The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • Law and disorder

    Law and disorder

    Something new always comes out of Nigeria. For a country that has turned ethical brinksmanship and flirtation with suicide into higher art, the current mass arrest and detention of judges from the uppermost echelons of the judiciary must be all in a day’s work. But the international world is aghast.  There is no comparative experience in the history of the civilized world.

    How can things turn to this sorry and sad pass in a country that has produced some of the most prodigiously endowed lawyers of the past century, a country that often farms out its judicial excellence to other countries? Where else in the world are judges, including Supreme Court justices, subjected to this kind of public humiliation and opprobrium?  Is this the country of Sapara-Williams and that long line of legal avatars stretching back to the mid-nineteenth century?

    Often, the international community sees farther than the local community. It sees what we don’t see and knows what we don’t know. It knows when a country is on the brink of anomie and when it has crossed the threshold of legal and judicial sanity and radical anarchy beckons. Like a wise elder, it knows how and where the tree would fall and the earth shaking nature of the impact when youths are engaged in tree-felling.

    But let us get legal niceties out of the way. The nocturnal visitation to the sacred domains of their Lordships may be regrettable but so far there has been no legal authority to challenge the powers of the DSS to arrest anybody threatening or undermining national security in all its ramifications. The interpretation of these ramifications, be it political sabotage, economic adversity, spiritual aggression, armed intimidation and even judicial terrorism in aid of the electoral subversion of the will of the nation as expressed by the electorate, is the sole responsibility of the security agencies.

    To be sure, it could not have been the intendment of the framers of the constitution that the law would one day go after its most sacred protectors in such a shabby manner. Nobody could have imagined a situation in which state functionaries would hurl top judges and lawyers into detention on the suspicion of engaging in manifest and manifold acts of illegality bordering on state subversion.

    If the international community is alarmed by the state assault on the judiciary, many Nigerians are also traumatized by the astonishing revelations and the scale of judicial sleaze. Many citizens are horrified by the outlandish nature of judicial thievery and the in your face nature of the acquisitions. No constitution could have foreseen this judicial obscenity from the leading lights of the bench. By aiding the law to abet social disorder, our lordships have thrown up an intriguing dimension of social justice as part of the National Question. This is institutional suicide by any other name.

    But since it is merely an accessory after the notorious fact, the judiciary will not go down alone. In every human society, the ruling law is the law of the ruling class. The law is expected to uphold and valorize social order as seen and as conceptualized by the ruling class for the benefit of the entire society. But when and where the law and its enforcing agents act in a way that undermines and subverts social order, it is an invitation to social anomie  which often compels a drastic retribution from forces acting—or thinking they are acting—on behalf of the old status quo.

    Like gluttonous rodents set upon a sugarcane plantation, the Nigerian judiciary is too far gone to save or redeem itself through internal reform. In the past thirty years or so, every attempt to reform the judiciary either through external intervention or internal purge has been spurned or treated with abrasive contempt or met with outright stonewalling.

    The confrontation with Buhari’s Law and Order administration is inevitable. For law to thrive there must be order. For order to be sustained there must be law. It may well turn out that by stepping in with force and drama, the Buhari government may yet save the Nigerian judiciary from itself or from more ruinous consequences.

    The law loses its badge of authority and force of legitimacy when nobody believes in it, when the public holds every judicial pronouncement in contempt and when its leading lights are subject of public ridicule and open disdain. It will take radical surgery within the context of revolutionary stirring in the society to redeem both legal system and public order.

    But in a situation where essentially conservative social forces are locked in contention, it may be naïve and simplistic to expect a radical emancipation of the nation from the clutches of a medieval social order as the immediate outcome. Despite his heroic probity and open abhorrence for injustice, there is no evidence that General Buhari fancies a structured and programmatic approach to the crisis of the Nigerian state and its judiciary.

    Indeed it may well be that what is playing out is a convergence of private animosity and public misgiving. General Buhari himself has been a serial victim of judicial delinquency and is known to have the memory of an elephant. If his private anger and indignation are allowed to shape public developments, if his personal sentiments and preferences are allowed to determine the fate of the judiciary, the outcome may not be as altruistic and patriotic as one might be led to expect.

    Having learnt to lower one’s sights about the ideological and political direction of the Buhari administration, having learnt not to raise the bar of hope higher than the limits and limitations of its principal actors, perhaps the most scientific way to look at the judicial palaver is to see it as the dialectical interplay of hostile and antagonistic forces which may result in the mutual ruination of contending forces. The judiciary cannot hope to win this, but neither will anybody trying to rework the nation away from the modernist template of a true nation-state.

    As usual with a country at the mercy of bitterly centrifugal forces, Nigerians have been split down the line over this one as well. Class, ethnic and regional solidarities have rent the elite asunder while the masses are braying for blood. Where you expect solidarity along the lines of superior national interest, you have what can only be described as competing tribalismsor the ethnicizationof equity with justice viewed from the prism of primordial interest.

    For example, those who watched quietly when top judges were receiving humongous gratification for perverting the course of justice and for delivering judgement in conflict with common sense are now charging the government with highhandedness and a descent into tyranny; those who kept quiet when Jonathan stoutly and stubbornly refused to reinstate Justice Ayo Salami based on the recommendation of the NJC have now found their voice, screaming from the rooftop that General Buhari has turned the nation into a Banana Republic.Some banana indeed.

    What can one say about a country in which the political elite find it difficult to unite behind a common cause or coalesce behind a pan-Nigerian conception of justice based on equity and fair play for all? What does the future portend for such a country with an irredeemably fractured ruling class?

    The Nigerian judiciary has had it coming for a long time. Something was bound to give eventually. Like an old nemesis, it has taken the return of General Buhari to earn it divine retribution. But by a tragic irony, the unravelling of the law may also trigger the second comeuppance of the man from Daura himself, if the counter-accusations coming from the judicial council are to be believed. History is a cruel task master indeed.

    At the end of Buhari’s first tenure, the Nigerian political class was so bitterly divided and so badly polarized by what appeared to be the lopsided nature of justice meted out to the political offenders of the Second Republic and what was widely considered to be the religious, regional and primordial prejudices of the Buhari administration that a section of the political elite were openly mooting the idea of secession. Two civil war heroes from the west gave interviews where they canvassed a con-federal arrangement for the federation.

    After Buhari’s ouster, his successor and former Chief of Army Staff, Ibrahim Babangida, was forced to shop for willing and compliant judges to reverse most of the draconian convictions of the military tribunals in order to placate some sections of the political class. It was from that moment on that majoritysectors of the judiciary became willing tools of the executive as long as the price is right.

