The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • The Children of Barabbas

    Snooper apologises ahead to some of our numerous readers for this rather heavy-going piece, but it is in the nature of the business at hand.  You can take a man out of his professorial habitat, but you cannot take the professorial habitat out of a man. An unhappy consciousness stalks the land. This deep distress and disappointment with everything and everybody manifests itself in many ways. Nigerian kids are no longer napping. They are kidnapping. And kidnapping is a serious business, like the stealing of a nation’s patrimony by a criminal elite.

    The kidnappers do not appropriate the patrimony of a nation directly; they do it by indirect labour. And in so doing, they stand the whole logic of patrimony on its head. The kid has become the real father of the man. Welcome to the kidnappers manifesto; or, Barabbas Syndrome.

    Barabbas Syndrome is the latest manifestation of our peculiar post-colonial condition. At least a malignant psychological ailment like Oedipus complex is straightforward enough. Every son, according to Freud, drawing on the Sophoclean drama, wants to marry his mother after killing his father. For Freud, this is the primal motive of human existence and the root of all human conflicts.

    But Barabbas Syndome is not so clear and straightforward. It is indeed a different kettle of fish. It is a dark and deeply recondite drama of human existence itself, full of contradictory impulses and motives, some of these noble and heroic; others criminal and perverted. The kidnappers are criminals because, lacking in ideological education, they seek to disrupt the order of corruption rather than the corruption of order. But in disrupting the order of corruption, they may worsen the corruption of order, which is not a bad thing at all.

    Herein surfaces the difficulties and troubling complications at the heart of the Barabbas story. But before we come to elucidate on this, the unhappy consciousness, its ideological soul-mate, beckons. The unhappy consciousness has been with humankind since the dawn of the human society. The absolute discomfort with one’s lot and one’s society is the driving force behind all phenomenal occurrences in civilization and hence of human evolution itself.

    Anybody closely monitoring the contemporary Nigerian society in all its riotous disequilibrium will notice the unhappy consciousness at work in every facet of our national life. Even if it occludes or elides itself in circuitous ideological camouflage, it is there. It is there in politics, it is there in the economy, it is there in religion, and it is there in the traditional concept of marriage which is vast dissolving as new economic realities take a grenade to the feudal set up where women were thought to be the lower gender. Finally, it is there in the intellectual space as every article attracts hundreds of furious and frank rejoinders.

    The intellectual ferment in Nigeria today, replete with émigré bazooka, is reminiscent of pre-Revolution Russia when the Russian people finally caught up with the idiocies and odiousness of Tsarist rule and the bankruptcy of the ancient class. But of all these disruptions of the epistemic logic on which the crumbling order is based, none is more potentially devastating than the rising wave of armed critiques of the nation-in- crisis whether it emanates from ethnic, regional, religious or sheer class disaffection.

    It is within the logic of class confrontation that we must situate the rising wave of kidnapping and abduction throughout the length and breadth of the country. Although most severe in the east, it is a pan-Nigerian phenomenon. There are new kids on the block. The new kids are kidnappers. Anybody who has closely monitored the drama of the abduction of the four journalists and the capillary network of informants, rogue policemen, rogue security people, rogue traditional rulers and rogue state operatives must conclude that we are in totally uncharted territory. This is not to talk of the sharp clarity with which the kidnappers defined the objectives of their criminal enterprise.

    This criminal redistribution of criminally acquired wealth is anarchy on the march. But anarchy, we need to remind ourselves, is not the collapse of law and order but the collapse of lawlessness and disorder. Perhaps we need to summon G.F.W Hegel, the great German philosophical genius and theorist of the unhappy consciousness. Hegel was a great man but a frank racist to boot who believed that Africa and Africans never left the cradle of humankind; a dark jungle of uncultured and uncultivated savages.

    Hegel was forced to resolve the cruel existential dilemma of the unhappy consciousness in favour of the modern state and its implacable masters. According to him, the unhappy consciousness usually dissolves itself into hedonism and asceticism, and at a later stage in history into cynicism and scepticism. Throughout his life, Hegel was bedevilled by an unthinking glorification of the power and majesty of the nascent Prussian state. It was unchallenged and unchallengeable. “What is real is rational and what is rational is real”, Hegel famously proclaimed.

    Having resurrected the master-slave dialectic, Hegel did not know what to do with it. For him, it was unthinkable and unfeasible that the slave should trump and triumph over his master even when the master is abominably inferior to the slave. The unhappy consciousness courts disaster and the cult of futile martyrdom, all for the glory and magnification of something he calls the Absolute Spirit, which is a euphemism for God.

    It was left to Karl Marx, the great philosopher of radical consciousness, to stand Hegel’s logic on its head. Drawing deeply on Ludwig Feuerbach, another great German materialist philosopher, Marx avers that rather than being an ordinary drama of existence, the master-slave dialectic, or class struggle unto death, is the fulcrum on which history revolves and human society evolves.

    There is nothing like the absolute spirit but the disguised will of humanity. Rather than seeing paradise as an otherworldly pursuit, it is indeed a worldly possibility which must be struggled and fought for. For good measure, and as if he was heckling Hegel, Marx famously thundered: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it!!”

    It was as if Barabbas had anticipated Marx. Although often demonised as a violent thief and armed robber in Christian mythology, he was indeed a more stirring and intriguing historical figure. Barabbas was also a freedom fighter, having taken part in several uprisings against the local Roman tyranny. Echoes of our own kidnappers?

    In Mark 15:7, Barabbas was described as a member of the Jewish resistance who was in jail because he had taken part in a recent uprising. Many biblical scholars actually believed that he was an important figure in the local resistance. This might explain why the local crowd was rooting for him instead of Jesus. Barabbas might have been a thief, but he was also a local hero.

    The Roman authorities were not neutral arbiters. Through shrewd and strategic thinking, they might have come to the conclusion that the heroic thief was a lesser social risk than the man who called himself the messiah and who was beginning to acquire a huge following. If the strange man were to parlay and leverage his religious popularity in favour of political insurrection, that would surely be the end of Roman suzerainty in the land.

    There is an interesting twist at the end of this tale of Barabbas which has a peculiar resonance for contemporary Nigerian society and its kidnappers. Apart from Barabbas and Jesus sharing the same distinction as heroic rebel leaders, they also shared the same first name. Barabbas was actually Jesus Barabbas which was a very popular name around that place and period. In subsequent Christian literature, the name was deliberately expunged because the writers could not bear their religious hero share the same name as a common criminal.

    Like Barabbas who was a hero and a thief at the same time, kidnapping or hostage-taking combines heroism with perversion and criminality. Lest we forget, the original acts of hostage taking and kidnapping before it went industrial were isolated acts of considerable valour that were designed to draw attention to the parlous condition in the Niger Delta.

    But very soon, human prospecting became the equivalent of oil prospecting along the patterns of thievery and gangsterism. The militias originally trained to murder opponents and rig election now transformed into an equal opportunity employer of violence and forcible abduction in their own right.

    Why then are we so blest?  In Aramaic language, the name Barabbas, or bar Abba means the son of the father. The kidnappers are true sons of their fathers who have kidnapped the Nigerian state and appropriated resources belonging to a whole nation. The kidnappers seek not only to emulate their fathers but they also will like to immolate them. In this they appear to be a step ahead of their fathers in terms of criminal perversion. The son is truly the father of the man. The prospects are grim.

    In addition to all the measures to be put in place to eradicate the menace of kidnapping, greater surveillance, community policing, a better network of state informants, greater scrutiny of state bribery and money laundering, the resuscitation of the death penalty etc, please try this simple one. Let Barabbas stop stealing our money and let us see if his children will not stop kidnapping our people.

     

    (First published in July, 2010.)

