The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

The lost children of Banking Zuwo

As the interrogation and frisking of economic predators get under way, Nigeria is awash in dark comedies. There are unconfirmed and unconfirmable reports of money hidden away in the most unlikely of places and in the most delicate parts of the human anatomy. As Ibrahim Magu and his people close in, cemeteries, forsaken graveyards, solitary grain silos, soak-away and abandoned water reservoirs are reported to be brimming with various currencies.

A notorious female socialite has let it be known that she is carrying an eight month pregnancy which will not terminate until the return of the great prophet. The Yoruba call such monster children, “Omopeninu”, (The one that tarries in the womb). It was also said that an infamous carpetbagger in one of the provincial capitals recently celebrated the “turning of the grave” of his parents by summarily exhuming and expelling the remains and reburying them in gold caskets filled with Nigeria’s looted patrimony.

Thereafter, the sepulchre Bureau de Change was walled round and electrified. Another was known to have hurriedly constructed a modern Plaza with a secret underground floor filled with cash. Another dug up the soak-away and replaced the human waste with more expensive inhuman waste. It doesn’t get more ghoulish and it all reminds one of the last days of the Roman Empire. If retired General Buhari is looking for a way of balancing the budget deficit, it is obvious that he doesn’t need to look farther afield. It can be internally sourced.

The Nigerian grave yard is an El Dorado brimming with filthy lucre. This is the way of Black people. Mother Nature has gifted them with prodigal resources. After clumsily extracting, they return to bury the proceeds alive. The grave yard cries, and so do the living dead. This is the sacred ritual of the eternal hunter-gatherer. With Nigeria in the last stages of a regression to the Stone Age, who will save the Black person from himself?

But how will the founding patron of private state banking in Nigeria view this development? Very dismally indeed. Barkin Zuwo would have dismissed these unworthy descendants as cowardly banza who could not make an economic kill and stand by it, waiting for any impudent state interloper to dare query them. These are not valiant repositories of state funds but ordinary garden variety robbers who could not hold a candle to their illustrious forebears.

So, God bless good old Barkin Zuwo, and may Allah grant his commodious frame a fitting repose. It was said of the late King Farouk of Egypt that he was a man of much weight but little substance. Farouk, it will be recalled, developed an enormous, Pavarotti-like girth and phenomenal bulk from polishing off a whole lamb at a single sitting. When Nasser finally overthrew him, the obese hulk had to be wheel-barrowed into a waiting ship.

Our own Barkin Zuwo cannot be accused of such gastronomic impunity. Although rumours had it that the late beloved governor of Kano was partial to a huge bowl of Tuwo Shikanfi which he munched with an agrarian relish, he could not be accused of gluttony. The second executive governor of old Kano might have been educationally challenged in the western sense, but he was nobody’s fool. He was as sharp and shrewd as a political marksman, and keen –witted to boot.

For the three months he governed good old tempestuous Kano, there was no shortage of drama, and of the electrifying stuff, too. With his furry Fez cap, the former NEPU stalwart of Nupe extraction could have been mistaken for a Black actor impersonating a pre-Gorbachev era Communist Party supremo, or a royal extra hand in the film, Trading Places.

It was however in the department of creative misprision that Barkin Zuwo courted real immortality. It will be recalled that when good old Barkin was asked about which mineral resources his state could boast of, he growled: “ We get am for Phanta, Coca cola, Sphrite and Miranda”.

Please recall that around the same time, another colleague of Barkin from the old wild, wild west, a dedicated strongman who could prise open an iron fortress gate with bare fists, was asked what he thought was behind the whole phenomenon of students unrest. Infamously, the celebrated stalwart from Erunmu agrarian community near Ibadan was said to have retorted: “How can they rest when they are always fighting?”—or words to that effect.

When the soldiers eventually struck putting an end to the shenanigans of the Second Republic, Barkin Zuwo marched to military detention camp with plenty of aplomb and pizzazz to spare. (Please note that snooper did not say pizza). Zuwo was not going to be fazed or cowed by some boy scouts pretending to be generals. He had after all known the dreaded and ferocious Abacha as a mere boy playing football in Kano, a feat that earned the future infantry general the appellation of “Obe the Pele”.

It was in brief detention that Zuwo finally earned his deserved place in the Guinness Book of records, and in the most bizarre of circumstances. It was put out to the world at large that a huge some of money was found under his bed. Zuwo could not understand what the fuss was all about. “It is govmen money in govmen house, shikena”, the old NEPU hell-raiser tersely noted.

The churlish press boys quickly nicknamed him “Banking Zuwo” to reflect his new status as the banker of the bankrupt. But Zuwo was not done yet. When it was let out what a staggering sum of money that was found in his house, Zuwo cried blue murder. “Barawo ne” (Thief!), he screamed at the NSO boys. According to Zuwo, there had been some creative accounting somewhere because the money he hid was far in excess of what had been declared.

Ibrahim Magu and the new firebrand no-nonsense EFCC should note this. Till date nobody has bothered to reconcile the differing accounts or the accountants for that matter. The man of the people chopped until the redeemer of the people came, oil flowed and blood flowed, but If anything, Nigerians had merely exchanged monkeys for baboons——apologies to Sad Sam.

Twenty five years later, in the year of our Lord 2008 the “Banking Zuwo” drama replayed itself, which shows that in Nigeria, the more things change the more they remain the same. Enter Joshua Chibi Dariye, the former governor of Plateau state and a celebrated modern-day Croesus and fugitive from Metropolitan justice.

Ousted twice from office by forces loyal to the implacable General Obasanjo, the dapper Dariye survived by the skin of his teeth, with his elegant French suit dripping with the dewy mush and manure of the remote plateau. The old EFCC under Malam Nuhu Ribadu, like a vicious rottweiler, went beyond the call of duty to nail him. Disobliging the tenets of democracy and the rule of law, it finally assembled six members of the assembly to commit executive regicide.

It is understandable, then, if there was no love lost between the EFCC and the then embattled Dariye. In the heat of battle, and in a gory turn of metaphor, Dariye likened the EFCC to dogs which he said constituted a mouth watering delicacy among his people. It will be recalled that Dariye’s sturdy tribesmen once made a mince meat of the invading caliphate forces in a memorable massacre which turned the entire plateau into a grisly fountain of blood. In the event, wiser counsel prevailed and a bloody show down was averted.

But that was only an inconclusive battle in an unending war. The gladiators eventually returned to the ring. This time it was an embattled Dariye who moved rapidly to the offensive against his tormentors. In an allegation all too reminiscent of the late Barkin Zuwo, Dariye claimed that there was a shortfall of 741 million naira between money actually impounded from him and money actually declared. Phew!!!. Zuwo would have been barking mad.

Now, in international gossip circuits, as snooper noted at that material point in time, the British journalist is often the butt of cruel jokes for congenitally fiddling with expense accounts. The rich Americans are openly and brutally scornful of this hand wringing petty thievery. Snooper was not sure whether this vice has also caught up with the metropolitan cops. The British High Commission actually confirmed that only part of the money has been returned even as the Federal government of that period chose to hide under empty technicalities.

