode to power on the cusp of huge public approval and general goodwill.

Let the truth now be told. The government will be deceiving itself if it thinks that Sonala is in the minority. There are thousands of affronted patriots who feel exactly the same way as Sonala, disappointed by the pace and paucity of achievement of a government they have supported against all odds. But this is the time to put on our thinking caps once again. There are many out there who still root for the Buhari regime and its glum regimen if only for its determined bid to rid Nigeria of economic leeches no matter how awkward and inconsistent this may appear.

Sonala writes with severity and caustic candour, which recalls Karl Marx himself at his most savagely contemptuous. One can imagine the great German philosopher writing about the historical and sociological aberration called Nigeria with his face contorted with rage and a bitterly ironic grimace.

But there are many close enough to the ringside and unfolding events to sense that what lies beyond the hazy horizon is an even messier and more sinister meltdown, if the situation is not handled with the caution and the statesmanlike clarity it deserves. With weak state institutions and a weaker civil society, the coming Black Spring in Nigeria may eventuate in renewed civilian dictatorship as we have seen in Egypt and Tunisia or anarchic chaos and the reign of warlords as it is the current lot of post-Ghaddafi Libya.

In many parts of the nation, our youths are already on the streets and the poor are bitterly and hungrily awake. Demography and number are now with them.Yet in Nigeria it is not only with political history that events repeat themselves. They do so with political letters too. In Nigeria, politics and fiction are Siamese twins conjoined and shadowing each other.

In 2005, snooper wrote a piece in which he foresaw a fancifully attired DSP Alamieyeseigha slipping his captors’ mooring in England and arriving in his parlous and deprived state capital to a heroic and tumultuous welcome. The ink had hardly dried when futuristic fiction became immediate and compelling reality. Lo, the rogue former Squadron Leader had actually arrived in Yenagoa to wild applause.

Last week, it was the turn of another Niger Delta political warlord: James Ibori. The crowd of native well-wishers was in an even more festive and adulating mood. The boyish-looking but famously deadly political master of the creeks could not have chosen a more poignant and devastating entrée. It was a time General Buhari’s anti-corruption crusade appeared stalled and demobilized with critical question marks put on its probity, impartiality and integrity.

Five years ago as the Ibori political saga unfolded, this column wrote a piece titled Escobar comes to Escavos. We republish the piece this morning before coming to grips with kleptocracy in Nigeria and the inevitable Nubian Spring.

In recent times, no phrase or political terminology has been a greater source of pains and perplexity to Nigerians than the notion of unitary federalism. Federalism and all the ancillary benefits that may flow from it  presupposes freely federating units, whereas unitary government suggests entities that have been forcibly brought together or territorial units compulsorily conjoined by superior force.

The question Nigerians do not often ask themselves is how conquered territories would be allowed to freely federate and —were this to be so— how a hugely favoured entity among the federating units can be prevented from naturally imposing its hegemonic fiat on the others. In other words, unitary federalism is a grand oxymoron. But as a complex and contradictory mediation of complicated reality, it was an oxymoron that has served its historical purpose. It closed the lid firmly on a roiling cauldron of combustible nationalities until it is either no longer cost effective or the captives themselves figure out that something is terribly amiss.

This is the stage we seem to have reached in Nigeria, with the giant of Africa increasingly looking like the sick man of Africa; a post-colonial version of the Ottoman Empire at the end of its tether. Unitary federalism is another name for feudal federalism. We use the word feudal not in any pejorative sense but as an analytical tool for describing a historical phenomenon and its mode of political, economic, intellectual and spiritual production.

But if feudal federalism appears as a violent oxymoron and a contradiction in terms, it is because the transition from one epoch to another is not a neat and symmetrical affair. It is often messy and chaotic. History is not like a snake slithering out and casting off its slough in one fell swoop. In the transition from feudalism and empire state to the modern nation-state and liberal democracy, some of the features of classical feudalism are willy-nilly grafted to the new mode of political production until the historic transformation is complete.

The unitary state with its harsh centralization and relentless militarization is a sine qua non of empires and the feudal order. It didn’t make sense to talk of federating units in such arrangements. Force of arms and the writ of empire are needed to administer such a vast and humongous territory stretching from one corner of the globe to the other and often incorporating people of different races, creeds and mutually unintelligible cultures. Unlike modern federations which work from the bottom up, empires are top-heavy affairs with orders given and orders enforced.