  • Now, bloggers are their nemesis

    Now, bloggers are their nemesis

    If not for anything else, the current senate will be remembered for ages to come as a body without any sense of shame or propriety. With this lot, Nigeria has really scraped the bottom of the barrel. At a time when it should be working round the clock to redeem its battered image and to shore up its badly damaged credibility, the senate is coming up with the equivalent of a final solution for its critics in the guise of Social Media Bill which will put the fear of the Lord in its tormentors.

    It has been quite a hilarious sight this past week watching the members of the august assembly whip themselves into such frenzy. Snooper was particularly entertained by Senator Biodun Olujimi from Ekiti state who was so hopping mad with the cyber urchins that she became almost apoplectic with rage. One can imagine the irate Ekiti woman chasing around the urchins with a pestle for yam pounding. If only one had not known the former Ms Biodun Ariyo of old NTA Ibadan fame as an irrepressible journalist herself. How times change.

    But it is said that when you are in a hole, you must stop digging. The senate is furiously digging, shaming those who believe that perhaps by some miraculous reprieve the members may yet be able to salvage some honour and dignity from the epic mess. The scale of venom and fury its attempt to muzzle its critics through this quixotic bill has attracted should be enough to convince the senators of their dismal standing with their compatriots. Even a freshly minted exemplar of press freedom like old General Muhammadu Buhari has wisely and discreetly distanced himself from the grosser absurdities of the proposed bill.

    This proposed bill fails significantly on the two major templates of integrity that must drive public spirited reforms in a patriotic political class. First the timing is suspect, coming at a time when the senate is under public siege for what is widely perceived as its brazen ethical lapses in the conduct of its own business. Second, the sponsoring body is itself a serial suspect in the moral suborning of a nation. It is a trite supposition in law that you cannot be a judge in your own case.

    Given what Messrs Julian Assang» and others have done to expose the ritzy rituals of state subterfuges in the last decade, it is a case of compounding felony with obtuseness that the Nigerian senate should put itself on the path of a global earthquake against state manipulation of information. It is said that if knowledge is power, then secret knowledge is secret power.

    The Nigerian senate should have kept its ammunition dry for another day. In the global explosion of blogging and citizens’ patrol of their state patrollers, what regulates the trade is not authoritarian and draconian legislation but a simple test of credibility and integrity. In the last decade alone, how many blogging websites set up for the purposes of blackmail and corrupt ensnarement have disappeared with their owners permanently disgraced?

    But the Sahara Reporters, the senate bête noire, has continued to grow from strength to strength, whatever the occasional exuberance and youthful enthusiasm. Its owner, the hell-raising and punitively proactive Omoyele Sowore, is no spring chicken when it comes to these matters. An outstanding Students Union leader at the University of Lagos at the turn of the nineties, Sowore has a historic and heroic record of defending to the last drop of his blood the notion of public interest as he perceives it.

    Sowore’s scary exploits as a student union leader include wresting to the ground with service pistol flung afar a former naval chieftain and future no 2 in Nigeria over a university dispute concerning examinations disruption.  The late admiral was a moonlighting law student. If the young man is not going to be fazed by the real thing, it is a hard to see how mere senate sabre-rattling can drive him out of business.

    Snooper can testify to the fact that Sahara Reporters started in a small backroom office with Sowore’s  medium-sized SUV serving as communication centre. At that point in time, the jalopy reminded one of a burgled and thoroughly vandalized electronics shop. From such humble beginnings, the intrepid fellow has put himself and his nation on the global map of citizens’ journalism.

    How time flies! It is almost a decade ago that Sahara Reporters was officially launched at the Empire State Building in New York. Snooper was there all the way from San Antonio and distributed a prepared text. This morning, we republish that address as a timely reminder to those who believe they can scorch an idea whose time has come.  Here is wishing Sokoti many more years of productive service to his fatherland and humanity at large.

  • The Blogger as Nemesis

    The Blogger as Nemesis

    As the world goes through rapid transformations, so do the professions and the old divisions of labour. There are interesting developments that make nonsense of specialization and even the old notion of the nation-state. Yet it is too early to conclude that globalization will provide the coup de grace for the post-colonial state in Africa or precipitate what will put the superannuated colonial contraption out of its terminal misery.

    The omens are not very reassuring. Already gravely imperilled by its juvenile delinquency, its serial breach of the Lockean contract, its aggravating insolence, its multiple infidelities, the post-colonial state in Africa lurches from crisis to crisis, conflict to conflict and confrontation to confrontation.

    Such are the internal contradictions, the antinomies between state and nation that the moment it weathers a crisis, a more terrifying disaster looms in the horizon. Disorder is the organizing order, the dysfunctional fulcrum on which national dysfunction revolves.

    Yet despite its debilitating impairment, its historic infirmities, the post-colonial state, particularly its Nigerian incarnation, has shown a surprising resilience, a capacity for self-reproduction, an elegant ability to mutate at short notice that has defied all historical odds and doomsday predictions.

    The obituaries have been premature. The reports of its death are grossly exaggerated. Drawing incredible resources from its very contradictions, its increasing criminalization and sheer perversities, the Nigerian state fumbles and wobbles on. As the Nigerian state mutates, wearing several masks of tyranny while its fundamental nature remains the same, adversarial journalism, its dialectical mirror image, is also constantly transformed as a response to its own internal contradictions as well as historical developments.

    In the First and Second Republics, oppositional journalists were content with writing their stuff and waiting for the government to come for them. Many ended in jail. Ironically enough, because the effects of colonial rule were yet to wear out, there were still some rules to the game. The government was trusted to obey its own laws.

    As the Nigerian military state naturalized and sheer lawlessness became the norm, military tactics also infiltrated the press. Obeying the dictates of self-preservation, which is the first law of nature, journalists were no longer willing to trust their fate to a state which murders its own citizens. Hence the rise of the “guerrilla journalist’, an insurgent with mobile typewriter who operated outside the laws as an intellectual sniper.

    Now, the journalist as journalissimo has arrived: an insurrectionist with a laptop who has carried the battle to the state from global space. It is the age of the new kids on the blog. Just as it is said that war is too serious a business to be left to soldiers and politics is too sacred a profession to be left to politicians, journalism is too serious a business to be left to professional journalists.

    Nature abhors a vacuum and as history has demonstrated, every profession which devalues itself, which desecrates its sacred obligations, invites external interventions. The generalissimo defied and demystified the general; the political practitioner disrobed the politician; the “journalissimo” has demystified journalism turning citizens’ arrest into the pre-eminent form of order-enforcement.

    The age of the Internet is proving as revolutionary as the discovery of the printing press. Of all the dangers threatening the post-colonial state in Nigeria, none is more debilitating and potentially more devastating than the rise of the Nigerian blogger. Using tactics and electronics normally associated with advance espionage, taking advantage of globalization and the sheer borderlessness of the new world, the blogger threatens the very foundation of the post-colonial state in its totality and territoriality.

    As explosive exposure follows explosive exposure, as revelations of spellbinding corruption and official chicanery cascade, the legitimacy and authority of the state suffer signal erosion. Thus an interview began in Benin Republic under the watchful eyes of rent-seeking immigration officials might be concluded in Lagos, Nigeria only to be edited and put on the World Wide Web in New York.

    Totally paralyzed and rendered inept by the ceaseless global flow of information, the state becomes a minor, inconsequential actor within a micro-pluralism of power. Unable to police either its borders or its so-called citizens, the state forfeits its power of surveillance. In this brave new world of Internet hostilities, the surveiller becomes the surveilled.

    As disaffected nationals in the Diaspora position themselves on the Internet lobbing artillery shells of disgust and disdain on the home country, the situation becomes very dire indeed. Such are the resources available; such is the intellectual firepower that village despots tremble in their liars under the sustained bombardment. The hunter has become the hunted.

    What then has brought the post-colonial state in Africa to this critical impasse?  And what is the implication for the colonial contraptions that go by the name of nation-states on the continent? In all the major indices of governance, the state is unable to justify its fundamental raison d’Átre. The serial defaulting on the Lockean contract between the ruled and rulers, the peevish and pathological re-offending, have led to massive alienation and one-way exits from the benighted continent.