This did not assuage Joshua Dariye, and neither would Barkin Zuwo ,his patron saint, have been too pleased. With or without metropolitan reassurance, Dariye cried blue murder. That seems like ages ago, but we are again at a similar conjuncture in this endlessly gory tale of the gang-raping of a nation by its own privileged children. The tribe of economic rapists has multiplied. With so many notorious Nigerian economic predators taking refuge in Britain, let the Metropolitan Police beware of Africa as the new ethical graveyard of the white man. There is an evil spirit abroad.

February 14, 2016
A milestone…. of sorts

Snooper does not like talking about the man behind the mask, that is, the pipe smoking gnome behind the weekly sorties. Howard Hughes, the reclusive American billionaire, once noted that too much self exposure and unwarranted self-revelation lead to self-demystification and the loss of mystique. (If you believe the loony hermit actually said that, then you are in for a big ride).

But there are some milestones in the life of an individual that are worth celebrating, if only for the illuminating light they throw on the trajectory of a society. How does it feel to be reading yourself for the first time in a national daily, and at a time when newspapers were few and far between? It is like eavesdropping on your own solitary ruminations or savouring the arrival of glorious dawn on a lonely beach.

This week marks the forty fifth anniversary of the columnist’s first appearance in national print in an article published in the Nigerian Tribune on February 16th, 1971 when yours sincerely was a teenage reporter/ proof reader in that famous organization. Thank you, Chief Fola Oredoyin, the Chief sub-editor at the foreign desk at The Nigeria Tribune at that point in time, for publishing the piece. And thank you the dapper and unflappable Chief Olukayode Bakre, the editor of The Nigerian Tribune at that point in time, for fervently believing in and adoring a boy you considered a child prodigy.

Titled “Powell and the coloured immigrants”, it was a blistering attack on Enoch Powell, the British politician whose racist comments on immigration stoked up the fire of a looming apocalypse in Britain as a result of the hordes of coloured immigrants sweeping through the island. The article took Powell to stiff task over his inflammatory remarks which divided and completely polarized the Conservative Party in particular and Great Britain in general.

Enoch Powell was no empty rabble-rouser like the American Donald Trump. With his icy stare and donnish imperiousness, he was a master of the brilliant and devastating putdown. But he allowed the virus of hatred and racial bigotry to consume his own career. Although a full Professor of Greek at the University of Sydney in Australia at the precociously early age of twenty five, there was little to show that the ancient humanities actually humanized the Conservative M.P from the British Midlands.

There were private whispers about his mental health. For centuries after the revolution, Britain had tried to forge a national consensus based on liberality, tolerance and order, a tradition in which the gentleman is expected to wear his hat and opinion lightly, as Terry Eagleton, the Anglo-Irish Marxist hell-raiser , famously put it.

But Powell would have none of this one-nation High Tory fudge. He was as hard as he was uncompromising and as a result of his extreme right wing views, he was never to achieve the towering stature in British politics commensurate with his dazzling intellectual talents. In a feat of clairvoyance , Powell himself once famously noted that all political careers end in failure.

A few weeks after the Powell article, snooper was dramatically catapulted over the head of several elderly veterans of close marking both on and off the galley proofs and grizzled warriors of state inspired mayhem to a sub-editorship in the daring and iconoclastic newspaper. This meant a ringside sneak preview of those hard-hitting Tribune editorials of mysterious provenance which promptly arrived at the editor’s desk without anybody knowing how and where they materialized from. It must remain a trade secret.

It was one of these remarkable salvoes and editorial broadsides that would cause trouble a few weeks later. In protest against the confirmation and selection of the then Prince Lamidi Olayiwola Adeyemi as the new Alaafin of Oyo, the newspaper wrote a pungent hard-hitting editorial titled: We Shall be back to Square One. It was an incredibly daring and defiant thing to do, but then The Nigerian Tribune did not earn its celebrated spurs on the basis of pacifist advocacy.

However, as it is nowadays, so it was in those days. State moles plying their furtive and sinister trade abound. A few minutes to midnight and as the newspaper was about to put to bed, Brigadier Robert Adeyinka Adebayo’s men came calling, sacking and ransacking everywhere as they impounded the impoundable and abducted the abductable. It was over in a few brisk minutes culminating in a disorderly rout and a disorganized retreat through Oke Sapati on to the Minor Seminary and from there to Oke Padi and the bowels of commercial Ibadan. The sword had made a short shrift of the pen, but only for the moment.

Among the lucky survivors of that military siege was a young, intrepid and enterprising reporter who had earlier covered the Kunle Adepeju murder for the paper. Gabriel Ajayi’s sturdy limbs and power of acceleration foreshadowed a glorious military career that would be cruelly and callously terminated by military despotism. Twenty four years after in 1995 just as Colonel Ajayi was being sentenced to death by Abacha’s phoney Tribunal simply for serving as secretary to a panel which asked for the de-annulment of the June 12 election, snooper was also heading for exile. Memories are made of these.

February 14, 2016
On the rule of law

(Why Gani Fawehinmi still matters)

Suddenly and just exactly as it happened during retired General Buhari’s first sojourn, fierce arguments about the rule of law have returned to the front burner. The urgent and passionate tone of the debate, its relentlessly agonistic contention, suggests a society that has succumbed to intellectual trauma in addition to political and economic trauma.

Despite the philosophy of Heraclitus and its notion of permanent flux, Nigeria appears mired in the same eddy pool just as it was over thirty years ago. But this may well be an optical illusion. The ground might have shifted under us while the nation has stalled, stuck with the same ruling class miscreants. What has happened this time around is that the Nigerian masses have also joined the debate. This is when the ruling class “game” is fatally threatened, and the entire chess board is in danger.

Like its other accessories such as equality before the law and the right to vote and be voted for, the rule of law is one of the pious myths of modern liberal democracy. But these are factual myths, or truthful falsehoods if you like, that must be sustained at all costs if the ascendant classes must survive. All sustainable and self-sustaining ruling classes must be seen to pay not just lip service but actual service to the rule of law.

There should be no equivocation about this. There is as yet no human society where there is complete equality before the law or the rule of law for that matter. In leading western societies, the quality of lawyers you are able to hire and their sheer gravitas often determine the process and outcome of the matter at hand. The evidence of legal weight trumps the weight of factual evidence.

But since everybody has been programmed by institutional memory to buy into this, it is where the matter ends. Being a very costly matter to both sides revolutions are hardly ignited by isolated cases of injustice but by mass repression that has become intolerable.

In every society, then, the ruling law is the law of the ruling classes. In other words, the rule of law is the law or the grundnorm on which the rule of the ascendant classes is anchored. But as history has taught us, this arrangement is neither eternal nor immutable. It cannot be equated with the wholesale brutalization of the people and the vandalization of the sacred ethos of the state through egregious greed and ruling class gluttony such as we have witnessed in Nigeria.

