Category: Tatalo Alamu

Now that the Obama extravaganza has come and gone, it is time for nations, societies and people alike to learn some important lessons. There are major lessons to be learnt from the events preceding, surrounding and succeeding the glittering spectacle. While it lasted, snooper was in the thick of things, arriving at a crowded and festive Dulles International Airport on the Sunday preceding the inauguration and not leaving until Hillary Clinton was firmly ensconced in office on Thursday morning.
The triumph of Barack Obama has been a great public relations coup for an America that was widely reviled abroad as a seething conurbation of unintelligent and feckless militarism, a land that projects its internal injustice and political inequities on the rest of the world with the malice of a naughty but supremely devious toddler.
It was clear that if nothing was done, America was going to inflict its own internal contradictions on the rest of the world with apocalyptic consequences. With unwinnable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with its economy hobbled as a direct consequence of its arrogant unilateralism, it was only a question of time before the entire globe was dragged under in an economic and political maelstrom.
With the Obama miracle, the tendency has been to over-romanticise the sturdy values and endearing attributes of the society and nation that has thrown up America’s forty fourth President. We were all Americans this last week. From Australia to Zambia, from Auckland to Yenagoa, the entire globe stood still in admiration and awe of a truly functioning democracy, of people’s power at its most potent and potentially devastating.
It was one of those great moments of history, a spectacular ritual of human renewal and societal self-validation. History may be a nightmare from which we are all struggling to wake up, as James Joyce famously quipped. But history can also be a sweet dream from which we do not wish to wake up or be disturbed by uncomfortable reality. The quintessential American dream was at work last week, and it was a glimpse of Elysium, of human paradise on earth.
Yet in our rapture and admiration, we seem to have forgotten or conveniently overlooked the fact that an Obama presidency, as brimful of hope and promise as it is, does not even begin to disturb the litany of woes that has plagued America since its birth. Nor does it automatically presage the end of the multiple scourges that have turned America into a consuming hell for many of its nationals.
These helpful reminders notwithstanding, let nobody take away the considerable achievement of the American nation in casting traditional bias and hateful prejudices aside to elect its first president of African American extraction. The triumph itself may be largely at the symbolic level. But to continue to dwell on this is to ignore the extraordinary collective courage and visionary resolve that went into cobbling the Obama rainbow coalition together.
All nations are artificial constructs, counterfeit contraptions arbitrarily slammed on a territorial space by the imperial will of a mighty few. The United States of America is no exception to this iron law of modern nationhood. The modern history of America itself bespeaks a constant and occasionally violent struggle to impose order and cohesion on an increasingly unwieldy and dramatically shifting territorial space. Empires, kingdoms and fiefdoms are nothing but signifiers of space delineation at specific historical conjunctures, subject to change and terminal duress. What is permanent are the human communities so arbitrarily marked by the human will to power.
In this Homeric battlefield, some nations have turned out to be more cohesive and coherent than others. This is because if the nation is an expression of the imperial will of the few, it takes the collective heroic will of the many to turn it into a national community of organic principles. A nation that has not transcended its inchoate origins to become a national community of shared values and common destiny remains what the revered Obafemi Awolowo has called a mere geographical expression or a congregation of mutually antagonistic armed camps permanently at war with themselves.
Once the organic principles that bind a nation together evolve, it is the constant battle to reaffirm these core principles that shape and frame the evolution of the nation. Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains, as Rousseau famously asserted. The founding fathers of America envisaged a nation of freeborn where all are equal before the law. But the ink had hardly dried on this noble declaration before America reverted to the default setting of a savage slave plantation.
It is in the nature of human societies for noble ideals to be corrupted. The chief culprits are often the visioners themselves. What is important is not the corruption of ideals or their progressive desiccation in the roiling cauldron of history and lived experiences but the innate capacity of each society to summon the will and the inner resources of strength to challenge the decimation of its core principles. This is the road to renewal and self-validation.
It is this battle for the soul of a nation, for its core values that the world has just witnessed in America. With the election of Barack Obama, America has once again demonstrated an amazing capacity for self-renewal which should be the envy of the rest of the world. It has not been easy for this change to come, and it has taken decades of blood, sweat and tears.
