The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • A case note of two African giants

    A case note of two African giants

    (Why restructuring is a coded battle for modernity)

     In medical science, comparisons of case notes often illuminate and enlighten.  They throw up unusual and startling insights into the nature of human organism and how similar pathologies can drive dissimilar afflictions. They can also show how and why certain dreaded human afflictions can be largely absent in a particular race even as they become the dreadful scourge of some other races. For the ill and the ailing, comparison of ailment is a known and probably analgesic exertion.

    As it is with human beings, so it is with nations, particularly post-colonial nations suffering from the trauma of colonial gestation and induced labour. If this medical hypothesis is applied to the study of two African giant nations, Nigeria and the Congo Democratic Republic, we may begin to understand why in certain nations compound fractures never manage to heal simply because the external nourishment is not there and the internal organs are incapable of growing regenerative tissues.

    Last week, Etienne Tshisekedi wa Mulumba, the veteran Congolese opposition leader, returned to his country after a two-year absence to begin a fresh round of hell-raising and agitation against Joseph Kabila’s despotic rule, just as he has done in the past forty years or so against Kabila the elder and Joseph Mobutu. It is useful to note that unlike Nigeria which has held several elections and had managed a historic regime change through the ballot box in 2015, Congo has never since independence in 1960 effected a change of government through democratic means.

    Mobutu finally took power in 1965 and remained in place until 1996 when he was deposed in a civil war, while Kabila ruled till 2001 when he was assassinated in a failed coup bid. His son has been at it ever since, managing to hang on to power through egregiously rigged elections and sheer authoritarian savagery when all else fail. Between Mobutu and the two Kabilas, fifty one years of the modern Congolese nation have evaporated in a bonfire of Equatorial despotism.

    As this drama unfolded in the Congolese Republic,  and as if a cruel and neat symmetry of shared post-colonial fate is at play, Nigeria also witnessed the revival of a fifty year old national festival of hate and mutual loathing. While the west was mourning the assassination fifty years earlier of one of their most illustrious sons ever, the east was grieving over the summary execution of their son and former head of state in the same momentous bloodbath.

    Meanwhile the north was commemorating the anniversary of the leader who told the world that the rest of the country would hear from his people at the appropriate time. Fearsome rhetoric of ethnic exceptionalism echoed and reverberated throughout the length and breadth of the country. It was as if the country was on the verge of war and disintegration all over again. Unlike 1966 when the country was relatively prosperous and financially viable, the looming economic apocalypse has not helped matters. Once again, the idols of the tribes are on rampage.

    It goes to show how Nigeria is powered by a reverse nationalism in which the valorous myth of the nationality is more powerful and all-suffusing than the myth of the nation. It is as if nothing has been learnt or taught in the intervening five decades or half a century. In a bitterly polarized nation, politics of remembrance can easily degenerate to the politicization of institutional memory as can be seen in the attempts by rival ethnic sections to call to question the very heroism and altruistic nobility of a man whose exemplary courage in the heat of savage battle against Congolese rebels had earned him a colonial medal just a tad short of the ultimate British honour for a soldier. It was the first ever awarded to a Nigerian combatant.

    This desecration of sacred memory as a way of evading debts of gratitude and the burden of honorable obligation or as a strategy of demeaning the stellar import of heroic national sacrifice in order to obviate guilt and the shame of insensate revenge shows the diabolic imagination at work in the construction of mutually cancelling narratives of a nation in the context of permanent de-nationalization. It demonstrates why the Nigerian story will never be an authoritative narrative but a story of many stories in a conflicted atmosphere of polyphonic strife and tension.

    Yet as the Americans will put it, stuff do really happen even as we seek to authorize and notarize them from the point of view of primordial sentiments and ethnic subjectivity. Perhaps the most significant event of 1966, apart from the two momentous coups, was the declaration of independence from Nigeria by a ragtag band of Ijaw militants led by Isaac Adaka Boro. It was a forlorn and doomed bid summarily degraded by force of superior arms. Last week, fifty years after, a predominantly Ijaw group known as The Adaka Boro Avengers (ABA) sought to declare a Niger Delta Republic. As we write, the entire region is crawling with military personnel hunting down the rogue secessionists.

    As we have noted in this column once and appropriating the seminal insight of Leo Tolstoy, arguably the greatest novelist the world has seen, all happy nations are the same, every unhappy nation is unhappy in its own unique way. From different routes but similar debilities, both Nigeria and the Congo Republic, like so many African post-colonial nations, have arrived at a state of unadulterated unhappiness.

    All happy nations, however they arrived at modernist rationality, be it through Western Enlightenment, Confucianism, Shintoism, Hinduism or even benign variants of Islamic modernization, look suspiciously alike. You may go to bed in Stockholm and wake up in New York. But you expect certain benefits of modernity to be in place: regular supply of electricity, potable water, public utilities that function with seamless efficiency, particularly public transportation that run on time and with clockwork precision, decent housing for most and adequate medical facilities even for visitors.

    Local topography and native fauna notwithstanding, or the complexion of local politics not standing in the way, everything seems surreally alike. Indeed in some of these countries, you often develop an overpowering sense of Déjà vu. That is what we call the homogeneity of national feel-good or happiness. It comes with the territory.

    Conversely, because they exist in a whirlpool of political, economic and spiritual irrationality, a time-warp of stalled motion that derive  their peculiar dynamics from specific internal disorganization, all unhappy countries are unhappy in their own unique way. Apart from the underlying solidarity of human aberration, they have absolutely nothing in common. To the unwary visitor, African countries, particularly Congo and Nigeria, may appear the same as iconic monuments to underdevelopment, but they come as special brands in the unwavering commitment of their respective political elite to national ruination. In the heterogeneity of national unhappiness, no two nations are alike.

    The reason for this momentous paradox is simple.  Whereas the achievements of scientific modernity is open, universal and for all time, all remaining human societies that seek to dominate nature and overcome political, spiritual and economic adversity through the sheer power of poetic  or religious imagination become stranded in a peat bog of fetishes, risible rituals, superstitions and wild irrationalities that are localized, society-specific and time-bound. These are the last bastions of Early Man.  Modernity solves problems for all human societies, while mythology deflects the specific problems of specific societies through the fabulous and imaginary resolution of pressing contradictions.

    We must now return to our case file in order to press conclusions. The chaotic colonial amalgams of Congo and Nigeria, despite seeming structural similarities such as vast landmass, mighty life-enhancing rivers in each country, improbable natural riches and a vibrant and indomitable populace are plagued by country-specific contradictions.  Since independence, the Congo Republic has seen many civil wars, summary dismemberment, virtual excision of remote parts of the country and periodic descent into ungovernability.

    If Nigeria has been spared such horrific extremities, it is because the nation is powered along by a micro-pluralism of power in which competing and countervailing centres of power cancel out each other and make it impossible for any despot to stay put or for any group to lord it over the nation on a permanent basis. Potential potentates and regional power mafias should note that Nigeria is not the Congo.

    The obverse of the coin of the regionalization of power elite is the absence of a genuine national and nationalist elite group which makes it impossible for the Nigerian political elite to act with a pan-Nigerian concert when a pressing national conundrum surfaces. The engrossing historical irony is that it leads Nigeria to the same democratic and developmental impasse as the Congo Republic. Whereas in the Congo, national elections are a rarity, in Nigeria the electorate rouses itself once in every four years to do the needful before it is summarily disbanded by the selectorate until another electoral season in a political ecology of compulsory hibernation.

    It is this absence of a truly functioning and viable electorate that has made it impossible for the Nigerian electorate to successfully recall a single erring lawmaker in seventeen years of post-military democracy. Once elected, the electors are summarily vaporized while the elected join the selectorate in a macabre enactment of the ritual of national immolation. Yet while the political tomfoolery goes on the nation sinks further in the abyss of societal anomie.