When this happens, the veil of the illusion of equality before the law and the rule of law itself is torn off the visage of the howling masses and the braying mob. In such circumstances, and if it is to sustain its hegemonic grip over society, the ruling group must be prepared to pay maximum penalty. This is when harsh reality collides with optical illusion.

The irony of it all is that in such circumstances, the ruling class can only survive if it pays maximum and rigorous adherence to the principle of equality of all before law, if it upholds the rule of law in such a way that it is not seen or perceived to give preferential treatment to perceived crooks and criminals simply because they are privileged members of the ruling clan.

It is when the rule of law ossifies into the ruse of law that a strong signal is sent to the people to take the law into their own hands. Anarchy, we need to remind ourselves, is not the collapse of law and order but the collapse of lawlessness and disorder. In the current Nigerian circumstances, the strident advocacy for the rule of law where privileged law breakers may be concerned is a sign of paradoxical complicity with lawlessness and disorder.

The modern world did not get to this point by sheer accident of history or through the graciousness and rational conduct of rulers and their accessories. It has taken momentous and bloody exertions. The human toll has been prohibitive. Much blood has been shed before it can be burnt into the consciousness of kings that there is nothing like divinely ordained rule and that the delusion of ascribing earthly authority to some celestial behemoth is sheer nonsensical bunkum.

The French king who famously declared that he was the state might have said that in royal emphasis. But if only the deluded Louis X1Vcould see his luckless and hapless descendant who took very much the same route! He was summarily decapitated along with his wife and the throne was abolished forever to the bargain.

In England much earlier, Oliver Cromwell disbanded the House of Commons after putting the King to sword. For over three centuries, the Yoruba of Nigeria have been periodically chopping off the heads of their kings in a battle of will and wits that has shaped and defined the identity and libertarian politics of the people till date and their abhorrence for autocratic rule of any hue.

Many of these bloody upheavals are determined by the trajectory of a people’s history and the nature of the nation itself. It has been said of Stalin that he drove barbarity out of Russia by sheer barbarity. The whimsical cruelty and sadistic pleasure in human suffering are regrettable but there can be no doubt that the Bolshevik Revolution propelled Russia from a backward feudal society mired in superstitious idiocies to a modern industrial nation in one single generation.

You cannot have omelette without breaking eggs. As Nigeria confronts the demon of industrial corruption and official malfeasance which has hobbled the country and stalled its march to authentic nationhood, there are important lessons to take away from other societies that have managed the traumatic transition to modernity without much bloodshed and appalling suffering of the populace.

We must thank God for small mercies. Just as the inchoate and incoherent nature of the Nigerian nation prevents elite cohesion and the complete homogenization of the Nigerian ruling class, the chaotic ethnic tapestry of the nation has also made it impossible for the Nigerian under-classes to act in pan-Nigerian concert when and where it matters most.

But opportunities also abound in national contradictions. To the best of our knowledge, President Mohammadu Buhari is not a flaming revolutionary or a radical Leninist insurgent bent on completely smashing the old order. He is at best a Fulani aristocrat and conservative reformer genuinely appalled and rightly so by the appalling and degrading state of his country. Rather than undermining him, it is tactically better for members of Nigeria’s fractious political elite to endure the bitter pills rammed down their throat by a sympathetic undertaker than wait for the real thing in a situation of anomie and disorder.

This is why it is regrettable that certain scions of the northern feudal oligarchy, unlike Buhari, cannot grasp the historical connection between the current thieving disorder, their princely complicity in the rot and the appalling corruption and collapse of order in the old Hausa empire which prompted their heroic forbears to rise in revolt in a bid to cleanse the entire system.

This failure of moral imagination and the collapse of historical memory prompt one to recall Ganiyu Oyesola Fawehinmi, the late legal avatar and moral lodestar for his generation. How would Gani have conducted himself in the current ethical quagmire? In retrospect, it is now clear that Gani was clearly ahead of his time and his profession. In a gesture of defiance and contempt, Gani ignored the call of the legal profession to boycott the courts because of the infraction of human rights by the old Buhari administration.

For this, he was to suffer professional persecution and the denial of his rights to legitimate promotion and preferment. He became a noble outcast and pariah. In response to this outrage, the radical Students Union of the Obafemi Awolowo University conferred on him the honorary title of Senior Advocate of the Masses.

As a persecuted visionary of the profession, Gani was able to see through the legal chicanery which equates the rule of law with the observation of its formulaic tenets and formalistic tenors without paying any attention to contents and context. This legal game, so beloved of Nigeria’s juridical grandees, can only be sustained as long as the masses are kept firmly in check and under control. Once the masses sniff blood and the stench of incompetence, it is anybody’s game.

In 1983, a section of the Nigerian under-classes rose in fury against the state. The situation was about to snowball into anarchy when the military stepped in. Thirty two years after in 2015, the Nigerian masses needed no such help from a military institution that has badly compromised itself and its professional ethos. In fury, Nigerians rose to dethrone a government that had outlived its usefulness and a ruling party that had exhausted its historical possibilities.

This is what makes this particular conjuncture far more dangerous and threatening than 1983. But like the French Bourbons, the Nigerian ruling class has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. Otherwise they should know when the game is up. Had he lived and with his visionary intuition, Gani Fawehinmi would have grasped the ritual nexus between the aborted catharsis of 1983 and the renewal of hope for redemption of 2016.

As an absolute historical imperative, the repressed will always return in one form or the other. It is not by accident or sheer historical coincidence that the Fawehinmi example has spawned many avatars in the contemporary Nigerian bar who do not care a hoot about this “ rule of law” thing. The historical stakes have been dramatically raised. 2016 is not 1984. In the current frenzied climate, no group of lawyers will dare issue the kind of ultimatum their forebears slammed on the profession in 1984.

Gani Fawehinmi must be smirking in his grave. In seeming frustration with his beloved country and compatriots, the legal luminary had left a double Parthian, the one public and the other private. Publicly, Gani averred that if a draconian and drastic military regime bent on savage reprisals were to happen on the scene in Nigeria, he would keep his mouth firmly shut and withdraw to his shell.

Privately, he had noted that the only military intervention he would ever welcome in Nigeria again was if a tired and bedraggled young officer were to appear on television telling his compatriots that since he had spent the whole day killing, he was too tired and exhausted to address them.

We are still ages away from these dire scenarios. But given the fact that Fawehinmi is a man of punitive clairvoyance, it may not be for long. All it will take is for the ruse of law to prevail over the rule of law.

February 7, 2016
Look, no hands?

(The Beautification of Buba Jengele)

Look no hands? Folks, let us have some fun, or what Shakespeare famously describes as smiling at grief. Without any sense of humour, the Nigerian tragedy is enough to make one go completely gaga, screaming in a public place. Look no hands is about the magical abracadabra which makes the hand to disappear at will. The origin is more mundane. An American chap on learning to ride a bicycle without putting his hands on the handle bar famously screamed at his mother: “Ma, look no hands!”

