The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • Okon unveils a harsh austerity regime

    As the grueling economic meltdown holds everybody in a nasty bear hug, as the bitter reality of a nation  in economic recession begins to sink in, as tempers flare on the streets, it was a dejected and despondent snooper that arrived home last Friday to find the whole house in dire darkness. Meanwhile Okon was lurking somewhere with an eighteenth century torchlight feebly discharging grey yellowish rays. To compound matters, a drunken and triumphant Baba Lekki was regaling Okon with snippets of his lucky escape from a vehicle commandeered by one-chance boys.

    “Oga eku aiki na. Welcome to the Dark Age and say hello to the Dark City Brothers. When blind overseer come jam blind seer, na katakata be dat one”, the old crook jibed.  Snooper ignored the crazy old man, but he was relentless in his pursuit.

    “Oga, dem one chance boy come sit on my belly and I come shit. Dem oga come say na dat shit I go whack when dem reach Golgotha”, the old man cried. Snooper ignored him again and quickly moved to contain the mad theatre .

    “Okon, why is there no light? And what happened to the generator that I just serviced?” Snooper screamed in alarm.

    “Ha oga dem generator com degenerate again. No fuel. Diesel today dem dey sell for 180 naira for one cup”, Okon lamented.

    “Oh my God!! Why am I in the same country with this kind of people?” snooper growled.

    “So oga we  go dey manage with one hour light at nine o clock sharp sharp. Abi na for diesel you wan spend dem pension money?” Okon drawled. Shocked by the mad boy’s temerity, snooper exploded in volcanic distemper.

    “Shut up idiot! What is your business with that, or is it your father that pays me pension?” snooper shouted.

    “Okon, leave the fool. He will soon return to his village”, Baba Lekki sneered.

    “Oga, but I get one solution. You know dem tiny tiny insects dat dey give light for night? Dem dey sell dem for market. One bag na one thousand. Dem call dem solar insects”, Okon offered.

    “ Ha, na dat one dem Yoruba people dey call tanatana. I don dey farm dem too for Okokomaiko. Okon I go bring one basket of dem glow worm make you put am for him room make dem insects bite him blokos well well. Sebi him dey complain say no light, na dis one go remove him yeye pajamas”, Baba lekki hollered with sadistic relish.

    “And oga make una no vex sah”, Okon began with biting sarcasm. “From now on no milk, no sugar, no tea, no egg , no bread and no meat, you go dey manage camel milk, garden egg, cassava bread and dem elephant ear mushroom. I go put plenty locust beans”.

    “So, the essential commodities of the eighties have now become inessential commodities?” snooper lamented aloud.

    “You see stupid man? All that was bourgeois palliatives for an over-pampered elite. Just drink akamu with fried red ants. It is good for your libido . Good night”, Baba lekki sniggered and exited with legless bravura.

     

  • A Congolese allegory for Nigeria

    A Congolese allegory for Nigeria

    It is a year ago that the Buhari administration came on the scene. It is obviously a mixed bag. But as a gesture of charity and strategic goodwill, this column will suspend judgement to reflect on the harsh economic realities facing Nigerians at the moment and the consequences for the social fabric of the nation. At this point, recession is inevitable. When you combine wholesale looting of the treasury with global collapse of oil revenues and the lack of a clear economic blueprint, it is a perfect economic storm.

    Human beings, irrespective of race or civilization, behave very much the same way in the face of unimaginable social stress and looming economic genocide. The difference between us and our animal cousins lies in the power and efficacy of the institutions we have put in place to humanize us as we evolve away from the state of nature.  When these institutions collapse, we are no better than foraging and rampaging animals.

    There are times when human societies reach the same social and cultural cul de sac via different routes. So, has se dPbrouiller  as practiced in Mobutu’s Zaire finally berthed in this land? Arguably, se dPbrouiller is the summit of human corruption. In the face of social annihilation, human beings resort to strange and creative strategies of survival and the primal law of the jungle. There is no paddy in the jungle. Everybody is for himself. So severe is the degree of human alienation from self and society that social cannibalism reigns supreme.  You consume others before you get consumed by the other. It is as simple as that.

    It is important at his point to know what Mobutu and the old Congo are all about.  Joseph Mobutu, lately Mobutu Sese Seko, aka the cock that leaps from hen to hen in the barn yard, ruled his country with an iron fist for forty two years and presided over the most sustained and primitive case of state looting ever known to humankind before the advent of its Nigerian cousin . By the time Mobutu was chased out of his Gbadolite paradise, the old Congo had become a charred hulk of a former nation. So terrible had things become that even his trusted body guards peppered the plane carrying the absconding master thief with bullets.

    For a nation so richly endowed, Mobutu left behind only a few diamond stones and his soiled diapers. He was incontinent and had already reached the terminal stage of prostate cancer.  The enduring image one had of Mobutu was of a truculent and implacable despot, his body completely ravaged by cancer, being helped to his feet by a frail Nelson Mandela on a frigate off the Atlantic coast where his exit from power was being negotiated with a disdainful Kabila. After finishing off his country, Mobutu was not ready to let go.

    Nigeria and Congo are often compared. In terms of land mass, both are giant colonial contraptions whimsically and willfully carved out from the heart of Africa by the colonial masters. The two African mammoths are among the most richly endowed nations on earth, with Nigeria’s mineral wealth the stuff of legend while Congo has been described as “a huge country ridiculously endowed with natural resources”. But both are prone to man-made misfortunes and human disasters in the guise of rulers.

    Although Nigeria has by and large been able to avoid or negotiate the steep descent into chaos and ungovernability that have characterized much of post-independence Congo, the end-result appears to have been pretty much the same thing: shattered nations, collapsed state institutions, the dehumanization of the social order, weak and divided political classes and up-ended treasuries in both instances. It is useful to point out that rather than being a lone star brigand, Mobutu also had accomplices who superintended the industrial scale pillage with him.

    Nigeria’s luck— if it may be so called— is that it is powered along by strong, competing and countervailing centres of power, a micro-pluralism of terror-deterrents if you like, which makes it impossible for one person or a power group to rule the country in perpetuity or to hold on to power against the wish of other power centres. All Nigeria’s former rulers, military and civilian alike, who have tried to dominate the nation in perpetuity or to illegally extend their tenure have met their political Waterloo in the process. If this makes a unified elite and national consensus impossible, it also makes the prospects of permanent despotism improbable.

    Contrary to the opinion of those who say that structure does not matter, Joseph Mobutu benefited and profited immensely from the structural logjam of the Congolese nation. Conceived originally as a vast fiefdom of slave labour, it has been forcibly transformed into a nation-state without any mediating political institution worth the name. In the event, ever since the Portuguese invaded the old Kongo kingdom and dispersed its hapless inhabitants to the new colony of Brazil through the slave port of Luanda, the place has suffered from one form of harsh centralized and authoritarian rule or another.