    The result has been a steady regression into the Hobbesian state of nature where everything is short, nasty and brutish. With the breakdown of law and order, with the collapse of legitimacy and authority, anarchy reigns supreme and hostage taking both at the official and unofficial level becomes the norm. In frustration and impotence, and unable to obey its own laws, the state resorts to hostage-taking while the armed insurrection replies in kind. The result is new kind of anomie unique to civilian governance in post-colonial Africa.

    Yet dire as the situation is, it can get much worse. In Nigeria, for example, the crisis of governance is at the level of state and civil society. With poverty stalking the land, with the massive cooptation of many oppositionists into government, and with the exit of the best and brightest, there is struggle-fatigue. Nigeria lacks a tradition of long-distance resistance. We are all short-distance runners.

    Many contemporary leading lights in civil society anchor their reputation on one-off acts of defiance against a particular tyrant which they then inflate into cosmic self-importance, or which they use as bargaining chips for entrance into the ruling caste. Any wonder then that every phase of resistance usually leaves the opposition gasping for breath and ready to accommodate any political settlement imposed by the ruling class?

    Unlike the ANC which was founded in 1912 and which did not come to power until the mid-nineties, there is no such tradition of sustained and organic resistance. Every contention with the latest tyrant has to begin anew, and with fresh political formations. The result is an elite and elitist power play completely dislocated and disconnected from the real people. Realising that neither their vote nor even presence count, the people take refuge in cynical apathy as factions of the elite duel themselves unto death.

    This is the political disequilibrium under which our new kids on the blog will operate. There is a clear and present danger to this. Rather than leading to a revolution or even the reformation of an ailing state, the revelations of official shenanigans in the absence of a critical mass may provoke an extreme, right-wing fundamentalist cleansing of the state which may push the nation in the direction of civil war and dismemberment or lead to the consolidation of revolutionary anarchy.

    On the other hand, the abstract idealism which often underpins these interventions, the attempts by nationals in the Diaspora to view developments at home with the critical lens of developments in the west may lead to further alienation of the state without creating an enabling or conducive environment for genuine change at home. Either way, it is a play of giants with the blogger granted his fifteen minutes of fame, but marooned on the internet or stranded at the Empire State Building.

    In the past twenty years, the Nigerian military state has demonstrated a surprising capacity to deal with emergencies and an impressive ability to assume different masks to deal with political exigencies. It has also shown a ruthless will to power. It found a frowning general to handle the emergency created by the profligacy and irresponsibility of civilian governance in the Second Republic.

    When the political class began to chafe under the draconian inquisition, it came up with a smiling general. But when the smiling one lost command and the ruling caucus became gravely imperilled as a result of radical pressures from below, it came up with a begoggled frowning tyrant. After five years of low intensity warfare, the taciturn merchant of mayhem in turn expired in fabled circumstances just as he was about to push the nation over the precipice, thus giving way to another benign charmer who was to prepare the ground for the civilianized general who could frown by the day and smile at night.

    It is not the blogger who will put an end to this elaborate charade, this sustained chicanery and macabre musical chairs. But blogging will help. The defenestration of some important sectors of the Nigerian press as a result of corporate corruption and individual greed has assured the blogger of a great historical platform. Yet if he is to fulfill this historic mission, the blogger must conduct a constant reality check and come up with a profound intellectual interrogation of his own vulnerability in a web of elite deceit and mischief. It is only after this that the blogger can reconnect with the endangered forces of genuine change in the home country.

    • (This text was given as opening speech at the launch of the website Saharareporters.com at the Empire State Building, New York, Saturday, February 18th, 2006.)
  • Rewriting the writer

    Rewriting the writer

    In the ever unfolding track of history, there are times when a writer is proved right as a prophetic seer; a gifted clairvoyant. But there are also subsequent developments which make a mockery of the writer’s certitude and turn him into a big fool of history. Often and to emphasize what is known as the cunning of history, the two are an inseparable molecular unit with truth embedded in falsity and falsity containing a nucleus of the truth.

    Although first published in 2009, the piece below has a gripping and peculiar resonance in our present circumstances which makes one wonder whether history is not a cruel joke. But things do change, sometimes slowly and imperceptibly and occasionally with a disruptive revolutionary flourish which changes the nature of the game completely.

    Yet throughout the history of humankind, people fight for certain ideals often at prohibitive cost only to discover that what they have fought for is not what has actually prevailed. If their back is broken by the discovery, if their will is stymied by bitter disappointment, it will be left to others to continue the struggle. Even in wars, victory may turn out to be ultimate defeat, while revolutions often revolve into something totally unexpected and unanticipated.

    By 2009 when this piece was published, it was clear that the ruling post-military coalition had reached the end of its wits. The historic settlement which saw to the military withdrawal to the barracks had not lived to its billing. The country was in dire economic and political straits. The 2007 presidential election was so badly rigged that even Umaru Yar’Adua, the principal beneficiary, joined in the protest.

    But the ruling coalition limped on for another six years, despite the fierce buffeting by the gale of economic and political adversity. It even managed to win the general election of 2011 as political correctness trumped social justice. Thereafter, it was implosion and disintegration all the way as the Jonathan administration sank deeper into the peat bog of corruption and inefficiency.

    Even then, such was the historic monstrosity the PDP had become that it was unwilling to go under lightly, despite all the atrocities. It tried everything in the book to remain in power. In the event, it took a novel pan-Nigerian coalition of political forces to dethrone it. If the current revelations are anything to go by, it may no longer be possible to contain the damage within the rubrics of regular democratic rule. This is where grave danger looms for the country and hence the acute relevance of the piece published today.

    In closing, it may interest the reader to note that General Buhari ,in a sneak preview of the future, makes a brief appearance in this 2009 essay. He was said to have been the only northern Nigerian leader who was not booed by the irate crowd at the launch of the Foundation for the late northern leader, Ahmadu Bello. It was perhaps an augury of approaching developments.

    Six years after, General Buhari is firmly in the saddle as the fourth executive president of a post-military Nigeria and his personal stock has never been higher among the masses. But the nation’s economic and political woes have also deepened. The omens could never be more dire.  It will be a major historical irony if Mr Kum were to visit Nigeria under the watch of President Buhari. But then history is such a savage clown.

  • Please don’t come, Mr Kum

    Today, there is palpable anger in the land. The rising tide of fury and discontent is such that one is afraid things might topple over at short notice. This morning, this column drops all pretences to partisanship to urge Mallam Umaru Yar’Adua to summon as a matter of national emergency a summit of all political parties and principal power players to deliberate on the political and economic catastrophes threatening the nation on all fronts.

    The Nigerian ruling class has proved time and time again that rational calculations and enlightened self-interest are not its particular forte. But there are enough danger signals in the polity to give the jitters to even the most obdurate and obtuse of political elites. We are not even talking of regime collapse or violent change but something more fundamental and nation-threatening.

    Once again, the danger signals are flashing. Despite the hype and hoopla about amnesty and the pacification of the tribes of the lower Niger, it is obvious that the elite consensus which formed the bedrock and the political basis of the Obasanjo Settlement of 1999 has completely collapsed. As it happened in 1965, 1983 and 1993, a nasty spirit of vengeance and resentment has descended on the land. You can feel the fury in the air.  You watch the angry, sullen crowds roiling in the bitter, homicidal rage of dispossession and you feel it is only a question of time before Mr kum arrives from Cambodia.

    Never in the history of this country has there been so much murderous hatred for public officials as we are now witnessing. The surface below ordinary polite conversations is seething with rage and resentment. Let no one deceive himself. There is no discrimination or differentiation of culpability, no refinement of malice in this mass categorization of the Nigerian political elite as an abominable breed. Everybody who is well-off or appears to be well-heeled is summarily blacklisted. Your eventual executor may well be your houseboy or a member of the domestic staff.