    Thirty years after his dethronement, Buhari has come back to confront the Aegean stable with the same contradictions and his own personal failings obviously in place. The nation is back to unfinished business. If General Buhari continues to leave his political flanks exposed just as he did the first time around, if an important segment of the political class feels badly bruised and alienated by the looming confrontation, if he is unable to summon the Nigerian masses to his ensign, the outcome may not be different.

    General Buhari should count himself lucky. It is very rare and unusual for history to set the same exam for the same historical personage thirty years apart and in seemingly dissimilar circumstances. If he flunks it this time around, it is all but certain that neither the general nor the country will have a third chance doing the same thing and repeating the same error all over again. Nigeria is suffering from failure fatigue. That is the surest symptom of social disorder.

  • Bob Dylan is on song

    Bob Dylan is on song

    Seldom has the Nobel Committee on Literature acted with superior wisdom and an acute awareness of the supreme ironies of history. But then the whole Alfred Nobel project is anchored on a supreme irony. Seldom has money made from ignoble venture been put to more noble use and for the upliftment of humanity. Alfred Nobel might have made his money from manufacturing explosives, but he has put his vast resources to the timeless project of identifying the best and brightest that humanity has produced in various fields of human endeavour and rewarding them accordingly.

    At a time when an American politician named Donald Trump is hell bent on poisoning the communal well of universal goodwill with his dark, disturbing diatribe against all that is noble and inspiring about the human story, the Nobel Committee has chosen another American who has brought joy and rapture to the entire world with the haunting beauty and lyrical brilliance of his musical poetry. Bob Dylan is the laureate of lyrical lushness and luminosity.

    It has been a long time since the Nobel Prize for Literature has resonated with such global approval and rapturous applause. We may have to reach back to those periods when it went to non-literary superstars like the multi-talented former British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and the iconic philosopher, Bertrand Russell.

    For most time, the prize had been dominated by austere and dreary literati, remote geniusesviewing the rest of the world with ascetic forbearance and whose nominations are often greeted with glum approval and stoic admiration by the world.  This one is a prize for the boys, and for a man whose demotic singing and sense of the organic connectedness of all human communities have turned him into a universal folk hero and his music a global brand.

    Having famously described himself as a trapeze artist and not a poet, it helps that Mr Dylan fancies himself all along as a musician rather than a poet. Music is lighter and travels faster than literature. It also comes with less cultural baggage. But because of its coyness, attention is often deflected away from the great and inspiring qualities of poetic music. The great advantage of not being taken too seriously is that it tends to protect musical poetry from unhelpful disputations and envy until it is ready to assume its rightful place in the global pecking order.

    Bob Dylan is already a model of the gentleman-musician. Like all true geniuses and without appearing to unduly exert himself, his brand has helped to abolish the distinction between high and low art; between poetry as music and music as poetry and between informal versifying and formal verse-making. The singing bird is also a bard in its own right.

    While politicians preach hate and racial bigotry from Arlington to Sarajevo, there are men and women who are working round the clock in several corners of the world to mitigate the cultural angst that separates human communities and to collapse the formal distinctions which separate the genres and prevents cross-fertilization among human modes of expression. In this brave new world, all that is generically solid melts into thin air and it may be difficult to separate poetry from journalismand formal prose from informal creole.

    The future of humanity belongs to these men and women at the new frontiers of human expression and artistic exertion. They are the true liberators of the human spirit. Through his great music, Bob Dylan has already taught us how it can be done. Last Thursday the Nobel Committee in Stockholm affirmed and put the matter beyond controversy. It is a ringing affirmation of our collective humanity. Bob Dylan is truly on song.

     

  • How about one for the road?

    How about one for the road?

    The drama in the senate this past week over a bill asking for special privileges for Lagos as a megacity must concentrate the mind of those interested in the health of party formations in the Fourth Republic as well as the evaporation of elite consensus in the nation.  Anybody watching the hostile and rather intemperate put-down of the Bill can be forgiven for thinking that it was a victim of a bitter inter-party collision.

    But it was not a case of the APC and the PDP duelling in the senate over Senator OluremiTinubu’s bill. It was the APC openly imploding with all the attendant fireworks and fiery crackers. Taken together with the savage intrigues and poker-faced power-play that have embroiled the ruling party, it is clear that a major ruling party rumpus has once again berthed on these shores.

    It all reminds one of a gaily dressed fuddy –duddy couple who had arrived for a party only to be met at the entrance by the host who promptly turned them away with the immortal send forth. “Welcome, you are welcome, how about one for the road?” For the couple, the party was over before it began. One is beginning to have the sinking feeling that the ruling party wilted before the commencement of full play.

    Like AyiKweiArmah’sAboliga the man-child who grew to manhood the very day it was born only to die the same day, APC appears to have packed so much into its short eventful life— including a case of regicide and multiple attempts on the political life of its crowning prince—that it can be forgiven for collapsing so dramatically in the sweltering heat of bitter and agonistic contention. Nothing lasts in the tropics. They grow so fast and die so fast, like Aboliga. In any case, the truly great tend to die young before sweet innocence is deflowered by bitter experience.

    So the possibility that the APC is headed for the morgue should not cause any consternation, or alarm for that matter.  Neither must it precipitate undesirable panic. One must learn to take these things with equanimity. In Nigeria, party goes and party comes but the polity remains. It is in the nature of post-colonial politics.

    If parties are built to last, if they have durability and staying power, how will the moveable feast go round, how will the feeding frenzy revolve? Pounded yam cannot be padded. The modern world is not constructed like the world of those ancient fellows in Things Fall Apart who began a mountainous meal of pounded yam and could not see who was on the other side until three days after.

    We have said it several times on this page that we do not have political parties in the truly organic sense of that word. What we have are special projects platforms.They are designed for specific power projects after which they tend to lose their raison d’etreuntil a more catastrophic occurrence put them out of their misery. As products of specific conjunctures many of them survive as long as the conjuncture that throws them up subsists. For example until last week, who would have thought that the A.D was still alive and in fine fettle?

    But the A.D is back and with a hint of subtle transformation, too. Originally conceived by its founders as the perfect opposition and counterfoil to the looming PDP juggernaut, it was cynically seen by the military power-masters as the perfect miniscule opposition to provide legitimacy for the PDP electoral heist. Mum and dumb is the word about mummies and dummies for now.