    Despite the fact that competing centres of power have managed to thwart despotism and the phenomenon of political overlordism in the country, what stares us in the face is the reality of uneven political consciousness among the competing power groups that has led to growing disillusionment and widespread disenchantment with the state of the nation.  In a situation of stark economic decline, if the current muted cries of dismay and disappointment are allowed to reach their 1966 decibel, it has horrific portents for the continued viability of the country. The future may well be the past.

    It can now be seen why the current shrill cries for the restructuring of the country are mere shorthand or coded battle signal for the swift and urgent modernization of the country’s economic and political parameters. All over the modern world, the trend is for a gradual devolution of power from a stifling and suffocating centre to other loci of potential and accelerated development. The sterling and stellar example of contemporary Lagos state is a model that commends itself to other sections of the country. Unfortunately, while vital segments of the nation hunger and thirst for economic and political modernity, some other sections take a dim view of this as an invitation to a summary dismemberment of the country.

    Had the country been blessed with visionary military modernizers, this conundrum would have been overcome. But you cannot give what you don’t have.  Yet until that dawn when a truly modernizing political elite who will seize the nation by the scruff of the neck and drag it to modernity arrives, the more likely possibility is that impatient sections of the country will eventually resort to self-help to plot their way out of the iron cage of colonial contraries. That is likely to be messy and anarchic.

  • Baba Lekki solves restructure riddle for the nation

    A propos of the saying that unhappy nations are not alike in their unhappiness, it is meet to report our finding that all unhappy cooks and drivers are alike. As the Air Force jets pounded the western creeks and impounded the crooks, Okon wore a sad and dejected mien. His illicit oil and “disel” business having evaporated in a fiery bonfire, Okon was a distraught and disconsolate sight to behold. Snooper pressed advantage.

    “Oga Okon how market now?” yours sincerely taunted the crazy boy.

    “Oga, monkey don go market and him never return, oil and gas don become yell and gasp”, the mad boy rejoined with a bitter grin.

    “Alagba, don’t mind the yeye boy. Arepo don become Aorepo. As dem Yoruba people dey say, Adegun don become Adeogun”, Baba Lekki intoned with malicious gusto.

    “Baba at your age, I don tell una make you no follow dem military monkey chop bush”, Okon countered with an irate frown.

    “Ah you see yeye boy? Dem thin wey drive monkey come climb palm tree, him still dey wait for monkey below”,  Baba Lekki sneered.

    “You see dem Yoruba people?” Okon screamed. “You dey steal our oil blocks and when we come do our own oil block for Arepo, katakata come burst. Dem plane come dey spit fire. No be dem reason why we say make dem restructure dem useless kontri be dis?” Okon bitterly lamented.

    “Ha Okon restructure ke? Wetin you dey restructure?  You don join dem foolish bukuru people? You see when dem Ibrahim Baba Igida say him wan do adjustment for economy structure, I come ask am wey dem structure him wan adjust. If structure no dey, so wetin you wan restructure?. Dat one na intellectual misnomer and dem vulcanizer’s hot air. Dem thing to do na to destructure, make dem remove dem no-structure nonsense and replace am patapata.” The old contrarian volunteered.

    “Baba, if una sabi dis much grammar, why you no dey practice dem law for court?” Okon snorted.

    “Foolish boy, I don tell you say dem deport me from dem London Inn for two fighting. I come trek to Las Palmas. Each time I go court and I tell dem say I get am for Inter BL with dem LL. B in view dem dey ask police make dem finish me….”

    It was at this point that some hooded men with the insignia of a dreaded local militia campaigning for self-determination came in looking for Okon. The crazy boy vamoosed like a walnut spirit.

  • On the trail of aborted modernity ( The life of James Pinson Labulo Davies: A colossus of Victorian Lagos)

    On the trail of aborted modernity ( The life of James Pinson Labulo Davies: A colossus of Victorian Lagos)

    Something happened to Nigeria on the road to modernity. The evidence is there in the stultified institutions. They are so estranged and alienated from the principal goal of civilizing humanity that they have assumed a punitive life of their own. You have a political system that breed tyrants, men without economic conscience and moral imagination; an imported religious order that bristles with spiritual predators and afflicted redeemers; financial institutions that cripple initiatives and genuine enterprise; an intelligentsia so historically disoriented that it is incapable of reflecting on its own real condition.

    It is a miracle that Nigerians have managed to survive such a debilitating order. But the human toll has been quite prohibitive. Lacking in the most rudimentary formation of modernist rationality, many African societies are stuck in a time- warp; a whirlpool of irrationality and savage superstitions.

    Yet some architecture remains in the ancient and modern ruins. But if Pre-colonial Africa had some semblance of traditional order, it was because ancient African philosophers and statesmen, like their counterparts elsewhere, used the power of human imagination to resolve or deflect pressing existential contradictions.  That was before modernity and its scientific rationality took over from imaginative resolution and rationalization of concrete contradictions.

    Now, huge forests have grown around the ancient mud huts all over again, and they are resistant to primitive cutlasses. In a startling regression to animal barbarity, a cannibal ethos prevails. People still eat other people. At least four post-colonial rulers of Africa are documented cannibals. In the twenty first century, this is a metaphor for political savagery. The most urgent task at hand is how to plot our way out of the historic cul de sac.

    It is not going to be an easy task. But we must thank God for small mercies. Help sometimes comes from unexpected quarters. It has been noted that although humanity first civilized in Africa, they have not continued to do so there. But Africa has not always been completely hopeless and helpless.

    Despite the ravages of colonization and Arab pillage, despite imperialist occupation, there have been African avatars, particularly from the much storied coast of Lagos, who have heroically attempted to bridge the gap between Africa and western modernity by striving to impose their own vision of modernity powered by an African essence.

    The subject matter of this beautifully written and excellently packaged book is one of these unsung and unheralded titans. It is a moveable feast of colonial derring-do and a moving tribute to one of the greatest men ever thrown up by the Lagos Protectorate. Urbane, self-effacing and impeccably well-mannered, Professor Adeyemo Elebute, a retired surgeon and one of Nigeria’s most distinguished medical practitioners, wields his pen like a scalpel and with the thoroughness and finesse of a master surgeon performing a routine operation.

    The result is a tour de force of historical exposition which often reads like the magical Simon Schama, the famed historian, at the most sublime summit of his expository art. It is indeed a happy and uncanny coincidence of events that has brought a notable surgeon to focus on the life and times of this colossus of Victorian Lagos. Well-researched and impressively annotated, the beauty of this book lies in the fact that Professor Elebute is too well-bred to make any garrulous intellectual claim. But without doing so, he has contributed to modern Nigeria’s search for self-retrieval and continental self-validation.

    The book is also a labour of filial love and affection. According to the foreword written by J.D.Y Peel, the distinguished Africanist and Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Elebute had contacted him in connection with what he had written about his grandfather, J.B Sadare, a famed goldsmith of his time, who had provided the house in which Ijebu Ode Grammar School held its first classes in 1913.

    Unlike contemporary self-commemorating Nigerian billionaires who steal from government coffers without giving anything back to the society, these giants of colonial history provided the seed money, the accommodation, the selfless devotion and the tireless nurturing that gave birth to most of the iconic higher institutions in Lagos and the Yoruba hinterland which pushed that part of Nigeria sharply forward in the race to modernity. It was this fertile soil that Awolowo would find so conducive to his breathless modernization project.

    There are giants even among giants. Among these worthy exemplars, Labulo Davies stood out like a supreme exemplar for his superb courage, his indomitable spirit, his intimidating brilliance, stupendous energy, entrepreneurial wizardry and the immutable hand of destiny which accounts for his miraculous ability to survive and even prosper in adversity. He was one hell of a man.

    His life reads like a magical adventure or some African version of Robinson Crusoe. Born on August 13, 1828 to liberated African slaves of Yoruba extraction (Egba and Ogbomosho) who eventually settled in the Sierra Leonean village of Bathurst just outside Freetown, the young boy displayed early promise and exceptional brilliance which did not escape the attention of the visionary colonial abolitionists who wanted to train indigenous Africans who would man essential services for the emancipated continent.