In footballing parlance, the equivalent is known as “wingless wonders”, that is when you play without wingers. It is akin to a bird flying without visible wings. Sir Alf Ramsey and the all-conquering England team of 1966 know one or two things about that one. This was England’s response to the historic drubbing they received in the hands of the great Hungarian football team, “the magical Magyars”, in 1953.

Still talking about football, when the impish and impudent Diego Amanda Maradona was asked which one of his two goals against England he preferred, the dubious first one and the second arguably the greatest goal ever scored, Maradona promptly plumped for the first one which he powered in with his hand. When he was asked why, the former pickpocket from the slums of Buenos Aires, retorted that it was akin to picking the pocket of the English. Like most Argentines, Maradona was still fighting the Falkland war and till date the island is still known as The Malvinas in Argentina.

But this is not about the beautification of an Argentine area boy. It is about the beautification of a Nigerian former cattle rustler. Buba Jengele? Do you still remember him ? He was the one who had his right hand hacked off on the order of the then Ayatollah of Zamfara, the Ayasani Ahmed Rufai Bakura, for stealing a cow. That was when the Sharia law was foisted on the state as a political riposte to what was perceived as resurgent southern domination under General Obasanjo.

It was said that on his way to this horrid beautification, Jengele was all smiles, to the utter confoundment and consternation of the crowd chanting Allah akbar. When he was asked later about his profound inner peace despite his ordeal, Jegenle replied that he was happy because he thought the Nigerian state had finally figured out how to terminate his budding career as a cattle rustler.

But revolutions do revolve and what goes around must come round. On January 21, Yerima, the former Ayatollah of Zamfara, was himself docked at a Zamfara High Court on the allegation that he diverted one billion naira meant for the repair of the Gusau Dam in 2006. The crowd this time was so hostile, so bloodthirsty that the court needed police reinforcement. A hero has turned into zero. Winston Churchill once famously noted that the same crowd cheering him would also be applauding if he was being led to the gallows. Thus the whirligig of time brings its sweet revenge. Is the handless Buba Jengele still smiling somewhere? Snooper is only wondering aloud.

As a postscript, it was said that at the height of the Sharia controversy, Sani Yerima paid a courtesy call on General Olusegun Obasanjo obviously to rub salt in the wounds. But the old Owu warrior was unfazed. He was said to have fastened a contemptuous stare on the Ayatollah’s bulging babanriga. With a sneer, Obasanjo was said to have wondered aloud why Yerima still had his right hand in place. As a wily repository of state secrets, the great fox obviously knew what he was talking about. Now we too are in the know.

February 7, 2016
Alienation and the post-colonial nation

It was said of Karl Marx that it was historically important for him to leave his native Germany with its residual feudalism and rudimentary capitalism for a more advanced country before his seminal insights into the contradictions of nascent industrial capitalism could reach full maturity. Anybody attempting to study the contradictions of the post-colonial nation in all its riotous possibilities and impossibilities must come to Nigeria to see the real thing in its classic manifestation.

With the ruling party in structural, organizational and ideological disarray, and with the reprobate rump of the old PDP fighting over its bloated remains, Nigeria faces severe institutional ruptures in every department of governance, be it executive, judicial or legislative. It is a miracle how human beings manage to survive in such a normless environment. Yet they do, and apparently in fine fettle too. It is the psychic cost that is a tad prohibitive.

But as it is with people, so it is with nations. The state of disruptions and disequilibrium often reminds one of the victims of post- traumatic stress disorder. On the surface, they may appear normal and placid. But just below the surface is a seething confluence violent impulses that do not require elaborate firework to ignite. How many times have you seen well-dressed and otherwise respectable men and women suddenly come to blows on the streets? It gets to everybody, this epic disorder.

Although this organic crisis of the nation and statehood reached full maturity with military intervention, its fundamental causes actually predate military rule and go back to the very constitution of the colonial mirror-nation and the forcible disruption of the epistemic logic and parameters of traditional African societies. A people can be militarily conquered, politically subjugated and economically destroyed and still manage to survive. But once a people surrender the cultural initiative, they are doomed forever.

A lot has been written about the constitution of the colonial subject, but not much about the psychic disruptions and ruptures attending to the alienation of a nation. In human beings, alienation is a form of estrangement and detachment from societal mooring so severe that the subject becomes a virtual alien or stranger. In nations, alienation occurs when institutions created by human beings and for human beings come to assume a life of their own, tyrannizing over and terrorizing all at will.

In an inorganic country like Nigeria which is particularly vulnerable because of its size and population, this secular disorder assumes some prodigal possibilities which can be very disturbing indeed. The state often surprises itself by its own capacity for brutality and aptitude for violent absurdity. Acting in concert with a pliant judiciary and a corrupt and compromised legislature, the executive becomes a fascist terror machine dispensing injustice like a vending machine.

No one can deny that this was the way Nigeria was until recently when the retired general from Daura decided to re-impose a variant of the law and order state. We are not out of the wood yet and there still some vestigial remains of the old in the new. But there are objective tests of rationality that a society can be subjected to. Under Buhari, Nigeria, with all its imperfections, is beginning to look like a country all over again rather than a colonial plantation.

You may not want to agree with everything the president does. There is ample evidence that he may want to recreate the country along the lines of his own ascetic and frugal disposition which may bring him to momentous collision with genuinely productive forces itching to create legitimate wealth in a prodigiously endowed nation.

While he is going after economic saboteurs who have decided to wage a covert war against the fatherland, the president should take care not to give the impression that he is also against and in fact quietly criminalizing genuine entrepreneurial ventures. How this contradiction is finessed out will determine the fate of the administration and ability to carry important sections and segments of the nation along.

Buhari should take a cue from the noble and incomparable Abe Lincoln. An unenthusiastic theatre goer, the dour and reticent Lincoln was not the one to deny other people their pleasure. When he was asked to comment on the premiere of a new production, the old codger miserably and awkwardly blurted out: “Those who like this sort of things will find that this is the sort of things they like”. Exit gaunt and gangling Abe.

The contradictions engendered by Buhari’s very ascendancy will take time to work out. But despite the stirring of the state, the situation is very dire indeed. The legislature remains compromised and corrupt. Despite the loud warnings of the Chief Justice of Nigeria, it appears that a substantial section of the judiciary is yet to purge itself of questionable and criminal practice. And the farce that has just run its course in Kogi State suggests that there are still some important state actors who will hide under the chicanery of party supremacy to undermine party and justice. When will the spots of the leopard disappear?

It is against this sombre background of pervasive rot and deepening legislative malaise that Obasanjo’s recent intervention must be situated. In a sharp and characteristically vehement rebuke, the former president accused the two houses of wastefulness, corruption, shortsightedness and lack of compassion for millions of impoverished Nigerians.