    Yet it should be obvious to political augury that as it was in the beginning so it is proving to be at the end of the beginning.  The NPN was conceived as a broad national platform to ease the military back to the barracks. When Augustus Meredith AdisaAkinloye, with the next bottle of his personally branded champagne in sight, joyously proclaimed that there were only two parties in Nigeria, many thought he was hallucinating. But the NPN turned out to be a mere holding device for the military.

    Like its old forebear, the PDP was also conceived as a broad national platform for demilitarization with ease and without questions asked. Having completely exhausted their national goodwill, having reached the limits of theirhistoric and political possibilities, the military power brokers were frantically looking for a way to return to the barracks without giving the impression of a precipitate retreat and without paying substantial indemnity to Nigerians for the trauma they have inflicted on them.

    How the immutable logic of history andimplacable social forces often mock puny human calculations forcing them to derail or to be outwitted in the heat of exertions. It is not as if these choices are crassly naïve or lacking in strategic mettle. But going forward, they often turn out to be the very opposite of what is needed for the precise conjuncture.

    What makes the tame and sober AlhajiShehuShagari a great choice for holding the political class together also made him a very poor choice when it comes to the political discipline and fiscal restraint needed to protect democratic rule. What makes the wily, calculating and implacably combative General Obasanjo a brilliant choice for the project of demilitarization also made him a very poor choice for deepening and nourishing the democratic project. What makes one thing possible makes the other impossible. Even a foreman is not four men.

    In the case of General MohammaduBuhari and the APC, history is still unfolding before our very eyes. But the omens are very dire. Suffice it to say that while his charismatic populism and messianic one-upmanship make him a perfect choice for regime change in a bitterly divided and polarized multi-ethnic nation, they also come with a severe baggage. When General Yakubu Gowon hinted last Monday at the launch of John Paden’s biography of President Buhari that Buhari took over Aso Rock like a combatant, he was providing evidence that in the game of elaborate bluff and counter bluff which saw Goodluck Jonathan ousted from the presidency, some military muscling came to play.

    But going forward, it should be obvious thatBuhari needs more than messianic populism and an authoritarian cast of mind to move Nigeria away from the precipice. If what happened in the senate to Senator OluremiTinubu’s Bill about a special status for Lagos is anything to go by, it means that those who claim not to understand what restructuring is all about could smell its deadly embrace from a mile despite its feminized charms and seductive prowess. But if this is the mind-set of the dominant legislative segment of the APC, then God help the party in the old West from now on.

    It may well be that what we are witnessing once again is a looming collision of cultural altars.Progressive forces that are itching for the radical and accelerated development of the country must learn of the dangers of crashing the gears of history or short-circuiting its dialectics. In a bitterly polarized nation, a lot depends on the aggregated consciousness of the entire people, the balance of forces actually on ground and the disposition of political and social troops. You may have to get to a particular point before you can reach other points. Radical futilities only lead to radical political suicide.Let no one claim they were pushed to jump when they are already tottering.

    In a bizarre twist to the restructuring rumpus which speaks volumes for the disaggregation of national consciousness, AlhajiTankoYakasai has dismissed the whole debate as a Yoruba red herring which dates back to 1959and the inevitable Chief ObafemiAwolowo and his Action Group fellow travellers.

    Obviously enjoying a respite from the EFCC which has asked him to explain how money meant for arms procurement found its way into his commodious pockets, the old bruiser from Kano and veteran of retrogressive causes, noted that restructuring was the Yoruba way of expressing hatred and envy for the superior political advantage that the north enjoys from its humongous land mass and population.

    According to Yakasai, Awolowo, having gifted his people with superior knowledge production which resulted in quality professionals in virtually all the fields of human endeavour, suddenly began to covet the hegemonic virility and superior power production of the north in a futile and frantic bid for power at the centre which he felt he could not realize without the strange bird of restructuring.

    The unintended irony of Yakasai’s outburst is that it has brought to the front burner the fact that we are confronting a crisis of knowledge production as an integral part of the much vexed National Question. It is better for a society to be founded on the power of knowledge than the knowledge of power.  In America, the federalist papers with their unremitting intellectual rigour and illuminating insights set the tone and template for how the new nation should be governed.

    The most sober and sane solution to this impasse is for power to collaborate with knowledge for the betterment of the entire society. In a multi-ethnic nation with clashing systems of knowledge production when those who have found their way to power and hegemonic domination acknowledge that those they are bent on permanently excluding from power are far more knowledgeable, the stage is set for a violent collision of altars and a duel unto death. Despite the naivete and strategic carelessness, this is a negation of the driving spirit behind APC.

    Whether the current party formation can contain the turbulence and the tumult arising from this is a question that will be answered in the coming months. But all is not lost. In the meantime, let those who suddenly find the entrance door of the party firmly shut against them not wait for the proverbial “one for the road” should the door remain firmly shut. As General Alexander Madiebo famously observed with tragic insight, it may turn out to be one for the grave.

  • Now, Okon puts pounded rice on the menu

    The times are very desperate. After spending a whole day hunting for forex to pay for a periodical in London, snooper came back home with his tail between his legs and completely famished. Comprehensively drunk on paraga, Okon and Baba Lekki were quite a sight to behold.

    “Okon, what is on the menu?” snooper called out.

    “Menu don become fenumonu or menuduro”, Baba Lekki whined with sadistic relish.

    “I am not talking to you crazy old man”, snooper snarled.

    “Oga no vex. Na Sapele water dey worry baba. Menu na pounded rice”, Okon said with a sneer.

    “And what is pounded rice?” snooper shrieked.

    “Na rice demcustom steal from dem smuggler and we come steal from dem. To pound rice you must to impound rice”, the mad boy snorted with malice. Snooper was momentarily speechless from the revolutionary wickedness of the whole scam.

    “And how come that on Monday morning you put breakfast and also breakfast in the evening?”snooper demanded angrily.

    “Oga, as we dey use formula 101, it means say if you breakfast for morning you must to break your fasting too for evening, abi make I let hunger wire you finish?” the unruly boy demanded.

    “I think you are out of your mind. By the way, you put Ogi and Akara for Tuesday morning and then Ogi and Shakara for Wednesday morning. What is Shakara?” snooper screamed.

    “Shakaranashakaraoloje. It mean say na only ogi you go drink after all demshakara. When akara no deynashakara remain”, the mad boy sniggered.

    “And when Shakara don kaput naSakara music remain. You no see now say menu don become menukuro”,  BabaLekki interjected with icy disdain.

    “You must be a lunatic. I think you lot are out of your mind”,snooper stuttered and banged the door on the crazy duo.