    Towards the end of the seventh decade of the nineteenth century, King Leopold of Belgium seized the Congolese rump and turned it to a colonial plantation for the expropriation of rubber resources for the emergent auto industry of the western world. His word was iron law and such was the Stone Age severity with which he ruled that at the end of it all, a quarter of the entire population had lost their life or limb. Those who refused to work or were thought to be malingering had their hands summarily hacked off. Such was the fear of the White One and the terror struck into the heart of the populace that the state in its suffused ubiquity and malignancy became known as Bula Matari or the crusher of rocks.

    Joseph Mobutu, a cruel natural enforcer and master of political intrigues, who had been de-enlisted after conscription from the army where he rose to the position of a master sergeant, had his work made easy for him by the institutional chaos left by the departing colonial masters. The son of a former maid who was escaping conscription into the harem of a local chief and a cook, he was physically imposing and gifted with the superior intelligence to dominate his environment. In the brutal world of Congolese politics, he soon learnt to put his mental endowments and mesmerizing charisma to use.

    He was originally an ally and collaborator of Patrice Lumumba who promoted him and returned him to the army as a full colonel. Lumumba himself had had barely four years of formal education. But in the brutal world of political duplicity, Mobutu soon learnt to make hay for himself. In the violent power play that erupted shortly after independence, Mobutu sided with President Joseph Kasavubu and quietly connived at the summary execution of Lumumba by Belgian troops.

    In 1965, Mobutu sacked Kasavubu and thus began a reign of terror and thievery which was to last a whopping forty two years until 1997 when Kabila’s troops arrived at the gates of Kinshasa. Mobutu became so stupendously wealthy that he often loaned his country money to pay workers’ salary. He was so calm and cool about it that everybody thought that it was normal and natural. Money flowed in from the west and priceless minerals flowed out of the Congo. When the western patrons complained, Mobutu quietly and politely told them to shut up because he had learnt his trade from them. The chicanery and duplicity eventually cost the French the life of their ambassador in Kinshasa.

    But by then, the social, political and economic fabric of the nation had been completely destroyed by Mobutu’s rule. The culture of se debrouiller had firmly taken root in Zaire. Translated rather roughly from French, se debrouiller means to manage or to evade suffering. This was the common refrain among Zairians at the height of Mobutu’s misrule. Nobody was being paid and nobody was complaining. Everybody was managing. The wages of fake labour is false currency.

    But all government property gradually managed to vanish. Even the fittings in public places disappeared. Meanwhile, Mobutu himself” managed” with periodic Concorde flights, a barber imported daily from Paris, twenty eight palaces, specially farmed giant maggots washed down with pink champagne popped at nine every morning and a luxury yacht moored off the Congo from which Mobutu contemplated the plight of his stricken compatriots in sybaritic opulence.

    In what was arguably the most explosive expression of se debrouiller, Mobutu was known to have been furious with a soldier who complained of not having been paid. Pointing at the gun in the hand of the enlisted man, Mobutu asked him what other salary he was expecting. There is nothing as terrible as state corruption because it infects everything in the society. The glue that binds humanity and society together has come unstuck; mutual trust has evaporated. Long after the actual disease might have disappeared, the pathologies remain.

    Human societies often arrive at the same point of social perdition through different routes. After decades of misrule, there are firm indications that something worse than the Congolese plague has arrived in Nigeria. Trust between and among classes has completely broken down. Everybody is openly cheating everybody. Intimate enemies abound as spouses kill their spouses. The police routinely murder the unpoliced. Your employee or employer is looking for an opportunity to put you away. Ethnic groups that have existed in mutual goodwill and affection for centuries slay each other at the slightest provocation. Public utilities are sabotaged at short notice by disaffected nationals. Hell is here with us, and it is not a respecter of anybody.

    You cannot plant cassava and expect to harvest yam. In the end, not even Mobutu was spared the horror of it all. At the end of it all, he was a wretched and pathetic figure, swindled by everybody including the importers of his choice champagne, his accountants whom he employed to hide his loot, his flying crew, his domestic details, his concubines, members of his elite Presidential guard and members of his own family, particularly his own son, the bestial and nefarious Kongulu Mobutu who had personally ordered the execution of the best general in the army, Kyolo Mahele.

    But human societies have incredible regenerative capacity. What we are currently witnessing in Nigeria may well be dying throes of an old order, or the pathologies of an active ailment. Seeds must completely decay before new plants can sprout. Whatever it is, this tale of Black man’s inhumanity to fellow Black people is an engrossing allegory for contemporary Nigeria.

  • Okon named hero of democracy

    As Democracy Day approached, a rogue civil society group known as Calamity for State Robbers with offices in Orile Iganmu has named Okon as one of its heroes of democracy. Snooper was put in a terrible dilemma. If one put a stop to the endless stream of well wishers and idle political lunchers knocking at the door to congratulate the boy, it may be misconstrued. How the mad boy gained such traction remains a source of mystery even to snooper. Many of these civil society groups are crazy scammers and Okon might have paid through his nose to have his name mentioned. When he showed his certificate to Baba Lekki, the old contrarian snorted.

    “You see, sebi you say dem people dey Iganmu, abi? Na dat one dem Yoruba people dey call igan mu se”   But Okon was undeterred, leveraging his new found star status for a controversial radio interview. Okon wasted no time and hostilities commenced straightaway.

    “High Chief Okon, congratulations on your recent award”, the interview began.

    “Point of incorrection!” Okon screamed. “I be higher chief now. I no wan any Yoruba tortoise come mess around with Calabar title. I dey higher pass dem Otunba. Even Yoruba mechanic for Matori dey answer dat one, you hear me?”

    “Okay, Higher Chief Okon, it is the seventeenth anniversary of democracy. It is obviously better than military rule, isn’t it?” the second interviewer opened with a cunning glare.

    “Bia, Yoruba soup mouse, you wan trick me? We thank God dem soja don leave patapata. Make dem type never come back again. But dis civilian one he get as he be. When dem soja dey thief, na only dem oga patapata but this one everybody dey thief yanfunyanfun. I been dey wonder why dem money never finish, but I hear say he don finish so we dey one chance  motor for obodo”, Okon sneered.

    “Sir, how do you see the last strike by the Nigerian Labour Congress?”

    “You see dat dem labour leader, Wabba abi wetin him dey call himself? He come remind me of dem book I read for primary school for Itigidi, na Wanba the Jester dem dey call am”. Okon snorted.

    “How do you mean sir?”the interviewer pressed.

    “Wetin you mean by wetin I mean? Dem foolish labour people say make we strike, I strike well well. I come put my oga under dem house arrest. I no give am food and I no even give am water. Dem come say dem no dey strike again. Na so dem dey do all dem time. Next time when dem say strike, na dem head I go strike well well”, Okon snarled.

    “Mr Okon, what is your view on the menace of herdsmen?”, one interviewer asked with deadpan daring.

    “Ha ha yeye man. You wan put me for trouble with dem Daura man, abi? He get time like dat when dem Kanu Ibo boy dey blab him mouth and him dey yabi everybody. Kai dem don forget dat one for Guje and him come grow Nebu beard. So, I no sabi menace and I no sabi dem cattle people,but I sabi say Efik people no dey drive dem cattle”, the mad boy crowed.

