Category: Tatalo Alamu

There is historical romance in the air. It is love in Peking, or better still Love in the time of The Yellow Peril. As a film buff of the old Odeon and Metro cinema variety, snooper prides himself as an authority on the arcane stuff of oriental romance. Ever heard of the film, The Bride of Fu Manchu? Or better still, the epic, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers?  But if this is light-headed stuff, try the classic sonnet by Andrew Marvell, the marvellous genius of Metaphysical poetry, To His Coy Mistress.

As far as rainbow weddings go, the recent nuptial in faraway Peking between the ailing Nigerian Naira and the macho Chinese currency, Yuan Renminbi, must rank as one of the most significant fiscal developments in global political economy in modern times. It has set off tremors in international financial circuits from Iceland to New Zealand comparable only to a major earthquake. Both the seen and unseen regulators of western economic dominance as well as the over-pampered and over-indulged Bretton Wood institutions are in a state of shock.

It is said that beggars must not be choosers. But this is a case of a beggarly nation choosing its own destiny and vowing to stick and stand by the choice. It is gradually dawning on Nigeria that it is a beggar by choice and by elite vocation.  A nation of such stupendous and staggering natural and human resources ought not to be seen in international circles begging for miserable alms if its political class is up to scratch.

For the Nigerian authorities, it is an act of courage and immense daring which deserves applause and a standing ovation. In its declaration of national will and intent, it is comparable only to the famous “trade by barter” of Buhari’s first coming. It is not easy to look the internal regulators of global peonage in the eye and tell them to take a walk.  In his first coming, the retired general from Daura was economically court-martialled for his rude rebuff. He may yet suffer the same fate if he does not take immediate steps to protect his political and strategic flanks.

The attempt to hitch the vandalized Nigerian economy to the rampaging wagon of Chinese global ascendancy sets off several historical echoes all at once. It is the Yellow Peril, the military confiscation of Hong Kong, the Boxers’ Uprising, the Long Trek, the collapse of the old Chinese ruling feudal caste and the perpetual duel between westernization and modernization all rolled into one. The Chinese people have suffered immensely in the hands of the west in psychological particular, but they have managed to turn the table on their tormentors.

But before we get carried away in typical African emotional incontinence and post-nuptial self-adulation and self-congratulation, it is good to look at the dotted lines and the fine letters of the union. The Chinese are a mercilessly meticulous race. They do not leave anything to chance like us, and their infinite patience can be awesomely ensnaring.

First, let us look at the disclaimers as enunciated by the bridegroom ironically through the bride in the typical gnomic wisdom of the oriental savants. According to clarifications offered by GeoffreyOnyeama, the Nigerian Foreign Minister, this is not exactly a currency swap. The Chinese are not about to exchange their potent currency wholesale for the prostrate naira. Comrade Yuan may marry Madam Naira but there is nothing like joint assets and joint liabilities in this kind of union. Everybody must carry their own can. A nuptial toga is not an excuse for profligate walk-about.

What the Chinese have done in response to the international pressure to “float” the Yuan and make it globally convertible in the currency trenches as an interchangeable storage of value is to give it limited convertibility as an exchange medium by freely choosing who to exchange with. By so doing and by this economic sleight of hand, they have retained the initiative to protect and insulate their national currency against the prowling dollar and other western currencies waiting to capitalize on a catastrophic slip from the Chinese. When all has been said, the dollar remains the alpha currency of the civilized world.

From the foregoing, it can be seen that the principal interest of the Chinese in these matters remains principally Chinese. This is the way of all wise nations.  The people are too disciplined, too focused and too self-reliant to have a sanguinary view of any laggard nation. The modern Chinese nation is a product of blood, sweat and tears. Any nation that cannot lift its people by the bootstraps should be encouraged to disappear.

The advantages of the wedlock are however enormous and historic. First, and in a rather indirect and circuitous manner, the interest free loan and other incentives will ease the unbearable pressure on the nairaby making it possible for Nigerian business concerns to access Chinese markets without going through the dollar as an intermediary median of exchange.  The manic and frenzied dollar hoarding and speculation will decline because it will become unprofitable with appropriate overriding veto from the CBN.