    Yet because the Nigerian political elite have lost so much authority and ethical legitimacy, this bleak fury in the land cannot be channeled for the revolutionary transformation of the nation. For the same reason, neither can it be canalized for higher political purpose. So, what we have is raw , untrammeled rage which is neither transformative nor infused by a nobility of purpose. When the dam of this unstructured, freewheeling and deregulated anger breaks, it is going to be a messy and bloody anarchy the like of which no one has seen before.

    This no-hold-barred distemper speaks to the temper of the times. But more than that, they speak to a total disconnect between the aspirations of the generality of the Yoruba people and many of those parading themselves as their leaders. You could almost feel it in the marrow that if these disillusioned and distraught people should lay their hands on their so called leaders after law and order has broken down, it is going to be mayhem day indeed.

    But it is not only in the west that you have this ferment, this burgeoning social rebellion. In the east, the normless political theatre and perpetually unprincipled leadership has turned the place into a vast coliseum of unhinged gladiators baying for blood. The north is also raring to go. A few weeks ago, snooper attended the inaugural launch of the Sardauna Foundation in Kaduna. Practically all the former heads of state with the exception of General Mohamadu Buhari were booed by an irate mob at the mere mentioning of their name. Mr Kum is surely on the way.

    But who is Mr Kum anyway? Kum, or kum, kum is a Cambodian word or concept for disproportionate revenge. Although emanating from a particular Cambodian mindset for restoring parity of cruelty, it also has universal applications. There is a Mr Kum in every one of us. Even the normally sedate Yoruba people have a saying that if a hen overturns one’s charm potion, one must break its egg.  That is kum for you. However, it is when kum is collectivized, when anger is nationalized or resentment ethnicised that things turn genocidal.

    Although kum is designed to restore parity and salvage some honour, the parity is such that it often turns out to be a final solution. The response is always disproportionate to the original offense because you want to render the other party permanently combat-ineffective so that he will never be in a position to inflict further harm on you. Rather than being an eye for an eye, kum is a head for an eye. Sometimes the urge to vengeance is driven by such ferocity, such savagery that entire families are exterminated up till the seventh generation.

    Anthropologists studying the cultural parameters which predispose humanity to genocidal tsunamis point at the moment when the object of hatred ceases to be a human and becomes a symbol, a trope, an animal, insect or a non-person. When Franz Kafka famously wrote a novel in which a man suddenly wakes up to discover that he had become an insect many people thought the disturbed and neurotic writer was exercising his right to creative lunacy. But given what Hitler would later do to the Jews, it turned out to be a haunting prophecy. It surely takes the downward declassification of humans for murder to proceed on such an industrial scale.  In Rwanda, the genocidal war-cry was “kill the uyensi”. Kill the cockroach. Once humans become insects, they are like flies in the hands of wanton boys and men.

    It is profoundly ironic that we should be talking about kum thirty years after the Pol Pot regime was driven out of the Cambodian capital by Vietnamese troops. Arguably the most pathologically callous regime ever visited on mankind in the modern epoch, the Khmer Rouge killed about one seventh of the Cambodian population before being driven out. A regimen of deliberate and systematic elimination of perceived opponents became state policy. Violence, pure violence, became the organizing principle. Thousands perished of hunger. Many expired like animals in unimaginably filthy conditions. Such was the abominable scale of human extermination that at a point bullets were considered too expensive to be wasted on human vermin. Those to be executed had to make do with being clubbed to death or by having their skulls cracked .

    Even the tough and battle-hardened Vietnamese communist regime to the north was appalled by this abysmal human cruelty. When the victorious Khmer army finally entered the Cambodian capital in April 1975 after years of battling the corrupt American backed government of Lon Nol, they swiftly emptied the city of its inhabitants and sent the populace to the country side to farm. The same process was repeated across the country. Many died of sheer exhaustion. The social ranking was forcibly and summarily reversed and former masters became servants. It was an apocalyptic glimpse into Dante’s inferno.

    But it all boils down to kum.  It is a truism that social brutalization begets physical brutality.  Although totally disproportionate, the Khmer Rouge were responding to years of cruel suppression and the social cruelties inflicted on the Cambodian society by a corrupt and decadent political elite. When kum arrives, the social structure for containing anger and resentment simply disappears. The mad man has begun to consume the flies consuming him. It is no surprise that thirty years after, the brutal Pol Pot regime still has its partisans and admirers in Cambodia who believe that they did what had to be done.

    Years after the parity of barbarity might have been restored, the social wounds refuse to heal and a society is permanently at war with itself. This is the problem with kum and the basis of the clear and present dangers Nigeria faces from an imminent social implosion. Forget about amnesty and all the post-amnesty pizzazz for now. As it is currently configured, Nigeria faces Mr kum on several fronts. First, are revenge-seeking minority groups responding to social deprivation and environmental degradation. Second are parity-seeking majority groups seeking to exclude their excluders. Third are terminated power blocs seeking to terminate their terminators.

    But by far the most potent and potentially annihilating threat faced by Nigeria today is the adamantine class divide which has seen to millions wallowing in hunger and biblical misery while a few make away openly with the national patrimony. The polity roils with rage and discontent. The smouldering resentment across ethnic, regional and religious divide threatens to engulf the entire country.

    Let us end by paraphrasing Leon Trotsky in a moment of radical depression. “As socialists we seek a socialist world not because we believe that man will be happier—such claims are best left to dictators….But we believe that the moral imperative in life is to raise the human condition even if this means no more than that the current farce and monstrosity has proceeded to tragedy itself” .

    It is not a revolution we must fear. It is Mr Kum.

     

    • First published in 2009.
  • On leave without absence

    On leave without absence

    There are different kinds of leaves, and some are more terminal than others. Some leaves terminate while others exterminate. For example, there is terminal leave before retirement, which is the Civil Service way of saying please leave and don’t come back. There is also sick leave, which is another way of saying that even though you are sick of it all, you are not about to leave. In America where you must earn your dime, a couple of sick leaves can earn you terminal leave.

    The reason for these loud ruminations should be obvious. After repeatedly failing to cadge a leave of real absence from the onerous responsibility of writing this column, snooper decided to ask the editor to put it about last week that this column was going on a short leave. But this was swiftly countermanded by the authorities. “Sir, the voice sweetly cajoled, how can you go on leave when so many issues are crying for attention?”

    Snooper had thought that it was the other way round, and that so many issues are already crying from the attention of the column. No column is exempt from the biases and prejudices that drive the columnist.  In a society riven by ethnic, religious, political and cultural animosities, column writing is often an agonistic contention with the columnist often reminding one of a bloodied gladiator in a coliseum.  The column often wields the heavy cane with a magisterial frown, but can itself be mugged severely in a counter offensive.

    The trick is never to obsess on a particular topic, a particular individual or particular groups. When you write repeatedly and adversarially on a particular topic or individual or groups, you come across as mean and vindictive; a tortured psychotic pursuing an unworthy vendetta. This is why snooper never returns to his vomit, no matter the provocation. The last word must never belong to those who utter the first.

    Yes indeed, there are so many issues crying for attention.  There is the stalemate in the senate, which has made it impossible for that hallowed body to exercise any moral or genuine political authority on developments in the nation. There is the legal logjam whereby so many writs and counter writs have virtually impaled justice and a just order in the nation. There is the worsening economic plight of the nation as President Buhari battles with the fallout of a burglarized treasury. There is the bogey of secession which is beginning to assume a nasty dimension in the eastern part of the nation.

    In the circumstances, the columnist has a stark choice. Either one goes on leave without absence, or on leave of presence or leave in absentia or completely AWOL which means Away Without being On Leave. In the military, this is often treated as desertion. In wartime situations, it is often met with summary execution.

    We have chosen to be on leave without absence, which means that for the next few weeks while the columnist is technically on leave, the page will be filled with articles from the past thirty five years written by the columnist which throws interesting light on the present. This morning, we start with a tribute to the great Nigerian intellectual and man of ideas, the late Stanley Macebuh , who showed what it takes to assemble a truly pan-Nigerian team which can shape and profoundly affect the cultural, intellectual and political destiny of the nation.