    “Sir, one last question. Chief Obasanjo said that President Buhari does not know much about politics and economy. What is your view?”.

    “You see, baba don old well well past bed time and him head no correct again. Wetin himself sabi for politiks and money matter? But him sabi two-fighting and teeth-fighting pass Buhari and na for dat area dem go finish dem Buhari man”, Okon grunted as he dismissed the interviewers with an imperious swagger.

  • The perils of rogue westernization

    The perils of rogue westernization

    Great events often steal upon a people virtually unnoticed.It is when they gather speed and momentum that we begin to wonder what has hit us. This past fortnight has been quite dramatic in its possibilities for the nation. Once againwe are on the cusp of unusual developments.

    Last week began innocuously enough. But by midweek, all illusions of peace and calm have been shattered. Upon all the crippling economic burdens the average Nigerian is forced to bear, a totally unforeseen and unprecedented hike in petroleum pricing was slammed on the nation with the deadly ferocity of a military ambush.

    It all seems so unreal and bizarre in the extreme. All of a sudden, a governmentwhich has bonded so intimately with the poor and injured of the land, a government which has advertised its compassion for the injury inflicted on Nigerians by their ruling class, bared its knuckles in a manner reminiscent of harsh, authoritarian military rule.

    Yet in a strange reversal of role, it was the government that began playing the injured, pretending to be hurt that explanations not offered have not been heard. Glum and uncommunicative at best, jumping from one absurdexcuse to the other, with IbeKachikwu levitating on highfalutin techno-speak and the latest petrolese, this is not the finest hour of the administration.

    Is it any wonder, then, that up till this moment and in the face of looming mass alienation, the president has not found the courage to address the nation? At least, the retired general from Daura cannot be accused of great immoral courage. Like all formidable military commanders, the president has retreated behind a wall of silence, secrecy and stealth. But one suspects that the general is personally hurting from this breach of trust and his inability to guarantee the integrity of his own earlier promise.

    But General Buhari needs not obsess about this failure of policy or be fixated on the dent on his honour as an officer and gentleman. There is plenty of opportunity to make up. Government is not about a single capitulation. There is still much hope invested in the Buhari administration as the very last opportunity for this country to get it right after forty years in the wilderness of aborted promise.

    Yet amidst of all this, the divided and polarized Labour Union has ordered a national strike which has turned out a damp squib, shunned and ignored by majority of the workers on whose behalf they claim to be stirring. This is the first time in the history of the country that Labour has been so comprehensively cuckolded by labourers. In effect, the Nigerian Labour Union stands disgraced and demystified.

    It is a disgrace and demystification that has been long in coming. For over thirty years, many of us have been warning our labour aristocrats that the day is coming when the falcon will no longer hearken to the falconer. That day, it seems, is now upon us. For the post-colonial society battered by the rampaging forces of global capitalism, old labour, with its rustic and rusticated conceptual armature, no longer works.

    When labour is not in collusion and conspiracy with the state to break the back of rampart civil society as it was evident in the watershed January 2012 protests, it has turned itself into an enemy of the very workers whose interests it is supposed to protect. For a long time, some of us have argued that what labour needs is not retroactive and reactive protests whose outcome do not make a dent on the plight of workers but an alternative political platform and ideological paradigm which will challenge the ravages of global capitalism in its current stage and particularly in Nigeria.

    But this has fallen on deaf ear. You cannot give what you don’t have. Rotten mango cannot fall very far from the parent tree. The conceptual and intellectual rigour demanded is beyond the ken of the dinosaurs of “up and at ém” struggle.

    The irony t is that with its reformist consciousness and salary increment per protest mind-set, labour exists in a state of antagonistic but paradoxical collusion and complicity with global capitalism and its transnational oligarchs. The masters of the forces of production are even toying with dispensing with human labour altogether.

    With labour added to the casualty list, Nigeria is a post-colonial morgue of dead and dying institutions. All the vital institutions of the state and civil society are either dead or on life-support machine. This is why there is this eerie disorientation in the nation, as if one is walking in a land of living ghosts.

    Unless Nigeria is remade and rebuilt from scratch, we can forget it. The greatest affliction which can befall a people is not the affliction itself but the inability to correctly identify the affliction.  The current crisis about petroleum pricing is not caused by the precipitate removal of the so called subsidy but something more fundamental. It is a classic case of confusing the symptom with the disease.

    In the hallucinatory haze of the terminally diseased, we often reach for whatever we confuse with the nearest pain killer. When Nigeria was fairly well-governed, particularly before the advent of military despotism, we did not hear of subsidy. When there was no run on the naira by a kleptomaniac ruling class and massive corruption compounded by impunity, we did not hear of subsidy.

    Simply put, what is erroneously referred to as subsidy is State levy or government tax on rogue westernization. It is a case of double jeopardy and a lose-lose situation for the teeming Nigerian underclass. But pray what is rogue westernization?

    Nigeria was never conceived as an organic country but as a trading and retailing outlet of the western imperium. Till date, the nation has retained a proud fidelity to the founding charter. Deliberately peopled by a political elite organically divorced from the aspirations and yearnings of a true nation, a political elite unable to come together to found a new authentic nation, aping the worst aspects of western capitalism without being able to draw on the inner strengths and resources of the new nation, Nigeria is a disaster always waiting to happen.

    In the event, Nigeria has come up with national institutions which are genetic hybrids combining the worst aspects of western societies with the most pernicious carry-over from traditional institutions. They can hardly pass muster.

    Worse, and a result of the programmed inferiority complex of our elite, we hanker after western goods that we do not produce: from the latest cars, household gadgets and even petroleum products that we ought to be able to produce were this not to be a truly dysfunctional society.

    Yet apart from crude oil, we can hardly sell anything to the west. How can we preserve our foreign reserve and strengthen the value of the naira when we are wedded to frivolities and meretricious fripperies from the west?

    On any typical journey by train from London on a weekend, you are likely to run into one of Her Majesty’s ministers on his way to his constituency clutching his red briefcase and his sandwich. Nigeria does not have a viable rail system or even decent road transportation.

    Meanwhile, our own national and state assemblies as well as other functionaries of the state award themselves humongous salaries and emoluments which have no bearing with the dismal economic realities of the nation. All the mass transportation schemes which they claim to be derivative ameliorations from subsidy removals of the past have ended up as gigantic frauds fuelling inflation and the run on the naira. When will Nigeria produce Nigerians?

    To survive, the government must tax this rogue westernization and petroleum products are the softest targets because of the sheer volume of the racket. Everybody, particularly the poor, must bear the brunt of elite malfeasance.We have now been told with commendable if brutal candour that petroleum prices went up simply because the nation was flat broke.

    At a similar point in his nation’s history, Pandit Nehru decreed that if India cannot produce its own fabric or develop its own indigenous car, then the people can trek and walk naked. After mongering platitudes about self-reliance and the need to stimulate indigenous production, Nigerian leaders usually relapse into the despotic opulence of village tyrants. The people take their cue from the rulers.