As the transition from feudalism and empire-states to modern nation-states got underway, it was inevitable that some of the vestiges of the old arrangement, particularly its architecture of power and ideological apparatuses in all their toxic potency, would be handy in the administration of the new order. This is why it was inevitable that old empire states such as Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and Russia, even after shedding their empire status, still resembled something like empire-nations or some oxymoronic hybrids straddling two different historical epochs.

History often mocks the bold and revolutionary efforts of the human species to chart a new and independent course for itself. As it has been famously observed, people make history but not under the circumstances of their choice. Looking back and with the benefit of hindsight, we can now see how conceptually impossible it was for humanity to transit straight from the old feudal order to modernity without some intervening hybrids and genetic monstrosities. The uneven nature of human consciousness and unequal development can be seen in the fact that almost six hundred years after this fundamental disruption of the old feudal order, some human communities are still in the throes of traumatic transition even as they grapple with the toxic pathologies.

In Africa in particular and in Latin America where the transition from the feudal order to modernity was accompanied by imperial conquest and colonial subjugation, impossible genetic anomalies subsist. The transition to modernity cannot be a tea party. Several wars of national liberation had to be fought on both continents. The arbitrary boxing of human communities in different stages of economic development and political consciousness into a fit-all colonial trunk has led to unspeakable horrors and some of the worst human tragedies of our time.

Portugal, which is technically speaking the first nation-state, did not even have a concept of the modern nation-state. All its overseas possessions were treated as mere extensions and plantations of the metropolitan homeland. At a point, the entire Portuguese royal household relocated to Brazil, gifting the world with its first tri-continental state. Consequently, ruinous and bitter wars of liberation had to be fought in Brazil, Angola, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau to wrest control, triggering an internal political revolution in the metropolitan homeland itself.

France, having spurned the famous interdiction of Toussaint L’ Ouverture, the great Haitian Black revolutionary, not to substitute the aristocracy of class it has overthrown in a blood-soaked drama for an aristocracy of superior race, elected to turn its conquered natives into proud French people. The tragic consequences of this romantic racism and genetic engineering can be seen in the racial and religious disorder crippling the French homeland. Swallowing strange human species has not proved a delectable meal. A majority of the Frenchified evolues still remember that they came from somewhere.

The historic luck of the United States of America resides in the fact that it was blessed at the beginning with a set of visionary intellectuals and revolutionary thinkers who were bent on charting a new course for a radical modern nation away from the ruins of feudal Europe. It was the first collective experiment in revolutionary humanism where humankind and its rapid progress towards self-actualization and not some divine ordination became the measure of all things.

Even then, the American revolutionaries were not far behind the French romantic idealists. To gain traction, this new elitism took off with a savage pogrom of the native Indian population who were viewed as surplus to modern human requirement and the dehumanization of non-European races, particularly the African slaves who have had to struggle through centuries of unspeakable terror in order to achieve racial parity.

The unspeakable irony is that it is the backlash that has created the pulsating paradox of a multi-racial American underclass up in arms against the entire American establishment with the unspeakably bigoted and joyfully racist Donald Trump as its champion and chief haymaker.  There are secessionist tremors from Texas and California and no one is sure of how all this will pan out. The world has arrived at the truly post-modern and post-liberal frontiers.

Yet it can be worse and the grey mist can only be lifted by another oxymoron: gloomy optimism. No nation or people can escape the historic consequences of their own actions. As the originator and prime mover of the world’s seminal break with the old feudal order, it is to Europe that we must look for the early warning signals of another rupture in the global order and arrangement of territorial space.

Nations which behaved very much like the old empires forcibly co-opting people of different nationalities and diverse cultures by unitary fiat have disappeared in the sand of time: Yugoslavia, the old Soviet Union, Sudan, Ethiopia, and good old Czechoslovakia have all disintegrated into their components parts. If care is not taken, Britain is most likely to follow in the wake of the Brexit rumpus.

It is not as if the world has been cursed with the collapse of the old nation-state paradigm. Rather, what is staring us in the face is the possibility that human evolution no longer requires vast and unwieldy nation-states as the engine and accelerator of human development and the maximization of opportunities for self-actualization.