    “Oga he better say make man dey out of mind than to dey out of pocket. If you get assets make we dey sell dem now like dem crazy federal government”, Okon croaked.

    “Okon, I don tell dem foolish man make him run comot go him village, When hunger wire am well him go run comot Lagos. Ile kokont’agbe” Baba Lekki added.

     

  • Peter Obi exports his brand

    Peter Obi exports his brand

    It is good to have a good brand. It has been famously noted that while Nigeria imports what it has in abundance, it exports what it doesn’t have. Ever heard of Peter obi’s paradigm of state parsimony or the notorious fiscal frugality of the former governor of Anambra state?  Ever since Obi’s testimony about his niggardly disposition and exemplary financial prudence went viral, snooper has been quietly and furtively on duty.

    Listening in to the debate among cyber rodents, one can say that the reaction has been mixed. While many applauded Obi’s stellar probity, others denounced him for pandering and for opportunism.  A few are unwilling to forgive him for the rank perfidy of abandoning the APGA submarine for a helping of pottage that never quite materialized under Jonathan.

    Snooper must now weigh in on the debate without any further ado. Snooper snoops everywhere and at any time. As an international vagrant afflicted by the wandering disease of Sokugo, snooper often sleeps in Lagos only to wake up in far flung outreaches of the globe. Often this wanderlust yields encounters that are as surreal as they are outlandish.

    Towards the very tail end of the month of August, snooper was prowling around the plush ambience of the Hilton Hotel at JFK Airport in New York, ogling at the bevy of oriental airline hostesses when a quiet altercation at the reception attracted his attention. Lo, it was the inevitable Peter Obi himself coolly and courteously arguing his way out of a tricky situation. Calling him governor did not deter the impertinent American girls who probably thought it was a nickname any way.

    Apparently, Peter’s earlier booking had gone missing in the system and the girls were bent on slamming him with on the spot booking tariff. But the former governor was having none of this, insisting that they must look for the old booking. For a man of Peter’s famous fiscal discipline, the difference made a lot.

    As the argument went back and forth, Snooper quietly excused himself to continue his vigil. When yours sincerely met up with the former governor at breakfast the next morning and asked how it went, Peter, dressed in a tracksuit, replied with a miserly grin that the girls eventually came to their senses.Needless to add that the breakfast was complimentary.Anyone for Peter?

  • Reverse nationalism and its discontents

    Reverse nationalism and its discontents

    ( Anniversary ruminations on the state of the Nigerian state)

    As Nigeria celebrates its fifty sixth anniversary this weekend in dire economic and political circumstances, it is important once again to return to the foundational blocks of the nation to see where the rains started beating us. Apart from the plague of corruption and the crisis of knowledge production, the more fundamental problem facing Nigeria is the problem of aborted nationhood or what we may benignly describe as reverse nationalism.

    Indeed, there is a sense in which it can be argued that corruption and allied ailments are the mere superstructural offshoots of the foundational crisis of aborted nationhood. The nexus of this crisis is not hard to locate. It stares at us in every department of national endeavour, even as it hobbles every heroic attempt at national self-recovery. But a nation cannot continue to exist in perpetual deferral of organic nationhood. Something is bound to give eventually. It seems as if we may be approaching the dangerous frontiers.

    A simple and elementary test of this failure of nationhood will suffice. Why is it that despite the country’s globally acclaimed prowess in the realm of imaginative exertions, be it in literature, music, fashion or even misdirected ingenuity, Nigerians, a hundred years after amalgamation and fifty six years after independence, have so far been unable to come up with powerful, conjuring myths of nationhood and imaginative tropes of togetherness which will stand the text of time and resonate beyond these shores?

    Let us get this right. We cannot continue to blame our colonial creators. It is not the business or historical remit of our colonial conquerors having created Nigeria to supply Nigerians to fill the territorial vacuum. The Europeans are not Africans in the first instance. They were not in Africa to look in for Africans or to seek out their long lost continental cousins. They were in Africa to further their own economic and historical interests. Lord Fredrick Dealtry Lugard said that much. It is historically impossible to expect the colonial thesis to provide its own logical antithesis.

    To replace genuine and authentic nationalism, Nigerians have substituted a reverse nationalism, a situation in which the myths of constituting nationalities are more powerful and alluring than the myth of a new nation forged in the smithy of harsh colonial repression and biblical suffering. In such a fractious and combustible polity, the myths of ethnic Exceptionalism trump the myths of Nigerian Exceptionalism before cancelling out each other in a violent dialogue of the deaf.

    This problem dates all the way back to our founding fathers. If only they had devoted a fraction of the imaginative and intellectual powers they had use up in protecting and projecting ethnic supremacist myths, perhaps the story of modern Nigeria would have been different. One of them famously described Nigeria as his great grandfather’s empire, a feudal antinomy which makes it intellectually impossible to imagine or conceive a modern nation-state of free citizens.

    Another, just before wading into the deadly fray, noted that Nigeria was a mere geographical expression which makes it imperative to rally your own people before embarking on federal and federating negotiations. A third avers that Nigeria is made up of people with different cultures and histories without any unifying commonality.

    The fourth a global citizen in his own right, whose long sojourn in the United States weaned him on a transnational diet of the emancipation of the Black person the world over, had even attempted to settle in Ghana which at that point in time —and thanks to a radical leadership —was seen as the rallying Mecca for the total liberation of the Black people. But upon returning to the fierce maelstrom of Nigerian politics, he too was eventually overwhelmed by the reality of ethnic particularism. As he was to be reminded, the stark differences in political habitué cannot be forgotten but must be understood and negotiated.

    In the event, there is no point in continuing to blame our founding fathers for the plight of the nation. They were products of their time and children of the midnight of the colonial state in Africa. The post-colonial state that has evolved from this colonial incubation and conquest is a violent coliseum of contending, competing, countervailing and finally colliding political, economic, cultural and spiritual interests in which no hostages are taken. And this primitive warfare takes place under the veneer of modern governance.

    The colonial envisioning of Africa did not entail a healthy respect for the historical antecedents or socio-cultural potency of the forcibly co-opted nationalities. It did not occur to them that many of these constituting nationalities were empires in their own right or vestiges of older empires with distinct personalities and different modes of apprehending and making sense of reality.

    Long after the material basis of their existence has been liquidated, long after they have become historically superannuated, the ideological apparatuses of the ancient African states boast of a lingering efficacy which suborns extant consciousness. For example, it will be considered foolish and foolhardy of a Yoruba person not to obey the dictates of the Oro cult or for an Ibo native to disavow traditional rites of passage. It is like boxing the English, the French and the Germans into a colonial cage and expecting them to achieve organic coherence overnight.