    In 1849, the British Admiralty having agreed to this proposal took on a set of African boys for training on ships belonging to the British Preventive Squadron with a view to turning them into captains of merchant ships. After a rigorous selection exercise at Freetown Grammar School, the young Davies and another boy were selected and placed on the HMA Volcano, a formidable war sloop, as cadets under Commander Robert Coote.

    Displaying exceptional courage and brilliance, Davies, within three years, had risen from cadet to midshipman and eventually to lieutenant. Echoes of Equaino, the fabled African sea-warrior of Igbo extraction, who together with other liberated slaves such as Cuguano and Sancho were to seize the literary saloons of London by the scruff of the neck towards the end of the eighteenth century?

    In December 1851, the young Lieutenant Davies was on board HMS Bloodhound in the Lagos lagoon and participated fully in the historic bombardment of Lagos. He was wounded in action. James Labulo Davies retired from the British Navy in 1852 and became a fully fledged master of merchant vessels plying the West African coast. Despite a naval disaster which saw to the ruin of his vessel at the Igbosere beach, Davies rose swiftly and was soon established as arguably the leading businessman in Lagos with choice property and land all over the future capital of Nigeria.

    Renowned for the scruples and the humane integrity of his business transactions and blending visionary entrepreneurship with missionary advocacy, Davies was to become one of the movers and shakers of Victorian Lagos. By this time, the entire maritime world had become the oyster of this enterprising African business mogul and son of former slaves  constantly shuttling between the coast of West Africa and London and being feted as he went along. It has been a long walk to real freedom.

    On Thursday, 14, August, 1862, after some initial hiccups, James Davies took his belle, the delectable former Sarah Forbes, to the altar in St Nicholas’ Church, Brighton, Sussex in England. It was a marriage that had to be sanctioned and personally approved by Queen Victoria. According to the author: “For several days before the wedding, the whole of Brighton was agog with the news of the grand marriage of an African couple rumoured to be of royal pedigree”.

    If the life of Captain Davies reads like pure fiction, the story of his wife is straight out of magical fantasia of outlandish dimensions.

    Originally a slave girl captured by the Dahomeans’ army after her Oke Oda/ Ilobi homestead was sacked and her parents slaughtered in 1848 when she was about five years old, she was handed over as a gift to the visiting Commander Forbes by King Gezo of Dahomey on July 5, 1850.

    Ina as she was then known—probably a corruption of the Yoruba name Aina—eventually made it to England with her adoptive father where Queen Victoria instantly took a great shine to the bright and precocious. Famously contrarian and eccentric about royal etiquettes where it came to African and oriental former captives, the great British sovereign showered love affection on the young girl and took her to live in the palace. Queen Victoria would eventually adopt a daughter of the union and send her study at Cheltenham, a famous private boarding school for girls.

    This work throws rich and fascinating light on a nascent African middle class and the stirring of some form of modernity which now stands tragically aborted. It was no doubt a society that looked towards the west for guidance and enlightenment. But it paid its dues by imbibing the finer aspects of higher bourgeois culture. It eschewed conspicuous consumption, was scrupulous in its business dealing, adopted a Calvinist restraint and rectitude in its outlook, was aggressively modernist in the pursuit of education and massively philanthropic in its vision of an integrated society.

    And it had massive restraints and severe deterrents in place for erring members. When he became bankrupt, Davies found himself excluded from consideration for political office until he retired his bankruptcy through massive plantation of cocoa at a place called Ijon. Known felons were shunned and deprived of the oxygen of permissive and primitive adulation. The social services worked smoothly and without the humongous lubrication of greasy corruption. It was a prim and proper society with frugal discipline as its watchword.

    To be sure, there was a hint of cultural disorientation such as when one of the grandees of the society was later tell the Reverend Henry Townsend that they considered themselves as middlemen between the white and the Egba.  Yet these self-assured men were no lackeys of the imperialist do-gooders as Sir Lugard and his brother would find out. In any case, better cultural alienation than the comprehensive epistemic deracination that has overtaken contemporary Nigeria.

    You cannot completely control what you didn’t invent. Let it be with western modernity. Despite centuries of imperialist subjugation, the culturally assured and intellectually confident Chinese, Japanese, Indians and lately the Singaporeans and the desert Arabs of Dubai have shown us how it can be done. But in most of Africa, particularly in a richly endowed country like Nigeria, we have completely surrendered the initiative. The result is the institutional chaos and social anomie that stare us in the face.

    From the weighty evidence of this important book, there was going to be another country. But it went under like an overburdened cargo ship. We can go on from here to eternity sharing the blame about what went wrong. It will not change anything. What is now important is to find our way out of the debris of aborted modernity.

  • Okon and Baba Lekki in phone-in drama

    AS the House of Representatives finally unravels in a smouldering inferno of truly outlandish scams, snooper has been assembling a team of crack editorialists to pen the political obituary of the leading figures of the upper and lower chambers. But you must trust Okon and his ancient collaborator to take a dimmer view of developments in the country. After being invited to take part in a phone-in programme by a popular radio station, the rebel duo have been running subversive commentaries about the state of the nation until the D-day.
    Hostilities began as soon as they walked in and Okon accosted the beautiful lady moderator with a lewd stare.
    “Bia nwannem maranma. No be you I been dey see for Okota before before?”, the mad boy crowed. But the gamely lady had a full measure of her man and gave it back to the rogue.
    “Mr Okon, we know you are a boastful efulefu. Just get on with it!!” the lady shot back with a prim smile.
    “Ha my sister, no vex. You know say man no be wood. Even Tiger Wood sef no be wood”, a half-contrite Okon whimpered to the raucous delight of the audience. An irate caller opened proceedings.
    “Okon, where are we going gan gan in this country? I want to know?” the angry man hollered. With a self-important swagger, Okon adjusted his resource control cap and began to ventilate.
    “You see my brother dem country be like when towing vehicle dey tow towing vehicle and him come tumble and catch fire for Third Mainland and katakata come burst. Override come override Overdrive. Fire come kill driver. Conductor come jump inside lagoon”, the mad boy sniggered as his lips parted in a sadistic grin.
    “What is your take on Baba’s statement that most members of the house are thieves?” a caller from Mushin demanded in an imperious tone.
    “As for dat one, na baba’s goat dey chop baba’s corn ooo”, Okon sneered. It was at this point that Baba Lekki, in a deranged burst of energy, began a savage parody of a famous Yoruba ditty about the immutable law of self-cloning.
    Omo o le jo baba kama binu omo, aiyee le
    Moni eniarebu yi jo baba e ju
    Omo o le jo baba kama binu omo.
    As the old crook cantered and capered to his own music sending the audience into rapture, it was another angry caller who stopped him in his track.
    “You this yeye old man. You are dancing like a fool when some stupid so called militants are still holding on to that Yoruba Oba from Iba.” The man growled like an angry bear. Baba Lekki sat down like a punctured balloon.
    “You see my brother. Dat one na case of juju get accident. Na dem female traitor inside palace who come phone dem militants say make dem dey come as baba don remove him ibante. (Yoruba underwear made of charms) Na the reason why dem capture baba like fowl be dat,” Baba Lekki grunted.
    “Baba I been dey surprise say small boy yab you like dat and you come dey shiver like dem Obudu monkey. Abi juju don get accident again?”, Okon sneered.
    “Okon, leave the fool. No be the same day small pikin abuse Iroko dat dem thunder go strike him and him mama”, the old man noted as he began rubbing his palms together with satanic relish. It was at this point that crackling gun fire from approaching militants sent everybody scampering for safety.

  • On sovereignty and restructuring

    On sovereignty and restructuring

    The noise about the structural viability of Nigeria and how this affects sane governance has now assumed a shrill ferocity. While the traditional ramparts of restructuring are still warming up, new converts have seized the battlefield.  There is a gradual hardening of positions with fears masquerading as facts and with prejudice pretending to be the unassailable truth.