Freighted with several contending and mutually contradictory notions of what is good for the nation and society, America has been a natural candidate for a deadlocked existence and the inevitable paralysis of the collective will. But once in a while in every society, an extraordinary figure of charisma and vision often emerges to break the deadlock and defreeze the frozen dialectic of history once again. In Barack Obama, the gifted son of an absconding African immigrant, America appears to have found such a person.
It is too early to say whether the old stalemating demons will not return to hobble Mr Obama’s presidency. Many an American presidency had started on such a glorious note only to come spectacularly unstuck. Defeated, demoralised but not completely demobilised, the old warmongers and petrified foes of progress are still lurking with intent. In Obama’s case, youthful idealism and visionary vigour may well be a stuff that will not endure, as Shakespeare famously noted of youth itself.
But if Obama’s extraordinary campaign and the swift and surefootedness of his opening move on the political chessboard are anything to go by, the omens are very reassuring indeed. Obama has shown a precocious understanding of the dilemmas and uncertainties that face his beloved country. He has shown an unusual empathy for the tragic emptiness of contemporary American society and the ultimate futility of the rampart militarism of its super-security state.
The comparison with old Abe Lincoln may not be farfetched after all, and it is one that Obama himself seems to deliberately invite. The gangling and inexperienced Lincoln also won a gruelling campaign against better fancied opponents and went on to become arguably America’s greatest president till date. Lincoln went ahead to build bridges and to invite his implacable political adversaries like William Seward to the cabinet.
Obama has done exactly the same thing, drawing sustenance from his opponents’ strength while building bridges of goodwill and genuine fellowship across a bitterly polarised polity. While his Republican opponents ran a divisive, partisan campaign and politicised everything under the sun, Obama chose to remain wisely above the murky fray coming across in the process as the healer and statesman America needs at this particular moment of its history.
With President Barack Obama, it is morning yet on creation day for America. It is in the nature of nations and human societies to falter, to stumble and even to fall at critical moments. What is important is to find the courage and the strength of character to get up and get going again. Anybody who has been in America in the past few days will bear witness to history and give testimony to the inherent good nature of humanity.
The mammoth crowd that witnessed the coronation of an American of African extraction is unprecedented in human memory. It was a carnival-like atmosphere of human regeneration. Something is astir in God’s own country. In transforming itself, America may yet help to transform the rest of the world. It will do so by the might of its example and not by the example of its might.
•First published in January, 2009

In times of grave political emergencies, the human imagination often develops outsize wings possibly as a strategy of containing and coming to terms with impossible reality. What cannot be imagined is what cannot be endured. The civilized world has been filled with apocalyptic trepidation as the prospects of a Donald Trump presidency drew nearer, and the world woke up on Friday to the possibility that the rogue contrarian may actually pull the nuclear trigger on the occasion of his own inauguration to send the human race on a terminal snooze.
But as the inauguration proceeded peacefully without a nuclear incident and without Donald Trump physically roughing up his running mate, one has been forced to scale down the Order of Calamity and to downgrade the furious political gale to a Category C storm. Trump even spoke brilliantly about patriotic protectionism as a harbinger of national prosperity. It is a de-globalizing project, stupid.
Even then, the prospects of Donald Trump physically assaulting a visiting African strongman or suddenly unleashing his infamous verbal grenades remain real and gripping. Flashes of impatience and irritation with political rituals bristled as Donald struggled to maintain icy composure. There is also the possibility that the whole thing may end in a historic fiasco with Trump committing an epic security infraction which will trigger a bi-partisan impeachment proceeding against him.
As the Trump presidency got underway, yours sincerely headed for his favourite watering hole to drown his sorrow. It has not been a good year for pundits and the stellar commentariat. The advent of Donald Trump has thrown the business of political star-gazing into disrepute. Eight years ago yours sincerely was in Washington to witness the triumph of Obama. At least one got that one right. But this one has been a huge lump in the throat. One had been praying that the day would never come or that Trump himself would make life easier by just disappearing.
Here we are watching on television as the Obamas welcome the Trumps to the White House in a seamless transition which spoke volumes for the strength of American institutions and the magic of human power. In revenge, snooper has resolved to collect all of Donald Trump’s verbal howitzers as a constant reality check. We call them tantrumps.

In fragile and unstable post-colonial states and nations, the incursion of religion into the state arena ought to be avoided like a plague. This is because religion, being a faith-based and emotive phenomenon, is resistant to logic and the rational intellectual constructs on which modern nationhood is founded. No amount of logic and intellectual rigour on display can sway the religious adherent. Magic cannot be explained away rationally. In its purest form, religious worship is based on the suspension of logical and intellectual disbelief.