    It is thus inevitable that political, economic, cultural and spiritual baggage from the old pre-colonial formations would be brought to play in the new nation-state, creating momentous contradictions of which reverse nationalism is arguably the most outstanding product. Without any guiding lodestar or fundamental amity among the constituting nationalities about the destiny of the new nation, it is inevitable that ascendant ethnic groups will try to impose their own solution to fill the yawning vacuum.

    Yet it should also be obvious that neither ad hoc restructuring and its military and colonial fiat or force, nor hegemonic aggression and spiritual blackmail by ascendant ethnic formations have been able to rein in the polarizing and divisive tendencies hobbling the Nigerian nation-state. As a matter of fact, history has taught us that any time a hegemonic nationality has tried to impose its own solution on the National Question, it has always suffered disproportionate retribution.

    Historians will continue to debate whether Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s precipitate and swaggering move to capture the centre in 1959 and rid the modern nation-state of what he himself had described as the incubus of feudalism was strategically well-timed or well-judged. The objective reality was that it panicked the north into a repressive ferocity and brutal intolerance of opposition which eventuated in the historic final solution of January 15, 1966 spearheaded in the main by mid-ranking military officers of Igbo extraction. This in turn led to the savage revenge coup of July 1966 and the civil war which has led to the virtual obliteration of the Igbo bloc and the old tripod arrangement which provided some measure of structural equilibrium for the nation in the run up to independence.

    Every nation that fails to learn and profit from its own history is condemned to repeat the same history.    It bears repeating that in the short history of Nigeria as a nation, every nationality that has tried to impose its own solution on the colonial conundrum has always suffered immensely for its temerity and collective narcissism.

    To achieve purposeful regional coherence, class, ethnic and cultural differentiations must be summarily liquidated. Yet for all its military alertness, its political cunning and strategic wizardry, the north remains economically and politically blighted even as the spiritual hegemony of its old feudal master-class comes under an unrelenting armed critique.

    The west has lost its old cutting edge economic, cultural, technological and intellectual renaissance with its globally acclaimed educational system in tatters, its old vibrant cottage industry destroyed, its technocratic and intellectual master-class demolished and its fractious political class ever more bitterly polarized and full of splenetic rancor.

    The east having been collectively battered, has lost its old jaunty self-confidence, its expansive chutzpah, its genius for genuine innovation and has suffered a drastic erosion of goodwill. In their place is a nasty testiness among a misguided section of its elite which does not conduce to elite consensus or the urgent political re-engineering of a fractured nation. Yours sincerely must say this as somebody who grew up in an NCNC household and who suffered the attendant persecution.

    Unfortunately, it now seems to be the turn of the Ijaw nationality to be given the Nigerian treatment in addition to the massive despoliation of its land. Two years ago, snooper had cautioned this vibrant ethnic formation not to contemplate an armed resistance should it lose its noisy and jarring hegemonic pretensions to political delinquency and power naivete. The Nigerian post-colonial state is an equal opportunity terminator suffering from the old curse of its English forebear in its nascent incarnation. By the time the rubble has cleared the Ijaw nation would have suffered severe collateral damage.

    As Albert Einstein has famously observed, the surest sign of insanity is doing the same thing all over again and expecting a different result. Yet despite the manifest and demonstrated unprofitability to both nation and nationality, Nigerian ethnic formations have continued to fashion preferred weapons of choice in the perpetual war to capture the Nigerian state leading to endemic tension and strife when superior thinking demands a master plan to humanize and domesticate the post-colonial state in order to make it amenable to the yearnings and aspirations of the hapless citizens.

    As it is today, Nigeria is hostage to five major terroristic forces: intellectual terrorism, hegemonic terrorism, economic terrorism, spiritual terrorism and the terrorism of insurgency with each taking turns to pound both the state and the nation into submission even as they seek to mould both in their own appalling image. It is a war of all against all in which no hostages are taken and with the nation as prime hostage. No nation can survive for long in such contentious circumstances.

    Democracy might help and it ought to help. But it does seem as if democracy is no cure for reverse nationalism. As a matter of fact, democracy often exacerbates the fault lines in bitterly divided and ethnically polarized nations as the ensuing struggle for the spoils of office among victors return the nation to its ethnic particularities and regional rancour.

    This is why the argument for a drastic restructuring of the country to devolve power and responsibility from the centre makes eminent and irreproachable sense. Environmental and political structure conditions and in the last instance determines societal character and political behavior. As Durkheim famously avers, whenever a social phenomenon is explained by a psychological category, we can be sure that the explanation is false.

    The current reflex hostility in some sections of the country to any talk about restructuring is a sign of misplaced and misguided political aggression. Perhaps this is due to the fact that many proponents of restructuring have not been able to put their case across with patriotic altruism and without a hint of vengeful grandstanding.

    The argument for restructuring is not about hatred for a particular section of the country but about love for the whole country. No section of the country can claim exemption from the tragedy that has befallen us. In a hostile environment in which ethnocide is never far away, it is only natural for people to look out for their own and to use their God-given resources and advantages to tame or negotiate the looming Leviathan while keeping others in medieval peonage. But as we have seen, this can never and will never work in a multiethnic nation with diverse people of diverse cultural and political sensibility.

    It is time for a bipartisan congregation to reexamine the structural configuration of the nation. This is the best anniversary gift anybody can give the nation at this critical conjuncture of its existence. Despite some loud mutterings and misgivings about the political and economic direction of the government, there are many who believe that President Buhari has the residual strength of character and resolve to do what is right for the nation. Happy anniversary once again.

  • Falling behind and stumbling forward

    Falling behind and stumbling forward

    The summit of human knowledge is self-discovery through constant self-examination. While some societies are quite adept at meeting the great expectations of their people, others are notorious for breaking the heart of their citizens. Dear readers, what you are about to read was written in 2004. It was in response to the promise by the Americans at the beginning of the century to put human beings on Mars by the year 2030.

    Sixteen years later, there is nothing to suggest that the Americans are daunted or fazed by their single-minded scientific resolve to perform the greatest human miracle of all time. Having conquered the world as we know it, there is nothing left for the Americans to prove, except the possibility of humanity conquering extraterrestrial space. Very soon some Americans will land on Mars.  Please permit me to quote from the earlier script.