    Yet one thing driving the debate which is not obvious to the partisans on both sides of the divide, is the fact that whether we choose to restructure or not, the base of leadership recruitment in the nation is too narrow and constricted, too hamstrung by ethnic bigotry and partisan pettiness to power the aspirations and manifest destiny of the greatest conglomeration of Black people anywhere in the world.

    While President Buhari has insisted times without number that the unity of the nation is non-negotiable and the sovereignty of the state inviolable, his opponents have dismissed this as mere executive daydreaming which is out of sinc with actual reality. There is no human conglomeration or national community whose unity is non-negotiable or fixed for all times, they insist.

    There is sense in which these contrasting positions once again reflect abiding geo-ethnic fault lines in the country.  While General Buhari’s position is backed by the main north and its dominant political tendency, significant sections of the South South, the South East have taken umbrage even as the South West, the old intellectual epicentre for the radical restructuring of the country, watches with quiet animation.

    Those who approve insist that restructuring is the only way forward for the nation even as the opponents maintain that it is just a decoy or mere shorthand for the precipitate dismemberment of the country. Once again, the nation is at the mercy of centrifugal forces. It is important to wade through this thicket of confusion. But first, a historical detour.

    As the new paradigm of nation-states gradually supplanted the old notion of traditional or religious fiefdoms and empire-states, the sovereignty of rulers was extended to the sovereignty of their territories.  Like the old rulers of yore whose reign was inviolable, non-negotiable and attributed to divine ordination, the new nations came to assume an inviolable, non-negotiable and almost religious aura and awe.  In some nations, the worship of the nation almost came to supplant actual religion itself. It was pious fiction; a necessary hoax. To nudge them higher telos, humanity must always believe in something.

    Since it preceded the myth of the inviolable and non-negotiable nation, it was the myth of the inviolable and non-negotiable ruler that had to go first. It exploded in memorable bloodbath as humanity hitherto thought dormant and docile rose in murderous rage to reclaim sovereignty for the people in historic confrontations which have shaped the contours of modern history. Such was the venom and vitriol of these momentous upheavals that thereafter no ruler dare to claim that he was the sum total of the state. As it was to happen in Russia, so had it happened in England, France and the Austro-Hapsburg Empire. In the case of America, the feudal order of succession was summarily banished from the constitution.

    Next to go was the myth of the inviolable and non-negotiable nation as hitherto powerful nations fell to the military might of less fancied nations and as many powerful human communities were supplanted in political and economic ascendancy by seemingly weaker and newer nations. In the process, the sun has set on many empires and nations that had thought that their God was superior to other national Gods. By this token, some nations disappeared never to be seen again while new nations appeared on the scene from the embroiled and embattled wombs of older nations.

    It is a grim irony of history that African nations that are nothing but dreadful caricatures of their colonial foster fathers often invest themselves with the toga of inviolability and non-negotiable sacredness even without the sterling attributes of their heroic European forebears.  The coups, violent seizures of government, persistent armed critiques, summary executions of incumbents and dismemberments of many African nations that have characterized the post-colonial history of Africa should put an end to such grand illusions.

    The enemy in Africa is largely within.  The central contradiction of colonial nationhood in Africa stems from national armies that originated as instruments of internal pacification and rigid enforcers of the territorial integrity of the nation. In the absence of a genuine nationalist political class, the national army often stands between the nation and chaos and as the last bulwark against state disintegration in the face of unyielding fissiparous tendencies.

    But under immense historical pressures, the army often falters, relapsing into its originating summons as an army of internal occupation and instrument of extractive predation preying on national resources. In many African countries, the colonial army had to be disbanded and reconstituted for the nation to move forward. This has been the case in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cote D’Ivoire, Rwanda, Uganda, Guinea, Mali, the old Zaire, Ethiopia, Somalia etc.

    As a sterling and exemplary product of the old missionary military, General Mohammadu Buhari  is surely within his right and historic brief to insist that the sovereignty of Nigerian state is inviolable and the unity of the country non-negotiable. For a civil war veteran, this is at it should be. Whenever Nigeria gets into a rough patch, the old military master class have always thrust the reins of power into the hands of one of their own.  The patriotic ardour and firmness of purpose with which the retired general has brought back the ailing Nigerian state from the edge of death in the past one year is an eloquent testimony to this superiority of will.

    Unfortunately, the sovereignty of a state and the non-negotiable nature of a country end when it is confronted by a sovereign ailment that can overwhelm it if care is not taken. This is the situation in which we have found ourselves and it requires much more than military will but creative and visionary statesmanship. Twice, General Buhari has been summoned at such critical conjunctures to bail the nation out with his political skills failing him the first time around. Care must be taken that history does not repeat itself, for the National Question has been exacerbated in the intervening thirty years.

    All nations in the course of their journey towards self-actualization are often confronted by impossible historical and political conundrums which sorely test their will and ability to survive. The talented statesmen and visionary thinkers who framed the American constitution knew what was tormenting them when they spoke to the possibilities of a “more perfect union”. It was an arch and awkward phrase which hints at the troubling tension between actuality and future possibilities. This is not just a semantic quirk but a historic aporia.

    Professor David-West was surely right when he noted the ungrammatical and quaint nature of the phrasing. But nothing can be perfectly perfect.  Under the relentless pressure of history and political developments, the perfect becomes less perfect and it is left to visionary human agency to make it more perfect. The founding fathers of America could not have imagined how the addition of gargantuan land masses of turbulent Texas, the West Coast, Florida, parts of Hispanic Mexico and even Russianized  Alaska would have gelled with the original brew, or the epic contradictions of a country transforming into a continent-nation.

    President  Buhari needs not be afraid of restructuring, but he should be wary of those who use the slogan of restructuring to preach hate and the summary dismemberment of the country. He should also be mindful of those who scream against restructuring as a strategy of keeping the nation in fossilized underdevelopment and Stone Age depredations simply to perpetuate an unjust system and its entrenched privileges.

    All countries, if they are not to perish, must undergo periodic restructuring as an ironic reaffirmation of their sovereignty. This is what has been happening in Nigeria since colonial amalgamation. For a long time after amalgamation and until the run up to independence, Nigerian was ruled as a unitary harshly centralized state in which the South did not know what the North was up to and with subsequent perilous consequences for national unity and cohesion.

    It was the first coup, the civil war, the sudden explosion in oil revenues and the military’s morbid fear of centrifugal forces which terminated the experiment with regional governance and fiscal federalism. In their notion of the nation as they understood it, and no doubt coloured by the rigidly centralized and harshly regimented vision of a vast garrison, the Nigerian military simply gathered the reins of power under a federal command.  This authoritarian regime with its abhorrence of indiscipline and querulous bids for Bohemian independence no doubt resonates with a section or sections of the country that find comfort in the certainties and orderliness of centralized feudal rule and its mutants.

    But a nation is like a growing organism and there can be no permanent quick-fix solutions to its ailments. As history progresses and as the iron law of uneven development overtakes a chaotic colonial amalgam like Nigeria, new pathologies surface and new nation-disabling infirmities emerge which can only be contained by prising open the draconian iron cage which restrains centrifugal forces no doubt but which also bottles up the creative energies of our diverse people.

    Ironically enough, the greatest enemies of restructuring in Nigeria are the political elite who reduce this vital aspect of national reengineering to partisan and execrable political gaming. When they are in power they keep mute about restructuring. But once they are outside the loop of power, they keep shouting restructuring from the rooftop as a rearguard rally for unaccountable power all over again. What is lost on them is the fact that just as federal elections in a multi-ethnic nation cannot be won by hateful ethnic jingoism, the successful restructuring of a post-colonial polity requires substantial elite consensus which involves the intricate negotiations and arduous elite pacting that more organic nations take as already given.

    Meanwhile as this political gaming and zero sum grandstanding take the central stage of our existence, many sections of the country are hurting badly in the iron cage of national disorientation. A federation must not become an instrument of flagellation. There can be no doubt that the ravaged Niger Delta requires a conceptually impregnable New Deal which must be sustained and incorporated into a new federal constitution.

