The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • A Ruling Class tragedy in Nigeria

    A Ruling Class tragedy in Nigeria

    “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places”—— St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians as quoted in This Present Darkness: A History of Nigerian Organized Crime.

    terrifying fog has descended on Nigeria. It is a fog that has spiritual, legal, moral, economic and political dimensions. Such is the enervating cloudiness, the occluding intensity, that it reminds one of a historic eclipse. In the blinding haze we can hardly recognize each other anymore. Great historical epochs often steal upon a people with leisure and at a friendly pace. We may be in for such developments. The Nigerian ruling class is at war with itself and against itself.

    On Tuesday 13th December, Justice Adeniyi Ademola of the Federal High Court and his wife, Olabowale, were arraigned before a High Court of the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja on an eleven count charge of conspiracy and receipt of gratification, to which they pleaded not guilty. It was a dark moment for the Nigerian judiciary and perhaps the gravest instance of the judicial dimension of the crisis of the post-colonial state. For if those whose duty is to rein in lawlessness and preserve order are being arraigned on the suspicion of being lawless, then law and order are in a free fall.

    The case being before a court of law and effectively sub-judice, this columnist will not join in removing the last strand of bureaucratic rationality and authority from the Nigerian judicial system. But since this is a long-standing boil in a sensitive part of the anatomy that has to be lanced and drained of its pus, some extra-legal comments and observations are now in order.

    For Justice Ademola, it is a personal, professional and historic tragedy. Scion of illustrious Yoruba royalty that has contributed sterling products to the evolution of the modern Nigerian state, it was not supposed to go this way. His grandfather, Sir Adetokunbo Ademola, was the first indigenous Chief Justice of Nigeria; a 1931 Law graduate of Selwyn College, Cambridge. His father, Justice Adenekan Ademola, was an influential and respected jurist who retired from the Court of Appeal. An uncle, Justice Gboyega Ademola, aka Gbogus, was widely celebrated for his brilliance and originality.

    The founding paterfamilias was no pushover. Justice Ademola’s great grandfather, Sir Ladapo Ademola, was a consummate diplomat, statesman and master conciliator who had reigned on the Egba throne at a difficult period of transition to modernity while bringing much prestige and prosperity to the Egba people.

    History has it that Sir Ladapo was one of the early modernizing and westernizing Egba elite who strove and fought for the transformation of the Egba people in their new homestead. By the first decade of the twentieth century the Egba city-state had achieved considerable success in revenues from effective taxation, urban sanitation and security before it was forcibly incorporated into the Southern Nigerian protectorate. But when the Alake throne became vacant upon the transition of Oba Gbadebo the first, the then Prince Ladapo Ademola was the unanimous choice of kingmakers.

    A century down the line, the nation they struggled to create is floundering abysmally, turning and turning in a widening gyre as the falcon no longer hearken to the falconer. What will these departed avatars be thinking as they watched their scion in the dock turning away from the intense public glare in misery and humiliation even as his flustered wife clutched an i-phone to record this site of historic obloquy for posterity? It is surely a world out of joints.

    And the toll mounts. Two days after her arraignment with her husband, Olabowale was quietly disengaged as the Head of Service by the Lagos State Government thus terminating a commendable career which still had about six months to run. It would have been legally incongruous and politically unwieldy for her to continue in service.

    Now, consider these developments which may appear on the surface to be tangentially unrelated to the matter at hand. This past week, President Buhari submitted a budget proposal to the senate with much hype and hoopla. Two days later, the senate declined confirmation of Ibrahim Magu as the substantive chairman of the EFCC, citing security reports which indict the nation’s anti-crime boss for corruption and extortion. About the same time, a new version of what is known as Ponzi scam collapsed as a result of oversubscription.

    Known as MMM, the brain behind this scam launched into a barely coherent tirade against perceived enemies of the scheme. Sergey Mavrodi, a rogue speculator who looks straight out of the Russian oligarchy nightmare of the nineties, berated the Nigerian government for not providing for the people and undermining those trying to help. The goodwill CONvoy has since relocated to Kenya.

    Is this the rumoured arrival of post-state actors or some criminal grandstanding by a man habitually conditioned to cheating others? Meanwhile as this was going on, a nasty spat over allegations of sleaze and corrupt enrichment ensued between the Secretary to the Federal Government and the selfsame senate. While Malam David Babachir Lawal has dismissed the allegations against him as a charade, the senate is insisting on his dismissal. The report of the senate adhoc committee is straight out of a horror movie.

    Something must be terribly amiss. These developments are critical to understanding the current forlorn plight of the nation. As we have seen, the federal budget is the grand patron of legislative and executive corruption in Nigeria. Since it is not anchored on any integrative national developmental plan, since it is not tied to specific and rigidly delineated phases, it quickly unravels into an all comers open-ended bazaar with padding, constituency scams, outright stealing and other bizarre heists as its hallmark.

    There is nothing to suggest in General Buhari’s body language as the annual budget ritual proceeded in the senate that the tragic lessons of the last budgetary fiasco have been learnt or internalized by the presidency. If the truth must be told, the executive has shown a remarkable aversion for confrontation where corruption and sleaze in the upper and lower houses are concerned. Party and presidency have allowed those who are guilty of padding to remain in place while the whistle blower has been thrown out of the house and to the wilderness reserved for political orphans.

    But political deception also has its steep price. An objective appraisal of the forces in contention shows that as a result of executive dithering and dilatoriness, the balance of forces might have shifted in favour of the senate in a way that is not imaginable last year. This has emboldened its leadership to move from defensive rope hugging to rapid offensive. It is an offensive pointing ultimately at the political jugular of the presidency.

    When everything is in place, only an extraordinary counter offensive will rescue the Buhari presidency. The political hyenas in the senate have smelt blood and God help those who are in need of help. The swift political defenestration of the outstanding Ibrahim Magu and the determined bid to bring the Secretary of the Federal Government to heel are opening gambits on the political chessboard whose echoes will soon reverberate across the political landscape.

    Can we then rightly insinuate that this is a glaring and startling case of corruption fighting back? Unfortunately, matters can no longer be cast in such grim Manichean terms. The atmosphere is demonically foggy. The government has had enough time to demonstrate that it is a knight in shining armour ready to slay the demon of corruption. But it has sown enough doubts in the mind of the populace that it is probably motivated by something else other than fighting against corruption. The past two years have demonstrated that there are no saints in the Nigerian political jungle.

    So rather than fight against corruption or corruption fighting back, what we have is a war of political hegemony among different factions of the ruling class. It is a war of all against all and no holds are barred. With the PDP dead and interred and with the APC critically impaired as a change platform, the war against corruption is a mask for a deeper and more fundamental contention for the battered soul of the nation. After a brief respite, the repressed has returned. Centrifugal forces have returned to haunt Nigeria. As history has taught us, this kind of contention only ends with the mutual ruination of the contending classes and the nation as currently configured.

    Tragically enough, the Nigerian multitude and suffering masses who are expected to intervene very decisively in this hegemonic war of the ruling class have been so hobbled by poverty and immiseration that they have resorted to their own Ponzi scheme to get rich quickly. In a situation of deepening misery and biblical hunger, the ordinary people will be vulnerable to economic miracle workers and religious Rasputins.