    “In some strange ways, we have come to the end of history, and the nation-state paradigm is about to exhaust its possibilities. America has become the ultimate nation. Nothing underscores the nature of America’s total dominance and the reality of its mega-powerdom than the fact that at the last count two former rulers of sovereign nations are its unwilling guests, making nonsense of the very notion of the nation-state and its hallowed apparatuses.

    There may be more in the kitty before the end of the decade. Noriega and Saddam Hussein may be former American thugs but they would have learnt to rue the day they cocked a snook at their former masters. The Americans are bored, having dealt with all the challenges to their authority and global supremacy. Like a monstrous super heavy weight boxer who has beaten all challengers black and blue, Uncle Sam now relishes a fight with outer nature itself and its robotized machines.

    It is a moot point to argue that the money to be spent on this venture could have lifted all human societies from the abyss of poverty and deepening immiseration. But that is against the logic of history and human nature. Let the dead bury the dead. It is better to stumble forward than to wobble backward. If America courts disaster, it does so on behalf of all humanity, whether as involuntary spectators or as active participants”.

    When this was written in 2004, there was no Barack Obama as a presidential candidate of the Democratic Party, not to talk of President Barack Obama.  Obama was a junior senator learning the rope with hope and audacity. But since then America has broken a centuries old taboo by electing twice its first president of African American extraction. If the Americans were to elect Hilary Clinton as their first female president in the November election, they would have broken another centuries old taboo.

    Why then would the Americans not be in Mars? In one concentrated burst of history, America has broken through seemingly impregnable fortresses of racial prejudice and gender bias, even if at the merely symbolic level. As this column loves to quote, there are decades when nothing happens and there are periods when decades happen. No country can survive without constant self-rejuvenation and ceaseless self-invention. America, for all its manifest faults, its crass materialism and the constant possibility of backsliding, is a classic example of relentless striving towards a more perfect nation.

    For those interested in a tale of two nations, the history of Nigeria during this period cannot be more startling in the intriguing paradoxes it throws up. Nigeria has been famously described as a country where the best never happens, but where the worst portents also never occur. Nigeria is a nation of legendary luck. Like a punch-drunk heavy weight boxer, Nigeria may wobble and stumble in the ring, but each time it hits the canvas, its power of recovery has been a tad short of the miraculous.

    When what follows was being written in 2004, Nigeria had just managed to survive a badly rigged federal election which returned General Obasanjo to office. The loser was none other than the current President. So egregiously rigged was the election that the usually perceptive Chief Sunday Awoniyi observed with gnomic wisdom that the atmosphere had been so badly fouled, so comprehensively besmirched, that something good must come out of the pervasive electoral rot.

    This was followed in 2007 by an even more sensationally rigged election in which the declared winner openly acknowledged his own suspect legitimacy by setting up an electoral reform panel. But what Chief Adeniran Ogunsanya famously described as the National Riggers’ Theatre was yet to act out its full script. The 2011 election was met with such savage reprisal and wanton destruction in the north that for a moment, the continued survival of the nation was called to question.

    Yet in 2015, Nigeria managed to achieve a momentous regime change through the ballot box which has never happened in the history of the nation. In the interval, Nigeria has survived a full scale religious insurgency which has put the corporate existence and survival of the country to its stiffest test since the civil war. In fact large swathes of the north east of the country were overrun and occupied by the vicious sect.

    But as we are discovering to our peril, elections, however historic, do not resolve some fundamental questioning of the nation. In fact they often exacerbate it. In the glorious aftermath of the 2015 elections, Nigeria has reverted to its default line of endemic crises and conflicts. With the two major parties fracturing before our very eyes in a cesspit of intrigues and treachery, with the judiciary under siege, with the legislature under the spell of delinquency, with the economy in critical straits and with ethnic and regional rancor embroiling the polity, Nigeria has never been more divided and polarized in its entire history.

    The national demons are here with us once again. This is the most critical conjuncture in the history of the country. Suddenly, we seem to have arrived at the epoch of zero-party politics or no party formation.  It is a sign of revolutionary anomie. Will our legendary luck hold once more?

     

  • Now, Okon solves the exchange rate riddle

    Talking about African oddities and oddballs, Okon is surely a distinguished specimen. As various scams overwhelm the nation, Okon has devised his own scam to become a trillionaire. One morning, the old crackpot marched into the sitting room wearing the uniform of a Niger Delta insurgent. Before snooper could say a word, the crazy boy opened up in a verbal torrent.

    “Oga, I wan quickly reach dem Ambode boy , make I too surenda dem weapons like dem Ibo boys. I get two dane guns, one cutlass, two hoes and three katapots. Make dem pay me dollar make I go open pepper soup joint like dem Mama de piss.”

    “I see “, snooper replied with a deadpan expression.

    “Oga, you know say dem soldiers don drive man comot for Arepo. Money no dey yanfunyanfun again. Price don hit roof. Everything don skyrocket and dem rocket come tear heaven apart”, the mad boy rued.

    “By the way Okon, what is the current exchange rate?” snooper asked.

    “It depends oga. For dem Yoruba oba or otunba, na four million to one, for Ibo Reverend Father na one point five million to one, for Lagos landlords na sixteen million to four minus one and for dem Otedola boy na one billion to one”, the crazy boy sniggered. On that note snooper quickly drove him out.

  • Dateline 2030: The Blackman’s burden

    In the summer of 2000, I attended a send-off party for a younger friend, a famous Nigerian dissident, who was returning to the home front after a ten year spell of involuntary exile. The host was a successful business magnate of Indian extraction, and the party was held in a posh and plush London Heathrow hotel recently acquired by the business mogul. It was a glittering affair, and the place was packed full with upwardly mobile and enterprising Indians who had found fortune in the west in a remarkably short period.

    Many of their parents had arrived penniless in England after being expelled from Uganda by the notorious and unlamented Idi Amin Dada. For practically all of them, there was no question of returning to India, except on brief spiritual pilgrimages. The west was home. I suppose this makes for greater focus and intense concentration. I put this question to an Anglo-American friend of mine, a distinguished professor of post-colonial history, and he was as withering as he was devastating.

    “You see”, he began as he cut me to size with a look of blistering contempt. “The Indians have their instincts in the right place. Even their ancestors made it to the other side of the Mediterranean before they got stuck. In the case of your people, you cannot cope with fresh challenges of life and history, you are always longing to go back to the womb, to the cradle of mankind, so that you can continue a life of tropical indolence and lassitude. That is why you never made it out of Africa in the first instance.”