Second and as a medium term strategy, it will encourage the Nigerian economy to begin to look inward and produce what it must consume rather than relying on the current lazy regime of the wholesale importation of western perishable and consumerist goods at the expense of our indigenous products. Any nation which cannot internally source its own need and produce its own technological wonders should disband its political elite as a matter of urgent necessity.

Thirdly, the Chinese dalliance provides intellectual anchorage and conceptual scaffolding for our brainwashed western ideologues to view the debate about modernity from a new illuminating perspective. Having been fed on the staple diet of automatic western superiority, our intellectuals are programmed to confuse westernization with modernization.  Yet there are competing and countervailing modes of modernization.

Western modernity is only one of these and there is nothing preordained about its current hegemonic pre-eminence. Anybody who has studied the dynamics of modernity from the emergence of Portugal as the first true nation-state at the end of the thirteenth century to the rise to economic superstardom of the Chinese in the twenty first would discover that it had been a ding-dong affair with empire-states and state-nations rising and falling in the unceasing march of history.

It is however good and beneficial to look at the obverse of the coin and see what the Chinese nuptial will not do for us. First, it will not prevent the perennial and perpetual trade imbalance between Nigeria and China. On the contrary, it will accentuate and accelerate this in the short run. Except oil and some precious mineral resources, Nigeria does not produce anything the Chinese desire in abundance at the moment. This is the dungeon of underdevelopment we have found ourselves through the lack of visionary political elite.

Second, and flowing from the first, this nuptial will not stop the Chinese from flooding the Nigerian market with sub-standard goods.  But if we are complaining about sub-standard goods, where is our own? The Chinese do not claim to be economic angels or technological super-geniuses, they are also on the make. We are viewing Chinese goods from the lens of western standards which we have no economic or technological rights to covet in the light of our own primitive predicament.  Sub-standard goods are a good reflection of the sub-standard politics and the internal configuration of the end-user country.

The wise and inscrutable Chinese will not try this with America or any of the civilized countries of Europe. But that is only because the powerful currencies of western nations afford them instant alternatives from other accessible markets. In Nigeria, enemy nationals collude and conspire with Chinese industrial barons to produce under-strength medication and deliberately dumbed down goods to maximize profits. In China, such enemy nationals would have been summarily shot for economic treason.

We have now come to the heart of the matter. No amount of Chinese loan or incentives can help a politically dysfunctional nation. The Chinese wisely refrain from commenting on the internal politics of Nigeria. But it is not by accident that in China, corrupt officials are summarily shot. In China, a corrupt and deeply diseased l institution like the current national assembly would have been summarily disbanded by a popular uprising. We may yet get to this point if Nigeria is to be redeemed.

This is why President Buhari has his political work cut out for him in spite of his heroic economic initiatives. In order to minimally heave forward, this hobbled giant of a nation requires political, intellectual, economic and spiritual revolutions or a combination of these in whatever order. The retired general from Daura should be prepared to conduct a national referendum to determine the political destiny of the nation. Otherwise, the current tremors may eventuate in a major political earthquake, despite President Buhari’s honest and patriotic intentions. All the way from Peking, it is economic nuptial in the time of political dystopia.

The abduction of almost three hundred female secondary schoolpupils from Chibok in Bornu State two years ago represents a new low in the struggle to preserve the sovereignty and sanctity of the Nigerian state. But the amateurish and cack-handed response of the federal authorities, the evident lack of federal will andthe sheer dilatoriness of the rescue efforts so far, also confirm why state implosion was inevitable in Nigeria.

Columnist apologizes ahead to readers who may find some of theimagesand expressions deployed in this column this morning rather coarse and emotive; a breach of the code of civility and restraint; a capitulation to gross and repulsive sensuality. It is true that this column is modeled on the canons of intellectual rigour and dispassionate analysis. But there are times when it is imperative and even healing to give free rein to one’s emotions particularly when and where reality defies cold logic and reason.

The title of the column is not original.  It is adapted from two pieces from Norman Mailer,without doubt one of the greatest American writers of all time and a relentless social gadfly and hell-raiser extraordinary: The time of our time and The time of her time. The first is an epic romp through major events of American time while the other was written much earlier. With its whiff of the female reproductive cycle and the monthly maelstrom virtually all women are subject to, The time of her timeis the story of a monstrous male predator preying on the weaker sex and not so innocent women.

