The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • As Metuh trumps Taiwan shredder, Baba Lekki sings Kusimilaya

    These are definitely interesting times in Nigeria, with outlandish revelations about state larceny followed by even more outlandish revelations. No one knows who is going to be “outed” next. It is a grand parade of fallen idols of the tribe. You never know what will do it for you, whether it is unreceipted free lunch or a casual bulge under flowing agbada robes after a chance meeting which you never know was being faithfully videoed.  In order to forestall any untoward eventuality, snooper sent Okon to the market to buy a strong and durable shredder.

    The crazy boy had hardly departed when Baba Lekki took up position blabbing insensate nonsense while waiting for his juvenile accomplice.

    “Ina dogo?” the crazy old man began with a savage sneer. “You mean say dem Buhari man go try all dem old people, Tanko Yakassai, Mr Fix am and dem Yoruba chief? Dem mortuary go get work ooo”.

    “Listen, I am not a politician, I am a policy analyst”, snooper snapped in utter irritation.

    “ Weeereeee!!!”, the crazy old man screamed as he jumped at snooper. “Policy ko, publicity ni. If you no be politician why you dey send for shredder? Wo, waa gbaa !” Before snooper could regain his composure, the ancient agitator began singing a cruel parody of an old classic.

    Mori baba kan t’onjo, kusimilaya

    Ewa woran mi male gboju mi oo

    Biosi t’ewon to duro mba ba baba yen lo oo

    Mori baba kan t’onjo kusimilaya .

    It was at this point that Okon barged in without any shredder or shred of truth.

    “And you, what happened, where is the shredder?” snooper demanded angrily.

    “Ah oga dem Ibo trader come ask whether na Metuh or Taiwan shredder you want”, Okon replied with a sadistic grin.

    “And what is that supposed to mean?” snooper shouted.

    “Oga no vex. As dem come explain, Metuh na man and Taiwan na machine. But where dem Metuh man dey whack ten sheets of paper per minute dem Taiwan machine dey manage only two. So na market be dat”, Okon explained.

    “Kai, kai Okon, na dat one dem Yoruba people dey call Gbetu-gbetu”, the old contrarian snorted as he dragged the crazy boy away.

  • Between the General and the President

    Between the General and the President

    THE Eighteenth Brumaire of Luis Napoleon from which this piece derived its title and inspiration is one of the great classics of historical expositions. Written in 1852 as a response to the slow-motion unravelling of the French Revolution, The Eighteenth Brumaire is a sustained piece of polemical brilliance; a tour de force of imaginative perspicuity. Karl Marx was obviously at the height of his intellectual power. Superb insights and witty observations leap from its scornful and sardonic pages like tracer bullets.
    The great German philosopher makes two valid points which are very germane to the issues at hand in Nigeria at this moment. Appropriating Hegel’s earlier observation that historical occurrences and personages tend to come twice, Marx added that the first time it is usually a tragedy while the repeat appearance often yields a farce. Building on this tantalizing insight, Marx goes on to contend that even if the same historical personages happen on the same stage after an interval of time, it is as poor parodies of their former selves.
    In other words, Luis Napoleon was not just a grim caricature of his illustrious uncle, this was how the illustrious uncle himself would have appeared at that material time, a fumbling caricature of his old self, a pathetic pastiche of the real thing. In an interesting and absorbing gloss on this perplexing historical drama, Terry Eagleton has noted that Louis Bonaparte was not just a regressive caricature of his more illustrious uncle, the distinguished uncle was also offering himself as a parlous parody of his former self through his less talented nephew. The gifted family had scraped the bottom of the barrel.
    Echoes of Nigeria’s recent history? Let us not jump ahead of the script. There are important lessons for Nigerians and their elected president to learn from this reappearance of historical personages on the political scene. Today, in his second coming, President Buhari is confronted by an awful mess. The task is even more Herculean than his first coming. It is a revolutionary situation without revolutionary enablers.
    It is obvious from his body language and its abiding militarism, his caustic disdain for shabby politicking that President Buhari would like to cut through the crap and bring immediate restitution to a Nigerian populace braying for the blood of their tormentors. But given the fact that the retired general is a product of democratic consensus, there is no way he can do this without sawing off the tree branch on which he himself is perched perilously and precariously.
    It is a situation that calls for much caution and greater tact. There can be no doubt that if it is to survive this perilous conjuncture, Nigeria needs a wholesale redemptive cleansing. Yet with a compromised judiciary, a section of the political elite screaming from the rooftop and a National Assembly populated by retrogressive elements from the ancien regime, there is going to be a lot of caterwauling and hollering in the land. It is impossible to imagine a civilian regime with this level of daring and pluck. The general is alive, long live the president!!!!!.

  • The Marxist scholar as avatar

    The Marxist scholar as avatar

    To the prim and proper University of Ibadan and its iconic Theatre department this last Tuesday for the seventieth birthday celebration of Biodun Jeyifo, notable theatre Arts critic, dramatic theorist and outstanding public intellectual who now plies his trade at Harvard University.  It was a gathering of some of the greatest literary and critical minds the country has produced and in keeping with Jeyifo’s known aversion for the pomp and pomposities of power, not a single siren violated this remarkable gathering of eggheads at the founding shrine of Nigeria’s  homo sapiens.