Those who have responded by abusing and summarily dismissing him have forgotten that Obasanjo has a legendary capacity for the proactive self-fulfilling prophecy. Something may actually be in the offing. Those who see very far on the political chessboard must know that something is about to give and very shortly too. Despite the huffing and puffing of its leadership, the National Assembly is in reality the most vulnerable of the three branches of government to a determined externally induced putsch.

Given the inability of the NASS, particularly the senate, to internally reform itself and reorder its own affairs along the path of rectitude and righteousness, it can be argued that it has become a veritable national nuisance and a major stumbling block in the reinvention of the Nigerian state spearheaded by General Buhari. A case can then be made for the summary abrogation of the NASS in a radical restructuring of Nigeria or at the very least a drastic curtailment of its activities and strategic importance.

But those who rounded on General Obasanjo have their point and might have served the purpose of unwittingly directing attention to the institutional calamity the retired general also helped to foster. National amnesia should not lead to general amnesty. The absence of institutional memory in Nigeria means that each time the existing order collapses, the real culprits often manage to evade sanctions only to emerge soon at the bully pulpits as affronted statesmen and outraged patriots.

Obasanjo is engaged in characteristic cunning gamesmanship, and as many have pointed out, the rot at the National Assembly did not start with the current Eighth Assembly or yesterday either. You cannot plant cassava and expect to harvest yam.

We recall historic heists such as the bazaar of bribery and open arm-twisting which characterized earlier changes of leadership at both the senate and the House of Representative, particularly between years 2000 till 2006. One must also not forget the humongous inducements in Ghana must go bags which facilitated the horse-trading during the infamous Third Term bid which ended in weeping and wailing. The political graveyard is filled with the bones of indisposable men indeed, to quote Charles de Gaulle.

But as it has been famously noted, a man can make for himself a throne of bayonet, it remains to be seen whether he will be able to sit in it. What Obasanjo’s intervention has done is to unwittingly draw attention to the virtual collapse of the last traditional institution with which the old pre-colonial society mediated conflict: the conclave of elders and grizzled savants. With the disappearance of their authority and legitimacy, the pan-Nigerian cartel of elder statesmen who fouled themselves up in the last sixteen years or so must be ruing the day they succumbed to the perversity of earthly pleasure.

Amidst the chaos of collapsing institutions, the clear and present danger facing the nation must now be spelt out without fear or favour. We have on our hand a crusading president stumped and swamped by a fractious and disorganized ruling party, a stunted civil society, a failed legislature and a compromised judiciary. The alienation of nation and post-colonial subject in Nigeria has now reached a critical stage.

The regnant rump of reaction and retrogression has sniffed blood and corruption is fighting back on all fronts. This is not a battle a messianic presidency can win alone and all by itself. The earlier President Buhari understands this, the better for all of us. It is a battle for all critical sectors of the nation. Failure cannot be contemplated. Otherwise, we will not only be dealing with a failed state but a failed race.

January 31, 2016
Okon takes over Wadata Plaza

And so the seconds tick for Secondus. In the week that The Economist magazine of London famously dismissed Goodluck Jonathan as an “ineffectual buffoon”, (Phew!!!) you would have thought that there ought to be a let up in the cosmic buffoonery that has overtaken the former ruling party. But farce and Rabelaisian horse-play seem to have become the staple fare of the biggest power rally in Africa. Vultures are fighting dirty over the bloated carcass.

At the last count, more than three pretenders including a former Jonathan journeyman portentously named Gulak (sans Archipelago) have staked their claim. Secondus the First appears to have been seconded to political Siberia. It is power play in the time of political cholera, or is it political lassa? But it is said that if you don’t bury a dead person because he has no relations, you will have to bury him because of the foul stench and the public health hazard.

As snooper was ruminating over the plight of a party that once shook Nigeria to its foundation but which has now become the butt of hilarious jokes and savage derision, a decrepit lorry pulled up right in front of the house. Out jumped Okon dressed like a resource control robber-baron together with several stalwarts and the inevitable Baba Lekki uproariously and leglessly drunk as usual.

They were all calling Okon chairman and hailing his bravery and native sagacity to high heavens. Before you could say Jack Robinson, the men had started offloading cutlasses, cudgels and all manner of dangerous charms: Onde, Ikunpa, gbetu-gbetu, Ayeta. Isiju,kanako, Gbabi-magbabe, Balu-balu, Gbekude etc. Oh Lord, has it come to this in this country, snooper wondered.

“Okon, what is the meaning of all this?” snooper demanded in alarm.

“Ha oga, gbegede don catch fire, as dem Baba Sikira dey say for Epe Yoruba. I don overtake dem PDP chairman,” the mad boy chortled triumphantly. “We no go gree make dem mala people overtake dem party by cunny cunny. As dem no want Secondus, dem don get Okon.”

“I second!” Baba Lekki concurred with drunken relish. One of the men began snaggling and snapping at snooper like a demented hunter’s dog.

“And who is this man?” snooper asked in alarm as the Rottweiler made to charge at him.

“Ha dat one na Agbako Olisa. Na my own Metuh be dat. Na him go bite dem finis and if dem conduct yeye election na him go tear and whack dem paper.” The mad boy retorted.

“I see, so where is your manifesto?” snooper demanded, trying to suppress his mirth and amusement.

“Oga plane don crash and you dey ask for manifest, which kind manifest be dat?” the crazy boy retorted.

“Mr man, stop asking foolish questions. Chairman no dey read paper”, one man screamed and heaved forward like a menacing hooligan.

“Who is this man?” snooper shouted as the thug began shadow wrestling.

“Ha oga dis one na Professor Pakaleke. Him head no correct at all. Make him no come wire you well well. Na him kill dem Ibadan masquerade”, Okon cautioned.

On that perilous note snooper quickly back-heeled into the house and bolted the door.

January 31, 2016
The dishonourable art of not ever resigning

A propos of the subject of the alienation of the post-colonial subject, one must observe that one of the reasons for the massive institutional failure in post-colonial Africa is the dishonorable art of not ever resigning. Nobody ever resigns honorably in these climes. Why is it that Africans cling to office long after they have disgraced themselves in the selfsame office? Yet honorable resignation matters for the institutionalization of public honour. It shows that principles transcend principals.

This column once published a piece titled “The honorable art of resignation”. It urged those who felt personally betrayed by the Jonathan administration to take a honorable bow and exit. There were no takers. Not even those who claim to be the blue-eyed boys and girls of the Bretton Wood institutions. They loitered around until their reputation became thoroughly besmirched in the gargantuan cesspool of corruption and sleaze.

There are still many of them loitering around the corridor of the Buhari administration long after they have disgraced themselves and their profession by their unworthy and unprofessional conduct. These grim careerists and shabby charlatans abound in parastatals, commissions, government-owned media organizations, particularly the so called NTA, and even university councils. If President Buhari’s withering stare of contempt does not faze them, neither will his stony frown of disapprobation.