    The argument for the removal of petroleum subsidy is solely conducted at the level of synchronic manifestation of reality without any conceptual linkage to its diachronic and futuristic dimensions. It is all about where we are at the moment rather than where we are coming from and where we are headed. The faulty answer is embedded in the faulty question.

    This inability to totalize facts is a conceptual subterfuge which allows the mind to avoid uncomfortable political truths and it is the bane of western empiricist epistemology and all the disciplines derived from it, particularly modern Economics which often accounts for their lack of dialectical rigour and delinquent simplification of complex reality. This is perhaps the worst intellectual legacy our colonial masters bequeathed to us.

    It is this endemic crisis of nationhood and rogue westernization which often manifest in the periodic removal of so called subsidy to much national anguish. As long as there is unregulated consumption of western goods and as long as corruption is backed by impunity, there will always be a run on the naira and the subsidy trap will open once again. Once the naira hits 500 to one single dollar, the subsidy experts will be back again to collect their scalp until we reach Weimar Republic and its worthless currency.

    This crisis which has been long in coming has now developed its local pathologies and may no longer be amenable to a national cure-all prescription but a creative and visionary restructuring of the entire political architecture of the nation. We have now reached a point where what is tonic for a particular nationality and its local economy may be toxic to another.

    In retrospect, it is doubtful whetherPandit Nehru, with all his heroism and considerable political clout, could have achieved the grand Hindu consensus about the destiny of the new nation if Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the Pakistani militants were still to be part of an amorphous India nation. Colonial India had to be created anew, but in a situation of regrettable mayhem and bloodshed.

    National consensus and cohesion will always elude colonial creations where constituting nationalities retain strong individual identities and a vibrant sense of private destiny within or outside of the superimposed behemoth. Nigeria remains a classic example of this explosive colonial cocktail.

    But it can be made to work, particularly if Nigerian nationalities are willing to surrender this unstated but turbulent sovereignty in exchange for a more creative and cooperative union of fiercely independent nationalities. At no other point in its history has Nigerian been in a greater need of a visionary political genius. The next twelve months will show whether General Buhari is truly the man we have been waiting for, or whether we have to tarry awhile.

     

  • The exit of a star prince

    The exit of a star prince

    As evening approaches, as the final bend in the river of life comes in full view, and as one can see the lone terminus of a long journey, the crowd begins to thin dramatically. On behalf of the surviving members of the Cobra clan of the old University of Ife, snooper mourns the loss of hisboy ,indefatigable lieutenant and comrade in campus combustion, Prince Jimoh Ademola Adeniji-Adele. He was a stellar cub reporter for the Cobra News Agency.

    Some are born princes and some achieve principality. Ademola, aka “Akoke”, was a prince by birth and bearing. There was always something about his geniality, conviviality and genuine humility which reminds one of those remarkable nobility of ancient Yoruba lore. He was a true man of the people.

    Like his late much beloved brother, Sultan Adeniji Adele, who was a star mathematician, Demola was a star pupil scientist entering the old university at the precocious age of sixteen in 1972 and graduating near the top of his Chemical Engineering class five years later in 1977. He could easily have found his niche among Nigeria’s eminent Chemical Engineers, but like his ancestors and illustrious forebears, he chose the vocation of politics and social engineering instead.

    He was particularly outstanding as the Chairman of the Lagos Island Council, a post to which he brought his boundless energy and characteristic gifts of fairness and empathy for the people. Thereafter, as a formidable grassroots organiser and relentless hell-raiser, he played a prominent and heroic role in the struggle to actualize Abiola’s June 12 mandate, suffering harassment and subsequent incarceration in the process. Whenever this turbulent phase of Yoruba history in Nigeria is properly recorded, Ademola would be accorded his due place as one of the avatars of his people.

    In his last years despite failing health and dwindling political opportunities, the scion of Oba MusendikuAdeniji-Adele remained his cheerful, occasionally self-depreciating self often wondering what a top flight Chemical Engineer was doing in the murky political world of hand to hand combat and savage infighting.

    But he was neither daunted nor fazed by the prospects of looming political incapacitation. He remained till the end, a ferocious freedom fighter. Wherever he got whiff of political imbalance or inequity of opportunities, he would be there in the thick of battle often against wiser political calculations and judgement.

    Long after his earthly remains have been interred, this charming prince of Lagos will be remembered as an exemplar of the saying that nobility must have its obligations. Snooper remembers the prince with warmth and affection and for the unfailing civility and courtesy he accorded his former comrade and old editor in chief and mischief till the end. May Allah grant him eternal repose.

     

     

  • A diplomatic kerfuffle from Britain

    A diplomatic kerfuffle from Britain

    it feels like the unkindest cut of all. Many fair-minded Nigerians are aghast. To be sure, the odd political tiff, the occasional diplomatic shindig, is not unusual between a former colony and its former colonial masters. It is in the nature of this thing called international politics. In international relations, there are no permanent coalitions only permanent collusions. A nation is on its own and must fend for itself.

    But even then, there are periods when the handshake goes beyond the elbow, particularly after persistent signals of irritation and disgust.  Coming so soon after The Economist, the influential London magazine, dismissed Nigeria’s former ruler, Goodluck Jonathan, as “an ineffectual buffoon”, this week’s sharp putdown of the nation as “fantastically corrupt” by David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, shows how low our stock has fallen with our former colonial masters.

    The language of diplomacy, not to talk of global statesmanship, is usually polite and coolly understated. But there are moments when the telling tease, the friendly tick off, gives way to the sledge hammer, the severe bareknuckle rap. When a European diplomat to the court of the Russian Czars was asked what he thought the Russians did best, he hesitated for a while and then grunted: “They steal!” General Alexander Haig, an American Secretary of State, once famously dismissed Lord Peter Carrington, the British Foreign Secretary, as a “duplicitous bastard”.

    Phew!!! Snooper’s favourite diplomatic putdown is possibly apocryphal. It was alleged that when a serving American diplomat in Karachi finally met the reclusive, dowdy and unprepossessing spouse of the general who executedZulfikar Ali Bhutto, he crowed: “No wonder, he screws the country instead!!!” Give it at least to Nigeria’s military and civilian rulers, most, if not all of their wives, could have come straight out of a beauty pageant.

    Still, it is important for Nigerians and the policy makers not to allow the import and real message of Cameron’s scarifying shellacking to be lost in the thicket of national displeasure and bitter disappointment. President MohammaduBuhari should be commended for rising heroically to the bait with his barbed retort. Coming on the eve of an official visit to Britain, the insult was in your face, an ego-deflating psychological offensive calculated to give maximum offence.

    To be adjudged corrupt is one thing, but to be condemned as “fantastically corrupt” is not a funny matter at all. It connotes gravity-defying sleaze and irredeemable muck; a world-historic despoliation that is beyond the realm of actual reality; a fairy tale phantasmagoria of stealing which calls into question the very notion of national sanity.

    The Brits are known as the masters of the wry understatement, not given to hyperactive hyperbole. But they are also deadly past masters of the rapier thrust in close diplomatic encounters. That their current leader should reach for this extreme metaphor to describe Nigeria ought to be a cause for national anxiety.  If this is the way we are perceived by the outside world, then God helps the nation in the coming years.