    An icy fog held Ibadan in its savage grips. The dry winds were at their most ferocious. Harmattan-draped and sporting a monstrous grey beard like an ancient Yoruba medium, the city of a hundred hills wore a mournful post-Christmas visage. A major miscue had sent one in the direction of Kakanfo Inn before learning that the event had been shifted to the university theatre.

    There was plenty of drama. Before one got to the venue, J.P Clark, chairman of the occasion and the man whose imaginative prowess gave this land of ancient warriors its most alluring poetic encapsulation, had literally seized the day and the stage, summarily banishing Yemi Ogunbiyi, the master of ceremony, to the outer margins of the Travelling Theatre. It was a command performance from the autumnal but brisk and bouncy poet-dramatist.  As if to remind one of ancient literary feuds, Clark ribbed into BJ for once consigning him to oblivion in a moment of youthful indiscretion.

    Upon entering the coven, snooper was briskly accosted by two members of the Jeyifous clan who must have shared some bachelorhood pranks with yours sincerely as a youthful cub journalist at the Nigerian Tribune at Adeoyo at the turn of the seventies. The riotous inquisitions would commence  at the Togonu-Bickersteths homestead at the tip of the Seventh Day Road, heading towards the Oginnis and from there to the Ogunkoyas passing through the Jeyifous and finally to Ajasco the master tailor who constructed tight-fitting James Brown shirts with playful precision. Where is Yomi Jeyifous, a snooper crony, whose famous dishes in faraway Houston were a culinary delight any day?

    Yet despite the hilarity and bonhomie, this was also a sober and sombre occasion. One can sense the passing of a great era of great men and women, the very best that Nigeria has thrown up in the arena of cultural production.  If this glittering spectacle was a moveable literary feast, it was also in a sense one of the last snapshots of the greatest era of literature and literary scholarship that Nigeria has witnessed. The devastation of the Nigerian society by unlettered thugs has also made a short shrift of its cultural production. It will take another generation and proactive social engineering for the wounds to properly heal.

    On the high table were some of the titans who made this feat of cultural production possible. Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, the notable Feminist critic who was the first person to bag a First Class degree from the old department; Dan Izevbaye, the humble and self-effacing master literary critic who was also the guest lecturer.

    There was also a surprisingly witty and entertaining Dr Lekan Aare who would later be described by Soyinka as one of those naturally brilliant people –including the fabled Omololu Olunloyo—-who did not have to exert themselves to excel. Sitting quietly somewhere in the hall in his customary urbane self-possession was Professor Ayo Banjo, the notable linguist and scholar. Lurking somewhere in the hall with tigerish forbearance was Kongi himself before he erupted on the stage to pay generous compliments to the celebrant.

    As his student and later as his colleague, snooper has had time and many occasions to cross intellectual swords with BJ particularly over his overly rigid doctrinaire Marxism. On one particularly infamous occasion, yours sincerely attempted to turn the table against BJ by questioning the validity of his very question. “The question itself begs the question, which is as much as to say that it writhes under the tyranny of its own redundancy”.

    In less humane and generous climes, this would have been a sure manual for academic suicide. It is a measure of BJ’s generosity of spirit that he often acknowledges the contribution of his former students turned scholarly adversaries to his own intellectual development. Here is wishing Professor Biodun Jeyifo many more years of productive intellectual engagements.

  • Why History appears to repeat itself

    Why History appears to repeat itself

    A constant reality check is not only good and beneficial to individuals it is also medicinal and therapeutic for nations, people and human societies. A reality check involves asking yourself how and why you got to where you have found yourself and where you may be heading for. For a nation, however organic or clumsily glued together by colonial interlopers, this collective reflection or retrospection is an important determinant of the next course of action or phase of history.

    As the now infamous Arms Bazaar, otherwise known as Dasukigate, threatens to overwhelm every sector of the Nigerian political society with the humongous slime of sheer sleaze, the political landscape is also echoing to loud grumbles about  retired General Buhari’s authoritarian excesses, the constant political faux pas arising from the anti-democratic implacability of his reflexes, his abiding distaste for corrupt consensus, his grumpy discomfort before the klieg lights and fabled inattention to finicky details.

    A feeling of déjà vu has enveloped the land. We have surely traversed this route before. Why does history repeat itself so often? As it was during his first coming when the retired general’s strengths of granite integrity, incorruptibility, nationalism and genuine compassion for the poor were on glorious parade, the peccadilloes that would undermine and eventually hobble his regime are also beginning to rear their head.

    The problem this time around is that if Nigeria misses the road and route of redemption, we might as well say goodbye to the nation as a corporeal entity. Whether we like him or not; whether we applaud his sterling nationalism or dismiss the half-baked and startlingly incoherent nature of his recent economic measures, it should be obvious to anybody who can see the apocalypse beyond that the president and the trajectory of his presidency are central to Nigeria’s immediate destiny.

    Unlike thirty years ago when the nation was still convulsed by the Nigerian equivalent of a military Russian roulette and when the then Major General Buhari could be elbowed aside by disaffected colleagues, that option is no longer historically available. For the moment, given the creeping resurgence of elite-fueled ethno-regional disaffection, the pan-Nigerian consensus which produced the electoral miracle of 2015 is no longer feasible. This is why it is imperative to critically, honestly, intelligently and intellectually engage the Buhari administration and nudge it towards a higher national telos.