    When I protested that my people, the Yoruba, were fabled to have left ancient Egypt after a bitter succession struggle, he shrugged with weary disdain. “They were headed in the wrong direction. Soft people looking for softer targets to dominate. If they had moved in the direction of the Red Sea even if they had been conquered, by now they would have been completely assimilated as a European race”.  As I reeled from this relentlessly Afrophobic onslaught, I informed my friend that despite everything, I longed to return home.

    “That is empty nostalgia, which is a form of psychiatric disorder”, he blasted.

    Before I return to my distinguished friend, let me make a curious confession. Yours sincerely suffers from an affliction which can be best described as intellectual masochism, a gluttony for mental punishment. I take delight in testing my hunches against other insights no matter how savage and antagonistic these may be and no matter how devastating or destabilizing the consequences are. I also take a secret delight in inflicting maximum intellectual punishment on those who believe that Africans are incapable of tremendous intellectual exertions. I have been in some desperate intellectual scrapes and might have been blacklisted by a few conference organizers in the hallowed sanctuaries of western intellectual power.

    I met Professor Lambert Trevor-Roper at one of those conferences, and he was obviously the star of the show. He was as brilliant and dazzling as ever, and had a reputation for not taking intellectual hostages. My first question to him was whether he was related to his more infamous namesake who had famously proclaimed that Africans had no history and were an embarrassment to humanity. But this he proudly and pointedly ignored. But as I turned the table on him, forcing him into precipitate retreat and testy non-sequiturs, he knew I could not be ignored.  He eyed me with a mixture of scorn and panic. He collared me during a break in hostilities.

    “If you are filled with this contempt for the west and its institutions, what are you doing here?” he thundered.

    “I am here for the decolonization project”, I had replied casually.

    “What? I thought we did that for you sometimes ago”, he replied.

    “No, I mean mental decolonization, that is decolonizing the colonizers. I want to show that all these theoretical gimmicks and nonsensical abstractions are a game anybody can play”, I shot back.

    “I see then”, he stuttered and slunk away.

    But Lambert was not one to take defeat lying low. Still smarting from my vicious put-down, he cornered me in a dark alley at the end of the conference.

    “I see you are one of those uppity Africans who think they know everything. Take this and get in touch so that I can drill some sense into your thick, Early Man’s skull”, he said thrusting his card into my hand and vanishing before I could give him a good measure of my tongue.

    I took up his challenge and we became great buddies. Despite his caustic, malignant tongue, he was as warm as he was generous and was eccentricity personified. On my first visit, he peeped through the shutter of his magnificent study and exclaimed: “Ah, Cannibal!” When I protested vigorously at this racist denigration, he told me he meant Hannibal, the great Roman general of Carthage fame, and that ever since his last visit to a sadistic dentist, he had found himself unable to pronounce the “H” silent consonant and had been substituting it with a “K”. “It is the tyranny of the dentist’s tong, my friend”. Then he called out to his elegant and aristocratic wife. “Betty, Betty, Othello’s Countryman is here!” he screamed, slyly recalling Professor Eldred Durosimi Jones’ celebrated doctoral thesis.

    As the evening wore on, it was apparent that Lambert took a child-like delight in outraging and scandalizing. At a point, he took a tipsy lunge at me.

    “I like the way you down your wine, with refinement and considerable finesse. Where did you learn that from?” he asked with snide condescension.

    “When my ancestors were making wine, yours were Roman galley slaves”, I fired back.

    “I see, I see”, he crooned with juvenile delight. “But instead of looking for ways of inventing the storage barn you were turning your surplus food into cheap wine and thereafter engaging in orgies of drinking and fornicating and that has continued till date. But you see, we are not going to allow you to drink and fornicate yourself to death. It is not in the interest of humanity at large. By the time we are going to Mars, we would have sanitized your evil forests for you, rid them of Ebola, Aids and human pestilences such as your pot-bellied tyrants and devious dictators. Then we will parcel out the land again to those who have better use for real estate. For example, if we hand over your country to Bill Gates, in five years you will achieve the food sufficiency which has eluded you for a thousand years…”

    He completely ignored my feeble gesticulations of protest, eyeing me with triumphant malice. I had had enough punishment to last ten meetings. On our last meeting, I told him I was sick and tired of the of the institutionalized cruelties of the west, its merciless rationalism, its attempts to turn humanity into unfeeling cyborgs, robotized machines and this business of going to Mars when three quarters of humanity cannot feed itself. He cut me short with professorial severity.

    “It does not matter what intellectual sophisticates like you think. What is important is to take the bull of history by the horns, and that is what we are doing. We gave you modernity, we gave you Christianity, we even gave you your names. Now we are going to take man to Mars. Do you want another beer, my friend?”

    To my shame, I didn’t decline.

    • (First published in 2004.)

     

  • The nation in question: some conceptual clarifications

    The nation in question: some conceptual clarifications

    In its modern incarnation, the National question arose from a feeling of marginalization and oppression by distinct nationalities who felt cheated or shortchanged by the forcible imperialist restructuring of their territorial space.  Some of them were rendered stateless or technically nation-less. But in some embryonic forms, the national question has been with us since the beginning of civilization and modern warfare.

    It is captured for posterity in the Israelite dirge of loss and traumatic captivity. How can we sing King Alpha’s song in a strange land?  Today, there are many children of Alpha crying for freedom even in their own land. With floods of refugees sacking the most secure bastions of the nation-state paradigm, with America virtually fractured along racial lines, it is the return of the repressed. The National Question has returned to haunt the global order. It has become the International Question.

    If gold can rust, what will iron do? The public climate in contemporary Nigeria is of such burning hostility and ferocity that it has proved impossible to achieve consensus on any matter, be it the wobbling economy, fiscal federalism, restructuring, appropriate federalism, the nature of the nation itself or the transformation of the paradigm of change. It is an enervating Bedlam which reminds one of the film, One Flew out of the Cuckoo’s Nest. The Tower of Babel itself would have been a model of moderate and modest exchanges.

    A lot of this reflex hostility is based on myths presenting themselves as grand actualities and on ethnic and regional fears masquerading as facts. Yet it should also be obvious to the various gladiators that without some minimal consensus on the destiny of the nation, moving it forward is an impossibility. We can continue to rave and rant till the end of eternity and we would still be where our colonial masters left us.

    The problem with the politics of change leading to a change of politics is that it does not advert our mind to certain changes taking place in the polity without any prodding or prompting from the government. Certain emergent forces, both national and international, are beginning to take away the resolution of both the national and the continental question from the political elites of Nigeria in particular and Africa in general.