  • The liberal tradition and its enemies

    The death of Stanley Macebuh last weekend robs Nigeria of one of its greatest minds ever; a man of outstanding intellect and great cultivation.  He was cut in the finest tradition of the liberal intellectual. He was refined, humane and tolerant of dissenting opinion. He was also generous and compulsively selfless. In a brutal and uncaring society, these endearing traits cannot be part of a survivalist kit or a manual for manumission from economic slavery. But exceptional nobility of spirit is not a crime. It is a monument in itself.

    Stanley Macebuh was the quintessential man of ideas, an intellectuals’ intellectual and a pundit among pundits. He was unarguably the doyen of intellectual journalism in Nigeria. To make this claim is of course to do grievous injustice to those “old thunderers” of early Nigerian journalism; anti-colonial men of letters and pan-African patriots who took the colonialists to the cleaners in their own game of fiery polemics. In his grave, Lord Lugard still winces in pain at the rowdy effrontery of “these seditious niggers”.

    But when we are talking of intellectual journalism, we are talking of a deliberate and systematic infusion of ideas and conceptual rigour into the practice of journalism and the transposition of the principles of standard scholarship into its modus operandi. On this, the scholarly and urbane Macebuh was the dean and doyen. He was the driving motivator and master of connectivity.

    It is to be noted that before Macebuh arrived on these shores from America, he was already a tenured Associate Professor and author of two acclaimed scholarly works particularly a memorable treatise on James Baldwin, the celebrated African American writer. Had he chosen to stay on in America, the sky would have been the limit. But America’s loss is Nigeria’s inestimable gain.

    It is to this fortuitous development in conjunction with certain beneficial economic and political circumstances that we owe the intellectual transformation that has taken root in Nigerian journalism. A few prominent Nigerian journalists might have become a corrupt and unethical lot, but there can be no doubting the keenness of their mind or the soundness of their education. If in the process they have become a more menacing danger to the society, this is a subject for another day.

    Before its dramatic transformation, journalism in Nigeria was in danger of becoming a veritable haven of “the flotsam and jetsam” of the society as Jeremiah Obafemi Awolowo once memorably put it. The typical column was an impressionistic rollercoaster lacking intellectual depth or rigorous engagement; full of sound and fury; brimming with petty sulking and nasty name-calling. Conceptual thinking was persona non grata and litigious writs flew in all directions from Agbadagbudu to Kakawa Street.

    Macebuh and his colleagues seized all this intemperate nonsense by the scruff of the neck. Apart from Macebuh with his cherubic insouciance and professorial mien, there was the courtly, cigar-chomping Patrick Dele Cole with his donnish imperiousness and Oxbridge bravura. And then there was Oladele Sunmonu Giwa, he of the film star good looks and Great Gatsby sartorial aplomb, who pioneered a new tradition of feature writing based on American New Journalism with its combination of creative flair and political pizzazz.

    It must be said at this point that certain favourable developments anticipated and complemented this new intellectual crusade in journalism. First, was Alhaji Jose’s visionary policy of recruiting fresh graduates into Journalism. This singular policy was so transformative that it led to a paradigm shift and an explosion of talents. Next was the arrival on our campuses from various graduate schools a new generation of university teachers who were bent on having a say in how the nation was run. Finally, the economic and political climate was quite good. Nigeria was awash with petrodollars, and having survived a Civil War, the country was also steadily and solidly transiting to democratic rule.

    But something was afoot in journalism. Something truly new was coming out of Africa. The old order took it all in the chin, shocked and awed by the daring of it all and the breezy confidence of the shamans of the new order. Ruing the momentous developments one afternoon on the corridor of the Daily Times at Kakawa with a friend, the late Chief Olu Akaraogun, himself a notable journalist with considerable intellectual firepower, was shocked out of wits when Stanley Macebuh, the subject matter, suddenly materialised. But rather than join an animated but futile discussion, Macebuh romped through the duo as if they were nonexistent. Macebuh took both praise and damnation in his stride.

    Stanley Macebuh always took things in his stride. He was not a temperamental genius. He was gifted with calm fortitude and equanimity. He was courteous, courtly and unfailingly polite, but he knew his onions. He could be roused to occasional fury by ungentlemanly conduct. But till the end, there was something about him which reminded one of a star professor in a notable American campus. Perhaps it was his mien and comportment.

    But the professorial mantra cuts both ways. While it connotes a cool sobriety and calm detachment, it also suggests a certain degree of naiveté and idealistic hubris. In the real world to be dismissed as an intellectual is to be deemed to be on sabbatical from grim reality. In the brutal world of post-colonial politics it is almost always fatal to be demonised as an intellectual.

    Yet only a visionary idealist could have conceived The Guardian on such magnitude and magnificence. The Guardian remains a magnificent tribute to visionary idealism and the ineluctable power of brilliant ideas and to the fact that no monument is ever left behind by the incurable cynic. But The Guardian is also a telling reminder of how lofty idealism can come unstuck under the relentless hammer of dogged reality.

    The typical Macebuh project always came unstuck as recalcitrant reality came into violent and potentially fatal contradiction with posturing idealism. To have imagined that the liberal tradition as it is known in the west can be transplanted to a post-colonial culture without first transforming its illiberal economy and politics is a classic instance of daydreaming that is particularly touching in its idyllic innocence.

    To think that the tenets of New Journalism as it is practised in America can be grafted overnight on a culture nurtured by Fleet Street and the wizards of Wapping is to fail to distinguish between harsh reality and elevated reverie. Finally, to begin to imagine that intellectual capital, however solid and sterling, will be equated to real capital when the blue chips are down is to substitute fiction and fantasy for the real world. But as Paul de Man has taught us in Literary Theory, the moment of great insight is often accompanied by great blindness.

    The illiberal culture has a way of taking care of the liberal tradition. No organic liberal tradition can emerge from a society steeped in authoritarian and feudal mores. As we are currently learning with the drama unfolding in Nigeria, the more you try to humour such a malignant tradition, the more severe and exorbitant its price becomes.

    Stanley Macebuh ought to have learnt the lesson very early enough. Shortly after the military retreated to the barracks, Dr Patrick Dele Cole, his bosom friend and confidant, was eased out of office. Most politicians have no time for freewheeling intellectuals. For Macebuh, the final straw and the moment of radical epiphany came not long after. By his own admission, he had gone back to Umaru Dikko’s office to retrieve a document only to find the great man of letters and Admiral of the rice armada, red biro in hand, poring over an editorial he (Macebuh) had just passed for publication. It doesn’t get more liberal than that.

    Still, it must be conceded that it takes a certain audacity of hope to have conceived The Guardian on such a scale, and so soon after The Daily Times fiasco. The Guardian at its inception was the greatest constellation of intellectual luminaries to have graced any newspaper stable in the history of Nigeria. It was brimful of the best and the brightest and boasted of all kinds of ideological tendencies from the far left to the far right. Almost three decades later, one still marvels at how anybody could have pulled off such a stupendous coup. It was a starry-eyed venture by a starry-eyed intellectual.

    As a completely detribalised Nigerian who believed in the aristocracy of intellect, one of the unintended consequences of the arrival of The Guardian was that it opened the door for many Nigerians who were technically Macebuh’s intellectual adversaries to be heard. Snooper owes Macebuh  and Dele Giwa a personal debt of gratitude for this development. But as usual, reality came knocking very fast. The strange but understandable reversal of The Guardian’s “simply Mr” policy was a sickening blow to its credibility but it was a pointer to a coming katakata. It showcases the immense capacity of a rooted and organic illiberal culture to upend a disembodied liberal tradition. From this point, things began to read like the chronicle of a liberal collapse foretold.