    The fact that no retraction was given and none was forthcoming despite General Buhari’s aura of incorruptibility and immaculate integrity shows that Britain means business. Indeed if anything the fact that usual diplomatic gnomes from the storied catacombs of Whitehall insisted that there was nothing to add or remove is indicative of how the western world might have lost patience with this gifted but dysfunctional nation.

    Another way of looking at this is to view it as a typical relapse of a hard pressed Tory government to the old infamous image of the nasty Tory notorious for their lack of civic and cultural compassion and empathy for embattled people. It is this trait that often turns the Conservative Party to a political pariah in most of Northern England, Scotland and among coloured people in Britain.

    Yet when all is said, we need to ask ourselves whether we didn’t bring this historic shame on our own head. Each new day brings such horrid tales of looting that the nation itself has become scandal-fatigued. You begin to wonder whether these people are human-beings at all. The daily tales are so outlandish that you wonder whether this is a nation at all or some armed robbers’ paradise straight out of the most macabre of malignant fiction.

    This is the burden of shame in a nation crying for some catharsis. We do not know what information the British government have on us. But so far it seems they are not impressed by the efforts to cleanse and sanitize the system. It is possible that they feel it is too personalized for their liking and smacks of the loss of institutional ballast.

    But it is also possibly an attempt to arm twist theBuhari administration and makeit amenable to western bidding. The sudden and precipitate capitulation of the Nigerian authorities to the forces of deregulation after months of stiff resistance is an indication of a well-coordinated political psych-op. If General Buhari is unable to withstand these forces, and if he is unwilling to call out for assistance, the situation may be more scary than one had imagined.

    To those from whom much has been taken in the course of an unequal exchange lasting a millennium, there ought to be some charity and generosity of spirit. Britain should not join the league of Nigerian tormentors, or at least should be seen to be resisting the temptation to do so. Apart from being occasionally politically unhelpful in our hour of political distress such as during the June 12 debacle, it has found it economically lucrative to serve as a haven for stolen patrimony from Nigeria and a smiling paradise for Nigerian economic miscreants.

    This is not how a parent colony should treat its colonial offspring that it ought to nurture out of protracted teething troubles. Yet despite the infractions, most Nigerians retain a certain fondness and affection for the parent country. It remains our preferred destination and our first port of call whenever the global wanderlust beckons. Despite adopting the presidential system of governance, the brilliant jousting, the cut and thrust of British parliamentary system, are a source of eternal fascination and admiration for many Nigerian political pundits.

    While it is true that a section of the British ruling class exhibits a sweet tooth for filthy lucre, Nigerians always applaud when other British institutions, particularly an upright judiciary, a stringent investigative body and a truly independent press, rise to the occasion in a redemptive rally. This is the hallmark of a nation that truly functions. When one national institution stumbles and falters, others cover for the loss and lapses.

    Britain should not always seek to tie its former colonies to its political and economic apron strings. This is historically counter-productive and against the longer term interests of the parent-nation. Were the great American founding fathers to listen to Great Britain and remain a vassal and underling of the old empire, it would have been impossible for the new nation, bursting with fresh and dynamic energies, to strike out in a bold and innovative direction.

    Were this to be so, and without the help of this new gargantuan nation and bedrock of liberal democracy, it is quite feasible that Britain would have gone under from the fascist sledge hammer of the German military machine. America came on the world scene precisely at the moment when the liberal democratic project needed to be re-imagined and re-envisioned on a grand and grandiose scale despite the great and roiling internal contradictions of America itself. This was conceptually beyond empire hallucinations.

    Ironically, the only other nation that rallied against the German onslaught and the destruction of the liberal democratic project was Soviet and socialist Russia whose emergence had earlier caused Britain so much trepidation and palpitation. The cunning of history is such that nations often mistake their natural friends and potential allies for enemies and automatic political adversaries.

    The Commandist economy made it possible for the Soviet production of war munitions to outstrip western efforts and the rallying ideology which made it possible for the Russian people to forge ahead as one people proved decisive in the battle for Stalingrad. After the Germans were turned back at this site of historic and horrific carnage, the end of Hitler’s monstrous Reich became a matter of time.

    For a people so deep and reflective in their ways, so alert to the contradictions of historical developments, it is quite bemusing that the British attitude to Nigeria since independence has been a classic example of how to sacrifice longer term interest and perspective for the sake of short-termism and immediate gratification.

    It is in Britain’s longer term interest to help nurture Nigeria through its protracted adolescence, and to help the beleaguered nation achieve its manifest destiny as the Mecca for Black people. If Nigeria were to unravel, the humanitarian catastrophe would be unimaginable in its magnitude and seismic possibilities.  Everybody, including Great Britain, would be hurt.

    It is only those with a misbegotten and incurably racist mind-set who cannot imagine a prosperous and democratically vibrant Nigeria one day coming to the aid of the parent colony. For now, it is not only strategically expedient for Britain to help Nigeria overcome its cripplinglimitations, it is also politically rational to do so. A crumbling Nigeria is a death sentence for so many.

    In this diplomatic duel between colonial father and son, the son appears to trump the father despite being fatally wounded. It is a profound irony that it is the man with the military background famously challenged in the department of verbal eloquence who has carried day with the political cogency of his response and its higher moral clarity and authority.

    General Buhari is right.Nigeria does not demand an apology or retraction from Britain. A receiver of stolen goods is also morally compromised. What Nigeria demands from Britain is the repatriation of its stolen patrimony with or without apologies. A father must not be seen helping to rob his own child however profligate and irresponsible the son appears to be. Even in the amoral world of international politics and diplomacy, this is quite a crushing ethical burden.

  • Haba, Kudu, haba!!!!

    To Apongbon, and the offices of a leading Law Firm, to take a writfor libel and defamation against Mohammed Kudu Haruna,  a columnist with this newspaper and publisher of the defunct Citizen magazine. Ever since last Wednesday when the pesky and foolhardy columnist attempted to out what he thought was the real identity of the man behind this column, snooper has been inundated with calls to confirm or deny whether he was also the elusive and reclusive scholar so named by Mohammed Kudu Haruna.

    Well,snooper is happy to report that this was a case of appalling mistaken identity. In journalism as everybody knows, it is a taboo for anybody to unmask the identity of a pseudonymous columnist. For a man who has risen to the top of the profession to commit such a gaffe is bizarre in the extreme. Something must be happening to Kudu these days. If this is his way of rewarding a friendship of over forty years which began in August 1975 at the Youth Corps camp in Awgu in the then East Central State, then the stress of these times must be getting to the old boy.

    Many mutual friends have asked snooper to take it easy with the old boy. One mutual acquaintance even volunteered the information that Kudu may be obsessing with the identity of TataloAlamu because he(Haruna)  himself is no stranger to conflicted and conflicting identity: A Yoruba boy who speaks Nupe language but who thinks he ought to be Hausa/Fulani. Nobody can beat that for generic and genetic upheaval.