    Hunger and burning resentment do not conduce to rational and respectful citizens. If President Mohammadu Buhari expected the Nigerian populace to show gratitude and admiration of for the new “Change begins with me” campaign, he must have been appalled and dismayed by the fury and ferocity of the return to sender response.

    With many citizens charging the government with a betrayal of fundamental obligation and poverty of emotional intelligence, this new effort at national mobilization is dead on arrival. The renewal and rejuvenation of national consciousness cannot begin at the deck of the pyramid of fraud. It is a top/bottom affair. That is why you have the political elite in the first instance. The dominated cannot be made to bear the burden and dereliction of the dominant.

    Perhaps the problem has to do with the conceptual hiatus at the heart of contemporary governance in Nigeria. With the “change begins with me” mantra, the weaknesses and intellectual limitations of the Buhari government are in bold and open display. You cannot whip the people into line when you have not convincingly whipped the political elite into line. When the first Buhari administration inaugurated the war against indiscipline campaign, many citizens openly and willingly bought into it because the body language and the opening salvoes suggested that the unsmiling duo meant business.

    But not so this time around. First unlike WAI, this one is coming rather late in the day and as an afterthought; a mere response to grave political pressures from civil and political society. It does not portray the government as a proactive and active organ but as a tentative and temporizing entity probing and feeling its way forward without any conceptual organogram or ideological master-plan.

    Although so far nobody has had the courage and audacity to query General Buhari’s personal probity, controversies continue to dog the integrity of the current campaign against corruption and the lop-sided nature of sensitive national appointments. The problem really is that the government appears to feed on a daily calorie of paranoia and paralysis. Paralysis as a result of its intellectual deficiencies and paranoia about the kind of help and friends it must seek to help it move the nation forward.

    But to dwell on all this is a tad unfair without also mentioning some positive developments such as the overall improvement of power supply, the humongous and staggering nature of loot recovered and the valiant efforts to secure the nation against sundry miscreants. The presence of conflicts is not synonymous with the absence of development. All human societies evolve in conflict and dynamic contradictions. Since the National Question resonates through these developments, they bear close monitoring and conceptual clarifications.

    With “Operation Crocodile Smile” extending its theatre of operations and with General Buhari warning Biafran separatists for the umpteenth time that the unity of the country is not negotiable, what is crystallizing is a law and order administration which will go to war to defend the territorial integrity of the nation and to provide security for the citizens. In other words, a super-security state is attempting to impose territorial order and security on Nigeria at a time when the economic, political and spiritual insecurity of Nigerians has never been more severe and crippling.

    A super-security state which does not address the political architecture of the nation or the devolution of economic power to more vibrant sectors of the polity is bound to come into potentially prohibitive contradictions with forces spawned by these foundational anomalies. This is why it is important at this point to offer some conceptual clarifications about the vexed National Question. There are three important issues to isolate.

    Although the International Question is present in the National Question, the two are often in conflict and they sometimes exist in a state of paradoxical and contradictory reciprocity. The International Question came into being with the hegemonic dominance of the nation-state paradigm imposed on the rest of the world by European civilization. Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas were forcibly restructured in compliance with the dominant paradigm of envisioning the global order.

    After the Second World War, the League of Nations transformed into the United Nations. This was in direct and dynamic response to German, and to a less extent, Japanese nationalist militarism. In the case of the Germans, they felt that The Treaty of Versailles which imposed punitive retributions on a proud and warlike people was unfair and unjust. In the case of the Japanese, it arose from indignation at the global dominance of western powers and the abiding resentment arising from Commodore Perry’s humiliating trip to Japanese shores at the close of the nineteenth century.

    The United Nations is an example of how the global order can restructure itself in response to international pressures. But this has not stopped international conflicts as new forces of history come into collision with old forces. The colonial cartography of Africa and the Middle East which resulted in a posse of unstable and often unviable nations, the rise of a unipolar world with America as supreme power and the pressures from a resurgent and resentful Russia powered by Slavic nationalism, have concentrated the mind of the international community.

    Thus the Colonial Question which was solved but not resolved by the forcible restructuring of Africa and the Middle East in the national image of their European conquerors has turned out to be the greatest threat to global peace as seen in the violent flashpoints of Syria, Yemen, Kuwait, Iraq, Congo, Nigeria etc, They all speak to unfinished business and the need for constant repair works.

    To be fair to the colonialists, they maintained fidelity to the home culture of permanent maintenance in their attitude to their overseas possessions. Whether this maintenance was for the right purpose or in the right direction is another matter. The reason for the amalgamation of the northern and southern protectorates of Nigeria is suspect. Thereafter, Nigeria was ruled very much like a dual-state nation only for a flurry of restructuring exercises to take place in the final run to independence.

    It was during this period which lasted until military intervention in 1966 and the collapse of the First Republic that what approximated to many observers’ ideal of a beneficial and benevolent federalism was practiced in Nigeria. According to the romantic lore of federalism, this was Nigeria’s golden epoch when regional autonomy and fiscal federalism reigned supreme. The three regions were in dynamic competition which spurred growth and meaningful development.

    At this point in time, the demon of forcible cohabitation for the purpose of surplus extraction which spurred the original amalgamation of the various protectorates appeared to have been exorcised. However, a more vicious mutation of the demon emerged thereafter. Using the nation’s vulnerability to centrifugal and polarizing forces as an excuse, the military realigned the nation with the statist and centralizing worldview of its original colonial conquerors. The structure of federating units was forcibly restructured and de-federalized into dependent, feeding bottle vassals of a neo-feudal state.

    Those who claim not to understand what restructuring means must now be told in bold and bald terms that restructuring is a reconfiguration of a polity in such a fundamental manner that it affects its subsequent destiny for good or bad. In Nigeria’s history, the three agencies of restructuring have been the colonial overlords, the military and the political formation.

    But unlike the first two agencies which rely on forcible acquiescence, you cannot have restructuring in a civilian dispensation without substantial elite consensus. This is why since the First Republic, no civilian administration has had the courage or audacity to embark on a restructuring exercise. Agitators hoping to steamroll the rest of the country into compliance should note this fundamental conundrum, particularly in the light of General Buhari’s statist revanchism.

    Drawing conclusions from the above, it can be seen that the International Question is permanently embedded in the National Question. But more importantly, we can see that both cannot be wished away nor are they amenable to a once and for all time cure or “final solution”. As Britain continues to lick its wounds from the “Brexit” debacle and as America, the world greatest democracy, lurches and thrashes about in uncharted waters, National Questions will remain with us as long as nations remain. This is a lesson for contemporary Nigerian leaders. {c, 2016}