    The siege on the urbanized South West coming through the labyrinthine maze of creeks and the phenomenon of urban terrorism that has infiltrated the area from all directions as a result of those fleeing rural poverty and biblical misery speak to the need for the urgent decentralization of our police force or at the very least the setting up of special security forces in the area answerable only to the respective local authorities.

    In the north, particularly after Boko Haram and the miscarried Arab Spring, it is now mandatory to set up a Special Border Guard to ward off the phenomenon of religious, economic and political terrorism coming through our porous, ill-secured borders from the larger Maghreb and the Sahelian Desert. This must be in place with an equivalent of the American Coast Guard which contains maritime threats to the nation’s territorial and economic sovereignty from source. The current trend of involving the army and the navy in purely internal security operations portends danger to nation and national institution.

    It is the prayer of many Nigerians that General Mohammadu Buhari must find within himself the inner reserves of courage and resilience to rise above petty political partisanship and ethnic bigotry in order to do what is needful for the country at this perilous conjuncture. This government has done many things right. But it has also committed unforced errors and made strategic mistakes in the political and economic sectors.

    The post-colonial state in its current incarnation in Nigeria is too weak and dispirited to attempt a radical surgery on the nation without losing the patient to the forces of ungainly and bloody dismemberment.  Nobody ever thought the rot was this humongous and deeply systemic. It is not helpful to the current Global Order for Nigeria to go down in smoke and chaos. They will do everything within their power to prevent this even if it means radical surgery of their own.

    But once the nation is economically stabilized and morally sanitized, the Buhari administration must confront the crucial and critical need to revisit the current anomalous structure of the country. If however it chooses to be a one-issue government and mono-agendum intervention, it is absolutely within its democratic prerogative——until 2019 that is.

  • The life and times of a master spook

    The life and times of a master spook

    Columnist apologizes for the brief disappearance of column. It was due to a traumatic personal bereavement. Even then and as usual with him, yours sincerely had tried to pull off a coup against adversity. But this time around, it turned out a bridge too far. There comes a time when the body simply refuses to go along with the whiplash of the mind.

    And yet events continue to unfurl at such a breakneck speed that it is now certain that this is going to be an even shorter century than the short and explosive twentieth century. Just take a sampler. In only four weeks, we have heard the phenomenon of Brexit , renewed carnage in France, turmoil in Turkey and dramatic developments in Europe which have now paved the way for three of the four major powers of the western world to be led by women. And even the rogue, famously rumpled and meticulously untidy Boris Johnson has made a dramatic reentry as Foreign Secretary in Britain.

    On the home front, the call for restructuring is reaching its highest decibel in the post-military era even as President Buhari continues to infuriate his growing critics by what they consider the lopsided pattern and particularities of his appointments. Apparently, they can shout from here to eternity, the stiff old general is not for turning. The ruling party gives the impression of an ideological tailspin as top government officials and party grandees make confusing and contradictory pronouncements.  Yet the ground of promise is gradually beginning to give way. For the first time agony and confusion are writ large on the face of the Nigerian underclass as well as its master class.

    If we were to put a fine historical comb to it or subject events to the rigour of dialectical analysis, we may discover these seemingly disparate developments both at the national and international level are not completely unrelated in the sense that they speak to a growing crisis of the nation-state paradigm which will eventually lead to its modulation or the modification of its harsher absurdities.  This is of course subject to the eternal law of uneven development. There are nations and there are nations.

    Of all the recent developments in Nigeria, none can be more fascinating and intriguing than the passing to higher glory of the old Zamfara master spook, Umaru Aliyu Shinkafi. It is the end of an era and Umaru Shinkafi is the last of the Mohicans, a glorious lineage of gentleman-spies who belong to a now extinct breed of aristocratic spy-masters. His glum taciturnity betrayed cutting edge intelligence and a sharp rapier-like wit. Like an ancient nobility of domestic espionage, Shinkafi could see farther than most of his contemporaries, an advantage he hid under a forbidding veil of silence, secrecy and stealth.

    There are some people who carry in their commodious bosom the tormenting and turbulent contradictions of their age.  Umaru Shinkafi was undoubtedly one of these people. His political career encapsulated the contradictions of politics in the epoch of military ascendancy.  Yet in a curious and contradictory manner it also points the way forward for a nation hobbled by a crisis of core political values and vanishing possibility of elite consensus.

    A top ranking officer of the elite special branch, Shinkafi viewed the military incursion into Nigerian politics and the subordination of the old Nigerian political class to military whims with quiet outrage. No retired Nigerian Inspector General of Police or head of domestic intelligence has ever been so magically rich or phenomenally influential to challenge the military aristocracy in their acquired political turf. Although coolly resentful of military incursion into politics and its appropriation of the political heirloom of the nation, Shinkafi was too disciplined, too intelligent and too politically savvy to force an all out confrontation which would have threatened the system and turned him into a political martyr.

    Till the end, both the military class and unyielding spy master viewed each other with wary respect and cagey regard in a classic parity of nuclear deterrents. They had numbers on each other. When General Babangida eventually banished him to the sidelines of his doomed Transition Programme, Shinkafi quietly complied despite his enormous investments. And when General Sani Abacha summarily discountenanced his political outfit, the late Marafan Sokoto calmly took it in the chin. But behind the scene, he became a quiet facilitator and resource person for what became the historic All Politicians Summit of 1995.

    A pack of distressed and disoriented dogs cannot become spectators at a lion’s funeral. Despite its manifest failings what the Nigerian military had in sufficient abundance were cohesion, discipline, focus and abiding loyalty to an institution once its institutional authority and hegemony is threatened by countervailing political forces.  Class blood is thicker than ethnic water. Shinkafi would find this out in a hard and bitter manner.

    As the Abdusalaam  Abubakar Transition got underway, Shinkafi who had heroically stuck out his neck once again against military political shenanigans by facilitating an alternative platform would soon  discover that all the ranking military officers with whom he had formed the ANPP began deserting in droves once it became clear that General Obasanjo was the military candidate and the PDP the preferred route to military disengagement. Famously and with witty alacrity, the Zamfara spook pointedly asked one of them: “Is your posting out?”.

    “Politics as military posting”. That historic and haunting phrase in all its beguiling anachronism and national befuddlement may well serve as the most befitting epitaph for post-military politics in Nigeria and the complete subordination of the political class and total domination of the Fourth Republic by the old military master class. So overwhelming is this domination that of the four presidents that we have had so far in the Fourth Republic, two are retired generals and former military rulers, one is the direct sibling of a former influential general and presidential hopeful while the last was an autocratic imposition on the nation by a departing military general turned civilian despot.

    It may well be that this authoritarian democracy is a painful but inevitable stage for all traditional societies in a state of traumatic transition to political modernity. But it is important to know where the rains started beating us in the current phase of the journey to national self-actualization riddled with potholes and dangerous mines. All the current noise and uproar about restructuring, fiscal federalism, the inviolable sovereignty of the state and nation, self-determination for constituting ethnic nationalities and the phenomenon of state larceny can be traced to the fundamental and fundamentalist military ethos bequeathed to the nation by the departing military barons as exemplified by the 1999 constitution.

    The Don Quixotes of the much rhapsodized Jonathan Constitutional Conference who collapsed most of their otherwise sensible recommendations into the same 1999 Constitution should know that they are tilting at imaginary windmills. They have merely converted a problem into its own solution. It is obvious from his public utterances that the general from Daura holds most of the purveyors of this conference in utter contempt.

    This is probably because while they were at it and while Jonathan was dithering with even the most anodyne of the recommendations, the Nigerian masses intervened decisively by electing a man who is not sold on elite shenanigans and who does not take political hostages.  With the raucous masses hooting and braying for the blood of those who have led the country into its direst economic perdition since independence, Buhari can do no wrong even if he chooses to fill up all the vacancies with his Daura people. For those who are already down, the fall of evil men and women is enough consolation and catharsis.