    The identity of the man behind the mask or behind the pipe has been the subject of a raging controversy for quite some time. For the education of Kudu and his ilk, the original name is an oriki from Ogbomosho food lore. Thanks to Mr AgboAreo, a diligent researcher and prolific pen-pusher, Atatalosigbegiriana, means he who regrinds fresh pepper to add to stale gbegirisoup. TataloAlamu was an iconic musician who plied his trade around Beere, Ibadan going towards Mapo Hall and was famous for his profane lyrics and pulsating beat. Snooper was a denizen of the ancient quarters.

    A famous columnist of the seventies actually contracted snooper to find out the true identity of the mysterious columnist. A week after snooper confronted him with the fact that all evidence led in his direction, the man screamed: “ Ha won fepaminiyen!!!” (They want to kill me!”)  Another famous columnist prowled around The Nation for quite some time before he was sent away with the miscue that the columnist was none other than the Nobel laureate himself.

    During the Abacha years, SeyeKehinde, formerly editor of the fiery Tempo paper and now publisher of the City People, told a famous general that he was about to pay a visit to the columnist (Real name revealed). The man took SeyeKehinde aside and thundered. “ You mean that fellow is for real? I had thought it was a pen name all along. Kai, but there are lunatics in this country. How can anybody append his real name to such incendiary stuff?”

    TundeFagbenle, celebrated columnist lately of The Punch, has his own unique theory. The man behind the mask is an anjonnu or spirit. “I mean he goes out with us drinking and hell-raising and yet by the early hours of the morning, he would have written another tome. No normal human being can do that. The man is ebora!!”

    But the prize for strenuous sleuthing must go to the celebrated spy-master, AlhajiUmaruShinkafi, the MarafanSokoto. This column once wrote a piece on him and the man ordered one of his subordinate spooks still in service to fish out the writer known as TataloAlamu within twenty four hours. The spook later confessed to snooper at the Isaac John Guest House of the Lagos State Governor that he beat the deadline by two hours.

    As snooper writes this at four in Lagos in the morning of Saturday after having had lunch a few hours earlier at theKatsina Motel with KashimIbrahim, Mohammed Haruna can see that he labours in vain to pin down the man behind the mask.

     

  • The Whiteman’s burden

    The Whiteman’s burden

    (The founding continent and the founder effect)

    Basil Davidson calls it the Blackman’s burden— a savage and ironic jibe at the Whiteman’s burden, the self-imposed historical duty of stamping rational order and humane civilization on the rest of the human race. Yet two hundred and fifty one years after the infamous Berlin Conference which partitioned Africa among the colonial powers(1814-1815),  It is now obvious at least in Nigeria and many African countries that the messianic burden the imperialist masters imposed on themselves is facing its toughest challenge.

    Based on their current circumstances, these colonial chimeras pose a grave security risk to western modernization and its expansive notion of accelerated and unimpeded progress, particularly after the triumph of liberal democracy over the Soviet Communist model. With wars raging in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa and with famine, poverty and epidemics of dereliction the lot of the populace, it is just a question of time before the Dark Age is re-enacted.

    When you now factor into this the virtual implosion of a vast swathe of the Middle East and the biblical outpouring of refuge attendant upon this, you get a feel of human suffering and misery on a scale unprecedented in history.  The wanton brutality, the Stone Age cruelty and callous disregard for the sanctity of human life displayed by sectarian militias from Boko Haram in Nigeria, through ISIS in the Levant and the Taliban in Afghanistan suggest a new low that has not been seen since the Jewish pogrom of the Second World War.

    If one theme is common to all these multi-dimensional conflicts, if there is one single and solid cause that unites the disparate combatants, it is the written and unwritten disavowal of the nation-state paradigm which has been imposed on their people by triumphant western modernity.

    With the Islamic sects, from Boko Haram in Nigeria to the militantly state-evaporating al-Qaeda and ISIS, it is a violent and conscious rebuff of the nation-state arrangement and the colonial cartography which radically redrew the old map of Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

    The Islamists are stuck with the old notions of a theocratic world in which religiously homogenous communities could not be abridged or disrupted by the political distraction of nation-states. The Islamic empire-state cannot be curtailed and carved up like that except on the field of battle.

    It has not occurred to the sectarian ideologues that it was the defeat of the Ottoman Turks in battle in old Serbia which made this possible and inevitable, just as the introduction of French artillery to modern warfare made nonsense of the weak Italian city-states and their pretensions to both nation-hood and state-hood. Machiavelli had been proved right in his strident call for a powerful new state which would put an end to the political caprices of the Italian mini-royalties.

    In contemporary Africa, although the rebellion against the nation-state is neither conscious nor stringently articulated as you find in Islamic disavowals, it is obvious that some of the largest colonial contraptions on the continent have been chafing under the colonial yoke that boxed together people of diverse and mutually contradictory cultures and political orientation.

    This is the basis of the endemic instability and perpetual conflicts on the continent, particularly in four of the largest countries, namely Nigeria, Sudan, CAR and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In Nigeria, a thieving ruling cartel until recently presided over the systematic brutalization and decimation of the populace occasioning casual bloodletting of which the Boko Haram insurgency and bloody clashes between pastoral herdsmen and local farming populations are recent manifestations.

    In the Democratic Republic of the Congo where the Mobutu-Kabila kleptocracy has been continuously in power for fifty one years, the country has technically evaporated in a series of civil wars occasioning much human suffering and misery. In Sudan, Omar Bashir who has been in power since 1989, has presided over the dismemberment of the country. In CAR, the state has collapsed in chaos and mayhem as bitter ethnic feuding with a religious coloration has led to an effective partitioning of both capital and country.

    In many African countries where the nation-state paradigm limps on — Angola, Mozambique, Egypt, Liberia, Sierra-Leone, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia, Congo Brazzaville, Algeria, Cote D’Ivoire, Mali and Kenya—it has been after bloody civil wars fought among enemy nationalities which have sown deep seeds of discord and rancour in the body politic.

    Others such as Togo, Cameroons, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Egypt, Gambia, Guinea Bissau and Zimbabwe stumble on by becoming an expensive charade of liberal democracy which is the political and historical deity of the modern nation-state or by transmuting into the worst examples of one-man despotism.

    It should be obvious from the foregoing analysis that except for a few shining exemplars such as Botswana, Namibia, Senegal, Tanzania, Benin and Ghana, the nation-state paradigm has fared very badly in Africa. These nations in terms of political mass and economic pull are not enough to form the critical mass that will rescue Africa.

    It is a profound irony that it is in Africa, the very cradle of civilization and from where our human ancestors first began their epic slouch towards Asia, Europe and the rest of the world that colonial hubris and narcissism has met its Waterloo. Even in captivity,It is not easy to force one’s political deity on others.

    But the objective cost of the structural and spiritual resistance to the nation-state paradigm in Africa is the continuous regression of the continent in all parameters of inclusive governance and developmental indices.In all available data of human progress, African nations comfortably pick the rear. The nation-state may not be perfect, but it is an obvious historical improvement on fiefdoms and kingdoms.