    It has been said that people make history but not under the circumstances of their choice. There was nothing nearly inevitable or even divine about the second coming of the retired general from Daura. If this dose of historical and dialectical materialism can curb or curtail messianic pretensions, it is also important to concede that given the structural configuration of the nation, the range of ethical , regional and religious constraints that impinge on political realities at that point in time also narrowed down the choices and made the  emergence of Buhari  a virtual inevitability.

    If the nation had developed properly since his first coming and if it had advanced according to the logically ordained path of rational societies, there would have been no need to go back to a man who tasted power three long decades earlier. But there was unfinished business in the air. Nigerians were simply tired of the ineptitude and outlandish corruption of the ousted regime and its under-achieving progenitors.

    They had correctly surmised that if they didn’t see off the Jonathan crowd and its area fathers, they might see off the nation itself. Anybody thrown up in the circumstances in all their structural contingencies waving the flag of discipline and frugality was bound to be the automatic frontrunner. Such was the power and potency of change and its possibilities for a broken people.

    But it was not going to be just anybody indeed. Nigerians remember the first coming of the general with great nostalgia. There were also many who remember what they consider its grievous infractions. Yet hobbled by the trauma of misgovernance and corruption, the overwhelming majority of Nigerians were willing to overlook the youthful excesses of a man they have come to regard as a well-meaning patriot.

    It is noteworthy that while Buhari had long been regarded as the avenging messiah by the teeming northern masses,  it was not until 2014 or thereabouts that this adulating worship and mystical regard assumed a pan-Nigerian urgency and stridency.  All efforts by the Nigerian ruling mafia to cut him to size or prune down his political influence simply boomeranged.

    To be sure, virtually all the APC presidential frontrunners would have made good presidential materials. Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, in a more liberal conjuncture given his affability, his fabulous wealth, courtly cosmopolitan outlook, urban ubiquity and pan-Nigerian elite networking would have given the job a decent shot. But since this was a national referendum on the PDP years of misrule, anybody remotely or directly connected to that empire of filth is automatically disqualified from further consideration.

    It was very curious indeed that the PDP power mongers tried their vicious best to shoot down Buhari’s candidacy and to promote an alternative so as to miscue the APC strategists. But the APC machine sprang the trap by plumping for Buhari. Given the epic mess they knew they were leaving behind in the light of current revelations, one can now understand the source of their anxieties. One can also understand why they persist in heating up the polity.

    But to whom much is given, much is also expected. We have laid bare the material and historical circumstances behind President Mohammadu Buhari’s current ascendancy so that the retired general does not labour under any mystical illusions about the real historical forces behind his current dominance of the Nigerian political landscape and the game-changing possibilities of his second tenure.

    History may appear to repeat itself but it is not always under the same conditions and historical possibilities. You cannot step into same river twice.  2015 is not quite 1983. While all well-meaning Nigerians must support and applaud his fierce zeal and the anti-corruption drive, it is now time for the Buhari administration to convince Nigerians that changing is not synonymous with shortchanging. The retired general may have to take a pause and a reality check of the circumscribed circumstances of his second coming.

  • On statism and economic nationalism

    On statism and economic nationalism

    It is a brand new year. There is a feeling of cautious even wary optimism abroad. At least in one significant respect, Nigerians have a bragging right and the license to beat their chest in accomplishment and self-satisfaction. The nation has survived 2015 in one piece. It is not a mean achievement. Like a historic and mysterious platform whistle blower, 2015 stood between the nation and further meaningless gallivanting. It was the year widely touted by international experts as the final terminus for a giant crawler.

    It has been a close run affair. Nigeria plumbed the depths of horror and state evisceration. If the outlandish revelations currently making the round are anything to be believed, the post-colonial state in Nigeria had actually dissolved into a criminal cartel whose sole purpose has been extractive predation and the wholesale looting of national patrimony. It is worse than  kleptocracy.

    For a long time to come, the sociology of state larceny will be studied and probed for the insights offered into the criminal mindset of a dysfunctional political elite. It calls to further question, the ability of the Black person to nurture vibrant institutions that underwrite the modern state or to will into existence the stellar armature of a functioning nation.

    As this column once noted, twice in his lifetime, President Mohammadu Buhari has been summoned by fate to preside over major ruling class implosions in the nation. But this time around, the rot has been compounded by ethnic, regional and religious animosities fuelled and powered by elite delinquency. The struggle for state control and the misappropriation of national resources has exacerbated the National Question.  The retired general from Daura has his work cut out for him.

    Fortunately, with his budget and the wide-ranging interview of a few days ago, the major economic and political templates of the Buhari administration now appear to the nation and his compatriots in bold relief. Politically, the retired general remains a strong statist hooked on the ameliorative and redemptive possibilities of a powerful, omniscient and omnipresent state, fearsome and forbidding enough to withstand and see off all countervailing and centrifugal forces in a titanic battle of will.