    In a way, this development is good for the nation for it forces us back to the fundamental issue, which is the unresolved National Question. It has been said that history is something that hurts and that which will not ignore us however much we ignore it. Given the poverty of politics and the politicization of poverty and corruption, can this gifted but much abused country survive in its current structural configuration? Yours sincerely doubt very much.

    As for the docked Justice Ademola and his wife, since the current fog has made it impossible to distinguish between saints and sinners, they are likely to be remembered as inevitable collateral damage of a civil war for the control of Nigeria in which ethics and morality are fanciful tropes fashioned as weapons of political assault.

    This is not a development to be applauded by genuine patriots. In No Longer at Ease, a man trained with community funds returns only to be gobbled up by the cesspit of corruption that has turned out a prescient projection of the neo-colonial state. He was jailed. But that was not the problem. The problem was that he was the grandson of the illustrious and heroic Okonkwo.

  • The dead also speak

    Introduction

    Apropos of the foundational crisis of the Nigerian nation, it is meet to report that it is not only in scholarly tracts, passionate polemics and jaundiced jeremiads that the trouble with Nigeria is openly discussed and analysed. It has also found its way into fiction and literature. A person who gives birth to a misbegotten child must be ready to carry it on her back. Many affronted nationals and concerned sympathisers have questioned the wisdom and efficacy of the originating colonial clause of amalgamation. This morning, we publish a brief excerpt from Bulletin from the Land of Living Ghosts first published in 2004.

    “I can assure you, Mr Pemberton-Gilbey, and without any fear of contradiction, that General Waja did not die on that day of the bloody coup which swept the National Salvation Council from power, and he may very well not be the man that was buried in the Cemetery of Patriots”, wrote Professor Ignatius Alawiye, notable crank and retired Professor of history in the nation’s premier university who had lost his own mind while plotting the historical narrative of the nation’s decline into lunacy and anomie.

    James had met the infamous hell-raiser running rings around government officials and top civil servants at an official seminar at the nation’s administrative capital. It was on the seemingly safe and sanitised subject of why Generals could never be revolutionaries and the impossibility of a State carrying out a coup against itself.

    They had reckoned without the scrupulously shabby autodidact who shambled in lugging a huge box bursting with hansards, official gazettes, war memos, classified and declassified documents and British parliamentary reports from the governments of William Gladstone, Benjamin Disreali, Authur James Balfour, Herbert Asquith, Lloyd George, Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay Macdonald and was eyeing everybody with neurotic scorn. A top government official made the mistake of grasping at the cobra’s tail.

    “Is it possible to carry out a coup against one’s self?” the bland bureaucrat asked.

    “Why not? Isn’t that how the nation itself came into existence?” the old bruiser suddenly shot out after a testy silence.

    “Professor, how?” the bureaucrat asked with a smile thinking it was time for some comic relief. He was profoundly mistaken.

    “The amalgamation of the protectorates was an act of violence against separate states carried out on a whimsical impulse by Lord Lugard after a night of torrid passion with an Irish journalist”, the professor growled.

    “How?” the civil servant stuttered.

    “I have searched all the declassified documents, the correspondence, the memos, the hansards and the letters. I have not seen the instrument of authorization. So, Lugard carried out a coup against himself or committed what the Latin Americans call an autogolpe”, the professor noted.

    “But…”

    “There is no but there. The founder of the nation is also its first coup maker. A congenital cripple can never carry a straight luggage. Lugard must first be brought to justice before we try other coup plotters.  This nation was born of a coup and it will die of one”, the professor screamed as he was carried off by security agents.

    The professor was a study in apostasy. Before he recanted and became a born-again-democrat, he was in fact a defender and apologist of the military oligarchy. When the old General was overthrown, he had put together a caustic biography of the war-hero. Titled, The Lion That Squeaked, it was full of the fireworks of scurrility. It was meant to demystify the General and put him in his place. Shortly after the launching, he experienced a conversion of Saul-like proportions and started shouting himself hoarse that the General was the greatest hero of the nation and that he had been paid to undermine his memory. It was alleged that he had been accosted as he hurried away from the hovel of a woman of easy virtue by the ghost of the General which gave him a sound beating. Thereafter, he became persona non grata with succeeding coup-makers and gradually sank into penurious oblivion until he was dredged up by the soldiers once more.

    • Bulletin from the Land of Living Ghosts, published 2004.
  • Elephant and throne in Gambia ( An aomerinjoba template for African despots)

    Elephant and throne in Gambia ( An aomerinjoba template for African despots)

    Aomerin joba ( We are going to crown the elephant)
    Erekuewele ……………………..
    Aomerinjoba (We are going to crown the elephant)
    Erekuewele …………………………
    Gbobo wa pata kalo merin joba ( All of us must go and crown the elephant)
    Erekuewele……………….