    After the great electoral robbery of 1983 by the Shagari administration, The Guardian for a long time maintained a studied and significant silence. It was a case of hear no evil and see no evil. It took a blistering and damning rejoinder from a don in one of our universities to rouse the flagship from its millennial stupor. The article was published on 1st November, 1983 after The Guardian Nomenklatura sat on it for over five weeks. As the author, yours sincerely should know.

    As a direct response to the article and a rebuttal of its argumentative thrust, Stanley Macebuh penned a classic famously titled, The liberal Tradition and its Enemies. It was Macebuh at his most brilliantly persuasive and at the summit of his stylistic sublimity. But the article was also seething with glaring contradictions and unintended ironies. Rather than calming frayed nerves, it brought a gale of intellectual recriminations which only subsided with the military take over a few weeks after. The Guardian and Macebuh had been badly mauled.

    After this, it was only a question of time before the contradiction between real capital and intellectual capital would arrive at the flashing point of fatality. In the contest between brutish, illiberal power and effete liberality the outcome is certain. The end came not long thereafter. In a night of the long knife, Stanley Macebuh was summarily cashiered from The Guardian. He was also reportedly slammed with an oath of silence as part of the settlement.

    By this time, Dele Giwa had been physically accounted for. SAP was also taking care of those rowdy professors who were disturbing the peace of the nation by writing what they were not paid to write. Surely, if they do not eat, they cannot philosophize; and if they are made to become pedestrians all over again, their thinking will also become pedestrian. By which time they will know the true husband of their mothers. And so it came to pass. All became quiet on the intellectual front. It is called the pacification of professors.

    But Stanley has paid his dues and paid the price. Hurt by the abominable discourtesy with which he had been treated by the capital class, Macebuh also made a bid to acquire real capital through the business of sugar importation. This did not go far either. Impishly hilarious as usual, MKO Abiola was known to have accosted Macebuh at a public function. “Ah Stanley, sugar is sweet ooo!!!”, MKO bellowed. “Chief, but money sweet pass”, Macebuh was said to have shot back.

    Sugar is sweet, money is sweeter but power is the sweetest. In his bid to understudy power, Stanley Macebuh was rewarded with serial dismissal by his friend, General Olusegun Obasanjo. Perhaps we can now conclude. The greatest enemies of the trader in intellectual commodity are not the other traders in ideas however adversarial but the trader in power as a commodity. The greatest enemy of the liberal tradition is the illiberal tradition and its champions and collaborators. Let this great Nigerian now rest in peace.

     

    • First published in 2009

     

  • Lagos, the Black capital of the future

    Lagos, the Black capital of the future

    Among the many sins of the Black people, none stands out more conspicuously than their inability to build or sustain durable nation-states.  Only very few African nations are sustainable in their current configuration.  In western diplomatic circuits, the standard joke is that Africans don’t do nations. As proof, they point to the sorry mess on the continent and out of the continent in Haiti where the African psyche finally overwhelmed African heroism.

    In the more extreme version of this Afro-dismissal, the entire continent is seen as being merely there to make up the number. As a writer famously put it, humankind first evolved in Africa, but they have not continued to do so there. In such circles, Africa is seen as a historic digression and Africans an evolutionary bye-pass in the course of human evolution.

    It is a scary proposition, this thesis that shuts out a whole race and the founding continent of humanity. One of the debilities pointed out is the inability of African nations to create and configure modern institutions that will sustain and nurture the neo-colonial state foisted on the continent and its people by imperialist conquest and subjugation. Needless to add that this sin flows from the original sin, the colonial contraptions foisted on Africa in the name of nations, or what Basil Davidson has famously described as the Blackman’s burden.

    If we discount the use of illness as an alibi as newly perfected by Nigerian elites when the law catches up with them, the greatest sin of Africa’s post-colonial elites is their inability to create and sustain great cities and megalopolis which will serve as a cultural, economic and technological hub for the rest of the nation and the continent at large.

    In what is now a celebrated encounter with the Lagos epic gridlock, The Economist correspondent put the blame for the resumption of traffic anarchy on the streets of Lagos on the incompetence and inadequacies of the new governor, Akinwumi Ambode, who in his estimate has so far been unable to match the proactive vigour and sheer reforming energy of his immediate predecessor.

    It is possible that the correspondent of The Economist wrote out of turn and out of anger without doing his research or homework. He did not bother to find out what was actually going on. This has brought a gale of furious recriminations accusing the iconic London magazine of neo-colonial journalism. Taken together, this is just as it should be, for it shows that many Nigerians are bothered about the state and condition of the greatest conurbation of black people anywhere in the world.

    The best way to go is to tackle the matter from the root in order to show why Lagos matters to Nigeria and to Africa and the black person.  Are Africans truly incapable of creating and sustaining great cities? If we insist that early European explorers of the fifteenth and eighteenth century spoke of the wide well-paved streets of Ilesa, the neat perpendicular avenues of Benin and the sprawling amphitheatre of old Oyo town, it may be dismissed as foolish romanticization.

    But the fact remains that when the Portuguese adventurers arrived at the old Kongo kingdom around present day Angola around the middle of the fifteenth century, they met a political organization and social structure at par if not superior to the one they left at home. They loitered around a bit hoping to have a glimpse of the mighty army that underwrote the flourishing kingdom. Alas, old Africans didn’t do matching military either. And since God marches on the side of the bigger battalion, virtually all the inhabitants of the kingdom were captured and transported to the new colony of Brazil through the slave port of Luanda.

    In the event, the old kingdom was to suffer three different types of colonial rationalization: Portuguese, French and Belgian. There can be no bigger recipe for millennial disorientation and dysfunction. In his leopard cap and resplendent costume complete with barbers daily imported to Gbadolite from Paris, Joseph Mobutu reminded one of the old Belgian minister of the interior famously captured in Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness who superintended the systemic brutalization of a race while being elegantly and nattily turned out. Yet by 1901, the indigenous city state of Abeokuta had solved the problem of sanitation and peaceful order.

    There is a sense then in which it can be argued that Lagos is the once and future capital of Nigeria, nay of Africa and the Black race. We do not mean capital in the pedestrian capitalist modernist sense but in the sense of a cultural, economic and technological hub of a nation, a continent and the whole Black race.

    This is why Lagos means so much to many, with the astral aura of greatness as an authentic African megalopolis hovering over it. It should be noted that Lagos did not start out as the capital of amalgamated Nigeria and neither has it ended up as the commanding capital of a harshly unitarist nation. But there can be no doubting its continuing relevance as the cultural, technological and economic powerhouse of the nation and indeed tropical Africa as a whole.

    There are at least three other great African mega-cities that could have served the same purpose: Cairo in Egypt, Johannesburg in South Africa and Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But while Johannesburg lacks an authentic African feel, Cairo is hobbled by religious and cultural constraints whereas the sprawling anarchic human conurbation of Kinshasa has unraveled under the strain of a thriving kleptocracy and endemic political disorder.

    Lagos seems to have been specially prepared for its destiny. Originally a flourishing fishing, trading and farming outpost, the modern name was a Portuguese reenactment of home abroad. The city has since grown exponentially taking in mammoth waves of settlers as it survived colonial slave raiders, a civil war, colonial bombardment and a protracted intellectual, political and cultural duel between its coastal elites and the colonial authorities fought out in pamphlets and newspapers which shaped and defined its character and possibilities as a Black Mecca of freedom and enlightenment.

    With its Yoruba and later Benin nucleus and influx of Nupe settlers, Hausa traders, Brazilian returnees, Sierra-Leonean recaptives, West African fortune-seekers and the Igbo people, this colonial and post-colonial hybridity has helped to foster a sense of oneness and belonging for all bar a few hiccups arising from competition for increasingly scarce resources. This delicate mix should not be overturned in the name of ethnic jingoism or cultural revanchism.

    No other African metropolis can boast of this kaleidoscopic potpourri. This is why Lagos has set the pace for the rest of the country, whether it is colonial politics, the decolonizing project, fashion, music, literature and post-colonial razzmatazz. The most iconic picture one can boast of is that of the late regally resplendent Oba of Lagos, Adeyinka Oyekan circa 1966, waltzing with the famous Caribbean singing diva, Millicent Small. It was a class act at the summit of sophistication and culture.