    Given his military background with its harsh centralization, its distaste for disorder and rigid institutionalized hierarchy which sustain authority and stability, Buhari can be forgiven for his statist predilection. Indeed, it can be argued that in the post-empire world order, all the developing nations that have rapidly transited from the Third World to the First no matter their ideological hue have been powered by strong state institutions and the cult of the strong leader. Post-Tsarist Russia, post-feudal Russia, modern Cuba, Singapore, the Asian Tigers and Vietnam all come to mind.

    It is in this sense, then, that Buhari’s current ameliorative and redemptive measures to instill sense and sanity into state institutions in Nigeria must be appreciated by his compatriots. The post-colonial state in Nigeria has become a huge joke: authoritarian but lacking in real authority; weighed down by sheer mass but without any meaningful substance; potent in stealing propensity but impotent in ruling possibility; bullying the cowed citizens while being bullied in turn by ragtag militias, it has been stripped of all its power and aura of legitimacy.

    We can no longer afford to put the cart before the horse. Unlike the strong state and functioning national institutions inherited from the colonial masters, the post-colonial state in Nigeria is so badly weakened that it cannot withstand radical surgery without giving up the ghost. Before we can even broach the possibility of a radical restructuring of the nation, the shell-shocked state has to be reinvented with its fundamental raison d’être restored.

    Experience has shown that when failed states break up, they merely produce more failed states. In Africa, Sudan and South Sudan, Congo and the farcical Republic of Katanga, are classic examples. On current form, even if Nigeria were to split into a hundred nations, it is hard to see how its dysfunctional and factionalized elite-formations with their primitive hunter-gatherer mindset can pass muster.

    In the context of institutional collapse and virtual state failure, separatist and secessionist agitations by sections of a moribund political elite, as if nations are timeless toys in the hands of over-pampered juveniles, merely throw unflattering light on the original sin: the failure of Nigeria’s post-independence political elite at nation-building and their inability to nurture and sustain state-validating institutions.

    Unlike the titans thrown up by the decolonizing project, it is hard to see how the current generation of Nigerian politicians can maintain a functioning and viable nation or state. A thousand Biafras, Oduduwa Republics, Arewa nations will merely reproduce the miseries and traumas of the captive people in a fresh territorial arrangement.

    This fundamental political failure, the inability to succeed at genuine nation-building, also explains the fundamental economic failure of the nation and Buhari’s resurgent economic nationalism. In a sense, this can be seen as a return of the repressed and a throwback to the retired general’s first coming. The failure of deregulation, economic liberalization, market forces and the concomitant rolling back of the state and its vexatious interventions tells its own story. It is a story of state failure and the appalling inability of state actors to rein in a few non-state actors and their cannibal capitalism.

    Let us be clear about one thing. Economic nationalism is another word for regulated state capitalism. No nation ever leaves its economy unprotected and at the mercy of pristine predators bent on bringing the country to its economic heels. This is not a debate about subsidy or its removal for in the final analysis there is no such thing. Subsidy is state rents and slush funds willingly paid to a rentier class for the sole purpose of influencing the outcome of elections and the destiny of the nation. Nigerians themselves broke the yoke in the watershed election of 2015.

    It is strange that in view of the run on the naira occasioned by wholesale looting of our national patrimony and the consequent plummeting of the national exchange median, none of our IMF and World Bank economists is calling for the removal of further “subsidy” even as global prices of oil have fallen to below forty dollars per barrel. Perhaps when the naira plunges into five hundred to the single dollar, petroleum product will also “obtain” at five hundred naira per litre.

    This is the economic canard and the subsidy trap of permanent peonage that General Buhari has perceptively seen through. By heroically refusing any further devaluation of the naira thereby making further subsidies official, the Nigerian president might have sprung the trap. Whatever the authoritarian excesses, Nigerians may soon have Buhari to thank for this.

    Every sovereign nation has the sovereign right to determine which economic policies best suit its people and in specific circumstances. Let us not hear any orchestrated cry of economic illiteracy from western interlopers and their local agents. Singapore, China, Cuba and the Asian Tigers did not triumph by aping western economic policies.

    In a perceptive review, retired Ambassador Dapo Fafowora has described President Buhari’s budget as “neo-Keynesian” and reflationary. This is at should be in the current circumstances. Looted funds do not reflate any economy. What reflates is money put in the pocket of the teeming poor and the economically disempowered.  This is what Buhari has tried to do by the various empowerment schemes. When all the monies stolen from the exchequer are courageously called in, the naira and Nigeria will witness a new dawn.

    This is not to say that there are no contradictions and complexities about political statism and economic nationalism in a country in which the various nationalities are at a stage or stages of unequal and uneven political and economic productions. Buhari will have to fine tune all this without appearing to punish the industrious and enterprising to please the indolent and the compulsively lazy. Let the debate begin. But let us give President Buhari some respite to mend this broken state. It is 2016, and it is morning yet on creation day.

  • Okon is Father Christmas

    A few days into the Christmas celebrations, snooper witnessed a most outlandish and unforgettable sight. It was Okon fully kitted in Father Christmas costumes being borne along the streets by Baba Lekki and the usual retinues of hangers on all chanting “Feliz navidad” in a rowdy and raucous manner. Boy, the whole place smelt like an abandoned ogogoro factory. The crazy boy was obviously in high spirits, no pun intended, and appeared in fine fettle.