Two years ago as the Boko Haram insurgency reached its peak, two hundred and seventy six girls from Chibok Secondary School in the north eastern fringes of the country were forcibly abducted from their school in the dead of the night and then frog-marched straight back to the Stone Age. It was a crime against humanity so chilling in it is audacity, so brazen in its psychotic daredevilry and sectarian dementia that one is still at a loss about how anybody could even contemplate such a thing.

For those who are sensitive and whose capability to imagine human suffering on an outlandish scalehas not been blunted by the Nigerian condition, the Chibok tragedy is a severe blow at the deepest level of psychic disruption. No one born of a woman, who have female siblings, or who have fathered female children will fail to be disturbed.

Dear readers, is it the horror of imagining pubescent girls being matched through arid wastelands in the dead of the night by homicidal sickos, the insanitary hell of their primitive incarceration, the collapse of personal hygiene or the anguished cries of physical violation and the sheer bloody mess as psychotic virgin-hunters arrive in the time of their time? What type of human beings are these people, what species of humankind do they belong to?

Yet two years after this monstrous heist, it is as if the girls of Chibok have been neatly airbrushed out of history and memory. The official body language suggests that they are treated as tragic and unavoidable war casualties. It is obvious that the government would rather the matter die quietly and the girls expire unsung because of the crying shame and embarrassment it constitutes for the federal authorities. No state worth its salt or even the name will treat its valued citizens in this callous and indifferent manner. Civilized states have been known to stake their entire national honour and military prestige in rescuing a few nationals trapped in hostile circumstances, but not so the post-colonial state in Nigeria.

This past week, it has taken a foreign media outfit, this time the CNN, to show how derelict the Nigerian federal authorities have been in their responsibility to their citizens. CNN showed a clear montage of some of the girls in captivity, which means that contrary to official disinformation that the girls have been dispersed and scattered to the winds, a cluster of them still remains together, and they are alive if not exactly kicking.

Some of the girls appeared to be in fine fettle and one or two even managed a smile, a case of smiling at grief. The traumatized mothers, craning their neck in sheer disbelief, finally collapsedin hot sultry tears. If the living are this distraught, one can then imagine the agony of mothers who have gone to their graves not knowing whether their beloved daughters are alive or safe in sub-human captivity.

The unyielding political adversaries of the current federal administration may demur, but there can be no doubt that General Buhari has shown far more resolve and national muscle in battling the Boko Haram pestilence to a standstill. At the moment, the insurgent sect is effectively degraded as a viable fighting force and potent threat to national security. This is in sharp contrast to Buhari’s fey and feckless predecessor who was seen on prime time national television dancing azomto or whatever it is called the very next day the Chibok girls were abducted. This is discounting his presiding over the arms bazaar in which funds meant for buying weapons to fight the homophobic sect was shared among party loyalists.

The problem with the Buhari administration is that it has shown a reluctance and stoic unwillingness in coming up with an ideological protocol, a deep conceptual template for combating the clear and present danger this pernicious strain of Islamic fundamentalism represents to the political and spiritual health of the nationand its survival as a corporate entity.

So far, there is no clearly enunciated intellectual disavowal of the primitive and pre-modern prejudices which drive the genocidal sect and which have found a fertile nursery bed in the north of the country. This is the ideological bedrock of the periodic anti-secularist assaults on the modern nation-state of which Boko Haram is merely the latest and most horrid manifestation. The result has been the economic and spiritual devastation of large swathes of our northern landscape. This time it is Boko Haram. Next time it may be something more catastrophic.

There are those who believe that President MohammaduBuhari himself harbours patriarchal and paternalistic ideas about women and their role in society which are only a benign variant of the violent and homicidal virus that drive the Boko Haram insurgency. As proof, they point at the virtual absence of the fairer sex in the engine room of the Buhari presidency. Since this is a question of cultural conditioning and political habitus, it is a very sensitive matter indeed. A man’s religious code cannot be subjected to withering assault simply because he happens to be the president of a country.

Objectively however, this seeming presidential contradiction leads to several salient issues which open the backdoor to the dreaded and testily ignored National Question once again. First, it speaks to the cruelly asymmetrical and mutually contradictory nature of the elite values which drive politics in Nigeria and the inability of the nation to cohere around a set of core national values.