    Umaru Shinkafi would be chuckling in his grave. It was said by those who knew him that despite his aloof aristocratic mien, his grave exterior and his forbiddingly disobliging countenance, he was man with a robust sense of humour. This was precisely the kind of outcome he was trying to avoid by trying to forge an elite consensus among the fractious political class of his beloved nation to no avail. He was said to have left the sinking Shagari government after warning of an impending coup and when it became obvious that the Sokoto aristocrat was in no position to do the needful. Although his politics was archly conservative, he had come away with a healthy respect for the old political class of the South West after interrogating some of the suspects in the famed Treason trial of 1962.

    In 1999, the Marafan Sokoto sacrificed his burning ambition to rule the country and the larger class interest of his feudal extraction to become a junior partner in an alliance with a party that was so politically hobbled and strategically hamstrung that it barely registered outside its South West redoubt all in a futile bid to prevent a military steamrolling of the entire country. This was at a time when those who are now screaming restructuring and fiscal federalism were lining up behind their military paymasters and godfathers, just as they did during the June 12 debacle. Shinkafi was not sold on an elite consensus based on ethnic obsessions.

    In the event, it was a resounding rout. The military-backed coalition gave the alliance a shellacking from which it never recovered. Thereafter, a humbled Shinkafi retreated behind a wall of silence to watch unfolding events. It was the last sigh of a noble man in politics. Thereafter, Obasanjo turned his itching attention to the two rudderless opposition parties as they expired in his massive anaconda embrace. Now, everybody is crying for another national summit as if this will alter the fundamentally destitute character of the Nigerian political class, or make them amenable to genuine and altruistic nation-growing.

    In politics as in life, a person’s true worth cannot be determined by the post they have held or the preferment they have acceded to but by the position they take at critical moments. It is this cult of heroic example that posterity takes away as building blocks for a saner society.  Judging by the outpouring of grief on the occasion of his translation to higher glory and the glowing tributes that have been heaped on him, it is obvious that even though he did not realize his ultimate ambition, Shinkafi will forever be regarded and remembered as a decent man and avatar of principled politics. May Allah grant him eternal repose.

     

  • Baba Lekki turns the table on one chance boys

    In the darkest entrails of the sprawling megacity, a cannibal ethos prevails. You either kill or you get killed. It is as simple as that.  Autochthon savages from outlying primitive enclaves and the last redoubts of Early Man in Africa finally overran the famed metropolis. Despite the bravest efforts of the law enforcement agencies, they held sway in the swampy outreach of the beleaguered city from where they spread their reign of primitive terror via the inner ghettoes to the glittering landmarks of African modernity.

    But help is finally on the way from traditional quarters. Where modern policing falters, African magic comes to the rescue. Snooper never gave a chance to General Obasanjo’s famed formula for dislodging apartheid from South Africa until recently. At this rate, it may well be the old magus from ancient Owu who may yet have the last laugh over this matter of pre-colonial hostilities.

    As usual with the freeloading contrarian, Baba Lekki had boarded a mass transit “danfo” bus at Oshodi after an all night carousal with the intention of linking up with Okon at Freedom Park. But the one chance boys had other ideas.

    The old savant sensed major trouble once he entered the bus and was immediately hemmed in by two burly ruffians who looked like characters from the outer margins of hell. As soon as the rickety bus flew past the Ikorodu Road loop without making a detour, Baba Lekki knew that he was in for a hard time.

    “Awusu billahi!!!” the old codger grunted in a gesture of false religious outrage. A lady who had been monitoring the awful developments with trepidation suddenly screamed.

    “Driver, na Ojota I say I dey go!! I no dey go dem Oworo”, she wailed.

    “Shut up. Whether na Ojota or na Oguta, you don reach Golgotha”, the driver jeered.

    “Bring out all your phones, money and ATM cards”, one of the thugs shouted. Everybody started complying in fright. When it came to Baba Lekki’s turn, the old rebel brought out an ancient pen and pre-historic reading glasses.

    “Wetin be dis yeye nonsense? Stupid old man, if you dey joke, make you stop am”, the mad ruffian screamed as everybody cowered in terror.

    “I no get phone, but I get Kalamu and Molubi”—ancient Yoruba words for pen and glasses— the old contrarian whimpered .

    “Bad Fish, wetin the old Yoruba fool dey say? Giam one dirty slap for me.” The driver ordered. As the impudent fellow made to comply, Baba Lekki sprang with surprising agility and the hand froze in mid-air. “Eeeeewo! Aisiwo lumi. Igbe o l’egun sugbon enite gbodo tiro”, the old man burst into torrid incantation.

    “Chairman, I no fit bring down dem hand again”, the foolish fellow whimpered. At this point, one of the burly ruffians hemming the old man attempted to twist his right hand from behind, but remembering the tricks he had learnt from  Alimi Yopayopa, the famed Ibadan magician, Baba Lekki puffed like an adder and the hand came off  clean from the shoulder joint.

    “Oga, oga him hand dey my hand, him hand dey for my hand!!!”, the poor fellow cried and began pissing in his trousers.

    “Idiot, give me back that hand now now”, Baba Lekki thundered, grabbed his hand and put it back without any effort. At this point, the driver who had been monitoring the weird drama through the mirror suddenly brought the bus to a screeching halt.

    “Baba, we no dey go again”, the hooligan stammered, shivering with fright and premonition.

    “But me I dey go!” Baba Lekki thundered.

    “Where you dey go sir make we drop you?” the crook mumbled disjointedly.

    “I dey go meet Oduduwa. I get meeting with dem Oranmiyan, dem Agboniregun, dem Ogedengbe, dem Lisabi Agbongbon, dem Basorun Ogunmola and dem Balogun Ogunsigi. This nonsense must stop immediately. Make you come chop no be say make you come chop off our head”, the old man growled. At this point, the driver and his criminal accomplices jumped out of the bus and fled in different directions.

     

  • Muhammad Ali and the invention of boxing

    Muhammad Ali and the invention of boxing

    What would the world have been without its geniuses and exceptional talents? Human history would have been a dull monotony of uninspiring facts. Humanity itself would have been gravely endangered by its sheer ordinariness and the unmitigated evil of banality. Civilization owes its dazzling triumphs over nature, its remarkable strides towards self-actualization to these gifted game-changers. Without them, the world would have been a poorer place indeed.

    These extraordinary men and women worked so hard at their game that you would think their life depended on it. In most instances, it actually did. They can be an uncomfortable troubling reality; a fearsome nuisance. Simply because they rupture reality as we know it, or challenge conventional norms and established practice as routinely perceived, they are often subject to hardship, persecution and even the occasional violent death.

    The often fatal contradiction between visionary genius and apprehensive society was succinctly put by the late American writer, John Kennedy Toole himself echoing another major contrarian, Jonathan Swift. Toole should have known. After unsuccessfully hawking the manuscript of his novel to various publishers for eleven years, the poor chap committed suicide only to be posthumously lionized and feted in absentia by American society. According to him: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, the dunces are all in confederacy against him”. (A Confederacy of Dunces).

    Human nature is naturally and stupendously wasteful. The oceanic plenitude of time and the sheer prodigality of human possibilities allow for this relentless wastage of human and other resources. But somehow, we always manage to come back to our senses and pay handsomely for the initial error of judgement. At the end of it all, the sacrifices of genius are appreciated by a grateful and contrite humanity and they assume their rightful place in the pantheon of heroes.

    This past weekend, the world said goodbye to one of such extraordinary people. The human race stood still as Mohammad Ali exchanged mortality for immortality. It was a parting reserved for kings and the very greatest of the human breed. The man famously known as the Louisville Lip would have been nodding in bemused acknowledgement. Supremely self-confident, self-irony was a stranger to him. For decades, he had shouted himself hoarse from the roof top that he was the greatest . Now, wasn’t he?  And yet he was just a boxer, or was he?

    Unarguably the greatest boxer of all time, the former Cassius Clay was also one of the most serially endowed personalities of the epoch: a poet marked by genius, a talented dramatist and a gifted orator. Had he given much thought and time to it, Ali would have been an extraordinary political practitioner. Like his beloved country, the 1960 Olympics Light Heavyweight Champion and three times Heavyweight Champion of the world was a master of the art of ceaseless self-renewal and creative explorer of the limits of human possibilities in punitive exertions.