    Very soon, the riotous crowd was joined by urchins and other urban vagabonds turning the whole thing into a carnival-like procession of the dispossessed. It was at this point that a drunken solitary policeman attempted to arrest Okon for impersonating Jesus.

    “Sebi you say you be Jesu, abi? Na sergeant go settle dat one when we reach station”, the drunken cop guffawed as he pointed his Mark 4 rifle at Okon. To everybody’s surprise, Okon brushed aside the fellow with disarming familiarity.

    “Yellow, I give you one minute to run for your life with your Shakabula gun or you will smell your mama’s yansh”, Okon roared. The policeman, now recognizing who it was, jumped through the restive crowd and took to his heels.

    “Yeepaa, na dem Esu boy from Calabar . He don beat me well well before before”, he screamed as he tore through the adjoining street with the crowd cursing at his heels.

    The train soon stopped in front of an abandoned warehouse as Okon settled down to distributing rice pilfered from an upended trailer even as Baba Lekki began smoking prohibited weeds from his prodigious pipe.

    “Dis one na ma own contribution to dem National Pension scheme, or baba abi na pension scam as you dey call am?”, the mad boy began with an expansive flourish.

    “Go on my boy, your head never knock. Him still get engine oil”, the crazy old crook nodded with warm approval.

    “Baba no be say Okon thief rice. Na trailer jam and Okon come jam rice, baba abi no be so?”, the crazy boy drawled.

    “Na dat one dem they call ijamba for Yoruba”, the old devil concurred.

    “Why dem trailer dey carry only rice and no currency from ONSA?” one fellow snorted from the crowd. Like a practiced operative, Baba Lekki immediately picked the dangerous train of thought.

    “Dangote no dey transport currency. Na Seriki  mai-rice. Onsa means he dey run for Yoruba.”. Baba Lekki crowed. But the damage had been done. It was the turn of one sturdy-looking man who flatly refused the offer of rice.

    “Give me one Dasuki”, the man bellowed rather threateningly.

    “Wetin be one Dasuki?” Okon asked the irate fellow.

    “One billion, period!” the man screamed and stormed away.  A hush fell on the crowd. There was an awful silence everywhere. Even Okon appeared momentarily lost. Then he seemed to have regained his old confidence.

    “Baba, see me see trouble. You no see how the yeye people I wan help dey disgrace me?  Dem no wan chop rice rice again na money dem wan chop”, Okon rued like a lost soul.

    “Okon, rice sweet but money sweet pass am”, the crazy old man whispered.

    “Baba, you come dey sound like dem old TAN people. Abi you don obtain sef?” Okon chortled.

    “Ha Okon, stealing no be corruption and obtainment no be stealing” the old man crowed.

    “Na God go punish dem wuruwuru fisherman. He come turn dem obodo country to Kalokalo machine. As dem thing come dey vomit money dem come dey carry go”, the crazy boy lamented.

    “Okon I don tell una say father Christmas pass father Christmas. Make we dey go home”, Baba sneered.

    “Baba, I never know say stealing dey dem Nigerian constitution”, Okon rued.

    “Okon dat one he depend on dem intendment of dem framers of dem constitution”, Baba Lekki noted with a jocular frown.

    “Baba he be like if say dem don frame dem framers for dis time. Na iron frame dem must to put for Kirikiri”, Okon screamed.

    “Okon your brother Bode come say na jara dem gave am, so na jara jail he go go dis time”, Baba Lekki sniggered.

    “Dat one him head no correct at all”, Okon spat.

    It was at this point that a madman who had been snoring through the proceeding suddenly roused and screamed, “rice ooo compatriots”. Before anybody could make any sense out of this, he seized a cudgel and began attacking everybody and everything in sight.

  • All hail the Asiwaju of Okeho

    Snooper wishes to felicitate with our fellow columnist, former colleague at the iconic Faculty of Arts, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, and fellow member of the Board of Trustees of the Obafemi Awolowo Institute of Government and Public Policy, Professor Segun Gbadegesin on his retirement and installation as the Asiwaju of Okeho.

    A man who detests self-promotion in all its forms and manifestations, it is rare to find an academic these days who is not sold on fake honours and false distinctions. In all his heroic stirring at the behest of his nation and beloved Yoruba race, Gbadegesin has applied himself with uncommon nobility of purpose and much humility and calm equanimity. Long after the charlatans have been evacuated from the stage, the example of this quintessential Yoruba omoluabi will remain as a beacon of hope and inspiration to younger generations.

    Having served his profession, race and nation so meritoriously and with such distinction, the notable Professor of Philosophy has now quietly retired to his Oke Ogun rural paradise as a leader of his community. Such a class act! Here is wishing this philosopher-statesman many more years of productive services to his people and nation at large.

  • From settlement to obtainment

    When it comes to self expression, Nigerians are a colourful and creative lot. No other nation on earth, imagined or willed into existence by sheer colonial hubris, can match the Nigerian capacity for an inventive and colourful appraisal of the political pathologies that hobble the nation. It has been said of the Congo that there are at least a thousand words to describe corruption. But Nigeria trumps them all, if not in quantity but in the sheer brilliance and wit with which they come up with metaphors for their own affliction.