This is even more so if such nations brim and bristle with irresolvable and insurmountable national contradictions which stifle developments and hobble the creative energies of their diverse people. Rather than face eventual dismemberment and disintegration, it is better and more beneficial to humanity for such nations to find within their inner resources, the structural re-engineering which will liberate their national genius and blast open the frigid dialectic of history. This is different from the strident calls for summary disintegration by affronted and traumatized nationals.

Africans in general and Nigerians in particular can no longer afford to play the ostrich to global developments. All available indices of human development, stability and accelerated growth tend to support the fact that the fastest developing, best governed, most congenial and amenable nations on earth are loose federations such as Canada, Australia and India or the portable compact wonders of northern Europe: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland and probably Northern Ireland. These havens of human progress and prosperity prove the thesis that when it comes to nations big can be big for nothing indeed.

As a matter of fact, recent research tend to support the notion that in the last five thousand years the greatest monument to civilization and perhaps the most outstanding achievement of the human race are not great kingdoms, remarkable empires and outstanding nations but great cities or megalopolis. As it was in the earliest time, it is these great human conurbations that drive accelerated development and rapid growth irrespective of changing territorial rationalizations.

In the UK, the greater London metropolis alone accounts for almost half of Britain’s GDP. In America, the Boston-New York-Washington corridor and the Californian arcadia stretching all the way to the Silicon valley hold at least one-third of America’s GDP, just as the Taiheiyo Belt in Japan, Greater Sao Paulo in Brazil, Mumbai-Pune in India, Chongqing in China with its concentric city-cells and the emerging African wonder of Lagos all hold the key to unlocking the staggering economic potentials of these huge nations.

And just as it happened with the great rivers of the world which powered and served as a hub for prosperity for earlier civilizations, great urban enclaves are swelling around major airports of the world often bypassing the constraints of the hosting domains to connect with the global emporia and the ceaseless air traffic. Known as aerotropolises, these economic and technological nirvanas drive human commerce to a level that would have been unimaginable in an earlier epoch.  Goods from the Tokyo-Nagoya-Osaka ultrapolis and Seoul’s Incheon Airport arrive at Los Angeles on a daily basis while Sydney in Australia has become just one aerial hop from London.

If this new demographic reconfiguration solves the problem of accelerated development and rapid economic progress for humanity, it is also likely to resolve the political conundrum of unitary federalism in the least politically advanced societies, particularly in Nigeria and generally in Africa. Already dubbed as one of the fastest growing economies in the world and the fifth largest in Africa, the greater Lagos megalopolis eventually stretching to Epe and incorporating Abeokuta, Shagamu and Badagry is likely to put paid to the arrant conceit of unitary federalism in Nigeria.

When fully operationalized, this vast urban Mesopotamia, aided by its culturally congenial and socially conducive environment, is likely to profoundly affect the contours and complexion of the colonial cartography of Nigeria through economic decoupling from the iron cage of futile and feeble unitarism. There is no caging the human spirit. When you block the political path to human progress, you also open up other avenues.

This is subtle but firm restructuring in progress. No power on earth can stop this development. This is because it does not depend on force or the power of a famished state but on the collective genius of over forty million people. No contemporary state can muster that kind of anti-work force against its most politically sophisticated and economically advanced citizenry.

It is no longer possible in contemporary post-military Nigeria to equalize and federalize poverty and deliberate under-development as a strategy for maintaining political stranglehold. With its current difficulties and obvious inability to galvanize the entire nation for a purposeful national project of salvation, the Nigerian post-colonial state will struggle hard in the coming years to come to terms with this developing scenario.

But it will be akin to locking the door of the stable after the horse might have bolted. As we have demonstrated in this piece, unitary federalism has had its day in other parts of the world. It is a carry-over from the epoch of feudal empire. Whatever advantages it conferred on earlier state and nation formations have now dissolved in the crucible of human evolution. It is also about to come to grief in Nigeria with portentous implications for state and nation alike.

Rather than working on the next mega party or rearranging the sitting and feeding order in a sinking Titanic, what is now imperative is for the nation to sit together in order to chart a new course for the Nigerian people. With economic sabotage bringing the country to its knees and with centrifugal forces seizing hold of its jugular from all directions, the omens are very dire indeed.