This is why religious disputes are a potentially explosive affair. Yet Nigerian authorities find it very hard to shy away from religious contentions. If religion is truly the opium of the people, it may well be the adrenalin of the ruling class in Nigeria. The Nigerian post-colonial state, like a condemned moth, finds religious conflagrations very conducive and appealing indeed. It is like an addictive urge to play with fire, just to test one’s fire-fighting skills. But there are fires and there are fires.
Yet it is also obvious that despite its strength, its power and capacity for violence, its ability to instil and inflict terror on the populace, the state continues to be vulnerable to certain traditional institutions and religions particularly in Nigeria. Why this is so goes back to the very foundation of the colonial state on the continent and the emergence of the Nigerian nation from the colonial laboratory of artificial insemination.
Events of this past week have brought to the front burner the explosive mix of religion and statehood in Nigeria. Jim Obazee, the rogue regulator at the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), in an attempt to bring the leadership of the non-traditional church in Nigeria to heel brought himself to heel instead and brought the federal government to precipitate fury in an unhelpful and maladroit manner. For a government often characterized as slow and tardy in response to national emergencies, the retribution was swift and severe. In one fell swoop, Obazee was dismissed and the council reconstituted.
The ripple effects of this dramatic denouement are still very much with us. Many have lined up behind the government and the embattled leadership of the non-traditional church. Superstitious intellectuals, an oxymoronic formulation unique to Nigeria and Africa, are having a field day. The alleluia boys and girls of the press have risen as one to condemn what they consider to be an unwarranted interference in freedom of worship and choice of church however its structural and fiscal eccentricities. While the senate kept a dignified silence, the house waded in in an unwieldy and unhelpful manner.
This development leads to several interesting and intriguing paradoxes which must be teased out in the interest of national clarity and state illumination. Some of these need to be immediately isolated for the sake of analytic leverage. For example, is the Nigerian post-colonial state a secular state or a theocratic state with pretences to secularity based on its choice of democratic governance underscored by secular parties, secular ideologies and secular elections based on secular freedom of association and leveraged by a free, secular press?
The very idea of a theocratic secular state is a contradiction in terms. Despite the prevalence of theocratic rule in certain segments of the human society, the modern-nation state is premised on the secularization of the state and the subordination of religious practice to the rule of law as fashioned by the state and its agents. This development occured when territorial space came to be defined by earthly authority rather than religious identity. Whereas in the old arrangement, religious identification and spiritual affiliation was all that mattered, in the new arrangement it was national identification and a pan-ethnic identity which superseded tribe and tongue. Thus was born the modern nation and its concomitant nationalism.
It is to be noted that like all human activities the advent of the modern nation-state is not a result of peaceful contemplations, political decrees and philosophical postulates. It was as a result of relentless human exertion in the field of battle followed by peace treaties, particularly the Treaty of Westphalia and later The Treaty of Utrecht. Indeed, had the Ottoman Turks sweeping all before them not come to grief outside modern Serbia, we might have been talking of global Islamic theocracy.
The subjugation and pacification of the continent of Africa by the European imperialist powers followed much the same pattern. It was a function of relentless and dogged secularization. The motive was economic and political and only secondarily religious. Several nationalities with different religions were boxed together and slammed with a national identity with the state superintending.
In Nigeria, the marked preference of the colonial authorities for a cohesive north even with its different religious affiliation shows that theocracy was far from the pressing agenda. By this same token, it shows that any attempt to impose a theocratic solution on the contradictions of a multi-religious nation like Nigeria is bound to come to grief.
This leads directly to the other paradox. Is Nigeria a multi-religious state? Contrary to some prevalent political illiteracy, there can be nothing like a multi-religious state. The idea of a multi-religious state is a violent contradiction in terms. Nigeria is a secular state superintending over a multi-ethnic and multi-religious nation and adjudicating among different factions of the political elite who often use the blackmail of religion and ethnicity to pursue their economic goals and interest. The idea of a multi-religious state presupposes a turn by turn power arrangement in which different religious leaders take turn to rule the nation which can only presage much division and disruption.