    Before our very eyes, Nigeria has become the cancer ward of corruption. Political, economic and spiritual predators abound. In The Cancer Ward, Alexandr Solzhenitzyn, the great Russian writer, notes that no greater calamity can befall a doctor than for him to suffer an affliction in his own area of specialization. With individuals so it is with nation. Oil wealth has ruined Nigeria.

    Anybody interested in how manna from nature can destroy an entire nation must study how the black gold originally procured from Oloibiri has impaled the Nigerian project. Gold from the Inca civilization destroyed Spain and hobbled its prospects as a world power for five centuries. When the Iberian nation finally roused from the nightmare of unearned riches, the world had moved on.

    Anybody interested in studying the modern Nigerian disaster must first spare a thought for a scientific survey of the evolution of the language of corruption in Nigeria, as distinct from the corruption of language. This is a challenge to our intrepid scholars, if they are not already overwhelmed by the struggle for sustenance, or the struggle for obtainance, as the case may be. As the phenomenon of corruption develops its own masks, Nigerians have also become quite agile in decoding its amoebic possibilities.

    In the aborted The Third Republic, the prevailing lingo of corruption was settlement. To be settled was to be economically pacified. Go and settle with them suddenly became go and settle them. To be thus settled means you had forsworn all rights to further obtainment. Around the airports and other commercial nerve centres, just settle us became the war-cry. Suddenly and with great linguistic mischief and felicity, this ordinary folk nuance forced its way into royal military parlance. Nigeria would never be the same again.

    It was at this point that the late Admiral of the Fleet (and the fleecing), Augustus Akabueze Aikhomu, introduced a new linguistic conundrum to existing perplexities. With great verve and veracity, the late admiral sought to distinguish between misapplication of funds and misappropriation of funds. Settlement is not and cannot be deemed to be stealing. Please note that the culprit in question was a certain Maina and the scoundrel in question is manna from oil.

    In the Fourth Republic, Goodluck Jonathan introduced a worthy dimension to the conundrum when he famously noted that stealing is not corruption. It was a short epistemic leap to the reality that obtaining is not stealing. It has turned out a radical game changer for omnibus larceny and a free for all bazaar of impudence and impunity.

    From that point on, the most sensitive office in the land, the Office of the National Security Adviser, became a humungous cash-dispensing machine; a huge economic almshouse. By the time they finished with us, the national exchequer itself has virtually disappeared with the nation fiscally broke and her back broken. Yet there is a weird logic to it all. In the parlance of state larceny and elite degeneration, obtaining is the mother of all settlements and the father of all misapplications of funds. Jonathan should be praised for the elegant simplification of a complex equation.

    But all this will also pass, and that is if the nation itself does not pass into the oblivion of the terminally diseased. Pity the nation without institutional memory. How many people remember that in the First Republic, there was an even a more colourful word for the misappropriation? It was known as gazumping. Traceable to the inimitable K O Mbadiwe in its lexical misappropriation, gazumping occurs when a seller accepts a higher offer for a property than that to which he had orally committed himself. It is another name for a legal swindle.

    Now, see how far we have journeyed. In the First Republic, corruption had to wear a mask. Nowadays, it doesn’t.  The masquerade without a mask, is the master of the masquerade with a mask, according to a character from the Bulletin of the Living Dead. Meanwhile, the nation roils on the death bed of oil while gasping for breath from the foul and suffocating stench of its own diseased innards.

  • The Beach of Dead Whales

    The Beach of Dead Whales

    It was while swimming off the sandy beach at Tarkwa Bay that a group of boys first beheld what looked like a monster creature thrashing about the turbulent seas. It was a huge monster, which looked like a jumbo fish, a sea-dwelling animal and an amphibious prehistoric bird all rolled into one. It was luminously black and its lustrous hide glowered in the brilliant sunset creating the effects of an optical illusion. It was a whale.

    As the strange creature dived and banked in the shallow waters in obvious distress, the boys abandoned their tethered canoe and took to their heels. The ripples were powerful and strong enough to throw a big ship off course. At night and still trembling under his mother’s murky bed sheet, one of the boys told the matriarch about the strange sighting. She hushed him up. “You fool, when I told you to finish the malaria potion you refused. Now, it has returned”, the harassed woman screamed at a delinquent son.

    No one has sighted or seen a whale in these climes before. There was not even a name for it either in antiquity or contemporary parlance. The odd stray shark has been sighted in adjacent waters. Occasionally, the carcass of the solitary sea lion or off-message seal has been washed ashore. Once in a long while, a mammoth version of the barracuda has been known to tangle with the fishing trawl. And awed by its massive size, the local people named the hippopotamus the water elephant.

    Still, no word on or about the real thing: the whale. Up till that historic moment, its existence belonged in the realm of intrepid dreaming or the malarial imagination. But since the whale is a migratory mammal, it is quite possible that it had learnt to give these shores a wide berth because it was hunted to extinction in an earlier epoch.

    On the other hand, since scientific legend has it that the whale once lived on land but went back to water when the going got too rough, ancient caution might have led it to avoid the old killing shores of West Africa. Even for savage mammals, the fear of these shores is the beginning of wisdom.