    In the traditional African tortoise fable so beloved by the Yoruba people, an overweening and overbearing elephant consumed by ambition, insisted on being crowned as the king on account of its size. The people obliged. They had already hatched a plot to lure the foolish mammoth to its destruction and sure death. A deep pit was dug covered with damask and all the accoutrements of royalty. Thereafter, the elephant was asked to proceed to the throne accompanied by much singing and dancing.
    Like many of their fellow Africans in the epoch after formal colonization, the good and good-natured people of Gambia have been to hell and back. It is an intriguing irony that they eventually resorted to traditional African stratagems of cunning, concealment and dissimulation to see off the crackpot despot who has tormented and tortured them for twenty two years.
    In the end, Yahya Jammeh, through a combination of overconfidence and battle-weariness, succumbed to an elementary political miscalculation so obtuse that you begin to wonder whether his fabled marabous and political antennae were on sabbatical. It simply shows that no dictator can dictate beyond his allotted time once the time is ripe and the people are ready.
    The international, continental and local climate had turned against him, but he thought he could hang on. If he had known that the election would end in such a comprehensive shellacking, he would have stalled and stonewalled. But like all despots on an opiate diet of messianic invincibility, he underestimated the Pan-Gambian revulsion against his odious rule and the bitter resolve among both the elite and the people of his country to see him off in. In the end, such was the scale and magnitude of his electoral humiliation that the fog of messianic delusion suddenly cleared revealing a pathetic, whimpering bully.
    Yet here was a man who only three years earlier in 2013 was boasting that he could rule for a billion years, if it was the wish of Allah. Allah is not the God of injustice, but the rogue despot knew what he was talking about. Before then, he had routinely rigged elections and had silenced the most vocal of Gambian opposition. He thought he had happened upon the perfect formula for ruling in perpetuity. Such was the cult of personality he had built around himself and the aura of impregnable power that his people only spoke about him in whispers even after casting furtive whispers around for the ubiquitous enforcers solely recruited from his Jola people.
    A lady friend of this columnist, an iron lady in her own right who once chaired the African Union Commission on Human Rights based in the Gambian capital, told snooper of being sent several official feelers that the government of Yahya Jammeh will not tolerate any human rights nonsense and she should take note if she valued her life. It all reminds one of the barely literate Valentine Strasser, a former Freetown disc jockey turned military ruler of Sierra Leone who now lives with his mother in a hovel outside the capital, summoning a resident American upon seizing the reins of power and asking the harried fellow in creole: “A wan know if America go recognize we gobment?”
    Such has been the level of depravity and murderous comedy some illiterate military usurpers dragged this unfortunate continent. Officially known as His Excellency Sheikh Prof Alhaji Doctor Yahya AJJ Jammeh Babili Mansa, the illiterate hooligan was a combination of comic brutality and murderous buffoonery which would have made Field Marshal Alhaji Idi Amin Dada wince in horror.
    The Gambian nightmare began one quiet morning in July 1994 when soldiers led by the then Lieutenant Jammeh began protesting for better pay and conditions of service. But they quickly realised how weak, inefficient and unpopular the government they were demonstrating against was and swiftly raised the stakes.
    The government of Sir Dawda Jawara, an ethnic Mandika, collapsed like a pack of cards as the protests snowballed into a full-blown military intervention. The Nigerian Colonel who had been seconded as Army Chief of Staff quietly disappeared from Banjul only to meet a more fateful nemesis in the punitively proactive and strategically pre-emptive General Sani Abacha in a matter of months.
    Having ensconced himself in the presidential Villa, it took only a few months for Jammeh to unleash a reign of terror on the Gambian populace. Most military coups in Africa are an opportunistic affair with strategically placed officers cashing in on popular discontent without any ideological unanimity or coherence and even coincidence of political principles among the coup plotters. Regime instability is therefore a foregone conclusion. Gambia could not have been an exception.
    Jammeh was to bring the entire Gambian nation to heel having decimated the original band of coup plotters. Some were sentenced to long term imprisonment others were hounded into exile while the unlucky few disappeared forever. Summary executions of prisoners on death row became the norm. A few years back, Alieu Bah, a former military officer who had been in prison since 1997 on charges of plotting to overthrow the government, was taken out and shot.
    Any wonder then that under Jammeh, the formerly sedate and serene country became a police state? Many citizens fled to nearby Senegal as Jammeh became the only political game in Gambia. Human rights violations became rampart, even as the Gambian despot built up a reputation for eccentric pronouncement on matters beyond his ken and comprehension. He claimed to have a cure for infertility and AIDs and advocated that gays should be summarily decapitated.
    In the course of a twenty two year despotic reign, Jammeh virtually alienated all sectors of the Gambian society with his brutish insensitivity and lack of concern for the plight of the ordinary Gambian. If Gambians thought that life under Sir Dauda was hard and harsh, it became pure hell under Jammeh.
    His cruel and casually brutal attitude to human rights violations slipped through when he was asked about the fate of Deyda Hydara, a journalist suspected to have been murdered on his orders. “Other people have also died in this country. So what is so special about Deyda Hydara?” he quipped with barely concealed irritation. This cruel disregard for the sanctity of human life indicates how far Gambia regressed into the Stone Age under its whimsical tyrant.
    Yet when all has been said about this barbaric spell in Gambia, an inescapable fact stares us in the face: national character or the structural configuration of a nation is fate. Like most African nations in the epoch after formal colonization, Gambia must throw up its own local tyrant. There must be something about the structural configuration of most African nations which predisposes them to the irresistible rise of local tyranny until the nation in itself becomes a nation for itself. This is what has just happened in Gambia.
    Despite its miniscule size, Gambia is also riven by ethnic, class, regional and caste divisions. There was no genuine elite consensus, not even an agreement to disagree. Its founding father, Dawda Jawara, a British-trained veterinary surgeon, was a product of a provincial revolt of agrarian and pastoral notables against the urban elites. Gambia boasts of the sophisticated Aku people, descendants of former American slaves who upon manumission decided to settle along the coastal strip. Until his first marriage to a lady with impeccable upper class credentials, Jawara himself suffered under the social slur of belonging to an inferior caste of leather traders.
    The urbane, cultured and unfailingly polite Sir Dawda was a master conciliator who ruled with a restraint and rectitude that was unusual and uncommon among Africa’s traditional post-independence big men. But he was no visionary. Under his watch, the national divisions simmered just below the surface, boiling over once in 1981 in a Marxist inspired guerrilla uprising led by the Libyan trained and funded Kukoi Samba Sanyang in cahoots with elements of the constabulary known as the Field Force.
    It took the intervention of the Senegalese army and about six hundred dead to quell the rebellion. Jawara, who was attending the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana in London, had to be ferried to the safety of the Senegalese capital while the rebels held sway. The debacle underscored Gambia’s utter dependence on its bigger neighbour for its survival. But this vulnerability and the unmistakable sway of Senegal in turn led to quiet national indignation and resentment.
    Thirteen years later, the national contradictions boiled over again in a bloodless military coup which toppled Jawara. Nobody was willing to lift a finger for a government which was widely regarded as corrupt, dissolute and well past its sell-by date. Senegal was not willing to risk its troops to maintain a government that had lost popular legitimacy. This time around, a nearby American frigate ferried the urbane vet and his family to safety and historical oblivion.
    Thus began a twenty two year reign of terror by a barely literate military thug which culminated in a battle of will and wits this past week when the entire nation rose in concert against the crackpot despot. It was the first time the entire populace would be acting in Pan-Gambian concert against an enemy of the nation. It has taken a demographic shift in favour of the youths of Gambia who had been homogenized by poverty and hunger and an international climate of hostility to civilian and military autocrats to achieve this.
    It is a new day and dawn in Gambia. To be sure, the transition from despotism to genuine democracy in the nation is going to be a fraught and delicate matter. With the agents of the defeated ancien regime still manning the security apparatus of the nation the focus and steeliness of the new rulers will be sorely tested as overt and covert attempts are made to roll back the historic gains. But it is most likely that out of the ashes of despotism and despondency a new Gambia is set to emerge. And the rest of Africa will take note.

  • Okon takes to bushmeat “husbandry”