    Also as if by some divine or mystical coincidence, Lagos parades an illustrious gallery of former military and civilian rulers: from Mobolaji Johnson, the late Navy Commodore Lawal, the indefatigable Admiral Godwin Ndubuisi Kanu, the iconic Lateef Jakande to the late Air Commodore Gbolahan Mudashiru. But it is with the advent of the Fourth Republic and the financial wizardry and modernizing genius of Bola Ahmed Tinubu that Lagos finally came into its own in terms of breakneck development consolidated by his tough and doughty successor, Babatunde Raji Fashola.

    This is where the current Governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, has his work cut out for him. If he appears slow and tardy in coming away from the starting block, if he appears to have been remiss in darting away at the sound of the referee’s whistle , it may well be because the methodical accountant in the governor has been taking  a mental and fiscal audit of the Lagos project in its entirety. The truth also is that the Lagos APC command centre which ought to have nudged the governor appeared to have been distracted by the protracted and unproductive politics surrounding President Buhari’s cabinet.

    But if that were to be the case, the return of traffic gridlock and unruly motorists, cyclists and criminal urchins to the streets of Lagos tells its own story. It goes to show why and how the institutionalization of human habits and behavioural  patterns often matters even more than the enforcing personnel. Institutions are a function of repeated habits and gestures with instant state reprisals for offenders burnt into the human consciousness. If putative offenders know that no matter how long it takes the long arm of the law will finally catch up with them, they will think twice.

    Yet it is also axiomatic that no straight furniture can be procured from crooked timber. Without documented data and a functioning electronic pool of drivers, commercial or otherwise, tracking offenders is going to be a Herculean task. Many will offend simply to re-offend. And in a parlous economy bristling with bitter inequity asking the police, LASTMA officials and members of the Road Safety Corps not to take or demand bribe is a tall order indeed.

    While pursuing institutionalized order through constant education and enlightenment programmes for road users through organs of mass dissemination,  Ambode should not be afraid of wielding the big stick on offenders while purging the worst miscreants from the services. Nigerians are a hardy and hardened lot and if all humankind are angels, there would have been no need for government.

    Having said all this, the time has come for the federal authorities to see Lagos as a special national project which is beyond the scope and resources of a particular state government. With a population approaching four medium-sized states of the federation, it is time for Nigeria to revisit the structural and constitutional anomaly which groups Lagos together with other states.

    A Lagos megalopolis of the immediate future must have an underground metro which will rival the best efforts in Europe, Asia and America. It must also be self-sufficient in the generation and production of its own electricity needs. Needless to add that this cannot be handled by the state but in partnership with the private sector. It will be recalled that the first time these ameliorative projects were contemplated, they were summarily scuttled by unitarist governments whose sole concerns seem to be the forcible uniformity of growth for the different components of the nation.

    Going forward and given this sorry history of unitarist and statist governance in Nigeria, we must now repeat the original question. Can the Black person do great cities? Of course yes, and Lagos is going to be the stellar exemplar. Rather than relying on a solitary state, a megalopolis is often the product of the explosion of human vitality and multifarious talents convulsing and concussing together as they break through man-made barriers and artificial boundaries all within the bounds of law and order.

    Given the great developmental strides Lagos has taken in the last forty years and in particular the last one and a half decades, it should be clear that no human principality can stop a megalopolis whose time has come. The rough edges will eventually be straightened out. The history of human development has shown that timeless cities often trump temporal states and transient authorities. No matter the future configuration of Nigeria, Lagos is the destined capital of the Black race.

  • Baba Lekki propounds a Neo-Biafran theory

    As the entire length and breadth of the Eastern part of the country is convulsed by agitations for a new state of Biafra, tongues are beginning to wag about the real motives( and motivation) of the protesters. Not a few people are worried that should things get out of hand, there may soon be a bloody confrontation between the agitators and a determined military authority that has vowed to crush all threats to national security with maximum force.

    Originally thought to be a fringe group looking for attention and led by a metropolitan smart aleck and out of work con-man called Nnamdi Kanu, it has gathered tremendous strength and momentum in the past few weeks as the nation sinks deeper into an economic quagmire. The dire economic straits that the nation has found itself has proved a fertile recruiting ground for unemployed urchins and many disaffected nationals who see a forcible dissolution of the Nigerian union as the only route to self-determination.  IPOB has supplanted MASSOB for now.

    It was a worried Okon that went in search of Baba Lekki who had relocated to Papa Ajao. The old man was in fine fettle and gamey mischief.

    “Kukuruku boy. You can see that I am moving in the right direction, towards the airport in case yanponyanrin come burst for obodo”, the old man crowed with savage delight.

    “Ha baba, dis one no be laughing matter. Dem useless Kanu boy don come again. The last time for one-million march I supply am with container full of dem Ibo people and him no pay”, Okon opened.

    “Okon, you are a fool, no be dat Kanu and dis one no be one million march na twenty three million. Katakata don dey come small small.”

    “Baba, wetin dem want dis time abi na so so fight?”

    “Na dem Yoruba fit explain dat one. Dem say name be destiny. As dem boy dey bear Kanu the problem be say Ko kanu. In Yoruba, he mean say food dey but he no dey enough. Appetite don whet pass saliva”, the old man sneered.

    “Baba, wetin go happen if dem Buhari general come hammer dem people?” Okon demanded.

    “Okon na dem name go explain dat one again. Na dat one dem Yoruba people dey call Kanuko, or shut your mouth. Na mechonu for Ibo “.  With that, the old man dismissed the poor boy.

  • Guerrilla democracy in Africa

    Guerrilla democracy in Africa

    The Putin Paradigm  revisited

    Events unfolding in Burundi and in neighbouring Rwanda must concentrate the mind about the democratic prospects of post-colonial Africa. In Burundi, the determined efforts of the Hutu president, Pierre Nkurunziza, to hang on to power after exhausting the constitutionally stipulated two terms has led to epic bloodletting on a scale that is beginning to rival the 1972 genocidal mayhem which convulsed the land-locked nation and set it on the path of endemic instability.

    Nkurunziza is no stranger to the killing fields of Bujumbura. His own father, a notable and influential Hutu politician, was killed in the 1972 pogrom when the Burundian president was a mere boy. He has never looked back. When Melchior Ndadaye, the first democratically elected president of Burundi, was assassinated by rogue Tutsi officers in 1993, the nation unraveled in a spiral of violence. After his Hutu successor was killed with the Rwandan Hutu president in 1994 in a mysterious air crash, Nkurunziza took up arms against the Burundian state and its Tutsi supremacist hardliners.

    It should be recalled that this was also the genesis of the Rwandan genocide. The ensuing Burundi Civil War lasted  ten years. In 2005, Nkurunziza was elected president by the parliament after some arduous and tricky negotiations which tested the political ingenuity of Julius Nyerere and later Nelson Mandela. Nkurunziza’s argument for a third term is that since he was not originally elected president by a popular suffragette, his first term could only be regarded as an interim tenure. This has cut no ice with the irate opposition, and the entire country has erupted in chaos.

    In neighbouring Rwanda, Paul Kagame is also toying with a constitutional amendment which will allow him to run for a third term and perhaps perpetual rule. It will be recalled that the austere no-nonsense former guerilla leader has been the de facto ruler of Rwanda since 1994 when his rebel forces swept into Kigali amidst the carnage and cannibalism that accompanied genocide. Kagame himself is a  veteran of the Homeric battlefield of the volcanic region, having fled into exile in Uganda as a toddler with his parents after an earlier Tutsi massacre.