In civilized climes, nobody would have told them to hand in their resignation. They would have jumped before being pushed. They are a disgrace to their family and profession and a crying shame to the kind of Nigeria many who voted in the historic presidential election are hoping to see in their life time. But there ought to be a limit to self-abasement in the pursuit of the next meal.

These people constitute a menace and hazard to public health and morality. Since they will not fall on their broken swords, Buhari should direct that they should be weeded out without any further procrastination. This is the only way we can begin to lay a new foundation for public rectitude and the institutionalization of public honour and principles so crucial to modern governance.

January 31, 2016
A milestone and a millstone

Some mothers do have them indeed. But just as it is in the human family, so it is in the comity of nations. There are nations and there are nations. Just as Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist, said of the human family, we can now extend to the nation: all happy nations are the same, every unhappy nation is unhappy in its own way. If Nigeria is compared with its neighbours, particularly Ghana and the Republic of Benin, but unlike Togo which shares the genes of perpetual and pathological unhappiness with Nigeria, this historical truism is even more obvious.

Last week, Boni Yayi, the Beninois president, came to bid his Nigerian counterpart a rousing and moving farewell having completed the second term of a maximum two term presidency. As usual, the outgoing president of Benin was urbane, exquisitely polite, charmingly diffident, pleasantly remote and courteously self-effacing. Having served his nation and people to the best of his ability, Monsieur Yayi will now retreat to the shadows of stellar statesmanship, unlike Nigeria’s meddlesome and quarrelsome former rulers.

In another Francophone African country, Senegal to be precise, another epic milestone quietly passed. Monsieur Macky Sall, the president, dramatically announced the reduction of the presidential term of seven years to five famously noting that it was not the length of tenure that matters but the institutionalization of certain elite behavioral pattern. Modelled after the French Gaullist monarchical model, the Senegalese presidential system has finally shaken off the yoke of colonial paternalistic rule.

It was the same Macky Sall who upon coming to power in a landmark election in which the ruling party was humiliatingly defeated, dramatically abolished the Senegalese senate, noting that it was an absolute waste of the nation’s time and resources. Heavens did not fall. In fact the people applauded. It is not by accident that the widest and longest boulevard in Dakar, the Senegalese capital, bears the name of the nation’s most revered and iconic intellectual avatar, Cheikh Anta Diop.

A nation that has no institutionalized memory will have no memorable monuments to inspire it or galvanize its people in moments of stress. In retrospect, it would appear that the energies released by the dramatic sacking of the Kerekou dictatorship by the Constituent Assembly of Benin in 1990 and events surrounding the deposition of both Presidents Abdu Diouf and Abdoulaye Wade in Senegal have continued to galvanize the two nations towards genuine emancipation .

By contrast, this past week Nigeria also celebrated a milestone. That is the fiftieth anniversary of the military coup that ousted the founding civilian administration. It was so to say a jubilee of infamy which traumatized the nation and bitterly polarized the political elite along ethnic, regional and cultural fault lines. As far as milestones go, this one has become a millennial millstone around the neck of the nation with anguished cries from the graves and from dazed family survivors crying for justice.

Fortuitously or otherwise, fifty years after the original coupists stridently highlighted the ills of the country that they had hoped to eradicate by force and bloodshed, we have in place another government trying to confront the advanced manifestations of those grave nation-threatening ailments. Nigeria has been stolen blind by its leading citizens. There is no name for what has gone on other than organized state banditry. Nowhere in the world has this kind of feeding frenzy occurred, this Gadarene rush on the exchequer, without provoking a popular uprising.

This past week in a historic appearance at The Nation newspaper premises, Ibrahim Mustafa Magu, the boss of EFCC, noted that there is no morning he prepares to go to work without shedding tears for a nation so badly defiled by its own children. Magu’s quiet, unruffled mien masks a chilling resolve and a ruthless capacity for maximum psychological offensive.

It will be interesting how this confrontation with Nigeria’s band of looters shapes up in the coming months. Never in the history of humanity has a country been so serially gang-raped by its own denizens. The Ottoman Turks had a unique coinage for the plunder and rapine that followed brutal conquest . We have to find our own word for this millennial mayhem.

Such as been the historic heist and the colossal scale of thieving in all its bizarre manifestations that we may at some point of restitution have to invite the world’s leading clinical authorities to come and adjudge on the psychiatric status of some of these fiscal psychopaths. The stealing without compunction suggests a systemic collapse that has no equivalent in contemporary human history.

Yet despite the wholesale crime against humanity, it is obvious that the Nigerian political elite are badly polarized and bitterly divided about what course of action to take against the looters. While the generality of the Nigerian masses seem affronted and on the same page with the Buhari administration, a significant section of the elite appears to demure, citing the authoritarian excesses of the president, the flagrant disobedience of the rule of law and growing contempt for constituted judicial authority.

Their argument is interesting and points at the ideological occlusion which occurs when a ruling class has its back to the world and the masses are roused to fury and pitiless vengeance. Fighting corruption is okay but it must be institutionalized and legally routinized otherwise it may slide into arbitrary tyranny and a thirst for vendetta and vengeance masquerading as public good and order.

Rather than coming up with a holistic legally foolproof conceptual framework for combating corruption and official malfeasance, they aver, General Buhari is on an exhibitionist and messianic circus show which will come to naught. In extremis, they even argue that it may eventually be shown that despite his famous aversion for graft, Buhari himself exists in a state of antagonistic but paradoxical complicity with corruption.

The main argument of those who urge for a draconian settlement of accounts with all those responsible for the economic adversity of the nation irrespective of the rule of law and legal niceties is this: what level of civility and civilized conduct must one extend to people who have been so uncivil and uncivilized in their economic brutalization of their own people, people who have caused the nation so much trauma by sending thousands to their untimely death, people who have been responsible for the untimely deaths of thousands of gallant servicemen who were sent to warfronts without adequate weapons or means of defending themselves against an incredibly savage enemy?

The nation must not press its luck any further. For so long this country has camped at the edge of the abyss and has flirted with suicide that it is a miracle that it has survived intact. With this level of the bestialization of the armed forces and the traumatization of the citizenry it is a tribute to the residual discipline of the armed forces as well as the residual fatality of the people that major mutinies and popular revolts have not broken out.

But we must not tempt fate any further. All those responsible for these crimes against humanity must be severely punished as a warning and as a timely reminder for succeeding generations. Men are hanged not because horses are stolen but so that horses may not be stolen. The rule of law must never be equated with the reign of lawlessness. You cannot violate the Lockean covenant between the ruled and their rulers only to seek refuge in the rule of law.

With the history of revolutionary upheavals in their societies weighing upon their mind, ruling classes in advanced nations shy away from this nasty conundrum by sacrificing those who have desecrated the land for the very sake of the survival of their class. From time to time and ever so often, an admiral is quartered to encourage the others, as an English wag famously noted.