    It is Christmas once again, the season of giving and forgiving. It is the season of extravagant weddings among the children of the stupendously well-heeled and even more extravagant gestures of generosity and goodwill among the fabulously unhinged. And Jesus laughed. While the pockets of the very poor bled to death, exquisite and pedigreed pink champagne flowed from the quarters of the affluent, drowning the tears of the needy in the mush of the needless.
    Snooper has been in the thick of things, separating those who have been asked to slap from those who have been slapped senseless. As a gesture of Christianly goodwill Okon has been slapping everybody in the neighbourhood and wishing them happy Christmas. When he was asked what he thought he was doing, the crazy boy told his interlocutors that slapping is no violence since it was the last order he received from party headquarters.
    But this turned out to be nothing but a cunning decoy. Snooper was woken up last Friday by the noise of sundry animals from the garage. It was as if the whole world has become a vast menagerie of menacing mammals. Half-dressed, yours sincerely rushed to the scene to find out what the problem was only to be confronted by the most outlandish sight anybody can imagine. There was Okon tending to all kinds of domestic captives, including goats, rams, sheep, tortoise, snakes, dogs, pigs, cats and the odd cow with Baba Lekki nodding in senile applause.
    “Okon, what exactly is the meaning of this noise and nonsense?” snooper demanded without concealing his disgust even while on the look out for the meanest and maddest of the animals.
    “Ha oga na Christmas come turn houseboy to dem bushmeat hawker. I been dey forget to tell you say I dey do dem bushmeat production. Dem be 100percent local sourcing”, the boy snorted as he turned to Baba Lekki for verbal reinforcement against his boss.
    “Listen, you bourgeois rascal. The boy said he is into animal husbandry. Which one is your own there? Abi chanji no dey for change again? “the old codger weighed in with caustic malice.
    “Baba thank una. He good say you never fire gbana dis morning. Na me be dem mama him husband, na me be dem animal husband”, Okon cooed with delight.
    “Look, I am not talking to you old fool”, snooper snapped and then rounded on Okon. “Okon where did you get the two goats from?”
    “Ha dem two goats dey do two fighting for Ojuelegba. Dis one he come beat dat one silly and him come reverse as if him go gather strength as dem Yoruba people dey say, but him come dey run away, naim I come arrest dem and I come sentence dem to death”, Okon submitted.
    “What about the dogs?” snooper demanded.
    “Dem two dogs dey knack each other for Ikeja. Dem knack each other sotey dem no fit walk again. I come look dem well well I come see dem be male. Dem be gay dogs. Naim I come arrest dem for same sex kpoi kpoi or homosex”, the mad boy crowed.
    “Änd the pigs?” snooper pressed.
    “Ha dem three pigs no get common sense. Dem dey do zebra crossing for pedestrian crossing and since dem no be zebra or pedestrian, I come jail dem for wandering and impersonate”, Okon remarked. At this point, the cackling from the hens became unbearable.
    “Why, you even have about six hens. I bet they were fighting too ?” snooper sneered. Before Okon could answer, the old man looked at him in approval before bursting into a parody of Odolaiye Aremu’s classic tribute to Lamidi Ariyibi Adedibu.
    Hun, Jagunlabi re gboro Ibafo
    O k’adie bo bi onisenla
    Beni kora, kota, kogbe, won o si bun
    Agbako l ‘ádie se.
    “Oga true true I dey go jeje when dem hen come dey start abuse me, naim I come charge dem for treason and I come surround dem and dem come dey cry, but dat one no concern me”, Okon whimpered like a shifty thief.
    “Ökon, all these are domestic animals, they are not bush meat”, snooper admonished the crazy boy.
    “Ha oga, bushmeat simply mean meat from bush. So I go take dem to dem bush, kill dem for dem bush and come roast dem for bush, bushmeat don ready be dat”, Okon sniggered. It was at this point that one of Okon’s indescribable reptiles made a direct hay for snooper forcing yours sincerely to back-heel into the house with automatic alacrity.

  • On Fidel and fidelity to history (The death of a world-historic leader)

    On Fidel and fidelity to history (The death of a world-historic leader)

    He had grown so old that for a moment you thought he had also triumphed against the grim reaper. It was no longer possible to speak about him in ordinary human terms. Even in death, something simply does not add up. A man who defied death so many times and dared the powerful living was not supposed to die peacefully at home. He ought to expire in the field of battle. Last week, Fidel kept faith with death just as he kept fidelity with history and heroic action. His life had become a brilliant film. He was a box office attraction, the major star in his own epic.
    With the death of the modern day Spartacus in Havana last week end, the world has lost one of its most iconic figures. In a sense, the passing of the great Cuban leader signals the end of an era of revolutionary titans, men of exceptional courage and unrivalled heroism who seized history by the scruff of the neck and by so doing altered the course of history and the story of their society.
    Fidel Castro was without any doubt one of these giants of history and they include world-historic personages such as Vladimir Lenin, the father of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky, his fabled lieutenant, Joseph Stalin their nemesis, Mao Tse Tung, the architect of the Chinese Revolution, Chou En Lai, the warrior-diplomat, Marshal JosefTito of the defunct Yugoslavia, Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam and ErnestoChe Guevara of Argentina. It is impossible to write the story of what has been called the short twentieth century without mentioning their superhuman stirring at the behest of their respective societies.
    Like all true revolutionaries, Fidel Castro operated at the summit of human consciousness, the rarefied zone where ideological clarity combines with intellectual rigour to dispel the fog of illusion, superstition, supernatural idiocies and human complicity in their own wretched existence. Revolutions have no historical timeframe. There will always be revolutions whenever and wherever the conditions are ripe for revolutions. To the extent that revolting injustice remains part of the human condition, people will always revolt against injustice.
    This open defiance of an unjust order, the collective rebellion against official brutality, has always been part of the human condition. But since no two revolutions are ever alike, every revolution is a unique leap of radical faith. Revolutions are not a drab repeat of the past or its mere encore. They can only borrow tropes from past events. They must find own unique strengths and internal energies in the powerful furies that drive their resentments as well as in the vitality and charisma of their leadership.
    It is this superlative heroism and boundless vitality that link Fidel Castro to all the great figures of popular revolt against inhuman authority, beginning with Spartacus, the Thracian born leader of the slave revolt in Rome, El Cid, a fabled hero of the Iberian revolt against the Berbers and of course Jesus Christ the spiritual father of them all who is arguably the greatest revolutionary of all times. In all these men, moral imagination leads to a penetrating insight into the plight of the poor while emotional intelligence at its most proactive leads to an identification with the needy in alltheir emotional distress and psychic disorientation.
    Although born into considerable wealth and privilege as the son of a nouveau riche sugar plantation owner, Fidel Castro never wavered once he had identified the underprivileged as his soul mates and kindred spirits. Like a passionate lover he spent his time serenading them from the prison and from the presidential bunker. And while marching towards Havana from the hills and the forests, he kept faith and fidelity to their cause. For Fidel Castro, nothing else mattered but the Cuban people. This is leadership at its most sublime and inspiring. It does not matter that it came with a lust for power and freak control.
    Before Castro, Cuba was a backyard luxury slum for American playboys and superrich to indulge in their fantasies. There was cheap rum, cheaper hand-rolled cigars and sex at its most volatile and cheapest. The Americans were determined to keep their toy and so was the local tyranny. The military campaign against the FulgencioBatista dictatorship was a ferocious slog with neither side taking hostage. Summary execution was the norm. The brutality and cruelty on both sides was to affect the colour and complexion of Cuba’s history.
    Those who were cheering and weeping profusely in Cuba last week were the relics of the revolution and their descendants who feel eternally grateful to Castro for delivering them and their country from modern slavery. But on the other side, particularly among the hordes of Cuban refugees and immigrants, were those who felt undone by the revolution and who had nothing but harsh words for the leader. Donald Trump, the US president-elect, dismissed him as a brutal dictator.
    Revolutions are a sharply polarizing and bitterly divisive affair. They are not, and cannot, be driven by normal consensus. While those who lost their old privileges are bound to rue and regret for eternity, those who have discovered new privileges are bound to be grateful forever. But the gold standard test of every step taken by government must remainwhether it is in the greatest interest of the greatest majority of the populace.
    In one generation, Fidel Castro has wiped out illiteracy from Cuba. He has also extended free medical facilities to about ninety eight per cent of the Cuban populace. Nothing in the dismal and desultory history of Cuba and its unending parade of crackpot tyrants could have prepared the much-abused island for this revolutionary leap into modernity and within so short a timeline. The transformation was so sudden and irruptive that it led to immense dislocation on the social and class ladder. From a rural and backward Third World country, Cuba has leapfrogged into First World reckoning at least in service delivery to the citizens.
    In another stupendous feat of social engineering, Fidel Castro virtually eliminated corruption from Cuba’s social life by force of example and a zero personal tolerance for the cankerworm. In 1989, many thought that Fidel Castro would wilt under the strain and stress when his childhood friend, revolutionary crony and hero of Angolan wars in Africa, General ArnaldoOchoa Sanchez, was docked for racketeering, drug-cartelling and corrupt self-enrichment. But once the much decorated warlord was found guilty, Castro swiftly assented to his summary execution.
    Perhaps Cuba’s greatest achievement under Castro was its unswerving and unwavering commitment to the international brotherhood of humanity in the finest socialist tradition. At a point when the greatest beneficiaries of globalization are shrinking from its ultimate logic, this is a point worth mulling over. Wherever there was injustice or an infringement of socialist ideals anywhere in the world, you could be sure to find Cuban troops in the thick of the fighting and in the hottest sector of the engagement. In Congo, in Angola, in Grenada, in the forests and mountainous ranges of Latin America, Cuba troops fought with uncommon bravery and valour and a desperate heroism stemming from the noblest of human ideals.
    It all seems like yesterday but it is almost sixty years when Castro and his ragtag band of starry-eyed idealists descended on Havana in a classic military decapitation of the rump of a corrupt and dissolute order, Batista having fled with 300milion dollars pilfered from the country’s coffers. Castro’s greatest legacy to social engineering is that the revolution has held despite the gravest odds which include countless assassination attempts, actual invasion, threats of nuclear annihilation and economic blockade by the US. The more they threw at the cigar-chomping maverick, the more he seemed capable of absorbing.
    On the obverse side of this tale of stirring heroism are reports of vicious suppression of individual rights, state terrorism at its most cynical and a stringent curtailment of free association and freedom of expression. Socialism has not brought great prosperity to Cuba. The brutal suppression of greed and the human lust for material prosperity leads to a drastic curtailment of the urge for innovation and the capacity for invention. With its smoke-belching ancient vehicles and colonial promenades, Havana is a city frozen in time.
    Yet when these drawbacks are weighed against the socialist reengineering of the Cuban society in the last sixty years, the odds seem to favour the drastic intervention despite the loss in modernizing edge and political freedom. If the post-Castro phase were to witness a liberalization of politics and a gradual loosening of state grip on economic matters, the irony of it all may well be that the socialist phase might have made it easier for Cuba to force its way into the capitalist orbit of human development at a higher level and on its own terms.
    In the final analysis, the point is not whether a society should have a revolution or not; or whether revolutions are desirable. History is not a schoolboy’s debate. In any human society where the possibility of redemption appears remote and where injustice has become a permanent way of life, revolution will always remain on the card as the last gesture of heroic desperation. In that respect, Fidel Castro was not a villain but a hero responding to the historic yearning of a society in need of salvation. He will be sorely missed as the founding father of modern Cuba. Adieu Fidel.