    The fact remains that history, in all its all brutal and alienating necessities, waits for no laggard society. While we are still sulking about the nation-state, African countries are being frog-marched to the post-nation frontiers in the age of relentless globalization. We can no longer have the Berlin Conference all over again. That epoch is gone forever even where there are residues of the old empire system everywhere.

    Since we cannot unscramble egg that is already scrambled, a lot would depend on African nations and nationalists to find within themselves the strength, energy and vision to reform the colonial incubus that they have been saddled with by the imperialists before they can join the mainstream of humanity. As Marx famously puts it, verily one day Germany would find itself on the road to ruins with Britain and France without having   achieved their economic prosperity.

    Just as it happened with the internationalization of the slave trade which caught the people of Africa napping because of their lack of maritime and military innovations, the absence of viable nation-states on the continent may prove perilous to the people in the global sweepstakes that will follow the “opening” up of hitherto remote possibilities by the relentless onslaught of globalization.

    No one is sure of what the new frontiers of human evolution will look like, whether it will lead to a modification of the existing nation-state paradigm, its transformation to something more refined or its superannuation by something totally novel.

    But we can glimpse the emerging world order in the rise of new economic superpowers, the deepening poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, the accelerating gap between the rich nations and the poverty-wracked hell-holes on earth , the rise of the new right both as a political as well as a spiritual category and the advent of a new class of international mega-citizens who play and operate beyond the nation-states.

    All these developments will no doubt rebound on Africa as a passive object of history and a mere pawn in a play of giants. But there is a sense in which Africa will play a leading role in the emerging global configuration that is if the founder effect as propounded in the field known as population genetics is applied to global population and the phenomenon of the nation-state.

    But what is the founder effect? Put simply and with bald brevity, founder effect is the thinning and shrinking of genetic pool when people set out from their original homestead to find new colonies and new countries as the case may be. Consequently, the genetic variation available is increasingly limited and with that the possibilities of human expansiveness and talent formation.

    As the original homestead of the human race, Africa retains its largest genetic pool and possibilities of genetic recombination in infinite permutations. What this means—and as we are beginning to find out— is that as time goes on the most physically, intellectually and artistically gifted people among the human race will come from Africa: the best athletes,singers, footballers, philosophers, writers, actors, scientific geniuses and intellectual avatars.

    What impact will this rare species of humanity, this special breed at the summit of human evolution, have on Africa, the founding and fathering continent? Practically nil, unfortunately as long as the nation-state does not come to scratch in Africa.

    As it is already happening, this new breed of super-people will shun the chaos and disorder of Africa for the safe and liberating confines of the civilized world where they will gladly and joyously pay Value Added Tax for the value that the refined world has added to their life away from a dark and savage continent.

    If care is not taken by visionary African nationalists, it is possible that by the time the third wave of globalizationis fully with us, the fate of the continent as a perpetual human plantation for growing exceptionally endowed export to the west and a nursery for the transplantation of talents to advanced countries would have been sealed.

    By then, it will not matter to the rest of the world, whether Africa has viable or functioning nation-states. As it was the case with oil until most recently and earlier with the procurement of slaves what will be important is the uninterrupted flow of human talent from Africa to the west. The Portuguese, the first bearers of western modernity to Africa, have taught us in Guinea Bissau and to a lesser extent in Angola and Mozambique that you don’t need a nation to have a plantation or slave depot.

    WhenPliny the Second famously observed that something new always comes out of Africa, he was not only referring to the endless assortment of African oddities, oddballs and crackpots that entertained the Roman imperial court. He was also referring to the illustrious retinue of great African generals, writers, philosophers, actorsetc who graced the Roman imperium.  Several thousand years later, something new is still coming out of Africa, just as it was in the beginning.

  • No-Fly Zone lands Okon in police soup

    As the new Niger Delta insurgent group makes good their threat to bomb the nation’s oil facilities out of existence, the rumour began to gain traction that the Americans have sent in their drones to put the fear of the lord into the rogue militants.  Another rumour, confusing the name of a football club, Agatu Bombers, with the real thing concluded that the herdsmen were about to be evaporated by aerial bombardment.

    One morning, snooper woke up only to find a huge “no-fly zone” banner erected in front of the house. When the mad boy was questioned as to the reason behind his antics, he retorted with a scornful glare.

    “But you can’t do this. This is a violation of federal space”, snooper pleaded.

    “Oga, I no know book, but I sabi bomb, and I sabidemOgbunike. Na dem mad Biafra boys wan finis obodo again. He get one man for Biafra demdey call Air Raid. Na him be Bomb Scare”, Okon screamed.

    One morning, the police came for the rogue and promptly charged him for disrupting the smooth flow of air-traffic. Snooper followed at a safe distance.

    “Why I am here?” Okon suddenly thundered.

    “Dem say you be among demyeye people who dey complain say president dey travel too much and you wan stone him plane,  dat one na treason”, the desk sergeant hollered with a sinister frown. Okon was momentarily flustered but he quickly regained the initiative.

    “Hmmmm. Sebi you no say I be cook?”, he demanded.

    “Hen he, hen he so what?”, the irate corporal roared.

    “And dem cook office bedem kitchen?” Okon pursued.

    “And so?” the corporal  thundered.

    “So, if dem cook come put notice say make fly and dem insect no come kitchen, dat no treason?” Okon demanded with his nostrils flaring contemptuously.

    “Kai, kai, wonnana real kata and katakata boy. Just release dem crazy crook”, the sergeant ordered, shaking his head in stunned disbelief.

    “No, no, no, you must to pay me compensation”, Okon raved.

    “Compenwetin? Okay put am back for cell and let dem mad man from Mushin shit for him stupid mouth. Datna compensation”, the sergeant who looked like a deranged hippopotamus ordered.

    “Na shit go be your pension”, Okon cursed as he stormed out of the station.

  • Herdsmen and other hearse-men

    Herdsmen and other hearse-men

    The mood of the country is foul and nasty. There is an ugly distemper abroad. There are just too many deaths and suffering for one to be sanguine and optimistic. The promise of 2015, of national rebirth and regeneration, now appears gravelly imperilled.

    The enemy is within. As usual,we do not need to look very far. The deadly virus is locally sourced. Between the herdsmen and the hearse-men, the national obsequies are loud and clear. The person who wants to die has met the person who wants to kill. Anarchy looms.

    Call them the horsemen or outriders of the imminent apocalypse, and you will not be wrong. The crude motorcade of national disintegration is manned not just by homicidal herdsmen but also by the hearse-men of ethical impunity. Once again we ask, where are our surviving statesmen?

    For General Buhari, it never rains but pours. All the major contradictions of the nation are coming to a boil at once, and what a riotous mix! This is beginning to look like the second political crucifixion of the same man—a rare historical occurrence. When he is not dealing with an ethically challenged senate, he is grappling witha morally diseased political elite running rings around him.

    When he is not dealing with crippling fuel shortage and severe power outage, he is contending with state larceny on a scale that beggars belief. While the enemies of progress and the redoubt of retrogression rally with surprising ease and ferocity, the man from Daura is left clutching at judicial and executive straws even as the ruling party decomposes before our very eyes.