Second, since other elite factions from other parts of the country in which women have wrested higher prominence and visibility have teamed up with General Buhari in a national project of state redemption, a harmonization of political, economic and spiritual values is imperative if national support for the well-meaning but politically hobbled retired general is not to suffer a severe hemorrhage henceforth.

Finally, even more than what it means for the whole nation, the allure of the Buhari presidency at this particular historical conjuncture stems from the widespread belief that the retired general is the only one with the integrity, the mass appeal and the heroic courage to carry out the fundamental political, economic and spiritual reforms for the core north which will align its core citizenry and increasingly restive denizens with the dictates and imperatives of a modern nation-state. If Buhari fails in this venture, the apocalyptic meltdown that is bound to follow will make the Boko Haram scourge look like a child’s play.

The harmonization of core values cannot be achieved by mere presidential diktat in a country riven by ethnic, religious, economic and regional polarities. It is time to fashion out an organogram of national core values through dialogue-driven initiatives even as the war against corruption proceeds apace, failing which a disaggregation of the political structure into a quasi-confederation arrangement is inevitable. Nigeria is stalled and disabled by a series of overlapping and interlocking contradictionswhich can only be prised apart and reset by delicate and superior political engineering.

The Boko Haram tragedy is merely a most hideous instance of these national contradictions. It took its time to warn and prepare us but as usual we failed to be warned and to be prepared. It is now obviously impossible to bring back all the girls at once, but since a military solution is frankly out of the question, the government should bring a kind of closure by seeking international help to negotiate for the release of the girls even if it means entering into dialogue with the more benign faction of the murderous sect. Poor girls, it is time to bring back the violated cycle of their time.

He was probably the last of the Mohicans. Every now and then, the sheer turmoil and contradictions of Nigeria throws up a figure of arresting vitality to remind us of unfinished business. Olatunji Braithwaite, the distinguished Lagos lawyer who died last weekend aged eighty two, was such a person. For a man of immense personal bravery and punishing physical exertions, it was so appropriate that the legal gladiator should die in his gym and literally on the tread mill.

There was always something of a high-born Roman nobleman about the Lagosian lawyer. His upper class credentials were impeccable. Well-born, well-bred and well-connected, he carried himself with aristocratic flair,panache and a hint of sartorial eccentricity which sat very well on a sprightly well-honed physique.

If his public school diction betrayed his elitist and privileged background, his fiery rhetoric and the magnetic aura of his personality endeared him to the political mob and other denizens of the barricades. He belonged to a body of men— rebel aristocrats and gentleman gladiators all—- who viewed law principally as a weapon for the emancipation of the people rather than a social and political racket for protecting injustice and inequality.

It is a long line of legal avatars stretching from Braithwaite through the youthful and much mourned BamideleAturu, GaniFawehinmi, AlaoAka-Basorun, thetempestuous KanmiIsola-Osobu to the founding patriarch himself, Sapara-Williams. It should be noted that bar one of them all these people were children of considerable privileges and scions of the emergent merchant elite in the hinterland or on the coast. Yet they did not flinch when it came to defending the rights of the underprivileged.

For these men, the law is a noble instrument for advancing the cause of the ordinary citizen and for championing political and social justice. In any society, it is when the practice of law and its adjudication fall into the hands of the ignoble that the sanctity of the profession is breached and its sacred ethos desecrated.

All of these men in their separate and individual manner, and within the limits and limitations of their god’s given talents, fought titanic battles against tyrants of all hue and turned the law courts into one vast coliseum of colliding gladiators. For them, everywhere there is injustice is a legal battlefield. They drew blood and blood was drawn from them. They bore the scars of their confrontations till they fell in battle. In at least one of them, there was more than enough hints and evidence of circuitous state execution.

What could have drawn a young man from a privileged and pampered background like Tunji Braithwaite to this holy band of iconic legal warriors is a matter for historical conjecture. The late lawyer could have been a born rebel who was bound to revolt against the grosser absurdities of his class in any case. Or it may well be that as he grew up and was confronted by the inequities of Nigeria, he concluded that his life’s mission was to see to the amelioration of the dreadful condition of the Nigerian underclass.

Whatever the source of the summons, the great man never wavered thereafter and despite the odd and occasional tactical adjustment, he would never be found speaking from both sides of the mouth where injustice and tyranny are concerned. The scandalously rich he viewed with courteous disapproval, the arriviste or new rich with bemused contempt and a whiff of condescension and the vulgarly opulent he ticked off a withering stare of revulsion.