  • Okon joins the search for a missing green card

    As the clock ticks mercilessly away for the inauguration of Donald Trump as the forty fifth president of America, the civilized world is concentrating its attention on apocalyptic possibilities. Will the maverick rogue billionaire end what WS has called “the endless cycle of human stupidity” by pulling the nuclear trigger that same day? It has been variously predicted that the world will end up in smoke and snooper is taking no chances. No matter how wrong our prophets often are in their political predictions, they may just get this one right, just to prove a point and send their mounting critics to permanent repose.
    As the Yoruba say oroburukuatounaterin— a grim situation is never without its lighter humorous undertones. The possibility of a Trump presidency has actually provoked a rash of comic projections. Among snooper’s Afro-phobic associates, it has become a favourite pastime to come up with comic scenes out of the political apocalypse, the most alarming of which is to imagine a furious and implacable Donald Trump tongue-lashing and actually whiplashing African leaders who came to felicitate with the famed contrarian in the White House. In one version, Donald Trump is known to have told a senile African leader who has presided over the ruination of his country. “I don’t ever want to see you stinking African motherfucker here again until the situation improves in your country!”
    But of all these comic scenarios, the one that has held the literary world and the commune of the gloriously dishevelled in rapt attention was the threat by the Nigerian Nobel laureate to cut up his green card and throw the shreds into the dustbin should Donald Trump prevail in the American presidential election. Donald Trump having prevailed, the deadline was extended to his inauguration with Soyinka furiously charging at the time-bound chronologues not to take a trope too literally. There is a sub-text to every context, the old literary lion seemed to be warning.
    The green card palaver has provoked such a furious debate and internet fire-fight that you begin to wonder whether there is more to all this than a mere red card for a green card. Pugnacious and punch-happy pundits have weighed in on either side with venom and vitriol. It was like watching a blood sports as cyber savages tore into the eccentric fabric of his leonine majesty.
    Such was the rowdy nature of this debate that it even attracted the attention of landlubbers and lugubrious rogues like the duo of Baba Lekki and Okon. One morning as snooper prepared for the daily chores, the duo suddenly emerged from nowhere bristling with sadistic humor.
    “Oga, make you warn your oga make him no throway him green card oooo’, becos suffer go whack am for obodo Nigeria and famine go fiam am patapata” Baba Lekki cautioned, his face glowering with maniacal relish.
    “Öga, tell Baba Kongidat as demkulukulukalakala group weydey kaput Black people deyboku for America godogodo people who dey fire everybody dey for Niger kontri,.” The mad boy snorted.
    “Gentlemen, it is too early in the morning and I don’t entertain this idle minded drooling and pedestrian drivel”, yours sincerely snapped.
    “Pedestrian driving ko, pedestrian crossing ni. Weereeee!” Baba Lekki jeered.
    Two days ago, the controversy took another turn as the Nobel laureate, like a man whose honour has been deeply affronted by sundry tormentors, declared to the public that he had actually disposed of his green card. Snooper was alerted to the direction the whole controversy was heading when Okon, with Baba Lekki in tow, jumped into the sitting room with Okon covered in dirt and soot, looking and smelling like somebody who had survived a headlong plunge into a sewage canal.
    “Okon, what is the meaning of all this nonsense?” snooper asked covering his nose from the stench as the whole house was invaded by the smell of a pit latrine.
    “Oga I been dey search for dem Soyinka man him green card. I don search everywhere. Dem say demdey see am for one joint but na lie, dem man naIwin” Okon said in a muffled tone.
    “Okon remember you are here only to take a quick wash and put Dettol on your body” Baba Lekki ordered with a frown. “You are to resume the search immediately. By the way, have we searched the man’s hometown? Have we been to Isara?”
    “Baba I sabi say you wan kill me. I go demIsara yesterday and demdey bury another big man for dem town. You know say nadem time when dem wicked Yoruba people dey hunt stranger, dem they kill dem, demdey cook dem and demdey roast dem like suya before they come dey whack dem.Naim I come pick race”, Okon chanted breathlessly.
    “So if you find the green card how will you convince them in America that you are the man?” snooper asked the mad boy.
    “Ha oga I don buy dem old wig and baba don teach me how I go dey walk and frown like dem man”, the crazy boy retorted.
    “What if the immigration people ask you to reveal your identity?” snooper pressed.
    “Baba tell me say make I tell dem say medal on konkeredey jam my thinking robes. Him say when dat one hit demgbuademyeyepeople go run for cover”, the mad boy whimpered. On that note, snooper sank into a nearby sofa in profuse mirth.

  • The owl of Alagbaka

    The owl of Alagbaka

    “The owl of Minerva always begins its flight after the event”— Karl Marx.