    From now on and for the foreseeable future,  all the determined enemies of the retired general need to do is simply to latch on to the unresolved menace of the maniacal cattle rearers and their own crimes and infractions against the nation pale into utter insignificance. Killing is after all more deadly than stealing.We are setting the stage for an exchange of prisoners.

    The nation is squeezed to death between the murderous hordes of primitive herdsmen on the rampage and the rallying hearse-men of social and economic cannibalism feasting on its entrails while screaming blue murder. There is genocide and there is genocide. Cry, the unbeloved colonial contraption.

    Let anybody perish the thought that this is by any stretch a mitigating plea for the herdsmen and the genocidal malice and venom with which they have hacked and shot their way through large swathes of the country both north and south leaving a trail of gore and mayhem in their wake. It is an appeal to focus our eyes on the ball so that we do not confuse the symptoms with the real malady.

    There can be no excuse whatsoever be it cultural, social, historical or economic for the merciless bloodletting of this murderous group. Indeed, let it be stated right away that if General Buhari were to suffer a second political martyrdom, much of the blame will be placed at the doorstep of his stubborn fixations, his indiscretions and lack of a firm and resolute approach to a grave national security crisis.

    The herdsmen menace has been with us for some time. It predates Buhari’s second ascendancy, but it seems to have gone worse with his second coming. As a dedicated cattle rearer himself and a notable scion of the nomadic worldview, he has had enough time to study the phenomenon and how its arcane ritual of untrammelled roaming is locked in fatal contradiction with the sacred dictates of the modern nation-state, particularly a multi-nation country.

    This is why the much expected response of the government leaves much to be desired in its vacuity and vacant non-sequiturs. It is not enough after so many lives have been lost to order the security forces to crack down on the herdsmen.  This is nothing but officialese at its most uninspired and uninspiring.

    As many others have noted, what the nation expected was a well-reasoned intellectual template for confronting the menace and a militarily coordinated programme of action for bringing the tragedy to heel and the offenders swiftly to book. There was nothing like this; neither was there official solace and succour for the injured of the land. At the very least, the president ought to have addressed the nation.

    Contrary to the dangerous bogey being fed to the nation, the herdsmen are not a new mutation of Boko Haram. There might have been an influx of arms and munitions from the Libyan debacle and the open corridor of the Maghreb through Mali. There might have been a militarization of herd-protection as a result of organized cattle rustling and organized resistance to free roaming as the logic of settled and sedentary culture violently collides with the logic of nomadic free passage.

    But while Boko Haram is ideologically driven and principally targeted at the state, the herdsmen are culturally propelled; a regnant residue of ancient customs and nomadic shuttling which targets entire communities and their people.

    Yet because it is ideologically driven, the Boko Haram scourge eventuatedin anarmed uprising against the statewhereas if left untreated,  the cultural chauvinism of the herdsmen may eventuate in an armed collision with other people and communities leading to the possibility of genocide and ethnic vacuuming.

    This looming Rwandanizationof Nigeria is a threat that cannot be taken lightly. There are two pressing reasons why violence-happy herdsmen constitute a threat to the survival of the nation even more than the Boko Haram. First unlike Boko Haram, the herdsmen, or their sedentary segments, are already firmly embedded in many communities from the north of the nation to the southernmost tip.

    Second, nobody knows when an apocalyptic massacre of the host community will trigger a reprisal on a scale that will tip the entire country into ethnocidal mayhem and anarchy. The herdsmen may then be able to call upon the travelling Taliban and equal opportunity jihadists that might have infiltrated the country through its porous borders in a war of all against all.

    Let it not be forgotten that there is a historical and spiritual factor in all this which unites both the Boko Haram and the herdsmen. Whether ideological or cultural, both groups are driven by contempt and disdain for the norms of the secular modern state which finds resonance in a primitive and pre-modern strain of Islam dominant in the northern part of the nation.

    As we have seen with al-Qaeda and ISIS, this type of Islam has no truck with the modern nation-state which it believes is an imposition of western civilization. Yet it partakes of the gain of western civilization, particularly the western modernity imposed on the world through the Industrial Revolution and the onslaught of two waves of globalization.

    While the northern master-class send their children to the best schools in the world and enjoy the luxury of the latest western consumer goods, the under-class are the herdsmen who are armed to roam the length and breadth of the nation tending their cattle. Who knows whether their current genocidal restiveness is a form of social rebellion?

    Whereas the two other ethnic majorities in the country have largely transcended this feudal contradiction by cocking a snook at their old ruling classes, in the north the master class remains solid and impregnable, an ironic tribute to political wizardry and power of cohesion and organizational acumen.

    But no one can stall or arrest the relentless march of history. The Boko Haram phenomenon has demystified the northern ruling class and made nonsense of their hallowed aura by deposing and assassinating the rulers at will. It will amount to double jeopardy if they were to allow the unruly herdsmen to put them in terminal contradictions with other sections of the country where they do not hold sway.

    Hence once again, the historic centrality of General Buhari to the resolution of the Northern Question and Nigeria’s crisis of modernization. When the politically chaste and tactically fumbling general allowed BukolaSaraki to nick the senate presidency from his divided and disloyal party, this column noted that the retired general had committed the equivalent of a “self-coup”or what the Latin Americans call autogolpe  which would haunt him for a long time and stymie his second coming. Recent events are bearing this out.

    Once again, we must wager that if the retired general allows the herdsmen palaver to get out of hand, it will spell terminal doom for his presidency and the nation at large. As this column noted once, the historical providence behind a Buhari presidency at this point in time stems from the fact that he is the only one with the integrity, the mass appeal and the moral charisma to carry out the painful cultural, political and spiritual reform needed to bring the north at par with the dictates of a modern nation state.

    If Buhari fails in this venture, there is every possibility that the nation will disappear or dissolve into a confederalist arrangement under the supervision of the international community.  The idea of herdsmen roaming freely all over the country, particularly in areas where they are not domiciled, is a cultural anachronism which clashes with the precepts of a modernizing nation-state and can only be sustained by violence.

    Cattle-rearing has since undergone several Copernican revolutions in other parts of the world that have transcended fetishes and primordial superstitions. In any case, there is not much economic value to the business except a fondness for a past that is divorced from pressing material reality.

    Research has shown that cattle force-marched for thousands of miles through hostile and inhospitable territories would have lost much of their fat and muscles by the time they arrived at their destination. Despite the protective affection of their minders, they have become an example of man’s inhumanity to animals.

    Despite its stupendous riches and promise, this country is hobbled by ethnic, religious, regional and cultural polarities at the horizontal level and by a sharp and accelerating division between the master class and the underclass at the vertical level. It is a miraculous wonder that it has survived so far.

    The Nigerian political elite has shown that it lacks the visionary impetus to come up with core values binding all elite factions of the nation and the will to pursue a programme of shared wealth and integrative prosperity that leads to social harmony. Beyond fighting corruption, it is now imperative for the Buhari government to come up with a coherent programme about how to overcome these crippling divisions, starting with the menace of the murderous herdsmen.