    Mohammad Ali invented modern boxing by reinventing the ancient art of fistic confrontation.  Before him, boxing was a mere blood sports of two men pummeling each other unto death on a blood splattered canvas. With him, it became a game of refined violence and consummate intelligence   combining stunning physical coordination with acute mental awareness. It was the invention of total boxing: bobbing and weaving with your fists, your tongue, your eyes, your legs and your brains. The lion may be stronger than Androcles but Androcles is smarter. The brain is mightier than brawns.

    Here is one of God’s gifts to humanity. We leave it to the authority of Norman Mailer, the great American writer and a boxing aficionado himself, who once dumped Gore Vidal on a pile of pudding in a nasty spat. Mailer wrote two great books on Mohammed Ali’s epic duels. According to him, these fistic contentions could no longer be described as boxing. They were gladiatorial chess enacted at the highest and most refined level of human intelligence.

    If Mohammad Ali had left it at that, he would still have made the galaxy of avatars as one of the most extraordinary prize fighters of all time. But Ali was much more than a boxer. He was a moral genius and supreme political hero who proudly and stoutly refused to follow the American dominant collective to do evil, and at a time when it was particularly dangerous and feckless to do so. In doing so, the poor nigger of Louisville, who was neither a card-carrying intellectual nor a professional political philosopher, redefined the very concept of modern citizenship and its obligations to a fumbling and faltering super-security state.

    Nobody ought to have doubted Ali’s sterling patriotism and intense nationalism. He ate America and breathed America. At the 1960 Olympics Games where he took the gold medal barely out of High School, the then Cassius Clay let it be known to everybody within and without earshot that he did it for his beloved country. According to eyewitnesses, for two weeks of the games, the boy from Kentucky State wore his gold medal as a badge of honour and affection for his country.

    Half a decade later, the Lip of Louisville had gone on to spectacular fame and fortune as the undisputed Heavyweight Champion of the world with the uncanny knack for predicting when his opponent would fall and managing in the process to dump the monstrous mobster, Sonny Liston, on the canvas twice. A boxing superstar had arrived at the American supermarket.

    For the first Liston fight, Ali was a rank outsider by 7-1. Everybody thought that the menacing hulk with a fearsome reputation as a doyen and denizen of the American under-world was going to take the loquacious fellow apart and make a mince meat of him. Even Ali’s own handlers had failed to organize a victory party. They probably thought that if there was going to be a gathering at all, it would probably be an all night vigil at Ali’s hospital bedside praying for his survival.

    But something was beginning to happen to boxing as they all knew it. It was no longer a duel of brute force but an imaginative tour de force of elaborate bluff and bluster; a cerebral game in which the opponent is first psychologically destroyed before being physically and clinically dismantled. It was no longer about bare knuckle physical savagery and joyous bloodletting but a triumph of refined mind over vulgar strength. The wildest animal can be tamed and domesticated by superior human intelligence.

    But if this was Ali’s hour of gold, it was also America’s hour of lead—to borrow from the title of Charles Lindbergh memorable memoir. An ethical and moral lacuna had opened up in God’s own country. The Vietnam War was raging and consuming everything. The nation found itself in a double bind. The IQ requirement for enlistment was lowered and Ali became eligible for war service to his nation. A draft was issued.

    Ali chose to fight rather than to flee, risking everything in the process. Ali flatly refused to be drafted to war on the ground of being a conscientious objector. The uppity upstart has finally got his comeuppance, or so it seemed. Tempers were inflamed along racial lines in America. Revulsion against the great prize fighter rose and Ali was summarily stripped of his title and banished to the dungeon of the unworthy. He became an object of hate-filled messages.

    But the great boxer was not going to be fazed by all this. He had faced greater hostility in the ring and triumphed. To those who saw him as a traitor and draft dodger, Ali famously retorted: “I ain’t got no problem with them Vietcong. Them don’t call me nigger”. It was a mortal rebuff and moral reproach to an America that has failed to face its own inner demons while seeking to lord it over other nations.

    Like the doughty and redoubtable fighter that he was, Ali fought on, losing so much but gaining global respect and admiration for his heroic stance. He had become a pariah in a country he loved and admired so much. His inability to practise his trade caused him so much trauma and private pains. But after an epic legal slugfest the American Supreme Court eventually ruled in his favour.

    There is as yet no perfect human society. We must give it to America that it is a land of ceaseless self-surpassing and unrelenting self-interrogation which allow it to come to term with its own moral absurdities. It is a wonderful trick for national rejuvenation. Yet in the particular case of Mohammad Ali, there are those who argue that the damage had already been done, that he was only allowed back into the ring after he was past his glorious prime and after his  superhuman reflexes had been dulled by humiliation and adversity.

    This is neither here nor there. For it can also be argued that it was the memory of injustice and humiliation that allowed Ali to summon deep reserves of courage and resilience when they mattered most and against the physical ferocity of stronger opponents leaving us with classics of human exertion such as the “rumble in the jungle” and “thrilla in Manila”. Ali showed us the elastic limits of the human capacity to absorb physical punishment. It was ritual suicide by installment.

    Ali had taken enough blows to fell even a stubborn elephant. But for thirty two years, he bore the resultant affliction with great dignity and Olympian pride. It was his longest bout and it showed in the charred hulk of a once magnificent physique. When the hour of the grim reaper finally came, it was a grateful nation that mourned and buried one of its greatest sons ever. Ali had died the way he would have wished: an all-American hero and a global icon. He didn’t need to tell us that. He had earned his spurs. Human beauty has triumphed over human bestiality.

  • Now, a Persian parable for Nigeria

    Remember the Persian Empire? Apart from the Oriental splendor and magnificent riches, it was a land of great emperors and first rate royal fighters and eagle-eyed archers who could take enemies out from a mile. But it was also a land of militant rebels and redoubtable nay-sayers that could fight to the last man without yielding ground in a fiery enactment of the “Masada Complex” of Israeli soldiers. Masada was a site of historic carnage where the ancient Israelite warriors fought to the last man rather than surrender.

    The mighty empire-building British forces learnt never to toy with Afghan tribesmen. They fight with the ferocity of affronted ants. Twice in the nineteenth century, they were trapped in the notorious Kyber Pass and routed by Afghan forces, leaving the odd straggler to tell the story of memorable mayhem. Two hundred years later, the Afghan warriors are still at it after seeing off virtually anybody who dared to interfere in their internal affairs. For almost two decades, they have been involved in a messy and nasty dog-fight with the Americans. They regroup with greater resolve after they have been dislodged. Let the top dog beware of the gutsy underdog.

    And the fable was told of a mighty Persian emperor who had been waging a fierce campaign to subdue a rag-tag rebel force. The entire landscape was crimson with blood and gore and the battle field was littered with the dead and the dying. A temporary truce had to be arranged to evacuate the quick and the dead. During the lull in fighting, the Persian emperor rode on a chariot of fire and fury to parley with the rebel commander in his field headquarters.

    “So, my friend, why do you fight so hard?” the puzzled emperor asked the intrepid and hardy rebel commander.

    “For loot of course. What else is there to fight for? “, the rebel fighter responded poker-faced.

    “I see”, the great emperor grunted with fiendish relish.

    “And if I may ask why does your majesty also fight so hard?” the rebel commander pressed.

    “I fight for honour. There is nothing else to fight for in life”, the emperor blurted with a wary countenance.

    “In that case your majesty, we are both fighting for what we don’t have”, the rebel chieftain growled and then ordered the battle to be rejoined after honorably allowing the emperor a safe passage.

  • The President in their Labyrinth

    The President in their Labyrinth

    In his dying moments, trapped and ensnared in a maze of intrigues and subterfuges he has woven round himself and his people, Simon Bolivar, the great Latin American revolutionary hero aka the liberator, was known to have exclaimed: “How am I ever going to get out of this labyrinth?”. So close to his chest did the liberator play his cards that nobody could predict his next move or military gamble. One of his aides was known to have quipped: “only my master knows what my master is thinking about.”