     

    Many readers of this column have been asking the columnist to comment on the political imbroglio in Ondo State, particularly as it affects the nation and the fortunes of the ruling party. Whatever the playful and light-hearted pretences, snooper does not speak or write out of turn. Democracy is a problematic child in Nigeria and has to be nurtured with care and caution. One must not be seen to be setting off explosives against a house he has helped to build.  Like many other compatriots, this writer invested a lot of hope and considerable faith in the change mantra. The point is democracy is hard to build and sustain in multi-ethnic societies crippled by centrifugal forces. It requires patience, wisdom and a sensitive appreciation of mutual differences arising from disparities of culture, religion and social orientation. Nigeria is not yet an organic nation but a commonwealth of disparate nationalities afflicted by varying degrees of destructive political narcissism. It will take a political genius, a statesman of extraordinary talents, to keep the gargantuan mess from toppling over into anomie and chaos. In order to appreciate the nature of the democratic impasse in Nigeria, what we have done this morning is to situate the crisis of democratization in the country in its current post-military epoch within the global and continental crisis of liberal democracy. Hopefully, our leaders will find the strength and the mental concentration required to plot our way out of the historiccul de sac. Unlike human organisms, the beauty of democracy is that it can die and then be resurrected even if at prohibitive costto nation and people. Let us put on our thinking cap once again.

  • Liberal Democracy and its discontents

    Democracy is not, and has never been, a tea party. In many parts of the world where it seems to work, it has taken constant struggle, bloody strife and a permanent jogging of the institutional memory of the nation. Societies that practise forms and variants of structured national consensus do not seem to appreciate what they have until they are in critical danger of losing it.

    Once again, events occurring in different parts of the world point to a crisis of liberal democracy which may well be a shorthand for the crisis of the post-Wesphaliannation-state as bequeathed to the world by the west. Often touted as the finest and best form of governance, there is as yet no ideal democratic society anywhere in the world. However liberal in form or democratic in content, liberal democracy remains very much a work in progress everywhere.

    As it is, there is no single route or magic formula for the democratic emancipation of a society. Every nation, out of its given internal strengths and unique disposition, must beat its own path to popular governance. It must fashion its own democratic garment from its internal fabric. This is why the American founding fathers came up with a presidential system unique to the history and aspirations of the people. This is why Great Britain has plumped for a parliamentary democracy with a royal dynasty as titular head.

    Any surprise then that post-revolution France operates a quasi-monarchical democracy in which a president reigns and rules while a prime minister is saddled with day to day mundanity and minutiae of governance? China is experimenting with an economic liberalization which must eventually lead to political liberation and democratic freedom. After the collapse of the Soviet model and the USSR, Russia has pursued a Slavic democratic nationalism which would have been simply impossible within the context of the old Soviet Union.

    Yet even in the most advanced democracies of the world, it is argued that what passes for liberal democracy is at best a variant more correctly identified as illiberal democracy. With the total vote tally of Hillary Clinton topping Donald Trump’s by over two million votes, many have argued that the Electoral College in the United States of America is a fountain head of illiberal and authoritarian democracy.

    Yet this is not by accident but a deliberate design. The founding fathers of the modern American nation and their successors cannot be described as card-carrying populists and starry-eyed egalitarians. They did not trust the masses and their raw emotions. They were averse to choosing the leader of the most powerful nation the world has seen by a simple majority of the much contemned hoi-polloi.

    They hedged their bet accordingly by making sure that no huge conglomeration of electorate in a gargantuan corner of the new nation is allowed to determine the democratic destiny of the United States. Every state, including the slave-dominated states whose main denizens were denied popular suffragette at that point in time, was allowed to have their say, however insignificant.

    By so doing , they removed the possibility of electoral gazumping, or what has entered modern Nigerian political folklore as the infamous “Modakeke” model—— which itself was a function of sub-ethnic anxieties. But they replaced it with something more frankly elitist. It is a reflection of the patrician mind-set of the American political elite that over two dozens subsequent attempts to amend the Electoral College Act have ended in the political crematoriumof the Capitol.

    Yet things can get even more undemocratic and anti-people. Many scholars have noted that just as the much rhapsodized Athenian and Roman democracies were founded on slave-holding economies, modern liberal democracy came into its own after the forcible homogenizing of ethnic identities in Europe and the Americas.

    As a result of superior technology, superior knowledge production and superior firepower, ethnically disadvantaged people even where they were numerically superior have been known to have been “sanitized” to a point where they could offer no further resistance to the prevailing tribal consensus of the master-nationality. It is thus a momentous irony of modern history that liberal democracy despite its promise of individual liberty and personal freedom is founded on the liquidation of ethnic differences.

    So it is then that parliamentary democracy would have been impossible in Great Britain without the earlier defeat of the Scots and the Welsh, liberal democracy in the United States without the brutal decimation of the original Indian populace and the substitution by import of African slave labour, post-Franco democracy in Spain without the harsh suppression of the Basques and the Catalans, and of course Apartheid-powered South Africa without the cruel subjugation of the majority Black population.

    Multi-ethnic African nations created by colonial fiat continue to present the world with a democratic conundrum. In these roiling human conglomerations, democratic struggle accentuated by competing and countervailing ethnic nationalism is often a protracted and painfully exacting process marked by slow advances and sharp retreats into the tribal cocoon. With the National Question largely unresolved and in some cases largely unresolvable, the struggle for deepening and expanding the democratic vista is also a struggle for ethnic supremacyand a permanent rearguard revolt against internal colonization.

    As such, the electoral process is a dignified and disguised tribal census which often terminates in civil wars, military coups, pogroms and the odd genocide. In Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria, Cote D’Ívoire, Liberia, Guinea, Uganda, Sierra-Leone, the two Congos, Mali, Guinea Bissau, CAR and South Africa, disputed elections have led directly to civil wars while in Rwanda, Burundi and Kenya both actual and looming regime change from one ethnic cluster to the other has led to civil wars, genocide and pogrom.

    As long as ethnic divisions persist and are manipulated by the elite for political advantage, as long as these nations continue to be polarized along religious, regional and cultural lines and as long as an equitable power-sharing formula set in marble and acceptable to all continues to be elusive, these countries will continue to resemble permanent war-camps with economic insecurities feeding on political insecurities until something gives. As long as certain ethnic formations have the will to power and the hunger for hegemonic domination and as long as some other ethnic formations have the will to resist and the determination not to be browbeaten something must give.

    Believing that it is not possible for a continent or any nation of that matter to escape the harsh backlash of their precise location in the historical continuum, many have argued that what many African nations need in their current conjuncture is not the western type luxury democracies but talented strongmen who will preside over continuous economic boom while riding roughshod over national polarities until the contradictions disappear willy nilly and the ethnic gladiators exhausted to a point where they become historic relics of a misbegotten national phase.

    Yet for every YoweriMuseveni who has presided over such moderate boom and relative political transformation of his nation, there is a Robert Mugabe, the old wizard of Harare, who has superintended the political and economic collapse of his country with authoritarian and cheerful equanimity. For every Paul Kagame who has magically transformed his country from the ruins of genocide even while putting the entire nation on an authoritarian leash, there is a Paul Biya in Cameroons who has held his country together in stupendous and stupefying stagnancy for almost four decades.