    With Yoweri Museveni who has been in power in Uganda since 1986 and Robert Mugabe who has ruled Zimbabwe with an iron fist since 1979, we can now come to the tentative conclusion that the iron rule of strongmen is the rule rather than the exception in that part of post-colonial Africa. This is not discounting the Democratic Republic of Congo where Kabila the son has been in power since the assassination of his father in 2001, or the other Congo where Nguesso is up to the old tricks having ruled his country in one guise or the other for almost thirty years.

    One thing that unites all the six rulers mentioned , Nkurunziza, Kagame, Museveni ,  the old wizard of Harare, Kabila and Nguesso ,is the fact that they are all former guerilla leaders who deposed the existing status quo of their respective countries by sheer force of arms. They are not about to be dismissed by moral suasion or teary remonstration by the international community. Welcome to guerrilla democracy in Africa.

    Often touted as the most ideal form of governance ever devised by humanity, there is as yet no perfect democracy on earth. Great Britain, the founding father of modern liberal democracy, still has a constitutional monarchy and the American president is not elected by popular votes but by an electoral college. The American senate, patrician and authoritarian, is a deliberate hedge against a descent into mob rule and the more plebian House of Representatives.

    But turning elections to a farce and hollow ritual presents democracy with great difficulties. This is where the Putin paradigm comes to mind. The Putin paradigm is an extremely potent concoction brimming with a petulant defiance of western institutions powered by Russian nationalism, pan-Slavic gusto and an authoritarian democracy which guarantees safety, security and reasonable accountability without caring a hoot about freedom of association, freedom of expression and ultimately freedom of election itself.

    For the past twenty years or so, Vladimir Putin has been cocking a snook at the west without his national support base shrinking. When he exhausted his constitutionally delimited terms, Putin simply put his trusted ally and served as Prime Minister while ruling from the background. After his loyal collaborator finished his term, Putin swept back to office without batting an eyelid.

    Why does the Putin paradigm resonate so profoundly with the Russian people? This is where nationalism often trumps the finer ideals of democracy.  After the collapse of the Soviet empire, its Russian rump quickly unraveled into a reign of political and economic gangsters. A crack security operative, Putin halted the slide into democratic anarchy by putting the oligarchs to sword thereby restoring order and Russian pride. The entire country united behind the new avenging tsar.

    The Putin paradigm finds a fertile soil in a Russian populace long accustomed to treating patriarchal and harshly paternalistic but benevolent authority with indulgence and awe-struck reverence. Having exchanged their old Tsars with a long line of socialist Czars, they are not hooked on the anarchic individualism of liberal democracy.

    In the botched 1905 revolutionary uprising, many of the protesters were found clutching the portrait of the Tsar they called “father” in their bosom even as they succumbed to bullets from OGPU, the Russian secret police. An accidental politician, Putin is the latest Tsar of modern Russian.

    So why don’t the African strongmen try the Putin formula by installing their favourite allies to fulfill all democratic  righteousness? This is where national complexion matters, and where the post-colonial state has tripped very badly in Africa.  Unlike Russia which is a fairly organic and homogenous country in terms of culture and ethnic composition, most African nations are rumbling cauldrons of ethnic, regional and cultural contraries.

    It is obvious that despite his outstanding performance in governance and heroic efforts in imposing unity and harmony on his fractured country from above, Paul Kagame fears another Hutu apocalyptic meltdown once he vacates office or loosens his grips on the levers of the power that he has wielded with such authoritarian sternness and severity. With Hutu nationalism very much at play despite genocide and Kagame’s undeniably sterling performance, it is an excruciating democratic conundrum.

    In Burundi, a curious reverse logic is at play. With Tutsi supremacists such as Pierre Buyoya and Jean-Baptiste Bagaza  still very much on the prowl, Nkurunziza fears that evacuating state control and the levers on military institution would eventuate in a steamrolling by the old Hima Tutsi lions and former ethnic overlords of the nation. It was very much the same group in 1993 that assassinated the hugely popular former Hutu president and his supporters under the pretext of taking them to safety from military mutineers.

    Thus we can see how in a post-colonial Africa riven by ethnic, regional and religious divisions fighting old tyrants often consecrate new tyrannies.  It will be recalled that the only time Robert Mugabe allowed free and fair elections, he was defeated hands down before the old warrior-caste stepped in to disband both the elected and the electorate. It is this fear of the unknown that has turned Yoweri Museveni into a delinquent despot and tired tyrant in the same land where he was dubbed a liberator as his troops swept through Kampala in 1986. Ditto for Joseph Kabila.

    Much as the western democracies clamour for democratic rule in Africa, it can be seen that the situation depends very much on the actual forces on ground and varies from country to country and subcontinent to subcontinent depending on the logic of the cultural and political dominant.

    In West Africa, despite atrophied family tyrannies in Togo, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon and untrammeled military and civilian despotism in Gambia, Congo Brazzaville and Cameroons, the subcontinent as a whole has taken giant strides towards the consolidation of democratic rule in the last two and a half decades. There is no single case of guerrilla democracy in the subcontinent.

    In the Benin Republic, Ghana and Nigeria entrenched military autocracies and regnant forces of the status quo have been defeated in landmark elections with the last election in Nigeria completing the glorious triad. In Senegal, the political status quo has been defeated twice by nationalist forces. In Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone the old political hegemony has been disbanded after civil wars. The same thing has happened in Mali, Guinea and lately Burkina Faso after unwarranted military interventions which led to the self-destruction of the old order.

    It is useful to note that what happens in West Africa is a clash of the residual formations of liquidated pre-colonial empires whereas in Rwanda and Burundi you have the unique situation of pre-colonial feudal formations and kingship systems surviving colonization unscathed while casually reclaiming authority and dominance after colonization. The ensuing collision between this old feudal order and the new forces and relations of economic and political production unleashed by modernity provoked such stress and social convulsions  that it eventually led to genocide in the two countries.

    What is important in all this is for each country to bolster its strengths and banish its fears.  In vibrant western democracies with entrenched citizenship, democracy is sustained when individuals, groups and guilds subsume their competing and countervailing egos and self-pride under the rubric of higher national interests. By so doing, individual rights do not disappear but are tailored to national needs and necessity.

    In a post-colonial nation like Nigeria fissured by ethnic, religious and cultural polarities what often drives the system is a negative equilibrium powered by competing and countervailing centres of power. Often, and with enough prayers and luck, this equivalent of tribal nuclear deterrence is enough to prevent the nation from sliding into an apocalyptic meltdown.

    But this neither guarantees national stability nor enhances democratic development in the long run. It merely calcifies the categories leading to a fractured public of competing proto-republics.  From the mixed reaction to the announcement of his cabinet, it is obvious that despite President  Buhari’s most heroic efforts to reform the delinquent Nigerian post-colonial state and make it amenable to a rational order, the ethnic caterwauling and sponsored calumny  will not just disappear .

    There two options available to the president in handling this elite-driven disaffection and sponsored hysteria. He can ignore it as mere blackmail and treat it with the icy contempt he thinks it deserves hoping that when his reforms and outstanding corrective measures finally kick in, even his most craven critics will be shamed into silence. On the other hand, he can see it as a symptom of a state that is overburdened by self-imposed unitarist and statist responsibility.

    There is no harm in erring on the side of caution. This is the time to be creative and think out of the box. In order to enhance the prospects of democracy and accelerated development, Nigeria must achieve what we now propose as an equilibrium of ethnic hubris, that is a situation in which  ethnic narcissism is subsumed under national interest no matter the  military prowess, economic vibrancy, political sagacity or diplomatic perspicuity of competing ethnic formations.

    Although a Herculean task, it is not as impossible as it seems.  A way out is to take another look at the political architecture of the nation and realign it in such a way that it liberates and harmonizes the competing and countervailing energies and geniuses of our different people. In a multi-ethnic nation, what holds true for genuine federalism also holds true for genuine democracy.

    No constituting bloc or cultural unit must be in a position to exercise a veto power on the democratic destiny of the nation. This is the abiding tragedy of guerilla democracy in many African countries.  Nigeria must avoid the road to Bujumbura and a passage to Kigali.