But in doing this, we must be mindful of the larger picture. It has been noted that the strength of every revolutionary upheaval is also its weakness: the thirst for social justice is also accompanied by the passion for social vengeance. While the one is noble and uplifting, the other often degenerates into mean vendetta and sheer bloodlust. We call on President Buhari to manage the mass hysteria unleashed by this consuming national tragedy with some rectitude and restraint so as not to appear to be personally fanning the embers of mass-hate and discord.

With the humungous number of culprits, it should be clear that we are dealing with a systemic collapse of societal values far more dangerous than individual aberrations. As Durkheim famously noted, whenever a social phenomenon is explained by a psychological category, we may be sure that the explanation is false.

Even if he spends the next ten years on this, such is the mammoth pan-Nigerian scale of the economic infraction that the retired general from Daura may not be able to bring all the looters to book. This is where a theoretically integrative and holistic conceptual framework for dealing with this national emergency is imperative.

In addition to jailing looters and seizing their loots, President Buhari should immediately inaugurate a National Restitution Commission comprising of eminent Nigerians of proven integrity and soundness of mind that will undertake a comprehensive inquiry of what went wrong and how to prevent a future reoccurrence of this national tragedy.

January 24, 2016
The Nigerian Legionnaire’s apotheosis

This is not about the dreaded Legionnaire’s Disease. That will be like counting fingers before a man afflicted with leprosy. Nigeria may be buffeted by sundry human and non-human plagues but there is always a ray of hope and a window of opportunity to showcase our national strengths in depth. To whom much is given, much ought to be expected. There are many Nigerians whose forefathers served the colonial empire’s mighty army with devotion and distinction. Please step forward, dear descendants of the Nigerian Legionnaires.

It is said that old soldiers never die, they simply fade way with time. But what about very old soldiers? They tend to disappear in a blaze of glory and martial pomp. Snooper remembers with affection an old uncle who returned to the village as a hero after seeing action with the British Imperial Army in the Burma sector of the great war. Every evening, the old man would gather youths together to tell them outlandish tales of superlative human heroism in the snake-infested ravines of Rangoon.

It all looked like scenes from an Arabian night entertainment. In one fearful instance, the old man told his audience of how in the thick jungle of Burma, he was once bitten by a mighty python which had tried to swallow him after felling him with a mighty flick of its tail. With sure death starring him in the face, the old soldier bit the python back whereupon the vicious monster gave a fearsome human yell and slid off.

This surreal salad of martial derrin’ do in some strange land was grist to the mill of a budding novelist. But oh boy, oh boy, how many people saw the fetching picture of the ancient Nigerian legionnaire resplendent in uniform as the old soldier recently paid homage to the Emir of Bauchi? It was an iconic snapshot of undying love and affection for a great profession.

And snooper was told a story by a top retired military officer who should know about the late Brigadier Usman, the founding military governor of the then North Eastern state. The son of an old legionnaire who had seen action in the Far East, the old boy told his father that since his son was by the grace of God the new ruler of the place, he would find it very embarrassing to take his own father’s salute at the annual Legionnaire’s parade.

On this particular occasion when General Yakubu Gowon was visiting, the military governor pleaded tearfully with his father not to show up at the parade ground so as not to embarrass his son and the visiting Commander in chief. The ancient legionnaire pretended to have agreed with his son. But on the stroke of the hour, the old soldier slipped his mooring and headed for the parade ground.

To Brigadier Usman’s eternal consternation, he had barely introduced three legionnaires to General Gowon when his own father appeared in bold relief resplendent in uniform and martial glory. The ground almost gave way under the Brigadier but the good soldier that he was, he quickly recovered his poise. Very shortly, it was his father’s turn.

“Sir, Corporal Usman of Burma Rifles”, the old soldier had saluted Gowon in stiff attention. As they made for the next legionnaire, the Brigadier chuckled to the ever amiable general. “Sir, that was my father, you know”, whereupon the ever charming and unfailingly polite Yakubu Gowon went back to give the old soldier a big hug.

God bless our legionnaires, and here is wishing the ancient men of arms many more years of superior health.

January 24, 2016
Fifty years that shook the nation

(The end of the nation as empire paradigm)

Fifty years ago this week—on the fifteenth of January, 1966, to be precise— some mid-ranking officers rebelled against the military high command as well as the civilian authorities. Nigeria would never be the same again. Although the mutiny was swiftly put down, the damage had already been done. Shocked and demoralized by the extremely bloody nature of the uprising, the rump of the civilian administration quickly capitulated and handed over power to the military authorities that had quelled the rebellion.

On this transfer of power, there has been much controversy. Like all things Nigerian, the “truth” depends on which side you belong and through what prism one views the development. Suffice it to say that given the decapitation of civil order and the emergent power configuration, it could not have been otherwise. The political class was simply too demoralized, too disunited and too disoriented to weather the storm.

Fifty years on, it is a measure of the total dominance of the Nigerian political landscape by the military and the centrality of official arms to the fortunes of Nigeria that well into the Fourth Republic, two of the four presidents the country has had are retired generals and former military rulers. Military personnel have ruled Nigeria for the longest spell, 1966-1979 and 1983 till 1999— that is discounting the hybrid holding device of Ernest Shonekan which lasted for three months while the military reassembled its scrambled wits.

In the light of this, does it still make sense to regard military rule as an aberration or as an organic and integral part of a phase of national development and the evolution of the post-colonial state in African nations willed into existence by colonial force of arms? Could this be a case of their colonial fathers haven eaten sour grapes, their children’s teeth being set at the edge?

Nigeria was conjured into existence by imperialist fiat and the military will of an intrepid and enterprising colonial adventurer, Fredrick Lugard, who had already seen stirring action in East Africa and Hong Kong at the behest of her Imperial Majesty. Only few African nations so fashioned into existence have so far managed to survive the threat or actuality of military take over.

Given their structural misalignment at birth and the chaotic ethnic mix, the centrality of arms and the harshly centralizing imperative of all empires have been the dominant strand in the narrative of modern African nations. The empire manifesto is crisp and clear: It is better to have injustice than to have disorder. Let the new nations congeal and cohere around a master-nationality that has the organizing discipline and the military valour to whip the others into line and let them get on with it.

This is the way and will of empire and the greatest agglomeration of humanity that civilization has thrown up, not some wishy-washy sentiments about political self-determination and economic determinism: Greek, Roman, Islamic-Sunni, Ottoman Turks and latterly Russia, England, French and American. Disorderly and disorganized people are forcibly incorporated and harshly suppressed. As far this worldview is concerned, the threat to human evolution is not racial or ethnic injustice but disorder and chaos.

In the event and given the turbulent ethnic, religious, cultural and regional configuration of Nigeria, something was bound to give eventually. Before the attempted putsch of January, 15, 1966, there were already murmurs and rumours of an impending collision of altars. In 1962, the opposition Action Group was accused of plotting to take over the federal administration by force of arms. Its leadership was promptly impounded and incarcerated.