    The situation in Nigeria with its actively competing and countervailing power-centres, its micro-pluralism of hegemonic political and economic oligarchies does not conduce to the emergence of such an all-conquering and all-dominating power patriarch. All those who have tried it in the past either under military despotism or autocratic civilian dispensations have ended up as miserable failures. This is simply because Nigeria was not designed or cobbled together like an ordinary African nation. There seems to be a divine method to colonial insanity.

    But to whom much space and astonishing human and natural riches are given, much should be expected. Count no nation lucky until its luck has helped it to achieve its manifest destiny. Embarrassment of riches can also lead to a richly embarrassing situation. That is if the hugely favoured turn out to be a huge disappointment. That is why the unfolding scenario should be a source of worry to all patriots who have laboured assiduously for the Nigerian project.

    When we achieved a historic regime change for the first time last year without a single shot being fired despite all the warmongering and bleak prognostications, the entire world applauded. There were a few who thought that the much rumoured Nigerian Exceptionalism was coming into prominent play. As a nation, Nigeria has proved to be a consummate expert in brinksmanship, always pulling back from the abyss in time and sometimes on time.

    It is sad to observe thatthe feeling of euphoria and national exultation is beginning to give way to national despondency and sheer frustration. Almost two years into the new regime, the government has shown neither much political wisdom nor economic sagacity. The harsh recession proceeds apace as if an economic free fall is the order of the day. The brilliantly strategic political coalition which swept General Buhari to power has all but disappeared and the ruling party is in a shambles.

    Faced with a choice between strategic reflation with its inflationary possibilities and measured devaluation with the possibility of depressed demand and stagnation, the government dithered and delayed until the nation was hit by a combination of both, a perfect economic storm known as stagflation, a crushing combination of stagnation and galloping inflation. It is so rare an economic ailment that there is no conventional cure. Thus we have spiralling inflation even as purchasing power is dramatically reduced.

    Three weeks after an economic neophytelike this columnist hinted at the advent of stagflation, the Central Bank governor has repeated likewise.  And so it is that a litany of unforced errors, political and economic failures and a curious inability to seize the day litter the roadmap. Even a much despised senate with its astounding ethical baggage is beginning to turn the table on the presidency. Yet there is a curious paralysis of will abroad and a languid and lackadaisical ineptitude on display.

    There are ominous echoes of the Express to Kisumu and the Kenyan debacle. It will be recalled that in 2008 faced with popular elections he was about to lose, MwaiKibaki, the old Gikiyu fox, simply barricaded himself in with the help of security forces thus plunging his country into a brief civil war and ethnic pogrom. With the Luo, Kenyan second largest ethnic group, inconsolable since then, Kenya remains a bitterly polarized and divided nation, saddled with a president dogged by allegations of complicity in the pogrom.

    But if Kenya is too far away, General Buhari ought to be reminded of the events that brought him to power as a military ruler. In 1983, the old Ondo State was the flashpoint and the final straw that broke the back of the Second Republic. Thirty two years later, the Owl of Alagbaka has returned to haunt the nation.

    It should be instructive to the Buhari presidency that General Obasanjo has joined in the widespread lamentation with an astringent putdown of the Buhari administration. The obtuse and abusive response of a Federal House whose denizens are shameless carpetbaggers is understandable.Crooked timber does not produce straight furniture. But whatever his many faults, the Owu born power-master remains very adept at gauging the mood of the nation. A government can only ignore him at its own peril.

    At the very least, General Buhari should go back to the drawing board to re-envision and refocus his government even if this involves a major overhauling of personnel. There are still many Nigerians out there who invested much hope and expectations in his second coming. He will never be able to live down the shame and misery if he were to disappoint them.

  • An American storm in a global teacup

    An American storm in a global teacup

    ( The Rise of Political Darwinism)

    The American presidential election has now come and gone. But not so its ripples. It was a political earthquake which stunned and shocked many parts of the globe into utter silence and disbelief. Never in history has an American presidential election held the rest of the world in such rapt attention. It was as if the fate and future of humanity depended on this single election.

    The rancour, the frenzy, the sheer nastiness and personalization of issues that drove the campaign might have induced an atmosphere of hysteria. It is rare to find two presidential candidates harbouring such mutual loathing and intense personal dislike for each other. If this were to be the golden age of American public duelling, only God knows how this would have ended. In earlier climes, one could hear the thunderous bellow: “Name your second!” The fact that the other contestant happens to be a woman did not seem to matter.

    No two presidential candidates could have been more dissimilar in temperament and background: the one a calmly ruthless, impeccably credentialed scion of the establishment with a reputation for being clever by half, the other a boisterously single-minded anti-establishment rabble-rouser and gladiator of crony capitalism who delights in cocking a snook at the same establishment that has permitted him to rise to the top of the economic pile while breaking most of the rules.

    As one commentator wryly put it, America was saddled with two presidential candidates, one that ought to be in jail and the other that ought to be in an asylum.But the entire drama is also a reflection of just how the new forces of communication are turning the world into a vast global village. The world is  a-changing indeed and no corner of the globe, no dark and dingy corner is too remote for the relentless beams of satellite gadgets.

    Now that all is quiet on the American front, it is time to take some lessons away for the rest of humanity. A hard-headed pragmatist, Donald Trump may be learning his first lessons in presidential politics. Having pooh-poohed and demonized globalization in the course of his campaigns, he may yet discover that the institutional and pan-national forces that drive globalization are beyond the reach of an American president however powerful and single-minded. His volte-face on Obama care may also suggest a growing awareness of certain institutional disincentives which prevent a slide into political deviancy and delinquency.

    What the rest of the world must now determine is whether the Trump triumph is a mere corrective glitch in the American political system or part of the global resurgence of right-wing fascism, a recrudescence of political Darwinism and neo-Con brutality which abolishes all societal safety nets in favour of open competition and the free market where everybody must test their strength and nerve.

    It has been noted by perceptive observers that contemporary western societies through some post-war consensus and intelligent design oscillate between the two extremes of liberal permissiveness and radical sloth and the conservative rerouting of society towards prudence and competitiveness.

    It is all there in the famous image of the Machiavelli-Leninist stick of societal progress. Whenever your ideological adversaries bend the stick of human development too far in the wrong ideological direction, you seize the stick and bend it in the other extreme direction. It is only then that you can come to the golden mean through a subtle aggregation of societal impulses and aspirations.

    So whenever left-wing liberality pushes the vision thing too far by turning the state into a huge alms house and citizens into over-pampered human wrecks who feed fat on the system without contributing anything to its development and economic growth, right-wing conservatism halts the ideological drivel by insisting that those who do not work do not deserve to eat and neither do they deserve health care.

    The right-wing resurgence and the triumph of Donald Trump can be seen as a backlash against Obama care and what is seen as an attempt to cripple human initiative and the innate ability of all humanity to lift themselves up by the bootstraps and to contribute meaningfully to the society. The modern state is not a patrimonial benefactor of mendicants and laggard flotsam and jetsam of the society but an unobtrusive arbiter and regulator in the unremitting acquisitive contest that drivesocieties to new heights of progress and prosperity.

    It was not for nothing that Margaret Thatcher was known as Thatcher the milk snatcher. The iron lady, daughter of a Methodist alderman who was brought up with thrift and Calvinist restraint, could not understand what the fuss was all about in the removal of public subsidy and state-funded licentiousness. As far as she was concerned the real public odium of state subsidy was that it encouraged permissiveness and the promiscuity of profuse breeding among the dirt poor.