    In a brilliant fictional recreation titled The General in his Labyrinth, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the late Colombian master of magical realism, has done gripping justice to the last days of Simon Bolivar. What is important is to note that there are labyrinths and there are labyrinths. For the trapped it is mandatory to find a way out of them. But while some labyrinths are entirely self-made or self-spun, a case of the trapper being entrapped by his own wiles and subterfuges or being finally manipulated by his own manipulations, some labyrinths are woven by a constellation of political forces in their economic, spiritual and structural malevolence which leaves the entrapped floundering in hopeless and futile audacity.

    General Mohammadu Buhari is trapped in their labyrinth. It is a severe, mortal maze which is not entirely of his own making, but one to which his political failings have contributed significantly.  This is how the Nigerian presidency must appear to clinical and dispassionate onlookers at the moment. It is obviously easier to find your way out of a labyrinth of your own making, but certainly not out of a maze unfurled by others. To start with, the initiative is not yours. You are merely reacting to forces that may be one or two steps ahead. The Buhari presidency has already lost one or two of these epic battles of will and wits. But how did we get to this sorry pass in an atmosphere of revolutionary clamour for change?

    It is obvious that the nation is going through a very difficult phase and nothing is guaranteed, not even deep, enduring institutional change. As the first anniversary of the Buhari administration stole upon the country last week, it was obvious that all was not well. There was an atmosphere of dolorous dismay and quiet desperation. Even the much awaited presidential speech, if it was not exactly a damp squib, did not do much to galvanize the nation into greater resolve or mend its broken spirit.

    As the harsh and hostile economic realities finally dissolve and evaporate the remnants of the old Nigerian middle class and its lower substratum, there is much bitterness and anger in the land while the old lower classes welcome back their absconding siblings with open smiling arms. The child who says his father did not take his chance will soon find out that there are no chances left to be taken but an illusionist fantasia in the cannibal casino.

    But in our misdirected anger and the orchestrated vendetta against the Buhari administration, it is important to keep our eyes focused on the ball. There are two articles of faith on which this column still stands. First is that regime change for the nation was mandatory in the context of the kleptomaniac flailing and floundering of the Jonathan administration. Second is that owing to the structural contingency imposed on the nation, there was no one else to turn to in the circumstances we  found ourselves except the retired general from Daura.

    Anybody who believes otherwise no matter the highfalutin rhetoric is a purveyor of ethnic, religious and economic irrationality and an enemy of political rationality and the immanent logic that undergirds the development of human society. But this being a democratic set up, everybody is entitled to his opinion. The only thing is that you cannot win back what you lost in the arena of democratic contention by a resort to violent demonstration and the minatory blackmail of other groups.

    Nigerians may bemoan the electoral fate which has foisted  a seventy four year old retired general who may well be past his prime and who ruled last about thirty years earlier on them, but this is a question for the Nigerian selectorate. The selectorate select and the electorate elect willy-nilly. Thrice in his younger and more vibrant prime, Buhari offered himself for national services and thrice the Nigerian selectorate checkmated him. It was only when they had their back to the wall and revolutionary anarchy beckoned  that they relented just  like they did with him thirty three years earlier. But on both occasions, they made sure they put the politically challenged general in their labyrinth. It is not a long leash.

    What Nigerians should bemoan is the contradiction between structural contingency and human agency which has made it possible for a few individuals to determine the political destiny of the nation. Oligopolistic politics is the politics of oligarchies and not meant for average folks who are nothing but spectators at a play of giants. In the process of misruling and misdirecting the nation, the political oligarchs have acquired enormous economic clout, and they are not going to let go easily.

    Such has been the epic structural gridlock that by the time the political divinations and anti-democractic diviners come up with their short list, the best and the brightest, the most qualified to rule Nigeria in the age of rampaging globalization and knowledge explosion, would have been casually eliminated. And those who are left, haunted by the trauma of ancestral memory or the pathology of personal suffering can only rule with a persecution complex so bitter and damaging that it must affect their judgement.

    The structural constraints and contingency which put a president in an iron labyrinth can also be seen in the existing dominant party formations in the country. These political agglomerations are not parties in the real organic sense of the word but special project platforms in power formation. But they often work. This is the reality since the advent of the military. Thus in the Second Republic the NPN was formed as a broad national coalition to ease off the military from power.

    Once the NPN briskly unraveled, its military patrons stepped in to prevent a bloody challenge to the dominant power formation in all its dire consequences. The clairvoyant Augustus Meredith Adisa Akinloye could not have put it better when he noted that there were only two parties in the country: the military and their civilian subalterns.  General Babangida’s Transition Parties, SDP and NRC, brilliantly dismissed as government parastatals by Chief Anthony Enahoro, perished with the transition programme after acquiescing in the annulment of the best presidential election ever held in the nation.

    In the case of General Abacha’s transition, the parties famously described as the five fingers from a leprous hand did not even make any pretence to neutrality and independence. They existed at the mercy of the prickly despot and were there merely to facilitate his metamorphosis into civilian dictator. They died with the despot and when General Abdulsalaam Abubakar tried to resuscitate them in his maiden broadcast to the nation, he was swiftly countermanded by those who put him there and he changed tack accordingly.

    Consequently, the PDP was conceived like its old forebear the NPN: a broad coalition of Nigerian political heavyweights that could guarantee post-military stability and peace even at the expense genuine democracy and development.  For some time, the PDP stayed the course, relentlessly chopping off the head of their party chairmen until they lost concentration and forgot why they were there. In a self-deluding tip at political equity they brought a power neophyte who brought the house crashing on everybody.

    Regime change became inevitable. In the past, it was through the mechanism of military intervention. But since military rule was no longer feasible, a coalition of contraries had to be cobbled together to ease the PDP out of power. Unlike the PDP which is an organic formation of the ruling class, the APC is an antagonistic platform of mutually exclusive political tendencies brought together for the purpose of regime change. Once that purpose is achieved, there is no unifying vision or bonding experience to fall back upon. If care is not taken, the party’s tenure in federal power may be much shorter than imagined. Perhaps that is the whole idea, anyway.

    General Buhari may be finding out to his peril that unlike military rule in which command and authority are clearly delineated, civilian rule is a different kettle of fish. Khaki no be Guinea brocade or Atiku fabric for that matter. In the military, you know where the enemy is or where he is likely to come from. But in the cloak and dagger world of real political war, the enemy is in bed and already embedded. Having failed to stamp his authority on the centrifugal forces in his party early enough and having lost the senate to contrary forces, the president has found himself in the labyrinth of intimate adversaries.

    Last week, the Turaki of Adamawa, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, opened another front for the president by lending his considerable weight to the clamour for an urgent restructuring of the country. It is easy and tempting to dismiss these increasingly strident calls as mere red-herring or opportunistic political gaming. But they find resonance in an increasing number of Nigerians who believe that this is the only solution to the political shenanigans which have hobbled Nigeria’s development and stifled the diverse energies and creative spirit of its diverse people.

    President Buhari appears to be unmoved and unimpressed by the cheek of it all. While he should be commended for heroically battling the scourge of corruption and for restoring the sanity of the Nigerian state, the reality on ground shows that the unease in at least two significant sections of the country coupled with the international and local conspiracy to defang his economic nationalism are beginning to chip away at his statist and commandist escutcheon. If these loud rumblings were to find traction in a Yoruba middle class already embittered by the prospects of economic vaporization, it may put the entire change project and its south West phalanx in acute political jeopardy indeed.

    Going forward, the president needs to go back to the drawing board. The creeping militarization of the polity draws the army into needless and unwise civil commotions. This is the time for the president to commence a rigorous study of this difficult country in its political minutiae and economic, religious and ethnic particularities and peculiarities. For starters, rather than throw the last conference into the archives as he vowed to do, the president should gather a group of wise citizens who will study all the conferences and advise him on the way forward accordingly.