    All this became the stuff of airy speculations as citizens of the crazed megalopolis woke up that rain-soaked morning to find the troubling reality of a beached whale as their august guest. By mid-morning, a huge crowd had gathered to take a look at the mammoth monstrosity.

    No one had seen anything like this before. Those who thought the elephant was the ultimate creation could not believe their eyes. What was this thing that was more massive than ten huge elephants combined? But the monster simply ignored everybody occasionally emitting a rumbling sound that drove the fear of the lord into the crowd.

    By the next morning, the stranded behemoth had been joined by two other mammoth whales. This was no ordinary coincidence. Something new was happening in this turbulent part of Africa. No one had seen a whale before not to talk of three jumbo whales at the same time. A huge portion of the rehabilitated Maroko beach was now occupied by beached whales.

    Upon hearing the news of the strange visitants which spread like wild bushfire in the harmattan, the entire interior of the country emptied into an already besieged mega city. Very soon, things took on the colour and atmosphere of a beach carnival of the oppressed and the unfortunate. The people were having a whale of a time. For many upcountry vagrants and joyless hobos, it was their first chance to see the city in its glittering opulence matched only by the feral nastiness of its slums and its decaying infrastructure. It was like Havana before the Cuban revolution.

    In fairness to the government of Alhaji Mallam Mansa Musa, it quickly assembled a team of experts to study the strange visitation. In view of the urgency of the situation, they were given one year to submit their report, with a provision for multiple extensions in case they wanted to travel abroad. These chaps were notable scientists and consultant oceanographers who had seen action off the coast of New Zealand and on the island of Okinawa.

    They had worked with merchant whalers and other offshore buccaneers. They measured the bulk and breadth of the bulbous invaders and came to the conclusion that by regular standards, these were no regular whales. They recommended that they must be towed back to the ocean depths without any further ado.

    But there was an immediate problem. In the history of the country and throughout its length and breadth, there was no, and there has never been, such a towing contraption. Up till that point, the nation had lived on miracles and survived by miraculous reprieves. Ever since its birth, the nation has flirted with suicide, often getting to the brink of an apocalypse before being dramatically delivered by the god of the Blackman.

    In 1992 September when the cream of the nation’s middle ranking military officers perished in one of the most infamous aeronautical scandals of the century, the traumatised citizenry had to wait for a whole twelve hours before help came from a German company based in the country. By then it was too late for the boys.

    It was not the impact of the crash in the shallow marshes of Ejigbo that killed the boys. Most of them actually survived the headlong dive. The survivors died of strangulation and asphyxiation. Throughout the night, the inhabitants of outlying slums heard the wails and cries of the brave chaps as they thrashed about and struggled to wrench themselves free of the iron coffin.

    It was like being buried alive. When they were eventually brought out, many of them had the residue of the first aid treatment they had applied to themselves in the sulphurous entombment. The nation had lost the cream of its future generals and marshals.

    Oh boy, did the corpses of those illustrious chaps stink. On the day of burial, the whole of Abuja stank to high heavens like the abandoned abattoir that the nation has become. What are we going to tell the children of Major Sam Mesaba Ogbeha, a first class officer and gentleman, or the newly promoted gentle giant, Colonel Taiwo Ogunjobi and many others?

    None of the ranking echelons in the military high command saw it fit to resign at this epochal disgrace of the black being. They were too consumed by the vicious power play that was to lead the nation to the brink of disintegration.

    Meanwhile on the beach, things took a more dramatic turn. More whales turned up as if in a historic reunion of distressed mammals. The whales were piled so hard and high that the entire coastline took on a dark, deathly hue. An observer from the nation’s last surviving military helicopter, in a strange turn of imagery, described the scene as resembling a huge offshore warehouse of whale waiting to discharge its cargo.

    Something began to give. While some of the whales lay still in terminal lassitude, others plunged their head deeper in the sand in fretful distress. All began discharging some gory substance. Then the very first one, now driven into the main road by the bulbous pile, let forth a frightful bellow and lay still. It was dead. Others quickly followed and the entire beach soon became a tangled mass of dead and dying whales.

    Many people, now convinced that the whales were a harmless mass of protoplasm climbed the skyscraper of soft, appealing meat, frolicking and sliding at will. Then one man brought out a jack knife and with the cry of “na better meat” heaved out a huge slab from the dead whale. It was like a divine signal. Thousands of hungry and famished humanity descended on dead and dying whales with all manner of crude instruments. In a moment, the entire beach became a huge abattoir foaming with blood and gore.

    As the news of this biblical bounty spread to the interior, many descended on the beach to have their share of the national whale. Salivating with apostolic relish, the nation’s leading spiritual merchant described the whalefest as “manna from heaven”. Urging his despairing congregation to take full advantage, it was God’s way of showing that he would never abandon his own, the man of God added.

    Then divine disaster struck, and for a nation that has lived at the edge of the abyss, it was massive and merciless. In the tropics, things flourish and perish very quickly. Obeying the iron tropical law, the whales began to decompose very rapidly. By the following evening, the entire coast had been taken over by a suffocating smell of decay and decomposition. Worse still, many who had taken the strange meat started vomiting and dying after a violent seizure.