    For a moment it seemed to have worked. Many voluntarily returned to work and the economy began to assume a competitive edge which was lacking during the labour years of “Sunny Jim” Callaghan. After an epic face off with the labour union which ended in humiliation for organized labour, the economy took a further shot in the arm as a resurgent middle class rallied to Thatcher’s neo-con social engineering.

    In a moment of triumphalist hubris, Margaret famously let it be known that there was no such thing as society, only individuals. It was an extreme formulation of neo-con ideology and right-wing Political Darwinism. Despite stiff opposition from left-leaning ideologues in her own party who Thatcher routinely dismissed “as wets who are not one of us”, the lady with the deadly handbag went ahead to slam an unpopular and divisive poll tax on the nation.

    For many in her party and the country at large, Thatcher had bent the stick of societal harmony too far in the other direction and it was time to seek the consensual middle ground and golden mean. It was time for Thatcherism and Reaganism, its American mutant cousin, to go. In retrospect, the tame and temperate regimes of John Major and Bush the elder in Britain and America respectively were nothing but stop-gap measures and holding devices before the advent of a hugely modernized Labour Party under Tony Blair and a renascent Democratic Party powered into office by the charismatic William J. Clinton.

    Thatcher’s seemingly casual and flippant observation is indeed a Freudian slip. In its pristine state, the neo-con society reminds one of a Darwinian state of nature, a war of all against all which emphasizes casual brutality and the survival of the fittest. Anybody who has a glimpse of this state of nature or who has watched Nature Geographic Wild and had seen animals pounce and predate on each other must have a fair sense of the sadistic prototype of the human society as envisioned by certain right-wing fascist ideologies.

    Yet even in this animal society, some animals are simply more animal than other animals. Natural predators are born not bred. A wild horse cannot become a lion.  The killer instinct is wired into the DNA of certain animals. They are genetically conditioned to go for the jugular while their herbivorous victims, however big and massive, could only offer futile, defensive kicks. Scientists applaud this as nature’s way of maintaining balance in the eco system. Are we also saying that the savagery inherent in political Darwinism is a way of maintaining balance in human ecology?

    The point is that human society is not an animal kingdom. As humanity evolved away from the state of nature which closely approximates the animal order, society developed certain mechanisms for protecting the weak and for ameliorating the conditions of the desperately needy. This is the essence of human civilization and what distinguishes it from the animal kingdom and its cutthroat savagery.

    While one can understand frustrations with those who contribute nothing to the society and are seen as a clog in the wheel of human progress, the neo-liberal argument for a kinder and more inclusive society is compelling. All people are born equal but they are not equally endowed. Even in the same nuclear family there is usually a divergence among progenies. If it were possible to gather all human resources together and redistribute them among human societies and their denizens, the usual laggards and no-hopers will soon re-emerge among new billionaires just as prosperous societies will re-emerge among the poverty-stricken hellholes of the world.

    What should now concern Africans in general and Nigerians in particular is how to develop indigenous knowledge-systems which will cure the continent of its colonial trauma and power the rapid development of politically stable and prosperous African societies. The debate in the wake of Trump’s triumph shows how the current plight of the continent owes a lot to ethnically polarized and mutually unintelligible enclaves and an absence of reasoned engagement with western orthodoxies.

    It is time to begin to look beyond competing western ideologies that have served their respective societies well. But for the purposes of international interaction, Donald Trump is the least of our problems in Nigeria and Africa. Except what we are witnessing in the west presages a fundamental epistemological rupture which will lead to the birth of new societies after much tumult and chaos, it should be clear that western societies have learnt how to take care of the aberrant outgrowths of liberal democracies.

    We must now begin to tell ourselves some home truths. Both Liberal Welfarism and neo-con Darwinism are competing and countervailing state models developed in the west as a result of their internal history. They are organic derivatives of centuries long struggle which witnessed revolutions and momentous bloodbath. They cannot be applied to African societies wholesale and without significant modifications and respect for the internal history and constitutive logic of colonial nations. While there will be points of convergence, there will also be points of critical divergence and incompatibility.

    In all modern non-western societies that have bucked the trend of underdevelopment and declining national relevance, there is always the presence of a serious, focused and committed nationalist intelligentsia. China’s combination of authoritarian politics with economic liberalisation, Japan’s transformation of its Samurai ethos and bee-like cohesion and discipline for rapid growth, the Singaporean model of political repression and developmental acceleration, the Brazilian brand of economic populism and political elitism, the modernization of feudal honour in Dubai and the combination of dynastic but dynamic caste politics and rapid innovation in India and some of the Asian tigers, have all been powered by innovative and inventive indigenous knowledge production.

    Fifty six years after independence, Nigeria is yet to have an organic and durable political structure, not to talk of a viable economic blueprint for rapid development and accelerated growth despite the country’s prodigious natural resources and intellectual endowments. Almost two years into General Buhari’s tenure the country is still busy trying to apprehend elusive executive, legislative, judicial and bureaucratic thieves. Surely, there must be some fundamental things we are not getting right. And surely, it has nothing to do with the emergence of Donald Trump or the stunning defeat of Hillary Clinton for that matter.

  • Okon adds kataba to the menu

    It is said that when a man is floored by a big tribulation, lesser misfortunes clamber on top. It is hard to know how the crazy boy called Okon got to know of snooper’s fiscal inability to procure his occasional after lunch cigar from the local supermarket. It may be due to the occasional lament about the evaporation of the old academic class and its occupational perks which in those halcyon days often included chomping on fat cigars.

    The austerity has even extended to international travels. The last time a friend had to go abroad, he had to make do with a ticket procured from Air Shokolokobangosay, an airline which flies Tupolev aircrafts remaindered from the old Angolan civil war and a special hardship cabin known as Comrade. Events were approaching a dark climax.

    It was with such heavy thoughts of looming class evisceration that snooper approached the house not knowing that an even more unworthy drama was brewing. The entire sitting area was invaded by the smell of raw tobacco. Adept nostrils already used to the smell of fumigating and public smoking quickly apprehended the culprit. There under greyish duvetthat had seen better days were four crude and clumsy rolls of fresh tobacco straight from provincial dead-ends.

    “What is this nonsense smelling?” snooper thundered.

    “Ha, oga no vex, na tobacco, na real kataba”, the mad boy replied with a devilish smile.

    “And what is my business with that?”snooper demanded.

    “Ha oga as money no reach buy dem original taba from dem supermarket, naim I come send demmala make dem buy dem better taba from Iseyin make oga mouth no come go idle”, the crazy boy noted with a sly wink at Baba Lekki who just walked in.

    “Is now very clear that you have gone out of your mind”, snooper stuttered.

    “ Öga, abi di thin no big enough? Abi make I put dem thin wey baba dey smoke weydey make him head dey do gbigigbigiand gbagagbaga”, the crazy boy continued.

    “Add better Indian hemp make the yeye man come smoke am make him head come kaput. Put dem seed make dem come explode for him gelede face. Na dat one demdey call real local sourcing” Baba Lekki yelled.

    “What? “snooper muttered in disbelief. Before anyone could comment any further, the crazy old crook suddenly lit up his monster pipe and huge fumes enveloped everywhere.

    “You see, that is lesson 1 in supply side Economics. You must smoke what you produce and inhale what you exhale”, the old man noted with a professorial frown and walked away.