In human societies, ideological battles among and within the classes are always fought under a great occlusion in which all sides are beset by one illusion or the other about their real motives and the actual causus belli which lead them to fight under one ensign or the other. Some may think they are furthering the cause of their class when they are actually threatening its long term viability. Others may think they are deliberately undermining their class interests when they are actually and unconsciously cementing the long term viability of the same class.

The same week that Braithwaite departed, more than three dozen of his silk-donning professional colleagues filed up in court to defend the rights to fair hearing of a celebrated political rustler and to forestall any attempts by the state to undermine the rule of law as it appears to them. To them, this may well be a selfless and patriotic duty.

Braithwaite would never have been caught dead in such a company. Unknown to our SANs, by defending the indefensible, they are the ones actually undermining the rule of law and setting up their class for a violent confrontation with the seething mob lying in wait just outside the courts. When law fails, everything is lawful.

Many of our top lawyersbeing parvenus and newly empowered upstarts from the lowest rungs of the society,  it should be obvious that securing the longer term interests and conditions of reproductions of their new class may well be beyond their ken.This is how the cunning of history plays itself out often leading to the destruction and mutual ruination of the contending classes and their various factions.

Like all well-heeled and entrenched scions of the old propertied class, Braithwaite had no time or patience with the neo-rich rabble and the arrivistes. For him nobility must fulfil its obligation and if it cannot it must give way in order not to endanger the survival of the society as a whole and the greatest Black nation as an entity.

It is this capacity to see farther than and much beyond circumscribed class interests which allows a man like Braithwaite to place emphasis on the survival of a nation as a whole rather than the perpetuation of narrow and unsustainable class interests. It is a noble tradition that harks back to the old burgher classes of Europe and the founding fathers of America.

That he was able to grasp the critical connectionbetween the rule of law and social justice shows that Braithwaite was principally a man of ideas, an intellectual who also happened to have been a lawyer rather than a mere middleman of legal mumbo-jumbo. This critical shortage of intellectual acuity is the Achilles heel of many of our lawyers no matter how technically proficient and forensically brilliant they may be.

African post-colonial ruling classes in general and the Nigerian political elite in particular have failed to grasp the concept of integrated prosperity and shared wealth for the entire society, a prerequisite for securing the security architecture of the nation. But rather than ameliorate the living condition of the people, they resort to stealing on an outlandish scale aided by all kinds of schemes and scams .This is what has turned the typical African nation into a permanent war camp; a hotbed of acrimonies andinsecurities.

Tunji Braithwaite fought such governments to a standstill no matter their hue, whether it is military despotism or civilian autocracy.But towards the end of his life, he seemed to have given up on the nation as it is currently configured, dismissing it as a structural monstrosity that is going nowhere. This need to restructure the country might have led the great legal activist to some strangeand questionable political association at the twilight.

But his ardour for public agitation was never diminished. It was not surprising that his very last gesture of public defiance came as a result of a principled opposition to the fuel subsidy scam. In January 2012, Braithwaite joined other patriots and elder statesmen led by Professor Ben Nwabueze to register their dismay about the subsidy hoax and the savage suppression of popular protests.

This writer got his summons to the barricades via a text from the grand old man that came in around four in the morning even as one was preparing for another meeting at the Lagos State Secretariat later that morning. By 8: 15 am, one had established contact with the crowd of protesters at the park opposite the House of Assembly.

Nwabueze, Braithwaite and others gave soul-stirring speeches as a detachment of fierce-looking policemen materialized asking the crowd to peacefully disband or be forcibly dispersed. A tense face off which seemed to have lasted for hours ensued as the singing and dancing crowd of merry protesters inched their way towards the Freedom Park. In the event, the police made good their threat by tear-gassing and manhandling everybody in sight including the octogenarian Nwabueze.

This was Braithwaite’s finest hour in defence of political and civil liberties. It was as if the great man was saying goodbye to his beloved compatriots amidst the chaos of emptied canisters, streaming tears, crumpled old men and fallen women. The veteran of several brushes with authorities, survivor of cruel incarcerations, brutal detentions, civilian ambush and military ambuscade might have had enough. Four years later, he has joined his ancestors. May his noble soul rest in peace.