During the brief constitutional crisis of 1964 following a badly rigged federal election, it was rumoured that a group of military officers had approached Zik to canvas for a military solution to the constitutional impasse. The federally engineered take- over of the western region during the infamous “weti e” uprising would be viewed by many as a prelude and precursor to a constitutional coup and a forcible suppression of the entire region. As the old west erupted in flames, rumours of an impending preemptive putsch by the federal authorities or a strike by dissident officers filled the airwaves.

When the real thing finally arrived in the dead of the night fifty years ago, it was to shed much blood without shedding any light on the crippling ailment. Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu, the de facto leader of the coup who announced the take over from the regional capital of Kaduna, was a charismatic and ascetic officer with considerable following but without any talent or appetite for political or ideological mobilization.

Not for him, a clear-headed analysis of Nigeria’s problems and national contradictions beyond a coup day hectoring and fierce denunciations. Not for him, a studious and painstaking attention to details; a rigorous strategic plan of action such as we had seen with Nasser’s Free Officers Movement and the youthful conspirators of Colonel Moammar Ghaddafi or the radical Dergue of Major Haile Mariame Mengistu.

If the troubled but disjointed and incoherent manuscript that survived Major Emmanuel Ifeajuna, the putative leader of the mutiny, was anything to go by, it was clear that rather than coming to redeem Nigeria, the plotters were motivated by pure anger and incandescent rage against the system and the need for a bloody settling of accounts. It was a typical Nigerian mess and a very bloodthirsty one at that.

The attempted coup was doomed and its fate sealed by the blatantly selective pattern of killing, the lopsided nature of the casualties and its sloppy disdain for the nation’s ethnic sensitivities. A return match appeared inevitable and it came in July 1966 in the guise of an even more savage reprisal coup. Nigeria had lost its political innocence forever. By July the following year, the nation was already roiling in a civil war which was to cost at least a million casualties and a still unresolved tension among the nation’s major ethnic nationalities.

More than a century after amalgamation, almost sixty years after independence and fifty years after the first coup, Nigeria is still battling with the founding demons of a multi-ethnic nation and centrifugal forces still threatening to tear it apart. If anything, the current agitations for a separatist Biafran state forty six years after the end of a costly civil war, no matter the real motive, is a troubling reminder of our failure at elite consensus and national integration. So is the fact that we have a government headed by a retired general battling to fix the nation and instill institutional sanity after a virtual systemic collapse.

It is indeed a reflection of the enormity of the crisis and a measure of our failure as a functioning nation that half a century after Nzeogwu famously denounced ten-percenters, Nigeria is currently battling 100-percenters who have taken the national exchequer to the cleaners. Perhaps for the first time in its history, the country is statutorily broke to the bargain.

In the light of all this, it is tempting to see the past fifty years and military intervention as a sheer waste of everybody’s time and a depressing epoch in a nation’s history. But this verdict does grievous injury to the long term perspective of history or what the French call la longue duree, a situation in which hopeless contradictions take time to work themselves out in the ceaseless march of history.

It is an engrossing historical irony but by keeping Nigerian one at all costs, the army has actually fulfilled its historical destiny which is in tandem with the founding colonial imaginary and a seeming justification of the centrality of arms in the fortunes of a turbulent conglomeration. But fifty years later as the nation is still held in the vice grip of a unitarist and harshly centralizing system, what lessons can we take from the turbulent past that can serve us as a guide and pathfinder to the immediate future?

For starters, while we are still busy killing and maiming each other, the empire model from which the colonial nation derives its organizing principles and dominant ruling motif has reached the utter limits of its political and historical possibilities in human evolution. The epoch of the nation as empire is fast receding into historical antiquity. In the last five hundred years or so, certain nations have acted as virtual empires, just as African colonial nations served as internally colonizing sub-empires in the context of multiple nationalities.

While it lasted, the modern empire paradigm did some good by forcibly incorporating disparate and different people and nationalities under the rubric of global capitalism. This was the iron law of globalization in the epoch of the capitalist restructuring of the international order beginning with the internationalization of the phenomenon of slavery and the subsequent economic enslavement of the Third World.

The collapse of actually existing socialist nations and the transformation of the global pecking order from a spatial category to a seemingly random and arbitrary congeries of leading nations are the mere working out of the finer details of the new logic of human development. With the unraveling of the Second World, there is no middle ground again. The Third World has invaded the First World while the First World has discovered new habitats in the old Third World.

Such has been the stupendous success of this finessing of the capitalist means and modes of production, the explosion of human developmental possibilities and capacity building and the sheer scale of new avenues of turning knowledge into wealth that the modern state has been forced to loosen its grip on the modern society. Nowadays, different sections of the same nation may look like totally different mini-nations virtually decoupled in texture and tempo.

This is the collective genius of a people at work, unlike statist imposed monolithic development which slams arbitrary “national” projects on constituting units without bothering about the internal configuration of the components. Without losing its proactive potency, the modern state has become a benign overseer.-

It is the rise of the multi-sectoral nation with the US, Canada, Australia, China/Hong Kong, UAE/Dubai as glittering exemplars. Except in Great Britain and Spain where ancestral feuds and old ethnic fault lines subsist, no one ever talks of the forcible split of these nations. The talk is of harnessing the individual strengths, energies and genius of the different components for the greater good of the nation.

With the passing of the nation as empire model and the forcible incorporation of the entire human civilization within the ambit of modern capitalism, it is no longer fashionable or even economically desirable to keep different nationalities together by force of arms. What works better is the appeal to human rationality and the superior economic argument stressing the advantage of hanging together.

Unfortunately without having consolidated the nation-state paradigm, most African nations are beginning to look like Rip van Winkles in the comity of modern nations with only industrial bloodshed and perpetual strife to show for their pains. The modern template is already there and it points at an increasing devolution of power and responsibility from the stifling and suffocating centre. There is no point in reinventing the wheel.

Let us restate this conundrum is baldly as possible. Those who created Nigeria the way it is have since moved on to higher glory. It is left to Nigerians to recreate their country the way it ought to be and for the maximum emancipation of the Black race. With the virtual abolition of time and space, with the advent of the virtual global trading of the internet revolution, there is no further need for huge mass markets and retailing outlets of Africa in their national actuality and raw physicality.

Africa’s most populous nation is in the fortuitous position to take the lead. While we must applaud the current heroic efforts in dealing with looters and instilling institutional sanity in the system, it will all amount to little if President Buhari does not take another look at the structural configuration of the nation with a view to liberating the diverse strengths, energies and genius of the people.

We commiserate with all those who have lost their loved one at the shrine of the nation in the last fifty years. But if we do not do the needful and urgently too, the historic wager is that we may spend the next fifty years still killing and maiming each other with nobody caring a hoot except western societies that will be bothered by the impact of the Biblical hordes of refugees trying to reach salvation in the new Noah’s Ark of humanity.

January 17, 2016