    Disoriented by the septic stench, the entire populace started fleeing in all direction. As the pestilence took hold, the remaining institutions collapsed and the politicians, soldiers, clergymen, traditional rulers and judges took to their heels, heading for the airports or the interior. Unfortunately for them, a human sandstorm of refugees had taken over all the airports, while dead whales had taken over the seaports.

    In three brisk days, it was all over. The entire land lay still and quiet like a vast sepulchre. But this is not the silence of lambs. Born a human disaster and fed by a series of man-made disasters, it has taken a natural disaster to overwhelm the nation. A plague has seen off another plague. When politics and science fail, nature triumphs. That is the only iron law of human evolution. The early morning sun shone brilliantly. It is a beautiful day on the Marina Quayside.

     

    • First published in July,2010.
  • The Devil’s December

    The Devil’s December

    (Adedibu’s Doctrine revisited)

      It is as if the devil himself decided to pay an unscheduled visit to Nigeria this outgoing December. It has been the Bazaar of Beelzebub himself. The god of Mammon has demanded a walk-on part in the ongoing drama of the children of Barabbas. State larceny has never been more egregious and confounding in the entire history of the nation. The fragile foundation of the nation is itself threatened by the outlandish revelations. This is what happens when a criminal elite captures the levers of power and uses them for the sole purpose of stealing the nation blind.

    No word, or artist however powerfully endowed, can quite capture the scale and magnitude of the heist. The Nigerian Exchequer has been taken to the cleaners. Nothing in history can quite match this in its sheer psychotic daring and mindless bravura. The scale of the heist is mindboggling even by African standards of kleptocracy.

    The office of the National Security Adviser has been turned into a mammoth cash-vending machine with the holder of that office himself nothing more than a voucher-issuing  ledger clerk. Not even Franz  Kafka, the fabled master of dark bureaucratic comedy, would have  imagined this outlandish reality. But this is not horror fiction. It has actually been happening in Nigeria. Welcome to the Penal Colony where actual reality has become unrealistic.

    We must tremble at the implications of this mindless scam for the very notions of national security. A state that cannot secure itself against the fiscal depredations of a predatory elite is a very vulnerable state indeed. This is a nation whose ultimate implosion is maximally guaranteed since it is internally hobbled by elite greed and gluttony rather than by external adversity. Unless a nationalist elite class is forcibly created in these climes, Nigeria is sentenced to the fate of permanent penal colonies.

    It is therefore not enough to insist that those who are responsible for this monumental scam be brought to speedy and expeditious justice. After jailing them and confiscating their ill-gotten loot, the current administration must also take a look at the institutional fragility that has made this possible in the first instance. Jonathan and his compliant National Security Adviser are probably not the only culprits. They have merely driven the logic of a nation built on shaky foundations to its ultimate perdition.

    If he is to make any dent on the nation’s multifarious problems, it should now be obvious to President Mohammadu Buhari that corruption per se is not the nation’s problem but the very system that has made such obscene corruption a troubling and inevitable reality of our national existence. The gung-ho courage and incorruptibility he has so far demonstrated will help. But they are not nearly enough when it comes to the intellectual courage and conceptual wherewithal required to dismantle the rent-seeking nature of the post-colonial state in Nigeria and replace it with a new state architecture.

    There is a perfectly satisfying and even uncanny logic about the turn of events and the strange patchwork of alliances that have brought the retired general to the Nigerian presidency at this very time in the life of the nation. No other Nigerian leader of his type and generation is better positioned historically, experientially and psychologically to deal with the Aegean stable without flinching, and without shying away from the testy implications for his own ascendancy and the untidy affiliations that have brought him to the presidency.

    This past week a security gnome from the Jonathan camp has hinted rather darkly that the office of National Security Adviser also handles the overhead costs for retired heads of state and regular largesse to needy friendly countries. If Buhari were to probe deeper, it is going to be a nation-destabilizing Pandora Box indeed with the multitude braying for blood. But like a fatally afflicted patient that has shied away from radical surgery for so long, the moment of truth has finally arrived for Nigeria.

    In the light of the ongoing revelations, perhaps it is time to revisit the Adedibu Doctrine of State Security if only for the light it throws on the absurdities of the Nigerian state, and the way forward. In a fabled confrontation with the then governor of Oyo state, Rasheed Adewolu Ladoja, the late primogenitor of amala politics had clairvoyantly warned the naïve fellow that since state security is no more than the containment of elite destabilization and disaffection, Ladoja should turn over a huge chunk of his security vote to him since he was already doing that with aplomb. Ladoja’s refusal led to mayhem and his eventual impeachment.

    The greatest security problem amalgamated Nigeria has faced is elite destabilization. It has led to a civil war, coups, religious upheavals, electoral heists and the current separatist agitations. It is a momentous irony that Sambo Dasuki, a prince of the last empire in Nigeria, continued to dispense from his vending machine long after the presidential election ought to have put him out of business. It speaks to a shambolic state structure.

    Mohammadu Buhari has his work cut out for him. This nation-disabling ailment must be tackled with a combination of drastic proactive measures and radical structural surgery. At the very least and from now on, security votes must be publicly appropriated and sternly audited. Erring culprits must be swiftly brought to justice.

    This morning, we bring you a piece published five years ago which reads like the chronicle of state implosion foretold.