The question to be asked is this: why is it that despite the fact that Nigeria is not a theocratic state, religion is often allowed to invade the arena of the state in a way and manner that threatens the secularity of the state, its sacred ethos and fundamental covenant? Virtually all of Nigeria’s post-military leaders in the Fourth Republic with the exception of Umaru Yar’Adua are guilty of this relentless de-secularization of the state.
In the case of General Obasanjo in his second coming, perhaps in an attempt to validate his sense of messianic exceptionalism, Aso Rock was virtually turned into a permanent Christian Revivalist kingdom with tropes and totems of His Second Coming dotting the landscape. But if this can be excused as arising from the psychological trauma of a man who nursed cosmic vengeance against his tormentors, what can one say of a man like Goodluck Jonathan who became a footloose prayer warrior routinely kneeling before religious authority in a vote-garnering political gimmick bristling with spiritual chicanery?
Yet the fact that Jonathan became a virtual praying mantis abasing himself and the sacred ethos of secular authority did not stave off looming defeat and the crippling economic depression he and his cohorts inflicted on the nation. There is another historic reference point. In the Second Republic, the pious and prayerful Alhaji Shehu Shagari was known to retire upstairs to commune with his maker as his acolytes took the nation to the financial slaughter slab. It seems as if the more underdeveloped a nation is the more over-religious its leaders are.
In the particular case of General Mohammadu Buhari, it may well be that his ascetic and abstemious nature, the solid and stolid credentials of his Islamic piety, do not admit of the spiritual razzmatazz of his Christian predecessors. Nobody can fairly accuse him of religious one-upmanship in his public conduct or utterances or of turning the precincts of Aso Rock into an Islamic redoubt with minarets blaring.
Yet the paradox on ground suggests that in a bid to avoid the tar of religious fundamentalism, he has raised the decibel of the politicization of religion in the country particularly in his last two campaigns as political exigencies led him to court and cultivate certain religious pressure groups at the expense of the secularity of the state simply to demonstrate that he is not a fanatic but a much misunderstood statesman.
This is precisely what has returned to haunt the government in the Obazee affair as the Buhari administration appears to bend over backward to please and mollify a particular religious tendency with presidential vote-husbandry and the next election in view. To be sure, Obazee, driven by petty animosity for a sect that had reportedly sanctioned him for an earlier pastoral infraction, demonstrated grave political irresponsibility by not clearing matters with his superiors.
Yet the bald fact remains that in a secular state, all religious groups are subordinate to the directing vision of the secularized Leviathan. This is what guarantees societal cohesion, intra and inter-religious harmony and economic prosperity certainly not religious piety. Even the bible enjoins us to give unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar.
Ordinarily, respect for freedom of association ought to preclude the state from unwarranted interference in the internal political structure and tenure of leadership of private associations such as non-traditional churches. But it is also the case that government cannot refrain from intervention where the conduct of certain non-traditional religious associations constitutes an economic security threat to the nation or when the internal jostling for power or succession struggle is deemed as prejudicial to public order.
Having been forcibly constituted as a modern nation-state by colonial conquerors, it would amount to a great historical tragedy if the nation were to regress into Stone Age religious anarchy where religious leaders hold the nascent state to ransom. In contemporary Nigeria, there is a marked disjunction between inner spirituality and overt religiosity, otherwise why is there so much wickedness and wanton cruelty such as we are currently witnessing, despite the nocturnal vigils and endemic fasting?
As some sections of the political elite fan the embers of religious cum ethnic schisms in several flashpoints leading to widespread mayhem and industrial killing, it is the bounden duty of the Nigerian state to rise to the occasion or lose its fundamental raison d’etre. If that were to be the case, both the state and the nation it is supposed to superintend will unravel in the shortest possible time.
Finally a word for our spiritual leaders and people of God. To whom much is donated, much is also expected in terms of probity, accountability and fiscal godliness. They cannot continue to resist or cleverly evade state audit of their finances as long as they remain an integral part of the nation and not some theocratic enclaves operating at some interstices beyond state surveillance. But even more important at this perilous conjuncture for the nation, our religious leaders must avoid inflammatory political rhetoric and divisive statements which tend to put the entire nation at grave political risk.
They must avoid the temptation to turn their exalted political platforms into a bullying pulpit for the sole purpose of wresting political and economic concessions from the state. From the events of the past few years, it is obvious that many of them need political minders. May God grant them the wisdom to appreciate the fact that we are not equally endowed and that a religious avatar is not the same thing as a political genius.